The game needs to penalize players less.

[fourteenfour]

The current design philosophy of the development teams seems to be, punish. Apply penalties at every step of the way and clutter the screen with lots of red text to emphasize the penalty which in effect gives the players the impression they are playing the game wrong.

We now have a system where you are under a penalty before the timer starts. All empires start with an edict penalty.

I understand the main issue at hand that has been expressed over and over, tech rushing is bad. There are a multitude of reasons why its bad. From the AI not being able compete by this method to it becoming the default method of play for many players. It came to be because of a major error in the design of the system. The penalty could be toggled on and off as needed by the player because it was applied to the cost of purchasing the item instead of applied as a tax to the production of the currency needed to buy the item.

Example, with obviously fake numbers.
Researcher produces 6 points per turn. Tech cost 600. You are over cap so the cost becomes 720. You can be back at cap for four jobs but you don't need them to be staffed until you have accrued 600 points. So when you see you have 600/720 you just turn on those jobs, click purchase, and then turn off those jobs.

If instead the tech always cost 600 and the game reduced how much of that research you received by even one point per turn suddenly you need twenty more turns if you did not employ the job to keep yourself below the cap. there would be no gaming the system, the penalty is applied to the generation of the resource needed to buy the tech, tradition, edict, or etc.

However... we can remove penalties and red text altogether

But wait, this does not solve the tech rush nor would it solve a unity rush either. However those can be treated to the concept of diminishing returns.

Example, again with obviously fake numbers.

Two researcher produced 20 points per turn. Tech cost 2000. So 100 turns before modifiers. Logically 100 researchers means you get those 2000 point techs in one turn; ludicrous example, stay with me. So what is done is that your maximum tech level per category and average tech level across all three determines how much research can be applied before each additional point applied to the current research item increases and quickly.

Now using the funny numbers above. That technology will take over eight years to research. Player is just starting the game so they are tech level one with an average level of one. How fast is too fast? Lets set a threshold of 24 months for equal technology. This gives us a limit of 83.3 applied per turn to this tech. So eight researchers will suffice or you could get the equivalent with research stations. If you had ten researchers you would generate 100 points but they would not all apply. This is where the decision of how fast the returns fall off occurs. Lets go severe, take your limit and divided it by four. Each of those first 21 points would be double cost, the next 21 four times, and so on.

Now there light at the end of the tunnel. Your scientist applies his bonus to the maximum permitted value you can spend before penalty and stored research is applied without penalty. Its only points you create and spend that are subject to returns. so apply all your points, say you paid 83 and another 17 at 34 cost for 100. Your scientist applies his bonus to the 83 and stored research value added together but not the excess you paid in.


I know, but how does this help people who just want to play tall. Tall will never beat out a wide player when it comes to gathering resources but game play changes centered around diminishing returns can bring generated resources to a more even level. Currently we need research for techs and unity for traditions; depending on version you may need it for edicts. If we apply diminishing returns to the production of both resources a tall empire will likely have the building slots to maintain parity except against the largest of empires. Eventually an expanding empire will outstrip a tall empire, the numbers just have to pile up.


Hope you made it to the bottom here. I am just of the opinion that game design enforcing behavior through penalties does not make for a fun game.

 

[Floimus]

I agree wholeheartedly. It feels worse and worse to play this way. Empire wide negatives on fun things (tech + traditions + growth) for doing the fun things like ... building an empire (planets/districts/pops) is just not fun. Feels like taxes which are not fun and it's hard to reason about. Worse it's hard to build compelling strategies around.

Tech rushing has never been a problem really, that's the point of tech rushing and should be a valid strategy. The issue here is the viability of non-tech rush strategies. It seems backwards to penalize the good synergies to help lack of synergies.

Instead why not introduce new synergies for each different playstyle, let those accumulate bonuses at about the same exponential rate. This can be easier to manage as mixed strategies can accumulate both and usually overall get reduced total bonuses which is compensated by the additional utility.

That would be much more rewarding and make light playing easier as well as min-maxing more fun.

 

[KNakamura]

I agree wholeheartedly. It feels worse and worse to play this way. Empire wide negatives on fun things (tech + traditions + growth) for doing the fun things like ... building an empire (planets/districts/pops) is just not fun. Feels like taxes which are not fun and it's hard to reason about. Worse it's hard to build compelling strategies around.

Tech rushing has never been a problem really, that's the point of tech rushing and should be a valid strategy. The issue here is the viability of non-tech rush strategies. It seems backwards to penalize the good synergies to help lack of synergies.

Instead why not introduce new synergies for each different playstyle, let those accumulate bonuses at about the same exponential rate. This can be easier to manage as mixed strategies can accumulate both and usually overall get reduced total bonuses which is compensated by the additional utility.

That would be much more rewarding and make light playing easier as well as min-maxing more fun.

I'd say this is why penalties exist. They're trying to stop snowballing, not just make it easier for other playstyles.

 

[Floimus]

I'd say this is why penalties exist. They're trying to stop snowballing, not just make it easier for other playstyles.

Penalties aren't required to stop snowballing, increasing costs are sufficient if tuned to the "level" of the society. This should be ok for tech and traditions, probably can be set for any other synergies. Penalties should be avoided because they just aren't fun.

 

[KNakamura]

Penalties aren't required to stop snowballing, increasing costs are sufficient if tuned to the "level" of the society. This should be ok for tech and traditions, probably can be set for any other synergies. Penalties should be avoided because they just aren't fun.

Penalties *are* increasing costs. That's the point of them.

I mean, it's irrelevant if there's a multiple positive cost applied to the target, or multiple negative penalty applied to production, it's about the same thing mathematically. One just makes it more clearer that this is not an intended playstyle.

 

[Floimus]

Penalties *are* increasing costs. That's the point of them.

I mean, it's irrelevant if there's a multiple positive cost applied to the target, or multiple negative penalty applied to production, it's about the same thing mathematically. One just makes it more clearer that this is not an intended playstyle.

I think that's exactly the issue, lots of red is a bad way to indicate a not intended playstyle -- its not the fun way.

Secondly, this is mostly a single player game, very few playstyles should be "not intended": how is that fun?
And if some playstyles are too powerful, then lots of red then sends the wrong message.
Thirdly, if a playstyle is actually not intended, why is it allowed at all?

To digress here a bit, the population penalties and sprawl penalties act like traps, if you conquer too many pops, or expand too quickly, your empire machine massively slows down. Regardless if this realistic or not, or anti-snowballing, its a trap for new players who are encouraged to do these things, and railroading for experienced players that somehow know better.

 

[KNakamura]

Man, it's almost like being good at something requires experience.

Also, "traps"? It CLEARLY tells you what's going to cause sprawl and penalties. It's only a trap if you don't read the tooltips or notice trends.

(as for "not intended", most games include ways you can make work with skill but are also skill-ceiling executions. It's the way of things.)

 

[Carl_Bar]

I'm going to quote somthing i posted in another thread as it's relevant here:

Suggestion based solely on some comments here. At least for research has there been consideration given to making sprawl penalty to act as a negative modifier to research totals in the top bar. One of the issues with scaling costs is that without a fair amount of math and memorised prior numbers it's fairly hard at a glance to comprehend weather you doing better or worse at any given point of the game.

This also undoubtedly strongly affects peoples ability to give meaningful feedback to some degree as their sense of how good/bad somthing is, is less precise and in borderline cases could actually be factually wrong without them being aware of it.

As has also been mentioned elsewhere as well, tech and tradition costs going up as your empire got bigger with zero way to mitigate it was how the game worked for absolutely ages before they brought in the current admin cap system, and even that wasn't supposed to let you drive the penalties down to nothing.

I think that's exactly the issue, lots of red is a bad way to indicate a not intended playstyle -- its not the fun way.

Secondly, this is mostly a single player game, very few playstyles should be "not intended": how is that fun?
And if some playstyles are too powerful, then lots of red then sends the wrong message.
Thirdly, if a playstyle is actually not intended, why is it allowed at all?

To digress here a bit, the population penalties and sprawl penalties act like traps, if you conquer too many pops, or expand too quickly, your empire machine massively slows down. Regardless if this realistic or not, or anti-snowballing, its a trap for new players who are encouraged to do these things, and railroading for experience players that somehow know better.

Extreme tech rushing is possibble because they screwed up the balance of the existing empire sprawl system. It was supposed to be that you could not worry about it upto the point of getting your guaranteed habitable's, but after that unless you dedicated a significant portion of your output to admin cap you took penalties. they kinda screwed that up, but it didn't become obvious until later when other things intentionally and unintentionally interacted with it turning the dial up.

The game has allways struggled from day one with issues around preventing snowballing being powerful because more resources initially meant more fleet in a linear relationship. They eventually hit that with the fleet cap system which cut that back, but that just pushed the optimisation issue towards making each ship better at it's job, which pushed repeatable techs as the answer.

Which eventually got us to where we are now, (there's a lot of factors that keep ultra-wide tech rush going and super strong, but at it's core it's allways going to be a preferred strategy as is because it's the optimisation point).

Stellaris has been changed a lot over it's lifetme and that makes it easy for overly strong builds to pop up without anyone intending it to happen. It's also a complex enough game even the community tends to take quite a while after a patch is released to find all the most abusbale things, usually it will be several more patches later before everything gets figured out. That makes it hard to avoid making abusable things stronger in the next patch because you don;t know an abusable ting exists to avoid strengthening yet because no one's figured out that loophole that exists yet.

 

[Nevars]

Nah the game should penalize player more not less.

It still boggle my mind that conquest is ridiculously easy and cheap while their ROI is also too high.

 

[Floimus]

Nah the game should penalize player more not less.

It still boggle my mind that conquest is ridiculously easy and cheap while their ROI is also too high.

I think this is missing the point. It's not the absolute hardness that is the issue, it's how its presented. To first order, the worst thing is seeing the penalties as penalties.

Other effects are that a penalty oriented game design leads to traps and railroading.

 

[Floimus]

I'm going to quote somthing i posted in another thread as it's relevant here:



As has also been mentioned elsewhere as well, tech and tradition costs going up as your empire got bigger with zero way to mitigate it was how the game worked for absolutely ages before they brought in the current admin cap system, and even that wasn't supposed to let you drive the penalties down to nothing.



Extreme tech rushing is possibble because they screwed up the balance of the existing empire sprawl system. It was supposed to be that you could not worry about it upto the point of getting your guaranteed habitable's, but after that unless you dedicated a significant portion of your output to admin cap you took penalties. they kinda screwed that up, but it didn't become obvious until later when other things intentionally and unintentionally interacted with it turning the dial up.

The game has allways struggled from day one with issues around preventing snowballing being powerful because more resources initially meant more fleet in a linear relationship. They eventually hit that with the fleet cap system which cut that back, but that just pushed the optimisation issue towards making each ship better at it's job, which pushed repeatable techs as the answer.

Which eventually got us to where we are now, (there's a lot of factors that keep ultra-wide tech rush going and super strong, but at it's core it's allways going to be a preferred strategy as is because it's the optimisation point).

You make a lot of good points here.

I think fundamentally the issue here is everything in the tech tree, tradition tree, ascension perks, settling planets, building districts and growing pops is meant to synergize and grow super-linearly if not exponentially. The tech tree is probably the worst offender with it's self buffs (really everything is a self buff). I don't think anything is wrong with this, actually much of the fun in empire building is getting that synergistic progression. The right thing here to slow down techs/progression is to increase the costs of higher tier techs/progress exponentially as well.

The answer should not be to instead add massive linear penalties to tech rush, or empire building. If synergies are super-linear, that probably won't even help, and like you say, it hasn't.

Instead the fun thing to do would be to add a competing superlinear path which competes for resources with tech. Add large bonuses for fun synergies. In some ways we already have this with conquest, though could perhaps use more balance. I think they correctly see there's an opportunity with unity.

A good example perhaps is crisis ascension: they did not add random penalties to the other ascention paths to make it competitive. Instead it gets very strong bonuses and even a leveling mechanism, which adds power and synergies.

Stellaris has been changed a lot over it's lifetme and that makes it easy for overly strong builds to pop up without anyone intending it to happen. It's also a complex enough game even the community tends to take quite a while after a patch is released to find all the most abusbale things, usually it will be several more patches later before everything gets figured out. That makes it hard to avoid making abusable things stronger in the next patch because you don;t know an abusable ting exists to avoid strengthening yet because no one's figured out that loophole that exists yet.

I think the bonus oriented approach leaves less room for weird exploits. In these cases usually you can only do better by combining good things (which are known and balance-able). In the penalty case, instead the meta becomes weird workarounds. I really don't like the current meta where because of these penalties its actually advantageous for your super empire to split off vassals, let them grow a bit without the malice, and then resorb them, or just tax them as tributaries, or abuse the broken trade system. It's railroads you into the worst, roughest bits of the game.

 

[Pancakelord]

I think this is missing the point. It's not the absolute hardness that is the issue, it's how its presented. To first order, the worst thing is seeing the penalties as penalties.

Other effects are that a penalty oriented game design leads to traps and railroading.

How would you feel if they just changed the colour of all the red numbers to yellow numbers (e.g in the sprawl tooltip).

I welcome extra penalties (I find playing through constraints more fun than a totally freeform environment), and would welcome more still in other areas [the values themselves do need tuning, or scalars].

• For example changing more/most initially habitable worlds in to terraforming candidates, so that colonies open up more slowly over the course of the game.
• Occupation events and modifiers
• Post annexation integration mechanics.

But, I agree that any unmitigatable penalty should not use the colour red. Red implies - to me - 1) bad 2) you can fix this.
You can no longer 'fix sprawl' - it's just a fact of life, once more, like death and taxes. So it's penalties using the colour red doesn't make sense to me. I'm not cut-up about it, but it is an example of poor visual design language.

 

[Ludaire]

You're trying to achieve the same basic idea with a more confusing system that is *also* a penalty. That's what diminishing returns are: a penalty reducing your output. How does that make things better?

Also, the big issue was never the fact that you could abuse admin cap by shifting it up and down. That was a bad thing, sure, but it was a niche issue. The real issue was that 300 research got you the same tech advancement speed whether you're an empire with 5 planets and 200 pops or an empire with 50 planets and 2,000 pops. If instead, that 50 planet empire puts out 10 times the research, meaning 3,000, then they research techs in 1/10th the time. Add this to the snowballing nature of 4x games and the fact that the rest of their economy will also be ten times larger than the smaller empire, and you get the kind of ludicrously wide swings we saw in the admin cap with bureaucrats era.

With the new mechanics, the empire that's 10 times as big would be spending about 2.5 times as much on techs as the smaller empire. If they have the same tech level because the giant totally neglected it, they'll take two and a half times as long to research the same tech. If the giant empire keeps pace, they'll research the same tech in a quarter of the time.

This narrows the gap between stronger and weaker empires/strategies, it slows down the 4x snowball, and it makes the pace of the game a bit more consistent. All of these are desirable things, and lead to a more enjoyable and more balanced game.

I think in an ideal world, they'd achieve this through a bonus instead of a penalty. Basically, use that old "rest bonus instead of fatigue penalty" trick WoW did back in the day to turn a hated mechanic into a loved one even though under the hood it was exactly the same. (Such is the power of text color or a +/- sign.)

However, The only way to do that here is to give other empires a bonus based on how well you're doing or something along those lines. That doesn't feel any better, and likely would feel worse. I'd much rather manage an increasing cost for various things alongside all the other forms of maintenance and increasing costs (like traditions costing more each time you get another tradition or select a new tree). Having stuff I do apply essentially invisibly to other empires with no way to interact with it would be much more confusing and feel worse.

I wonder if it would help if they had some representation of your research/tech speed independent of sprawl and such. A number along the lines of "Here's how many months it would take you to research mega engineering given your current research amount and sprawl" indicator. That way, it's a number you can see go up when you increase science output and down as your sprawl goes up the same way your net energy, food, and so on does. Because energy and food upkeep is also a red number, but it's not as scary because you can see an aggregate that takes into account both increased production and increased use. A "research power" and "traditions power" that shows you how your research and unity output stack up against the sprawl cost increases could achieve the same purpose as the empire-wide resource counters in showing the bigger picture.

Really, I think the mechanics they've landed on works great to solve many problems in the game, and they work fine numerically. It's just a matter of adjusting the presentation to convince players that sprawl's increases to various costs are not a punishment or an indication that you're doing anything wrong any more than increased food usage on your planets is.

 

[Urloc the Great]

My wish for the future is for Paradox to turn sprawl penalty into a slider:
From "No Sprawl Penalty at all" to "What ever you guys want the max penalty to be"
so that everyone would be happy.

Worked for pop growth and tech so why shouldn't it work for sprawl?

 

[MK1980]

diminishing returns on output are much worse than escalating tech costs based on empire size to slow down tech progress.

increasing tech costs leave most of the game mechanics intact. you invest more of your economy in techs, you get faster tech progress. the upper limit is a natural limit - you can't increase the tech pace any further when everyone in your empire is already a researcher or does a job that is required to keep the researchers going.

with a diminishing returns formula, the upper limit is arbitrary. the game decides that your researchers become increasingly inefficient as they approach an arbitrary target number and no matter how hard you try, you're hard capped at that static pace. also, slackers who only invest a fraction of what you invested get almost the same result, so you're actively punished for trying to play a tech focussed game.

can't think of any type of player who would find that system appealing

 

[Harmsway]

But, I agree that any unmitigatable penalty should not use the colour red. Red implies - to me - 1) bad 2) you can fix this.
You can no longer 'fix sprawl' - it's just a fact of life, once more, like death and taxes. So it's penalties using the colour red doesn't make sense to me. I'm not cut-up about it, but it is an example of poor visual design language.

I think that would go a long way for people new to the game. The current beta opens up on a new player with "you're already making the wrong choices", "no you screwed up", "all your numbers are red, you suck".

And only much later, if they choose to keep playing, do they learn that some red numbers are "you screwed up and you need to fix something" and other red numbers are "you are currently playing the game, and life sucking is just how it is".

edit: I still think there are the wrong kinds of penalties for players snowballing in a single-player game, but the visual messaging should be an easy fix

 

[Shark7]

From what I've seen and read, it seems like the solution is just as bad as the problem.

And to top it off, this all seems geared toward balancing multi-player. But I will never play multiplayer, so from my point of view I'm being told that I'm playing the game wrong and I must be coerced into playing "the right way".

Early game exploration is the fun part of the game. I am afraid these changes to leader costs are just going to make it tedious.

The sprawl thing is also a big one on my list. It starts out in the red and just keeps getting worse. And I can't do anything to fix it other than not do anything at all to prevent it getting worse. That is not fun. Fun is finding a solution to the problem within the game mechanics. But in 3.3 there appears to be no solution to the problem. I do agree that as it currently is, it is way too easy to fix, but having no mechanic to mitigate it at all is even worse IMO. It's there, showing in bright red and taunting you. I'd rather not even be able to see it al all TBH.

The more I think about it, the more I think we are just trading one unbalanced playstyle (the wide tech rush) for another unbalanced playstyle (the tall spiritualist unity rush), instead of actually making all play styles fun.

But this is just my opinion.

 

[Incompetent]

I think the logic of sprawl is basically correct, as it was pre-Bureaucrats, although the numbers could be adjusted. Big empires make more resources (including science and unity) but also need to spend more to make empire-wide reforms. Even then, the fact that sprawl adds to a baseline of 100% costs, rather than costs scaling up from zero, means that expansion tends increase your rate of tech/tradition progress (as long as the proportion of science/unity jobs in your empire stays roughly constant), it's just that there are effectively diminishing returns. You should try to use the pops you have efficiently, don't build lots of idle districts and so on, but you don't need to artificially constrain your empire size. Devs and players knew all this before Bureaucrats, you didn't become ultra-advanced while blobbing but you could tech up just fine, which is why I always thought jobs that made 10 admin cap were a big mistake as soon as they were announced.

The cost scaling for edicts in the beta is excessive and effectively makes edict fund a "small empires only" mechanic, which I don't like but it's probably not gamebreaking (although 0 unity exploits could be pretty bad; the devs really need to rethink the flat penalties for resource deficits, or new 0 resource exploits will keep popping up every other patch). The extra tech/tradition costs though look pretty soft to me, far milder than they were in most pre-Bureaucrat versions of Stellaris, so the diminishing returns of getting more pops/colonies (some of whom make science/unity) will kick in a lot slower, and blobbing will still be preferred over "going tall" for getting advanced tech and unity-based perks.

One thing I do think is a bad idea in the context of the new system is having a large blanket multiplier to sprawl penalties based on authority type. The basic logic is that your sprawl grows roughly linearly with size, so on large scales you need to maintain a steady proportion of science/unity jobs to keep up. A blanket sprawl multiplier means either a) you need that much better science/unity jobs (in which case the combined effect of the sprawl multiplier and the job upgrade cancels out, so better to simplify things), b) you need that much higher proportion of pops working science/unity jobs (is this really sustainable at scale?), or c) you are doomed to fall behind on tech, traditions and so on. I don't think Machine Intelligences for example have so much greater efficiency that they can make up for this level of blanket slowdown. By the same token, empire-wide modifiers to sprawl from pops/districts/colonies need to be balanced very carefully in the new system, e.g. you don't want to make it so that Expansion traditions are obligatory for maintaining tech progress.

 

[Shark7]

I think the logic of sprawl is basically correct, as it was pre-Bureaucrats, although the numbers could be adjusted. Big empires make more resources (including science and unity) but also need to spend more to make empire-wide reforms. Even then, the fact that sprawl adds to a baseline of 100% costs, rather than costs scaling up from zero, means that expansion tends increase your rate of tech/tradition progress (as long as the proportion of science/unity jobs in your empire stays roughly constant), it's just that there are effectively diminishing returns. You should try to use the pops you have efficiently, don't build lots of idle districts and so on, but you don't need to artificially constrain your empire size. Devs and players knew all this before Bureaucrats, you didn't become ultra-advanced while blobbing but you could tech up just fine, which is why I always thought jobs that made 10 admin cap were a big mistake as soon as they were announced.

The cost scaling for edicts in the beta is excessive and effectively makes edict fund a "small empires only" mechanic, which I don't like but it's probably not gamebreaking (although 0 unity exploits could be pretty bad; the devs really need to rethink the flat penalties for resource deficits, or new 0 resource exploits will keep popping up every other patch). The extra tech/tradition costs though look pretty soft to me, far milder than they were in most pre-Bureaucrat versions of Stellaris, so the diminishing returns of getting more pops/colonies (some of whom make science/unity) will kick in a lot slower, and blobbing will still be preferred over "going tall" for getting advanced tech and unity-based perks.

One thing I do think is a bad idea in the context of the new system is having a large blanket multiplier to sprawl penalties based on authority type. The basic logic is that your sprawl grows roughly linearly with size, so on large scales you need to maintain a steady proportion of science/unity jobs to keep up. A blanket sprawl multiplier means either a) you need that much better science/unity jobs (in which case the combined effect of the sprawl multiplier and the job upgrade cancels out, so better to simplify things), b) you need that much higher proportion of pops working science/unity jobs (is this really sustainable at scale?), or c) you are doomed to fall behind on tech, traditions and so on. I don't think Machine Intelligences for example have so much greater efficiency that they can make up for this level of blanket slowdown. By the same token, empire-wide modifiers to sprawl from pops/districts/colonies need to be balanced very carefully in the new system, e.g. you don't want to make it so that Expansion traditions are obligatory for maintaining tech progress.

But isn't that the real problem. No system they have yet created didn't end up with the consequences of making one play style completely superior to the other. And this latest fix is doing the same thing and expecting a different result. Sure its a new mechanic, but every time they've introduced a new mechanic to balance tall vs wide it has ended up making one (usually wide) completely superior to the other, just making the problem worse.

And I honestly don't know if there is a solution to balance playstyles, because you have to take into account that every player is in fact unique. In other words, you can balance the tools, but you can't balance the skill of the tool users. And making the game fun and balanced for one set of players completely destroys the fun for another group of players.

 

[Dinkelman]

Before bureaucrats existed, tech costs were increased based on number of pops and colonies. You could not avoid it, but if you got the penalties, it meant you also got even more research because of your expansion. What we have now is the same situation as that, but much more lax penalties relative to the increasing science income. The only other difference is that it is represented differently in the UI. Sprawl is explicit now, before you only saw it if you looked at the costs of techs. So it's a psychological difference.

People think it's bad because they call it a penalty instead of a modifier. You are not supposed to stop sprawling. Sprawl represents something natural, not something wrong.