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100% agree.

Maybe little offtopic, but I think it's connected with UI and gameplay problems described by OP - as the time goes I think Wiz era was a little... too revolutionary. Utopia was great, actually adding something to the game, enriching it without inventing game anew. In retrospect it felt like logical step in development. But Apocalypse & Megacorp (especially Megacorp) were just too ambitious. They decided to change too many things, with too few manpower and too little time avalaible. New systems and mechanics were thrown inside, without enough testing (e.g. war weariness) or thinking about game's internal cohesion. Meanwhile some things were just abandoned (e.g. hive minds) or illogically cut off (e.g. machine shipset). And the result is clearly visible - great mess everywhere. I pity for Daniel, because he is now left with all this mess. Hopefully, I think he knows what he's doing - Federations was closer to Utopia than Apo & Mega. I don't know if I can describe it properly, but for the first time since Utopia it feels like Stellaris is going forward instead going in circles, trying to redefine itself, again and again.
 
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The whole Notification design is utterly baffling. It's not even really because it's a bad design. It's because it's so obviously a bad design. Anyone who plays the game for an hour can see how terrible and spammy it is. Can you imagine if your phone threw up even 1/10th of the notifications at you that Stellaris does? It would drive you nuts.

Dear Paradox devs, please google Alarm Fatigue.

I'm thankful there are mods out there that silence the lion share of near useless notifications, because it's truly awful.
 
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What? You guys dont like it when you upgrade defense platforms and get a sound plus notifications for every single one of them?

What this game needs to get playable again (my subjective p o v):

- pop growth and migration rework
- planet and sector management for the lategame
- further performance improvements
- a starbase designer like we have for fleets

I stil start up the game from time to time but i always stop playing after ~100 years into a savegame. To that point the game is really fun. What do we need for further, really deep story telling in Stellaris?

- Divide the different types empires more from each other and give them different playstyles?
- Connect empires with each other and let them be dependand on each other through trade, science and miltary? Rn everyone is doing his own sh*t, maybe you have a federation on top of your empire, there is no real link within empires.
- A deeper development for systems to get a real "tall" playstyle? Upgrades for Planets? Habitats? Stations? More Infrastructure like fast travel lines?

The potential is so endless, but i have the feeling since 2.2 nothing really breaking new good QoL mechanic was added while stuff like sectors, migration was removed from the game and was never replaced. Three steps forward and two steps back...
 
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I don't care about a new content pack/expansion for the game, I just want valuable QoL changes that will help you manage your own planets.

That is exactly what playerbase has been asking for quite some time now.
@StellarisDevs At some point it would be nice to stop "reworking" for a minute, and stabilize on what we have already.
It's been 4 years. Enough reworking is enough, let us finish a single game in peace. Fix bugs, improve UI, do the basic housekeeping work.
Literally, you release a DLC called "Major performance patch with new shiny and useful UI" and I will most likely buy it.

Problem with the influence pricing is that there are no hard decisions to make. The bad pricing make the choices for you.
<snip>
Its baffling this is the regression we have had over 4 years for a game in constant development and several DLC.

I am still baffled at the "rework" of the Edicts. Nothing new really was added. It is literally same list with the checkmarks we had already.
Since the Influence used for expansion/building is simply worth more than any of the options in the "reworked" Edict list, there is no point in using it even.

I agree. This game is very fun and interesting in the beginning, lots of cool features to experience, then it becomes micro hell after a while.
And we are not talking about a mild headache type of hell, but a true, fire-and-brimstone soul-devouring hell.

Exactly my feeling - I am yet to finish a single game since 1.9
Either I am met with increasing game lag and inavoidable crash lategame (2400+), stopped by a gamebreaking bug, or the micromanagement hell finally gets to me and I uninstall the game for another half year.

Just want to make sure we're talking about the same thing here. The AI for other empires is fixed up fairly nicely - not perfect, but definitely a lot better than it was. The AI for player automation - planets and sectors mainly - is still practically nonexistent and desperately needs work. But I have hopes that'll be coming soon.
But otherwise yeah, I agree the frustrations are real, and workarounds (mod or otherwise) are kinda necessary for most players. I just think the solutions are to fix the underlying systems, (AI, pop growth and migration, etc).


Sounds to me this is more of an issue with many (most?) players being heavy conquest and land-grab oriented. Which the game as it stands does heavily encourage (unfortunately). Again though, seems more an issue of other systems needing heavy work.

On a tangential note for Influence, I think expansion in the early game is a fair bit too fast. I'm thinking about experimenting with a mod that'll make the influence costs for building outposts/claiming systems scale with distance from your capital, not your closest border, with heavy discounts scattered throughout the tech tree and the ability to colonize outside your borders for a reduced influence cost. Curious how the game will shape up like that.

Maybe I am just outpacing the Grand Admiral AI on economy side too much to notice the AI got better economy decisions.
None of the planets I have captured showed promise - random assorted trash buildings, not a single planet had any idea what it was doing and what was the focus.

The overall expansion rate indeed does feel a bit too quick. It feels like 10 years exploring so cool, 20 years, oh hi neighbors, 30 years in - Galaxy is discovered in full, I am spastically looking for any unsurveyed system, 40 years nothing to explore at all.
AI was like 20 systems away, 5 years in he is knocking at my border. I left out a few systems inside my Empire as low priority, some Empire *behind* my neighbors literally over 15 systems away from their closest border flew in and built starbases there, completely disconnected from their territory. Like, wtf seriously. I understand they have overflow and choking on influence, but that's a bit overdoing it...

All good points but I don't think they care at this point. A lot of this stuff has been brought up time and time again. The bug reports pages are full of bugs that have been reported over and over, some for over a year and are still broken.

We get a few crumbs here and there to help promote a DLC (We made it lag less now, please buy federations) but that's about it really. Judging from the last dev diary, I'm not hopeful this mentality will change any time soon.

Well I hope the developers come around, take a break from "Reworks" and actually make some QoL changes for the good old Stellaris. A bit naive I guess :)

100% agree.

Maybe little offtopic, but I think it's connected with UI and gameplay problems described by OP - as the time goes I think Wiz era was a little... too revolutionary. Utopia was great, actually adding something to the game, enriching it without inventing game anew. In retrospect it felt like logical step in development. But Apocalypse & Megacorp (especially Megacorp) were just too ambitious. They decided to change too many things, with too few manpower and too little time avalaible. New systems and mechanics were thrown inside, without enough testing (e.g. war weariness) or thinking about game's internal cohesion. Meanwhile some things were just abandoned (e.g. hive minds) or illogically cut off (e.g. machine shipset). And the result is clearly visible - great mess everywhere. I pity for Daniel, because he is now left with all this mess. Hopefully, I think he knows what he's doing - Federations was closer to Utopia than Apo & Mega. I don't know if I can describe it properly, but for the first time since Utopia it feels like Stellaris is going forward instead going in circles, trying to redefine itself, again and again.

Exactly what I had in the back of my mind. Each and every content expansion felt like a circlejerk.
The game did not become any better, more friendly to play or manage your Empire.
They just keep throwing more and more stuff into it until it just chokes and crash 200 years in. because somehow I doubt many of the development team even played first 30 years.

What? You guys dont like it when you upgrade defense platforms and get a sound plus notifications for every single one of them?

What this game needs to get playable again (my subjective p o v):

- pop growth and migration rework
- planet and sector management for the lategame
- further performance improvements
- a starbase designer like we have for fleets

I stil start up the game from time to time but i always stop playing after ~100 years into a savegame. To that point the game is really fun. What do we need for further, really deep story telling in Stellaris?

- Divide the different types empires more from each other and give them different playstyles?
- Connect empires with each other and let them be dependand on each other through trade, science and miltary? Rn everyone is doing his own sh*t, maybe you have a federation on top of your empire, there is no real link within empires.
- A deeper development for systems to get a real "tall" playstyle? Upgrades for Planets? Habitats? Stations? More Infrastructure like fast travel lines?

The potential is so endless, but i have the feeling since 2.2 nothing really breaking new good QoL mechanic was added while stuff like sectors, migration was removed from the game and was never replaced. Three steps forward and two steps back...

God bless man, all good points
And don't get me started about platform notifications.
There is a good reason I never build defense platforms EVER AGAIN.
 
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OP is pretty spot on. With regard to the outliner and notifications, I've been saying the same thing for a while. In addition to what has already been said, I would add:

Outliner
The control groups icons in the bottom left of the screen are kinda broken and very under-utilised. I would suggest all construction ships, science ships and fleets are automatically shown here and get relevant status icons or flash when they're idle etc. Science ships performing 'assist research' missions can be stacked into a single icon that when clicked expands out so you can select a particular one. This would drastically reduce the need to use the outliner throughout the game and reduce the burden on the notifications system.

Notifications

I'm a bit against having settings for notifications for a number of reasons.

First, it becomes yet another crutch for UI. The problems we currently have with both the outliner and the notifications system are that those two systems are the only way the current UI can really tell us stuff. That means every new feature piggy backs on those two systems blindly. If we get settings for notifications, all future features & DLC will continue to blindly piggy back on notifications regardless of whether it's appropriate or not.

Second, not every player is going to be smart enough, patient enough, or experienced enough with the game to set up good notification settings. That harms potential growth of the game, turns off new players.

Third, I think there are only two reasons for requesting settings - either it's because we think each player will want different settings, or because we don't trust Paradox to come up with appropriate global settings. I'm fairly sceptical about the former, and the latter is... problematic.

I think the best way forward is to look for ways to reduce the reliance on the notification system, as exampled it the idea above. Further, I would suggest some UI study by observing a few different players play the game, at early, mid and (importantly) late game stages to identify (list) the most common events that require a player reaction. Then, take a look at other 4x space games and see how those equivalent events are managed and try to figure out what UI element is missing. I expect it will be something like a global production queue/log.
 
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I feel we could argue about the war score thing, but aside from that - Yeah, obviously. At this point would it really cost paradox that much to just hire 1 programmer and 1 UX guy fulltime just for slowly fixing up obvious and long outstanding stuff like that?
 
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Gotta say, where Asuzu has a point is that - with 4 years into development of the game - we unfortunately still have to focus on annoyances, that should have been fixed long before the game reached v1.5. And while devs still have to focus these, it hinders them to come up with the real good new stuffs (Jesus, why do hyperlanes have to be 100% static throughout a game?!?).

Yes. I played Civ VI before really getting into Stellaris and as much as I hate to give Firaxis credit, they do a much better job at fixing those little annoyances than Paradox. I'm often flabbergasted about some of the bugs that still exist in the game.

If Stellaris needs anything, it would be a halt on new features and a brush up of existing ones, that do not shine yet.

Completely agree.

Civ VI is like this as well. The AI doesn't know how to play the game but they keep adding in new features.

Polish the game!!!!
 
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This thread definitely needs more attention from devs... and actually give us some answer what's going to happen with all those problems...
 
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Oddly enough I've never had a problem with the outliner, but reading through this I can't stop thinking 'yea it could use some work'. It might be because when my empires get big enough for it to be a chore to scroll through the planet list, I usually stop caring about effeciency and only look through my planets once every few years, queing up buildings and whatnot for a planet to last a while. The rest of the time the list is just minimized, same with the other things on the list like civilian ships, I only expand that part of the list when I actually need one of them, which doesn't happen a lot past the early to early-mid game, how often to you really need to find a construction ship, or science ship once the galaxy has been surveyed and your systems claimed. Same with a lot of the other things on the outliner, like starbases or armies.

Most of the other things I absolutely agree with, especially the micromanagement issues, just read the previous paragraph it becomes so tedious I start to ignore part of the game, that is just not right. Personally I would be happy to have working sector automation, giving me the option to in the late game just turn it on easily for all sectors and all their planets, and leave it to deal with planet management. That and a better form of pop management and overcrowding issues would solve most of the late game tediousness for me.
 
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I agree with the OP.

Another thing that IMO increases micro is the UI is a bit dumb when it comes to queuing up buildings that require other buildings.
- When building A is needed to build building B, then it should be possible to queue up building A and B. The UI should be smart enough to realize that, by the time you've finished building A, building B is now buildable so it's ok the queue it. Right now you have to build A, wait till it's finished, come back to the planet and click building B. It's annoying.
- Same things on starbases, with the addition of having to upgrade the starbase level as well.

As suggested in this thread, a starbase designer would help with the second point. Similarly, perhaps we could have a planet designer as well?

By the way, another related thing, why are building slots locked by population level? I wonder about how much it adds to the game vs how much micro it generates. Sure it makes it so that you can't have a planet with only specialists (although I'm not 100% sure why exactly that would be a bad thing balance-wise) but it comes at the cost of serious micromanagement. And it doesn't really seem that realistic (it's not like IRL an increased population level would suddenly make the planet bigger so there's room for another building). If building slots were available from the start the player could just queue up 10 of them at a time or so - while that is not optimal efficiency-wise because most of them will start out unused, it would greatly reduce micro to the player.
 
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I have almost 800 hours and almost 700 is pre 2.0. The game is waay better now then back when it 1st launched. However ya man the micro gets me down too. I have recently gotten back into it and playing on .25 habitable worlds helps but man the planet micro gets me down. The way it works sucks.
It's an amazing game otherwise.

It would be soo cool if they looked at that for the next update but it's possible it may not be till stellaris 2 that micro hell goes away lol. I guess well see.
 
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I agree with the OP.

Another thing that IMO increases micro is the UI is a bit dumb when it comes to queuing up buildings that require other buildings.
- When building A is needed to build building B, then it should be possible to queue up building A and B. The UI should be smart enough to realize that, by the time you've finished building A, building B is now buildable so it's ok the queue it. Right now you have to build A, wait till it's finished, come back to the planet and click building B. It's annoying.
- Same things on starbases, with the addition of having to upgrade the starbase level as well.

As suggested in this thread, a starbase designer would help with the second point. Similarly, perhaps we could have a planet designer as well?

By the way, another related thing, why are building slots locked by population level? I wonder about how much it adds to the game vs how much micro it generates. Sure it makes it so that you can't have a planet with only specialists (although I'm not 100% sure why exactly that would be a bad thing balance-wise) but it comes at the cost of serious micromanagement. And it doesn't really seem that realistic (it's not like IRL an increased population level would suddenly make the planet bigger so there's room for another building). If building slots were available from the start the player could just queue up 10 of them at a time or so - while that is not optimal efficiency-wise because most of them will start out unused, it would greatly reduce micro to the player.

With the last part. I agree 100%. Early game you wouldnt want to build too many buildings anyway since your economy cant afford the cost of specialists. But if I could build all the buildings I wanted on the planet and they didnt cost upkeep while not in use I could que up entire planets in the mid/late game and then just forget them instead of entering micro hell. They could put in a few population caps on activating(not building it but for using it) certain buildings if they dont want you to use robot assembly plants + clone vats with 1 pop on the planet. And perhaps make it so the rare late game resource boost buildings that need the 40 pop capital upgrade wont be active unless you have 40+ pops on the actual planet.

But at least let us build all of it even if most of it will just sitting there empty and not cost anything for a few decades. I have still spent lots of minerals and resources decades before being used in a non optimal way so it would still be worse than optimal micro managing. This is why I late game only use ecumenopolises, ringworlds and size 22+ normal worlds with lots of mineral/energy districts. I can just que up all the districts on those planets day 1 and come back in a few decades and que up a lot of buildings or even more districts and then come back another 20 years later for a last pass. Habitats and smaller planets that need more micro management gets to taste the colossus.
 
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With the last part. I agree 100%. Early game you wouldnt want to build too many buildings anyway since your economy cant afford the cost of specialists. But if I could build all the buildings I wanted on the planet and they didnt cost upkeep while not in use I could que up entire planets in the mid/late game and then just forget them instead of entering micro hell. They could put in a few population caps on activating(not building it but for using it) certain buildings if they dont want you to use robot assembly plants + clone vats with 1 pop on the planet. And perhaps make it so the rare late game resource boost buildings that need the 40 pop capital upgrade wont be active unless you have 40+ pops on the actual planet.

But at least let us build all of it even if most of it will just sitting there empty and not cost anything for a few decades. I have still spent lots of minerals and resources decades before being used in a non optimal way so it would still be worse than optimal micro managing. This is why I late game only use ecumenopolises, ringworlds and size 22+ normal worlds with lots of mineral/energy districts. I can just que up all the districts on those planets day 1 and come back in a few decades and que up a lot of buildings or even more districts and then come back another 20 years later for a last pass. Habitats and smaller planets that need more micro management gets to taste the colossus.
Oh yeah, that is a great idea actually - just allow us to build the buildings but not be able to use them until the population level reaches the required amount. That way, the game balance will not be perturbed at all and we get the benefit of greatly reduced micro.
 
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In general, the post is simply outcry for developer attention.
The last Edict "rework" just shows that developers have no idea what is actually wrong/bad with the game in current state and needs work.
As general community agrees - we don't need new features, or reworks of already working features.
We need attention to game's core mechanics, UI/UX, excessive micromanagement, QoL annoyances, AI and stability improvements and so on.

Right now I am yet to finish a SINGLE game of Stellaris in the past 3 YEARS.
Some reasons are due to constant game changes/reworks invalidating my savegames (and no, this is not League of Legends where match is 20 minutes, common 600-1000 star galaxy Stellaris game takes weeks and months), some due to outright gamebreaking bugs in new content, and some due to complete and utter abysmal user experience of actually managing your Star Empire.

OP is pretty spot on. With regard to the outliner and notifications, I've been saying the same thing for a while. In addition to what has already been said, I would add:

Outliner
The control groups icons in the bottom left of the screen are kinda broken and very under-utilised. I would suggest all construction ships, science ships and fleets are automatically shown here and get relevant status icons or flash when they're idle etc. Science ships performing 'assist research' missions can be stacked into a single icon that when clicked expands out so you can select a particular one. This would drastically reduce the need to use the outliner throughout the game and reduce the burden on the notifications system.

Notifications
I'm a bit against having settings for notifications for a number of reasons.

First, it becomes yet another crutch for UI. The problems we currently have with both the outliner and the notifications system are that those two systems are the only way the current UI can really tell us stuff. That means every new feature piggy backs on those two systems blindly. If we get settings for notifications, all future features & DLC will continue to blindly piggy back on notifications regardless of whether it's appropriate or not.

Second, not every player is going to be smart enough, patient enough, or experienced enough with the game to set up good notification settings. That harms potential growth of the game, turns off new players.

Third, I think there are only two reasons for requesting settings - either it's because we think each player will want different settings, or because we don't trust Paradox to come up with appropriate global settings. I'm fairly sceptical about the former, and the latter is... problematic.

I think the best way forward is to look for ways to reduce the reliance on the notification system, as exampled it the idea above. Further, I would suggest some UI study by observing a few different players play the game, at early, mid and (importantly) late game stages to identify (list) the most common events that require a player reaction. Then, take a look at other 4x space games and see how those equivalent events are managed and try to figure out what UI element is missing. I expect it will be something like a global production queue/log.

There is so much that can be done with Outliner. Not even being an UI/UX designer we can see the flaws. I wonder what would happen if an actual specialist took it to hand? :)
Regarding notifications - I kinda disagree that they are not needed, since the notification system works perfectly fine in CK2, and other games.
Usually I enable everything by default, then start disabling messages that I deem useless or not worth attention.
Very quickly the notification spam turns into a compact stream of useful messages.

I have almost 800 hours and almost 700 is pre 2.0. The game is waay better now then back when it 1st launched. However ya man the micro gets me down too. I have recently gotten back into it and playing on .25 habitable worlds helps but man the planet micro gets me down. The way it works sucks.
It's an amazing game otherwise.

It would be soo cool if they looked at that for the next update but it's possible it may not be till stellaris 2 that micro hell goes away lol. I guess well see.

Haha, well you see, the game's default setting is 1 Habitable worlds. I see that people play on 0.25 habitable for quite a while, but the core reason is very simple - it is too much worlds to take over, and since AI spams habitats like no tomorrow, it is even worse.
I wish we had a simple option to just disable Habitats completely, same as CK2 game rules - because let's agree, the ability to infinitely spam additional settleable worlds gets very out of hand very quickly.

Eventually the player just gives up on the idea of taking over that much stuff with boring and repetitive army spamclicking, and you go to the game settings and put 0.25 worlds.
That is just highlight of the core issue - too many worlds spawned, too many habitats spammed, too boring/annoying to invade them all. Even using Colossus on each is a chore since it has a cooldown.

With the last part. I agree 100%. Early game you wouldnt want to build too many buildings anyway since your economy cant afford the cost of specialists. But if I could build all the buildings I wanted on the planet and they didnt cost upkeep while not in use I could que up entire planets in the mid/late game and then just forget them instead of entering micro hell. They could put in a few population caps on activating(not building it but for using it) certain buildings if they dont want you to use robot assembly plants + clone vats with 1 pop on the planet. And perhaps make it so the rare late game resource boost buildings that need the 40 pop capital upgrade wont be active unless you have 40+ pops on the actual planet.

But at least let us build all of it even if most of it will just sitting there empty and not cost anything for a few decades. I have still spent lots of minerals and resources decades before being used in a non optimal way so it would still be worse than optimal micro managing. This is why I late game only use ecumenopolises, ringworlds and size 22+ normal worlds with lots of mineral/energy districts. I can just que up all the districts on those planets day 1 and come back in a few decades and que up a lot of buildings or even more districts and then come back another 20 years later for a last pass. Habitats and smaller planets that need more micro management gets to taste the colossus.

That is the core issue of planet building now.
See, before 2.0 in 1.9.1 the micro management was actually getting in line, when Wiz broke the game.

Say I conquered a bunch of planets - next thing I destroy most of trash buildings, queue up constructions that I want in all planet slots, and immediately pass the planet to my sector AI. This way, AI only upgrades the buildings and doesn't build useless stuff because everything is set up. And it worked perfectly fine, just a quick chore to process your newly acquired planets and forget about them, move on with your life, war, and so on!

Now, in this new model since 2.0 you cannot queue up anything because pops, so you repetitively have to come back to each shitty Rural world and queue more buildings as they become available. There is not even ability to create an automated building pattern order, like, geez a 2016 Master of Orion remake had it, and the game was developed by a much less experienced studio.
 
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Right now I am yet to finish a SINGLE game of Stellaris in the past 3 YEARS.

Man, I feel you^^ and i perfectly know that this does affect a WHOLE LOT of players. I wish they all posted here and expressed their concerns, so that your outcry for developer attention will be heard - hell, its about time...
 
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I just cannot understand, what is the dev's problem with auto resettlement. It is so basic and obvious, that there just cannot be any mistake in game design. Like, if i am hired in gamedev company, and lead tells me look our game has tons of entities that must be sorted a lot during gameplay, my first thought will be ok i see u need an automation algoritm for that! End of story. Any other approach will be just a half baked crap, both technically and gameplay-wise. It is not a card game after all, where victory depends of how clever u placed ur coloured pictures with ur own hands. All this migrations, galaxy edicts, which can never pass, unless im a holder of 51% of galaxy diplomatic power... what for? What are u fighting for, mister Anderson? There is no problem, except the one u created. Even in real life people move around the world seeking jobs and living space with zero attention from allmighty emperor, except the cases when he wanna be very authoritarian and restrict it with special decision, but not the opposite. I just wonder, who or what forces devs to act in such weird way with such simple mechanic? Anyone know? No? Too sad.
 
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(and no, this is not League of Legends where match is 20 minutes, common 600-1000 star galaxy Stellaris game takes weeks and months)
It does? How long is playthrough? I would say, 15-25 hours to reach default victory screen.

Man, I feel you^^ and i perfectly know that this does affect a WHOLE LOT of players. I wish they all posted here and expressed their concerns, so that your outcry for developer attention will be heard - hell, its about time...
2.6.3 performance was the best in years (and maybe 2.7.2 is the same, I haven't played it yet). It is reasonable to finish a medium sized galaxy now.
 
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It does? How long is playthrough? I would say, 15-25 hours to reach default victory screen.

Haha yes possible over a weekend if you realy rush things.
Although I find very hard to believe you can rush down a 1000 star galaxy with all content in 24 hours. Maybe, I guess, I have seen amazing speedruns.
But if you have job, family and a cat to take care of, I find it hard to believe you can afford to play the game more than 3-4 hours per day.
In that (normal) case, big galaxy games take weeks and months.

2.6.3 performance was the best in years (and maybe 2.7.2 is the same, I haven't played it yet). It is reasonable to finish a medium sized galaxy now.

Well yes, the crippling midgame lag seems to be gone now, and I am actually able to play past year 2300.
Still starting at 2400 or when there is a big war breaking out somewhere, the game starts slowing down on every month tick, so I assume by the year 2400 it is same lagfiesta again.
 
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The Streamer/Youtuber Aavak Arumba made a video shortly after the 1.0 release documenting how he'd like the UI improved, including obvious stuff like planet production messages telling you what was built.
Most of it still applies.

And I still find it funny the 2.7.X. capacity overload edict increaes energy productiona dn energy upkeep of technicians.

But your last two points I vehemently disagree on.
Ok, so some influence costs might be worth tweaking. But overall Influence should be rare and valuable. I don't see 'having to make hard choices with limited resources' as a negative, but rather a core part of any game.

If Influence was for making hard choices, then it would be valuabel. Buit currently it is not. I worte in another thread that influence is used for two things in the game: Those deemed significant and those the devs don't want to be spammed.
Neither of those criteria makes these choices actually useful and a huge amount of them are simply not worth the opportunity cost.
And that's the rub. Not only do the criteria the devs used to determine if something should cost influence seem arbitrary at times, but a lot of them are non-choices.

You are advocating for something here that a lot of the players would probably like but that is simply not what the game is in it's current state.
Currently it's more Pay influence to stop robot production with 2 clicks instead of 5 clicks.

AI was like 20 systems away, 5 years in he is knocking at my border. I left out a few systems inside my Empire as low priority, some Empire *behind* my neighbors literally over 15 systems away from their closest border flew in and built starbases there, completely disconnected from their territory. Like, wtf seriously. I understand they have overflow and choking on influence, but that's a bit overdoing it...

You probably had wormholes ore gateways in the adjacent system. If borders are open and as such units can move directly between two systems they count as adjacent, and the AI will use it's current programming to maybe skip a system to claim adjacent ones.

A patch or two ago I even had the "fun" situation of an AI being just above the relationship with me to open borders. We had a wormhole connection and with open borders the two sides counted as adjacent, increased border friction and made the AI mad enough to close borders. With borders closed the systems were no longer adjacent and the border friction disappeared. That made the Ai open the borders again...rinse, repeat, constantly.


I just cannot understand, what is the dev's problem with auto resettlement. It is so basic and obvious, that there just cannot be any mistake in game design. Like, if i am hired in gamedev company, and lead tells me look our game has tons of entities that must be sorted a lot during gameplay, my first thought will be ok i see u need an automation algoritm for that! End of story. Any other approach will be just a half baked crap, both technically and gameplay-wise. It is not a card game after all, where victory depends of how clever u placed ur coloured pictures with ur own hands. All this migrations, galaxy edicts, which can never pass, unless im a holder of 51% of galaxy diplomatic power... what for? What are u fighting for, mister Anderson? There is no problem, except the one u created. Even in real life people move around the world seeking jobs and living space with zero attention from allmighty emperor, except the cases when he wanna be very authoritarian and restrict it with special decision, but not the opposite. I just wonder, who or what forces devs to act in such weird way with such simple mechanic? Anyone know? No? Too sad.

I think part of it is dev momentum where a decisionw as made version ago what is necessary and what not and is still upheld.
But I think the bigger part is the lack of otherwise engaging gameplay. What else is there to do?
Diplomacy quickly gets into fixed blocks and as you can't influence andy relationship between two AI empires (and the allied to a friend bonuses got decreased with 2.7.) you can't do much except choose which block to join or stay on your own.
Warfare is tedious, slow and if the opposing side is capable of putting up a fight, takes a while to recover from.
Events? Barely happen, have limited interactability and are quickly done.
If you weren't micromanagaing your planets, what would you do?
 
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The Streamer/Youtuber Aavak made a video shortly after the 1.0 release documenting how he'd like the UI improved, including obvious stuff like planet production messages telling you what was built.
Most of it still applies.
I remember those videos :)
Yeah funny that we still have no notification what exactly was completed on a planet build order
I guess Lithoids take priority


You probably had wormholes ore gateways in the adjacent system. If borders are open and as such units can move directly between two systems they count as adjacent, and the AI will use it's current programming to maybe skip a system to claim adjacent ones.

Nope, there were no Wormholes/Gateways/anything. triple-checked.
The galaxy was packed like a fish barrel, and AI just went in 15 systems away through the open borders and slapped a bunch of outposts in my territory for some space mining.

I cannot even declare war on him and beat him for doing this because I cannot reach his territory through closed borders half-galaxy away.

I think part of it is dev momentum where a decisionw as made version ago what is necessary and what not and is still upheld.
But I think the bigger part is the lack of otherwise engaging gameplay. What else is there to do?
Diplomacy quickly gets into fixed blocks and as you can't influence andy relationship between two AI empires (and the allied to a friend bonuses got decreased with 2.7.) you can't do much except choose which block to join or stay on your own.
Warfare is tedious, slow and if the opposing side is capable of putting up a fight, takes a while to recover from.
Events? Barely happen, have limited interactability and are quickly done.
If you weren't micromanagaing your planets, what would you do?

Aha, now we are getting to it - after the initial exploration is done, and no more cool events pop, and we are left with our bunch of worlds, there is nothing left to do.
There is no subtle Espionage action, and the political game is so rudimentary there is nothing to do still, although Federations DLC is a great step in good direction for that.
I can't even mark alien Empire for point of interest to have more detailed notifications about them...