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Stellaris Dev Diary #16 - Colony Events

Events in Stellaris will not be limited to the Anomalies you find in space. Another event category that you will encounter as you play the game are colony events. Fairly self-explanatory, colony events are events that can trigger on your colonies. Our goal with these events is to provide a bit of identity to the planets you colonize, and set them further apart.

Some events will have situations that you can respond to in a number of ways, and in many cases you will have to deal with the fallout (positive or negative) of your choices in follow-up events that can fire many years later.

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Minutes from the Board of Inquiry into the loss of colony NSD-578 (New Albion)
2279.244, 14:01 hours local station time

GIDDINGS, AMANDA (Advocate General, ISFA)
State your name for the record, please.

BORLAND, S. ERIC (PN-2344-D-1)
Eric Borland.

GIDDINGS
You served as the planetary governor of NSD-578, otherwise known as ‘New Albion’ to its inhabitants, for a period of seven years. Is this correct?

BORLAND
It is.

GIDDINGS
As I’m sure you’re aware, all contact was lost with New Albion four months ago, less than a year after your governorship ended. The relief expedition, led by the cruiser Vikramaditya, found no trace of the colonists.

BORLAND
I am aware of this, yes.

SWEENEY, LEONARD (Senior Representative, RCC)
We were hoping that you would be able to shed some light on what happened, Mr. Borland. The disappearance of an entire colony with over 100,000 inhabitants is a source of… some concern to us, as I’m sure you understand.

BORLAND
As I’ve said at all the other hearings you’ve put me through, these are things that can happen when you colonize a new planet. How many times do you want me to say this? There are always risks involved, especially when a colony is young!

ISHIKAWA, MIYU (Junior Commissioner, GTSA)
Would you care to elaborate?

BORLAND
It’s very simple. We are dealing with planets that are completely alien. Their ecosystems are still being mapped, and in many cases the planets in question have been visited, or even inhabited, by other spacefaring cultures.

ISHIKAWA
I’m not sure I see how this pertains to the situ-

BORLAND
The orbital surveys our Science Ships perform only reveal the tip of the iceberg. Once your colony starts growing, and you have thousands of colonists running around in the wild building settlements, you will sometimes run into things that weren’t in the survey reports. Look at what happened on Las Veredas, for example.

SWEENEY
I’m not quite up to speed on events from that sector. What exactly happened there?

HAGNER, L. TIMOTHY (Senior Investigator, BRSF)
I believe they found an old drone on the surface.

BORLAND
Not just one - there was a whole fleet. The drones evidently thought our colony belonged to whoever had originally built them, as they began to sporadically assist our colonists by gathering minerals and terraforming uninhabitable sections of the surface.

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SWEENEY
But it sounds like that had a positive effect on the development of the Las Veredas colony. What happened on New Albion is quite the opposite.

BORLAND
Of course it is, you pompous fool! We’re dealing with the unknown here! Our colonists will sometimes find that the planet they settled is even more valuable than the initial survey indicated, like when prospectors on Acrisia unearthed an intact battleship.

HAGNER
Really now, Mr. Borland, you need to -

BORLAND
Other times, the outcome can be disastrous, like when the colonists of Xianyang activated that ancient abandoned terraforming equipment, only to discover that the aliens who built it breathed ammonia!

GIDDINGS
Sit down, Mr. Borland! Sit down, or I will have security restrain you -

BORLAND
So what do I think happened on New Albion? I haven’t the slightest idea! Maybe the colonists were enslaved and brought underground by some kind of subterranean civilization. Maybe they were all consumed by a type of predator that hadn’t been encountered before! All I know is that while you’re sitting here safe and sound on your fat asses in low Earth orbit, there are… no, get your hands off me! Let me finish! There are colonists out there who -

GIDDINGS
Remove Mr. Borland from the room! The rest of us will reconvene in ten minutes.

BORLAND
<unintelligible shouting>

stellaris_dev_diary_15_03_20160111_event_3.jpg


Next week Game Director Henrik "Doomdark" Fåhraeus will tell to you about War, Peace, Influence and Claims!

Because of reasons, the "War, Peace, Influence and Claims!" Dev Diary has been postponed. The next Dev Diary will be about the ship designer instead. - BjornB
 
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JonathanPalfrey said:
Thanks for the info, but I'm worried about a game riddled with Paradox events. I've come across these things in Crusader Kings II: something happens and you get a choice of a few responses. Sometimes there seems no way to make an intelligent choice; and sometimes it seems that you get an equally bad result whatever you choose.

For me, playing a game means trying to make intelligent decisions. If the game gives me no basis for making an intelligent decision, or if the decision doesn't matter (!), then I wish that decision point wasn't in the game.
Click to expand...
Well if you are talking about Ck2 events specifically then the options are quite often determined by your character. If your Duke has a low Stewardship and there is a problem with collecting tithes then chances are you won't get a good option in that event. Events in EU are more similar to what I imagine Stellaris events to be. All options can be argued as being a good choice based off your RP/Perspective. Also there are some events that ALWAYS have a poor outcome, and that is as it should be. No-one is so blessed that everything that happens to them ends up awesome.
 
KonradKurze202 said:
Well if you are talking about Ck2 events specifically then the options are quite often determined by your character. If your Duke has a low Stewardship and there is a problem with collecting tithes then chances are you won't get a good option in that event. Events in EU are more similar to what I imagine Stellaris events to be. All options can be argued as being a good choice based off your RP/Perspective. Also there are some events that ALWAYS have a poor outcome, and that is as it should be. No-one is so blessed that everything that happens to them ends up awesome.
Click to expand...

All I'm saying is that a game is about making intelligent decisions. If I'm given a decision to make, and there's no way I can choose intelligently between the options available, then it's a waste of my time and I don't want to be offered that decision. This can happen if all options give equally bad (or equally good) results; or if some options are better than others but I lack information and can only choose at random. The program is capable of making random choices without my assistance.
 
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JonathanPalfrey said:
All I'm saying is that a game is about making intelligent decisions. If I'm given a decision to make, and there's no way I can choose intelligently between the options available, then it's a waste of my time and I don't want to be offered that decision. This can happen if all options give equally bad (or equally good) results; or if some options are better than others but I lack information and can only choose at random. The program is capable of making random choices without my assistance.
Click to expand...
I think you are missing the point. In CK2 you are your character. When you make a choice he is making that choice. The purpose of not having a good choice is because your character is faced with a problem he has no expertise in solving. Its Role Playing. I'm pretty much 100% certain there have been times in your life where you made stupid decisions (unless your a super intelligent alien). Why should games be so different than reality? If you aren't interested in playing a role and instead just want to paint the map then a lot of CK2 isn't gonna be of direct interest to you. Why would you take seduction focus and sleep with your vassal's wife when he's gonna get mad and might crush you? 'Cause its what your sex-crazed Duke wants to do :)
If you don't like a particular feature that doesn't mean it shouldn't be in the game, no game is catered 100% toward a single individual.
 
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KonradKurze202 said:
I think you are missing the point. In CK2 you are your character. When you make a choice he is making that choice. The purpose of not having a good choice is because your character is faced with a problem he has no expertise in solving. Its Role Playing. I'm pretty much 100% certain there have been times in your life where you made stupid decisions (unless your an super intelligent alien). Why should games be so different than reality? If you aren't interested in playing a role and instead just want to paint the map then a lot of CK2 isn't gonna be of direct interest to you. Why would you take seduction focus and sleep with your vassal's wife when he's gonna get mad and might crush you? 'Cause its what your sex-crazed Duke wants to do :)
If you don't like a particular feature that doesn't mean it shouldn't be in the game, no game is catered 100% toward a single individual.
Click to expand...
^ this!
Its soooo boring if you always know whats coming and always know which option's the best...
And its even more boring if you can't deliberately do something extremly stupid just for fun or rp reasons.
 
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Will there be any way for us to define our species as living underground? Say, a trait.
 
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KonradKurze202 said:
I think you are missing the point. In CK2 you are your character. When you make a choice he is making that choice. The purpose of not having a good choice is because your character is faced with a problem he has no expertise in solving. Its Role Playing. I'm pretty much 100% certain there have been times in your life where you made stupid decisions (unless your a super intelligent alien). Why should games be so different than reality? If you aren't interested in playing a role and instead just want to paint the map then a lot of CK2 isn't gonna be of direct interest to you. Why would you take seduction focus and sleep with your vassal's wife when he's gonna get mad and might crush you? 'Cause its what your sex-crazed Duke wants to do :)
If you don't like a particular feature that doesn't mean it shouldn't be in the game, no game is catered 100% toward a single individual.
Click to expand...

If you think that making decisions at random is fun, you're free to express that opinion and Paradox is free to take note of it. Similarly, if I don't think it's fun (which I don't), I'm free to express that opinion and Paradox is equally free to take note of it (or not).

Paradox doesn't have to cater for me specifically, and isn't going to; I'm merely one customer expressing an opinion, just as you are. I suppose there are some customers who share my opinion, and some customers who share yours.

Frankly, I'm not interested in what you call role playing. It's me playing this game, I make the decisions, and I make them the way I want to make them, within the constraints that the game gives me. If I think it's fun to do something stupid, OK, I'll do something stupid in order to have fun, but I'm not interested in trying to guess what my character wants to do. My character provides the body, I provide the brain, and the brain is in control.

If you think it's fun to do whatever you think your character wants to do, that's fine. We should all play the game the way we want to play it. But I don't have to play it your way, and you don't have to play it my way.

Regarding Stellaris, it's natural that you want it to be your kind of game, and I want it to be my kind of game. I suppose Paradox will be happiest if it somehow manages to satisfy both of us. That way, it maximizes sales.
 
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I want xenomorphs! :D
 
JonathanPalfrey said:
I make the decisions, and I make them the way I want to make them, within the constraints that the game gives me.
Click to expand...
So you are happy with the way it is, because you are making decisions within the constraints the game has placed. Or you are being disingenuous. In CK2 your low Stewardship ruler has to solve a banking/tax/money issue: his only choices suck because he is an idiot. That is the constraint the game places, and it will be probably be even more forgiving in Stellaris, just rank up your scientists before attempting the Super Difficult anomaly and you have a good chance at success. That is the constraint the game places.
 
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KonradKurze202 said:
So you are happy with the way it is, because you are making decisions within the constraints the game has placed. Or you are being disingenuous. In CK2 your low Stewardship ruler has to solve a banking/tax/money issue: his only choices suck because he is an idiot. That is the constraint the game places, and it will be probably be even more forgiving in Stellaris, just rank up your scientists before attempting the Super Difficult anomaly and you have a good chance at success. That is the constraint the game places.
Click to expand...

it can suck, but is the way Crusader Kings (1 and 2) work.

when Stellaris will be out we'll see how it will work.
 
KonradKurze202 said:
In CK2 your low Stewardship ruler has to solve a banking/tax/money issue: his only choices suck because he is an idiot.
Click to expand...

That's not my complaint. If my character's an idiot then fair enough, there are things he can't do. However, if at some point there's no useful choice that he can make, why waste my time by displaying a window about it?

My complaint about the events in CK2 is that too many of them are time-wasters, falling into one of the following categories:

1. There are various choices but I've learned by experience that it makes no difference which I choose, the results are about the same.
2. There are various choices but one of them is obviously always best.
3. There are various choices but I've learned by experience that one of them is always best.

The ideal event should require even an experienced player to think a bit; and thinking a bit should enable him to make a better choice than choosing without thinking. But many of the actual events are time-wasters that don't require thought, or don't reward thought. Better to get rid of these and speed up the game. I'm not looking for a frantic fast-paced game of quick reactions, but CK2 is a very slow game that could benefit from fewer pointless interruptions.
 
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