Feedback Requested: Factions and Politics

[Louco doido]

Doesn't really work because there aren't any classes, aside from Slave VS Non-Slave. There are occupational ranks, but class isn't simply a matter of occupational rank.

The existing ethics could be treated as an axis though, rather than a chosen trait.

I don't think so, there are right-wing dictatorships (elitist or fascist) and left-wing dictatorships (communist) around the world, and there are right-wing democracies (conservative) and left-wing democracies (social-democratic).

 

[cryptkeeper]

I want instead of revolutions on low stability maybe some events leading up to it like worker strikes, especially for megacorps. Maybe recalculate stability( would require changing a lot of +stability mods) to represent the happiness( how the pop+factions feels about the government and their actions+ policies) as well as their needs relative to their ambitions, so a authoritarian pop may have lower needs then a egalitarian due to how they see their place in society. Oligarchy with a egalitarian society would be less stable and require more maintenance from the state to keep people from say going on strike and impacting your economy.

But as benefit a Oligarchic society would have easier time generating influence, due to only have a few very rich influencing the agenda of your government. So I imagine galactic ambitions would be easier, while internally you will have a hard time generating unity and stability. Where as a democratic shared burdens style society would have easier time keeping things stable, but harder time expanding and conquering.

 

[Democratic Monarchy]

Do you know what I would like to see in Stellaris? A political axis. I would like to know if my government is right-wing or left-wing.

We have that already, it's called the Ethics Wheel.

 

[LS512]

When it comes to ethics, the requirement that you have to have 3 regular ethics or 1 fanatic and 1 regular kind of hampers some role-play aspects of creating a civ and it does feel a bit restrictive. It also feels sometimes that the ethics are too broad with what they want to represent.

It maybe would be interesting if there was more of a difference between the regular and fanatic variants of the ethics. Right now the only thing that is different is that fanatic ethics just give you higher values of the regular bonuses. One example of a difference that I can think of is fanatic xenophobes and xenophiles not having access to the “residence” species right, but instead being locked to “slaves” or “citizenship” respectively. But I have no idea if this would be good gameplay wise.

Maybe regular ethics could also allow for more flexibility? To be honest, I would be happy if regular xenophobe empires were able to give citizenship to non-primary species after some ingame years have passed as a way to show imperial assimilation. I got the impression that regular xenophobes were more about being afraid of alien empires rather than of alien species. Maybe aliens that are part of the empire for a long time wouldn't be exactly viewed as outsiders for regular xenophobes. The “selective kinship” civic is close, but it doesn't really scratch the itch. It would make the regular ethic stand out against its fanatic variant, but again I don't really know if this is a good idea. I can't think of anything similar for xenophiles unfortunately.

Ethics shifting could be a bit more flexible too. There were some games where I needed to shift ethics but couldn’t because the faction never formed. The need to get 20% of pops to change their ethics is also kind of a hassle, especially since policies or edicts that could help in that are often locked behind being egalitarian. Maybe factions could have some goals/objective you could complete and in turn it could boost that faction's popularity and ethic attraction.

I guess that overall I just would like to see more flexibility when it comes to choosing the empire's ethics and also for there to be bit more depth in the system without it being too restrictive. Gameplay wise, it feels like you're choosing between being restricted or not in what you can do ingame. Having xenophobe and not being pacifist gives you the least amount of restrictions in your gameplay compared to the other options. Yes, restrictions are there to make the ethics different and it makes sense when it comes to roleplay, but without any deeper flavour or novel systems being attached to the different ethics, it feel like you're just choosing to make the game more difficult without a meaningful reason.

 

[Imp0815]

Have read some posts and arguments here after I answered the questionnaire, and most of them reflect my own opinion about factions.
It boils down to:

• Factions do nothing or too little.
• Factions should do more.

And I fully agree, BUT I think I already know what a game designer is going to say about why it is how it is:
If factions had a larger impact on our game, we would be railroaded into decisions and gameplay, removing control from the player, and that is, for most people, a death sentence. Release Victoria 3 did that, and people were not happy with it—some still aren't.
In Stellaris, this is even more detrimental, as the core gameplay loop is not built to support an interesting simulation and to create compelling struggles with setbacks, internal crises, and rebellions that weaken your empire.

This is because the game revolves around amassing resources as fast as possible to build the biggest doomstack as quickly as possible. Any inconvenience or unpredictable role-play event—like a faction or planet getting unhappy due to distance from the capital or localized environmental differences affecting the local pops' ethics—creates a frustrating experience. Setbacks in the fleet power loop can lead to a game over screen, which players perceive as unfair.

This is, by the way, the same reason espionage does nothing, why the AI doesn't have access to all espionage elements, or why the AI lacks access to precursors. These mechanics would create setbacks for the fleet power loop of player empires based on uncontrollable factors like events, situations, or RNG, which would be perceived as unfair and frustrating.

That said, I want to close this side step by again stating that we cannot have meaningful and interesting stories or impacts on our empire as long as the game is structured like a race to build the biggest doomstack.

Coming back to factions, I fully agree that they are shallow checklists to gain some resource we can utilize to grow our fleet and snowball. I think they should be more localized to planets and create a more focused and unique experience on each one. For example, if a planet is mostly a mineral producer with mining districts, it should create a faction and an identity around it, demanding things that pops on a remote mining colony would care about—like better workplace safety, higher pay, and assurances of a clean environment.

Each planet could have an autonomy desire based on different circumstances or maybe even tied to how much automation the planet has. This would create a dynamic where too many automated planets lead to remote colonies developing autonomy desires because "the empire doesn’t care, so why should we?"

The real game changer—and the most important part of making internal politics and factions interesting—is the number and depth of systems we can use to interact with them. These systems should be vast, dynamic, and immersive.

For example, every interaction we have—like sending fleets into orbit, building certain buildings, terraforming, or landing armies—should directly impact factions and pops. Landing armies on a remote colony considered "core world armies" should lower autonomy desire as the colonists see that the empire does care. Building research labs on a mining colony and creating higher-status jobs could lead to division on the planet, as a mining world would never have experienced that before. The resulting class division among the millions of miners could create friction, possibly leading to rebellion.

Similarly, buildings considered "empire-related" on a remote colony could be destroyed by unhappy separatists, creating more internal friction within the empire.

There are so many interesting ideas we could explore, but most of them would likely be denied based on the current gameplay loop and how intrusive they are relative to what players expect from the game.

 

[Democratic Monarchy]

When it comes to ethics, the requirement that you have to have 3 regular ethics or 1 fanatic and 1 regular kind of hampers some role-play aspects of creating a civ and it does feel a bit restrictive. It also feels sometimes that the ethics are too broad with what they want to represent.

It maybe would be interesting if there was more of a difference between the regular and fanatic variants of the ethics. Right now the only thing that is different is that fanatic ethics just give you higher values of the regular bonuses. One example of a difference that I can think of is fanatic xenophobes and xenophiles not having access to the “residence” species right, but instead being locked to “slaves” or “citizenship” respectively. But I have no idea if this would be good gameplay wise.

Maybe regular ethics could also allow for more flexibility? To be honest, I would be happy if regular xenophobe empires were able to give citizenship to non-primary species after some ingame years have passed as a way to show imperial assimilation. I got the impression that regular xenophobes were more about being afraid of alien empires rather than of alien species. Maybe aliens that are part of the empire for a long time wouldn't be exactly viewed as outsiders for regular xenophobes. The “selective kinship” civic is close, but it doesn't really scratch the itch. It would make the regular ethic stand out against its fanatic variant, but again I don't really know if this is a good idea. I can't think of anything similar for xenophiles unfortunately.

Ethics shifting could be a bit more flexible too. There were some games where I needed to shift ethics but couldn’t because the faction never formed. The need to get 20% of pops to change their ethics is also kind of a hassle, especially since policies or edicts that could help in that are often locked behind being egalitarian. Maybe factions could have some goals/objective you could complete and in turn it could boost that faction's popularity and ethic attraction.

I guess that overall I just would like to see more flexibility when it comes to choosing the empire's ethics and also for there to be bit more depth in the system without it being too restrictive. Gameplay wise, it feels like you're choosing between being restricted or not in what you can do ingame. Having xenophobe and not being pacifist gives you the least amount of restrictions in your gameplay compared to the other options. Yes, restrictions are there to make the ethics different and it makes sense when it comes to roleplay, but without any deeper flavour or novel systems being attached to the different ethics, it feel like you're just choosing to make the game more difficult without a meaningful reason.

I feel like simply adding more Ethics would be the better option, like the Progressive-Traditional axis I suggested alongside splitting Egalitarian-Authoritarian into Egalitarian-Hierarchical and Libertarian-Authoritarian

Another idea of mine was an axis regarding ecology called Preserving-Exploitative, so that you could determine if your people believed in preserving the natural beauty of the world or if they thought the universe existed to be covered in parking lots and factories. Admittedly, without some sort of ecology and/or pollution mechanic this would be a somewhat underwhelming addition to the Ethics Wheel, but I do feel there is some merit to it.

 

[Goblin-Cookie]

I don't think so, there are right-wing dictatorships (elitist or fascist) and left-wing dictatorships (communist) around the world, and there are right-wing democracies (conservative) and left-wing democracies (social-democratic).

I am not sure what you mean by that, it is like you were responding to something else.

The lack of classes and therefore class politics means we cannot really place a Stellaris regime on a Left-Right axis, unlike with real-world regimes. It does not mean that we can place them on other axis, though the game does a poor job of this by separating governments/civics from ethics too much.

We could perhaps say that ALL Stellaris regimes are Far-Left, unless perhaps they have slaves or are a Megacorp in which case (?).

Because Class isn't the same thing as an occupational grade, slaves/non-slave are the only true class division in Stellaris. That seriously changes the political game against reality, where people who aren't slaves are also divided by classes. If we don't have slaves, then we are basically a communist, classless society in Stellaris.

 

[Calvax]

The last thing I want in my space fantasy game is to try and stuff in the incredibly flawed "left/right" categories that we use for politics IRL.

Similarly class in stellaris is something that should be handled by a combination of species rights and strata political power (the pop rework has the potential to improve and flesh these out) with mechanics to support exploring great ideas from sci fi. Not trying to hammer in RL concepts of class that don't even apply everywhere IRL.

 

[Zhe Toralf]

I usually like to play some kind of egalitarian,pacifist,materialist empire. Why? Because those factions arethe easiest to manage. You don't have issues that you can only satisfy temporarily and there is lots of synergy between the issues of those factions. Here's what I woul like to see.

- Less "has recently killed / conquered" issues and more permanent ones. If I know that a militarist faction is only happy as long as I constantly conquer new planets, I have less incentive to play militarist.
- More active involvenent with factions. As it stands, factions basically give you a passive bonus/malus depending on their happiness and that's it. I check in every once in a while to see if there are new issues I might wanna satisfy, but that's it. Factions would be more interesting if they could have quests and situations associated with them. Also, a system to notify you of new issues would be nice, otherwise I might get surprised if I don't check in for a while and suddenly my whole population is unhappy.
- New events for rapid changes in pop ethics would be nice. Suppose i accept a bunch of refugees from a spiritual empire, but my empire ethics are materialist, there could be events that address the change in general ethics in my population.

 

[Spacenavigator1974]

Hello Stellaris Community!

The devs have started trickling back into the office, and we expect to resume our regularly scheduled dev diaries next week! This means this is our final feedback post of the holiday break, but we’re ending strong with something that we know a lot of you have been wanting for a long time: factions and politics.

Internal politics is such a nebulous term, and it means many different things to different people, and we’ve discussed internally many times just what “Internal Politics” means to us. But this is our opportunity to ask:

What does internal politics mean to you?

Here’s what Eladrin said in DD#364:


As previously mentioned in all of these feedback posts: This is not a guarantee that an internal politics rework will happen at some point in the future. This is us collecting feedback from the community to inform potential future development.

So, Stellaris Community, let us know what you think about the current implementation of Factions, and what internal politics means to you in our final feedback form: Internal Factions and Politics.

Thank you for all your feedback over the holiday season, and we can’t wait to see what you think of what’s coming next for Stellaris!

I like the current mechanics of the game like this. I would aim to fix the bugs and add content and content....new leviathans, new races, new types of planets, a market to buy relics from other empires, new warships, new crises, many new end crises.... the game is mature in my opinion, it needs content to make each new game something unique compared to the others....

 

[AlfonsLM]

I have not read any other replies here but I feel like the factions in Stellaris have generally not had any personality so I have mostly interacted with them for stat gains. the factions in the Rome games have generally felt more interesting for me even if I don't have that many hours in that game since you can interact with them more directly and the lack of any extremist movement penalties or clear path to factions with more than 2 traits is a bummer.

Faction requests, faction buildings and just some personality and penalties would probably make them a whole lot more interesting. Eg warmongers and peace lovers should have a clear difference in how they engage in skirmishes or a full blown war. Just as an example, if you are a peace lover you might get war exhaustion faster but after a status quo you get special project to arm freedom fighters on any lost planet while warmongers can send a privateer fleet to raid space stations without starting a war.
One of the penalties to have extremist warmonger faction could just be that they want you to raid Citadels with a combat power that's way higher than your privateer fleet or gets displeased

 

[Imp0815]

One of the penalties to have extremist warmonger faction could just be that they want you to raid Citadels with a combat power that's way higher than your privateer fleet or gets displeased

For me, it's just another indicative fact that the whole fleet power stacking system is counterproductive to the rest of the game, no matter where I look.

Some might say, "If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail," but that doesn’t mean I’m not open to arguments that suggest this isn’t directly tied to how the game treats itself in terms of power dynamics, progression, and scaling when it comes to fleets.

 

[jose2534]

This must be one of the few feedback forms where all of us might be rating the whole 1 to 10 as a 10 constantly when it comes to "Should we do this, should it have a positive or negative effect?"

Also, the biggest thing I have written so far, if they don't implement anything else, would be, for the sake of a more interesting galaxy and more stories to create, this little thing I write:

The ability to intervene on an ongoing conflict on the side of the defender or the attacker, the ability to stop a conflict before it even starts, the ability to attack my enemy's enemy when they are in a system I have a claim on, or everywere on my main enemy's empire if I'm going for a liveration or subjugation CB against them.

 

[Goblin-Cookie]

There are literally 4 classes in the game. But it would need to be a lot more complex, like an axis for each class coming from the government form (empire, democracy, hive mind, stratified by species, etc)

Those are not classes; those are occupational grades within a potentially classless society.

Your class is not decided by what job you presently are doing, if any. Your class is a set of social attributes attached to an individual, such as their social-political status and their property, irrespective of what job they are presently doing.

What is confusing people, is that in societies with classes, occupational grades are often the entitlement of certain classes exclusively, so you get to be the leader of an organisation because it is *your* organisation. However, since being the leader of an organisation, does not in itself make you own the organisation, it does not inherently follow that you are of a different class than the followers below you, though you are of a higher occupational grade.

And because Stellaris has no classes in it aside from Slave/Non-Slave, the politics ends up being quite alien to what we are familiar with in real-life. Problem is they end up adding in things that don't make sense, because they don't realise how alien what they have created is to the actual historical societies we are familiar with.

 

[Calvax]

Those are not classes; those are occupational grades within a potentially classless society.

Your class is not decided by what job you presently are doing, if any. Your class is a set of social attributes attached to an individual, such as their social-political status and their property, irrespective of what job they are presently doing.

What is confusing people, is that in societies with classes, occupational grades are often the entitlement of certain classes exclusively, so you get to be the leader of an organisation because it is *your* organisation. However, since being the leader of an organisation, does not in itself make you own the organisation, it does not inherently follow that you are of a different class than the followers below you, though you are of a higher occupational grade.

And because Stellaris has no classes in it aside from Slave/Non-Slave, the politics ends up being quite alien to what we are familiar with in real-life. Problem is they end up adding in things that don't make sense, because they don't realise how alien what they have created is to the actual historical societies we are familiar with.

Occupation plays a role in class and vice versa, though you're right that it's not the sole determinant and in a science fiction game it should vary. But stellaris does have systems beyond slave/not slave for class. You have living standards and citizenship rights. If the pop rework draws more from Victoria 3, where pops are grouped based on species, ethic, strata, and job then depending on other settings you can have a class system apt for science fiction. Though in a case like this I would like to see living standards impact more than they do. There should be issues if certain pops have utopian living standards along sides those that don't, especially as you can have situations where the workers of one species hold more political power and resources than a ruler of another in the same empire.

 

[grommile]

TLDR: Unity should be a measure you work to maintain and improve, not a resource.

Unity is indeed not a good name for a mana pool.

However, we have that mana pool, and we have things that use it, and your proposal appears to completely fail to engage with that mana pool and the things you pay for using that mana pool.

 

[Rattaktak]

There are three concepts that come to mind when thinking about politics, factions and governance in this game: one, micromanagement and the lack of incentive to automate repetitive tasks related to planet management; two, the static nature of federations and the lack of options to break them; and three, the possibilities of ethics and pop loyalty for sparking civil wars.

Micromanagement and the lack of incentive to automate repetitive tasks related to planet management:
When I play the game, I prioritise keeping the empire size low. The game encourages this by using vassals and sectors with governors. It's a good thing but it could go further.
Vassals provide resources and sectors provide more control with the option of automation. Unfortunately, I don't automate planets as much as I should and tend to micromanage planet building and pop jobs in sectors to maintain the fleet cap and control the starholds. Considering that an average 600 star galaxy can have an empire of 30 planets by midgame, it gets tedious. Sure, I can turn the sectors into vassals but I don't trust the AI to make the most out of planets- there's no real incentive to use vassals because I lose the fleet cap.
What I would like is either the option to trade fleet cap from vassals, like basic minerals or voting rights, or a new vassal subtype, like a "state" that's an entity between a vassal and a sector. An entity that has a contract between itself and its overlord that allows the exchange of fleet cap, station/starhold construction, security and lower empire size for tax/resources/tribute and less management. It would allow the player to gain more fleet cap, provide another option to reduce micromanagement and improve game flow.

The static nature of federations and the lack of options to break them:
Federations don't really break up during normal gameplay. The AI usually turns them into static hug boxes that can only really be dealt by force on the outside. That and the mechanics could be expanded on.

When playing in a federation as a player, there's no real opportunity to consolidate the individual states together into a mega state. I would love to see the idea of federation integration/state mergers into super states and the individual states either leaving or calling in foreign powers/starting wars with a new/reworked casus belli to break the cohesion of the federation to maintain their sovereignty. There's no real danger into joining a federation because the mechanics are not quite fleshed out. An integration/game over mechanic could spice it up.

The possibilities of ethics and pop loyalty for sparking civil wars:
This is the hardest one to give suggestions for because there are so many ways to go about it. No doubt others have already made great suggestions. The only thing I can think of is that each frontier planet/sector/state/vassal has a loyalty mechanic and individual AI that can "call" for assistance from foreign powers to fight a resistance against their overlord. This mechanic seems to already exist with vassals with the overlord expansion, but I believe it could be expanded upon.
As an example: a materialistic empire conquers several planets from its neighbouring spiritualist empire and creates a sector/vassal/state out of it. The states population is a majority spiritualist faction that follows the same belief as its former ruler, but the government is lead by a materialist appointed by their new overlords. There could be mechanics where the population passivly resists, then mass strikes occur, then after the innevitable repression, the spiritualist faction "calls" its former rulers and the rest of the galaxy for help. This gives all empires the option to "answer" the "call" with material support, like energy, food, alloys that allows the spirtualist faction to build ships and hire fleets from the galaxies mercenary/raider outfits. Assuming the faction gets enough support, then the materialist empire has to fight faction fleet vs fleet, which could devastate the materialist empires fleets and leave it open to a "call" from the spiritualist faction to their old overlords with a "reconquest" casus belli.
I look forward to see what the devs come up with.


Two more things:
Four: The Galactic Market could use a few new tabs.
A new screen/tab on the galactic market to give us a list of all the mercenary fleets and armies that are ready to be hired. It would be so much more convenient.
Another new tab in the galactic market called "The Bar At The End Of The Galaxy" where independent mercenary leaders hang out for the finest drinks and entertainment, waiting to be hired.
Another tab where the curators, artisians etc is avaliable for quick reference. It would a handy feature.

Five: Give us the option to add more/unlimited districts to ecumonopoli. I don't care how much influence and alloys I need to spend; please allow the option to go super tall with ecumonopoli. I would love to just once have a capital world with 70 districts on it; purely for roleplaying of course.

Thanks for the thread and keep up the good work.

 

[daniel060]

Unity is indeed not a good name for a mana pool.

However, we have that mana pool, and we have things that use it, and your proposal appears to completely fail to engage with that mana pool and the things you pay for using that mana pool.

Perhaps I wasn't clear. I suggest that instead of using the mana pool to purchase traditions, you instead need to have a certain percentage of unity achieved (65%, 75%, whatever), and then there would be a cooldown timer (5, 10, 20 years, for example) before you could pick again.

I don't think leaders and edicts should cost unity. They can cost some of our many, many other mana pools instead. (They may, however, influence that unity percentage one way or the other.)

Does that make it clearer?

 

[Drullo321]

My feedback on this part will be rather short. While it is true that there are some shortcomings already outlined by the people posted before me, I have no problems with it, or they are not detrimental to my general enjoyment playing the game. Stellaris doesn't need the same political / faction complexity as other (Paradox) games.

 

[grommile]

Does that make it clearer?

Much clearer, yes. Thank you.