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Stellaris Dev Diary #108 - 2.0 Post-Release Support (part 1)

Hello and welcome to another Stellaris dev diary. As we are still in full post-release support mode, until we are ready to get back to regular feature dev diaries, we're not going to have full-length dev diaries. Instead, we'll use the dev diaries to highlight certain fixes or tweaks that we feel need highlighting. Today, we're going to be covering some changes coming to the 2.0.2 beta in regards to War Exhaustion and forced Status Quo.

In 2.0, with the new war system, we added forced status quo peace as part of the new war exhaustion mechanics. We felt that this mechanic was necessary to ensure that limited wars could actually happen and so that the outmatched side in a war still had a reason to fight (pushing the enemy into 100% war exhaustion in order to force peace and reduce their territorial concessions). There were some problems with this mechanic, however, primarily that people felt surprised by a sudden peace in which they might lose systems the enemy has just occupied days ago, and also that certain wars (such as subjugation wars) were very difficult to fully win before being force-peaced out.

After receiving intial player feedback on these issues, we decided to try out a different model of war exhaustion in the 2.0.2 beta, replacing the forced status quo with a penalty at 100% war exhaustion. We have since been playing, testing, tweaking and collecting further feedback, and coming to the conclusion that our original design was correct - forced peace is necessary for the new war system to not simply become a series of single wars to the death, or powerful empires forcing a weaker empire into 100% war exhaustion and refusing to peace while their enemies were crippled by penalties.

For this reason, we will be reintroducing forced status quo peace, and this time it's here to stay. However, we are not simply going to roll back to exactly the way it is in 2.0, instead it will now work as follows:
- When a side in a war reaches 100% war exhaustion, they are now flagged as being at high war exhaustion, and get the alert as before
- Once at high war exhaustion, a 24 month timer will start to tick down for that side in the war. Once the timer is up, that war side can be forced into a status quo peace
- There will be no penalties for war exhaustion, but we will leave in the functionality for modders, as well as the ability to change the number of months before a forced peace is possible or disable forced peace altogether, so that those who truly hate to the idea of ever being forced to peace can at least change it through modding

These changes should mean that a status quo peace is something that doesn't come as a sudden surprise, and give the player time to start winding down their war and retake occupied systems when that war exhaustion counter ticks over into 100%.

We are also going to look into the possibility of changing Subjugation and Forced Ideology wars to either provide a clearer path to win such a war when the enemy has allies defending them, or by allowing Status Quo in such a war to achieve a 'limited victory' (liberating/subjugating part of the enemy empire instead of the whole).

These changes will not be in the very next version of 2.0.2 (as that is already being internally tested and will hopefully be with you before the end of the week), but we expect to roll them out sometime next week if all goes well.

That's all for today! See you next week for another 2.0 post-release dev diary.
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Matt516 said:
You could look at it that way, or you could look at it as the "meant to" end of a war is 2 years after one party reaches 100% WE. The main difference now is that the timing of the end of the war is predictable.
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Well, it's 2 years after the player reaches 100%.

Seems like "war exhaustion" is still going to be miscommunicated because it means completely different things to the attacker and defender, especially if one of them is a player.

Which was kinda the problem with it in the first place.
 
@Wiz I don't understand why you labeled the Penalty aproach as a failure if the penalty was easily ignored??

If War Exhaustion have a 24 months timer now, why not make a scalable penalty that will more or less force people to end the War after this time?

Like, every month after 100% WE will get you a 5% penalty to Influence, Unity, Hapiness and Upkeep. There, after 24 months you have a 100% reduction to Influence, Unity, 120% Hapiness Malus and a 120% increase to Ship, Army, Starbase and Consumer Goods upkeep.

Players will not be able to keep the War Forever, there will be costs to keep a War after the 100% WE and they choose when it's enough. Because with the new system, there will be no reason to not fight to the Death until the 24 months countdown ends, you will try to grab everything you can instead of calculating if the cost-benefit is enough.

And no, it's not abusable, just make that offering a Status Quo or Surrender freeze and starts to tick down the penalty (reducing the penalties by 5% per month) and refusing to Accept the peace make your penalties tick up again.
 
Christmas came
Early.

Its a miracle.

And here we had to mod it to make forced peace happen and now they see the truth praise the makers!
 
I think the solution you have chosen sounds really good! Also nice to see you are working on a fix for subjugation and ideology wars. With ideology wars fixed I will finally be able to properly play my pacifist empire again.
 
I'm guessing the AI forum is up in arms about another 'human player cheat' being introduced to the game. "They get TWO YEARS and we get NOTHING! I want a level playing field!!!11!1!11!001011010110".

(I think this system sounds about right, glad to see devs are willing to experiment and go with what ultimately works.)
 
I welcome the return of forced status quo because, as you said, it allows the weaker opponent to stall and wear down the enemy to minimize his losses.

As for non conquest wars, how about taking planets into account? War Exhaustion is still calculated for the whole alliance but for the outcome of the war only the conquered planets of the primary defender count. For ideological wars all planets occupied in the war get a huge ethics attraction to your ethos + some pops automatically flip. If you occupied more than 60% of the enemies planets the empire officially flips its government form.
Same for subjugation wars. 40% occupation it becomes a tributary, 80% occupation it becomes a vassall. The capital counts tripple.
Of course in those CBs you do not get to keep claimed systems (although that can be debated)
 
Can destruction category be looked into please? As at the moment even bombing/cracking half of the enemy empire planets results in 1% exhaustion. So there is no moral moment of enemy being broken morally (Let say purifiers are fighting someone, getting world after the world, and when there are only few planets left it seems natural that some of them would just give up fighting and agree to purging themselves).
 
Matt516 said:
And besides, the beta showed that even a fairly significant penalty like zero unity and influence production won't stop a determined attacker
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I lol’d. The penalties for a 100 WE were peanuts. That’s why war dragged on. There were no incentives to stop. What we need are penalties that actually impact the war effort and penalizes the winner more than the loser: higher, growing up over time, ship maintenance!

But even an insufficient penalty was better that this unfun, frustrating, unrealistic, immersion breaking "feature". Taking meaningful choices away from players to force them to do what you think they should be doing is bad. Hard caps >>> soft caps always.
 
Whilst this is definitely better than the other 2 options that have been tried I still feel it leaves something to be desired.

Scaling penalties with WE to encourage peace combined with a system to buy down WE (unity?) and an option to turn down a peace deal at 100%WE using influence or something would still let there be limited wars as resistance is capped by stored unity and influence but players wouldn't get caught out. The scaling penalties with WE would offer another incentive to peace out as well as the fact that sooner or later if you don't start winning your'll stop being able to reject peace offers.

Also please let us declare more ways and rivalries on non bordering empires.
 
Matt516 said:
You could look at it that way, or you could look at it as the "meant to" end of a war is 2 years after one party reaches 100% WE. The main difference now is that the timing of the end of the war is predictable.

Adding in penalties again still only hurts the loser in the vast majority of cases because they reach 100% first - often decades before the winner. Hurting the loser for the entire second half of their war makes the game more snowbally, not less.

And besides, the beta showed that even a fairly significant penalty like zero unity and influence production won't stop a determined attacker.. So again you get to a point where the loser is crippled by penalties they don't need and the attacker is not dissuaded by them. It just didn't work. Leaving penalties out is the correct decision.
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Why you think the penalties will only hurts the loser? Just make the penalties to the player that not accept Peace. If one side offer Peace, they will not get penalties, simple as that. It will 100% of the time only hurts the side that wants to overxtend the War.

And how the penalties were fairly significant? Zero unity and influence is laughable, no one cares about this two resources if the prize is Territory or total victory. In the beta, it's like there is no penalty at all. Even the 20% hapiness malus is laughable. The only penalty that matters are Energy and Minerals.

Penalties can work very well if they scale indefinitely and hurts the Energy and Mineral production of an Empire. This is an ACTUAL cost to keep the War. Every mineral you lose is one mineral less invested in your Economy. Players can't keep the War if they have 0 energy and minerals in the bank.
 
So after a week the only news is the removal of last week's changes.

Is there any chance we could have some of the fixes for game breaking bugs on live while you're deciding what to do with war exhaustion please? Many of these bugs are already fixed in the beta.
 
Nox Eterna said:
- There will be no penalties for war exhaustion.
The most disappointing sentence in this dev diary for me.
Just because forced peace 2 years after high exhaustion would be a thing doesn't mean there shouldn't be ANY penalties. I really fail to see the logic here.
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I agree, it's hard to take that there are no repercussions to staggering war exhaustion. There should be "incentives" to peace out early, particularly sth that tackles inner politics potentially? Like decreasing satisfaction cumulative unrest penalties? Maybe even a damming political coupe?
 
i hope you'll fix a problem where claims have a negative effect on interaction between empires for the entire game (most crucial for the interactions between the Lord and newly subjugated Vassal, making him permanently disloyal)

also a fix to the interaction of the colossus and pacifist would be nice. right now it's broken sometims, leading to total inability to wage wars. yet the can take and build one.
 
Kobrakai said:
Is there any chance we could have some of the fixes for game breaking bugs on live while you're deciding what to do with war exhaustion please? Many of these bugs are already fixed in the beta.
Click to expand...

So play the beta. Doesn't sound like anything is going to live until they're completely happy with it and sure it won't break more than it fixes.
 
I have mixed feelings regarding the Forced Peace mechanic. I'm sure in the long run it will be fine; and the short term pain pain will be lessened if you can get a fix for non-claim wars soon. However, until there's a major focus on diplomacy, internal politics and some more, non-war mid-game content it will only help to highlight the fact that outside of war there is nothing really to do.

I've had a few games of 2.X so far where I've been boxed in by rivals fought one, claimed a few border worlds. Peace out, fight the other take a few border worlds, peace out they form a defensive pact and then I have to wait 10 years doing nothing to do but wait for whatever technology I'm researching to finish so I can upgrade a building, or a type of ship. Even if I wipe out one of my neighbours by this time either the federations have begun to blob and you have the same problem on a larger scale or the A.I.'s lack of economy management kicks in and they death spiral taking out the challenge of the game.

I have faith that the latter will be resolved in a patch or two but I have no idea when the lack of non-war mechanics will be addressed. I had hopes for 2.0 before any news of it was released, but the Grand Mechanics Rewrite seems to have reset the timers on it. The slowing down of everything will be good when these mechanics are finally introduced, but at the moment only helps to highlight their absence.

So please @Wiz, re-introduce Forced Peace, fix non-claim wars not being achievable under the current implementation of it, maybe adjust torpedoes vs point defence and then stop changing war mechanics and please, start adding more to do in the long periods of nothingness that shorter wars lead to.
 
@Wiz would a possibility to "recover" war exhaustion be useful?
Like certain edicts that penalize your empire, yet reduce war exhaution for X years by Y %?

Currently it is hard to recover from a losing war: and dragging out a war should be possible , yet to increasing costs on your economy - not only for your allied empires to do their damned job... but also to get that one fleet back into the fight while the enemy is distracted bombarding fringe worlds with fortresses.

I personally like the forced peace at 100%, and think the timer in the end could be a bit shorter then 2 years.
However I would like to change how my realm will react to war losses/wins. Even equalitarian empires can get their shit together for once, when they have an outside enemy to focus on...
So some "war edicts" would be nice to help reflect that.
 
Why not make it progressive and actually punishing to prosecute a war over 100%? Why this forced peace? It's pretty basic that removing player agency like this isn't going to please gamers. Everyone knew it was a bad idea to simply apply a penalty at 100% warscore and that this would affect the losing side more than the winning side, which runs counter to the point. There have been a bunch of decent ideas on how to implement it so it doesn't do this, I don't understand why we have to go back to this hard end. This will not solve the problem of people being like 1 warscore away from winning and being force status quo'd, nor will it mitigate how annoying that is.
 
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