Casus Belli is an okay system, but needs more love and special actions around it (e.g. Planetfall Imperial Mandate Operation"You can now declare war without any Casus Belli with full support from your population") and so on.
I wholeheartedly wish influence was rebalanced heavily. I completely abandoned using many of the game's features on the basis of them costing influence. Something went seriously wrong when the influence costs for stuff like influencing elections was decided. I would even say that it may be time to split influence into two resources - influence and political power or whatever, where the latter would be used for internal-politics stuff like factions, elections and edicts.6) Influence & New Edicts
Cool new edicts. I wish I had Influence to use them.
So much weight is put on influence it is not even fun anymore:
- Build an Outpost? Influence
- Elections? Influence
- Make a Non-aggression/Research/Commercial pact? Influence
- Build any Habitat, Megastructure, including simple Gates (like metro)? Influence, buddy
- Make Claims to go to war? Influence of course
- Need to do a planet decision like Ecumenopolis or even "Stop making robots"? (lol why this is costing me anything, it's a basic game mechanic to reduce micro)? Need influence bro
Anything I have missed? Ah right, every fart in the Galactic Community like veto and proposing new stuff also costs Influence.
Back in a day I was at least able to enable Map the Stars edict, while it was still relevant, and there was something to explore.
Now, I just stare at it 40 years in,. when there are literally no systems to survey.
160 Influence for Map the Stars??? Seriously? That's 3 systems worth.
200 Influence to affect elections? That's absurd amount, when I get +4 per month... I can build a ringworld with that.
Anyway - guys just get someone sit down, play the actual game and figure out the real new Influence pricing. Influence is being taxed ways too heavy with too much put on it, and is a very tight hole to enjoy content through (like new Edicts, for example)
Right now, I consider the entire Edict update to be useless, simply because
- Only 1 edict per time without penalties, without any ability to get more
- Edict gains are simply not worth the Influence costs
- In current meta Influence is more precious than Living Metal and spending it on shit edicts is just a no-no
Something went seriously wrong when the influence costs for stuff like influencing elections was decided.
Election Influence cost is unchanged since release.
However back then there were no megastructures, habitats, GC, planet decisions, branch offices and such. A single space station claimed multiple systems and edicts were all toggles which cost monsthly influence. But there simply was much less to spend influence on and the opportunity cost was lesser too, so the costs weren't as prohibitive as they are now.
I keep wondering this myself, because I can't believe if someone who plays Stellaris "wide" and have a bunch of planets (+20) can sincerely say that the game is not a micro-hell.I wonder if the devs actually even play the game.
Try Automatic pop migration and Tiny outliner mods, it helps me a lot in micro my big empire
I'm thinking that Paradox intends this game to be played on normal speed after 2350 or so.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.
When I see people argue against removing mindless busywork in the game, it makes me want to pull my hair out. This game actually has quite a few things to do if you weren't constantly pre-occupied queuing up yet another building on yet another world.You expect stellaris to be epic grand strategy 4x for you to enjoy unfolding space opera stories.
But in reality stellaris is badly done starcraft IN SPACE for people who suck at actual starcraft.
You often see them defending micromanagement and resulting apm as what makes competitive multiplayer gameplay interesting.