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Stellaris Dev Diary #142 - Sectors

Hello everyone!

Today we’re back with a dev diary and we want to take the opportunity to be more open with how we will attempt to tackle one of our more difficult systems – the sector system. The sector system was originally added to help players manage their planets, so that you would not need to micromanage everything once your empire gets large. We’ve often felt sectors are in a bit of an awkward place between different playstyles and what they actually should do for the player. Sectors have gone through a couple of different iterations, but never felt quite right.

I will start by outlining some of the goals with the (new) system and problems with the old one. This probably doesn’t include every concern for every player who ever used sectors, but it should cover some of the larger things. If you have something to add, we certainly want to hear about it!

The goal
  • Sectors should help to alleviate the player’s need to micromanage everything
  • Sectors should feel like a more unique part of the player’s empire
Problems
  • Sector geography can feel wrong
  • There are too many sectors in late-game
  • Wars and rebellions can mess up sectors
  • Player has to micro the sector economy
  • No manual control of sector area
  • Sectors don’t manage space stations
  • No “sector capitals”
I CANNOT PROMISE THAT ALL THESE CHANGES WILL HAPPEN, OR THAT THEY WILL APPEAR IN THE SAME UPDATE.

Sector types
The Core sector will be the sector that is formed around your homeworld and any system within range. A regular sector is formed around a Sector Capital, which you will be able to assign. It will also include all systems within range. Any system or planet not within a sector will be considered to belong to “Frontier Space”.

We are looking into also having different sector types, or sector policies, in which you could have different settings for sectors. Potentially, a sector could perhaps adjust its range in inverse relation to something else, like Administrative Capacity. Occupation Zones might also be a valid sector type, to make it easier to manage conquered territory.

Sector range simply means all systems within X jumps from the sector capital.

Sector budget
Players will have the ability to give resources to a shared sector pool, both as one-off grants and as monthly subsidies. This will convert minerals/energy into a sector budget, like it currently does. The new thing being automated monthly subsidies and a shared pool. It will still be possible to give a specific sector grants. Sectors will first attempt to use resources from its own pool, then from the shared pool.

Players will also be able to set planet automation to on/off. Planets in sectors will have automation turned On by default. This means you should be able to turn off automation for a specific planet in your sector, which you may sometimes want to do.

Sectors can have a sector focus, similar to how they do now in 2.2. The automatic control of planets should take sector focus and planet designation in consideration.

Sector geography
The current plan is to have systems be automatically added to a sector within range. If a system could belong to two different sectors, it should be possible to nudge them to decide which sector they belong to. This important for players being able to set a sector geography that looks good to them in their game.

Moving sector capital will also redraw the sector, and could potentially remove or add new systems to it. You cannot add systems to a sector if they are outside its range. Systems must also maintain cohesion to a sector, so it's not possible to cut off parts of a sector.

Planet designations
We really like the planet designations, i.e. “Mining World, Agri World, Forge World”, but we also want the player to have more control over them. We want to add the ability to manually set a planet designation, in addition to the automatic setting. If you designate a planet to be a Mining World, it should perhaps also be quicker to build mining districts there. It should generally feel cooler to colonize a world, and based on its features, immediately be able to decide it should be an Agri World – and designate it accordingly!

We also hope this will make it easier for the AI to specialize their planets a bit more in certain cases.

Governors
Although governors will remain mostly the same as to how they are now, we will try to remake the governor traits to be a bit more generic and applicable to a sector as a whole, as opposed to being so planet-specific with their bonuses.

Space stations
We have discussed adding an auto-build function for construction ships, similar to auto-explore, which should hopefully solve this problem better.

---

I CANNOT PROMISE THAT ALL THESE CHANGES WILL HAPPEN, OR THAT THEY WILL APPEAR IN THE SAME UPDATE.

Our goal is to be able to able to get as much of this done by the next update as possible, but I cannot promise what will get in when. This sector rework is fairly ambitious, so it might be deployed in sections over a few updates. I very much like the design though, and I think it's a good foundation to build upon.

Since the launch of 2.2 we've been a little quiet, with a focus on extensive post-launch support. Going forward however, I'd like to increase our interactions with you, our community. While we want to have a more open communication, we want to avoid over promising or disappointing you if ideas change radically.

This is also a good chance for you affect this great game, so I hope an open discussion will lead to some constructive exchanges.
 
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Looks great, all that would be missing is some character for sector and governors eg demanding independence and rebellions or other interactions with the empire.
 
Lovely concepts! I certainly hope most make it!

Can I cheeckely ask for "every_sector_planet" and "any_sector_planet" scopes and a "is_sector_capital" trigger
That way we/you can have sector capital planet decisions that effect every planet/colony in the sector.

That way we can add sector decisions to specialise/improve entire sectors (think of it like the Ecumenopolis decision).
I basically want to add a capital sector decision that costs a lot, and tells the "capital" to turn the entire sector into a super wealthy sector. Or a fortress sector, or madmax sector. With planet modifiers and other cool events!
 
Sorry that i'm late to reply, but by sectors not expanding i ment that you can make sectors some sort of "pinned". By that i mean that they don't increase by taking new systems in range and remain the same "shape".
 
I believe this will be great as the current Sector system is good but needs refinement. One addition I will be looking forward to is the ability to apply a planet designation that will direct the AI to prioritize certain buildings over others. I can finally specify “Make this planet a forge world” or “Make that planet an agri-world.” This will be especially helpful if the planet has a specific modifier boosting research or a type of production. One problem I run into a lot with Sector AI is its desire to build housing buildings when buildable districts are still available and to spam agri-dome buildings. Left unmanaged, this easily leads to my empires having 1000+ food production yet struggle to product energy and minerals. I can feed the entire galaxy but can barely keep my fleets in working order.

Here are some additional suggestions from me:

Required Buildings in Sectors

It would be helpful if players can designate buildings we want the AI to build and maintain on every planet in a sector. For example, my highly militaristic empire could have a requirement that every planet have at least 1 Fortress. Or maybe I want all my planets to have a Gene Clinic and Robot Factory to encourage population growth.

District growth by Sector AI

One problem that I have seen is the Sector AI does not seem to want to build districts. This is especially a problem when working with Habitats. I have seen the same behavior with Ecumenopolis planets. So instead of building a new district to expand housing, the Sector AI just builds a housing building that never gets replaced even if more districts are created to provide housing. This makes a lot of sector micro-management become simply undoing what the Sector AI did and hoping it does not undo your corrections.

Maybe this should be a flag like in pre-2.2 release where you could tell a sector to colonize or build robots. There could be a flag "Build Districts" that authorizes the Sector AI to build districts when new housing or employment is needed but no building slots are available. So players who do not want the AI building districts can turn this off and manage their empire's district growth themselves.

More Sector Focus options

It would be helpful if there were some more focus options for the Sector AI. This would provide more granularity so players can designate what they truly want. Here are some examples for how to further split the focus options:

Production – Focus on energy, minerals, and food (no real changes here)
Manufacturing – Focus on alloys and strategic resources (consumer goods moved to its own focus with trade)
Civilian Trade – Focus on civilian trade and consumer goods
Research – Focus on research (no real changes here)
Defense – Focus on Fortresses, Police Precincts, Planetary Shields
Pop Growth – Focus on Gene Clinics, Robot Factories, and immigration

Defense focus might be good for newly conquered sectors (occupation sectors) or sectors bordering a stronger empire that regularly threatens the player. Pop Growth focus could be used for frontier sectors full of newly formed colonies.
 
grekulf said:
Sector geography
The current plan is to have systems be automatically added to a sector within range. If a system could belong to two different sectors, it should be possible to nudge them to decide which sector they belong to. This important for players being able to set a sector geography that looks good to them in their game.

Moving sector capital will also redraw the sector, and could potentially remove or add new systems to it. You cannot add systems to a sector if they are outside its range. Systems must also maintain cohesion to a sector, so it's not possible to cut off parts of a sector.
Click to expand...

That sounds like a ridiculously over complicated system, especially compared to the good old manually creating sectors.
But planet designation and automation would be absolutely fantastic.
 
I think separating planetary designations from sector specializations should go a long way toward making sectors more useful. I'm curious how you see conflict resolution working, though.

Like, how does a Mining World in an Energy-focused sector look different from a Mining World in a Mineral-focused or Research-focused sector? Do they even look different? Or do you see the sector specialization coming into play more for planets that have a somewhat broad designation like Rural or Urban?

grekulf said:
Do you feel like you need to be able to set the cap yourself, or would a default cap of 10k work?
Click to expand...

Personally, I'd rather have control of the cap so I can manage it in relation to the scale of the rest of my economy. A sector storage cap of 10k Minerals might as well be uncapped in the early game, while in the late game it's quite reasonable.

Another idea would be to have the sector storage caps scale along with the empire storage cap. Say, 10% of whatever the empire storage cap is, to throw out a number. So at the start of the game, Sectors can only have 1500 Minerals at a time, but that increases naturally as you build Silos and research empire storage cap techs.
 
A Planetdesigner where you can save buildingtemplates and save them even for your next game. The sector Ai then builds accordingly. Bonuspoints if they choose the Best building possible in any current Situation.
For example the full Planet should have 10 forges and 1 police Station. Currently there are 4 forges, no Station but high crime --> Station :)
 
grekulf said:
It is an interesting thought, and something to look into. I'm not sure a "planet template" will be very easy to set up, though, considering how different planets can be. Maybe a small limit to how much a template can include, so it more easily can fit different planets?
Click to expand...
Thinking about this, my biggest frustration with sectors auto-building historically has been the AI prioritizing buildings that I don't want them to build (e.g. garrison and planetary shield buildings on a research or alloy planet deep in my space). I think some sort of template, either buildable in game or moddable would make a lot of sense.

grekulf said:
Do you feel like you need to be able to set the cap yourself, or would a default cap of 10k work?
Click to expand...
I think a settable cap makes the most sense because the sensible cap will probably change greatly depending on the stage of the game.
 
It's sad to see that Paradox still has not settled for what sectors are actually supposed to be. I expect sectors will unfortunately keep their problem status for a while.
@grekulf sectors are (and have been since launch) not just something to reduce micromanagement (an administrative tool for the player), but also featured various gameplay hooks, the most obvious being resource bonuses via governors. From a game design standpoint, this is a recipe for player frustration as the player is forced into structuring their empire in a specific manner to make the most out of gameplay interactions: Only a small segment of players (those who happen to favour whatever empire structure the system caters to) manage to completely avoid frustrations as a result of dealing with this system.

The problems listed in the dev diary are not the root cause of player's frustrations, but rather symptoms of the fundamental design problem. To fix the problems, start by addressing the core of the issue. Take a hard stance on the intended goal of the sector system: they should be either administrative tools OR (not both) gameplay hooks. It's not that either function is fundamentally flawed, the problem is only that both functions are tied to the same sector system.

As an example on this tool+hook problem, briefly consider control groups. In your "classic RTS" (starcraft, age of empires and so on) they're absolutely vital for controlling economy and army, allowing the player to rapidly switch between units or structures anywhere on the map. Control groups are what I'd call a pure administrative tool, as they have no gameplay hook whatsoever. Now imagine if they did, imagine if (for example) groups 1-3 got a damage bonus, groups 4-6 got a defense bonus, groups 7-9 got a movespeed bonus and group 0 got a resource collection bonus. As a further complication, assigning a control group costs resources.
Do you think such a system would be enjoyable for the player? No? Why would sectors be any different?
 
Gothbert said:
More Sector Focus options

It would be helpful if there were some more focus options for the Sector AI. This would provide more granularity so players can designate what they truly want. Here are some examples for how to further split the focus options:

Production – Focus on energy, minerals, and food (no real changes here)
Manufacturing – Focus on alloys and strategic resources (consumer goods moved to its own focus with trade)
Civilian Trade – Focus on civilian trade and consumer goods
Research – Focus on research (no real changes here)
Defense – Focus on Fortresses, Police Precincts, Planetary Shields
Pop Growth – Focus on Gene Clinics, Robot Factories, and immigration

Defense focus might be good for newly conquered sectors (occupation sectors) or sectors bordering a stronger empire that regularly threatens the player. Pop Growth focus could be used for frontier sectors full of newly formed colonies.
Click to expand...

Could be interesting if this tied into factions as well.
A sector with a Research Focus attracting Materialists, while one on Defence could attract Militarists and Xenophobes.
A sector could eventually become a base for that faction, and be more likely for their governor to become the leader of the faction.

And eventually, if it was possible for a new empire to break away, for a sector to revolt with the faction, and possibly even form a new nation based on those ethics.
 
On the subject of governor traits, I think some of the negative traits could use a small positive modifier so they arent universally bad. If I get a governor with arrested development or corrupt its usually an instant fire and replace, which is not fun or flavorful. What if corrupt increased crime but also increased energy credits? Stubborn could decrease advancement but also increase stability as the population trusts their leader. Something along those lines.

Alternatively, firing a sector governor could set a temporary modifier on planets (say you fire your corrupt governor, and all sector planets get a crime wave for modifier for 10 years) Or a flat stability penalty for changing leadership.
 
To me, it seems sectors need to be political entities in your empire, with potential rebelions and a common ideological drift, maybe. A sector's loyalty should determine its contribution to the empire.
I know this is a lot to ask, but it seems more important to me than the much talked about diplo expantion. How complex can diplomatic relations be, when the empire's inner political life is something you look at whe you create the empire and when you add a civic, never again? Just imo.
 
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Been playing a galactic conquest game and one of the biggest things that irked me was the mess in the sidebar. I liked how in the old system, the planets would move to a separate tab once assigned to a sector. Now, even when collapsing every automated sector, the sidebar gets so cluttered that everytime I dread to expanding the planets tab entirely (I'm talking like 75+ worlds and a good dozen of these sectors only having one to two planets each). I know that there's no more "core world" anymore but maybe having a seperate "Autonomous Sectors" tab that moves all the sectors you assigned a focus to into it that I can leave collapsed can make the management feel a lot less exhausting (my scroll wheel can only take so many scrolls).

Also what do you guys have in mind about how we release vassals? Currently, it's a miserable system, no offense. I can't release a vassal with border I want then to have, I really don't want them to take my sentry array with them but I have no choice because the sector border gods have willed it.
 
-About sector stockpile limit 10k should be minimum with some ability to increase it in 1k increments.

@grekulf Whatever you do please don't allow sectors to take from the empire resources unless the player allows it. That was the most frustrating thing about the old sector system where I could only get up to 75% of what they made. Other than that these plans sound good.

Thanks for All you guys do!
 
@grekulf Could there be a way (in a possible template system) to deprioritize, or even block the construction of any buildings on a given planet? This way, you could let sectors work their way up to a research world, or forge world? And even if they don't build them optimally, at least they're all buildings you would've built anyway.
 
What are the plans for allowing manual control of sector size and/or sector merging? I understand that there's a desire to have some trade-off for going wide with sectors, but I'm not sure I understand the reasoning why it needs to be above and beyond the general penalties for going wide. If there's concern over governors, why not have governor upkeep scale with admin cap under their control?
 
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