Warning to wide players: Unity costs are now multiplied
- Thread starter Aquilegia
- Start date
-
We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
Oh, and the population cost removal for unity was only consequential for extremely wide empires. The population factor was multiplied by the colony factor, but only after being added to the unlocked traditions factor, which quickly became a lot larger, unless you were expanding very quickly while producing very little unity and gaining very few traditions.
Basically, before, expanding in unison with getting traditions worked well. Now, since the system factor (replacement for pop factor) is multiplied by both sides (rather than added to unlocked traditions, then multiplied), expansion will always slow you down.
But, for OPC, the removal of pop costs and the reduction of colony costs from .25 to .2 barely had an effect; 5 planets is still best, and being able to do it with fewer systems is a huge boost.
Basically, before, expanding in unison with getting traditions worked well. Now, since the system factor (replacement for pop factor) is multiplied by both sides (rather than added to unlocked traditions, then multiplied), expansion will always slow you down.
But, for OPC, the removal of pop costs and the reduction of colony costs from .25 to .2 barely had an effect; 5 planets is still best, and being able to do it with fewer systems is a huge boost.
Yeah, it should be reported as a bug.
Science penalties are additive, whereas unity penalties are multiplicative, but both appear the same way.
Then times .75 because I set my slider to 75% unity and research costs, which the game doesn't acknowledge in the UI.
On the other hand, science
Then multiplied by .75 because sliders are still not acknowledged.
Both maluses are depicted in the same way, so something is wrong:
(1) the UI needs to be fixed to properly depict the way that the different maluses are applied
(2) unity is multiplying where it should add
(3) science is adding where it should multiply
Tried it. Got out teched by purifier spanning for quarter of galaxy. Purifier, and two nearby giant militarist, farmed battle tech from debris on "tall" weaklings around them and then shared it between themselves. This freed their science to keep up on domestic front with me. That's what I get for creating bunch of strong empires to spice things up. In the end I had to widen up to avoid anexation, and whole galaxy was pretty much equal in tech.
(And then purifier ate too much, built Colossus... and got annexed by fallen empire, but that's another story)
Well, there is also:
(4) none of the ui elements have ever made it clear which bonuses add vs multiply, so it's par for the course
But, that's still something that's wrong, so I'm not disagreeing something should change
Edit: unlocked trees was multiplied by colonies before, so at least that part is consistent: the stuff in the unity tooltip still all gets multiplied. It's just never been mentioned in the ui.
As mentioned before: playing tall was only beneficial for technology in some specific cases before; in those cases it was clearly 100% beneficial, but you really had to fully is the system. There is basically no such case anymore. You still reach a point of asymptotically decreasing returns, but expansion always helps tech, as long as you're actually putting labs on your planets.
For tradition costs, expansion in systems can now be crippling, assuming it's not a bug. Before, it only hurt if you expanded very quickly early on, but still became less and less impactful as you got more traditions. The optimal number of planets hasn't really changed, but having fewer systems is clearly far better.
While increased technology/unity costs for planets makes sense, both in terms of balance and narrative, the same thing can't be said about increased costs caused by owned systems.
Why should the player be penalized for building outposts? In terms of gameplay it ruins both wide and tall gameplays for different reasons. Especially if one plays on x0.25 habitable planets setting where you have to claim large chunks of space to get somewhere. In terms of narrative, regular starbase is just a hundred guys patrolling a space station. Why their existence should damage someone's research or unity is a mystery.
Why should the player be penalized for building outposts? In terms of gameplay it ruins both wide and tall gameplays for different reasons. Especially if one plays on x0.25 habitable planets setting where you have to claim large chunks of space to get somewhere. In terms of narrative, regular starbase is just a hundred guys patrolling a space station. Why their existence should damage someone's research or unity is a mystery.
There is no canon on how many people patrol a starbase.
Affecting unity costs makes sense. Having a lot of systems means 1 of 2 things:
1. Your planets are very spread out in space, which would make it tougher to be homogenous and unified.
2. Your planets are clumped together, but you've sent lots of people to the far reaches of space alone, which makes everyone feel disconnected.
Replace with hive mind or gestalt consciousness, still makes sense for the same reasons (insofar as unity makes any sense for them in the first place.)
For tech costs, why does having an additional planet increase tech costs at all? I've always interpreted it as overlap and inefficiency as your science efforts expand and are harder to manage. Claiming systems can provide science income, just like planets can. It makes just as much sense for it to affect tech costs as planets. Plus the additional "spread out" factor.
I mean, do you really think observing 2 black holes is twice as useful as observing one?
Since the malus is per planet and not per system, it make building habitats detrimental for unity output thereby affecting tall playstyle too. The fact the malus is multiplicative is probably an oversight since, for all PDX games, nearly all modifier are additive.
Yes, but judging by its size and speed of construction, it obviously does not hold many people.
No, systems should not increase either.
For example, let's assume that you play tall, and did not colonize anything outside Earth and did not claim any systems. The technology and unity are doing great because smaller size of population makes it more managable. Tech makes sense because you may quickly modernize your tech equipment as needed, allocate resources efficiently etc. Also, unity makes sense because tiny population is more likely to agree on something than a large group.
Once you build a station housing, say, 100 or 1000 or even 10,000 people, it is a drop compared to 15 billion people on Earth. To be more precise it is 0.00006% of the population in the latter case. It can't make teching up or obtaining unity raise by 2%. Even if you take 200 systems and it gets to 2 million spacefarers, that's still 0.01% of the entire population, yet your penalty would be astronomical.
1. The unity malus for building habitats is lower than it used to be. Starts at 20% instead of 25%.
2. The fact that it's multiplied by # of systems actually doesn't affect that. It in general makes getting traditions harder for any empire with more systems, but building a habitat will have the same % effect on your tradition acquisition speed whether you have 1 system or 500.
(Point is, this really really doesn't at all hurt tall play for unity, only cripples wide play for unity. However, tech cost and tech penalty changes have crippled very tall play for tech.)
3. Unlocked trees penalty was multiplied by owned colonies penalty before, and still is. The pop penalty was also multiplied by both those penalties before, but it was just added to # of traditions penalty, so often wasn't significant. The systems penalty is multiplied by both, which is why it's much stronger, but being multiplied is nothing new for unity cost increases.
That doesn't mean it's intentional of course. Just that it has precedent.
(Also, the polynomial (it's not exponential) cost increase also has precedent, since consumer goods per unit increases per pop.)
I tried a life seeded xenophile OPS. It was pretty doable tbh. I had a friendly neighbor so i signed my defensive pact and then disbanded my fleet completely. I built citadels in all my 4 chokepoints and i was totally fine. At some point, i didn't even have shipyards. Then cybrex ringworld spawned on my empire and i steamrolled everyone.
Talking about just unity, or tech an unity?
For tech, modernizing your equipment is a completely separate step in this game, from actual research. The only explanation for additional planets adding to tech costs, is overlapping research, and distance/size making it difficult to coordinate. Claimed systems contain scientists. So, same reason. (Really, any reason you can come up with for having planets affect tech cost can easily be applied to systems.) And, of course, you can have a planet without labs, and it still increases tech costs, and a system without labs does too... for gameplay reasons. Wide empires already got a big boost to tech in 2.0 (or more accurately, tall empires got nerfed) so nothing to complain about.
As for unity, 200 systems is an astronomical penalty? It's +400%. First, I'd say having 10,000 aboard a station is reasonable to me, I generally think everything in Stellaris is much larger in scale than some do. Your level 1 station is small? It takes 100 minerals. That's 6 months of the entire mineral output of year 2200 Earth!!! I should hope it houses at least 10,000. But, I agree, irl it would seem ridiculous for 2,000,000 spread across the galaxy to make anything on earth 400% harder. Irl, there are also far more than 1000 stars in the galaxy, and probably a farmlower percentage have habitable planets. So, let's not talk about 200 stations and 2,000,000. Let's talk "enough stations to claim control of 1/5th of the galaxy". Because that's what 200 stations represents. Yes. Yes, I'd expect "unity to be 400% harder" at that point.
Edit: well, the multiplication is a bug, now we know. Good news for wide unity play
but, systems will still affect it, and yah, still makes sense to me that controlling 1/5th of a galaxy would increase costs by 400%.
I'm looking forward to the fix, my current costs are just under 1 mil per tradition now. I'm unlocking my last tree and playing on 5x (I'm also not that big - about 100 systems).
Talking about just unity, or tech an unity?
For tech, modernizing your equipment is a completely separate step in this game, from actual research. The only explanation for additional planets adding to tech costs, is overlapping research, and distance/size making it difficult to coordinate. Claimed systems contain scientists. So, same reason. (Really, any reason you can come up with for having planets affect tech cost can easily be applied to systems.) And, of course, you can have a planet without labs, and it still increases tech costs, and a system without labs does too... for gameplay reasons. Wide empires already got a big boost to tech in 2.0 (or more accurately, tall empires got nerfed) so nothing to complain about.
As for unity, 200 systems is an astronomical penalty? It's +400%. First, I'd say having 10,000 aboard a station is reasonable to me, I generally think everything in Stellaris is much larger in scale than some do. Your level 1 station is small? It takes 100 minerals. That's 6 months of the entire mineral output of year 2200 Earth!!! I should hope it houses at least 10,000. But, I agree, irl it would seem ridiculous for 2,000,000 spread across the galaxy to make anything on earth 400% harder. Irl, there are also far more than 1000 stars in the galaxy, and probably a farmlower percentage have habitable planets. So, let's not talk about 200 stations and 2,000,000. Let's talk "enough stations to claim control of 1/5th of the galaxy". Because that's what 200 stations represents. Yes. Yes, I'd expect "unity to be 400% harder" at that point.
Edit: well, the multiplication is a bug, now we know. Good news for wide unity play
I believe that both tech and unity penalties may be roughly explained as "larger population is harder to organize". So if you colonize planets or habitats, your population increases dramatically and you take a justified hit to research and unity. It makes sense gameplay-wise and may be explained narratively.
Space stations don't work the same way. Their population is tiny compared to any planet. Actual number and distance between stations is not a factor at all because of instant FTL communications. 1/5th of a galaxy does not even necessarily imply large population because most of it may be void anyway, as is the case with x0.25 habitable planet setting.
There is no logical explanation for increased costs caused by systems themselves. It is a pure game balance decision.
Obviously i did, where i left OPS because hell, i have a ringworld now.
Another bug you wonder how it was not noticed.It took like an hours gameplay to see something was off.