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

[Pale Blue]

Can we get a psionic focused origin? Like starting with a psionic ruler/psionic speciality researcher, some zro deposits, the psionic barrier tech or a modifier for better shroud outcomes? Maybe your race even made a pact with a shroud God and starts with a shroud pact?

 

[BlackUmbrellas]

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.

I dunno what to tell you. A lot of changes have built up over time to make robots as overpowered and nessecary to an economy as they are, and I very DISTINCTLY remember that not always being the case. It used to be that you could play the game without building robots and still economically compete against empires that were building them.

Like, uh. A rundown of factors contributing to robotic power creep:

• Robots didn't have traits. This meant that their resource production was lower than an optimized organic.
• Organic growth was accelerated by surplus food, making it faster than robotic growth on a per-POP level.
• Ships used to cost minerals, making producing a lot of robots a direct cut to your shipbuilding budget/reserve.
  
• Robots and organics competed for limited planetary space and it was difficult for most empires to displace organic POPs to make way for machine ones to replace them. Growing/acquiring a large organic population necessarily prevented you from building a lot of robots.
• The Galactic Market allows for unlimited conversion of all resources into energy, making it easier to power a large robotic workforce.

In 2.2 onwards, raw POP count almost directly translates into economic potential. Single-POP growth and robotic POP assembly means that robots are the ONLY way to truly "double" your POP growth (whereas before 2.2 it was possible to outpace robotic production through a combination of multispecies empires and surplus food supply).

 

[G S Palmer]

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.

100% agree. I had really hoped this would be part of the base expansion.

 

[CalicoGray]

I really like the update so far. A couple things:
1. A way to ban non-citizen species from getting ruler jobs!
2. Re-scaling of some opinion modifiers to take advantage of the fact that large nominal opinion values are more meaningful now. For instance, trust caps might stand to be slightly higher, as might
3. Fed fleet still doesn't really scale well at endgame. Not exactly sure how to solve this though.

 

[Methone]

Robots didn't have traits. This meant that their resource production was lower than an optimized organic.

Sure, but you could grow them alongside your organic pops, so you max out earlier, no?

Organic growth was accelerated by surplus food, making it faster than robotic growth on a per-POP level.

Sure, but you could still only grow pops on so many tiles - and the more tiles your meatbags grew on, the slower it was.

Ships used to cost minerals, making producing a lot of robots a direct cut to your shipbuilding budget/reserve.

Sure, but you were supposed to be rushing minerals anyway.

I dunno. Maybe I was just playing really badly but I always sprung for robots whenever I could.

 

[klopkr]

That bug fixing patch better include a fix for the ghost shipyards in the fleet manager, CB's being broken for federations, most ascension paths and techs being useless for the voidborn as they don't effect habitats at all, and the stupid GC sanction spam.

Afaik the last two hot patches barely did anything so it's weird to stop them after the next one till may.

 

[BlackUmbrellas]

Sure, but you could grow them alongside your organic pops, so you max out earlier, no?

You wouldn't be "maxed-out", though. Robotic POP resource production couldn't match a properly engineered organic POP - meaning that if you filled your slots with robots, they'd be producing less than those slots would if filled with the right kinds of organics. Ergo, robots were not ECONOMICALLY a purely superior option.

Sure, but you were supposed to be rushing minerals anyway.

Yes, but it was a more immediate tradeoff economically to build a robot instead of a ship.

I dunno. Maybe I was just playing really badly but I always sprung for robots whenever I could.

I recall a LOT of threads where people showed their work crunching numbers, and generally a well-run authoritarian or xenophobic slave empire would be equally if not more competitive than a similarly well-run robotic empire.

The point being though, that you wouldn't be COMPLETELY LEFT IN THE DUST if you didn't constantly manufacture robots like you are now. It was entirely possible to play a strong game without building a zillion robots.

 

[Gromit]

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.

Solid list, other than fixing bugs this is what they should be focusing on. It's a shame Paradox doesn't seem to ever want to work on this area at all though.

 

[Brent15]

Small request, I would like to be able to name my origin created federation before I press play for prescripted species.

 

[robocelot]

Went through the hassle of creating an account here just to ask for this:
A mechanic for votes on when to end a war another federation member started.
and if we're just daydreaming. Generally have persuasion mechanics among you federation members in whatever way you guys come up with. There are a lot of occasions now where I just feel like I should somehow be able to persuade my allies on diplomatic matters.

Tons of fun with the update/expansion thanks for the great content

 

[Necra Mancie]

I would very much like to offer some suggestions:

1. Please balance out the Void Dweller origin. If nothing else, revamp Habitats so that they don't suck. Habitats in general are so horrible compared to what they used to be. They're not worth building, using, or picking as an origin "planet" right now. Starborn: Improved Voidtouched, one of the mods for Stellaris on Steam, takes the Void Dweller origin and Habitats and makes them playable. Please, go take notes from that mod. Seriously.

2. Phantom build queues. Fix. NOW. I'm tired of it registering my fleet at "max cap" when it is not.

3. Can we please get some more options for the Elf race located in the Humanoid list? Phenotypes, hair colors, etc? They really, really need some love.

4. Please don't hunt the Space Whales.

 

[robocelot]

Solid list, other than fixing bugs this is what they should be focusing on. It's a shame Paradox doesn't seem to ever want to work on this area at all though.

There's a bit of a problem with selecting a planet instead of a species for modding and that's that the species all have different traits to begin with. When you've ascended you basically have blank slates so that's cool, but even then some species still have psionic/cyborg/lithoid that can't be applied to other species.

 

[DrNukeLear]

Crazy idea. Would a series of “super resolutions” which curtail or enhance the powers of the GC be interesting?

 

[Maethendias]

honestly a big one:

let us convert conquered robot pops as a machine empire...

 

[VoodooDog]

i dont enjoy the voting in the galactic community. i basically spend zero attention to it after a few votes. it happens way to often and is just meaningless in my opinion.

 

[SeekingEtermity]

There's a bit of a problem with selecting a planet instead of a species for modding and that's that the species all have different traits to begin with. When you've ascended you basically have blank slates so that's cool, but even then some species still have psionic/cyborg/lithoid that can't be applied to other species.

Oh, obviously it would only apply to variants of the same base species on the planet. However, often you don't have all that many different base species on a planet, but you do have a ton of subspecies (gestalt are the obvious case here, but it can occur with normal empires too, especially xenophobes) and it's annoying to say "Apply template X to: all of the A on planet 14, and all of the B on planet 14, and all of the C on planet 14, and all of the D on planet 14, and...". Sorry, thought that was obvious. Of course you wouldn't be able to mod across base species.

 

[Brael]

I know this is really for federations specifically but both the main and beta branches are still unplayable with desyncs. A major reason I bought the previous DLC, after swearing off all Paradox games until this gets fixed is that it was specifically citied as having fixes for this issue.

If it can't be fixed, perhaps the solution is to go EU4 style and have an ingame resync button? At least then we wouldn't be forced to exit and reload.

My latest game, 600 stars, 2 players in MP on rather fast internet connections. The year is 2390 and desyncs are happening every couple days. Not even at the end game yet and it's literally unplayable. It's a shame too, because the game is so much fun but if the game can't be finished, then what's the point? I've owned the game for 2.5 years now and play exclusively in multiplayer. I have never been able to finish even a single game due to all of the desync issues it has been plagued with.

Edit: As I typed this we just loaded in for one final try. Loaded in and hit start. The game was still paused at start and it still desynced (although with construction rather than random count as the error).

 

[DarkLapiris]

Species tab is useless for telling where any pops are located. I have void dweller species on planets with literally no way to tell what planet they may be located on. This was available at launch?

 

[Pale Blue]

i dont enjoy the voting in the galactic community. i basically spend zero attention to it after a few votes. it happens way to often and is just meaningless in my opinion.

It would be enough if the reminder in the top screen were more visible when it is time to vote. Maybe something similar to the shroud reminder?

 

[Pale Blue]

Do you consider buffing life-seeded? It was bad before, but now it is even worse. The default prosperous unification has a modifier that is better than Gaia world's happiness and production bonus, while also giving reduced amenities. You also give up the bonus pops and districts, the ability to colonize with your main species and all you get in return is a slightly larger planet and 3 rare deposits that aren't that useful.

I really like the life seeded idea, but it is just so bad.