Stellaris Dev Diary #159 - Galactic Community

[Foefaller]

It's not that the value of influence changed. That's as great as ever, and it always has been one of the most vitally important resources. The supply has gotten a little better lately (faction changes, a few other sources) while the demand has remained largely constant, but overall it's still a scarce, precious thing. That hasn't changed, and adding more sinks for influence will just make it more so.

However, the changes to factions mean it matters far less whether you keep them happy. Yes, you want them (at least the big ones) happy because they provide that precious purple manainfluence, but demand for influence still almost always outstrips supply. Increasing demand a little bit more isn't going to have much impact on the value of the sources; the demand is already pretty inelastic.

I think the change was partly made because of the reduced pop control with 2.2. You could always mitigate unhappy factions by placing the members on farms where they could never produce less than the base value, or to enslave them. Neither is really possible with the current economy, so they probably figured it would be too frustrating for your CG income to tank because all the artisans joined a faction that hates you and you can't do jack about it.

Factions and internal gameplay might need a second Utopia-level rework in light of the new economy.

 

[methegrate]

but also faction demands like extended peace would have the potential to cripple your economy during wars, a shift from +5 to -10 could cause you to enter a death-spiral in the middle of a war as your income drops below expenses and you have the added cost of un-docked fleets to contend with. It would hit the player hardest when you really don't want the player to be trying to balance their economy and manage planets - during war. All the Faction demands stop being flavour and then need a strong balance pass to make sure you aren't crippled if you're e.g. materialist with grand admiral AI players who have higher tech, which causes you to have low happiness which causes you to have lower research output which stops you from catching up... that sort of feedback loop. e.g.

Agreed, although at the same time that isn't necessarily a bad thing.

I feel like it would need to strike a balance. Factions shouldn't be so powerful that they can twitch and ruin your game. But at the same time it should be okay to lose the game if you've badly mismanaged your internal politics.

If you've let your warlike empire get to the point where your peace faction is large and loud enough to cripple your economy during a war, then yeah. You should lose. Arguably the whole problem is that factions aren't strong enough to hit your economy hard. (Imo this is what leaders and sectors should be all about.)

Again, you're definitely right. The system needs to be balanced, and the player needs the tools to break a feedback loop. But balance should include the possibility of loss. Otherwise we're kinda right back where we started, with factions an influence pump at best and little more than a hassle at worst.

 

[DrFranknfurter]

Agreed, although at the same time that isn't necessarily a bad thing.

I feel like it would need to strike a balance. Factions shouldn't be so powerful that they can twitch and ruin your game. But at the same time it should be okay to lose the game if you've badly mismanaged your internal politics.

If you've let your warlike empire get to the point where your peace faction is large and loud enough to cripple your economy during a war, then yeah. You should lose. Arguably the whole problem is that factions aren't strong enough to hit your economy hard. (Imo this is what leaders and sectors should be all about.)

Again, you're definitely right. The system needs to be balanced, and the player needs the tools to break a feedback loop. But balance should include the possibility of loss. Otherwise we're kinda right back where we started, with factions an influence pump at best and little more than a hassle at worst.

I think it would certainly give factions more bite if they could ruin an empire, especially for storytelling... but I do fear that the feedback loop would cripple AI and new players unless it was made easier to get out of. Make it easy to get out of but not cheap - e.g. enacting military law decisions, expelling radical elements (like expel excess population but it forces non-empire-ethics faction pops to become refugees/a splinter empire, suppress faction lowering the production penalty from unhappy pops could work as well, edicts like information quarantine suppressing the penalties from factions - it cancels out negative effects of unhappy factions as they don't know you're at war/in debt/technologically inferior). Giving leaders of those factions more powers/bribes/increased upkeep/assassinating them via events... etc.

Currently as ethics shift is very slow, suppressing or endorsing a faction is pretty much throwing influence away. Factions need the corresponding mechanics to work smoothly and reliably before they are given too much power over everything else. (Or people would feel compelled to try and then get frustrated by the lack of progress thanks to mechanics not working as expected).

But I would like to see factions and happiness improved to be a more fun, engaging and powerful system - preferably with several ways of dealing with things if it all goes pear-shaped (using different resources, unity - traditions/edicts, minerals - buildings like the slave processing center, energy - enclaves deals like the festival from the artists, influence - decisions, edicts, suppressing and promoting factions... like we have currently but working and so on).

Currently there's an odd feedback loop that could occur where unhappy factions lower your influence which makes it harder to promote or suppress factions so you have more unhappy factions... as the main thing factions change is influence production and you need influence to stop factions being so unhappy. (It's the reason that an energy deficit doesn't lower energy generation). The only reason it's not normally an issue is that the effect of factions is so tiny and people never use those options as they've learned from experience that they don't do anything. If factions were buffed with all things remaining equal then the other problems with the system would be more obvious. (So although I said I wouldn't mind if factions had a stronger effect on influence before... thinking about it... there needs to be better ways of shifting pop ethics that doesn't also require influence for that to not be another nasty feedback loop).

 

[DrNukeLear]

I think that factions are a lost opportunity to differentiate between the four government types (Democracy, Oligarchy, Dictatorial and Imperial).

With a Democracy you should have to get decision, edict and policy changes through a parliament/assembly/congress/senate (controlled by representatives of the factions, so each percentage of the population will vote according to their ethic).
With an Oligarchy you should have a smaller council which are elected similarly to the leader, these councillors vote in accordance with their ethic.
With Dictatorial and Imperial you just make a decree and it's done.

Implementing decisions, edicts and policies on any populace which is majorly opposed to them should cause riots and lawlessness (read planet modifiers to happiness).

 

[methegrate]

Currently as ethics shift is very slow, suppressing or endorsing a faction is pretty much throwing influence away. Factions need the corresponding mechanics to work smoothly and reliably before they are given too much power over everything else. (Or people would feel compelled to try and then get frustrated by the lack of progress thanks to mechanics not working as expected).

But I would like to see factions and happiness improved to be a more fun, engaging and powerful system - preferably with several ways of dealing with things if it all goes pear-shaped (using different resources, unity - traditions/edicts, minerals - buildings like the slave processing center, energy - enclaves deals like the festival from the artists, influence - decisions, edicts, suppressing and promoting factions... like we have currently but working and so on).

Currently there's an odd feedback loop that could occur where unhappy factions lower your influence which makes it harder to promote or suppress factions so you have more unhappy factions... as the main thing factions change is influence production and you need influence to stop factions being so unhappy. (It's the reason that an energy deficit doesn't lower energy generation). The only reason it's not normally an issue is that the effect of factions is so tiny and people never use those options as they've learned from experience that they don't do anything. If factions were buffed with all things remaining equal then the other problems with the system would be more obvious. (So although I said I wouldn't mind if factions had a stronger effect on influence before... thinking about it... there needs to be better ways of shifting pop ethics that doesn't also require influence for that to not be another nasty feedback loop).

I agree completely with this.

Factions sort of feel like leaders, policies, sectors, governments/elections, and (tbh) trade and piracy to me, in that they feel like a placeholder mechanic. Someone came up with the idea to have internal politics based on ethics-driven factions. So they designed something basic while they worked out the kinks elsewhere, then never got around to actually designing the gameplay intended for that mechanic.

It's not just that there's no gameplay (although there isn't). It's that this is so obviously missing that I'm not really sure how it got out of playtesting without someone noticing that this big, important part of the game doesn't actually do anything. If you just close that section of the organizer you'd probably forget that the faction mechanic exists altogether. That's probably just as well, given that the few tools you have to manipulate factions drain as much influence as your factions generate (if not more in some cases).

I don't think it's a coincidence that the most undeveloped parts of Stellaris all have to do with politics and government. I'd bet anything that all of these mechanics were originally intended to interact, and you can easily see how that would happen. (Hell, half of us bought the game because we were explicitly promised deep political and diplomatic gameplay.) But somewhere along the line the dev team just kinda shrugged and slapped a "working as designed" sticker where a "TBD" clearly used to be.

It's like watching someone prepare the foundation for a building. You get all excited for the great new project they're going to build, then they come along and say that they'd really just planned to dig a hole all along. You can see the size and shape of the building that isn't there, but the developer is sitting on the side of the road selling tickets to play on the dirt slide.

 

[DrNukeLear]

I agree completely with this.

Factions sort of feel like leaders, policies, sectors, governments/elections, and (tbh) trade and piracy to me, in that they feel like a placeholder mechanic. Someone came up with the idea to have internal politics based on ethics-driven factions. So they designed something basic while they worked out the kinks elsewhere, then never got around to actually designing the gameplay intended for that mechanic.

It's not just that there's no gameplay (although there isn't). It's that this is so obviously missing that I'm not really sure how it got out of playtesting without someone noticing that this big, important part of the game doesn't actually do anything. If you just close that section of the organizer you'd probably forget that the faction mechanic exists altogether. That's probably just as well, given that the few tools you have to manipulate factions drain as much influence as your factions generate (if not more in some cases).

I don't think it's a coincidence that the most undeveloped parts of Stellaris all have to do with politics and government. I'd bet anything that all of these mechanics were originally intended to interact, and you can easily see how that would happen. (Hell, half of us bought the game because we were explicitly promised deep political and diplomatic gameplay.) But somewhere along the line the dev team just kinda shrugged and slapped a "working as designed" sticker where a "TBD" clearly used to be.

It's like watching someone prepare the foundation for a building. You get all excited for the great new project they're going to build, then they come along and say that they'd really just planned to dig a hole all along. You can see the size and shape of the building that isn't there, but the developer is sitting on the side of the road selling tickets to play on the dirt slide.

Actually while I was learning to play stellaris I spent a whole 60 minutes trying to work out how to "use" the factions screen. Yup - It took five minutes followed by fifty five of looking for what isn't there to be interacted with.

 

[Foefaller]

I agree completely with this.

Factions sort of feel like leaders, policies, sectors, governments/elections, and (tbh) trade and piracy to me, in that they feel like a placeholder mechanic. Someone came up with the idea to have internal politics based on ethics-driven factions. So they designed something basic while they worked out the kinks elsewhere, then never got around to actually designing the gameplay intended for that mechanic.

It's not just that there's no gameplay (although there isn't). It's that this is so obviously missing that I'm not really sure how it got out of playtesting without someone noticing that this big, important part of the game doesn't actually do anything. If you just close that section of the organizer you'd probably forget that the faction mechanic exists altogether. That's probably just as well, given that the few tools you have to manipulate factions drain as much influence as your factions generate (if not more in some cases).

I don't think it's a coincidence that the most undeveloped parts of Stellaris all have to do with politics and government. I'd bet anything that all of these mechanics were originally intended to interact, and you can easily see how that would happen. (Hell, half of us bought the game because we were explicitly promised deep political and diplomatic gameplay.) But somewhere along the line the dev team just kinda shrugged and slapped a "working as designed" sticker where a "TBD" clearly used to be.

It's like watching someone prepare the foundation for a building. You get all excited for the great new project they're going to build, then they come along and say that they'd really just planned to dig a hole all along. You can see the size and shape of the building that isn't there, but the developer is sitting on the side of the road selling tickets to play on the dirt slide.

Factions currently got borked with 2.2; as some have mentioned earlier, keeping a tab on factions was much more important when pop happiness had a much more direct influence to output.

Even so, current version is still better than pre-Utopia, where they were CKII-esque factions for planets sectors and species, which sounds cool, but they were completely toothless, especially the planet and sector ones because you could reset a faction's progress by creating/remaking the sector.

Leaders are roughly the same since 1.0, similarly with mechanics of policies/edicts and election types... though government type/customisization expanded greatly with Utopia's update; used to be a grid, with X axis being Imperial/Dicatorial, Oligarchy, and Democracy, and the Y axis being Militarist, Pacifist, Spirtualist, Materialist, and default, with the options available based on your ethics, which would never change after game start.)

Piracy is actually deeper than it was in 1.x, believe it or not, when it was an event that fired once around the time of your first colony to create a pirate outpost outside your borders that would occasionally spawn raiding ships, but once you destroyed it, no more pirates for the rest of the game (after 2.0, they tried to make it a counter for snaking empires where the above event had a chance to fire again based on a "pirate suppression" rating, but that was just annoying, and toothless depending on how you placed your starbases in light if unclaimed space)

I believe Wiz mentioned that the original game (which he wasn't the initial design lead for, though he did take over almost immediately after launch) was pitched as "4X with an emphasis on the first X (exploration)" and that has been, arguably, always Stellaris's strong point. Only probably is that it only lasts for about a third of the game.

 

[DrFranknfurter]

It's that this is so obviously missing that I'm not really sure how it got out of playtesting without someone noticing that this big, important part of the game doesn't actually do anything. If you just close that section of the organizer you'd probably forget that the faction mechanic exists altogether.

I agree with what you're saying, but I do have a couple of things to add. I think the first is that there is a huge amount of value added to the quality of the whole product by giving the impression of deepness. Like how a tiny blob on a painting conveys far more than the effort it took to make. These small, quickly-implemented systems that don't distract the player too much or offer too much in the way of depth but give the impression of a living economy, politics and so on... they do have a place and have value.

So I can imagine getting a better general result in game development by spreading the resources more thinly, rather than by focusing too much time on any one spot. But with the painting analogy it feels like Pointillism at the moment - seen from a large distance it looks amazing, with a complex dynamic system with almost everything you could possibly want... but up close you see that the dots aren't actually connected, some are obviously missing or poorly done, and the illusion of quality breaks down. Internal Trade isn't linked to external trade or the galactic market, piracy isn't linked to crime, the buttons on the faction screen are more for show than substance and so on. A huge number of small, quick, unconnected dots... but I do think they look great from a distance (it makes me excited to see the potential shape of it all) even if I wish those things were all interconnected - mixing the paint, some grand sweeping strokes that blend it all together and make every system relevant and flowing and real. Though done badly it'd be a big smudge that you can't fix as it's all too inter-linked. When they're all connected together it is only as strong as the weakest link. If they all stand alone, then they die alone. If piracy/ethics attraction fails it doesn't take the rest of the game down with it in a death-spiral, as could easily be the case if not tested enough.

Going to your building analogy. I wonder if the reason the game has so many... unfinished ideas. Is that the developers are afraid to link them together into one grand unified construction, until they have all the pieces in place and of sufficient quality. When you see each dot in the painting as subject to change or each building design in flux... then you may do the foundations (get the mechanics in place) but hold-off on linking the ideas together until the design is final and you have the confidence and resources to see it through. e.g. why make piracy integral when it's the 3rd revision and you expect to go through another few versions or maybe wipe it away at some point if you have a better idea. Why make factions integral when espionage isn't in the game and you can't do much to influence them in other empires? You become afraid of linking systems as they should logically be linked because it would require significantly more work later if you want to change any one of the linked systems... it'd make the game better if they were linked, but also far worse if you add one bad link to the chain and hang your hopes on it being able to carry the weight of the rest of the game.
(Anyway... I think that many analogies and mixed metaphors means I need sleep)

 

[methegrate]

Factions currently got borked with 2.2; as some have mentioned earlier, keeping a tab on factions was much more important when pop happiness had a much more direct influence to output.

Even so, current version is still better than pre-Utopia, where they were CKII-esque factions for planets sectors and species, which sounds cool, but they were completely toothless, especially the planet and sector ones because you could reset a faction's progress by creating/remaking the sector.

Leaders are roughly the same since 1.0, similarly with mechanics of policies/edicts and election types... though government type/customisization expanded greatly with Utopia's update; used to be a grid, with X axis being Imperial/Dicatorial, Oligarchy, and Democracy, and the Y axis being Militarist, Pacifist, Spirtualist, Materialist, and default, with the options available based on your ethics, which would never change after game start.)

Piracy is actually deeper than it was in 1.x, believe it or not, when it was an event that fired once around the time of your first colony to create a pirate outpost outside your borders that would occasionally spawn raiding ships, but once you destroyed it, no more pirates for the rest of the game (after 2.0, they tried to make it a counter for snaking empires where the above event had a chance to fire again based on a "pirate suppression" rating, but that was just annoying, and toothless depending on how you placed your starbases in light if unclaimed space)

I believe Wiz mentioned that the original game (which he wasn't the initial design lead for, though he did take over almost immediately after launch) was pitched as "4X with an emphasis on the first X (exploration)" and that has been, arguably, always Stellaris's strong point. Only probably is that it only lasts for about a third of the game.

It's not that this is wrong, but it's a little like saying "sure they dropped your hamburger in the mud, but do you remember when they used to serve it raw?" What I'd like is the hamburger I was promised. It isn't progress if it's just inedible in different ways.

Same thing here. Like a lot of posters, I've had this game since launch. I played those versions of the game too (and I actually preferred the 2.0 version of pirates). What'd I'd like is the political and diplomatic gameplay that Stellaris promised. It isn't progress if these various systems are just made irrelevant in different ways.

And honestly, it always bugged me when Wiz would say "it's a 4X, emphasis on the exploration." Putting a lampshade on a fundamental design flaw doesn't help. It just means that you know what you're doing wrong and don't plan on fixing it.

The exploration stage of any 4x is by definition brief. It ends once the players have explored the map and borders fill in. Just like the late stage in any 4X is when you build the big projects and game-changing superweapons. Focusing on those two sections of the game means emphasizing content over mechanics.

Content is things that are seen and consumed by the player. You see an event and it's over. You build a Dyson sphere and then have it. This is as opposed to mechanics which define how the players interact with each other and the game. Think about it like a board game. Content is the pieces in the box, mechanics are the rules for how those pieces are used.

While content defines the early and late games of a 4X (what you find and what you achieve), mechanics define the middle game. Since launch, that's the part of Stellaris that has been weakest. It's also, of course, the majority of the game. Yet this is what happens when you embrace a philosophy of "emphasis on the first X." You keep releasing new content instead of mechanical fixes because development shifts from focusing on how the players interact with the game and onto what they find in it. It turns the game from something you play into something you consume.

It's why I'm not yet willing to get excited about the upcoming diplomacy release. Everything that has been announced so far is content. Federation types, juggernauts, galactic councils... none of that will define how empires interact with each other on an ordinary basis. They're all big accomplishments you can reach or build. What matters is the gameplay of how you get there.

 

[methegrate]

I agree with what you're saying, but I do have a couple of things to add. I think the first is that there is a huge amount of value added to the quality of the whole product by giving the impression of deepness. Like how a tiny blob on a painting conveys far more than the effort it took to make. These small, quickly-implemented systems that don't distract the player too much or offer too much in the way of depth but give the impression of a living economy, politics and so on... they do have a place and have value.

So I can imagine getting a better general result in game development by spreading the resources more thinly, rather than by focusing too much time on any one spot. But with the painting analogy it feels like Pointillism at the moment - seen from a large distance it looks amazing, with a complex dynamic system with almost everything you could possibly want... but up close you see that the dots aren't actually connected, some are obviously missing or poorly done, and the illusion of quality breaks down. Internal Trade isn't linked to external trade or the galactic market, piracy isn't linked to crime, the buttons on the faction screen are more for show than substance and so on. A huge number of small, quick, unconnected dots... but I do think they look great from a distance (it makes me excited to see the potential shape of it all) even if I wish those things were all interconnected - mixing the paint, some grand sweeping strokes that blend it all together and make every system relevant and flowing and real. Though done badly it'd be a big smudge that you can't fix as it's all too inter-linked. When they're all connected together it is only as strong as the weakest link. If they all stand alone, then they die alone. If piracy/ethics attraction fails it doesn't take the rest of the game down with it in a death-spiral, as could easily be the case if not tested enough.

Going to your building analogy. I wonder if the reason the game has so many... unfinished ideas. Is that the developers are afraid to link them together into one grand unified construction, until they have all the pieces in place and of sufficient quality. When you see each dot in the painting as subject to change or each building design in flux... then you may do the foundations (get the mechanics in place) but hold-off on linking the ideas together until the design is final and you have the confidence and resources to see it through. e.g. why make piracy integral when it's the 3rd revision and you expect to go through another few versions or maybe wipe it away at some point if you have a better idea. Why make factions integral when espionage isn't in the game and you can't do much to influence them in other empires? You become afraid of linking systems as they should logically be linked because it would require significantly more work later if you want to change any one of the linked systems... it'd make the game better if they were linked, but also far worse if you add one bad link to the chain and hang your hopes on it being able to carry the weight of the rest of the game.
(Anyway... I think that many analogies and mixed metaphors means I need sleep)

No, I think that's all a great way to put it.

I think one thing that interests me is just how often I see your basic point (no pun intended) come up: The various mechanics in Stellaris don't interact with each other. There are a ton of game systems, but none of them are linked. I feel like that's one of the most consistent issues people cite, and I completely agree.

My best guess has always been that maybe this is partially by design. Stellaris has a ton of moving pieces, so maybe they're all meant to be fairly basic so that the player doesn't get overwhelmed by complexity. Then the depth and complexity of the game as a whole is supposed to come from how these independently simple mechanics all interact. That seems like a very good idea to me, but of course the problem is that few of these mechanics do actually interact.

 

[Monturiol]

I believe that voting on resolutions is an incredible possibility of organically promoting the attraction of ethics in empires on the basis of actual decisions taken by the player himself and offer a different strategic perspective.

Given that ethics attraction is very obviously bugged at the moment and has been for 2 years, I am reluctant to endorse a change like this.
If current ethics attraction were WAD, then the current system might be great, no changes like this needed.

Factions used to matter tremendously

Yes and no. You're right that it used to have more of an effect, but... there's never been any good levers by which to influence the proportions of your factional-happy pops. Partly because - as mentioned above - ethics attraction is broken, partly because it's largely zero-sum in that if you please one faction you piss off another so on aggregate every policy changes' effects get muted.
All in all, it's always been viable to ignore the faction screen entirely through the entire game because there's nothing you can do about it.

Yeah, there's a lot that can open up with Favors, assuming they're unshackled from being purely for resolutions.

I'm skeptical. As long as the diplomacy AI is dumb as a box of rocks* I don't think there's much point holding out any hope for "opening a lot up". Maybe if they work like CK2 favors in that they override the AI decisionmaking completely and just guarantee a "Yes" answer to whatever is asked of them?

* And before @BlackUmbrellas starts with her "But it's a diplo expansion this will be all change!!1!": I don't think Paradox is capable of making a diplomacy AI that's not dumb as a box of rocks, rendering whatever grand, expansion-thematically-appropriate intentions they may have irrelevant

 

[Methone]

I'm skeptical.

So am I. Hence the words 'can' and 'assuming'.

 

[Monturiol]

Agreed, although at the same time that isn't necessarily a bad thing.

I feel like it would need to strike a balance. Factions shouldn't be so powerful that they can twitch and ruin your game. But at the same time it should be okay to lose the game if you've badly mismanaged your internal politics.

An EUIV Disaster type mechanic might be useful here.
You can grossly mismanage your factions for a while without problems, but eventually you find yourself on a Disaster timer and then you've (at best) facing a new #1 priority ticking time bomb of a problem that you'd damn well better fix now, or (at worst) staring down the approach of an unstoppable freight train and you'd be best placed to move all your armies to Brazil now because you're going to be a government in exile and you know it.

Even so, current version is still better than pre-Utopia, where they were CKII-esque factions for planets sectors and species, which sounds cool, but they were completely toothless, especially the planet and sector ones because you could reset a faction's progress by creating/remaking the sector.

Hard disagree. The launch version factions were miles better than Utopia ones - they operated similar to Disasters and they were sector-geographically localised, which is exactly what I want out of them. Sure, you're right that they had that glaring exploit where you could just BALEET the sector, but that's trivial to overcome and if they'd plugged that one hole it would all have been fine.
I mean, in principle yes they should make it better than that by doing what the original pre-release dev diaries always promised and combine factions with sector rebellion by tweaking faction attractions such that you get a Materialist Sector, Authoritarian Sector, etc. But geographically-localised civil wars are a 1000% better internal dissent mechanic than just being forced to live for 300 years with a bunch of whiny -5% productivity pops that you can't do anything about.

 

[methegrate]

I mean, in principle yes they should make it better than that by doing what the original pre-release dev diaries always promised and combine factions with sector rebellion by tweaking faction attractions such that you get a Materialist Sector, Authoritarian Sector, etc. But geographically-localised civil wars are a 1000% better internal dissent mechanic than just being forced to live for 300 years with a bunch of whiny -5% productivity pops that you can't do anything about.

At the very least, I wish they'd do a DD explaining why those early ideas were ditched. I mean, I agree. Building politics around sectors is the original point and seems like the obvious thing to do with that system.

I'm sure there's a reason they never got around to building that mechanic. I kinda wish they'd explain it though.

 

[Jin_Cardassian]

Part of the issue with factions is that it is usually trivially easy to please your ruling ones. Other are never more than a minimal annoyance unless you are conquering really quickly or chose the wrong ascension perk (and who the hell would do that?).

An easy way to complexify this would be to have two factions for each ethic, each with opposing demands. Think of how the game has both the Supremacist and Isolationist factions for Xenophobes. It makes conquest slightly trickier and more interesting to deal with.

Of course, to do that game would need more content (policies, diplomatic options) in order to support more faction demands. Which it needs anyway.

Also, the MTTH for pops ethic shifting needs to come down, hard. 50 years is redonkulous. 5 years is a more useful number, given that this represents half a democratic election cycle.

 

[Monturiol]

Part of the issue with factions is that it is usually trivially easy to please your ruling ones.

And the reason for that is that in Stellaris, you really only have to keep one plate spinning: alloys.
As long as your alloy production is maxed, everything else doesn't really matter, so, I dunno, being forced to sign research agreements to placate the materialists or avoid tomb worlds for the spiritualists just doesn't matter. That's what makes placating them trivially easy; if it doesn't impinge on The Almighty Dollar Alloy, then any costs you incur by pleasing them aren't important costs.

But it works on the flip-side too; it's trivially easy to go through life the game NOT pleasing them. There is nothing a pissed-off faction can do to you that's worse than a drop in alloy production, so as long as it doesn't drop alloy production, who the hell cares what factions think?

THAT, I posit, is really the root cause of all the problems we have here: the fact that Stellaris (is it you that keeps saying this @methegrate ?) is a one-dimensional optimisation problem, for alloy production, which renders all other considerations ephemeral.

 

[methegrate]

THAT, I posit, is really the root cause of all the problems we have here: the fact that Stellaris (is it you that keeps saying this @methegrate ?) is a one-dimensional optimisation problem, for alloy production, which renders all other considerations ephemeral.

Certainly one of the ones who keep saying it... ; )

 

[Jin_Cardassian]

THAT, I posit, is really the root cause of all the problems we have here: the fact that Stellaris (is it you that keeps saying this @methegrate ?) is a one-dimensional optimisation problem, for alloy production, which renders all other considerations ephemeral.

Yeah, you're on the money. Happiness has got to effect production directly. Maybe have it drag down planetary production independently of political power and Stability. That way you get a degree of separation between "unhappy to the point of rebellion" vs "unhappy to the point of slacking off"

It wouldn't matter what jobs pops are working if it's not specific to jobs, but aggregated at the planet level. Tools to manage it could likewise be at the planet level, through decisions.

While we're on the subject of rebellions, an event chain leading unhappy factions to stage coups would be nice. Right now all they risk is planetary rebellion, which doesn't happen if those pops are evenly spread out instead of concentrated on particular planets. If they're spread out, but nonetheless large, then they're actually in a better position to take the government as a whole. Ditto for slave uprisings.

Basically a two-track secessionist vs coup approach to unrest could make it somewhat harder to dodge.

Another thing we could do is add an ecology system. Manufacturing degrades habitability and increases demand for amenities (bread and circuses, hospitals etc). Alloy production would likely be even worse than Consumer Goods.

All of which opens the door to new policies dealing with labor rights and environment regulations. Which could themselves be faction demands. Full circle.

 

[Pointyearedgit]

So the thread has devolved into alloy nihilism?

The question is ... how soon can I pass militarist resolutions so my alloy production can *also* give me diplomatic supremacy?

Do I ... trade alloys for favors?

 

[Monturiol]

So the thread has devolved into alloy nihilism?

The game has devolved into alloy nihilism.
Don't shoot us for noticing it, we're just the messengers.