The game needs to penalize players less.

[Paul93]

Why? There's no reason wide has to be inherently better.

It is inherently better because you both increase your intake and decrease your opponent's (human or AI) intake. Then, the next time you will interact with them, the situation will be even more unbalanced and as such it will be even easier for you to increase your gain. This creates the so-called "snowball" effect: in a series of fights, if you win the first time, it is easier for you to win again and again.

This is bad for at least three reasons:
- the game becomes easier as you progress, which makes it boring
- the game is predictable: the one who is in pole position in the early game will most certainly remain there for the rest of the game, which again makes it boring
- there is one and only one path to (try to) acquire and then retain the pole position, which is military conquest

Why not add gameplay features to make tall just as good? Why not add options to the game to balance it.

Since the wide gameplay is so powerful, the amount of extra bonuses that you have to give to tall empires are a lot, and then you have also to prevent that these bonuses are used also by wide empires. Adding a penalty for wide empires is simpler to implement for devs and to understand for players.

You are not prevented to go wide and in fact, large empires still win in the long run. However, at the very least, it's not a complete cakewalk for them. Consider also that the numbers in the beta are provisional and will certainly be revised for the final release.

If you want a sandbox then empire sprawl is not it.

It is, since now you can (hopefully) play both wide and tall, instead of only wide. For the word "play" I intend to be able to do, well, something meaningful in the game.

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.

At first you seem to be right, but there are a couple of important things you are not considering.

First of all, "organizational issues" are unfortunately not represented in the game (and are probably beyond the ability of the engine). Large empires should have tons of problems integrating conquered pops. They should be often on the brink of civil war. They should have an increasingly sclerotic and corrupt bureaucracy. Local leaders should scheme behind your back even during peacetime to acquire more power and wealth for themselves. And so on... Second, some of these problems have, as an indirect consequence, a slower tech acquisition (or even a technological regress). This happened to the late Roman Empire, for example.

To sum up, there are a lot of things going on in real nations (and in the empires of the past) that cannot be simulated in Stellaris. In absence of all these features, devs have decided to apply a simpler series of modifiers, and for me it's more than fine.

Since bureaucrats were largely required by small and large empires alike, and the CG tax they applied was basically flat, they were useless in regard of preventing snowball.

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.

In reality technology spreads very rapidly through borders and in fact the real world is largely homogeneous in terms of available techs, despite the wildly different levels of research expenditure between nations. This doesn't happen in Stellaris.

Also, technology is exponential regardless of the size of a nation. It is simply exponential within itself, so this actually doesn't matter to your argument.

 

[MK1980]

Consider also that the numbers in the beta are provisional and will certainly be revised for the final release.

i hope they revise the numbers. right now the tech penalty is very low and barely affects gameplay at all.

when they introduced the bureaucrats, everyone with half a brain realized that 10 admin cap per bureaucrat job was way to much and that it would essentially be nothing more than very cheap tax that would eliminate the sprawl penalty altogether. people warned the devs over and over, yet we ended up with that number going live

i think reviving the old penalty system is the right call. not very elegant, but better than the admin cap system.

but the numbers need to be higher for tech (and probably also for traditions). and probably also lower for edicts.

seems a bit overpriced to pay hundreds of energy per month for 25% leader exp gain or 10% less consumer goods usage. so i guess for edicts they could just make the baseline upkeep fairly cheap, but increase the cost for all edicts with each additional edict you activate. i.e. everyone can afford to run a few of them, but when you add too many, the cost skyrockets so you have to maintain a certain balance between what you want and what you can afford.

 

[Unseelie]

I do not believe there is a way to make tall play competitive that does not penalize wide play.

Anything that makes a tall nation better will either be given to everyone, or limited to tall players. Anything that's only given to tall, we don't have to discuss further, you've obviously penalized the wide player by saying nope, you can't have it.

Then the next case, things that every nation can have, well, they necessarily need to scale in respect to empire size to fight snowballing.

I invite anyone to suggest a method that doesn't penalize tall players, and after that point, I don't view the argument that the game ought only present mitigatable downsides to scale anything but an argument that the biggest empires ought always be better.

And if that's what you're trying to say, I'd argue that the game is won by whomever is in the pole position by 2050...which is not the game I'd like to play.

 

[Eled the Worm Tamer]

Honestly, I'd rather they did something more dynamic with it all.

The much asked for internal politics thing would be a great way to balance wide vs tall and do so organically.

Because you could make maintaining your big old empire legitimately hard. Every system you add tips the center of political gravity away from one's core worlds, every bit of development defuses power and makes a breakaway easier. The outrageous productivity of an ecu is balanced by the soft power that hands to its political classes.

Same with balancing conquest. You have unhappy border worlds, so you go to war for more resources, and take over a chunk of another civ. Guess what? Not only do you have a wider border and a grudge, now you have another cluster of unhappy border worlds...

 

[Red Death]

In reality technology spreads very rapidly through borders and in fact the real world is largely homogeneous in terms of available techs, despite the wildly different levels of research expenditure between nations. This doesn't happen in Stellaris.

This is a crucial reason I think people miss for a sprawl penalty being necessary: Because tech barely spreads (or not at all), the largest empires will always be the most advanced by far, to the point that any smaller empires have absolutely no chance of countering them, even when enough of them band together to be of larger total size than the larger empire.

This hasn't been the case in human history because tech spreads, as you said. Note that this is also not the case in most sci-fi fiction, since it's not interesting a lot of the time! I think the same goes for Stellaris. Some form of size-related tech penalty is needed to counteract this effect and keep things interesting.

Either that, or there needs to be much more tech spread than there is now.

 

[Unseelie]

Either that, or there needs to be much more tech spread than there is now.

While I think this would be neat, I do want to raise the idea that this will dramatically impact another problem that its part of the design-intention to avoid, which is blasting through the tech tree. And if I have a chance of getting tech from my neighbors, through trades, natural spread, spies, or industrial agreements, or what-have-you...that's just making tech faster.

But I'm totally for it. Just uh...adjust up the total cost of research to counterbalance it.

 

[Eled the Worm Tamer]

While I think this would be neat, I do want to raise the idea that this will dramatically impact another problem that its part of the design-intention to avoid, which is blasting through the tech tree. And if I have a chance of getting tech from my neighbors, through trades, natural spread, spies, or industrial agreements, or what-have-you...that's just making tech faster.

But I'm totally for it. Just uh...adjust up the total cost of research to counterbalance it.

Tie tech availability to special resources (to the point that each resource is its own tech tree with differing applications) that would a: make special resources matter more and b: limit the impact of spreading techs. Or failing that give us a tech tree that is deeper than 'Vulcan's meet Zefram Cochrane' to 'TNG' because seriously all the interesting game changing things are over in the early to mid-game, and then it's just making the numbers bigger.

 

[TheRevanchist25]

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.

Sounds to me like the change is utterly pointless then, and is just changing things for sake of change.

 

[Strangedane]

Sounds to me like the change is utterly pointless then, and is just changing things for sake of change.

You do get fewer ascenscion perks than before, if done like this.
But yes, if the goal was to make science rush less attractive (and it was) they completely missed their mark.

Going wide is still the only competetive option and there is nothing a "tall" empire can do, that a wide one can't do better.

 

[Paul93]

Don't know if can be applied, but what about a tech system like the one in EU4?

There could be something like a dozen or so "super-techs", powerful innovations that spread through the galaxy dynamically and that are paced in a such a way to render tech rushes nearly impossible (as in EU4), accompained by the normal techs that are, from a flavor point, special applications of these innovations. These innovations would be activated by some important steps in the galactic evolution like: the first planet to hit 100 pops, or the activation of L-Gates (that should be moved from normal techs to something other, like archeological site missions) and so on. Researching techs far ahead of time would then come with very steep prices.

This would also more closely resemble the "real" way by which technological advancement happens: a small number of breakthroughs that produce an array of applications up to the point that further enhancements are not possible/economically viable anymore. Then the society has to wait for the next breakthorugh to flourish into the next tech renaissance.

 

[Unseelie]

I've played a few mods that have spreading tech like things, so yes, its do-able.

 

[gamerk2]

I do not believe there is a way to make tall play competitive that does not penalize wide play.

The only way to ever make Tall viable would be to remove district/building limits. Rather then being set to some maximum value, they would become a function of a planets population. So in theory you could have one hyper-densely populated planet with the same outputs as an Empire with dozens of less-developed planets. The issue of course becomes it's harder to specialize in *everything*, but in theory one planet plus a few dedicated Habitats could do the job.

The downsides are obvious though: We'd need to ramp up pop growth again, which brings with it the same issues with performance. Nevermind the default growth settings really don't work on Large/Huge galaxies as worker shortages become things again anyways. We'd also need the jobs system re-worked from the ground up. As well as new incentives to go wide. And so on.

To me, everything goes back to pops/jobs. That's the core design feature of Stellaris, and the one I think needs a fundamental re-thinking. And frankly, its caused enough headaches where I'm all in favor of making jobs "Civilization level simple" so we can focus less on job management and more about subverting the galaxy to elect us Galactic Emperor. As it stands, late-game Stellaris is just a glorified Job Management Simulator anyways.

 

[KNakamura]

The only way to ever make Tall viable would be to remove district/building limits. Rather then being set to some maximum value, they would become a function of a planets population. So in theory you could have one hyper-densely populated planet with the same outputs as an Empire with dozens of less-developed planets. The issue of course becomes it's harder to specialize in *everything*, but in theory one planet plus a few dedicated Habitats could do the job.

The downsides are obvious though: We'd need to ramp up pop growth again, which brings with it the same issues with performance. Nevermind the default growth settings really don't work on Large/Huge galaxies as worker shortages become things again anyways. We'd also need the jobs system re-worked from the ground up. As well as new incentives to go wide. And so on.

To me, everything goes back to pops/jobs. That's the core design feature of Stellaris, and the one I think needs a fundamental re-thinking. And frankly, its caused enough headaches where I'm all in favor of making jobs "Civilization level simple" so we can focus less on job management and more about subverting the galaxy to elect us Galactic Emperor. As it stands, late-game Stellaris is just a glorified Job Management Simulator anyways.

That isn't what I said and I really resent people putting words in my mouth.

 

[Unseelie]

There's a bug in the quote system where if you backspace from a quote under another quote, it pops the words up into the other guy's bar.

That was what I said, and I imagine gamerk2 had just double-clicked your paragraph at some point.

 

[KNakamura]

There's a bug in the quote system where if you backspace from a quote under another quote, it pops the words up into the other guy's bar.

That was what I said, and I imagine gamerk2 had just double-clicked your paragraph at some point.

Huh. Thanks for clarifying! (That's some bug, but I'm glad you explained it.) Apologies for the curt tone.

 

[gamerk2]

Huh. Thanks for clarifying! (That's some bug, but I'm glad you explained it.) Apologies for the curt tone.

No worries.

Yeah, I had the remnants of another quote I abandoned my response to, and it messed up the original quote. Cleaning up mulitqoutes is messy.