Stellaris Dev Diary #166 - Federation Q&A

[HugsAndSnuggles]

Or it could mean giant federations fighting each other, I think that sounds pretty exciting.

Mind pointing out where devs said that AI will be more aggressive in Federations?
You see, currently, we have games going like this: no wars of note going after federation blocks form; and since those federation blocks not going anywhere - it's a stalemate. So, the concern that we won't be seeing any inter-federation wars (without mods) is a valid one.

 

[suplanter]

I will admit that I am not stoked to see that there is not an ability to unite federations into one empire peacefully. Martin mentioned this a few years ago and it is all I have been hoping for in regards to federations. Will there be a way to mod this is in? Currently there is not an easy way to mod in anything that resembles a peaceful political or diplomatic union of equals. Eu4 at least has commands like annex and inherit. As there won't be anything in the dlc is there a way we could get a command or effect that makes it easier for modders to create?

 

[Duuk]

Martin mentioned this a few years ago

I just mentioned this in another thread. Stellaris needs a "Dev Diary 0". This game has had several game directors, all with their own vision, and the game feels like it has NO actual clear design plan, no vision, no real identity.

So DLC/features are just shinies bolted on top that don't really work well with other features. This Federations DLC is, based on this Q+A, going to result in static, boring midgame where Federations are too strong to attack each other, the map will be painted, and too weak to take on the FEs. So 50-100 years of staring at your screen and clicking. Someone said, "This will be cool, look at all the cool federation mechanics!" but nobody asked, "but will it Bring The Fun?" Stellaris needs a vision. It doesn't seem to have one.

 

[The Founder]

Q: Will it be possible to build gateways in the territory of other Federation members? Or just your own space?
A: Currently it's only possible to build in your own space, but we’re looking into if it’s not too much trouble to allow building gateways in federation space as well.

Q: Is there anything about Federation budgets and federation projects - build ships or maybe a mega-project like a Dyson Sphere?
A: As much as we’d want it, there are currently no plans for shared projects like Dyson Spheres.

While adding the ability to build in each others space would be a issue even for Federations (just thinking about the Pathfinding nightmare from Gateways everywhere), what about an option to Sponsor a Federation Members Megatructure Project?
Basically you pick up the tab and they build the thing in a System of their choosing. Not sure if that should get you around Tech Resctrictions on the Sponsored Side, but it might be.
Just giving the AI the resources, runs into issues if they lack the tech. Or they waste the resources on something else.

Additional Questions:
- Can the Leaders of a Hegemon Federation integrate other Members, like they could with baseline Vassalage types? Or is integration locked out, like it is for Tributaries?
- Wich Vassal Types are eligible for being forced into a Hegemony? Tributary? Vassal? Protectorate?
If protectorates are not eligible, would they auto-join when tehy normally would reach vassal state?

 

[Bayes]

You might want to re-read the notes. All of the diplomacy changes made POSITIVE diplomacy easier. I'll wager all of the money in my pockets against all of the money in yours that wars become non-existent due to 1) too many empires having positive diplomacy meaning 2) war votes will fail.

No you are right, the stellaris team is completly incompotent and didnt anticipate how any of these changes will play out. The game is going to be impossible to enjoy because of another botched expansion and it leaves no room to be excited about anything. /s

Mind pointing out where devs said that AI will be more aggressive in Federations?
You see, currently, we have games going like this: no wars of note going after federation blocks form; and since those federation blocks not going anywhere - it's a stalemate. So, the concern that we won't be seeing any inter-federation wars (without mods) is a valid one.

I thought they said they would delay the expansion to among other things work on the AI mb.

 

[NilsFabian]

When will the real Dev Diaries start? This one feels more like a hasty filler with No's...

I'd like to see and read more about the game or enjoying a nice Stream instead of No No No

 

[BlackUmbrellas]

When will the real Dev Diaries start? This one feels more like a hasty filler with No's...

I'd like to see and read more about the game or enjoying a nice Stream instead of No No No

They asked us for questions. Then they answered them I'm on the side of that being a pretty good dev diary.

They've already shown off most if not all the new features. Not much left but bugfixing and balance tweaks until release.

Would you prefer they went back to one dev diary every TWO weeks?

 

[Pointyearedgit]

Thanks for answering the questions!
Glad to hear the streams are coming back!

 

[methegrate]

Since this is the Federation Rework Q&A, it does focus exclusively on the Federation Rework. We do have several other Q&A's planned, such as the Galactic Community one.

That makes sense, and I didn't mean to imply otherwise. The Galactic Community rework and Origins both sound interesting. As does the federation rework. That's a great addition, and federations have always had lots of room to grow.

My concern is that this is the diplomacy update that everyone has long waited for, and it barely seems to address basic diplomacy. Players have identified a few problems from day 1:

- Opinions are largely pre-determined by ethics. The opinion modifier from ethics tends to overwhelm everything else, especially since most other opinion modifiers fade over time, making diplomacy largely set in stone from the beginning of the game.

- Alliances/federations once formed tend to never break up. Nor is there any way to use diplomacy to interfere with them. As a result, most games trend towards stalemates, where the board is dominated by a handful of large alliances that no one can afford to attack.

- There's rarely anything to negotiate over except for war. Empires won't make commercial pacts and research agreements unless they already have a high opinion of you. There are no smaller agreements with which to build relations, no other trade or economic deals to make, and no incentives to negotiate with an empire you otherwise dislike. As a result, diplomacy becomes a self-reinforcing cycle and, like alliances and federations, trade deals tend to ossify because there is no way to outbid or otherwise disrupt an existing one.

- Diplomacy happens largely apart from the rest of the game. Outside of taking star systems, diplomacy is rarely about anything other than diplomacy itself. Player actions rarely impact diplomacy because empires have little, if any, economic or political relationship with each other. As a result, the typical way to shift an empire's opinion modifier is to simply spam actions that directly alter that number. There are no tradeoffs or unanticipated consequences to worry about because actions in the diplomacy screen rarely arise from or have an effect on actions outside of it.

- In general, diplomacy is self-reinforcing. This, I would argue, is the big one. Actions which boost opinion are generally reserved for empires which already have a high opinion of each other. Empires with low opinions of each other take actions that reduce those opinions further. There are few outside, unpredictable or destabilizing forces to break these feedback loops.

The update seems like it addresses some of these issues, but it also seems like it will make others worse. In particular:

- Envoys seem like they will exacerbate the diplomacy-in-isolation problem. While they might help players offset ethics predetermination, they also feel like gift spam taken to its logical extreme. Players won't send envoys to negotiate a trade agreement, or open borders or some other in-game goal. They will literally just use envoys to directly manipulate an empire's Opinion modifier until it ticks over to the right number.

- Relationship requirements for negative actions may help lock in feedback loops further. Opinion boosting actions will still be reserved for empires with high opinions of each other, but opinion reducing actions will now be reserved for empires with low opinions of each other.

- Nothing in this update appears to connect empires economically, politically or culturally. Nor does anything here seem to connect diplomacy to in-game actions. As a result, war will remain the only thing that drives conflict between empires.

***

Ultimately, I think the heart of the problem is that nothing about the current diplomatic system promotes instability, conflict or change. There is no way to make someone a better offer in the diplomacy screen, and because the system is so isolated from the rest of the game an empire's actions never touch its diplomatic relations. (Again, outside of war.) Few choices I make economically, politically or scientifically change another empire's opinion modifier, and the few that do have a negligible impact. Aside from territory there is nothing for me to want from another empire, nor is there any way for those interests to change over time.

This means that my relationship with another empire is, again, largely set in stone fairly early on. Those alliances and trade deals ossify because they self-reinforce and there is no counter-weight mechanic to pull them apart. Diplomacy needs many things, but this is what it needs most of all. The diplomacy system needs something to make it dynamic and less predictable. Instead, I get the impression that this update's goal is to make make diplomacy more mechanical and predictable.

The galactic community sounds interesting, as do the new federations, but they're features in the game. The core gameplay mechanic here, where players will spend the majority of their time and attention, is the basic diplomacy screen. This is why this update feels like (apologies) a bit of a lead balloon. This doesn't feel like it will do anything to make minute-by-minute gameplay any more interesting or dynamic. Nor, for all it’s good ideas, does this feel like it will address many of the core fixes that players have waited several years for.

 

[NilsFabian]

Would you prefer they went back to one dev diary every TWO weeks?

To be honest yes.
I don't know why they did this but, this dev diary has a uncomfortable format so it's hard to read. It is just a collection of No
and maybe I am just annoyed because I miss the old style community management by Wiz...

 

[AlleyTheToaster]

Can't wait

 

[CrazyJ]

I'm not going to form an opinion on the new dlc til i get my hands on it and i can spend an entire week playing with it . As far as i am concerned anything that improves diplomacy and leaves room for future improvements is a good thing. if the devs follow through on the performance fixes i am happy to tolerate a substandard dlc, i'd buy it just for the origins but i can imagine why not everyone would feel that way

 

[Spartan322]

I'm still waiting for an update that stops bolting on new headaches for "designers" and developers that clearly can't be managed appropriately and actually makes the game deep and dynamic. I still don't get what the actual design goal of Stellaris even is, it feels like there isn't a single game designer involved, but just a bunch of kids saying "This sounds cool" and then royally screwing it up, (which would explain the weird pivoting we keep getting) we don't need to have the game radically changed every 6 months, we just need some freaking core gameplay loop (that you may be able to extend inherently, too often things are just thrown at a wall to see what sticks) which Stellaris either consistently loses halfway through a match (not that it ever felt QA'ed at that point anyway) or it gets completely revamped again in a manner that fixes nothing. Or if you just want it to be a roleplay simulator, in the least its not that hard to create data simulation but it really feels like nobody is actually testing the designs themselves and just throw all their ideas together. You don't prototype ideas by throwing them in all at once and expecting them to come out fine. It makes the game feel more disjointed, not cohesive.

 

[HugsAndSnuggles]

I thought they said they would delay the expansion to among other things work on the AI mb.

They did, but for community (in general) the main problems with AI are its inability to handle economy and group fleets. Starnet-level aggressiveness is often considered excessive when it comes up in discussions (probably, by devs too, seeing how they never really touched diplomacy). So, I highly doubt it'll become the new standard with Federations, especially without much of a warning from dev team. That only leaves some counter mechanics as a possibility to break federation stalemate we had since 1.0 - a mechanic never developed. While I would love to see federations at war, I just don't see any indication of that happening. I guess, we'll wait and see. Perhaps, devs will enlighten us during diplomacy Q&A.

 

[methegrate]

Just so I’m making suggestions instead of only throwing stones... I think here's how I'd reorganize the system.

First, I'd have two major categories: scope and impact.

Scope: bilateral vs. unilateral
- Bilateral: any action that both parties participate in. This would include anything from treaties to trade pacts to war, as long as it involves both empires taking action.
- Unilateral: any action that one party takes on their own, but which involves or affects another empire and has a direct diplomatic effect.

Impact: military, economic or political
- Military: anything to do with taking, keeping or defending territory.
- Economic: anything to do with producing, transferring or spending resources (including research).
- Political: anything to do with managing, gaining or influencing population.

For every type of impact I would have at least one important, unilateral action that a player can take that boosts opinion and another that lowers it. Claims are, afaik, the only example of this currently in the game. This is an important military action (if you want a system you need to claim it) that lowers the opinion of the targeted empire. We need much more of this. In total we would have Military (Positive Action/Claims) Economic(Positive Action/Negative Action) Political(Positive Action/Negative Action).

The reason for this is so that empires would frequently shift the opinions of their neighbors in the course of managing their empires. We want positive and negative actions to avoid creating a one-way ratchet, and we want this to cover all three of the major aspects of empire management to ensure that all play styles influence diplomacy on a fairly regular basis. (The challenge, of course, is coming up with ways to have meaningful economic and political unilateral actions, but this is why the system needs a redesign.)

The AI would continue to weight bilateral actions as it does now, taking opinion primarily into account before it makes a deal with another empire. But it would make unilateral decisions primarily based on the value of the action itself.


Second, I'd make resource trades into percent of income trades.

With the advent of the galactic market, the only real function of resource trading is to spam gifts. I would replace that with a model based on commercial pacts. Instead of swapping lump-sum resources, empires would make resource-specific trades that boost their income based on the income of their trading partner. You can make a trade deal for any two resources, and each empire gets 10% of the other empire's income of that resource (just like commercial pacts).

For example, I have an income of 50 alloys. My trading partner has an income of 100 food. I enter a 10 year trade deal to exchange 30 income worth of alloys for 100 income worth of food. I would receive 10 food per month and they would receive 3 alloys per month off this deal.

For any given resource, an empire's total trade deals can't exceed its income. In our example above, say, I have a trade deal worth 30 of my 50 alloys per month of income. I can make other trade deals for up to the remaining 20.

By boosting income, this would make trade deals somewhat more useful. More importantly, the AI can weight this as a simple resource-for-resource exchange, creating a small-stakes way to negotiate with empires that may not be willing to sign full commercial pacts. It would also give specialist empires some clout.

To make this more viable, I would reduce the output of strategic resource buildings to between 0.5 and 0.1 of their current production. This system would only have value if empires really need to increase their income in some specific area, and by the middle game scarcity can only come from CG's, alloys and strategic resources.


Third, I'd make ethics more responsive and more unpredictable.

Gravitation: Every ethic would have a basket of actions that it individually responds to. This is already in the game in the form of policy modifiers, such as egalitarians disliking slavery or pacifists not liking a bombardment policy. I would expand this to include other buildings, policies, player actions, etc. For example, spiritualists might get an opinion boost for every tradition you adopt while egalitarians might like you less for every black site you build (or at least for every black site they know about).

The goal would not be to put a diplomatic weight on every action a player takes. Rather it would be to cause empires to gravitate towards or away from empires that actually share their interests, not merely ones which received the same setting at the outset of the game.

Guiding Ideas: Every ethic would have a guiding idea that, under the right conditions, can cause it to take otherwise-unpredictable diplomatic actions. This would be relatively randomized and would occur relatively rarely.

For every ethic this would be different. For example, militarists might have the idea of Respect Your Enemy, where at a certain, semi-randomized point of positive opinion they begin turning hostile. (They want to fight glorious battles against a worthy foe.) Or spiritualists might have Heretics, in which each gets a heretical faction that turns opinion bonuses into larger opinion maluses if they get strong enough. (Your empires grew closer when you banned AI, but the heretics worship it.)

The goal is to help address the diplomatic stalemates that Stellaris is prone to by introducing an element of controlled unpredictability. Every now and again an empire would act in a destabilizing way that nevertheless fits its narrative. Some information about an empire's guiding idea would be visible to other empires which share that ethic, otherwise, foreign empire would not see any information about another empire's guiding idea. These are philosophies largely incomprehensible to outsiders.

 

[Deckster1218]

Nice...Nice

 

[Cerinier]

Q: In the Federation or Hegemon start, will you be able to make the empires in your federation/hegemon in the Empire creation, along with your own?
A: No, you will not be able to design the other empires. They will be randomly generated and will match some of your ethics.

I really dislike the idea that the other empires are completely random but I see the problems a "Subempire" - creationtool could cause. But I would really appreciate if the function that selects the other empires for "lost colony" and "Federation" start would check the player created empire list first. This would be an easy to implement way to keep the usability of the origins high for players (like me) that do not want to have random named empires around.

To keep it less easy to mainpulate the system just make sure that the selected empires from the list only have one ethic in common for federation start and an opposed ethic for lost colony.

Just my thoughts because I like the idea of the origins but hate this random created empires with their horrible names.

 

[ragehavoc]

Doesn't seem like they added a whole lot of improvement into federations over how it used to be, no espionage and still no addition to diplomacy, but now we are FORCED to play into federations, ugh.
If they do not fix the AI PATHFINDING, this DLC is going to bomb.

 

[TheDarkMaster]

To make this more viable, I would reduce the output of strategic resource buildings to between 0.5 and 0.1 of their current production. This system would only have value if empires really need to increase their income in some specific area, and by the middle game scarcity can only come from CG's, alloys and strategic resources.

I don't think you can do this. The economy already doesn't work during the early game because you can't put a large enough percentage of your population on specialist jobs until you either get tier 2 buildings or an ecumenopolis. Empires end up with too much of the base resources with nothing to spend them on except the marketplace.

 

[Meddledom]

It pains me to say this but I'm quite a bit let down by all of this, I was hoping for a bit more depth to be honest... more interaction with the base game functions. Hoping to see more cool stuff, more "meat" in the following Diaries. Love the format though! Thanks for doing this and good job nonetheless!