Sci-fi is full of empires that barely leave their home system or their local area (The Tholians from Star Trek for example). Will this be a viable play style in Stellaris?
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Will playing 'tall' be a viable option?
- Thread starter jjake101
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THis is an interesting question. It does seem like it will be possible with larger empires fracturing do pop differences. We will see.
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I don't think it should be. Space operas and strategy games have fundamentally different requirements. Space opera just requires individuals to go out and partake in adventures, which they can do just as well while their empire sits at home, strategy games requires the empires themselves to go out and interact with the other players.
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Why would you want to spend the whole game in one system.I think these games are about expansion but smaller empires should have some benefits.
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Of all the space empire games on the market, this might be the one to do this in. Seeing that Paradox puts/is putting heavy emphasis on diplomacy for Stellaris. It would be an interesting play-through...trying to attain defensive alliances or protectorate status of some kind.
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You would almost need to make planetary development into its own fully detailed in-game game for that to be super fun. Most of the races that are one-planet wonders tend to be incredibly stagnant at some fundamental level.
Having said that, take the Ferengi: from what I understand they really don't conquer or colonize, but they are everywhere selling stuff and being awesome. I could see some sort of CK2 Merchant Republic-esque mechanic being suitable for a race like that (with the trade posts, only perhaps more detailed). That would be fun.
Full isolationism seems like it'd be more of a personal challenge than a really fun, viable game option though.
Having said that, take the Ferengi: from what I understand they really don't conquer or colonize, but they are everywhere selling stuff and being awesome. I could see some sort of CK2 Merchant Republic-esque mechanic being suitable for a race like that (with the trade posts, only perhaps more detailed). That would be fun.
Full isolationism seems like it'd be more of a personal challenge than a really fun, viable game option though.
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It seems that you at least don't have to go to war in the game. You probably still have to expand, but I don't see why you should have to expand to many planets. You could probably have an empire spanning around five or less planets, late middle game, and it would be fun, due to diplomacy, science ships, potential trade (still completely unknown how they will approach this), population and protecting yourself. Having one planet just seems like a waste. Three, good planets, would not be. Another type of playstyle, which I hope is viable, is to highly develop one of two planets, while having many underdeveloped outposts. These could be used as producers of exotic resources, a stop for ships, and a way to warn you of enemies.
I think it depends on stuff we don't know yet, such as how population growth or things like immigration work. Maybe you can build a small, stable utopia that people flock to when their empires get into century-long wars. Or maybe there's a hard cap on how many people can fit on one planet and you need to expand to get stronger, who knows.
One cool idea, again depending on how exactly things work, is that with wormhole tech you could just leapfrog to all of the best planets in the galaxy and not need to worry about settling all of the things in between. Not the traditional 'tall' style but it could be an alternative to the traditional blob style.
edit: tall empires might be able to get over a military weakness by joining a federation, now that I think of it. Again, depends on how all that works.
One cool idea, again depending on how exactly things work, is that with wormhole tech you could just leapfrog to all of the best planets in the galaxy and not need to worry about settling all of the things in between. Not the traditional 'tall' style but it could be an alternative to the traditional blob style.
edit: tall empires might be able to get over a military weakness by joining a federation, now that I think of it. Again, depends on how all that works.
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Well, the way I see it I would like to be able to play an empire that is all about the homeworld, a la Protoss in Starcraft. Colonies outside the home system are purely for resource extraction or supply depots, not settler colonies. An informal empire, if you will. Kinda like playing Venice, the Hansa or Genoa in EUIV and only seeking to establish yourself in all trade nodes or only conquering coastal centers of trade.
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Well I don't think it would be possible to remain locked into a single or a couple of planets. There is a limit to how much population a planet and its resources can hold, even taking into account future technological developments, so at least some mining colonies would be necessary for resource-gathering. A tall empire thus would be primarily composed of just a couple industrial core worlds with a few mining colonies or asteroid operations in their respective solar systems.
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I have a friend who always complains about me founding city after city in civilisation, when to me that is what the game is all about.
I guess it's just personal preference, but a problem I have with tall empires being viable is that it forces gamedesign to implement prohibitive drawbacks for wide empires (which would otherwise always be superior). Some make sense (like a larger potential for local unrest and revolts) but others (like diminishing returns) do not.
It is hard to do right
I guess it's just personal preference, but a problem I have with tall empires being viable is that it forces gamedesign to implement prohibitive drawbacks for wide empires (which would otherwise always be superior). Some make sense (like a larger potential for local unrest and revolts) but others (like diminishing returns) do not.
It is hard to do right
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Really don't know. Sure, it would be great to have additional option, but both in the 4x games and the grand strategy i didn't really seen any good "tall" empire possibility.
- We can't really call most small states "tall", their are just that, small and weak, once the "wide" empire wants their stuff, they are toast.
- "Tall" as opposite to "wide" suggest kind of equality or at least way to resist on the political, social and military planes, so that the quantity don't turn into quality. And this is hard to achieve, what i saw to this point were either artificial buffs or inintial technological supremacy combined with barrier to expansion. But the buffs are not fun and usually unrealistic, and once the "wide" close the technological gap the "tall" are falling hard. Especially when there are no specific victory conditions.
- There is always peace or federations options. Which i never saw implemented really good in 4x. Other empires are either weaker, and thus potentially prey, or equal, and that means "rivals" or stronger, and thus they treat you as prey. I've never even really saw good diplomacy in any 4x (with one possible exception of Beyond Earth expansion, where the deals are actually useful, but the diplomacy itself is still crap), the AI always seem oblivious to reality, either being totally passive or recklessly aggressive calling early wars for the lulz.
- We can't really call most small states "tall", their are just that, small and weak, once the "wide" empire wants their stuff, they are toast.
- "Tall" as opposite to "wide" suggest kind of equality or at least way to resist on the political, social and military planes, so that the quantity don't turn into quality. And this is hard to achieve, what i saw to this point were either artificial buffs or inintial technological supremacy combined with barrier to expansion. But the buffs are not fun and usually unrealistic, and once the "wide" close the technological gap the "tall" are falling hard. Especially when there are no specific victory conditions.
- There is always peace or federations options. Which i never saw implemented really good in 4x. Other empires are either weaker, and thus potentially prey, or equal, and that means "rivals" or stronger, and thus they treat you as prey. I've never even really saw good diplomacy in any 4x (with one possible exception of Beyond Earth expansion, where the deals are actually useful, but the diplomacy itself is still crap), the AI always seem oblivious to reality, either being totally passive or recklessly aggressive calling early wars for the lulz.
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Tall doesn't mean OPM, it just means focused on infrastructure/technology/quality vs expansion/quantity. I hope you can still be competitive as a smaller nation and don't have to lead the ledger in systems owned in order to succeed.
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If other system are similar to the Solar system we've seen, I think it will be possible to have a tall empire with maybe 3-4 systems and 10-12 colonized planets.
A small concentrated empire should be viable IMO, maybe suboptimal but viable.
A small concentrated empire should be viable IMO, maybe suboptimal but viable.
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Indeed. I would for example view Prussia pre-Congress of Vienna as a "tall empire", same with the Dutch Empire. The cores of both nations were small and their populations couldn't compare to the other Great Powers at the time, but they were well developed with armies and (in the case of the Netherlands) navies that could stand their own.
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Trouble is, there's a finite amount of space to expand into. Eventually the wide players run out of room to expand and start going tall as well. And Wide + Tall > Tall.
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Well yeah, but hopefully that's pretty end game and that gives the only Tall empire PLENTY of time to maintain superiority over an empire expanding rapidly (at least I'd hope so). Now, if you're the Tall empire and don't manage to keep said Wide empire from matching you (a long term goal)? You done screwed up.
So, I had a little think I think the main issue is that almost all 4x strategy games that I've played the issue is generally that what I'm going to called "nodes" in your empire (cites, planets, provinces, whatever the game uses as a basic unit of a nation) generally have some kind of cap on population/development, therefore "tall" will always be better because more nodes = more population = more resources, more production, more everything.
Therefore, although a tall player will be able to keep pace with a wide player short term by having more developed nodes than their opposition they will eventually run up against that limit while their wide colleges will not.
Let us take SMAC as an example, a game I'm pretty familiar with; in the early game cities can only grow to 7 until you get Industrial Economics and then they can grow to 14, unless you're Peacekeepers or you get a certain secret project. Only very late game do you get another facility which lets your bases grown indefinitely.
Now consider two factions on the same landmass, one goes tall the other wide. The tall one* builds five cities and pop-booms early to 7, build hab complexes and then pop-boom again to 14. In the same number of turns, the wide faction builds 14 cities which grow to an average of 5 pop each, so each faction has 70 population units. Neck and neck. But now what happens? The wide faction can't expand any further because all the land has now been taken and so assuming they don't go to war what are they going to do? Build hab-complexes, pop-boom, and have 14 cities with 14 pop each. Now they have 196 pop total and the Tall Empire is screwed.
The only recourse the Tall Empire has is to use the temporary advantage of their better developed cities to attack the Wide Empire while it's expanding and take their lands, which is just going wide by another route.
This is the fundamental problem with going Tall. It's always a losing proposition long term in most 4x games as designed.
There are two ways of getting round this; to include limitations on expansion in the same way there are limitations on population grow of your nodes; an example would be Civilisations beloved "corruption" system or perhaps you introduce a global population limit (which you can increase with tech, natch) which sets a population limit across the faction. In SMAC terms it might say that your faction can have 26 population, either in one base or in 26 separate bases.
The other option is simply to do away with population limits entirely, allow nodes to grow indefinitely. In Stellaris terms, allow planets to become ecumenopolis with billions or trillions of people on them.
Space games have another option which to my knowledge no one has really done anything with so far; artificial habitats. Solar systems are large and empty enough that you could fill them with very large numbers of O'Niell cylinders, Banks orbitals, Halos. Living space would not be a concern; this would give you a real choice of whether or not to spread your population out amongst dozens of star systems or keep it concentrated in just a handful; expansion would be a choice between colonizing and terraforming new worlds in other systems or constructing a new Ring in your home systems.
* this is starting to sound like some kind of folksy proverb or morally instructive tale. "There were three brothers, one went wide, the other tall, and the third one killed a wolf for some reason, then their houses fell down..."
Therefore, although a tall player will be able to keep pace with a wide player short term by having more developed nodes than their opposition they will eventually run up against that limit while their wide colleges will not.
Let us take SMAC as an example, a game I'm pretty familiar with; in the early game cities can only grow to 7 until you get Industrial Economics and then they can grow to 14, unless you're Peacekeepers or you get a certain secret project. Only very late game do you get another facility which lets your bases grown indefinitely.
Now consider two factions on the same landmass, one goes tall the other wide. The tall one* builds five cities and pop-booms early to 7, build hab complexes and then pop-boom again to 14. In the same number of turns, the wide faction builds 14 cities which grow to an average of 5 pop each, so each faction has 70 population units. Neck and neck. But now what happens? The wide faction can't expand any further because all the land has now been taken and so assuming they don't go to war what are they going to do? Build hab-complexes, pop-boom, and have 14 cities with 14 pop each. Now they have 196 pop total and the Tall Empire is screwed.
The only recourse the Tall Empire has is to use the temporary advantage of their better developed cities to attack the Wide Empire while it's expanding and take their lands, which is just going wide by another route.
This is the fundamental problem with going Tall. It's always a losing proposition long term in most 4x games as designed.
There are two ways of getting round this; to include limitations on expansion in the same way there are limitations on population grow of your nodes; an example would be Civilisations beloved "corruption" system or perhaps you introduce a global population limit (which you can increase with tech, natch) which sets a population limit across the faction. In SMAC terms it might say that your faction can have 26 population, either in one base or in 26 separate bases.
The other option is simply to do away with population limits entirely, allow nodes to grow indefinitely. In Stellaris terms, allow planets to become ecumenopolis with billions or trillions of people on them.
Space games have another option which to my knowledge no one has really done anything with so far; artificial habitats. Solar systems are large and empty enough that you could fill them with very large numbers of O'Niell cylinders, Banks orbitals, Halos. Living space would not be a concern; this would give you a real choice of whether or not to spread your population out amongst dozens of star systems or keep it concentrated in just a handful; expansion would be a choice between colonizing and terraforming new worlds in other systems or constructing a new Ring in your home systems.
* this is starting to sound like some kind of folksy proverb or morally instructive tale. "There were three brothers, one went wide, the other tall, and the third one killed a wolf for some reason, then their houses fell down..."
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The problem with placing limitations on factions' ability to expand territorially is that it results in each player playing in their own private sandbox. It's already a problem in 4x games that games can be effectively decided without the players having had much real interaction with each other. This would only make it worse.
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Playing tall should be viable but Paradox games have almost always rewarded blobbing heavily so I'm not holding my breath.
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