Stellaris Dev Diary #139 - 2.2.x post-launch patch

[Isinfier]

Improving the travel time for ships would be appreciated. I can understand them being slower in the early game, but they move at a literal snail pace in the end-game; which is even worse when the inevitable engine slowdown occurs.

 

[!?!]

I agree. But upgrade that needs more than 1000 days (longest upgrade I remember was about 1700 days) is somehow to long I suppose.

With this system in place I wouldn't be so sure. If somebody attacked you a year after you started said 1000 day upgrades, you'd still have 33% percent of your forces modernized. And that's way more manageable than the current situation. And making upgrades take long makes for an interesting strategic decisions: "Do I want to build these ships now and make myself less of a target, or do I want to wait 40 months until I research plasma weapons to have better force in near future?".

 

[yafeshan]

New system completely disables one big property of machine empires which is already very underwhelming. We can not specialize pops and make them work on correct jobs

 

[Mikhail_Mengsk]

Well maybe this can be offset by having more maneuverability in how you utilize your ships, assign the older ones to escort roles, maybe ship them off to patrol duty before scrapping them (or add a section to the market were ships can be bought and sold). Maybe some modules shouldn't be upgradable for capital ships keeping upgrade times in check with smaller vessels (there could be a perk that your ship designs are build in a modular fashion making it possible to upgrade everything). Naval strategy is build strategy, but maybe the battles in stellaris are still to deadly to allow for such strategy. I just like to see a bit less abstractions in the game so you actually need to have short and long term plans for most things you need to do. A lot of things can be ignored without consequences, or are omitted completely like resources teleporting to were they need to be. I don't think it would be good if stellaris would be completely hard core but all paradox's other games that are called "grand strategy" have these kinds of elements.

EU4 has none. You always switch to better troops in EU4. There are also no real roles for Stellaris' ships out of combat, except pirate patrol, for which you could use literally naked corvettes, and using anything else is a waste. You have no real alternative to upgrading, unless you want to sacrifice your old ships against the enemy (suffering a warscore hit) or scrap them entirely (gaining nothing), so...

 

[Mikhail_Mengsk]

With this system in place I wouldn't be so sure. If somebody attacked you a year after you started said 1000 day upgrades, you'd still have 33% percent of your forces modernized. And that's way more manageable than the current situation. And making upgrades take long makes for an interesting strategic decisions: "Do I want to build these ships now and make myself less of a target, or do I want to wait 40 months until I research plasma weapons to have better force in near future?".

That's what i always do. Unless i'm reasonably sure a war is inbound, i refrain from upgrading/building new ships unless i have researched enough new modules to make a real difference.

 

[Coconut_Cookie]

EU4 has none. You always switch to better troops in EU4. There are also no real roles for Stellaris' ships out of combat, except pirate patrol, for which you could use literally naked corvettes, and using anything else is a waste. You have no real alternative to upgrading, unless you want to sacrifice your old ships against the enemy (suffering a warscore hit) or scrap them entirely (gaining nothing), so...

What has EU4 got to do with this? If it is really necessary to get ideas from other paradox games, I think it is better to look at HOI, the development, construction and retrofitting of ships offers a lot more strategic flexibility in that game, in others it is just the choice build now or later. Mostly I just want a more engaging game, for this to work existing mechanics need to change, be expanded upon and more interlinked.

Despite all the dlc and patches stellaris still feels quite shallow there are not many strategies to pursue, no real mutual exclusive choices to be made. The most profound choices you can make are the ascension paths and what kind of empire you start with (robot, biological, hive, etc.). On top of that the most important strategy is making sure you have the biggest fleet possible, all choices need to be made serving this purpose. If there was a bit more leeway of this by maybe giving land armies bigger roles or limiting the effectiveness of your fleets, wars wouldn't need to be that one sided, more engaging and it would allow for more roleplay.

 

[Tyro]

Mechanist should swap some administrators for roboticists and give a robot build speed boost

 

[Onkel_Bums]

Mechanist should swap some administrators for roboticists and give a robot build speed boost

Or have Administrators give a speed boost on robot construction in addition.

 

[powerofvoid]

New system completely disables one big property of machine empires which is already very underwhelming. We can not specialize pops and make them work on correct jobs

Same with Hive Minds.

The AI needs to get better at putting the right pop in the right job, especially for Gestalt Consciousnesses, who don't have the option to have two tiers of pops.

 

[Mikhail_Mengsk]

What has EU4 got to do with this? If it is really necessary to get ideas from other paradox games, I think it is better to look at HOI, the development, construction and retrofitting of ships offers a lot more strategic flexibility in that game, in others it is just the choice build now or later. Mostly I just want a more engaging game, for this to work existing mechanics need to change, be expanded upon and more interlinked.

but all paradox's other games that are called "grand strategy" have these kinds of elements.

So, no, not all PDX games have this kind of elements.

 

[Ridixo]

Because tomb habitability is super overpowered and Survivor was never meant to give it.

Can you tell me why is overpowered? Yes, i know that 60% base is pretty strong, two researchs and you have 70%, two traditions, if barbaric despoiler, and you have 80% and that bonus and that other bonus. What is the wrongness in that? Robots have perfect habitability and there is no problem. Why tomb world habitability is so wrong then? Please explain it to me because if there is something wrong i don't see it.

 

[szmik]

could we just move job boxes around and prioritize this way?

 

[ViolentBeetle]

Can you tell me why is overpowered? Yes, i know that 60% base is pretty strong, two researchs and you have 70%, two traditions, if barbaric despoiler, and you have 80% and that bonus and that other bonus. What is the wrongness in that? Robots have perfect habitability and there is no problem. Why tomb world habitability is so wrong then? Please explain it to me because if there is something wrong i don't see it.

Machine empires have different mechanics, but everyone else have only 3 classes of planets in the yellow/green, while Tomb World Adaptation gives you all. That's a lot. That's not even something you could get to with techs, in most cases you'll have class mismatch below 50%

 

[Coconut_Cookie]

So, no, not all PDX games have this kind of elements.

I see. With more mechanics and a bit less abstractions and omissions I meant the game as a whole not just naval combat. Space combat doesn't need to be based on anything we know, but because space battles are such a huge part of stellaris it needs some form of strategic and tactic basis for it to serve a purpose in a strategy game. EU4 might not have that much depth for naval battles, ship construction,etc. but with land battles you need to take a lot more factors into the equation (army composition, leader skills, supply limits, forts, terrain bonusses, marching speed, discipline, morale, etc.). Stellaris lacks a lot of this depth, by far the most important factor is who has the biggest fleet.

I'd like to see combat in Stellaris that offers different strategic and tactical opportunities for different situations that the ai and the human player can use. So wars do not revolve arround massive forts and getting all your ships in the one decisive battle. Despite all the tweaks over multiple versions this is still more or less what wars come down to.

 

[Bearjuden]

Given the UI image of the Pops, couldn't priority be arranged by dragging the Jobs to a certain order? For example highest priority to the left on the condensed view or top on the expanded view. This way I can see at a glance the priority of jobs on a planet and adjust them as needed without manually adjusting each job. Currently when I adjust the job "priority" I am adjusting how many pops can work it, so the next pop that grows ends up unemployed until I adjust the "priority" again.

I think the star should be used to prioritize a certain class of jobs above others. Make it so I can prioritize workers over specialists on a planet.

I can't see being able to prioritize entire strata, at least outside of a very authoritarian system. It might, however, make more sense to be able to move jobs between strata if you value them highly. Consider if you had the power to make miners into specialist strata. In exchange for higher wages, you can also designate them as more important in society.

That's an interesting idea I'm willing to entertain.

Perhaps being Authoritarian should unlock the ability to directly assign pops.

Welcome to micro hell, then. No thank you.

Ah, I had the same issue when I first thought of this a few days ago, but you can weight it. So if you have five total planetary growth, and two species, then you can divide the five growth weighted amongst their demographic distribution. If Species A is 60% of the population and Species B is 40%, then A has growth of 3 and B has a growth of 2.

To then prevent that from being underpowered by making pops grow too slow in cases where you have lower growth and many species to divide it by, you can then have partially grown pops have jobs, which are operated at an efficiency determined by their growth. A 50% completed pop has 50% upkeep and 50% output, 60% completed has 60% upkeep and output, and so forth. I don't think this would be unbalanced at all, but it would allow for way more realistic growth. (this could be true for all societies, of course, not just multi-ethnic ones. It may also be too complicated, but the low population societies it would affect also tend to have high immigration, so if you cut that last bit maybe growth would stay reasonable courtesy of the migration bonus).

I want to add to this proposal for a second, and mention a few things I previously neglected to mention: this assumes equal habitability for the two and no migration boni. Migration would be added dependent on how many of a species are moving to that planet (thus, having more of A immigrating would lead to a bigger migration bonus for A than for B). it would also necessarily incorporate a higher migration bonus for high habitability, if pops are weighted to migrate to high habitability planets.

As far as natural planetary growth is concerned, one proposal for habitability is that whatever your weighted growth is then multiplied by your habitability. So if your natural growth would be 3, and you have 80% habitability, then your growth becomes 3 x .8 = 2.4. If this is considered too penalizing, then maybe use your habitability plus half the habitability penalty (so if you have 80% habitability, then your penalty is 20%. Half of 20% is 10%, so the growth penalty is 90%, for a net growth of 3 x .9 = 2.7 in the previous example).

Final note: I'm going to second (more like thousand, by now) the call for a better UI, especially for the outliner. Tiny Outliner is pretty much a must have mod at the moment, which realistically there should not be any of.

 

[OxfordNik]

Really liking the changes to the planetary view and to upgrades. On pop growth, @grekulf , can I query why migration and pop growth are (effectively) merged into one mechanic?

It seems to me, in general, to make more sense if only already "grown" pops are able to migrate (as was the case pre-2.2); the three "boxes" Growing - Assedmbling - Declining seem odd, too, because most of the time only two of them would/should be used (isn't it weird to have pops both "Growing" and "Declining"?).

I would instead suggest three boxes -
- Growth
- Assembly
- Migration
which can have either positive or negative values. This could be shown visually (e.g. with arrows on the top going left to right for positive values, and bottom going right to left for negative values).

This way, the UI on the planetary view screen would be utilised better, and the two mechanics of growth and migration would be more clearly explained, without having to hover over tooltips to figure out how much of the increase in population is down to migration and how much is down to growth.

(Separating the two mechanics would also, hopefully, have the added benefit of cutting down on the slightly ridiculous number of variations of species for multi-cultural empires with migration treaties where one or more of the parties has picked Xeno-Compatibility, as well as opening up more possibilities for players being able to have control over which pops grow / migrate within their empire, if they wanted to).

 

[FiddleSticks96]

Can you tell me why is overpowered? Yes, i know that 60% base is pretty strong, two researchs and you have 70%, two traditions, if barbaric despoiler, and you have 80% and that bonus and that other bonus. What is the wrongness in that? Robots have perfect habitability and there is no problem. Why tomb world habitability is so wrong then? Please explain it to me because if there is something wrong i don't see it.

There really isn't anything wrong with it. We can already change world preference, add stacking habitability bonuses, and terraform all by the mid game. Just look at what all the other unremovable civics give you and compare them to post-apocalyptic and you can see how the latter is subpar. It doesn't even give you a size 25 planet like life-seeded does. You get +10 to leader life and +70% habitability to tomb-worlds, which are rare compared to most other planet types anyway, so it is a really weak civic.

 

[TheDarkMaster]

...
Tl;dr:
The main reason to have automation, in my opinion, are:

1. Mandatory micromanagement since 2.2
   
2. Bad UI design regarding the outliner

Personally I only use the outliner to check two things. First is if there's anything that requires my attention right now or that I can spend resources on (idle civilian ships, unemployment, open building slots, faction happiness). The second is progress on major projects (uplifting, terraforming, station upgrades) and fleet construction. The outliner becomes extremely clunky and annoying to use the moment I have to scroll the list. Suddenly I can no longer see at a glance if there's idle ships or buildings that need to be built, dramatically slowing the game down for me. Military ships tend to end up sitting for months outside of ports and I won't notice that a faction has dropped in happiness because a new policy was unlocked.

 

[arktky]

Great to see, hope the team continues to focus on QoL, AI & performance for awhile yet.

Probably too late to get this answered but are these art assets going to be implemented? They're in the game files

 

[ViolentBeetle]

One of the ideas I had is to have pops gravitate towards the jobs that have the most vacancies, representing them being more in demand. That could add interesting layer of management.

But I don't think it would work.