The "randomness" does not add extra value to the game...

[Casko]

Agreed with Leader random trait, as it stands, is nothing but annoyance in many cases.

However I think the issue is on the traits themselves rather than the randomness. It is either decent bonus or awful negative you never want.

Things should be mixed, like Unyielding Trait, where you have a buff in an area but debuff in others. So you don't get either mild 'okay' or 'f-k this bs' reaction, but you are given a tool to work with instead.

I feel like in general the game would do well with like a ton more traits in general for leaders. That way you wouldn't really either be stuck with 50 same traits, and maybe reduce the need and want to minmax and spending 500k energy to get a genius or engineering scientist when there'd be multiple choices to pick from.

 

[Blackadder23]

but it isnt.... every "random" factor is acutally not random at all
and im not talking about seeds here, just look at empire placements and how the galaxy gen places ethics... its not random, its completly based upon YOUR ethic, and the generation places empires counter to your ethic next to you, and then does that across the whole galaxy

The devs and community ambassadors on here have said over and over that there is nothing in the game that actually does this. I suppose they could be lying for some reason, or they could have accidentally done something to create this effect without realizing it, but this is basically a canard until proven otherwise. I think it's probably confirmation bias at work (I've never especially noticed the ethics thing myself, but I've also never looked for it).

 

[Peko?]

The devs and community ambassadors on here have said over and over that there is nothing in the game that actually does this. I suppose they could be lying for some reason, or they could have accidentally done something to create this effect without realizing it, but this is basically a canard until proven otherwise. I think it's probably confirmation bias at work (I've never especially noticed the ethics thing myself, but I've also never looked for it).

I think I remember Wiz saying that the weights for any given ethos decrease for every instance of it already generated in the galaxy. Couldn't swear on it though.

 

[Brael]

I agree with OP on the issue of technology and growth, it really makes no sense that tech is "random" and, to those who think making it a standard tech tree would make everything the same every game, you just have to choose to follow a tech path every new game to make things different, if people really care about different options they will be able to make do with a standard tech tree and their own choices.

On the issue of growth, it really doesn't make sense that species with lower habitability would grow faster than ones with higher hab just because, it should be determined by a calculus involving habitability, rights, avaliable jobs (you could take it a step further and add the species traits that have synergy with jobs to it as people would like to go to a place were their abilities are best put to use) etc. instead of just randomly picking one to grow as it seems like is the case currently.

I have, however, to desagree vehemently on the issue of leaders. Leaders are people like you and me, they make bad decisions and sometimes it fucks their lives over, its just the way things are, its part of the empire experience stellaris is trying to emulate and i think removing it would be a loss. In fact, i think leaders should have a larger spectrum of traits to show better the human element in this game, i hope it arrives one day.

And to those who believe stellaris is all about randomness, i think you guys are projecting your own particular preferences into the wider player community or the devs, the game isn't mainly about randomness, nowhere it is advertised as such and, like the majority of the paradox playerbase, most players i see come here to rp the imperium of man or play microsoft excel with kino visuals, many would actually disagree with the idea the game is all about randomness if you asked them. Not that randomness doesn't have a very important place in the game, i believe it has, just that sometimes it hampers the experience, the tech and habitability being examples of such.

I don’t mind random techs, but I do think scientist traits are tedious. I would instead prefer an empire wide focus that could be changed every X years. It would have the same effect as the current traits without the tedious micromanagement.

 

[OwlOfSpace]

I feel like in general the game would do well with like a ton more traits in general for leaders. That way you wouldn't really either be stuck with 50 same traits, and maybe reduce the need and want to minmax and spending 500k energy to get a genius or engineering scientist when there'd be multiple choices to pick from.

Tons of both Postive *and* Negative traits, so you get both, making a certain leaders good for X thing but bad for Y thing, giving them more indivisual taste.

 

[Archael90]

I think that leveling system simmilar to vampires in the sims 4 would be nice here. More positive traits would require serious negative ones. This would fix three problems: 1. randomness in leader traits, 2. insignificant leaders, 3, lack of actual choices.

 

[gamerk2]

I don't mind the random techs, but one thing I hate is how higher tier techs are often blocked behind things you don't necessarily need/want to take when they first pop up. That's something that could be cleaned up going forward.

 

[ZeeHero]

Early game would definitely be improved by less reliable screwing of the player by "RNG", but after the first 50 years it's fine as is.

 

[Maethendias]

The devs and community ambassadors on here have said over and over that there is nothing in the game that actually does this. I suppose they could be lying for some reason, or they could have accidentally done something to create this effect without realizing it, but this is basically a canard until proven otherwise. I think it's probably confirmation bias at work (I've never especially noticed the ethics thing myself, but I've also never looked for it).

it is confirmed that galaxy generation seeds empires in a sort of "snail" motion, with the first empire being the core seed that defines all other random empires, despite what you may have heard

of course, if you dont disable pregenerated empires that always have a chance to show up in your game, you dont notice it, but if you remove your pre build empires, and allow pure empire generation upon seeding, you can see that in action everytime.

(very noticable for example when you play purifiers and end up in galaxies with "peaceful traders" or when you play a megacorp and end up in a galaxy of purifiers and marauders)

 

[Ryika]

it is confirmed that galaxy generation seeds empires in a sort of "snail" motion, with the first empire being the core seed that defines all other random empires, despite what you may have heard

How was that confirmed, and is that confirmation documented anywhere?

 

[Maethendias]

I think I remember Wiz saying that the weights for any given ethos decrease for every instance of it already generated in the galaxy. Couldn't swear on it though.

somewhat, empires generate based upon their neighbours, so if a random empire is generated near a purifier, its going to be a diplomatically weighted ai, if another empire is placed again (like i said earlier, seeding ocurs in a snail shape one by one, not in clusters all at once) the generation of the third empire is based upon the first purifier, and the second xenophile empire, changing the weighting again.

because of this however, the ethics of the first empire (usually the players) affect the galaxy the strongest, and thats why you see always more empires counter to your ethics than cooperative to them

 

[Maethendias]

How was that confirmed, and is that confirmation documented anywhere?

i just told you how you can confirm it yourself
you can also just look at the code, or generate a few galaxies and see the results unfold (again, important to remove pre build empires, since they arent randomly generated)

 

[Ryika]

i just told you how you can confirm it yourself
you can also just look at the code, or generate a few galaxies and see the results unfold (again, important to remove pre build empires, since they arent randomly generated)

I did some testing not too long ago, seeing whether the game spawns other megacorps near players if they play a megacorp (as is widely believed), wrote down the results meticulously, and in the end I could not find any correlation between the two after a few dozen attempts each.

I did a similar experiment quite a while back, where I set up a galaxy with me and 1 AI, and looked at what opponent was spawned, and while I didn't write down the results in that case, I didn't find any correlation between my empire and the empires that were spawned.

What you're suggesting - generating "a few galaxies" and looking at "the results" without even defining what exactly a positive and a negative result would be - seems like a prime candidate for false pattern recognition to me.

 

[methegrate]

I did some testing not too long ago, seeing whether the game spawns other megacorps near players if they play a megacorp (as is widely believed), wrote down the results meticulously, and in the end I could not find any correlation between the two after a few dozen attempts each.

I did a similar experiment quite a while back, where I set up a galaxy with me and 1 AI, and looked at what opponent was spawned, and while I didn't write down the results in that case, I didn't find any correlation between my empire and the empires that were spawned.

What you're suggesting - generating "a few galaxies" and looking at "the results" without even defining what exactly a positive and a negative result would be - seems like a prime candidate for false pattern recognition to me.

I recall reading the same thing actually. In posts/dev diaries a while back (like a couple years ago) Wiz talked about how the game was set up to place antagonistic empires next to the player's starting position. It does this (naturally) by putting empires with conflicting ethics next to your starting position. The idea is to create conflict right off the bat, especially once they made shared borders a general requirement to declare war on someone.

But as you note, I'm afraid I can't summon up a link off the top of my head either.

 

[ZomgK3tchup]

I don’t mind random techs, but I do think scientist traits are tedious. I would instead prefer an empire wide focus that could be changed every X years. It would have the same effect as the current traits without the tedious micromanagement.

I might be misremembering, but I'm pretty sure this used to be in the game. There was a set of edicts that would increase research speed in one of the three categories while decreasing research speed in the other two.

 

[SirBlackAxe]

If you play a 3 ethic empire, and each non-fanatic ethic is equally likely, I believe the the odds of any other given non-fanatic empire NOT having opposed ethics is 5/8 *4/7*3/6=60/336=17.85%. If you have a fanatic ethic, the odds are 6/8*5/7*4/6=120/336=35.7%. If you allow for the other empire to have a fanatic ethic the math gets a little more complicated, but I think it still comes out with it being significantly more likely for any given empire to have an opposed ethic than NOT have an opposed ethic, regardless of placement.

 

[prismaticmarcus]

How was that confirmed, and is that confirmation documented anywhere?

They also provide us with ways to create a more balanced start, by being able to affect the content of your star system and systems that are neighboring to yours. It is worth knowing that these initializers have a certain random factor attached to them, so you should never expect the exact same setup between game sessions.

Stellaris Dev Diary #3 - Galaxy Generation

Good news everyone! Today we are going to share some details with you on how the galaxy is generated in Stellaris. When discussing this we will also touch on some of the different features of the galaxy and how we try to anticipate what modders...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

 

[SirBlackAxe]

They also provide us with ways to create a more balanced start, by being able to affect the content of your star system and systems that are neighboring to yours. It is worth knowing that these initializers have a certain random factor attached to them, so you should never expect the exact same setup between game sessions.

Stellaris Dev Diary #3 - Galaxy Generation

Good news everyone! Today we are going to share some details with you on how the galaxy is generated in Stellaris. When discussing this we will also touch on some of the different features of the galaxy and how we try to anticipate what modders...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

The only thing this dev diary says about empire generation is that you can specify the number of normal AI empires in the game. Everything else is about celestial objects with some allusions to space creatures, absolutely nothing about ethics.

 

[Kapi96]

Couldn't disagree more. I think the random techs are one of Stellaris' best features!

Agree on the pop growth thing, but that's not randomness, that's the game being told to focus on growing minorities, rather than the best pop available for the planet (or more realistically the most numerable pop on the planet, more people = more babies).

 

[Maethendias]

I did some testing not too long ago, seeing whether the game spawns other megacorps near players if they play a megacorp (as is widely believed), wrote down the results meticulously, and in the end I could not find any correlation between the two after a few dozen attempts each.

I did a similar experiment quite a while back, where I set up a galaxy with me and 1 AI, and looked at what opponent was spawned, and while I didn't write down the results in that case, I didn't find any correlation between my empire and the empires that were spawned.

What you're suggesting - generating "a few galaxies" and looking at "the results" without even defining what exactly a positive and a negative result would be - seems like a prime candidate for false pattern recognition to me.

counter, not the same ethic, its counter your ethic