Why Penalize Peacefull Expansion with Science?

[Kayden_II]

"Why Penalize Peacefull Expansion with Science?" ...

It penalizes all Kinds of Expansion, not only the "peaceful" One ...

At Least, the Game offers 2 different Options (in the ideal Case with an balanced Amount of Advantages and Dis-Advantages) to run an Empire ...
A Smaller ("Taller") Empire = smaller Fleet (Dis-Advantage), but with better Tech (Advantage) or a Bigger ("Wider") Empire = bigger Fleet (Advantage), but with badder Tech (Dis-Advantage) ...

Without such a Penalty in Science, the "Option" for playing a bigger ("wider") Empire wouldn't be an Option anymore and the Game would forces You to play such a bigger ("wider") Empire.

 

[TheDungen]

You may as well ask why is scientific progress penalized when it comes to science, why does the techs keep getting more expensive, there's no realistic reason for this, the reason is game balance, because unlike the blobbing penatly being advanced in science actually speeds up the speed of scientific discoveries rather than slow it down.
But for both reasons there's a godo reason, because snowballing breaks the game.

 

[Kain2K]

You may as well ask why is scientific progress penalized when it comes to science, why does the techs keep getting more expensive, there's no realistic reason for this, the reason is game balance, because unlike the blobbing penatly being advanced in science actually speeds up the speed of scientific discoveries rather than slow it down.
But for both reasons there's a godo reason, because snowballing breaks the game.

Like I have already said, that most likely will not work. Once you're large enough to get the penalty into a value that is potentially feelable, it shouldn't matter anymore, because your overall research progress is high enough to compensate the penalty and actually speeds up your research quite a bit.
Such penalties are in most cases a way to slow down the research speed in large empires because it would be too fast otherwise. But in every game that I know off, it goes never as far as being an actual penalty to the player. Normally it is just a way to improve the balance a bit.

 

[TheDungen]

Like I have already said, that most likely will not work. Once you're large enough to get the penalty into a value that is potentially feelable, it shouldn't matter anymore, because your overall research progress is high enough to compensate the penalty and actually speeds up your research quite a bit.
Such penalties are in most cases a way to slow down the research speed in large empires because it would be too fast otherwise. But in every game that I know off, it goes never as far as being an actual penalty to the player. Normally it is just a way to improve the balance a bit.

Which was my point. Though t tcould really be even more severe, because as I said previously snowballing is a big problem in paradox games.

 

[N Katsyev]

Stop thinking of every trade-off as a penalty. In life there are choices, choices have consequences, pros and cons. Even an optimal strategy by some determined criteria comes with costs. Strategy games are about constantly evaluating your condition, your goals, and then deciding upon a route to achieve those with the most pros and the least cons for your desired end. There's never any one way to do anything because success and routes to success are always at least in part conditional.

If any choice had no costs it wouldn't actually be a choice and there's no fun in that.

 

[Jazerus]

If you can't produce enough science on a planet to offset the effect of its pops on research then you aren't setting your tiles up right. This isn't a penalty on expansion; it is a penalty on expanding without paying attention to keeping your economy fundamentally healthy. That is, it's an incentive to play well if you want to be a big empire.

 

[Wouter445]

keep hearing this "snowball" crap theory but power creeping is a very normal thing in any game.
it's rewards players of become more strong. (guess i never go play stellaris without mods)

 

[solidprice]

So how many pops is it equaliivent to 1 basic science lab?
So 1 lab = __ pops?

Because if we know the answer, than growing pains will be eaiser to manage.

 

[Graf Zeppelin]

keep hearing this "snowball" crap theory but power creeping is a very normal thing in any game.
it's rewards players of become more strong. (guess i never go play stellaris without mods)

Jesus you do nothing but complain and even dont know what power creep is.Its geting ridiculous ya know.

 

[Surimi]

it's rewards players of become more strong. (guess i never go play stellaris without mods)

You don't need to "reward players for becoming strong", becoming strong is already a reward. If you simply reward players for becoming strong, then strong players will use those rewards to become stronger, which means they get rewarded even more, and ultimately the game stops being fun because the players who "became strong" will keep getting stronger while the players who didn't will never have a chance to catch up. Even the "strong" player gets bored in that situation, because they've basically already won.

OP. Don't worry about it, it may seem harsh at first but you will learn to manage it. It doesn't really penalize expansion so much as it penalizes pointless or inefficient expansion. You want to get the most possible out of your population, not just keep grabbing new worlds for the sake of making sure the AI doesn't get them first.

 

[blue emu]

... it may seem harsh at first but you will learn to manage it. It doesn't really penalize expansion so much as it penalizes pointless or inefficient expansion.

This. Although I prefer a strategy that combines efficient expansion with limiting my opponents' opportunities.

 

[AtomicTank]

There are genuine difficulties with trying to advance a large country: look at China. I am not sure that I like the model Paradox has chosen, but I can see that they have to use some model. Why are backwards areas of China still really backwards while cosmopolitan areas are hardly in the same century as them? If you have 3 tech areas, minerals and energy as your resources, what do you make the country pay to raise the effective level of the civilization? While information distribution scales very well, information incorporation into people does not. The challenge of advancing all of a large empire should be immense.

 

[Chieron]

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.

MIght as well remove the population malus then and just scale tech cost with total number of tiles. (about the same scaling as now, but treat every planet as fully settled)

 

[blue emu]

Count unoccupied tiles as half-a-POP.

 

[Dantilus]

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.

I'm guessing the 1 robot colonies are 90% of the reason for the change, yeah.

 

[AvengerDr]

A counter-argument could be made that a larger empire with good economy would be able to finance more research. Perhaps it is not the research speed that should be slowed, but the implementation and spread rate of the technology. Now don't say "this is too complex". CK2 has different tech levels for each province (don't know about the other games).

After all, the European Research Council, for example, is born explicitly with this in mind: pooling the resources of individual countries to fund massive research projects that couldn't be supported otherwise. Then you have high-speed trains in some parts of Europe and old ruins in others.

 

[blue emu]

Perhaps it is not the research speed that should be slowed, but the implementation and spread rate of the technology.

Add implementation and spread for each known tech of each species in the galaxy to thousands of star systems every month?

Late game lag just called... they want another appointment.

 

[Pen Name]

Large empires already research things faster than smaller ones, so if anything they need an even more major nerf than those proposed in Clarke.

 

[Dnote]

A counter-argument could be made that a larger empire with good economy would be able to finance more research. Perhaps it is not the research speed that should be slowed, but the implementation and spread rate of the technology. Now don't say "this is too complex". CK2 has different tech levels for each province (don't know about the other games).

After all, the European Research Council, for example, is born explicitly with this in mind: pooling the resources of individual countries to fund massive research projects that couldn't be supported otherwise. Then you have high-speed trains in some parts of Europe and old ruins in others.

Tech in Stellaris is a solid thing though, not a gradient. You either have a tech or you don't.

What they should do is figure out how best to balance research gain from stations and planets. Early game the mining stations give you the majority of your income, but mid to late game, most of it comes from planets. Research however is less clear than that, you can definitely have more coming from your planets, but the ratio still favors plenty of research stations, because upgrades to research buildings are less frequent than mining or energy stations.

 

[TheDungen]

keep hearing this "snowball" crap theory but power creeping is a very normal thing in any game.
it's rewards players of become more strong. (guess i never go play stellaris without mods)

No most games start fairly easy and get harder the further into them you progress. If there's powercreep on the players side there is usualyl more powercreep on the enemies. Now a strategy game can't do that so it needs to implement other chalanges to keep the game intresting when the opponents have become far to weak relative to you to pose a genuine challange. And preferably one that does not make the early game harder, or even worse affects the early game more than the late game it was intended at. An example of this would the mechanics introduced in ck2:conclave, sure they add some challange to the late game but they honestly cause more frustration in the early game than they do in the late game.

There are genuine difficulties with trying to advance a large country: look at China. I am not sure that I like the model Paradox has chosen, but I can see that they have to use some model. Why are backwards areas of China still really backwards while cosmopolitan areas are hardly in the same century as them? If you have 3 tech areas, minerals and energy as your resources, what do you make the country pay to raise the effective level of the civilization? While information distribution scales very well, information incorporation into people does not. The challenge of advancing all of a large empire should be immense.

Yeah I'm looking at china, pretty much the most advanced nation on earth until the industrial revolution, you were saying? Usually throughout history large countriues with large populations have been the ones with the most technological progress. Europe is the exception and we have in the latter half of the last millenia had a supernational unity through the fact that we shared religions and legal codes across borders.

I kind of liked how victoria handled things. Having a large litterate population was great for generating tech, but having a large illeterate population really slowed things down.