Why Penalize Peacefull Expansion with Science?

[suksas]

Reading through Clarke upcoming details I found my self perplexed by Paradox placing restrictions on other playstyles and the way they do it.

Science for large empires being restricted even more then normal seems not only stupid but a bit to heavy penalty for expansionist style of players. I was promissed a game where I can run my Empire. Now I am watching my game turn into run your little 5planet empire and be corb stomped into ground by large AI empire who are the same tech level as you despite it's size theoretically should have been inferior tech to your half size of them empire or expand and be curb stomped into the ground by technologicaly superior empire.

There is a reason sectors are in the game. I was under impresion that they were the ones suposedly being what restricts expansion as they bring more chaos to your empire.

This is starting to feel like a grand strategy version of CoD. You play linearly like we want you to or we force you to play it like that.

 

[Ihit]

Meh i see it more as a nerf to "mongolia" like empires in Civ who go full prod. And a way to stop 1 robot colony landgrabs.

 

[PAnZuRiEL]

Are you aware that you will get more techs faster by expanding and building more research labs than by not expanding? There may be a lag as colonies take a while to develop, but in general expansion really shouldn't be slowing your research.

 

[TheDungen]

Because snowballing is already far to much of a thing in most paradox titles.

 

[Oscot]

Reading through Clarke upcoming details I found my self perplexed by Paradox placing restrictions on other playstyles and the way they do it.

Science for large empires being restricted even more then normal seems not only stupid but a bit to heavy penalty for expansionist style of players. I was promissed a game where I can run my Empire. Now I am watching my game turn into run your little 5planet empire and be corb stomped into ground by large AI empire who are the same tech level as you despite it's size theoretically should have been inferior tech to your half size of them empire or expand and be curb stomped into the ground by technologicaly superior empire.

There is a reason sectors are in the game. I was under impresion that they were the ones suposedly being what restricts expansion as they bring more chaos to your empire.

This is starting to feel like a grand strategy version of CoD. You play linearly like we want you to or we force you to play it like that.

Eh, I think you're half right and half wrong.
Sectors were SUPPOSED to be what slowed your expansion down. I think we all get the impression that they were supposed to be (or at least become) Crusader-Kings-2-style untrustworthy vassals and when you got big you would be permanently plagued by instability and civil war, thus preventing one doomblob from dominating the galaxy.
Which might be a little dubious, but it is at least a tried and tested formula for Paradox that we know from previous games just about works.

However, this section of the game apparently developed brain damage just before release (lookin' at you, slave revolts), so now science penalties are being hastily co-opted in to serve as an interim anti-blobbing measure until they can actually add functional internal politics.

 

[Zarine]

There is a tread about that and the math show that it's almost always good to expand regarding the ressearch.
If you keep your ratio Research Income / POP about the same following the colonisation then you even make research faster.

Now the math was done before the reduction of the POP impact and without the malus from the planets. But considering it's trading one for the other, it should be about the same effect.

 

[Brawler]

I raised the question if the malus to research from planets will be based on size of the planet but no response

If it doesn't care what size the planet is then forget colonising small size planets lest you hurt your R&D.

I really hope it does take into consideration the planet size.

In case i'm not very clear with the explanation let me illustrate with an example

you colonised 10 planets
lets say the research penalty for each planet in the patch is a flat value of 10% or whatever number paradox decided to place on them

so you're getting 100% malus to research not taking into account pops etc.

Now lets assume all these planets are size 10.

Now make sure you purge all the pops on it because you rather have size 20+ planets.

 

[PAnZuRiEL]

Now the math was done before the reduction of the POP impact and without the malus from the planets. But considering it's trading one for the other, it should be about the same effect.

It really just means that it's better to colonise larger planets than smaller ones, when there was no difference before.

 

[Kain2K]

Well I don't think that it will be that much of a penalty. Every game that I can think of, that is using the size of the realm to prolong the tech research fails in doing so. In most games the effect is useless since once you're large enough to theoretically be affected by it, your research point production (or however it is called) is so high that you can counter the effect easily and to even shorten the needed time per tech quite a bit.

I see no reason why it shouldn't be the same with Stellaris.

 

[blue emu]

As your empire grows, your research doesn't slow down... it speeds up. Unless you set all your POPs to harvesting food, minerals and energy.

You start the game with only five points per month going into each of the sciences. It really doesn't take much of a research-building program to scale that rate up as your empire grows. Just remember that you can't ignore your science income.

 

[Brawler]

As your empire grows, your research doesn't slow down... it speeds up. Unless you set all your POPs to harvesting food, minerals and energy.

You start the game with only five points per month going into each of the sciences. It really doesn't take much of a research-building program to scale that rate up as your empire grows. Just remember that you can't ignore your science income.

Current rate of research penalties are fine. OP is raising the question about the further penalties coming in clarke for owning planets. Depending on how severe this is it could put off a lot of people. And lets face it, paradox are pretty heavy handed with their nerfbat so the outlook from player perspective is not positive >_>

 

[Zarine]

It really just means that it's better to colonise larger planets than smaller ones, when there was no difference before.

Yes, that will be the main drawback of this change : colonizing small planet won't be as good as before but it doesn't mean it will slow the research either.
Math will tell once we have the values.

For instance, they said they'll reduce the POP factor.
We can hope for a 0.01 instead of 0.02.
And then there is the planet factor, let say 0.1
That would mean that a larger planet than 10 is better now and a smaller one is worse.

If it is based on size, it might increase the cost until the planet is full.
But until we have the values, no clues.

 

[yezhanquan]

It really just means that it's better to colonise larger planets than smaller ones, when there was no difference before.

Colonizing small planets still has its uses, especially when you need all the pops you need to push the border.

 

[Dnote]

It will reduce land grab early game, or those empires will suffer a slight fall off in research speed. By mid to late game though, the larger empire will have far more research capacity and in theory the ability to not only catch up, but over take those that remained small.

With finite tech, size is always going to be the winner in the end.

Slowing down the big blob for the first 20-30 years isn't going to hurt anyone, just make the early game a little more interesting.

 

[Kain2K]

Current rate of research penalties are fine. OP is raising the question about the further penalties coming in clarke for owning planets. Depending on how severe this is it could put off a lot of people. And lets face it, paradox are pretty heavy handed with their nerfbat so the outlook from player perspective is not positive >_>

As true as this may be, knowing Paradox it will be modable and you probably just need to change a line in the defines.lua to set it to 0.

 

[RyuKazuha]

It doesn't really slow you down, as it is counteracting your acceleration. You will still gain research-rate over all, if you keep your pop to research-ratio the same. It's more about normalizing research gain, then anything else.

 

[Wulfram]

I can't help but feel that it dodges the real problem, which is that research stations and mining stations don't increase tech costs like POPs do.

 

[Antediluvian Monster]

Current rate of research penalties are fine. OP is raising the question about the further penalties coming in clarke for owning planets. Depending on how severe this is it could put off a lot of people. And lets face it, paradox are pretty heavy handed with their nerfbat so the outlook from player perspective is not positive >_>

The intention of those are probably not further "penalties" on expansion but rather to nerf the single pop planet outpost strategy. This is particularly relevant if free sector frontier outposts are getting killed, as they probably are.

 

[Morwys]

Science for large empires being restricted even more then normal seems not only stupid but a bit to heavy penalty for expansionist style of players.

First of all, if you're a large, galaxy-wide empire, you'll be producing a lot of science regardless. Second, nerfing expansionism is a good thing, if there's something I hate in Paradox games is the damned blobs. Anything done to nerf them is good in my book.

 

[Achab]

Adequate approach would be to scale the research "number of planets" penalty according to number of unpopulated spots on the planets. So eventually as planets became more crowded that penalty would be replaced by the population penalty.