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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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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...
Just leave districts out of it and limit it to building slots? This will, at least, force AI to build saner buildings early on (when developing new colonies) and make late-game planet conversions easier (just select template in few clicks and let sector AI do building and budgeting).
 
I feel like someday there may be an internal politics update. If that's even remotely on the radar, then I'd suggest you have your current sector update keep that in mind and build the framework in such a way that when the time comes, sectors can have their own events, politics, rebellions, trade, intrigue, did I mention events? Interactions with leaders (or even underhanded deals with other empires?), etc., and events.
 
I don't like the idea of adding planets to a sectors whether if they are within a range. It's messy, you can have a solitary system being its own sector because it is just outside of range. Wouldn't it work better to identify sectors with star clusters? Or maybe, use clusters as a subunit and create sectors by combining one or more clusters together. In any case, using clusters a base would ensure that they look good on the map.
 
Maybe there should be the possibility for the player to select a couple of buildings as standard (e.g. clinic, assembly plant, monument, enforcer) so they get build in each planet of the sector/each sector. You may want enforcer if there is a mafia megacorp, but not in other cases. You may want the monument mid game, but substitute it everywhere or in some sectors once you have your core traditions completed.

Also, there could be 2 sector focus types: one for districts, to decide which gets maxed first; and another one for "advanced resources" that you get out of buildings. You should be able to select if you want to use special tiles (for motes, crystals, etc.).

You may want to include immigration & breeding policies in the automation. Maybe even rethink some edicts so they can also be automated like this.

The sum of above options would be a template. Maybe you could apply the same system for sector and planet automation. Then let the player select which template should be prioritized for each planet.

You could handle templates like species, being able to name them, copy/paste (apply to diffrent planets/sectors), create sub-layouts, etc.

And if you do this while providing a ledger-like interface, so we can see the overall effects on our empires economy -if possible without scrolling too much- it would be great.

If not, at least give us the ledger :)
 
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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...

A possible way for a planet template of sorts would be, as a possible example, this:
As a player, I see an interface with the types of districts the planet would have. I can from here set a priority on a scale from 1-10 (default 5) to the district types. I can also set a desired proportion of strata, and prioritize building types (again, scale from 1 to 10). This way, the planet in question will prioritize building certain districts (rural-type resource-gathering planets are covered by this), and having a certain population composition (this would cover the various urban world types, depending on which building type gets higher priority)
 
grekulf said:
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.
Click to expand...
Would it be possible to make it so that if a sector would go negative resources due to upkeep, that instead they draw from the player's resource pool instead of sitting at 0 resources and giving resource collection penalties to all planets in the sector like they did pre-2.2?
 
There seems to be two types of players when it comes to sectors:

A) Those that play with lots of planets and want to dump everything into a sector to be auto-managed.
B) Those that play with few planets and do not want sectors, preferring manual control over everything.

As a Type B player, my issue with sectors is that they can actually cause more micromanagement. I have to set and keep track of the governor for the sector, I have to feed it resources and consider using it as a back-up bank (lest I lose out on a potential economic advantage), and it's possible that the sector might construct or do things, like managing pops, that I don't want. The interfaces to handle all this are somewhat cumbersome as well, making me click all over the place and double-check what or who goes where. What is the point of creating or designing sectors? What does it add to the game? Why should I want to do it? Right now, I completely ignore them.

Overall, sectors just seem poorly conceptualized and somewhat shoehorned into the game. For instance, what is the role of a governor (for either planets or sectors)? You just shuffle through them until you find the one that has the traits you want. Then they sit there for 50 years until they die. Unlike admirals or scientists (and to a lesser extent, generals), I feel nothing for governors or their utility. This isn't to say they should be eliminated, but they just aren't very deep or important. In fact, there's almost a gamey aspect where you want to train up governors by putting them in a developing sector so they level up quicker. I don't have a solution here, but I have always felt that governors were just a "click here for a bonus" thing which is pretty meaningless to a strategy game.
 
grekulf said:
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!
Click to expand...

This is the best part of this dev diary, really. This being in the game would make my day.

Also, can we please get a hotfix for assimilation being completely broken in 2.2.6 before we get 2.3 (unless 2.3 is coming really soon)?
 
Look, It took you guys years just to barely fix the 1.0 sector issues. With 2.0 you have basically thrown all that work away and want to start over? This is not 1 step forward two steps back. This is one step forward, make a hard left, then jump off a cliff. I am not sure why, after several years of failures concerning sectors, you just have not scrapped the whole system and look at the core problem for even needing them, late game micro management. Fix that and you will not need sectors or just use sectors as a nice way to organize planet ledgers.

As of right now sectors are even more annoying than vanilla release. If that is even possible.
 
With how important capitals are, losing a sector capital will cause a lot of changes. Please at least add a grace period before sectors are redrawn after a war or have the sector oersist in its old form until the player reselects the capital (maybe adding a tickin inefficency modifier to encourage the player to eventually do so)?

As for there being to many sectors, that is imo still a problem with the new system. Have you thought about going the feudal route and add automated quadrants which consist out of multiple sectors?

My dream would be that sectors would form its own political entity similar to factions or EU4 estates to have some internal politics (and while you are at it, please make the existing factions interactive instead them just passively liking or disliking your policy settings).
Friction between the core planet(s) and frontier worlds are common in SciFi and should also be a possibility in Stellaris.

Also, please think about the idea to randomly or hidden, based on several calculation, give each sector some traits which are not immediately obvious to the player like having a higher immigration pull for a certain species or higher crime levels.

And finally, please teach sectors how to deal with piracy by themselves, at least to a degree.
 
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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...

I can see a couple different template approaches, a small one and a large one.
A small templating system I would find useful to cover buildings that aren't necessarily oriented towards a planet's job. Particularly buildings like Unity buildings, Gene Clinics and other Pop Growth Buildings, Ascension or Civic-Specific Buildings (Psi-Corps / Noble Estates / etc) that aren't necessarily linked to either planetary specialization or planetary conditions (e.g. Entertainment Buildings for Amenities, Enforcer Buildings for Crime).
E.g. Temple / Gene Clinic / Stronghold might be a common simple template for all planets in a sector.

There could be a larger templating system that would cover something like "This is what I want on a research planet, this on a farming planet", but that could be more unwieldy in the UI.
 
grekulf said:
I don't want to automate the process of building Outposts. I see expanding as being a player choice.
Click to expand...
And why not automate this choice a little? Say, you designate systems you want to expand to and AI does that at first opportunity.


PS honestly, I struggle to understand the entire concept of construction ships: you always build stuff at pre-defined places (except gateways), in perfect safety - why do you have to look for nearest free construction ship that takes space in outliner and order it around, instead of ordering construction of whatever stuff you need, letting empire take care of it?

Same with exploration: why autoexploring is even a tech? I could get it for gesalts... somewhat, but for normal empires, where leaders should be able to show a smidgen of initiative (it is in job description), it is strange that they can't carry out an "explore nearby space in whatever order you see fit" order by default.
 
Similar to Delthor's suggestion of planning buildings on slots that aren't open yet, maybe we should be able to do this for all our planets, not just sector-managed ones. I think a big part of what makes micromanagement annoying is having to divert one's attention from something more interesting, like a war.

I admit though that micromanagement has never been a problem for me personally. I tend to "win" my games long before I reach 10 planets, I don't think I've ever had that many.

By automating construction ships do you mean being able to order the building of an outpost and development of all the system's deposits in one go? That would be something I like.
 
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...
If it's for an individual sector 2k should be sufficient for most purposes, as even when you get a new level of building you still probably want building the new level to be spread out a little to stop all you workers upgrading to specialists at the same time.

If it's a universal stockpile 10k should be enough, but why not allow it to be set in increments of 1k to allow for a situation where you know you're going to need a big boost (say you're about to conquer/integrate a large neighbour and they're going to need a lot of work to rebuild)?
 
Really nice changes. If it could works as intendent. One suggestion for planet designation: slider to change from "self-sufficiant" to fully specialised. It could control the governor and AI in the development of planet, if they should try to obrain all resource at place, or base only on the shared resources and focus on the designation.
 
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...

Will you also look at sector merging? As you mentioned, one of the causes of sector gore is Total War, and the issues from Total War are the generation of new sectors because
1) A system with a planet wasn't taken over, but the system on the other side was, and
2) Systems within the same sector are separated by a change of allegiance by a connective sector

In most cases this could be addressed by merging small sectors into larger ones when they are connected to them. Or would this be addressed by the "Moving the Sector Capitol" issue?
 
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