Stellaris Dev Diary #159 - Galactic Community

[Zalmoxis]

'Random' should be renamed to 'Sortition' since that makes more sense.

 

[Methone]

If I understand you right, the information wich parts are actually in the DLC have no impact on you complaining about there being too much in the DLC/not enough in the free patch. Wich is exactly why we do not take you seriously.
If I understood you wrong, please correct me.

My concern is that they're showing off the fancy new stuff before the fundamental reworks, the exact opposite of what happened in the dev diaries leading up to 2.2. This makes me worried that the reason for this is because there isn't much of a fundamental rework coming. It's something I very much hope I am wrong about.

 

[The Wolf with the Dragon]

I really think that a zero should be dropped from the diplomatic weight. It can still be part of the code, but drop it from the Galactic Community UI. It looks too cluttered, doesn't really serve a purpose and it would be so much easier to read and calculate at a glance.

Lastly, I feel it weird that diplomatic weight is just something that keeps being added up. Instead, it would be cool if the senate acted like an actual senate. That instead of your number of votes being equal to DW (Diplomatic Weight), DW could instead give you a certain amount of seats from a fixed amount. Maybe 1000.

So if your 2387 DW would account for 22% of the total amount of DW in the Galactic Community, you would be awarded ~220 seats in the Senate. You could then much easier calculate how many seats/votes you would need for proposal and how many favors you might need to call in.

Right now, it's a bit of a mess. This would make it much more approachable.

 

[methegrate]

Well, you do need more energy to upkeep the fleet, but the point stands.

Surplus resources can also translate into surplus energy (and from there to alloys), but that's rarely a better strategy than direct energy or alloy production. So again, the point stands.

Any suggestions on what could be done with other resources? It seems like there could be a benefit to stockpiling them if there were ways to "lose your (proverbial) ships" akin to war. And there could be a benefit to keeping regular production above maintenance, in case something causes it to drop a bit.

Food: Interstellar blights could depress food production for years at a time.

Energy: Energy sources get periodically depleted, or some weird disturbance in the Shroud fucks with the physics in a region of the galaxy and suddenly fusion doesn't work until your scientists can adjust.

Minerals: Mines get tapped out, or sneaky silicoid tribbles have a population explosion and start eating them all until pest control deals with it.

Consumer Goods: Economic depressions.

And all the better if these aren't just events, but things that other empires can influence to make happen.

Maxing out alloys all the time won't necessarily save you if your meager consumer goods run out and suddenly there's massive civil unrest on the planets you just conquered. Then your alloy production tanks. Then the empire next door that kept a sensible surplus rushes your malus-ed fleets that were too busy bombing down the rebels.

I'm not sure. (Also, sorry, this got super long...)

I don't think the answer is additional resource sinks though, because I think those all still have the same problem. There's ultimately a correct answer for how much of that resource you need. I.e., an interstellar blight. If blights can last for, say, five years, then the objectively correct answer is to have five years' worth of food in storage and a net-zero income. If you don't have that much food in storage, you get it then go back to zero income. The same with something like fuel or manpower. Those would have correct answer set by your alloy production. The right amount of fuel would be the bare minimum it takes to move your entire fleet. Any extra fuel beyond that amount would be a waste, because what would you do with it?

I think that's the key here, right? Almost every resource in the game is a maintenance cost, meaning it fits the following formula:

- Producing less of it is objectively bad because it imposes negative modifiers/punitive consequences.
- Producing more of it has few benefits because there's little, if anything, you can do with the excess.

Any resource that meets those standards, I think, will have the same problem. Maintenance costs are the epitome of complexity without depth. No matter how many layers we add to that system, there will never be a decision to make. You objectively can't have fewer resources than the maintenance cost and it's a waste to produce more.

The solution is not in the game's economy. It's in the game's mechanics of power. We need more ways for players to get and express power, so that we can have more resources that meet a strategic cost formula:

- Producing more of this resource lets me build or do something that makes my empire more powerful.
- Producing less of this resource is a strategic decision to have less of something I don't objectively need.

Alloys meet that standard. Having more alloys always lets me build more ships, which makes my empire more powerful. Having fewer alloys means building fewer ships, which is a strategic decision on my part. Unlike a maintenance cost it's not objectively bad (I won't suffer negative modifiers). Therefore it's a decision whether to shift production from one area to another. Nothing else meets that standard. Strategic resources were supposed to, but you produce them in such abundance so easily that there's no bottleneck there.

I think the correct answer is to create mechanics so that two more resources meet this standard. The solution is a situation such that:

- Player A has 5,000 CG's, 1,000 Resource X, and 1,000 alloys;
- Player B has 1,000 CG's, 5,000 Resource X, and 1,000 alloys;
- Player C has 1,000 CG's, 1,000 Resource X, and 5,000 alloys;
- All players are in an equally viable strategic position.

Right now there's nothing that Player A or Player B can spend their excess resources on that would make them competitive on the game board. Player C would spend his 5,000 alloys on ships and would roll right over them. So we need a mechanic that lets Player A spend his CG's and Player B spend her Resource X and they're all as potentially powerful as Player C. Not necessarily in the same way. Perhaps their power is diplomatic or economic or something. They might still well lose any actual confrontation while being asymmetrically powerful in other ways.

The first thing I'd do is beef up technology as a viable path. If that were the case then Player B could have 5,000 research points and become a tech powerhouse. But my experience, at least, is that this is not currently practicable. A player who's all-in on research will always lose to a player who's all-in on alloys.

Otherwise, I don't know. I'm not sure what the mechanics should be.

 

[BlackUmbrellas]

The AI has clearly still not been fixed. The player having 1k more Diplo power then the strongest AI. What's even the point in these features if the game is so broken it'll bend to your will with no challenge

...or its a demonstration screenshot that they used console commands to set things up for. Like they do regularly.

 

[Mr Clock]

I'm looking forward to news on your efforts to improve late-game performance and the AI.

 

[BlackUmbrellas]

I'm looking forward to news on your efforts to improve late-game performance and the AI.

I'm sure if you copy+paste this message often enough, they'll respond to you.

 

[Mr Clock]

I'm sure if you copy+paste this message often enough, they'll respond to you.

I hear ya. It wasn't my intent to spam. I typed up this monster of a suggestion thread regarding some ideas I had bouncing around in my head today and realized when I hit post that I need to have 5 posts before I can include links. So I made 5 posts. I was just making a rethorical statement of my sentiments.

 

[SeekingEtermity]

- Producing more of this resource lets me build or do something that makes my empire more powerful.
- Producing less of this resource is a strategic decision to have less of something I don't objectively need.

Alloys meet that standard. Having more alloys always lets me build more ships, which makes my empire more powerful. Having fewer alloys means building fewer ships, which is a strategic decision on my part. Unlike a maintenance cost it's not objectively bad (I won't suffer negative modifiers). Therefore it's a decision whether to shift production from one area to another. Nothing else meets that standard. Strategic resources were supposed to, but you produce them in such abundance so easily that there's no bottleneck there.

The obvious resources already in the game that do that are research and (to a lesser extent) unity. Slacking on tech is absolutely a strategic decision, and you can possibly make up for it by building bigger fleets of less-efficient ships and hoping you win battles that way (you're not going to be able to research enemy debris if they win every fight), or by trying to be friends with all your neighbors and get research agreements to help you catch up. Alternatively, you can go hard on research and have fewer alloys (although going hard on research also allows producing alloys more efficiently), but those alloys are used to build vastly more powerful ships. It's somewhat harder to emphasize unity production, and the rewards of doing so are less dramatic, but it's there nonetheless and can make significant differences in both how many resources (including alloys) you produce, and directly in how militarily powerful you are.

Somewhat less obviously, territory and colonies meet that standard. Partially because of empire sprawl and partially because of things like alloy and influence costs to claim space + costs to settle and develop planets + increased burden of defending all that space, deciding how much to expand is a very strategic decision, and your economy plays a big role in it. Expansion directly trades off against some economic goals (if you can run the resource-boosting edicts, you need that much less production of those resources, which you can instead divert to alloys or research), and indirectly against some other things (a big empire means more trade patrolling, more starbases needed, more hostile borders to defend, and so on) by introducing new drains on the economy and/or the military (which, as you pointed out, mostly depends on your economy) Yes, map-painting with only minimal regard for sprawl is still usually the optimal strategy, but you still have to decide when to expand... is a 60% planet worth it, even though it'll struggle to pay off the investment for a while? Is it worth tangling with 3k of space monsters to claim a valuable system early, when you could instead wait until your fleet can crush them with ease?.

Additionally, there's influence itself. Obviously this plays a part in the above point about expansion, and your control over its generation is limited, but generally you've got more stuff that you want to spend it on than you can ever generate - it's the opposite of a "just pays upkeep" resource - and there are lots of ways it can impact your economy and military strength, which you have to choose between.

Finally, resources are fungible. You can sell them on the market or to other empires. You can use the rewards to buy alloys or to boost other resources so you can keep paying their upkeep. You can use energy to buy strategic resources that you have no other access to, to boost your production and your ships. This doesn't mean that you want to run big surpluses of food or whatnot, but it does mean there's strategy to be had on how you build even the "upkeep only" parts of your economy. You can specialize (I usually go hard on food and all-but-ignore generator districts, for example). You can take different optimization paths.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not disagreeing with the claim that most resources are, in the end, useful only to the extent that they let you get more alloys and/or research. However, I think there really is a lot of depth (not just complexity) that you're totally ignoring when you pass off everything else as only for purposes of maintenance.

 

[methegrate]

The obvious resources already in the game that do that are research and (to a lesser extent) unity. Slacking on tech is absolutely a strategic decision, and you can possibly make up for it by building bigger fleets of less-efficient ships and hoping you win battles that way (you're not going to be able to research enemy debris if they win every fight), or by trying to be friends with all your neighbors and get research agreements to help you catch up. Alternatively, you can go hard on research and have fewer alloys (although going hard on research also allows producing alloys more efficiently), but those alloys are used to build vastly more powerful ships. It's somewhat harder to emphasize unity production, and the rewards of doing so are less dramatic, but it's there nonetheless and can make significant differences in both how many resources (including alloys) you produce, and directly in how militarily powerful you are.

Somewhat less obviously, territory and colonies meet that standard. Partially because of empire sprawl and partially because of things like alloy and influence costs to claim space + costs to settle and develop planets + increased burden of defending all that space, deciding how much to expand is a very strategic decision, and your economy plays a big role in it. Expansion directly trades off against some economic goals (if you can run the resource-boosting edicts, you need that much less production of those resources, which you can instead divert to alloys or research), and indirectly against some other things (a big empire means more trade patrolling, more starbases needed, more hostile borders to defend, and so on) by introducing new drains on the economy and/or the military (which, as you pointed out, mostly depends on your economy) Yes, map-painting with only minimal regard for sprawl is still usually the optimal strategy, but you still have to decide when to expand... is a 60% planet worth it, even though it'll struggle to pay off the investment for a while? Is it worth tangling with 3k of space monsters to claim a valuable system early, when you could instead wait until your fleet can crush them with ease?.

Additionally, there's influence itself. Obviously this plays a part in the above point about expansion, and your control over its generation is limited, but generally you've got more stuff that you want to spend it on than you can ever generate - it's the opposite of a "just pays upkeep" resource - and there are lots of ways it can impact your economy and military strength, which you have to choose between.

Finally, resources are fungible. You can sell them on the market or to other empires. You can use the rewards to buy alloys or to boost other resources so you can keep paying their upkeep. You can use energy to buy strategic resources that you have no other access to, to boost your production and your ships. This doesn't mean that you want to run big surpluses of food or whatnot, but it does mean there's strategy to be had on how you build even the "upkeep only" parts of your economy. You can specialize (I usually go hard on food and all-but-ignore generator districts, for example). You can take different optimization paths.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not disagreeing with the claim that most resources are, in the end, useful only to the extent that they let you get more alloys and/or research. However, I think there really is a lot of depth (not just complexity) that you're totally ignoring when you pass off everything else as only for purposes of maintenance.

I don't disagree with you in theory. I think that influence is by far the most interesting resource in the game for exactly the reasons you named . I'd like to see far more resources force the kind of choices that you have to make with influence, rather than the standard situation of having more of everything than you could possibly spend.

I'd love it if strategic resources mirrored influence in that regard. If they were very hard to get, so forced you to really focus on how to specialize your empire, that would be terrific. But I usually have well over 1,000 of each stockpiled, and usually just sell the rest for money to buy more alloys. I've certainly never run into the situation where I had no or limited access to certain strategic resources. But it really should be that way. I definitely should make choices based on the resources I have access to and the ones I don't.

I think otherwise I'd have two main reactions.

First, you're not wrong that there are lots of decisions that you make as a player about how big to grow your empire, when to expand, how to manage your economy, etc. But those planets and star systems aren't resources. They're the means of producing resources, and I'm not sure I completely understand your point there. Sure, there are lots of ways you can build an empire and economy, but that doesn't change the fact that once you've built that empire the only useful thing to do with it is produce alloys.

More to the point, no matter how you build your economy the basic formula remains the same. For every other resource, there is little (if anything) useful you can do with income above the minimum needed to pay upkeep costs. If leaders, edicts and planetary decisions were a robust and powerful system that might change things. But as-is, all they are is a way of producing more resources that you can only use to pay upkeep costs. As you yourself note, what you do with edicts and decisions is find new ways to produce alloys and research.

It still always boils down to the same thing: If I have 5,000 extra alloys, I can do something on the game board. If I have 5,000 extra of anything else, I can't.

Beside that, you're absolutely right that research should be a viable alternative. I don't think I'd argue that unity should be considered a third resource. Traditions feel more like something that should distinguish empires. Personally, at least, I wouldn't suggest that they should be an independent source of power. But research, definitely.

The problem is that, at least in my experience, research is not in practice a viable alternative. Pound for pound, in the games I've played, tech empires lose. Always. Research in Stellaris just isn't powerful enough to set empires apart from each other. All of the technologies are either fundamental (everyone gets the basic ship classes and starbase upgrades) or too inconsequential to make a difference. When one empire comes in with twice as many ships and the other has lasers that are 10 percent more powerful, the nerds are going to get their asses kicked. You need to stay competitive in research, you can't fight plasma with red lasers. Beyond that, though, we're right back to alloys as the dominant choice.

Certainly I agree that research should be an alternative. Two empires that are otherwise equivalent, but one invested heavily in research and one invested heavily in alloys, should be evenly matched. At least in my games, though, I just don't see it.

 

[Jin_Cardassian]

@methegrate So what would you recommend concretely?

If we're getting a better diplomacy system, we could use excess Consumer Goods to generate diplomatic favors.

This is of course entirely dependent on diplomacy being as powerful as war. Which it almost certainly won't be, because strategy games are never ever like that and players will just scream about how "gamey" it is to have things like trade deficits and political corruption in a game about trade and politics. Realistically, diplomacy is going to be weak window dressing around the war system. Just like Research and Unity are fundamentally about how hurty your ships are and how effectively you can produce them.

 

[Jin_Cardassian]

On reflection I think it all traces back to a central problem. Not just with Stellaris, but with all strategy games. Real time, grand strat, 4x; they are all fundamentally still monomanical map painters. They wouldn't know how to model, much less balance, a steep asymmetry in tech, cultural power, economic power, and diplomatic power with steep asymmetries in military power.

Even the diplomacy we are getting bears the marks of this.

"How do you enforce the Galactic UN's demands?" people ask.

"Why, you create a CB and then somebody goes to war over it!" we hear.

Then there's some stuff about sanctions, which I guess means you'll hurt an enemy's economy. What will this do? It will make it harder for them to win a war.

 

[Dmitrius]

On reflection I think it all traces back to a central problem. Not just with Stellaris, but with all strategy games. Real time, grand strat, 4x; they are all fundamentally still monomanical map painters. They wouldn't know how to model, much less balance, a steep asymmetry in tech, cultural power, economic power, and diplomatic power with steep asymmetries in military power.

Even the diplomacy we are getting bears the marks of this.

"How do you enforce the Galactic UN's demands?" people ask.

"Why, you create a CB and then somebody goes to war over it!" we hear.

Then there's some stuff about sanctions, which I guess means you'll hurt an enemy's economy. What will this do? It will make it harder for them to win a war.

True, I think when people approach Stellaris expansion they need to be realistic about what the game is attempting to be.

The core gameplay loop here once you've past the initial exploration phase is expanding into enemy or subjugation, either way war.

But I question whether the game is capable of changing focus this late in development. It might have to be something for Stellaris 2. Then we might ask, well what should Stellaris 2 be based around? What should be at the core of that experience?

For me that would be economic growth and internal politics.

 

[Pointyearedgit]

True, I think when people approach Stellaris expansion they need to be realistic about what the game is attempting to be.

The core gameplay loop here once you've past the initial exploration phase is expanding into enemy or subjugation, either way war.

But I question whether the game is capable of changing focus this late in development. It might have to be something for Stellaris 2. Then we might ask, well what should Stellaris 2 be based around? What should be at the core of that experience?

For me that would be economic growth and internal politics.

I mean ... the loop does tend to go this way, but galactic politics and interventions could be a great addition to the midgame. When I’m playing buddy buddy xenophiles, I’d love to kick that aggressive xenoslaving empire in the pants, and not just by guaranteeing their possible war targets.

The game could evolve into exploration/expansion, waaagh/diplomatic maneuvering, then sprinkle in (working and scary) crises and AEs into the late game. The mid game has always been lacking, especially for non-map painters.

 

[methegrate]

@methegrate So what would you recommend concretely?

If we're getting a better diplomacy system, we could use excess Consumer Goods to generate diplomatic favors.

This is of course entirely dependent on diplomacy being as powerful as war. Which it almost certainly won't be, because strategy games are never ever like that and players will just scream about how "gamey" it is to have things like trade deficits and political corruption in a game about trade and politics. Realistically, diplomacy is going to be weak window dressing around the war system. Just like Research and Unity are fundamentally about how hurty your ships are and how effectively you can produce them.

I'm not sure what the alternative is. It would require new mechanics, something worth spending resources on.

Mostly I think the problem is that everything always goes back to warfare. Whatever the issue is, it always returns to "but how will that help win a fight?" When we talk about diplomacy, it's always in the context of defensive pacts and allies (a way to get more ships). When we talk about economics, it's always about hiring mercenaries (a way to get more ships). When we talk about research it's at least a little bit different in that it's in the context of upgraded weapons, so at least it's a way to get better ships.

And hell, maybe that's right. I mean, Stellaris is openly a map painting game. The victory condition is to control enough of the board, so maybe this is an Occam's Razor situation. The correct answer is to say that we want four asymmetric, viable ways to get more ships. So you can:

• Build ships (primary resource: alloys)
• Ally with ships (primary resource: CG's and external trade)
• Buy/hire ships (primary resource: energy and internal trade)
• Improve ships (primary resource: research)

The way to win the game is to win the fights. The way to win the fights is to have more or better ships. There are four (ideally asymmetric ways) to do that. If we have four otherwise-equivalent empires, but one has gone all-in on diplomacy, one on shipyards, one on trade and one on science, they will have equivalent fleets.

Honestly that's probably the right answer. Beef up technology so that a tech empire can go toe-to-toe with fleets five times their size. Create a robust system of diplomacy fueled by CG's and trade so that a motivated player can have a network of allies ready to stand by their side. Create a system of mercenaries, kickass leaders and bribery fueled by energy and trade so that a mercantile player can buy all the help he needs... including from your own captains. Then let industrialists pour out ships from the skunkworks fueled by alloys and dare anyone to challenge their fleet.

We embrace the fact that this is a wargame and that the goal is to put the most fleet power on the board in one place at one time, then working backwards from there try to create asymmetric strategies for doing so. It's not a great solution, but it might be the most workable.

 

[Jin_Cardassian]

True, I think when people approach Stellaris expansion they need to be realistic about what the game is attempting to be.

The core gameplay loop here once you've past the initial exploration phase is expanding into enemy or subjugation, either way war.

But I question whether the game is capable of changing focus this late in development. It might have to be something for Stellaris 2. Then we might ask, well what should Stellaris 2 be based around? What should be at the core of that experience?

For me that would be economic growth and internal politics.

Yeah, the problem is that to make the other systems work they would need to be able to directly do things that war can do. And the existing player base just isn't comfortable with that.

Should the AI be able to just diplo-annex a planet from a player? No, that's gamey.

How about sponsoring rebellions and then annexing the rebels? Nope, too gamey.

What about using diplomacy to force your enemies to ban slavery or AI? Still too gamey. Real politics is all about constantly threatening WW3, apparently.

What about inciting the enemy fleets to mutiny? "No way! Why do you want to gimp Militarists so much?"

Should science-focused empires be able to engineer plagues or nanoviruses to wipe out your population centers? "Ugh why would you even say that?! If I lost my population I'd ragequite!"

 

[Jin_Cardassian]

The game could evolve into exploration/expansion, waaagh/diplomatic maneuvering, then sprinkle in (working and scary) crises and AEs into the late game. The mid game has always been lacking, especially for non-map painters.

To really offer options other than war, we would need crises that can't be solved with war.

Plagues are an obvious example. You can shoot your way out of WW1. You can't shoot your way out of the Spanish Flu.

What is the nature of the current crises? Ships with weapons.

How do you defeat them? You shoot your way out of it.

 

[methegrate]

To just throw in another option...

Not to get too abstract, but I think any non-warfare answer needs to start with defining what players are even trying to accomplish through warfare in the first place. Why, from a gameplay standpoint, do I attack and take those systems?

We have the threshold problem that Stellaris explicitly defines itself as a map-painting wargame (the victory condition is to control enough of the board), so I attack because taking systems is how I win. But if we set that aside for a moment, I suggest that the game ultimately boils down to two formulas:

• Internal play (building power) is about creating new options for yourself, expanding existing ones, or making a decision you've chosen;
• External play (projecting power) is about eliminating options for the other player, limiting existing ones, or making a decision for them.

This is a game, not a puzzle, so my goal is to maximize external play. As a result, I build my internal strategy around my external strategy.

When it comes to external play, we attack because this is how Stellaris lets us project power onto the other player. In warfare you take away the enemy's ships, systems, stations, etc., in doing so eliminating and limiting their options (they now do not have the option to attack you or build anything on that planet). We also do so to force them into a decision that we've chosen which they otherwise wouldn't have (give me those systems, become my vassal).

And I think the alloy trap comes from the simple fact that there are no other mechanisms in Stellaris that let you do that. Off the top my head, at least, I can't think of any other ways that I can limit or define another player's options other than by attacking him. Diplomacy lets me ask nicely for things, but the foundational problem with that system is that there is no counter-move if they say no.

So that's a long-winded way of saying, I think the answer is to identify what gives a player options, what takes those options away, and how can I interact with those mechanics when facing another player? I think I would start with economics

- Economic Alternative

Between players, Stellaris is a war game. The rest is just window dressing. But internally, Stellaris is entirely an economics game. What you do and what you can do is defined entirely by your economy. That's ultimately why it's a problem to lose a war, because it always leads to losing resources either directly or through the loss of the territory that produced those them.

This makes economics a viable alternative to war. If I can reduce someone's energy income, alloy supply or strategic resources, I can eliminate their options. It doesn't matter if they lose that income because I took their star system or suppressed internal trade, both results are the same.

I'm not sure exactly what the mechanics here would be. In part they should be based on external trade. Not all external play must be coercive. If other empires can get rich by building trade routes with me, I can define their options according to what it will cost to access that trade. Then there should be a mechanic for influencing another empire's economy regardless of their agreement. If I want to reduce or eliminate your options, I can do so through a mechanic that lets me reduce your income to the point where you have fewer choices available. If we are at war, it is a viable strategy for me to try and cripple you not by taking systems but by making the war unaffordable for you.

Like I said, I'm not sure exactly what that mechanic would be, but that's where I would start.

 

[SeekingEtermity]

That's rather insightful, @methegrate . I agree that having some way to influence somebody else's economy beyond simply riddling it with railgun rounds would be good. There's a few options for how to achieve that: the classic request of an espionage system, but also the more above-board mechanisms of exerting influence on your neighbors' populations that make them want to switch sides. A few interesting examples from other 4X games:

• In some Civilization games, there's a "religion" aspect where your religion spreads to neighboring cities. The spread happens passively, although you can boost it using missionaries and so on. Successfully converting a city or even a significant portion of its population provides you with certain bonuses, although it doesn't make your neighbor lose control of the city.
  
• In Civ6 (specifically, in one of its expansions), cities that are surrounded by another empire's cities will slip out of your control and switch sides. This is mostly useful to make "sneak a settler into their space to grab land we want" non-viable, but it also means you can try deliberately surrounding and exerting pressure on somebody else to take their land without war.
• In Endless Space 2, every system you colonize exerts a sphere of influence, depending on how much influence it generates (influence in ES2 is just a resource, like food or science, produced by pops and buildings and so on). If your sphere of influence runs into somebody else's, its growth in that direction slows, but if you produce influence faster than they do you can eventually push their "sphere" back enough to bring their system into your sphere of influence. Once you do that, you can pay influence to annex the system. This will make them unhappy, of course - nobody likes having their land stolen, no matter how non-violently - and they may launch a war to win it back, but unless they can overcome your influence (possibly by capturing the relevant system), they'll be unable to prevent it from happening again. Perhaps even more relevantly, the influence-based annexation cannot be prevented - there's no last-ditch option like spamming armies to prevent capture - so anything they do about it will have to be reactive, and done without that system or its production. The "war" was the spheres of influence shoving at one another, and they already lost.
• Also in ES2, there's an interesting mechanic where, if you're sufficiently more powerful than another empire, you can diplomatically bully them and make them give you stuff (generally resources). Think of it like a trade deal, except they have a certain amount that they're "willing" to give you for free, and you can just... demand it. They have some ability to respond, but at the end of the day, if you're powerful enough to have this option and you choose to use this power, you're getting a prize for it, and they're paying for it. The accumulation of ability-to-bully then resets, and won't be available again (even if you remain more powerful) for some time to come, but it provides a constant incentive for empires to build up their power and not let their neighbors get too strong, even if those neighbors are pacifists.

Beyond that, though, there's also the option of having alternative victory conditions. In Stellaris, there are only two victory conditions: a "score" victory at the end of the game (which is so sadly painful to reach these days), or just painting the whole map your color. Other 4X games have all kinds of other options:

• A tech/wonder victory, where you reach end-game tech before everybody else and then build something really expensive as a sort of "look, I am clearly winning here, just accept it" statement.
• A diplomatic victory, where you convince everybody else to unite behind you (and then crush anybody who refuses to submit, so it's sort of a military victory, but you can sometimes do it without a fight).
• Alternatively, a diplomatic victory where you simply convince enough of the population to support you, regardless of their nominal overlord. Hard to do properly without feeling to "game-y" (Civ5's version is not great) but still adds an interesting axis of success beyond simply "who has more guns".
• A religious and/or cultural victory, where you convince everybody else that your people/beliefs/way of life are just obviously better and they should be like you.
• An economic victory, where you just straight-up buy out everybody else. I haven't seen this one in a game since Alpha Centauri, but it was a really interesting mechanic that gave the "get rich" faction - Stellaris would call them a megacorp - a way to directly turn their unique advantage into a possible win (though it was still hard, unless you'd conquered much of the world already).

I'm sure there are other options people could come up with. The point is, it's possible to be winning without actually having the military needed for an offensive war (or at least, without wanting to use it that way). This makes all sorts of other approaches to victory feasible in a way that Stellaris currently lacks, and they can also have goals beyond "be the top dog when <YEAR> rolls around" so you actually have something specific you have to work for.

 

[Monturiol]

Even the diplomacy we are getting bears the marks of this.

"How do you enforce the Galactic UN's demands?" people ask.

"Why, you create a CB and then somebody goes to war over it!" we hear.

And, repeat after me: Stellaris already has arbitrarily-acquirable CBs on demand, so providing another one doesn't actually do anything