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Stellaris Dev Diary #178 - Federal improvements (UI and more!)

Hello everyone!

Today’s dev diary will show you some of the improvements we’ve made to federations for the upcoming free update!

Federation Voting
Since the release of Federations and the 2.6 update we’ve wanted to make some improvements to how voting in federations is handled. Most of the improvements are related to UI and better feedback, but there’s also been some changes to functionality.

You are now able to use Favors to increase the acceptance chance for your AI-controlled federation members.

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You are now able to use Favors to increase the acceptance chance for federation law proposals.

We’ve also changed how AI acceptance works for federation laws, so that it is more transparent and more consistent with other features in the game. We look at the AI attitude a lot more now, and it will affect which laws the AI is attracted towards. For example, militaristic empires, or those with either Honorbound Warriors or Federation Builders personalities will be more likely to accept a higher fleet contribution law.

Generally speaking, the best way for you to pass new federation laws is to get the Federation Cohesion to 90 or above, and then suggest a new law change.

When it comes to suggesting changed, the AI will still not attempt to suggest changes very often, unless they are the federation president.

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The AI will generally not want to increase Centralization unless Cohesion is 90 or higher. Cohesion also directly affects the acceptance chance by a factor of x0.25 (100 cohesion equals +25 acceptance).

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The UI for voting on war declarations has received a face-lift. It’s now more clear which war goal is used, and you can see a summary of the target of the war, and which their allies are. This should hopefully make it easier for you to decide if you are in favor of the war or not.

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Whenever a federation law has been voted on, you will now get a pop-up that clearly informs you on what the results of the vote were, and how your federation allies voted.

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We’ve also improved the feedback you get whenever your federation unlocks a new level.

Joint Operations
Something we wanted to do, but couldn’t do for 2.6 due to lack of time, was to add some more flavor events to federations. We had some cool ideas for things we wanted to try, and we’re very happy that we’ve been able to add some events for the upcoming 2.7 update.

Joint Operations are events to which each member of a federation can contribute, and the types of events will depend on your federation type.

Research Co-operatives have the chance to engage in a joint archaeological dig across their region of federated space. Galactic Unions and Research Co-operatives alike may also find themselves dealing with strange new stellar phenomena at their federation capitals. Hegemonies will have the option of a grand project to celebrate cultural uniformity – and to see who’s still willing to tow the line. Military Alliances can partake in a joint training exercise, while Trade Leagues may seek to improve their collective worth through harmonized logistics.

In all cases, collaboration will bolster cohesion within your federation – however members may sometimes be tempted by individual gains, and further challenges may arise if the federation does not act as one.

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The beginning of a joint operation for the Research Cooperative!

Origins
A small change we’ve made, albeit probably a welcomed one, is to make it far less likely for the leader of a Common Ground or Hegemony start to be blocked off by their federation members. It’s very likely that they will have at least one open hyperlane to an unexplored star system.

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That’s it for this week! Next week we’ll be back with some more information regarding the upcoming free update!
 
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Nobody asked for these features -- we want more potent AI and bugfixes:
I do want them. These are improvements (or even call them fixes to the UX) that are actually needed. The Federation Laws are really hard to understand as they are now... and the improvement over resolution output is more than welcome
 
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  1. Will the commercial pact /research pacts get a UI update? Currently you can't see what you're getting out of them unless you propose it yourself (or only have 1 and do some mental maths with the tooltips)
    • Really, what we could do with, is a tab under the government menu showing a breakdown of inflows / outflows from all trade deals, vassal income, Federation income, market income (standing orders) & any active pacts. It gets messy later in the game with many sources.
  2. Will we see anywhere how long the current federal president has left in office? Or how long to the next federal election. (I don't think this is shown anywhere currently?)
  3. Can favours be used by junior members in a hegemony to convince other federal AIs to Rebel collectively against their overlord?
    • Edit: or even let us use favours to convince AIs to agree to go to war, both in and out of a federation (assuming forces built up etc).
Small suggestion for another use for favours: let vassals send favours to their lieges as a diplomatic option/trade, to postpone integration by their liege for a time (e.g. by 1-2 years per favour)
 
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While you're taking a look at the UI, it'd be absolutely terrific if windows that show you a sum of the modifiers lumped same modifiers together. So, for example, in the GC "galactic modifiers" - having two entries for +/-weight from economy is making the total modifiers hard(er) to read, considering that window is rather cramped. To the point of "I never use it". Another two examples: +naval cap from Anchorages (this actually breaks the UI in the lategame...) and +diplomatic weight from branch office buildings. It's always the same amount, why not instead of having a separate line for every entry lump them together to like "Anchorages (x N): +4N"? Pretty please?
 
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That seems like some great changes.

I was wondering if we could an Origine where you start in a trade federation?

and maybe make it cheaper to have certain agrements with your federation members. Like research agrements for non-science federations and trade agrements for none-trade federations. Or maybe make it law like migration.
 
Federation fleet contribution percentages are wasting fleet capacity, ex we have 5 members with 1000 fleet cap each, federation law passes for 30% contribution, now we have -1500 capacity loss across members, but only +600 for federation due to hard cap. We need either to remove hard cap, or introduce more steps, like 5-10-15-20-25-30
 
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Please, please, please add in a mechanism to vote for ending a long running war where the enemy is at 100% exhaustion, but the AI keeps going until both sides get to 100%. This can cause Federation wars to drag on for decades longer than they really need to, especially if the AI either can't be bothered to capture planets or systems with claims or they physically can't due to access or they don't have the strength to do so.

Currently this is the major reasons I don't enjoy being in a federation, the wars are easy to get into, but almost impossible to get out of until both sides are at 100% exhaustion, unless you are the war leader.

Similar to this, can we get a notification about who is being declared on and why? I've been in several fed wars now where I had no idea what's going on ><
 
Federation fleet contribution percentages are wasting fleet capacity, ex we have 5 members with 1000 fleet cap each, federation law passes for 30% contribution, now we have -1500 capacity loss across members, but only +600 for federation due to hard cap. We need either to remove hard cap, or introduce more steps, like 5-10-15-20-25-30

This! Or if you keep hard cap, that low/med/high refers to hard cap divided by number of members
 
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The UI for voting on war declarations has received a face-lift. It’s now more clear which war goal is used, and you can see a summary of the target of the war, and which their allies are. This should hopefully make it easier for you to decide if you are in favor of the war or not.

Little QOL improvements like this are really good :) could we please get a few more for war? In particular it would be very helpful to know in advance, and be able to check during a war, what exactly our wargoals are. Federation wars can really drag on due to the "claiming unoccupied systems/planets" modifier, but there's no easy way to tell which enemy systems our allies are claiming. If claimed systems could be marked on the galaxy map for the duration of a war that would be great.
 
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Shouldnt pacifist empires be more likely to increase federation fleet cap due to defence cooperation? Militarists have their own fleet cap higher so they would be less likely to decrease it and decrease their own military power.
 
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Favours need a rework in how they operate. For one, they need to exchange diplomatic power from the empire the favour is called from.

Secondly, they really need to restrict favour exchanges to only be bought via influence in the trade offer screen, and remove the influence cost of using them when calling them in.

That way, you can't exploit them by piling a load of resources into an empire and buy them outright, they are more powerful so you won't need as many and with the correct influence cost per favour, it restricts the amount that can be purchased at once, and makes it more of a deliberate decision to build them up over time.
 
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Can I spend favors on membership elections? ie - adding a new member to the Federation?
 
  1. Will the commercial pact /research pacts get a UI update? Currently you can't see what you're getting out of them unless you propose it yourself (or only have 1 and do some mental maths with the tooltips)
    • Really, what we could do with, is a tab under the government menu showing a breakdown of inflows / outflows from all trade deals, vassal income, Federation income, market income (standing orders) & any active pacts. It gets messy later in the game with many sources.
  2. Will we see anywhere how long the current federal president has left in office? Or how long to the next federal election. (I don't think this is shown anywhere currently?)
  3. Can favours be used by junior members in a hegemony to convince other federal AIs to Rebel collectively against their overlord?
    • Edit: or even let us use favours to convince AIs to agree to go to war, both in and out of a federation (assuming forces built up etc).
Small suggestion for another use for favours: let vassals send favours to their lieges as a diplomatic option/trade, to postpone integration by their liege for a time (e.g. by 1-2 years per favour)

For your second point on seeing the term lengths if you look at the term length law in the laws screen it should show you that info in the tooltip
 
Three UI improvements I'd like to see:
  1. How much time is left in the current federation president's term
  2. Who is going to be the next federation president
  3. A notification when the presidency changes
 
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Federation Voting
When I read this headline, I had really hoped to read, that it's possible for human and AI players to abstain from voting, like it's already done with resolutions in the galactic community. If the AI would abstain in the range of -49 to 0, that would already be a huge boon for federations.
 
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Nobody asked for these features -- we want more potent AI and bugfixes:
this is free update, features can be dumped in paid DLC
Yes, Karen, I wish PDX would understand we want their non-coders to do something else with their time.

i made these.png
 
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I will second that it's pretty important to be able to see the value of a commercial pact.

If someone else sends you one, you have no idea how much it is worth--so you have to do it yourself.....

And, even then, there still needs to be a way to see the value of each individual commercial pact on its own, as the game progresses.

If I'm giving something like 500+ energy credits, and I'm only getting like 5 energy credits back---at some point, I might want to re-evaluate the deal.
 
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Can we get a section in the fed UI that makes it absolutely clear who and when the next president will be? This all sounds like cool new stuff but seriously that should have been in there day 1.
 
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