Yes there are problems in 2.2 Why not use mods?

[FiddleSticks96]

At the end of the day, Stellaris is a product. It is a malleable product that can be made better or worse depending on the mods, but a product nonetheless. The onus lies on the product maker, not the consumers, to make sure the product is functional. If I buy something at the store, I expect it to be 100% there and 100% working as intended. I don't care if I or someone I know can fix a defective product. If it is defective I am returning it. This sort of thinking is why Bethesda is notorious for bug-ridden, barely functional games that modders spend years attempting to fix and it is why Fallout 76 is such a dumpster fire. The modding community does not exist to provide free labor for any company. Mods are fantastic. They enhance a product, but they are not responsible for actually making the product. I mod the crap out of a lot of my games, stellaris included, but I still expect my games to work as is.

Imagine if you bought a brand new laptop, but the motherboard was fried. You call the store you bought it from to explain the problem and they say, "that is how we sell that laptop, we won't fix or replace it for you, but you can buy a new motherboard and install it yourself." I could do that myself, as I have been building computers most of my life and have numerous spare parts lying around, but if that happened to me, not only would I return the laptop, I would never purchase anything from that store again because it is not my responsibility to make sure that the product I bought actually works. I have huge respect for PDX in general and the stellaris dev team in particular, but the day they adopt this mindset will be the day they lose me as a customer.

 

[Hyomoto]

Short answer: yup.

Long answer: if a game doesn't run, and a fan writes a patch that fixes it: the developers should still fix their game. A lot of complaints are noise, but that doesn't mean mods are the solution to all of it.

 

[Peace Weaver]

Literally no one in this thread has said that Paradox should not bother to fix bugs, or won't fix bugs, because of mods. The thread is simply pointing out that there are some mods that fix some of the problems in the game. Use them or don't - It will have 0 impact on the development of the game, but it might have some impact on your enjoyment of it.

 

[elitesix]

On the one hand, it's still legitimate to raise issues and be not satisfied with Paradox's lack of bugfixing test.

But then you have a huge amount of people who follow up the complaints and say they're done with the game because the is literally unplayable due to bad AI or popgrowth issues when there is a literally a 4 click solution that takes seconds to enable through steam workshop mods.

It's really bizarre, especially given stellaris modders have a history of fixing release bugs/oversights faster than the devs for the past few years.

 

[elitesix]

The beta branch is in very active development and it's difficult for modders to keep up. A lot of the issues are hardcoded and not fixable by mods. Glavius's AI mod causes MP desyncs.

Only one version for about a day causes MP desyncs (which we experienced and glavius posted about in his mod threads). Our group has played well over 16 hours on glavius AI mod without desyncs (base version) on3 separate days.

 

[Jamey]

This is a legit question. I'm baffled at the amount of vitriol aimed at the dev's. Sure It's pretty obvious that there are some glaring balance flaws in 2.2. The 2 biggest right now seem to be:

AI - use glavius AI
pop growth model - there are currently 3 that all essentially fix the problem in the same way.

And yes there are others and almost all of them have mods that fix them.

Which mod fixes performance so that the game is playable in the mid to late game? To me, every other problem I've encountered could be helped with mods (and, frankly, I haven't encountered any problems bad enough to convince me to go looking for mods).

 

[Pyoro]

Mods should be for stuff that goes beyond the base game or takes it into a different direction. See M&T for EUIV which basically adds more depth, or CK+ for CK which expands on CK. Fixing bugs and glitches and performance issues and other oversights really shouldn't be a modder's job ...

 

[Arutar]

If you need mods to fix the game experience, you will (among others) have a hard time to attract any new players, since they will surely not research mods before they try the game.

Also, being critical here on the forums is by defintion a sign that you probaly like the game. I surely do not spent my time on forums of games I do not want to play. Maybe we should as a community sometimes be more appreciative of the game as a whole, which to me is the best 4x game of all time (and I have been playing since Master of Orion I).

But criticism is warranted, since there are too many issues in particular with this patch to ignore (A.I., bonkers pop growth, Overall performance, etc.)

 

[khearn]

Stellaris is my first Paradox game, but I've been buying computer games since before many of you were born, and I'm not at all surprised that this release is buggy. It's release date was announced in advance, and fell between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Clearly the date was a top-down decision.

Management: We have to release it during the holiday season to maximize sales.
Development: But it probably won't be ready in time, there are just too many new things to get implemented and then debugged.
Management: I don't care, just release it shortly after Thanksgiving! Get everything implemented, and you can debug it after the release, but I want people to buy it in whatever state it's in!
Development: Ok, you're writing our paychecks, so I guess we don't have any choice. <sigh>

If you buy a game released shortly after Thanksgiving it's pretty much a given that it will be terrible until after a couple of rounds of patches. Is that the way it ought to be? No. But is that the way it is? Yup. That's the way it's always been, and I don't see any reason to expect things to ever change. Game companies come and go, but management always cares more about the bottom line than releasing a quality product.

So what can one do? Either wait a few weeks to buy a new game at this time of year, or buy it, knowing it'll have problems. At least with many modern games, there is the possibility of modding to work around some of the issues. Might as well take advantage of that if it's there.

I suppose you could actually try suing. Just threatening to sue doesn't do any good. If I had a nickel for every post I've seen from someone saying a game's developer should get sued, I'd be retired already. But good luck with your lawsuit. I suspect by the time you could get a court date, the game would be patched up and working well enough that they'd be able to show that it works as advertised. You'd probably have a hard time finding a lawyer willing to take the case, because they know it would be a losing cause. Let us know how it works for you.

So I think the OP's suggestion to use mods at this stage is probably about the best advice. Or, you could spend your time on this forum, bitching and moaning about how terrible the game is. If you like heartburn and high blood pressure, it's probably a great use of your time. I've noticed that this forum does seem to have a higher percentage of people who like that sort of thing than most gaming forums.

 

[FiddleSticks96]

Maybe we should as a community sometimes be more appreciative of the game as a whole, which to me is the best 4x game of all time (and I have been playing since Master of Orion I).

Actually, I started a thread awhile back to do just that. https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...appreciate-paradox-interactive.1126695/page-6

 

[Person012345]

This is a legit question. I'm baffled at the amount of vitriol aimed at the dev's. Sure It's pretty obvious that there are some glaring balance flaws in 2.2. The 2 biggest right now seem to be:

AI - use glavius AI
pop growth model - there are currently 3 that all essentially fix the problem in the same way.

And yes there are others and almost all of them have mods that fix them.

Glavius AI is not a magic bullet. It makes the AI function, but mods should be used for enhancing and customising the base game experience, not making it work in a basic way. I wouldn't even say it makes the AI per se "good", there's only so much modders can do, though it certainly puts it within acceptable limits. There are also numerous bugs in the game, that's a big point right now bugs and oversights. Glavius can't fix things like the AI being unable to repair ruined buildings, so as a stop gap the mod just prevents AI buildings from being ruined. this obviously is an extremely far from ideal situation. Similarly the pop growth model is ridiculous and aside from the fact that not everyone knows about specific mods, I would hardly call this a point of customisation, a mod to fix pop growth is almost mandatory unless you're playing a tightly pop-controlled empire.

The game is totally borked right now and there are problems that mods cant or haven't yet gotten around to fixing. The game should NEVER have been released in this state, THAT is why there is a lot of vitriol. I don't really think it helps to single out any particular part of the team and call them names or anything, but it's a legit question to ask how PDS/Paradox as a whole thought that the patch was in an acceptable release state to put it out when they did. It 100% should have been pushed back and there's no way they simply didn't catch all the issues here. They rushed it out because they wanted it out for christmas, so it seems, and calling out all the issues, letting them know this sort of shit isn't ok is important. again, it's not like mods just fix all the issues.

 

[Su-Pe-Biomech]

Is there a mod who turns planet management back to Niven? Also in design?


It's not like everything is good when you just turn back to Niven update. Future updates like maybe for diplomacy, you will obviously never get then.

 

[Person012345]

Stellaris is my first Paradox game, but I've been buying computer games since before many of you were born, and I'm not at all surprised that this release is buggy. It's release date was announced in advance, and fell between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Clearly the date was a top-down decision.

This is a big point. From my experience following game development, general time gaps between things, the fact that like, less than a month before they were saying "all of this is not even close to finished placeholder XYZ blah blah" and just my general sense of where development was, I, on the record, was predicting a february release. I gave them the benefit of the doubt that well maybe december seemed a bit early but they can probably crunch or something and it'll be a bit buggy but no more than PDS releases usually are. But when it released it became clear that it could sorely have used another couple of months in development. Given this, it feels absolutely like it was rushed out in an unfinished state, with the devs knowing this fact (there is no way a lot of this could have slipped past them unless they literally just didn't do any QA at all, people were pointing out some of these issues just from the dev streams but of course "this is all very unfinished and things will be fixed" they told us) simply to conform to a christmas release.

I think this is what is annoying to me, I mean I feel pretty vindicated in my assessment of when it should have been released and if I knew, then the devs must also have known that they weren't giving it enough time. The problem is that this release can in no way be considered an innocent mistake, the issues become apparent in a single game, hell in an hour or less. And now we have to deal with a broken, buggy game, the mods we're relying on to bodge-job the game being outdated with each update, that won't be properly fixed for months because paradox wanted to make some extra christmas bucks. I understand it as a business decision, but in return they can go ahead and understand our irritation as consumers.

 

[TheGrouch91]

Yes, the restaurant served your meal undercooked. Why not bring a grill and finish it yourself?

Yes, the store sold you jeans with a hole. Why not just sew them up?

Yes, the song you downloaded doesn't work. Why not have your friends record a song for you instead?

Because a product should work as advertised. The consumer shouldn't have to fix it themselves.

Mods are great for expanding the experience of a game. In Stellaris they can add new twists to the game's already clever mechanics, or add a layer of story and adventure that's essential to a space game. They are not a patch mechanic, and the players are not a volunteer labor force who should fix the game themselves.

So, no. No one is ignoring a mechanic that Pdx included. Because modding is neither a quality control nor a tech support mechanic.

Dude if your jeans had no holes how would you get into them? smh

 

[Slynx]

using mods is ok as a temporary fix. but it's not ok as a long term solution to all problems. cuz it's dev's responsibility to bring the working product without such issues(after all customers pay for it)
also mods brings problems when you want to play with randoms, cuz there are no system that'll synchronize modlist between all players when they join (like in Don'tStarveTogether).. so you have to create a collection and then convince others to play with mods you choose.

 

[Blodo]

Is there a mod that fix performance?

Surprisingly yes:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1592074962

But Paradox should still fix their game.

 

[Person012345]

Surprisingly yes:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1592074962

But Paradox should still fix their game.

I mean again this is a workaround that has to fundamentally alter and disable core gameplay functionality in order to get the game to work as it should on a basic level, it really strengthens the point that mods aren't the reliable answer to the problems at hand.

 

[klopkr]

What is this? Bethesda?