Stellaris Dev Diary #226 - Custodians & Next Steps

[Bezborg]

I disagree, again there are plenty of examples throughout sci-fi of civilisations and cultures surviving and thriving in their own small bubbles of territory, successfully fending off much larger hostile powers, and the entire concept of Stellaris is a sci-fi sandbox letting the player engage with whatever tropes and ideas they like. Some may be harder than others, obviously, but if playing wide and aggressive was the only way to enjoy the game it would just be another space-themed map painter.

I agree, tall gameplay should be viable. It can be hard, sure, but viable.

It's such an old trope, sci fi and others.

 

[jc_madden]

One way to connect with the community would be to mark off suggestions as implemented.

 

[Pancakelord]

I mean in game. there is no way to really scale up istead of wide. No way to make your planets better, make your pops more productive or make your fleets better in ways that don't work better with more. Tall ist just less wide and all ways to chagne that are just bad, don't work or jarring pointless penalties so far.

I agree. But IMO we don't have a way to scale up, because we're already scaling our planets upwards for free. We don't need to sacrifice expansion (or anything really) to develop our planets/pops.

• We (now) start with the ability to colonise almost anything [a few indi districts offset the habitability CG costs readily enough].
• We quickly unlock the techs for T2/3 capitals, they effectively cost nothing to run,
  • "advanced" worlds are largely indistinct from colonies.
  • This makes the scifi trope of "core/glitterworlds" vs "shitty rimworlds" a non-starter. It also removes any opportunity cost or strategy from planet designations AND planet capital upgrades, as its a largely free action you can also change for free at any time.
• Via cities/industrial districts its quick and easy to unlock building slots and coat a fresh "rimworld" colony in labs or heavy industry, you'll be limited by pops before minerals, usually.
• It costs influence to expand (claims/outposts) but its free to colonise or develop your own worlds, so you never need to compromise going wide with "tall" - beyond the trivial mineral cost.

And for further planet/pop enhancements

• Any empire can already fully develop a planet right away for no real extra cost,
  • Creating an Agriworld (where 1-2 usually cover your food needs for a "decent" portion of a game) or other kind of resource world, is a pretty cheap prospect, for a [capped] exponential payoff (if you start stacking like-for-like modifiers).
  • For example, there is no gating how many districts you can spam out on a planet (beyond size/blockers). There is no reason to be able to build 25 farm districts with just a colony shelter. You could easily have something like:
    • T0 Colony shelter - can build up to 25% of available districts. Planet Sprawl = 1.0x [or hypothetical unity upkeep].
    • T1 capital - can build up to 50% of available districts. Planet sprawl = 1.5x [or hypothetical unity upkeep]. [50% avail districts for hives, that start at T1 capital]
    • T2 capital - ^75% districts, 2.0x planet sprawl [or hypothetical unity upkeep]. [100% avail districts for hives, that go up to T2 capital]
    • T3 capital - ^100% districts, 3.0x planet sprawl [or hypothetical unity upkeep].
• Terraforming is a joke, and offers few to no real incentives (no making a "Tier I - V" continental world [or whatever] with bonuses or special features). Gaia worlds are also currently the best due to habitability/CG-upkeep-reduction making this irrelevant.
  • You could randomly find the 9 base types of planets in the game, as now, but with a lower chance to find "higher Tiers"(or some better word) of say oceanic worlds, which offer endemic bonuses [like +x1/x2/x3...x5% bonuses to food/energy/mineral output [per planet climate], unlock additional districts, or affect pop-properties like amenities, base trade output, mult of housing etc.
    • And terraforming techs could let you enhance this up to Tier 5 of a given world-type. (e.g. a T5 desert world, making it a hugely powerful energy hub), making advanced terraforming less about changing planet classes and more about increasing planet potency - at the [scalar] cost of unity in addition to some resource (energy, or terraforming gas/liquids?), so this is very valuable to do if you have a few worlds, but if you're going wide, you'll not have the resources to sustain this over many worlds, without it destroying your unity/income/sprawl. You'd be better off going wide and just making a few specific worlds "high value".
• Gene editing (and robo-modding, to a lesser degree) is clunky as hell.

In my eyes, "Wide" is the only possible way to play in Stellaris, because "tall" (planet & some pop development) is already ... free for all empires.

• or lacks sufficient incentives/mechanics (terraforming),
• or is too much effort/micro for the payoff (pop-modding),
• or has too little game impact/player control (ship ranks - they have little overall benefit, no way to "train" your forces up to elite ranks [a la hoi4], or scale up ship FP inversely with naval cap, to have a small but potent force).

A lot of planet development [limiting #districts you can build, types of designations - hell, tiers of designation effects - etc] could be gated behind

1. using more soc tecs[or a tradition/AP giving it sooner], to slow the rate of power curve growth
   1. e.g. Planet designations "Tech world I / II / III [5/10/15% SCI output]" - Designations DO support triggers, you can have a planet designation "listen" for you having X soc-tech and give you that extra sci-bonus if the tech has been researched.
2. locking X# district construction behind the capital tier (see above) and having the capital cost influence to upgrade or unity upkeep.
3. turning terraforming in to a dedicated ascension path/way-to-play, letting you upgrade through tiers of planet_types, giving various bonuses.
4. scaling sprawl/unity costs as planets get more districts - or higher terraforming tiers - (so you're forced to have more shitty colonies, unless you have a small empire, or a specific combo of APs and traditions).

 

[guiskj]

@Pancakelord I agree with everything you said. The tough part is that putting some of those restrictions now will feel like a punishment to a large section of the player-base.

When the player-base is accustomed to developing planets to its fullest easily, adding a bunch of gates to balance the game design will just feel wrong, because the players won't want to change how they play, therefore will be slapped with what, to them, just feels like extra hoops they didn't have to worry before.

Just look at how the pop growth rework went. The player-base was used to getting pops at a consistent rate and when that was "taken away" all hell broke loose both for good and crappy reasons.

I personally think that we are at a point in Stellaris where, for the most part, fixes need to be additive rather than constrictive. Meaning, if you want to make playing tall rewarding, you need to add cool things for that playstyle, rather than removing things from the wide playstyle. Even if the latter would result in a more cohesive design.

 

[Tech Noir Synth]

Can't you do this already? Can't you (for example) make 30 custom empires, set them all to force spawn, start a game with 15 AI empires, and the game will pick 15 of the ones you set to force spawn? I swear I've seen people talk about doing just that.

I said I want the option to have the game select only from player-created empires. If you select 15 player-created empires and select more than 16 empires in the galaxy, then you will have the AI randomly generate empires. And thats exactly the issue. Because the generation tends to create the opposite of your empire ethics. More Spiriualists if you are Materialists and the other way around. Instead of having a variety of empires. So the only way to have a real variety is to force it into the game - which also means you already know all existing empires and there is a lot less fun in discovery.

Atleast from my experience, there are way too many Hegemonic Imperialist empires.

 

[Pancakelord]

@Pancakelord I agree with everything you said. The tough part is that putting some of those restrictions now will feel like a punishment to a large section of the player-base.

When the player-base is accustomed to developing planets to its fullest easily, adding a bunch of gates to balance the game design will just feel wrong, because the players won't want to change how they play, therefore will be slapped with what, to them, just feels like extra hoops they didn't have to worry before.

Just look at how the pop growth rework went. The player-base was used to getting pops at a consistent rate and when that was "taken away" all hell broke loose both for good and crappy reasons.

I personally think that we are at a point in Stellaris where, for the most part, fixes need to be additive rather than constrictive. Meaning, if you want to make playing tall rewarding, you need to add cool things for that playstyle, rather than removing things from the wide playstyle. Even if the latter would result in a more cohesive design.

Completely true.

However, part of the issue with your example of non-linear pop growth, is that it simply broke pre-existing systems that were not re-designed to suit it.

• You had both people that were pissed off because their old way of play was gone AND people that were pissed off because stuff simply wasnt working/balanced right any more for the new mechanic.
• For example, Ecumenopolis were expressly designed to have *more* pops than the base planets do - I even remember reading this was one of the motivations for the tile>district rework. For planets to support More pops (and we all know how that's turned out).
  • A partial cull of the number of jobs from districts & buildings + a user-set slider, has helped in this regard.
    • It still isn't a great solution but they could at least finish the job off - I personally think they need to further restrict jobs spawned (e.g. all districts to 1 pop with double output). That, at least, carries the game much further in to 2500 before pop-growth and performance becomes a material issue.

So I view pop-changes less as we were "used to getting pops at a consistent rate" and more ... half the lategame stuff dependent on pops became irrelevant, as you couldnt get the pops to do those things. Its like cutting out content with extra steps..

That said, you are right. There should be additions (such as something like the terraforming tiers I alluded to), in addition to restrictions; you cannot have the stick without a carrot, too. Though, whilst my examples were hardline, they're basically the only thing that will "fully" work to differentiate wide and tall. Some could be implemented to narrow the gap (e.g. limiting available/buildable districts to 25/50/75/100% per capital tier, and making capitals cost 50/100/150 influence to upgrade) - as this would "take the wind out of early snowballs" so to speak.

When all is said and done, without real, mathematically robust / scalar limits (via influence/unity/sprawl one-off-costs or ongoing-upkeep), it simply is not possible to realise a true divide, between wide and tall gameplay within Stellaris, as it stands now.

 

[James Fire]

Sprawl is 100% an abstract game concept. It could be in the game, or it could not be in the game, but realism has nothing to do with it.

And I certainly understand sprawl: it's a welfare handout to so-called "tall" players, to disadvantage people who are actually playing a 4X game properly, instead of screwing around. (The argument there seems to be that Luxembourg and Monaco should be able to compete on the same footing with the United States and China. So much for "realism"!)

lol

 

[currylambchop]

You know what’s really funny is that you could just halve bureaucrat output or give them a heavy unity upkeep and tall would be able to compete

 

[Ferrus Animus]

So I view pop-changes less as we were "used to getting pops at a consistent rate" and more ... half the lategame stuff dependent on pops became irrelevant, as you couldnt get the pops to do those things. Its like cutting out content with extra steps..

Which is pretty much what your suggestions would do.
Like seriously? Being unable to even use the planets you find until you devote even mroe time to micromanage them (which the game alreadyy has far too much has been a contentious topic for years now).
And it's not like there's much of a ceiling on planet building. If your interpretation of a tall mining planet is a dozen mining districts, I don't know how pointless wide would be.
The building "up" option in Stellaris currently are Megastructures and Habitats.
You can't improve planets at all over a very low baseline of filling all the slots unad upgrading a handful of buildings (2.2 buildings gave up to 10 jobs, we're at 6 now).

There's a mod for Stellaris ccalled "Masters of nature" which allows you to build extra district slots for influence and applies type specific bonuses. Similarly the Mod jam had a subterranean origin, tha allowed similar if weaker. These two add more building tall options than Stellaris has ever had.
If you want tall gameplay you need an option to keep growing what you have, not just restrict other gameplay.

If I would play a atall build including your suggestions I would be done and waiting for pops to grow and numbers to tick up 50 years in. That's not gampleplay, that's the opposite.

You know what’s really funny is that you could just halve bureaucrat output or give them a heavy unity upkeep and tall would be able to compete

Wide would still be better. the thing you are forgetting is that wide has more pops and more resources (including unity), so literlally any resource-based gating benefits wide over tall.

 

[currylambchop]

Which is pretty much what your suggestions would do.
Like seriously? Being unable to even use the planets you find until you devote even mroe time to micromanage them (which the game alreadyy has far too much has been a contentious topic for years now).
And it's not like there's much of a ceiling on planet building. If your interpretation of a tall mining planet is a dozen mining districts, I don't know how pointless wide would be.
The building "up" option in Stellaris currently are Megastructures and Habitats.
You can't improve planets at all over a very low baseline of filling all the slots unad upgrading a handful of buildings (2.2 buildings gave up to 10 jobs, we're at 6 now).

There's a mod for Stellaris ccalled "Masters of nature" which allows you to build extra district slots for influence and applies type specific bonuses. Similarly the Mod jam had a subterranean origin, tha allowed similar if weaker. These two add more building tall options than Stellaris has ever had.
If you want tall gameplay you need an option to keep growing what you have, not just restrict other gameplay.

If I would play a atall build including your suggestions I would be done and waiting for pops to grow and numbers to tick up 50 years in. That's not gampleplay, that's the opposite.




Wide would still be better. the thing you are forgetting is that wide has more pops and more resources (including unity), so literlally any resource-based gating benefits wide over tall.

I don’t really care too much about tall, I’m more concerned about buffing spiritualist tbh

 

[Losttruppen]

So the only way to have a real variety is to force it into the game - which also means you already know all existing empires and there is a lot less fun in discovery.

If you create several pools of premade empires with the same "random" starting system they will block each other from spawning and a random one from the pool will be selected. If you don't use one of these for your own empire you can have up to 6 pools of empires that will be random. Still leaves up to 24 others as default or fixed premades, but it is something.

Does creating more than 30 forced spawn premades also cycle them?

 

[Nebbie Zebbie]

You know what’s really funny is that you could just halve bureaucrat output or give them a heavy unity upkeep and tall would be able to compete

Add a unity upkeep? Nah, we gotta wait 6 months for some new half-baked system that'll take an open beta to even get half the problems fixed, man. We can't just do a little test of the basic concept that'd take 5 minutes to implement in some job definitions.
I know I'm being a bit harsh, but I really do suspect this is the one big downfall of the Custodians' plans outlined here. Huge system reworks are exactly how Stellaris has kept on not quite being what it should be and game design simply should be about making a fun base concept, not having layers of complexity in the hope it'll sort things out.

 

[Kiwibaum]

Completely true.

However, part of the issue with your example of non-linear pop growth, is that it simply broke pre-existing systems that were not re-designed to suit it.

• You had both people that were pissed off because their old way of play was gone AND people that were pissed off because stuff simply wasnt working/balanced right any more for the new mechanic.
• For example, Ecumenopolis were expressly designed to have *more* pops than the base planets do - I even remember reading this was one of the motivations for the tile>district rework. For planets to support More pops (and we all know how that's turned out).
  • A partial cull of the number of jobs from districts & buildings + a user-set slider, has helped in this regard.
    • It still isn't a great solution but they could at least finish the job off - I personally think they need to further restrict jobs spawned (e.g. all districts to 1 pop with double output). That, at least, carries the game much further in to 2500 before pop-growth and performance becomes a material issue.

So I view pop-changes less as we were "used to getting pops at a consistent rate" and more ... half the lategame stuff dependent on pops became irrelevant, as you couldnt get the pops to do those things. Its like cutting out content with extra steps..

That said, you are right. There should be additions (such as something like the terraforming tiers I alluded to), in addition to restrictions; you cannot have the stick without a carrot, too. Though, whilst my examples were hardline, they're basically the only thing that will "fully" work to differentiate wide and tall. Some could be implemented to narrow the gap (e.g. limiting available/buildable districts to 25/50/75/100% per capital tier, and making capitals cost 50/100/150 influence to upgrade) - as this would "take the wind out of early snowballs" so to speak.

When all is said and done, without real, mathematically robust / scalar limits (via influence/unity/sprawl one-off-costs or ongoing-upkeep), it simply is not possible to realise a true divide, between wide and tall gameplay within Stellaris, as it stands now.

I think the issue with the new non-linear pop growth are different and for I would say they are:
-It makes no sense. Why do pops slow down growing in an empire on planets where there is literally all the space?
-It has really stupid gameplay implications. You want to grow pops, so your only options at some point becomes conquering or abducting pops or migration treaties while making sure YOU get the pops and not the other empire. Those might be ok, but kinda force you into some gamestyles sometimes. The really weird ones are the vassal tricks and the like.

There would've been better ways to deal with that, however they would have taken more time to implement. And with those I mean things that reduce pop amounts like pandemics, disasters and the like. Those could both make far more sense than whatever is happening now and are far more interesting gameplay wise.
The current system feels a lot like in a boardgame where you have limited figures and get to the oh you have all your 10 workers. Can't built more now.

 

[chilllounge]

this is probably not theme related, but i wish starbases would be changed a bit. unyielding was a nice step, but still starbases feel a bit useless to me, at least against max crisis, dk how they behave in multiplayer or against normal empires :" (mostly build them too late for normal conquests and mostly everywhere where it makes sence, also for roleplaying reasons. but they get easily rect by everything starnet ai)

also it would be nice to have the option to edit them in the ship builder, for anti crisis builds & pulsar systems and stuff, would be also nice to let them equip some X weapons or defense platforms with x weapons (similiar to ion canons, it would be nice to have stronger stuff, but advancing with repeatable tech) idk if my wish is realisable in multiplayer balance, but i guess not really, starbases that kinda compete with 25x crisis :S

also i hate how im sometimes the only one with envoys in my federation^^, i wish u could change that too :* its weird to see all other feds on lvl 1

but thanks for the great game, i only played it for some years now i guess, but from what ive seen it reaally improved and u made an already really! great game even better, thanks for making that game !!! &sorry for my terrible english



ahhh yes, i hoped there would be some changes to unity some day so im really glad u have confronted that front ! especially in the end game there is no use for it, but thats a thing most games have with similiar systems like civ5s culture. at the end of a game im mostly stuck with millions of unity, but also i always liked the unity/culture path more in games, so i like to specialize on that ! my first idea to change it was to make a special events happen for 10y or something that takes a big chunk of overflow unity when enough build up, something like (((5x tradition cost) / planets) * citiziens) / 15 , idk something that makes more sence. its just an idea, but its a way to get nice benefits for the empire and a way to use up unity outcomes of events could be ethic related. fanatic miterialists 15% more research for 10y, that kinda stuff, more firerate, popgrowth, alloy prod for machine, etc. maybe an relic (might also be an idea for a mod if someone likes to pick up on this :*)

 

[Libertine Angel]

this is probably not theme related, but i wish starbases would be changed a bit. unyielding was a nice step, but still starbases feel a bit useless to me, at least against max crisis, dk how they behave in multiplayer or against normal empires :" (mostly build them too late for normal conquests and mostly everywhere where it makes sence, also for roleplaying reasons. but they get easily rect by everything starnet ai)

also it would be nice to have the option to edit them in the ship builder, for anti crisis builds & pulsar systems and stuff, would be also nice to let them equip some X weapons or defense platforms with x weapons (similiar to ion canons, it would be nice to have stronger stuff, but advancing with repeatable tech) idk if my wish is realisable in multiplayer balance, but i guess not really, starbases that kinda compete with 25x crisis :S

Playing on Commodore scaling difficulty I've found Unyielding starbases excellent against (unmodded) AI empires, especially if you can rush Strike Craft early on and then stick them on a bunch of defence platforms, it takes serious enemy numbers to get through them and it takes long enough that your fleet should be there to mop up the remains soon after. Starbase customisation absolutely would be good, like removing shields from those in systems with nullification, but I think Unyielding is certainly an excellent start to making them genuinely useful.

 

[James Fire]

Add a unity upkeep? Nah, we gotta wait 6 months for some new half-baked system that'll take an open beta to even get half the problems fixed, man. We can't just do a little test of the basic concept that'd take 5 minutes to implement in some job definitions.
I know I'm being a bit harsh, but I really do suspect this is the one big downfall of the Custodians' plans outlined here. Huge system reworks are exactly how Stellaris has kept on not quite being what it should be and game design simply should be about making a fun base concept, not having layers of complexity in the hope it'll sort things out.

Aside the fact that just adding unity upkeep to bureaucrats won't appreciably change anything, cause it would still mean the system as a whole is linear in the penalties and required resources.

The system needs to be changed. Full stop. Just tweaking numbers or adding another resource upkeep isn't going to fix anything, because they aren't even touching the problem.

 

[exi123]

Wasnt a new diary scheduled for today?

 

[UltimateTobi]

Wasnt a new diary scheduled for today?

Yes, yes it was.

 

[Lordlory95]

 

[Nebbie Zebbie]

Aside the fact that just adding unity upkeep to bureaucrats won't appreciably change anything, cause it would still mean the system as a whole is linear in the penalties and required resources.

The system needs to be changed. Full stop. Just tweaking numbers or adding another resource upkeep isn't going to fix anything, because they aren't even touching the problem.

Linearity alone is not what makes bureaucrats a problem. The primary issue is that making more of them doesn't really conflict with your other goals since the extra sprawl from a colony for them is negligible, and their upkeep is rather low. The reason to use unity in particular is that slowing down traditions greatly impacts an empire's ability to become what it wants to become. Having to spend a bunch of it on bureaucrats would be a serious impact to gameplay that would slow the expansion of most empires.
And ultimately, I suspect what they will come up with will still be linear. Superlinear scaling has inherent issues in a game with settings that greatly affect sizes of things.