Stellaris Dev Diary #243 - 3.3 'Libra' is out, now what?

[SeraphAscending]

How would I make them more useful? Here's some easy, obvious ones:

1. Steal Technology: Remove the buff preventing doing it again soon (it's 30% in one tech, that's not exactly great).
2. Sabotage Starbase: Should be able to hit shipyards, and hit all modules/buildings that are within the starbase's role (so guns and defense stuff for Bastions), but success should lead to a buff on the target to prevent this kind of operation for a while.
3. Arm Privateers: Give them some nasty scaling by the target's navy and empire size.

1. YES. it also takes quite a while, so if you build your empires to be spies instead of scientists at least have their ridiculous infiltration power actually give them the edge that no one can hide any new tech secrets from them. I tried a spy-based megacorp just yesterday and it is really underwhelming how slow you progress through techs if you rely on steal technology. (i had 10 envoys, somewhere midgame. 6 of them spies)

2. Yeah, the sabotage is so underpowered that i have never even considered using it. It's a miniscule drop in efficiency for ONE starbase. neither worth the resources, time nor effort for strategic consideration even.

3. my suggestion: have events fire that make you pick multiple times between a few random options. investing energy/minerals/food/CG/influence to increase ship count. investing alloys to increase average ship size. investing rare resources for vastly better equipped ships. (all costs in different options and scaled to your tech power and general base fleet size scaled to enemy navy size.) - minor addition: have average crime and happiness effect the outcome. It's hard to have rebels rise up in a utopia and relatively easy in a crime-ridden dystopia. Give someone desperate money and a gun and you're done, don't need as much convincing there.

 

[Farbros]

The last one look like we are getting the star-eaters for every species and not just a single one.

 

[Dragatus]

Purely from an enhancement perspective, as unity is now the resource for recruiting leaders you should be able to select which bonii you want.

You kind of can, but it requires regularly checking the leader pool and hiring in advance. But they could make it easier if they increased the leader pool.

 

[DebbieElla]

Follow the rules folks, stay on topic, stay kind.

 

[Ikael]

Great work so far, and great to know about where Stellaris is heading up. As for the upcoming changes:

- Edicts need to be rebalanced badly, perhaps along with empire sprawl. As they stand right now, edicts are not a tool for tall empires, but rather a tool for early game empires, since you will only enjoy them until your pop grows to a certain size, due to how edict capacity does not scale with anything else. It is not a choice: at some point in your game edicts will simply stop being viable. Either empire sprawl is reworked so pops do not add as much sprawl, or edict capacity grows proportionately somehow (perhaps with techs, ascensions and traditions that give massive percentual increases to the edict fund, or massive discounts? Or perhaps by making edict costs grow way more slowly than tech and tradition costs).

- Tall is far from being "a thing", and Unity is more useful, yes, but still way less useful than most resources once you go beyond the initial exploration phase, and planet ascensions are a missed opportunity in that regard, I think. Please, please, go back to the drawing board regarding planetary ascensions, I beg you. Unity making your planets way more efficient is a good idea that it is woefully underdeveloped.

- Influence being used for espionage makes a ton of sense, but operations ought to be way more powerful than they currently are in order to compensate for that change. If they are properly buffed, espionage might get extremely interesting in the future!

- Situation system sounds awesome, at least if it is going to be like EU4's "disasters". Will that be part of the much-fabled internal politic rework? And will we be able to solve them in ways other than throwing a sack of Unity at it? Because the internal politics tab is really in dire need of actual decisions with both pros and cons, rather than non-decisions like allowing AI and robots VS committing economic suicide for no reason.

- Talking about internal politics, if they are going to be reworked in the future, I do hope that leaders get a complete overhaul as well, as they become something more than a mere pile of boring, re-rolling stats. The trifecta "espionage - internal politics - leaders" should perhaps be reworked as a holistic whole.

- Man, we ought to have more civics like that reworked idyllic bloom. Sounds great!

- The game would indeed benefit from a better tutorial. I have been trying to teach my 15-year-old nephew about Stellaris (he liked MoO2 and wanted to try something "more modern") and it has been quite an experience. I might write about how it looks to a newcomer on some topic of its own, there is a lot to unpack here.

 

[Nebbie Zebbie]

Oh, we know.

It's good you do, it's just worrying to see the thematic improvement announced before buffs. On a rather abstract level, it often seems like changes, especially as they're announced in dev diaries, focus first on improving the lore/logic behind things, leaving the fun and usefulness of them as a secondary thing.
Don't get me wrong, I love improving logic behind things, and think it's essential, I just think that, especially for espionage (the king of "makes sense, but is tedious and pointless"), you guys should consider putting "make the gameplay actually fun" higher on the priorities list. There's a reason Nemesis is one of the few DLCs I haven't bought, even after getting a hefty taste of it in multiplayer.

 

[DarrenZhu]

Hey, I just want to say a few things about the 3.3 update regarding the effects of empire sprawl (overall, I think the 3.3 update is a great one).
I noticed that as the size of your empire grows larger, not only does it affect technological and traditional costs (which can be compensated by dedicating pops to work on tech and unity jobs), but it also affects the pop growth speed. I am sure you all have noticed this if you are playing a large wide empire: the number of months till next pop growth would become considerably greater with the empire size (not due to the lower pop growth, but to the "expensiveness" of pop growth), this also applies to robot assembling! Due to the proportional nature of this mechanism, the yearly pop growth of a huge empire with 1800 pops would now be similar to an empire of 100 pops. Further, the pop growth rate is so small in the large empires that the mechanism of demographic dynamic (which would be surprisingly accurate if not for the additional empire size effect) becomes almost irrelevant. Your frontier planets will never ever grow unless you fill it manually with slaves or pops from other planets. This does not make sense. I also fail to follow the gaming balance rationale for this one. If this was meant to prevent large empires from snowballing (they do and they still do), there are many other mechanisms can be tweaked to achieve a better and more interesting balance.
I strongly suggest the developers take a look at the late-game implication of this change (or the implication of it on larger maps), and preferrably remove the empire size effect on the expensiveness of pop growth. Instead, I do have the following suggestions for a more realistic simulation of the size effect:
1. Instead of giving all pops, all systems, and all planets the same weight on empire size, it makes more sense to assign different weight. For example, the ruling pops and full-right pops should have lower impacts on empire size; the capital sector should have lower impacts on empire size; the frontier sector and all sectors without a governor should have a higher impact on empire size. This would make domestic administration more fun.
2. Resettling should take time (instead of taking effects instantly). Specifically, we can consider setting the resettling time to be half of the time that takes a construction ship to travel between the origin and target planets. Similarly, resettling costs should increase with the distance between the two planets.
3. Empire size might lead to higher admin costs (increased maintenance for administrators and governors, given the difficulty to oversee their work) and higher baseline crime rate (given the interstellar space and vast population that would allow domestic criminals to hide).
4. Empire size should also lead to increased cost and time of reforming government, changing policies (10 years may be too long for a small empire but too short for a huge empire), imposing new edicts (already do). It should also reduce the effectiveness of suppressing or promoting factions.
5. Combined war exhaustion (the total war exhaustion from multiple wars) should take a toll on stability, happiness, military maintanence costs, such that waging wars would be costly not just in the sense of winning or losing. However, small empires and defenders (which might accrue war exhaustion pretty quickly if they are on the losing side) should suffer relatively less from the adverse effect of war exhaustion than large empires and aggressors.

 

[SeraphAscending]

Hey, I just want to say a few things about the 3.3 update regarding the effects of empire sprawl (overall, I think the 3.3 update is a great one).
I noticed that as the size of your empire grows larger, not only does it affect technological and traditional costs (which can be compensated by dedicating pops to work on tech and unity jobs), but it also affects the pop growth speed. I am sure you all have noticed this if you are playing a large wide empire: the number of months till next pop growth would become considerably greater with the empire size (not due to the lower pop growth, but to the "expensiveness" of pop growth), this also applies to robot assembling! Due to the proportional nature of this mechanism, the yearly pop growth of a huge empire with 1800 pops would now be similar to an empire of 100 pops. Further, the pop growth rate is so small in the large empires that the mechanism of demographic dynamic (which would be surprisingly accurate if not for the additional empire size effect) becomes almost irrelevant. Your frontier planets will never ever grow unless you fill it manually with slaves or pops from other planets. This does not make sense. I also fail to follow the gaming balance rationale for this one. If this was meant to prevent large empires from snowballing (they do and they still do), there are many other mechanisms can be tweaked to achieve a better and more interesting balance.
I strongly suggest the developers take a look at the late-game implication of this change (or the implication of it on larger maps), and preferrably remove the empire size effect on the expensiveness of pop growth. Instead, I do have the following suggestions for a more realistic simulation of the size effect:
1. Instead of giving all pops, all systems, and all planets the same weight on empire size, it makes more sense to assign different weight. For example, the ruling pops and full-right pops should have lower impacts on empire size; the capital sector should have lower impacts on empire size; the frontier sector and all sectors without a governor should have a higher impact on empire size. This would make domestic administration more fun.
2. Resettling should take time (instead of taking effects instantly). Specifically, we can consider setting the resettling time to be half of the time that takes a construction ship to travel between the origin and target planets. Similarly, resettling costs should increase with the distance between the two planets.
3. Empire size might lead to higher admin costs (increased maintenance for administrators and governors, given the difficulty to oversee their work) and higher baseline crime rate (given the interstellar space and vast population that would allow domestic criminals to hide).
4. Empire size should also lead to increased cost and time of reforming government, changing policies (10 years may be too long for a small empire but too short for a huge empire), imposing new edicts (already do). It should also reduce the effectiveness of suppressing or promoting factions.
5. Combined war exhaustion (the total war exhaustion from multiple wars) should take a toll on stability, happiness, military maintanence costs, such that waging wars would be costly not just in the sense of winning or losing. However, small empires and defenders (which might accrue war exhaustion pretty quickly if they are on the losing side) should suffer relatively less from the adverse effect of war exhaustion than large empires and aggressors.

This is not the 3.3 update doing that.
This is the logistic growth that was added in an earlier update.
They made an effort to cut down on pops to improve performance and decided to rather make it hard for larger empires to get more pops than reducing pop growth in general.

 

[Dragatus]

I am sure you all have noticed this if you are playing a large wide empire: the number of months till next pop growth would become considerably greater with the empire size (not due to the lower pop growth, but to the "expensiveness" of pop growth), this also applies to robot assembling!

This change was introduced in the 3.0 update, nearly a year ago. It was the most contentious change of that update and sparked a lot of forum discussion. Ultimately it resulted in the the addition of two new game settings: Growth Required Scaling and Logistic Growth Ceiling. If you do not like the slowed down pop growth/assembly you can turn it off by setting Growth Required Scaling to 0. The second setting determines what the maximum bonus growth can be from being below 50% of the planet capacity.

 

[DarrenZhu]

This is not the 3.3 update doing that.
This is the logistic growth that was added in an earlier update.
They made an effort to cut down on pops to improve performance and decided to rather make it hard for larger empires to get more pops than reducing pop growth in general.

Thanks for the correction. I haven't been playing this game for a while. I only knew about the logistic growth update (thought it to be a good idea) but did not quite pay attention to the growth required scaling before trying out the post-3.0 game. In sync with the new changes to the empire spwral in 3.3 I guess this issue is just made suddenly obvious to me.

 

[DarrenZhu]

This change was introduced in the 3.0 update, nearly a year ago. It was the most contentious change of that update and sparked a lot of forum discussion. Ultimately it resulted in the the addition of two new game settings: Growth Required Scaling and Logistic Growth Ceiling. If you do not like the slowed down pop growth/assembly you can turn it off by setting Growth Required Scaling to 0. The second setting determines what the maximum bonus growth can be from being below 50% of the planet capacity.

Thanks for the info! Good to know that the growth required scaling can be turned off.

 

[styroler]

While one empire won't be able to spam them you can still have a dozen empires spamming them on a single player.

This only applies to sabotage. You can have extremely effective espionage operations that don't fall under the above as long as they do not negatively impact the target. Increasing how much tech progress steal technology gets you or giving you control over what tech you steal would vastly improve the usefulness while having minimal impact on the player. Being targeted for a smuggling ring that's effectively an involuntary one-way trade pact would be only emotionally damaging.

Then there's the difference between sabotage as random debuffs vs sabotage as stories. A sabotage event that makes all my power plants blow up out of nowhere is just frustrating. An event series or archaeology style deal with a randomly generated James Bond style name which I can assign envoys to and name decisions like choosing to go loud for a greater victory at the cost of international scrutiny? Mmmm yes delicious.

I would also point out on that note that peoples general aversion to destruction is somewhat misunderstood and not completely warranted in the case of something like Stelaris. People dont like espionage which seriously mess up their empires. They want to face controllable threats, not random acts of violence which cant be mitigated. If sabatoge events effected and destroyed specific buildings on planets, that would be incredibly annoying and people wouldnt like it. If sabatoge events though temporarily shut down the systems on one starbase, it would still be impactful but it would not be as annoying because its a temporary disruption which can be mitigated. Paradox has been so focused on this idea that people dont want random buildings blowing up, but what they really dont want is for enemy sabatoge to completely disrupt your plans. I compare this somewhat to Hoi4, where resistance can temporarily damage buildings which can be repaired. Players still seek to mitigate this, but its not like any player has been devastated by a factory being blown up by resistance because the way buildings work in that game means that any damage is the equivalent of a temporary modifier. It never really would have been opposed by players because it only delays instead of devastates the player. I think espionage should always keep this in mind, because it allows giving the enemy really impactful debuffs that are only temporary and automatically go away and so dont have to be worried about by the player.

 

[StellarisFan1]

Influence for espionage! This is a good idea!