[Dev Team] Astral Planes and Stellaris 3.10.0 "Pyxis" Released - checksum (462c)

[Starfury]

• Update:
  • [Balance]
    OLD: Increased Leadership Conditioning reward to 3,000 XP
    NEW: Changed Leadership Conditioning to reward 3,000 XP equally shared between all leaders below level 10.

That's quite the difference

If I understand it correctly, the Agenda's been changed from 1 level or 2000 XP per leader to 3000 XP split among all your non-maxed leaders.

Paradox have really put the brakes on turbo-leveling your leaders! (which I guess seems reasonable enough, you could really do some crazy things in 3.8 /3.9)

 

[Peter Ebbesen]

Random traits that aren't necessarily useful is not bad design. It makes getting leaders with great traits more fun, and also encourages using leaders in more varied ways depending on their expertise, especially ways you wouldn't normally use them. You shouldn't always have a lineup of leaders with all the right traits for how you want to use them.

True, but going from, "you can have up to three starting traits if you invest heavily in leaders, which gives you pretty good odds of seeing at least one leader from each category on a refresh having some trait you are interested in, even if you seldom get a perfect combination" to "you have one starting trait selected from a much larger trait pool regardless of how much you invest in leaders, which gives you awful odds of any category on each refresh having a leader with a starting trait you are interested in, unless you pretty much don't care what you get" is too huge a shift in anticipation to expect anything but a severe negative reaction from players.

With time expectations from those who started investing significantly in leaders with 3.8 will adjust from the norm being starting out with something useful to the norm being starting out with something mostly useless, just as it has been for those who did NOT invest in leaders, but still worth leveling them to high levels for the veteran traits, while those who did not invest significantly in leaders since 3.8 will just find leaders even more useless to invest in than they did before.

Starting scientists and commanders probably still shouldn't have governor traits though, since that's something that can tend to just make players restart the game - there's no real strategy or choice involved when that's what happens.

My guess is that many players are going to be using at least as many scientists as governors as officials.

Apart from their shared common traits aiding governing, and a few shared veteran traits:

• The official's governing subclass and its veteran traits helps energy, minerals, food, alloys, consumer goods, and unity production.
• The scientists's governing subclass and its veteran traits helps science production

So you are going to want to assign scientist governors to every planet/sector devoted to science production.

This suggests to me a larger need for official governors during the early stages of the game and scientist governors during the late stages.

Commander governors, who significantly harm the production of specialist and ruler POPs, with the benefit being of helping workers, stabilizing planets, aiding defenses etc. probably aren't going to see much use in well run empires.

 

[Peter Ebbesen]

That's quite the difference

If I understand it correctly, the Agenda's been changed from 1 level or 2000 XP per leader to 3000 XP split among all your non-maxed leaders.

Paradox have really put the brakes on turbo-leveling your leaders! (which I guess seems reasonable enough, you could really do some crazy things in 3.8 /3.9)

EDIT: A quick check of the scripts reveals that yes, that is exactly what they have done. The more you focus on leaders, the less each leader benefits from leader conditioning outside the very earliest levels. Leader conditioning is now best for people who use many lowlevel leaders or few leaders in total.

Sounds a bit like throwing the baby out with the bath water, and then beating its head in with the washing basin, but eh, let's see how it works out in practice.

EDIT: It is occasionally pleasing to be proved wrong. Further investigation showed me that the focus has merely been moved from recruiting low-level leaders and leveling them with high XP% increases aided by Leader Conditioning and Amongst Peers to recruiting mid- to high-level leaders that then only level their highest levels slowly. See my thread here for details.

The real question is: Did they change Progenitor Hive, or are they now turboleveling compared to everybody else rather than only turboleveling compared to players of other empires, that invested heavily in leveling their leaders?

---

With the huge nerfs to leader XP increases, the leadership conditioning change, and the Amongst Peers change, the only way regular empires have of leveling leaders at anything but a snail's pace would seem to be focusing on the XP increases that remain, agenda speed increases, and cycling agendas for Amongst Peers, with the added annoyance of having to swap in the leaders you want boosted as councilors before you trigger each agenda since it only applied XP to councilors now.

Which means that the revamped Politician trait (+10%/+20% agenda speed) might now be THE top common council trait for getting higher leveled leaders, replacing the nerfed Eye for Talent trait (+5%/+10% increased XP for everybody)

 

[chilllounge]

just a small featback on leader changes. i feel like now the cap is kinda too high (in some areas), just did a quick playtest. year 25 i had 1/5 admirals 2/7 commissioners and 5/5 scientist. i just didnt have the recources to employ more or the need. but i would have liked to employ more scientist at the beginning, so an easy "fix" to have more cap in one area would be a policy which changes 1 cap of the other two leader cap types with 2 i want (sorry for bad english), so i would get in the beginning 2/2/5 caps instead of 3/3/3 (officials/commanders/scientist).

another thing is, im missing the 5 year leader pool update notification (idk if it changed in the settings, but pre 3.10 i got the notifications for it).

the last thing, the leader traits which give recources now give jobs to the home planet. i wish they would give jobs only to the capital of the sector where the leader is stationed. this way a giga capital which anyway doenst have enough population to work this jobs is avoided and sector capitals wouldnt be just some random planets chosen by location, they could be specialized more with this and feel like being meaningful.

 

[Verx90]

I feel like the solution to most ppl lamenting about staring traits is to have the leader pools (or at least the starting pool) have forced traits from different specialization.

So, empires with small pools may still be stuck with Governor trait, but the other scientist will have 100% another trait type.

 

[Ikael]

So it seems that two leader problems remain:

- Too few scientist leaders at the start of the game, thus hampering exploration. I might suggest that perhaps giving +1 scientist cap to materialist ethoi (+2 to fanatics) instead of robot maintenance discount might be a straightforward way to solve this (simply pick materialist ethics if you want to have super-exploration from day one)
- There are too harsh penalties for going over the cap. Now that's weird, I thought they lessened those?

While two brand-new problems have arisen:

- Random starting traits might be completely useless due to governor functions merging with leader classes. Well, I have no problem with introducing a random element when leveling up leaders, but to have this from the start is quite different. This is the kind of RNG that is NOT fun at all.
- Way fewer options for customizing your leaders since day one due to overall civic and Tradition nerfs. Well, that was to be expected, and I guess that it is working as intended, but I don't know how to feel about it.

 

[Zagreb 887]

That's quite the difference

If I understand it correctly, the Agenda's been changed from 1 level or 2000 XP per leader to 3000 XP split among all your non-maxed leaders.

Paradox have really put the brakes on turbo-leveling your leaders! (which I guess seems reasonable enough, you could really do some crazy things in 3.8 /3.9)

I guess that penalize psionic empires that don't have access to increase lifespan beside the venerable trait. ( The Shroud lifespan boon is far too rare )

 

[Peter Ebbesen]

- There are too harsh penalties for going over the cap. Now that's weird, I thought they lessened those?

They didn't. The upkeep penalty is arguably lessened compared to 3.8 if you have a lot of leaders and a low leader cap, but much worse if you have a lot of leaders and a high leader cap, unless you have an extreme amount of leaders, where 3.8 would stop giving XP at all, but you now still get a trickle.

Okay, that wasn't particularly clear. Let me try again: In practice, the result is that you should never, ever, exceed the leader cap by more than a few leaders in the early game for unity reasons, and at any point in the game for XP reasons.

(Honourable exception: You stack initial leader skill so high you recruit level 8+ leaders. At that point, presumably, the unity cost becomes the significant limiter if you accept no further leveling. )

The upkeep penalty is ((nOfLeaders – LeaderCap)/LeaderCap) – 100%, and it is additive with all other sources of changed leader upkeep.

This is what results in traits, traditions, civics giving you leader upkeep reduction soon being rendered irrelevant when you go over the leader cap, but it is still a linear increase in the cost that is relative to the leader cap, so if your cap is 3 the upkeep cost doubles at 6, if the cap is 5 it doubles at 10. This penalty is fine and dandy, build an economy to afford it and no sweat.

BUT....

The XP penalty is determined by the difference (nOfLeaders - LevelCap), in accordance with the table below (actually, it is a function of the difference, but most people will prefer the table lookup), and it is multiplicative with all other sources of increased leader XP. So GainedXP = (100% – penalty) * (100% + sum of leader XP increases)

This is VERY harsh on XP from going just a few levels above the cap, and the fact that it never actually becomes 0% XP gained is completely irrelevant from a practical perspective since it rapidly slows to a crawl where it takes many decades to gain a level. So if you want significantly more leaders of any particular type than the base 3, you NEED to stack the leader cap increases.

EDIT: Before anybody goes bananas: There are a LOT of leader cap increases available in the game. If you want 9-10 leaders of one leader class while still being within its cap, you can achieve that fairly easily if you are willing to pay some moderate opportunity costs. If you want 12+ leader cap for a class it gets much more expensive but can still be done.

+1 14%
+2 27%
+3 38%
+4 47%
+5 55%
+6 62%
+7 67%
+8 72%
+9 76%
+10 80%
+11 83%
+12 85%
+13 87%
+14 89%
+15 91%
+16 92%
+17 93%
+18 94%
+19 95%

(I couldn't be bothered to go further, but let's just say that if you go much beyond 3 over the cap, it is going to suck big time regardless.)

 

[TilloKirov]

Leader traits from ascension paths no longer provide research points scaling with leader level.

Why does the trait ‘Synthetic’ give no research points output at all. Research points output just has been removed.
However, the trait 'Cybernetics' gives 33% research points output on a planet and 16.7% in a sector. What a huge value!
That's really not fair.

Another point of issue.

The trait 'Physics Specialization' for scientists is planetary effective, but the trait 'Particle Physics' is council effective.
If I want to choose 'Particle Physics', I have to choose 'Physics Specialization' first, which doesn't come into effect at all in council.
This is a complete contradiction in design, and intentionally makes players waste skill points.

 

[ixlone]

This new outliner is terrible.

I'm having to do so many clicks to see things that were just _there_ before.

Hate it.

 

[Pokenar]

I think the outliner would be fine if there was a simple toggle between the old way, when you want to look at everything, and category filters, when you just want to focus on one thing right now

 

[SupremeMorpheus]

It absolutely does. Have you researched cloaking?

I am very glad to hear this!

 

[Corpus Festerheart]

Doing my part until outliner is fixed

 

[King Harkinian]

True, but going from, "you can have up to three starting traits if you invest heavily in leaders, which gives you pretty good odds of seeing at least one leader from each category on a refresh having some trait you are interested in, even if you seldom get a perfect combination" to "you have one starting trait selected from a much larger trait pool regardless of how much you invest in leaders, which gives you awful odds of any category on each refresh having a leader with a starting trait you are interested in, unless you pretty much don't care what you get" is too huge a shift in anticipation to expect anything but a severe negative reaction from players.

This is very true, and it's an understandable backlash, but it's a very minor backlash compared to countless other disliked changes throughout the game's history. I think the overwhelming majority of people are more happy with the new system than the old.

Personally I thought the leader pools and leaders in general were a chaotic mess before, it was tedious to sift through so many different traits. I much prefer a simpler start for the leaders, like how it was before the previous DLC. And of course, getting rid of the governor swapping micro and having different leader caps for each category is just such a big relief in terms of game design.

I'll have to actually play more with the new systems though - I'm sure big flaws will be found with those too.

 

[Panzerslothen]

Doing my part until outliner is fixed

Your part of.... what? Harming the game and the community for no good reason? Why are you proud of leaving a bad review for that?

 

[Corpus Festerheart]

Your part of.... what? Harming the game and the community for no good reason? Why are you proud of leaving a bad review?

How am I harming...an entire community? By negative review? And I clearlly stated the reason for it. New outliner made gaming experience EXTREMELY annoying for me. To the point where i will not launch the game until it will be fixed or reverted.
Do not assume not liking anything abount the game is a punishable offence.

 

[Panzerslothen]

How am I harming...an entire community? By negative review? And I clearlly stated the reason for it. New outliner made gaming experience EXTREMELY annoying for me. To the point where i will not launch the game until it will be fixed or reverted.
Do not assume not liking anything abount the game is a punishable offence.

It's a spiteful action which makes Stellaris look bad and is going to put people off picking the game up, all because you can't wait the week or so for an incremental patch which will surely address it.

It could have been managed as a comment or two on the subject adding your voice to the matter in the relevant threads here - that would at least have been constructive. Leaving a bad review this soon, particularly based entirely or mostly on that one reason, simply seems vindictive, selfish, and petulant.

 

[Corpus Festerheart]

It's a spiteful action which makes Stellaris look bad and is going to put people off picking the game up

No, it is an action that will make one particular DLC look bad, because it is, you know, bad.

because you can't wait the week or so for an incremental patch which will surely address it.

I am not a QA or a tester and not paid by Paradox to do said jobs. Releasing incomplete and bug-ridden games, that break working mechanics, is NOT a normal state of things or "business as usual"

Leaving a bad review simply seems vindictive, selfish, and petulant.

How old are you?

 

[Masked Ermine]

Based on what I've seen I don't think I want to upgrade my game yet, or buy the dlc. Paradox seems to do this regularly, and it's a frustrating thing, they pump out an expensive DLC with a patch that changes basic components of the game, that kinda only sorta works, but more often than not just breaks or negatively alters game play (usually for a while but still), then you have to sit there and wait weeks for patches to fix whatever they changed, and those patches ruin whatever games you initially did with the initial purchase, and it finally gets about workable just in time for them to release a new patch that breaks everything again.... If I had any complaints about Paradox it's their infernal fiddling with stuff constantly and thus never giving anyone a properly completed product that feels like it completely works as intended. I realize that Stellaris is a large game, with lots of baggage and coding inertia behind it, but maybe these constant changes and fiddling that ultimately cause entire sections of the game to not work as intended should be considered when it comes to maybe starting a new sequel with everything we have now chucked in but all recoded so it all talks to each other like it's meant to instead of through what seems like a long chain of telephone through voice modulators. Then they can immediately start breaking Stellaris 2 with new DLCs and patches every 2-4 months for decades on end. It just feels like Paradox is whipping a dying horse with this stuff...

And I realize the profitability of the publishing schedule but increasingly, this seems to be a modality of devs not fully testing everything before rushing it to monthly-quarterly publication deadlines, on the theory of 'customers will understand we'll patch it in post'. No, I don't want to play the beta or gamma of a DLC, I want the DLC to be damn well smooth and polished with whatever patches being not basal fixes to game frustrating (if not breaking) bugs but iterative balance shifts or exploit fixes. And I realize this isn't just Paradox, this is a thing that's increasingly common across the games industry but maybe instead of having two-five major patch/DLC releases the Devs focused on one or two....and stopped trying to reinvent the wheel every 4-8 months...the game wouldn't be such a rats' nest of a mess.... Because even with the Custodians, I'm increasingly becoming of the opinion that Paradox's dev teams can't handle the schedule their forcing themselves into.

 

[Panzerslothen]

No, it is an action that will make one particular DLC look bad, because it is, you know, bad.

Is it? Is it REALLY? You say that only out of malice and rage, lashing out - and over one thing, no less!. One bad feature does not make a bad game (or update, or DLC). You're not judging it on the whole merits, you're just stomping your feet on the mountain you've made of the one particular molehill.

If we get to Christmas time or something like that and there's nothing addressing this, then sure, maybe you'd have a point. As is, though, we've barely had 24 hours since release.

How old are you?

Well, based on our comparative maturity levels, I'm going to guess 'older'...