Stellaris Dev Diary #142 - Sectors

[GolfballDM]

I need another gaming laptop so I can play CK2 & Stellaris at the same time.

 

[Sparrow]

Thank you so much.

 

[mysticdueler]

But if a planet were to specialize as mining world what would it do with it's spare buildings?

Maybe the planet templates use only a handful of the building slots to the common sense buildings (gene clinic, mineral processors/energy grids based on specialization, etc) and leave the rest for the player to fill in?

 

[Latheloi]

What about if the "sector capital" needed a specific level of planetary administration building (eg, the current "planetary capital")? That would then open up the scope for a next layer up above sectors (say, quadrants?) that could control a significantly wider area once they had a System Capital Complex.

This would then tie the shift from frontier space to a sector into the development of the planets involved.

 

[tef]

i wish pop growth would choose the best suited species for the available jobs if you're authoritarian, otherwise it will be a pain in the butt once you get too many planets to resettle pops or keep changing the forced pop growth all the time. if you choose to have this way then you could have a permanent growth penalty like you do with the forced choice.

for non-authoritarian, you could instead have pops with good traits migrate to planets where there are jobs they get a bonus for.

 

[M@ni@c]

Could you please add a condition "is_automated" in planet scope for modders?

 

[secretagentguy]

I haven't seen it mentioned by any Dev's yet, but the biggest improvement that Sectors could add that would make the game so much more enjoyable would be handling population growth and resettling amongst planets, especially for Gestalt Empires. Basically what I would love to see in sectors is that the Governor and Sector AI are understanding what the max capacity of pops on a planet should be and then auto-resettling pops to open jobs on other planets until those planets also hit a max cap of pops (to some threshold of overcrowding/unemployment - taking into consideration policies that keep unemployment from being problematic). After a sector has maxed its total population out, I would like to see it shuffle its overflow of population over to other sectors needing population. Thus, micromanagement would significantly decrease and maximized employment and pop happiness would increase. With Gestalt and Machines you don't need to worry about habitability, so that would be easier than with bio pops where that can be an issue.

Lastly, I would like to say that you guys have made a great game, I will continue to buy DLC to support you but I want to see it implemented in a working and effective manner instead of the mess that 2.2 was initially. Take more advantage of your test branches and let us, the player, help with your QA so that when you "release" to the main branch its fully baked and there is less whining.

 

[Warchild421]

We have discussed it, but I would need the galaxy generation to yield much better clusters to feel that I would want to go down that route.

I really like the idea that sectors and clusters would be the same. It would require some galaxy generation improvement, but I think the payoff would be worth it.

With going the sector = cluster route you could then have CB's for taking over the rest of the sector if you held part of it. Sectors without any planets would still be considered a sector, allowing for a sector governor, and governor could then improve different station outputs.

As well as it creating better space geography.

 

[Tavior]

@grekulf

I would like to echo other people to preference a static geography sector. Not that far removed from EU 4's state mechanic where you can have more than one owner of the same sector/state. I understand that it may not be possible without a tuned galaxy creator.

But that said, I read over your goal and plan. I am a bit skeptic on where you are trying to go as it only partially fix some of the current issues I have with 2.2 sector.


Although the per-planet and per-sector setting might be bit confusing no? For example, I set a X planet to farm under an energy XA sector. Then I have a Y planet set to energy under a mining YB sector. How am I suppose to know where majority of my energy came from if virtually all of my sectors are set to mining with a subset of planet in some of the sectors focused on energy? See where I am going?

My suggestion would be to entirely forgone per-sector specialization setting, as that never really made sense in the first place to be frank with you, and instead have sector list how many planets it has and use icon to represent which specialization it is on. For example, Sector Y12B has 1 mining worlds, 2 farming worlds, 2 energy worlds, 3 generalized worlds, and 1 specialization worlds in additional to sector total yield/upkeep. Although I am not opposite to a core vs frontier vs occupied type of sectors. I just rather have per-planet specialization only for simplification gameplay sake.


For the record, I am still adverse to having a solar systems at pre-fixed X jump distance can be added to a sector for a good reason. The last 4X game that I can remember to use sector like Stellaris 2.2 did was a nightmare to work with as you had to pre-planned everything from when to colonized and where to put your capital. I would rather see more dev time spend to make sector less of a hassle through a static geography method. Instead of repeating mistakes of past games and never to learn from them.

For those who are curious, the game I am talking about is Sword of Stars 2 and they tired a different approach to sector not too dissimilar to 2.2 Stellaris version and needless to say was a commercial flop. Not the only reason but one out of many reasons and I tired to point out that in real life sector, or it's equivalent, are not static. I just happens to live in a Suburbs that were fairly recent incorporated into a major urban city. I would like to see sector as a living organic changing thing not a "fixed size sector" if that makes sense?

This just happens to also tied into my next point, galaxy creation give players lot of freedom in planets density and how many are habitable. You can create a galaxy that is for most part barren and will likely end up with maybe 2 or 3 real sector while rest of the galaxy is barren sector (as in no planet). On the other side of the coin you can create a galaxy where you will have dozens sector with possibly 8 colonized worlds. Having a hard-coded jump distance is illogical given that you can have a huge variety on what the galaxy looks like. I would like to see some more flexible on jump distance depending on the galaxy conditions. IE shorter jump distance for a high density packed colonizable world galaxy, and higher jump distance for barren galaxy.


Once those issues are addressed I might come back in the future but right now I am exhausted with people who are in complete denial with respect to anemic level of micro-management.

 

[DreadLindwyrm]

But if a planet were to specialize as mining world what would it do with it's spare buildings?

Housing, foundry, customer goods, science, unity, strategic resources generation, fortresses (for naval cap), growth rate, and if really pushed, clerks.

 

[DreadLindwyrm]

I replaied to your statement about "planet template" not available at the start but sector ai do and now you write exactly my point. In the first circa 50 year there is no need for sector ai or planet template either so there is no difference. I'm sorry if not correctly understand you please correct me. About the build order i think its not to hard to save what was the order you build up your planet, and the ai execute that when the pops growth. For me this is the perfect sector ai.


I be very happy if the ai can be much "smarter" about the general macro of the game. But lets be honest its never be perfect morever if its too good that a problem too, because the ai need to be balanced to the average player. Just let think about this: The sector ai always do the perfect strat. Do you ever wanna build up a planet or just play autopilot always? Why do you bother play the macro game if u can not get any leverage on the ai.


Hmmm i'm sure now i did not explained well my thoughts. I dont need to update anything, when planet A has 50 pop and mineral/science world when i saw a similar planet i told the ai copy planet A to B and after that on the rest of the game when new pop available on planet B the ai build exactly the same buildigs in the exatly same order then planet A (ofc there is the district problem but that is not that big).

One problem here is that you want the game to remember the build order for every planet you make, just in case you later (perhaps 1-200 years later!) decide to use that as a template. This isn't necessarily a simple or "cheap" option, when you consider that at least for multiplayer the game has to remember build order for every planet in every empire.
Theres also that if you copy a template from a world at (say) 20 pop and use that elsewhere the template will only allow the planet to grow to 20 before you have to give it an updated template, perhaps from a 30, or 40, or 50 pop world.
In addition, you may want world B to upgrade to the highest tier buildings available *immediately* rather than waiting until it has developed the same size your template planet was when you researched them.

And then there are problems with worlds that have different deposits or features that change the balance point for what a world should build, or even *can* build.

 

[Lheim]

Nix Sectors.

I'm with the people here who don't really see a role for sectors in a game where per-planet automation controls are being floated around.

Number one, I'd hate to see how the AI tries to resolve the problem when an agri-focused sector tries to work with a mining-focused planet, and I definitely don't want to see the players complaining about how it handles that. What happens if they're in a sector with a planet I want to be urban-focused? Come on. Physical closeness means nothing for which way planets should go. Also, if you have sectors with 8 planets in them you can sort of balance that cuz statistically it'll be able to create a basically independent, evenish economy, but tiny sectors the way they are currently? No way.

Number two, they're just a mechanic in search of a problem at this point. Unless you have big plans for sectors in the diplomacy rework and we're going to end up playing Space CK2, they oughta just go. And if there is a role for them in diplomacy, just let them be solely diplomacy.

The automation ought to be on a per-planet basis, whether by template or just saying 'build this as a refinery world but let me tick the option to make it try to be energy and food neutral' and letting the ai handle it.

 

[Kypamop]

We have discussed it, but I would need the galaxy generation to yield much better clusters to feel that I would want to go down that route.

It is an interesting idea, but it's also wildly different from how the player approaches choice right now, and I'm a bit concerned about how quickly it would break if you lose a planet, gain a planet, or when circumstances change drastically.

Why not to let players to choose what they want to display on that macro screen, with ability to choose conditions like 'go red if x > 300', ability to show/hidecolumns from the list etc? And with saving / loading templates

 

[Ikael]

Wow, lots of new info! Please, keep sharing your plans for the future!

As for the content of this DD, some thoughts:

- Frontier space has A LOT of flavour and strategic potential. Neutral zones between empires that enemies can attack without a formal declaration of war and wild west frontiers with huge crime rates yet high inmigration pull are a must. They could also act like a penalty for low admin cap, too

- Specializing sectors via types and planets via planet designation offers a lot of of cool player decisions and drawbacks (this sector is overall great for energy, but there is this single agri-planet on it...) and it would help with automatization too! I think it is a really good idea.

- I am still baffled as to why developers do not want to try fixed sectors. Is it really that hard to create a good map generation algorythm that would lend to identify clusters as sectors? Tie-ing sectors to geography would allow for far more interesting strategic decisions and internal politics, while avoiding "gamey" strategies via intensive sector modification, but I suspect that it is harder to execute than it looks.

 

[Platoondas]

We have discussed it, but I would need the galaxy generation to yield much better clusters to feel that I would want to go down that route.

I've found I can get much better sectors by tweaking the galaxy generation parmaters to make larger sectors with fewer connections. For example I changed my medium galaxy to:

        max_systems = 13
        min_systems= 11

        min_bridges = 2
        max_bridges = 4

        method = depth_first
    }

Its not perfect but I like the results better I'm sure if you experimented with something along these lines you might find sectors you like better too.

 

[Promethian]

Do you feel like you need to be able to set the cap yourself, or would a default cap of 10k work?

I'd prefer the ability to set it myself however if that would be too much work 10k default cap seems kind of high to me. I'd want it at 5k.

 

[Playwars]

Oh god no, you stil want to keep the "All planet within range are part of this sector" ? Seriously ? That's absurd ! Not only do you end up with 2, 3 planet sectors, it clutters the UI and is virtually useless. Why can't you just give us the pre-2.2 sector creation toolkit ? Where we could modify sectors as we wished as long as they were one contiguous entity. Without sectors wielding any form of true power making that change would be QoL, not gameplay changing. So why won't you do it ? I guess you could say that it could give you a one sector empire with a single governor, then you can simply make the cost of the governor's pay scale with the sector's size (or basically it's administrative value).

 

[AlleyTheToaster]

Sounds good, cheers

 

[Tyrannical Prince]

I like the idea of different sector types

Core Worlds - centered on your capital
- bonuses to all resources, movement speed, defense, pop growth speed...
Administration Zone - standard sector, can designate bonuses to certain resources
-----Economic Zone - Increased trade value, consumer goods
-----Bread Basket - Increased Food Production
-----Industrial Zone - increased minerals, alloys
-----Energy Zone - increased energy
De-militarized Zone - something you can trade with another neighboring empire where you designate certain neighboring systems to not have military presence in it
- it increases ai attitude towards you. Having military presence in neighboring systems lowers ai attitude towards you
- both empires having de-militarized zones across from each other is effectively a neutral zone
Occupation zone - recently conquered territory, increased stability for planets in it, reduced migration speed
Frontier Space - non-sector systems, increased chance of piracy, reduced stability

 

[Caldasar]

Sounds nice. But in my opinion it is the Diplomacy System that Needs an overhaul. Why does EUIV feel so engaging and keeps the player busy until the end? Because of the alliances, the diplomatic actions and the coalitions. I'm sure that you can come up with an elaborated and unique diplomatic Approach, you should just make it your next big Goal. The sectors are just a minor issue.