Stellaris Dev Diary #147 - An update on Sectors & Designations

[Methone]

I really hope they have sector-based factions that could have secessionist feelings which could result in large scale civil wars.

Definitely not this upcoming patch. Maybe in the Diplomacy update.

 

[7ED]

I am a long-time Paradox fan (my first Paradox game was HOI1 and I played Vicky 1 through highschool) and I just want to say Stellaris is my favorite of the bunch--which is saying something. I held off on buying until Leviathans came out so the game could get some polishing through patches and (despite outstanding issues with the end game crises and War in Heaven) have loved the iterations since. Megacorp especially was a game-changer for me and added the economic depth I thought missing from all of the other Paradox titles (other than Victoria).

Here's to the next three years!

 

[RoverStorm]

If crime is high this will trigger a crisis that will build a Precinct House, ignoring the normal build order.

Is crime being reworked, and if it isn't can we disable this PARTICULAR thing about automation?

It's pretty pointless to use more than 4 pops to fight crime when I can "make a deal with crime lords" and only lose 4 pops to a useless job.

Also, I play with a friend who likes criminal syndicate, so I would like it if I could purposely NOT fight crime for his benefit.

 

[universal_kalle]

OK, but why do you anticipate spending significant time with them? After creating one and assigning a governor what's to do until that governor get's reassigned or dies off? I do agree that there could/should be intersting features like rebellions in the future which might not fit well with this fixed size. But until those mechanics exists why bother?

I think you're touching on the heart of the matter here.
What's the point of sectors?
Right now and with these changes they only serve to keep governors somewhat more tidy and to keep their upkeep down. They also serve in a minor capacity to organize planets.This can probably be done in a hundred ways which are all easier for the user and to implement. And with the new planet designation sectors lose their only real current purpose; reducing micro.

To be perfectly honest I’d rather see they scrapped sectors completely while adding in some decent tools to sort and filter your planets. And to be fair governors can be scrapped as well... They’re nothing but “buff bots” in their current implementation.
Amputate it instead of putting bandaids on it! Put the time and energy into other areas of the game that is in desperate need of attention.
Reimplement it later when it is an actual mechanic which ties into your empire in a meaningful way. Internal politics? Working sector ai? Semi autonomous parts of your empire? I dunno, but they need a true reason for even existing in the game.

 

[AKicebear]

Is crime being reworked, and if it isn't can we disable this PARTICULAR thing about automation?

It's pretty pointless to use more than 4 pops to fight crime when I can "make a deal with crime lords" and only lose 4 pops to a useless job.

Also, I play with a friend who likes criminal syndicate, so I would like it if I could purposely NOT fight crime for his benefit.

Sounds like a good candidate for a policy option - e.g. "Sector crime fighting"

 

[DarwinPon_y]

@grekulf Could you consider adding sector patrol fleets? This would be a real relief. Also can trade routes be directed to sector capitals instead of the Empire capital instead? This makes managing a "split" empire much easier, e.g. having an entire sector of the empire at the other end of the universe makes trading a bit difficult.

 

[Nathgar]

I really hope they have sector-based factions that could have secessionist feelings which could result in large scale civil wars.

I like this, it would also give a target for spying, or destabilizing other empires by using influence to mess with them. Players that focus on economy and not enough safety might get some serious damage or delays to their planned flip to conquest mode.

 

[methegrate]

Hello everyone!

First of all I want us to celebrate that today is the 3-year anniversary of Stellaris. Stellaris is such a great game that has changed a lot since its release. Since 1.0 we’ve added Civics, Traditions, Ascension Perks, Fallen Empires, Hive Minds, Machine Empires, planet killers, starbases and much much more.

When we started developing Stellaris, I don’t think we could ever foresee what Stellaris would become this many years later. It’s really become its own thing and it’s really fun to see how many new players – many of who may never have played any of our other games, or any other strategy game for that matter – have found their way to Stellaris. Stellaris is such a great game for telling your own stories and in general just enjoying the awesomeness of space.

A big thanks to our awesome community for making this game even better!

Alright, let’s move on to talking about sectors & designations. This will be a followup to Dev Diary #142 and I will try to outline what we’ve done so far.

Designations
Previously planets would automatically assume a role depending on what was built on it. It’s now possible to set this manually, if you wish to. Having played with this myself, I must say it feels pretty great to be able to make that choice directly yourself.

View attachment 479090​

Automation
A new neat feature is that it’s now possible to decide which planets, regardless if they are in a sector or not, should be automated. Automated planets will build things according to a certain build order, which is set up per designation. For example:

• Build all district types of its designation
• Build the buildings following the build order of its designation
• Remove Blockers
• Repair Buildings
• Upgrade all buildings

This will happen every time it has less than 3 open job slots.

If crime is high this will trigger a crisis that will build a Precinct House, ignoring the normal build order.

If a building in the build order can not be build, e.g. because you lack the technology, it will be skipped.

Automation will try to use its own Sector Stockpile if possible, otherwise it will use the Shared Stockpile. You can read more about the sector stockpiles further down in the dev diary.

View attachment 479098​

Because we deemed the risk to be too high right now, AI empires will not manually set designations or use the build orders. Our goal is for that to be improved in later updates, however, and when it’s had more time in the cooker we will be deploying those changes.

Sectors
In the new system, sectors will be created by making a planet a Sector Capital. This will immediately form the sector and include all systems within 4 jumps of the Sector Capital. We originally had thought to make the range 6 jumps, but we feel like 4 jumps feels better.

View attachment 479093
It becomes very easy to create a new sector. Simply click the flag on the galaxy to open the planet view.

View attachment 479094
In the planet view we have a create sector button. Once clicked, it will immediately create the sector.

View attachment 479096
Boom! Sector created. It’s just as easy to delete the sector as it is to create a new one. The sector capital is also visible on the map with its own icon.
​

Sectors now also have a Shared Stockpile, in addition to their Local Stockpiles. It is possible to set monthly subsidies for your Shared Stockpile. This should make it a lot easier to manage larger empires.

View attachment 479097​

What remains to do
We didn’t want to try to do too many things at once, so we will be going with the safer option of deploying these changes in increments. These changes will not be coming in the upcoming update, but rather in the future.

Left to do:

• Have AI empires set manual designations
• Have AI empires use build orders for designations
• Allow players to have control over the build orders for the different designations
• Add nudging of systems between sectors
• Allow you to create new sectors from within a sector
• Display non-sector systems as a “Frontier Space” sector
• Rework Governor traits to be more widely applicable
• Look into automation for construction ships

When we’ve looked into more of these things we may want to start exploring ideas like adding more mechanics to “Frontier Space” or if we can tie faction to sectors somehow. Those are only some thoughts we’ve had though, and it's too early to say if that will come to fruition or not.

---

That is all we had to share for this week’s dev diary. I’m really looking forward to next week’s dev diary, when I’ll be sharing something awesome.

Thanks again to all of our community, and let’s look forward to the next 3 years!

Not in a snarky way, but I don’t entirely understand why sectors are still in the game. The per-planet automation and designations seem to takes care of all the micromanagement that sectors originally did. With that moved to the planetary level, what is a sector’s role in the game? If it’s about limiting the resources that the AI governors can grab, the shared stockpile seems to have that well in hand. If it’s just about governors... this seems like a lot of work to give three planets a +10% unity bump.

 

[MichaelJanuary]

Looking forward to the changes, but cant help wondering if the entire rework of sectors is an over reaction to other problems.

The core problem in the game is micromanagement and lack of planet management tools, both of which can be sorted with much less intrusive fixes.

1. Allow for build queues to auto pause until jobs is below threshold value. This way you can queue up buildings and leave them.

2. Improve the outliner with a few sorting tools so planets with specific issues (crime, stability, unemployment, housing, etc) can be floated to the top.

3. Having a planet view page, which is sortable and supports some interaction like enabling/disabling decisions, managing queues, etc.

4. Review the resettle tool and add some minor features to it .... like sorting planets by unemployment, showing some more information like number of slaves, servants, robots.


Also, wondering what the point of sectors will be if planets are individually automated. Will sectors only exist for governor buff? It would be great if sectors actually had political consequence or affected empire size or scaled with galaxy size. I also look forward to it being tied into faction system, or even having other features like sector policies, decisions, piracy suppression, bonuses to intra/inter sector trade, etc.

EDIT: to be clear .... I love micromanagement but I hate unnecessary clicks and poor interface. It's not the micro per se that's the problem, but the poor interface.

 

[Ingros]

Not really impressed...
I want deeper faction gameplay... more go ernment differences more internal interaction
I want real logistics and physical trade.. not that instant transportation of resources

I want more interesting pirates and and...

 

[Methone]

I want deeper faction gameplay... more go ernment differences more internal interaction

Wait for the diplomacy update.

I want real logistics and physical trade.. not that instant transportation of resources

No. You really don't.

I want more interesting pirates and and...

No, you REALLY don't.

 

[FiddleSticks96]

Any word on if the bug that makes it so you can't choose to build your own main species after synthetically ascending has or will be fixed come 2.3? This has been a known and well documented issue since the launch of 2.2 and it is a doubly serious issue when you play any form of xenophobe (only your main species can be full citizens, but your planets insist that you build robots instead of your main species and there is nothing you can do about it). I have faith in the stellaris dev team and am overall happy with 2.2, but it is troubling that an issue this glaring in a feature I had to pay extra for persists 7 patches later.

 

[Deggial]

Why? Worlds in a sector are just as much "yours" as are worlds outside of it. Remember that planets can be "automated, regardless if they are in a sector or not"! ...

(Why did this “Multi quote” not work?)

Anyway, I wanted to comment on the idea of making “a world your own”.

While Spartakus is of course right in the sense that we will have full control over our worlds no matter what, I believe the idea has some merits - but for a different reason: The planets’ representation in the outliner.

If I assume correctly, the outliner will still be filled with a plethora of planets later in the game. This will probably include planets that were added to sectors in order to be able to “forget about them”. Hence, if there are planets we have specific ideas for and we want to develop manually, we will still have to search for them in an increasingly long list every time.

Maybe it might be a good idea to be able to flag a planets as “world of interest”.
These “worlds of interest” may live in their own, dedicated outliner tab and thus could be kept under easy surveillance. The tab with all the other planets will still be there, but can be closed and visited only if needed.

 

[methegrate]

Wait for the diplomacy update.

No. You really don't.

No, you REALLY don't.

No... I REALLY do.

Logistics and physical trade routes would make managing an empire kinetic and interesting. It would mean having to pay attention to how your ships are supplied, create asymmetric options for warfare and give something to actually do when it comes to the trade section of the game.

Don't get me wrong, I understand completely (I think) your point. It would be awful if the game became a fiddly exercise in optimizing fuel routes and freighter load. But, like everything in a game, it's a balancing act. What we have right now is the other end of the spectrum. Everything is abstracted past the point of interest. There's no actual gameplay to trade. If it's going to exist, trade should meet two criteria:

- First, require active decision making by the player.
- Second, be something that you can do well without a way to clearly optimize it.

Right now, there is little active decision making and what choices you do make are obvious.

As to the faction gameplay, we haven't heard anything about a diplomacy update other than that one might happen someday. "Wait for the diplomacy update" is a really speculative answer to a feature we were, frankly, promised three years ago. And the faction update is an essential part of any sector-related rework because internal politics is why sectors should exist at all. With micromanagement done by planets now, the only reason to keep sectors is so that they can become part of the internal politics game that was promised when Stellaris first launched.

Right now it feels like sectors are basically being redesigned as map flavor. They're an aesthetic feature. But doing it this way means that if the devs do end up building an internal politics system, they'll be laying it on top of an unrelated mechanic. They'll be building politics onto a feature that was deigned to look nice and trying to force the two unrelated concepts to work well together.

The two should be designed hand-in-hand from the ground up. Otherwise, the fact that the two were designed completely independently of each other will show through no matter what.

 

[Ramidel]

You say four jumps: Does that include wormholes and gateways?

 

[OwlOfSpace]

While the addressing of Sectors is fantastic, there is still two major concerns (I know I am repeating what others said)

One size dose NOT fit all situations. Bigger galaxy would be nicer with bigger sectors obviously, and then there will be some high yield spots that would be preferable to be cut in even smaller sectors to utilize focus. Heck, just look at states in about any country IRL, due to multiple of issues, they are not uniform in size.

Also,

Left to do:

• Add nudging of systems between sectors

I really, really, really hope this comes sooner then later. This becomes particularly more annoying when you want to make vassals but they would take that one resourceful system you would rather keep.

 

[Zoolimar]

It would mean having to pay attention to how your ships are supplied

Hell, even not being able to use enemy starbases as repair and defence points would help a lot. Actually needing to pay for repairs could be another way to slow down the death ball.

Right now taking an enemy choke point or even some intermediate station may very well end the war as he has no way of retaliation even if he did damage your fleet pretty handily. Because now you have a fleet and starbase sitting on his territory probably with multiple lanes to harass and cripple his empire.

 

[Shirasik]

Don't get me wrong, I understand completely (I think) your point. It would be awful if the game became a fiddly exercise in optimizing fuel routes and freighter load. But, like everything in a game, it's a balancing act. What we have right now is the other end of the spectrum. Everything is abstracted past the point of interest. There's no actual gameplay to trade.

AFAIK, Stellaris is 4X, yet. Is supposed logistics is a part of at least one of four X?

 

[Zoolimar]

Is supposed logistics is a part of at least one of four X?

For Stellaris? At least of the expand, explore and exterminate parts. Having a good cluster of stars with properly interconnected routes could mean a lot for initial expansion and exploration. And in war having 2 less lanes between your staging point/shipyard than your enemy could be a difference between a won war and a lost one. Just yesterday I had a game where I had 2 choke points between me and my enemy - 4 jumps from one point to the other. And he needed - 8 jumps from one point to the other. That was enough to make a difference between a decisive win and a stalemate.

 

[Shirasik]

For Stellaris? At least of the expand, explore and exterminate parts. Having a good cluster of stars with properly interconnected routes could mean a lot for initial expansion and exploration. And in war having 2 less lanes between your staging point/shipyard than your enemy could be a difference between a won war and a lost one. Just yesterday I had a game where I had 2 choke points between me and my enemy - 4 jumps from one point to the other. And he needed - 8 jumps from one point to the other. That was enough to make a difference between a decisive win and a stalemate.

Hmm... let's see...

Logistics and physical trade routes would make managing an empire kinetic and interesting. It would mean having to pay attention to how your ships are supplied, create asymmetric options for warfare and give something to actually do when it comes to the trade section of the game.

And a bit earlier...

I want real logistics and physical trade.. not that instant transportation of resources

Well, @Zoolimar.
How much real logistics you would like to see in Stellaris? Would you be content with managing of thousands of different products, such as different types of food, clothing, consumer goods, military goods, weapons, ammunitions, etc? Would you be content with managing of production lines for every of those products? Would you be content with managing physical trade routes, especially all sorts of delays caused by anything? Would you be content with inevitable slideshow caused by complexity of simulation?
And, especially, would be content with all sorts of upkeeps for hired "leaders", while all the work to organize everything will do you:

If it's going to exist, trade should meet two criteria:

- First, require active decision making by the player.
- Second, be something that you can do well without a way to clearly optimize it.

?