Feedback Requested: Pirates and Crime

[Henry 43]

Piracy and Crime? Didn't know these were features in Stellaris.

 

[Ajacoba]

I think piracy is fine, if you specialize into trade you get serious issues with piracy - once I had hundreds of trade value being channeled through a few systems and the resulting pirate fleets were seriously dangerous - and once in a while when I have a big empire I make cute little anti-piracy fleets and send them along the trade routes

Crime is kinda whatever? I guess it could be more easy to build up? Unless there's a crime corp there's hardly any need for police stations - and while most people hate crime corps with a passion I don't think it's actually an issue for one to exist, since two police stations will suppress most planets, saving me the need to go to war, lol

 

[MannheimCouncil]

Both being tedious and opaque systems is certainly near the top of my list why I don't like the current implementation. It would be better to just accept there is going to be a loss due to distance / population density instead of trying to patrol / suppress everything. I'm not against measures to reduce it, but especially piracy is boring and tedious to deal with. Its removal is a main draw of playing gestalts. And that does not make much sense either. We already have a crime-analog for gestalts, but the lack of trade makes piracy magically go away? Maybe extend it beyond just trade. Piracy should also be cross-border and tied to crime. If the empire next door has a lot of crime and you have no countermeasures, piracy should increase in your space too. Likewise your unhappy / conquered planets should boost piracy. Just making it fun to deal with seems hard.

Some sort of situation might be warranted if piracy / crime gets out of hand with diverging results depending on how you deal with it.

 

[03793]

Both systems have same problem - you want to rid of both if you notice them in your empire. So they just become a tax. There should be a choice of either stomping them out or benefitting from their presence (Yes, Negotiate with Crime Lord decision exists, and it's not enough)

 

[buttercrusader]

honestly i forget piracy exists because its so easy to deal with, and the only time i worry about crime is when theres a criminal heritage corporation and its more frustrating than rewarding

 

[alextoes]

I know this may not have a lot to do with the original topic and I am sure some of this has been recommended or thought about before but being able to play as a pirate and plunder systems for resources and creating pirate coves or hideouts and having AI be able to do the same would create a stronger piracy fantasy similar to some of the systems in CK3 when playing as Vikings. If you are not playing as a pirate being able to hire pirates or allow them to exist within your empire for the cut of the plunder. Recently watching Skeleton Crew has definitely been inspiring for ideas.

 

[Grenartia]

I think piracy is fine, if you specialize into trade you get serious issues with piracy - once I had hundreds of trade value being channeled through a few systems and the resulting pirate fleets were seriously dangerous - and once in a while when I have a big empire I make cute little anti-piracy fleets and send them along the trade routes

Crime is kinda whatever? I guess it could be more easy to build up? Unless there's a crime corp there's hardly any need for police stations - and while most people hate crime corps with a passion I don't think it's actually an issue for one to exist, since two police stations will suppress most planets, saving me the need to go to war, lol

The issue is the opportunity cost of enforcers.

 

[Calvax]

Thanks for asking for the feedback, will definitely fill out the form.

I think piracy and crime have the same problem that any level of them are annoying. They don’t offer anything interesting or different, just a straight resource debuff which is never fun. My tentative thought it there should be more variety in how they manifest with opportunities to use them in your empire in different ways.

 

[princezilla]

They are both oversimplified and honestly barely a factor in the game, at least part of that is due to how oversimplified the games economic systems have become.

 

[Idle America]

"Hey, you know that massive empire whose stations we just blew up? Let's build our base in the very same system we just raided, and assume nothing bad will happen!"

 

[daniel060]

I put this in the form:

The problem with them now is that they're more annoying than engaging. Building hangar bays on most starbases takes care of most piracy, and just being xenophile takes care of most crime. What those two don't take care of can be mitigated with moving a fleet or building Precinct Houses--one-click solutions that aren't very satisfying. What we need are systems that 1) Make Sense and 2) Are fun to deal with.

What if our leaders' traits had a big impact on their sector's/planet's crime rate, and vice versa? An official going to a high-crime place would be more likely to become corrupt, and a corrupt official going to a low-crime place might raise the crime rate. But before that can really be fun, the "crime rate" needs to matter more. ANY crime should have a negative impact, even if it's small at first.

So what should the impact of crime BE? In the real world, people usually either steal physical stuff (i.e., Consumer Goods) or steal money (in Stellaris, energy). So it seems like crime on a planet should negatively impact the consumer goods and energy production of that planet first. Then, as crime gets worse, it makes the neighborhood a less desirable place to live--so amenities, pop growth rate, and immigration pull should all decrease (and emigration push should increase). Eventually, as the criminals organize, they should start stealing minerals and alloys to build ships--and become space pirates! (This can mirror how gangs in the real world eventually displace the government as the holders of the state's monopoly on violence.)

Once there are space pirates, they shouldn't be destroying mining and science stations as they do now. They *want* resources to be produced so that they can steal them! They can set up a protection racket in systems where they're strong enough, or skim an ever-increasing percentage off all the traded resources that flow through the systems that they dominate. (This is where it would be really helpful to have an actual functioning trade system where resources produced on one planet get shipped to other planets. Without civilian supply ships, there's nothing to pirate!)

Pirates also need places to hide so that they can't be easily found and destroyed by a player's regular navy. For instance, a *hidden* asteroid station could function like the real-life Tortuga or New Providence in Caribbean. Pirate ships should also probably come equipped with cloaking by default--and perhaps cloaking that's a step better than their empire's current detection rating. That way they can just cloak whenever they're not attacking, and let the regular navy ships pass them by! They should also be able to move from system to system if a fleet is hunting them, raiding targets as they go in order to meet their ship maintenance costs. (Which is another reason why we should HAVE fleet maintenance costs beyond energy and alloys anyway. See my War Resolution post, last paragraph.)

If the pirates get strong enough to start defeating a player's fleets, they should eventually make a grab for the government by a rebellion or by simply invading the capitol. (Not sure if we want to make a playable "Pirate Republic Megacorp" that players can encourage on purpose, or just have the takeover be a "lose" condition, but I'd sure love to see it happen to AI empires!)

TLDR: Crime should lead to piracy, and piracy should lead to a fun cat-and-mouse game with real consequences if you lose.

 

[Calvax]

TLDR: Crime should lead to piracy, and piracy should lead to a fun cat-and-mouse game with real consequences if you lose.

The problem is; how do you make that fun and not a chore? And how do you make it fun within the context of a game that already has an insanely high amount of notification spam? I put this in the war form as well but any considered changes can’t be made in isolation. Because if they are, even if they’re fun systems, they add to the ever growing number of pop ups per minute. I’m not sure I want to have multiple chains of pirate quest pop ups on top of planetary events, elections, galactic storms, archeology sites, astral planes, leader level ups, leaders dying, yet another request for a migration pact from a species across the galaxy etc.

Which isn’t to say I don’t like the general idea of linking crime to piracy. I just think more thought needs to be put into how Stellaris mechanics have grown to demand so much attention already.

 

[Hunk Rawanda]

Hello Stellaris Community!

We hope you all have had/are having a great holiday season! Last week’s War and War Resolution Feedback Form had over 4000 responses, and we’d like to take the time to thank you all for your feedback. There are certainly some insights to be gained from the feedback you offered, and we’re excited to see some trends emerging - and combined with the rather large sample size - we feel we have a solid amount of community feedback that can inform potential future development on War and War resolution in Stellaris.

For those of you who didn’t see last week’s feedback post, we are taking advantage of the break in dev diaries to collect feedback to inform future Stellaris development. This is not a promise or a guarantee that there will be a rework on any of these mechanics at any point, this is to collect community feedback in a centralized place so that if the devs do a rework in a particular area, we have an idea of the community’s expectations and what you like and dislike about the current implementation of features in Stellaris.

Today we’re taking another look at another topic from Dev Diary #364 -Sights Unseen: Pirates and Crime.

This is what Eladrin said in DD#364:


So, Stellaris Community, what do you like/dislike about Pirates and Crime in Stellaris? Fill out our Piracy and Crime Feedback form and let us know!

From all of us here on Stellaris, thank you for taking the time to offer your feedback, and thanks for playing Stellaris!

This was mentioned in another post on feedback. Part of the problem in Stellaris is if you backslide at all it feels like failing rather than dealing with a situation. So if pirates have to much teeth it will cause this.

 

[Superdark33]

PIracy and crime have the same problems as space habitation in general: how do you represent your people going around in space on their own? How would you quantify "pops" that choose to live in ranch sized habitats on asteroids like that Yuht event instead of on a planet or a space station? Where would people go to hide if theres vehicles that can in a matter of days can go the full length of a solar system? How are ships built if the only option is a large spacebound shipyard, and why otherwise do ships spawn on their own?

 

[Emperor Lu Bu]

From a crime corp perspective, the most annoying thing is not being able to affect hive minds, followed closely by not being able to interact with other megacorps and their branch offices (we already put crime on regular empires without their consent, how is a megacorp different from a regular empire). Another thing is how easily crime is countered for example I had three crime buildings on one planet producing zero crime because the other empire ran 1 enforcer and a level three governor with righteous II, so either crime corp should be buffed or counter crime bonuses should be nerfed because going full into crime and not being able to produce any trade value the whole game because of early game bonuses is not fun.

 

[Great_Triangle]

The issue is the opportunity cost of enforcers.

This here is my biggest issue with crime. Unless your governor gets shot, it's in many cases more expensive to deal with crime than to just let it happen.

 

[Calvax]

From a crime corp perspective, the most annoying thing is not being able to affect hive minds, followed closely by not being able to interact with other megacorps and their branch offices (we already put crime on regular empires without their consent, how is a megacorp different from a regular empire). Another thing is how easily crime is countered for example I had three crime buildings on one planet producing zero crime because the other empire ran 1 enforcer and a level three governor with righteous II, so either crime corp should be buffed or counter crime bonuses should be nerfed because going full into crime and not being able to produce any trade value the whole game because of early game bonuses is not fun.

It’s not really fun playing with a crime corp in the galaxy either. Which is a problem because the go-to for every empire shouldn’t be to get a friendly corp/destroy the criminal one ASAP. There should be other ways of contending with them. Like perhaps getting a commercial contract with a crime corp could be a form of protection racket where you have a minimum level of crime enforcers can’t get rid of, but you’re also protected from some of the negative effects (like negotiating with crime lords at an empire level). Perhaps even escalating into a system where you also spread crime and benefit from it.

 

[ezno]

It’s not really fun playing with a crime corp in the galaxy either. Which is a problem because the go-to for every empire shouldn’t be to get a friendly corp/destroy the criminal one ASAP. There should be other ways of contending with them. Like perhaps getting a commercial contract with a crime corp could be a form of protection racket where you have a minimum level of crime enforcers can’t get rid of, but you’re also protected from some of the negative effects (like negotiating with crime lords at an empire level). Perhaps even escalating into a system where you also spread crime and benefit from it.

Agree with some kind of pacts possible, as a pacifist you nearly cannot do anything against them

 

[Emperor Lu Bu]

What if pirates played like a nomad empire with secret asteroid bases around the galaxy, this is the foundation. What if after multiple pirate nomads are established they meet together to form their version of the galactic community, a cool idea for example would be if an empire is about to build a sentry array (that would reveal all their secret pirate bases) all the pirates come together to declare that empire a crisis to their continued existence and throw everything they have against them (kind of like the sentry array is a aetherophasic engine).