The Real Problems With Stellaris

[methegrate]

Honestly i think there is a big potential for somthing that is all 4. But it has to do all 4 well. Stellaris does percisely 1 of those things well, and the rest fall on a specturm from okay to internal politics expansion pls. But if stelalris hasd the economy of vicky2, the war of hoi4, the rp of ck3 and the politics of eu4. But those things should all be different thenw hats found in those games. Still fun but mechanicly different.

Maybe? I mean, that sounds awesome, but it also sounds a little bit like the mythical Last Game You'll Ever Play.

It's sort of like when a restaurant has a menu that's 20 pages long. Their pitch is that they can make anything you want and it will all be great. But in practice, by trying to do everything they end up doing nothing all that well.

I feel like it would be the same thing here. By trying to do every mechanic, it would be hard to do any mechanic well. Or more specifically, it would be very difficult for the game to have the kind of focus it needs to create strong, central gameplay. It would be sort of like if you took a chess board and added pieces from Risk, Stratego, Axis & Allies, and Twilight Imperium. All great games, but mushing them all into chess wouldn't make the game better. It would just break a well balanced game with T-34s and spaceships.

Plus if a game did have that kind of depth I'm not sure you could ever actually play it. I mean... imagine if you had to spend the kind of time on leaders that you do in CK, on units that you do in HoI, on resources that you do in Vicky, and on planets/cities and people that you do in EU. I think it would take a year of real time just to advance six months in the game. It would topple under its own weight, and you would never get to actually enjoy any one of those systems. Every time you got into a rhythm of enjoying your RP as a leader, economic systems would break that immersion and pull your attention away. Every time you got into the flow of managing an economy and balancing resources, warfare would break that immersion and pull your attention away. Etc.

Focus is important not just because designers need it, but because we need it as players too. We need to know what the game is asking us to do.

 

[Kinkness]

On one hand I know this is a joke, but on the other, if you only have your one colony, it being your capital world, you are 100% almost paralyzed from the waist down due to how industrial districts and getting CSG vs Alloys work now. It's impossible to change designation on a capital world, so you will only ever have 1 Artisan job and 1 Metallurgist job per district. Meanwhile, Gestalts and instead have the same number of them and literally have double the alloy output, this is a balancing problem because in almost all post early-game scenarios, CSG upkeep is so low below potential Alloys upkeep that it doesn't even bear mentioning, even with Utopian Abundance on.

Additionally, the game is actually provable as boring. In literally every other galaxy-scale empire builder, or 4X game as the industry calls it, you can max out a colony or system (in the case of Endless Space) far before the end of the game, let alone multiple, it's just that over time you'll have to add a couple new improvements to them as you unlock them, sorta like in Stellaris, but in vanilla Stellaris, you literally can't do that in 100 in-game years.
But max-out, I mean "To make sure that a colony has nothing you could do to improve it further (minus very occasional unlocks) due to already doing everything" and one element of that is pop job filling.
When you mod out the scaling pop growth cost, you CAN max out a colony, but it still takes 3/4ths of Paradox's recommended game length, that being 100 years max, and if it wasn't, Paradox's last creator game where they previewed Federations, wouldn't have had an enforced length of only being at 100 years.
Not to mention, the game lags so badly because it recalculates tons of things and automaticaly rethinks about where pops should be, for practically no actually good reason that wouldn't be better than a "Only update/recalculate when absolutely necessary" kind of system, so the pace of the game is slowed even further by the game being so bad that it can't run at a consistent internal speed.

Lastly, the AI isn't capable of being called smart, it doesn't reason or employ any behavior capable of such, now all it really does is suicide bomb their ships into your front lines unless you're ridiculously more powerful, it doesn't do anything that doesn't make sense, it doesn't have wierd colony setups that, when a player thinks about it, is legitimately a really good idea, or is conditionally a good idea, it can't even use the economy right so Paradox, in their infinite intelligence, decided to dumb down the economy further for it, and all it did was introduce an early-game imbalance between the Normal Empires and Gestalts, but also Players playing Normals vs AIs with any number of cheat resources.

The designation system isn't even a swappable modifier system instead for crying out loud, just in theory, having 3 or 4 decisions on a planet that add the specialization modifiers that give extra jobs and take them away from the other between CSG and Alloys would work literally infinitely better than the current workings of the industrial district designation feature because it can easily work on Capital Worlds but would allow you to multi-task a planet at least a tiny bit better. Want to have Mining World designation on a world with some industrial districts? Well now you can with it being modifier-based and not designation-based and it won't drain your mineral income as hard, about 20% less hard in fact and you can choose between neither, or Alloys or CSG and it'll be fine. In my reckoning, 20% more minerals is a heck of a lot better for scaling than 20% less mineral upkeep.

So yes, Stellaris is, in fact, boring. Imagine how many would love Starcraft 2 if it took you literally 8 hours to get up to 200/200 supply and to get all upgrades. The game's pace is literally way too slow and there's too little to actually do for that slow pace to be at all worth it, it's just a fact. Most mods only make it better in that they let you have more options to create a stronger empire over time and the more mods you have that accomplish that, the less you're bound by RNG to basically beat your enemy without contest. The more mods you have, the more your SKILL matters because you have more ability to have it take advantage of everything to better effect. Any game where skill basically doesn't really matter is inherently boring until you get that run where you're literally the apex predator and nothing, not even a crisis can stop you, but then you've already won, you've created the strongest empire possible and there is no longer any inherent challenge and that, in turn, becomes boring even still.

Honestly: A faster pace, lower time cost of just about everything, lower resource cost of just about everything, and a lower COUNT of jobs available would be a good step in the right direction in making it less boring. Not to mention maybe having less incremental bonuses littered throughout the game and instead having fewer but more powerful bonuses in the game would make those bonuses feel more impactful, it would also reduce bloat and it could make the game at least somewhat more fun.
But to make it more fun, you would need people to be hired at Paradox who could actually make AI that could be interpreted as, intelligent, something capable of keeping up with the player without cheating, if Master of Orion 2 had that, if AI War: Fleet Command had that, then Stellaris can too honestly, and it's not like those two games are less complex. Economically? Sure, I guess, AI War is based in Streaming economies and colonies produce ships in Moo2, but they both have actualy balance and good design in the combat, they aren't just "lol spam the cheapest ship and win", AI War has tons of ship types which all can counter or hard counter one another, while MoO2's ship designing puts Stellaris' to absolute shame, is the source of the game's late-game optimization issues, but ships can be designed to counter other ship setups and larger ships just give you more options for an actually appropriate cost, and they're also based on a "space" system, and not rooted in the limiting crap of limited slot counts.

But it's not like anyone cares about my walls anyways, so i dunno why I bother x3

I would just like to say, I've framed, and gold plated this.

 

[HistoricalScore1]

I believe someone aptly put the major current problem with Stellaris. The developers/publishers haven't decided, by their actions, what type of game it is. Sure, they can say it's a strategy game. But it isn't really. Currently, in it's very state, it is a game of SimCity. If this is in fact a strategy game, then the focus should be on improving the current elements in place that are supposed to make it a strategy game. The majority of time designing and coding should be on making it a better strategy game. Once you have the game less like SimCity on S.I.N.G.L.E.P.L.A.Y.E.R. then you can add other elements.

Not to mention, the game lags so badly because it recalculates tons of things and automaticaly rethinks about where pops should be, for practically no actually good reason that wouldn't be better than a "Only update/recalculate when absolutely necessary" kind of system, so the pace of the game is slowed even further by the game being so bad that it can't run at a consistent internal speed.

This, to me has not been my experience and my computer is almost a decade old. I wonder what your computer specs are, for there are minimum system requirements for any game. My computer is quite loud with this game, but it is with Mount and Blade: Bannerlord as well. There are tools with computers to determine recommended game settings. I don't consider this a Paradox problem at all. Now if they have memory leaking, etc. Yes. It's their problem, i.e. Magic the Gathering: Arena has a ton of memory leak issues, where you have to exit the entire client after so many matches.

Lastly, the AI isn't capable of being called smart

100% agree. The basis for a strategy game is to have to make meaningful decisions. When the AI doesn't move it's fleet around a starbase with no FTL inhibitors of say 2 hangar bays and suicides its fleet of 1-2K into the starbase of 2.8K, it's a pretty lackluster experience.

So yes, Stellaris is, in fact, boring. Imagine how many would love Starcraft 2 if it took you literally 8 hours to get up to 200/200 supply and to get all upgrades. The game's pace is literally way too slow and there's too little to actually do for that slow pace to be at all worth it, it's just a fact. Most mods only make it better in that they let you have more options to create a stronger empire over time and the more mods you have that accomplish that, the less you're bound by RNG to basically beat your enemy without contest. The more mods you have, the more your SKILL matters because you have more ability to have it take advantage of everything to better effect. Any game where skill basically doesn't really matter is inherently boring until you get that run where you're literally the apex predator and nothing, not even a crisis can stop you, but then you've already won, you've created the strongest empire possible and there is no longer any inherent challenge and that, in turn, becomes boring even still.

I love StarCraft. Day9 fan for life. But StarCraft is nowhere near comparable in terms of expectations. StarCraft 2 is an RTS game. RTS games are usually shorter by nature. On the campaign a mission could take an hour or so, depending on skill level, sure. But there's a lot less mechanics to the game. You have only 2 main resources. There's no happiness, stability, etc. What I love about Stellaris' potential is the grand strategy, that a campaign is supposed to take a while, that choices matter and some of the leaders you started out with will not be there to see the "end." The ambition here is much larger scale.

But again, the onus is on Paradox to actually make making this game a strategy game their priority. Not just greedily working on DLC after DLC (saying they're better than x company is no excuse). Mount and Blade: Warband. How much DLC did it have? 2. The answer is 2. And look at the release dates of the DLC, look at the development history, changes, additions of gameplay promised. Has Bannerlord released any DLC? And another major problem is they have failed, thus far, by their actions for several years to do so. Am I blaming the developers? No. The responsibility ultimately falls on management and the producers/publishers for what they are prioritizing. Like the PDXCon.