[Jormungandur]

Is it possible to have more than three scientists? Ideally have one for each department and then one for each of your science vessels?

Yup, you can absolutely do that. There's additional details on leaders in dev diary #6.

 

[Kuschelflummi]

Yup, you can absolutely do that. There's additional details on leaders in dev diary #6.

It doesn't have to do much with the DD actually, but I have a really big question: Is there a option / ethic thing / whatever to make a species more Matriarchal or Patriarchal, so that there may some roles only be fulfilled by one gender?

 

[CptWilly]

Clearly an American... Look at the bags under her eyes indicative of stress and lack of sleep. This is not someone working a French work week with Scandanavian vacation time and German family leave. This is a good ol' fashioned work-til-you-drop American!

 

[ponasozis]

Clearly an American... Look at the bags under her eyes indicative of stress and lack of sleep. This is not someone working a French work week with Scandanavian vacation time and German family leave. This is a good ol' fashioned work-til-you-drop American!

if you are one of most important officer or scientist of human race
you would always be sleep deprived and without family even if you were Belgian

 

[kreissig]

Clearly an American... Look at the bags under her eyes indicative of stress and lack of sleep. This is not someone working a French work week with Scandanavian vacation time and German family leave. This is a good ol' fashioned work-til-you-drop American!

haha...excellent CptWilly!! She has the look of a Starbucks drinker!! Hahaha I also clearly see a California RBF going on there as well..!! Hahaha

 

[valergain]

Clearly an American... Look at the bags under her eyes indicative of stress and lack of sleep. This is not someone working a French work week with Scandanavian vacation time and German family leave. This is a good ol' fashioned work-til-you-drop American!

The only way to truly work.

 

[BunnyPoopCereal]

Everything but the human portraits so far look amazing. The background in the portraits looks fine but it's the washy look on their faces that's slightly annoying but very uninportant since it's only aesthetics.

 

[desiriel]

Everything but the human portraits so far look amazing. The background in the portraits looks fine but it's the washy look on their faces that's slightly annoying but very uninportant since it's only aesthetics.

I agree with you. For some odd reason, human portraits are the only one I find lacking so far.

 

[Vejita00]

I was really glad to hear you were going with this sort of approach instead of a pure tech tree. I always liked this kind of approach ever since I saw something somewhat similar(But not entirely) in Master of Orion 2. Where you'd only get to pick 1 tech from a choice of 3, instead of eventually researching everything at the same rate as everyone else. Which meant some races would naturally have tech you could never achieve without trading knowledge with them or spying on them.

 

[Soranya]

Hiding Information only is a good idea if the actuall information can not be simply looked up in the script files... (aka when there is no ingame tooltip most people will simply play with the Wiki/Tech Files open and look the probabilities up to min/max their tech.

This leads to hiding the Information beeing just one thing: Annoying, compared to the anticipated "interesting exploring mechanic".

 

[Knotz]

I'm curious about French work weeks, Scandinavian vacation time and German family life now...

 

[Wenla]

Actually 2) might turn out to be the tricky part...

Of course, but if we don't get wiser, they will...

 

[Teleros]

My post was more about the weirdness in other games where everyone has almost the same technology in the early and middle game, which I think is really terrible.

Ah, yeah. Whilst from an IRL point of view I can understand this happening, gameplay-wise things should be balanced enough that opting for (say) lasers over missiles is a viable choice and one that some AI will choose (and others will not).

That said, there will probably come a point when to min/max you'll want to go a certain route, but so long as the AI doesn't do that too much it should be okay.

Another bad thing in other games is that they lack the three types of technology. I really liked how they split technology into three parts. I feel like this wouldn't feel right if they had three tech trees, which would just feel even more wrong than having just one large tech tree. I really dislike both tech trees and tech webs. They both end up being a race for the best technologies most of the time, and the difference between them is that in tech webs, you can skip what you don't want. There is no true sense of "discovery" in discovering such technologies, making them less than ideal for Stellaris.

Yeah, but I don't see how you can get a more realistic tech tree system - at least not without it frustrating players more than it pleases. To take the real world as an example, you research the structure of the atom... that doesn't mean you can build nukes yet, as you need both (a) the theory and (b) the practical means of making them. And from the point of view of a 1910s physicist, (b) may not even exist, and you may pump millions of hours (and dollars etc) into something that goes nowhere.

I think the most realistic tech or production tree I've seen is in (where else?) Dwarf Fortress. You'll note two key things in that game though: (1) it's stupidly complex, and (2) you have lots of production / tech research happening simultaneously.

I think it would be quite good to see a 4X game where there is constant R&D in various fields (just like IRL), but you can use government action (ie sliders or whatever in-game) to get put extra effort into particular avenues of research. Throw in some randomly generated dead ends ("sorry sire, it turns out prayers do not enrich uranium...") if you want to introduce some more randomness / random events into the research system.

 

[Time Emperor]

I'm not sure how I feel about RNGesus being involved in my empires technological progress... At least it's innovative.

all praise RNGesus what he giveth he can taketh

 

[Time Emperor]

I think we can agree
our entire human history was just some guys being better at appeasing RNG gods

All praise RNGeuse

 

[chopak]

I'd also like to be able to select one tech choice that would be "carried" to the next "draw" (I'm going to pretend the techs are cards). Here's why: If there are rare and powerful techs that are good all around then you'll take those all the time when they come up and it's not really a choice; if you nerf the techs to make it a choice between those rare techs and normal techs then there'll be none of the impact of getting a super strong rare tech. In my opinion Paradox should make it so rare and (very) powerful techs are situational and, and the same time, give players the opportunity to put keep 1 of the current tech options in the next "draw" so they can come back to it if they want. For example, being able to take Powered exoskeletons with you to the next "draw" while picking Offworld construction this time around to use the OP's screenshots as an example. This way you keep a tech you might want (the in-universe rationale for it would be "Tech A has promise but we'll go with B for now") at the cost of only getting 2 new techs the next time around. Putting it into the next draw instead of off the side means that they won't just pick the safe option every time because there'll actually be a downside (only getting 2 techs). It would become a question of "Do I want this tech guaranteed or do I want a higher chance of getting a tech I might want more?" which I feel is better than having to just chose what you want now.

I support this idea.

 

[JohnnyBeGoodNot]

Hi folks!

It’s Monday and you all know what that means! Today I am going to talk about the technology system in Stellaris. If you have stayed up-to-date with the information flow, you probably know the basics already: there are three types of technology: Physics, Society and Engineering. Each one has its own research track, and each department is headed by a scientist character. You thus normally research three technologies in parallel.

View attachment 144501

Now, I want each new game of Stellaris to be a new and different journey. That is why the game does not have a “tech tree” in the classical sense. Instead, each time you start up a new research project, you are presented with three semi-random choices. This is a bit like drawing three cards from a deck of cards, picking one and returning the other two to the deck. However, to continue with this metaphor, the trick is in the shuffling... The deck is very much stacked, so to speak. Especially in the early game, some cards are extremely likely to end up in the top, so that all players get a fair start. What happens in the background is a complex weighting of various factors, like the ethics of the empire, the traits of the scientist character in charge of the department, the techs you already have, etc. I guess you could say the result is something like a fuzzy, hidden tech tree.

Certain technologies are considered rare or very rare, and these are clearly marked so that you know you should probably pick them lest you never see them again... There are also “tech cards” outside the deck (this card metaphor is really useful!), that can only be drawn in special circumstances, like when researching certain Anomalies, investigating debris, etc.

Of course, there are only so many normal technologies to research, so you will eventually have most of them. To keep things interesting even in a very long game though, there are also many procedurally generated “improvement technologies”. For example, techs that improve all types of laser weapons by a small degree. These technologies are a bit like the “Future Technologies” in Civilization except that you can start getting them long before you’ve actually run out of scripted technologies.

View attachment 144502

As with any game like this, techs get progressively more expensive, meaning you cannot neglect building research labs and stations lest you fall behind the other empires of the galaxy (however tempting it might be to use your precious real estate to produce more Minerals and Energy Credits…)

Im glad you acknowledged the games that you've gotten inspiration from. I can't wait for this game to come out and for the chance to possibly test it out with an Early Access release if you decide to go that route. I will gladly suffer through the bugs to play such a fresh, new game.

 

[redsimonDE]

Nice. This is great!

With this system I can definitely see myself foolishly forgoing 'Critical Space Medicine - 2 days' for something rare like 'Giant Laser Robots - 5487 days'.

Yes, except that I would probably take the "Space Medicine" one first to increase my chance of getting "Super Mutant Genome".

 

[aitaituo]

Yes, except that I would probably take the "Space Medicine" one first to increase my chance of getting "Super Mutant Genome".

FEV catastrophe?

 

[redsimonDE]

FEV catastrophe?

Nice guess, but more like a genome for creating large, crazy, alien looking mutants to be used instead of humans, like the Phagon in Spacelords.
See my descrption of the biologist faction of Spacelords here
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...ooking-forward-to.895834/page-4#post-20322883
and also some of their creations here (ok these ones are human sized, but not made out of humans nor terran animals)

as well as here

Though these latter ones look much better as actual metal miniatures than on this picture.