I'm not saying that Stellaris should be harder / easier -- that would be silly really since you can set the hardness at the start of the game.
It has nothing to do with whether it was nice to not tech up and get to repeatables as fast. That's overall scaling, not relative scaling of different strats.
I'm not saying going wide should be the best way to play -- that's not very fun either! And just because wide is good/easy now, doesn't mean it should stay that way. But changes they make should be fun and engaging.
What I'm saying is that there are ways to make compelling gameplay for each way of playing that doesn't involve justifying it by adding unavoidable unfun penalties to the other ways of playing! In this case, the devs could add compelling gameplay to tall strategies.
It's not zero sum. In fact there is no reason to tie unity to tall. Ideally we'd have tall/tech, tall/unity, wide/tech, wide/unity all as equally viable strategies with different feeling playstyles. More meaningful options are fun!
Still hitting repeatables before 70 years have passed and still clearing x25 at 2325 on 600 stars.
If you just spend the pops that you'd normally have producing admin cap on science, you'll get through the tech-tree faster than before.
You'll be behind on traditions, but meh. Traditions don't clear the crisis, techs and fleet does.
If you think the new sprawl mechanic is "penalizing players", you aren't understanding the new system at all.
Overproducing tech to get through it of course works, but its not going to feel like it's being dealt with effectively. At least in the 3.2 solution it's a solvable problem.
It doesn't matter if it's not meant to penalize players: wide is clearly intended. The problem is it FEELS like its penalizing players.
The game must include penalties for playing wide, since playing wide is already inherently better. And these penalties must be quite steep. Games that do not take steps to mitigate it end with having a single viable "strategy", which may be ok if there are multiple and clear victory conditions but is completely unacceptable for a sandbox. I agree with you that all this red ink is disturbing though.
Why? There's no reason wide has to be inherently better. Why not add gameplay features to make tall just as good? Why not add options to the game to balance it.
If you want a sandbox then empire sprawl is not it. A wide empire doesn't have inherent slower tech discovery - it has organizational issues -- which honestly the 3.2 system made better sense of with bureaucrats.
In reality we know technology is exponential. We didn't even have MOST of our current technology 100 years ago. Snowballing probably is a good model to sandbox.
I mean, Stellaris is a strategy game, not a shooter. Introducing a time limit to your decisions doesn't make sense nearly as much as adding a new obstacle to deal with in your decision making.
Empire sprawl isn't an obstacle either. Its a debuff. It's just there if you go wide, its not a choice, you can't avoid it, you can't balance it. You can't do a little bit tall and a little bit wide: there's nothing you can do with it but look at the growing red number (which even grows for tall too!).
The fundamental concept behind sprawl is logical: the bigger your nation gets, the more difficult it is to manage. You either adapt to overcome those difficulties, or you stop expanding because you've reached the limit of what you can handle.
There used to be a way to manage sprawl, now there is not. Perhaps it can be managed "in effect" but that isn't really rewarding.
This is how nations all throughout history have operated, it's a basic fact of nation management. The Roman empire had co-emperors where the reigning emperor and their designated heir would manage the empire, and finally split into two halves to manage its massive size (meaning there were, essentially, four emperors running things), and it still collapsed. Managing an empire of that size with the technology they had was just too difficult: too many people to please, too much commerce to keep track of, communication lag, vast distances to cover and move armies...
Sounds like a job for bureaucrats? Computers? This is simulating the FUTURE, we can manage most of these problems ok now. Stellaris has faster than light communication and computers the size of planets...
If anything, this game doesn't have enough penalties for wide empires. Unrest is a joke, enforcers are really only needed if a criminal megacorp establishes itself on a planet and you're not interested in fighting a war to drive them off, and civil wars are pretty much impossible in your own nation unless you (pretty much deliberaetly) have a machine uprising. Wide empires are incredibly stable and easy to build.
These sound like MUCH better ideas for making wide more interesting to play, and more immersive!
If there's anything railroading playstyle, it's that: why play tall when you can play wide and absolutely dominate? Tall play is a self-imposed RP restriction at this point, not a unique playstyle that has some benefits and drawbacks relative to wide. Everything tall can do, wide can do better.
So why not introduce a way to play that works well only if you are tall?
It make total sense, those are cost of implementing tech or idea for larger population, territory, etc.
For example million people getting personal holographic computer would be vastly cheaper than trillion people getting the same thing.
So sprawl penalty make sense if you think about it a little and more easier to balance too.
Sure you could explain it this way that's pretty good actually. But keep in mind it never was thought of that way before: Organizational bureaucrats were able to keep everything running smoothly. In my mind upgrade costs are usually included in upkeep.
Apologies for the compendium response post!
