Stellaris Dev Diary #174 - Federations is out, now what?

[Pyzayt]

A federation with max centralisation should almost be like one empire.

I think it'd be cool if a completely centralised Federation could be turned into a single empire; have the President take over completely.

 

[zorkon08]

Can we please have it so we can set the order of our planets in the outliner.

 

[Methone]

and being able to make full use of robots had opportunity costs that meant you didn't always want to do it.

... it did?

 

[Tzunki]

A whole bunch of QoL changes that I'd dearly love to see:

• SWAP leaders, rather than just moving one and booting the other (ending up with one unemployed leader and one empty position wherever they came from). This is just aggravating, especially if you aren't paused and your science ship instantly forgets all its orders because you wanted its Scientist for a research job.
• Move unemployed pops to the TOP of the resettlement screen. It's a pain in the butt to scroll to the bottom constantly.
• For pop-modding, allow mass-selection by PLANET, rather than only by Species. Sometimes you want everybody on a planet to be a particular template.
• On the Species screen, PLEASE allow us to collapse sub-species!
• Show research speeds for a given tech BEFORE you select them! At the very least, let us see what techs will be boosted by a research agreement. It's so annoying needing to manually cycle through every tech card in your list to see which ones you can get a bonus on.
• Don't STOP all research progress in an area just because you opened the picker! Nothing else works that way. Imagine if your shipyards halted their construction whenever you were looking at a list of ships to buy?
• Show planet DESIGNATIONS on the Resettlement and Pop Modding screens. I've taken to appending tags explaining what a planet is for to the planet name, because even with 0.25x habitable worlds, there's just too many planets to remember which ones want what kind of pops.
• Show pop HABITABILITY on the Resettlement screen. It's frustrating needing to keep track of which pop types like which planet types, and which ones have modifiers to their habitability in general, and so on. This gets especially bad with non-genocidal conquests and/or cross-breeding.
  
• Please make Encourage Growth and Distribute Luxury Goods into TOGGLED effects that modify upkeep of the relevant resources, rather than timed effects with up-front costs. Bonus: this makes their costs scale sensibly, rather than the current silly stepwise function for CGs and flat price for food whether it's a 2-pop new colony or a 200-pop ecu.
• Give us an "anti-favorite" option that actually REDUCES PRIORITY for a job, as opposed to simply closing slots. A counterpart to the "Mark as Favorite" option, so we can manage jobs with less fiddling and without actually closing jobs and then needing to re-open them to avoid unemployment.
• You gave us the (much-appreciated) ability to demote pops freely within a year of them promoting, but we can't tell who is demotable. Making that more apparent (and having them be the first to leave a job when a slot is closed, rather than needing to close all of the slots and wait to see who demotes) would be wonderful.
• Relatedly, since actually fixing the bugs where you get unemployed Specialists or Rulers due to weird events like "I upgraded my capital" is apparently hard, put in place a CHECK where, if any Specialist or Ruler pop is unemployed AND there's any other same-species pop at that stratum or above who can instantly demote, instantly demote them and put the unemployed pop in their place. So much more convenient than closing dozens of jobs, waiting for demotion, and then opening them again.
• Let us see the relative BENEFITS and COSTS of diplomatic actions when proposed by the AI! It's so annoying needing to do the dance of "Oh, you want a Research/Commerce deal with me? Let me go propose one to you so I can see whether that's a good idea...".
• ARMY MANAGER as a counterpart to the Fleet Manager.
• Don't make Armies immediately embark when created! Embarking is a free action, landing isn't. In particular, DO NOT make armies auto-embark if the system's starbase is hostile! You just end up making target practice for it, and because the transports get combat-locked you can't even land again or run away!
• Fix combat lock for transports! If they have orders, they should carry them out. If they don't have orders, they should either land or flee. Just running around like headless chickens is the WORST option.
• Just give us the ability to enact CRIME LORD deal at any time (or fix it, but this is a post about QoL, not about fixing cheese) so that you don't have to do silly stuff (like firing your Enforcers, unassigning your Governor, and bulk-firing your Workers to make them good and mad) to hit the threshold for the decision.
• Spread out Monthly Deals in the Market over the WHOLE MONTH (or something like that) so that we don't have to play the World's Worst Rhythm Game if we want to sell more than 100 food in a month for full price.
• Let us TYPE numbers! So, SO many places where it makes just so much more sense to enter a number rather than clicking little up/down buttons while holding modifier keys, or trying to place a one-time "monthly" order (that you cancel after the first of the next month) for 20 minerals so you can start that building ASAP without wasting a bunch of money on the other 80.

I cannot agree more. I would pay to be able to agree more. (A QoL DLS should always be free of charge, however. Please don't come up with bad ideas)

 

[Ixalmaris]

I hope you will look at Empire Sprawl again because currently the more planets you colonize or capture the easier sprawl becomes to manage as you hate more building slots for admin buildings which is the opposite of how it is supposed to work.

 

[DrNukeLear]

Another Galactic Community Resolution: Cessation Of Hostilities
Select an ongoing war when proposing. If the vote passes the defender and the aggressor must end the war. While the war continues both parties (and relevant allies) are in breach of Galactic Law.

 

[Ag3nt49]

Can we please have it so we can set the order of our planets in the outliner.

heck allow full reordering of things within the outliner. I like to organise fleets into battle groups, it would be nice if I could move them around so that each fleet in the BG is together.

Outliner is probably due for a cleanup as well, mid to late game there just ends up being wayyyy to much stuff in it. I'll usually just have my non-shipyard starbases permanently minimised so there's less scrolling to do

 

[Pyzayt]

Another Galactic Community Resolution: Cessation Of Hostilities
Select an ongoing war when proposing. If the vote passes the defender and the aggressor must end the war. While the war continues both parties (and relevant allies) are in breach of Galactic Law.

This is a good idea. Perhaps it allows a new peace offer of white peace that can be offered immediately: Galactic community members who don't want to be in breach of law will accept it. Those who don't, won't. Of course, if you offer it, you shouldn't be held in breach because they refused to cease fighting.

 

[Senna Seznec]

Here's an odd one for you. I spent much of a run slowly building a hegemony, and got to the point of a war in heaven, where one of the fallen empires demanded I submit, and I refused because I didn't want to break my hegemony. Well, then naturally the war started and I had to pick a side or go neutral. The incentive was strongly to go neutral, which is already dangerous, but then continued on to the potential of refactoring into the League of Non-Aligned Powers (would prefer if this didn't actually change your name but whatever, I can just change it back).

Anyway, the problem I'm getting at here is the breaking of the hegemony - I felt like I had few options but to try to unite the league given I'd be giving up actual in-game centuries of work and my win condition-of-choice if I submitted. It seems a little steep, is all I'm saying.

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

Here's an odd one for you. I spent much of a run slowly building a hegemony, and got to the point of a war in heaven, where one of the fallen empires demanded I submit, and I refused because I didn't want to break my hegemony. Well, then naturally the war started and I had to pick a side or go neutral. The incentive was strongly to go neutral, which is already dangerous, but then continued on to the potential of refactoring into the League of Non-Aligned Powers (would prefer if this didn't actually change your name but whatever, I can just change it back).

Anyway, the problem I'm getting at here is the breaking of the hegemony - I felt like I had few options but to try to unite the league given I'd be giving up actual in-game centuries of work and my win condition-of-choice if I submitted. It seems a little steep, is all I'm saying.

A federation upgraded to a certain centralisation should be able to be given the opportunity to stay Neutral as its own entity if the War in Heaven occur.

 

[Dintash]

I honestly would love it if you changed the way the Galactic Senate decides what it'll vote on next. I found it really annoying always having to wait like 10+ years for the resolution to be put on the Senate floor after it had been proposed. Or maybe add some resolutions that would change that. Also, I personally don't like how long the Galactic Senate takes on recesses. I think it would be cool if we could shorten or extend that with resolutions. It only makes sense to me to have stuff like that.

 

[BlackUmbrellas]

... it did?

Yes.

Again, robots being something EVERYONE needs to be building to be competitive is a problem 2.2 introduced. It wasn't like that before.

 

[Senna Seznec]

A federation upgraded to a certain centralisation should be able to be given the opportunity to stay Neutral as its own entity if the War in Heaven occur.

I mean, you can, you're just almost certainly gonna get attacked for it. It's the safest option, marginally, if you want to keep your existing business intact. It's just that it used to be if you submitted to a fallen empire/the khan you could put your federation back together no problem since there was no real continuity to it, but now it has a big game-long business it gets up to that gets completely reset afaik if you break it.

 

[GeorgieBest]

We found another bug, and the fix will be released in the next patch.

Great news, looking forward to it.

 

[DrNukeLear]

This is a good idea. Perhaps it allows a new peace offer of white peace that can be offered immediately: Galactic community members who don't want to be in breach of law will accept it. Those who don't, won't. Of course, if you offer it, you shouldn't be held in breach because they refused to cease fighting.

Actually I like the idea of affecting both participants. The original resolution as written allows you to impose it on two warring parties to penalise them, you can bring it on yourself and an enemy knowing it’ll harm your economy but wreck theirs, if a rival of yours is fighting someone outside of the galactic community you can use it to slow him down. The idea behind the resolution is to stop the fighting or penalise the combatants, their choice. Or you can use it defensively to secure a white peace that would otherwise be elusive.

 

[UAreDie]

It would be cool if you could pass laws within your federation that effected members, similar to the free migration policy. So you could set all members of the federation to have research agreements, or trade agreements.

Also I wish you could have federation policies that controlled things like slavery. It bugs me that as the leader of a Hegemony, when I enable free migration, my species gets enslaved by the weaker authoritarian empires inside it. Maybe have a policy where main federation species cant be enslaved, or the federation leader species cant be enslaved.

 

[mcolder]

First off, great expansion, MUCH better than last round. Few bugs but no big.

Second, is it logistically possible to merge federations? I am currently playing a game in which 2 federations have common enemies and otherwise great diplomacy between them. Would you consider Merging Federations as an option? As long as it is technically doable without major reworks. It would be something to consider.

 

[Methone]

Yes.

Again, robots being something EVERYONE needs to be building to be competitive is a problem 2.2 introduced. It wasn't like that before.

Okay, let me elaborate.

I don't remember it being different before and don't know what change in robots occurred to make you claim this.

 

[Pyzayt]

Oh, here's a thought I just had! Can we have a toggle option in the Expansion Planner to only list planets already within your territory? It's a little annoying looking for worlds to terraform, when all my options are in another empire's space.

 

[Calvax]

Oh, here's a thought I just had! Can we have a toggle option in the Expansion Planner to only list planets already within your territory? It's a little annoying looking for worlds to terraform, when all my options are in another empire's space.

Adding to this can we please get a branch office tab in the expansion planner for megacorps!