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Stellaris Dev Diary #245 - We have a Situation

Welcome to this week’s dev diary! Eladrin is busy with something exciting this week, so I’ve been roped into writing about the almost as exciting new Situations system we will be adding in the next patch.

The idea for implementing this system comes from the realisation that Stellaris provides excellent systems to tell stories about things that have happened - e.g. anomalies and archaeology sites - but lacks a good structure through which to tell stories about things which are happening right now. While we have a number of such stories, they are often either not as complex as we’d like them to be (e.g. we’d prefer to have more factors taken into account), or they are disproportionately complicated for us to implement (i.e. time-consuming and bug-prone). Either way, the player experience is often not as we’d like it, since such stories and event chains are likely to be hard to follow, and it may not always be clear that events are connected to each other or why certain things happen.

This was a state of affairs we wanted to improve upon, so we decided to implement a system which aimed to:
  • Give players an interactive and informative interface by which to experience current affairs event chains.
  • Provide a structure that is (relatively) easy to add new content to.

Initially, we took some inspiration from Disasters in EU4, but we soon diverged from it, since we realised not all the stories we wanted to tell were disasters, and we wanted a more UX-intensive solution. The result can be shown off in this mockup:

1646842176465.png

Note that this is a mockup - so not necessarily how the final UI will look.

To unpack this a bit, the flow progresses something like this:
  1. The Situation starts. This could happen e.g. through an event. The Situation can either be empire-wide, or it can be focused e.g. on a single planet
    1646842816635.png

    Event text is final.
  2. Each month, the Situation’s “progress” will tick upwards or downwards, depending on your response to the Situation.
    1646842610214.png

    A WIP tooltip showing the monthly change. It'll list all contributing factors.
  3. As the Situation progresses, you may reach the next “stage”. Often, an event will be fired as soon as this happens, to develop the story. Effects can also be applied to the empire or planet based on the current stage, e.g. an instability-based Situation may reduce stability by 10 for each stage.
  4. There may also be random events along the way that can happen on any monthly tick. To distinguish Situation-based events from regular ones, some tweaks have been made to the event interface:
    1646842979882.png
  5. The player can choose how to respond to a Situation via a selection of “Approaches”. On occasion, one might be prompted to change these via events, but otherwise, one can freely pick them in the Situations interface. (We have not yet decided whether there should generally be a cooldown to picking an option). Approaches usually have effects over time, such as “spend X Unity per month to gain faster progress”.
  6. When either end of the Situation’s progress bar is reached, the Situation is resolved, usually through an event in which something happens.

Some Situations will progress in a linear manner from left to right, others will start you in the middle and progress either to the left or to the right based on your choices. And we also want them to be differently coloured depending on how threatening the Situation is:

1646842264908.png

This is also a mockup.

This is all a bit theoretical, so, what changes can players expect in practice? Now I will take you through a few of the things we have done and are doing with the Situations system.

Narrative Situations

Content Design often implements narrative-based event chains set on a certain planet. Now, if we feel like the story has a bit more to give, a planet-based Situation can be crafted instead. The ability to have different outcomes at either end of the progress bar is particularly useful, since it can show which sort of conclusion the player is advancing towards (or at least indicate that there are multiple). To avoid giving spoilers, I won’t say exactly what stories we’ve added in this way, but there will be a few new planet-based narratives to encounter.

The “targeting” function of Situations is not limited to planets (though most of our effort has been towards making it work well there), so we have also managed to try adding a Situation based around a system or starbase.

Owners of the Leviathans DLC - or other DLCs that add Leviathan NPCs to the game - can also expect a few surprises next time they go monster-hunting ;)

Deficit Situations

Situations are not all fun and games. As their origin as EU4 Disasters would suggest, they are a great system through which to portray negative events. They give the player all the information they need to know what is happening, what the results of it will be, how severe the current Situation is, and what they can do about it.

One of our main priorities when it comes to using this aspect of Situations was reworking Deficits. At the moment, Deficits are like a light switch: as soon as you are in deficit (stockpile of 0 and negative income) for a given resource, you get all the defined penalties for being in that deficit (which can be quite harsh). But as soon as you spend a month no longer in deficit, all penalties are removed. This feels a bit off. Also, the penalties are the same for all empires, which has frequently led to headaches where they either disproportionately impacted a certain type of empire or left others (say, one with less need of a certain resource) relatively untouched. Finally, they can also be a cause for “death spirals” (in particular for the AI), as a shortage of one resource leads to penalties, which leads to a shortage of another resource.

With our rework, being in a deficit will start a Situation. You will start at 25% progress in this Situation, and it will increase in severity as long as you are at 0 balance and have a negative income. The rate of increase will depend on how much you are losing compared to your income. Having a stockpile will gradually make the Situation tick downwards; having a positive income will make it do so more rapidly.

1646843561944.png

This is the actual UI as it looks like right now. We are hard at work finishing it up and making it look presentable!

The penalties you receive for being in a deficit will start off light compared to their present settings, but will increase in severity as the Situation escalates. We are also able to configure them depending on your empire’s attributes, so for instance a Catalytic empire will now correctly get alloy output problems for being in a food deficit.

We aim to give each deficit Situation a choice of approaches, so that you can try to mitigate it from within the interface. So, for instance, a consumer goods shortage might be mitigated by electing to defund scientists, with the result that researchers cost less upkeep but also produce less research.

If however the deficit continues to grow, at 75% progress an event will fire which will warn that your empire is in truly dire financial straits and will need to make cutbacks soon. It will suggest a few, and you can pay a price (e.g. devastating a planet, or removing a special resource deposit) in return for some immediate resources that might help you alleviate the deficit.

1646843965654.png

Numbers not final

Finally, if the deficit becomes so severe that the progress bar is filled up, the empire is declared bankrupt. This is an unambiguously bad thing to happen to you - current effects (numbers to be finalised) are downgrading all non-capital buildings to their lowest level, disbanding half the fleet and all the armies, and giving 25% higher costs, 25% less ship damage, and 50% less unity and influence for 10 years. But it’s also designed to avoid death spirals: in return for liquidating these assets, you are given enough of the resource you defaulted on to survive for a while. Additionally, all other deficit Situations you are currently experiencing are terminated immediately, without penalty, and you are granted some resources to avoid them returning too soon.

1646844063692.png

Numbers are subject to change.

Changes are likely to come to this design as we continue to play with the new system and iron out its kinks, but we are hopeful that this new version of deficits will resolve many of the issues with the current deficits system, and make deficits, if not exactly fun to experience, at least a more interesting and less frustrating game mechanic.

Further “Strategic” Situations

We have further plans to overhaul systems or features using Situations. For these (unlike the Situations listed above), we can’t guarantee that they will definitely be in the next patch, but we are looking to adapt the likes of slave revolts, planetary separatism revolts, and the Synthetic Dawn AI Uprising to this new system.

With regards to the AI Uprising: we are broadly happy with the way the chain works now, but there are a few improvements to be made, and we feel that it would be beneficial to the player to be able to experience it through a UI. For instance, it has a bunch of events that an experienced player would recognise as warning signs that they should do something about it, but the inexperienced player would not know what is up and would not stop it from happening. With the Situations system, experienced and inexperienced players alike would know that something is up. However, this also makes it easier to know that you should do something about it, so we are also looking at making it a bit more challenging than just changing species right to end the Situation - after all, the robots are still extremely annoyed at you having deprived them of sentience for all these years! We are also looking at making purging the robots a viable if high-risk approach, at least so long as you don’t have too many robots.

With planetary revolts and slave uprisings, we have a feature that hasn’t seen much love for many a patch even as the game has changed around it, so we hope to improve it in a variety of aspects. At the moment, it would be fair to say that the unrest events are more a nuisance than a threat: revolts feel like they come out of the blue, but don’t have much teeth, as you can usually just conquer back the planet (since one planet alone cannot hope to stand against your empire). Our changes to this system are at a fairly early stage, but our goals include:
  • Make revolts feel less random - they will no longer happen suddenly, and whether unrest turns into a successful revolt will depend more reliably on factors such as how many pops are on the planet, and just how annoyed they are.
  • Smooth out issues such as one habitat in a system revolting leading to the loss of all planets in the system. The opinions of other planets in the system should have an impact on the success of the revolt.
  • Improve the system where planets can sometimes join other empires after the revolt. (At the moment, this can happen in separatist revolts if the original owner still exists and is nearby, and in slave revolts if there is an egalitarian empire nearby). Basically, they should be asked in advance if they wish to support the revolt, at which point it should progress faster, but on the other hand, the other side will know this is happening. Also, we may want to review the conditions for revolts joining other empires, since in some cases a completely annexed empire might have each planet revolt to form its own micronation.
  • We are toying with the idea of removing the stage where planets have ground combat during rebellions. Troops stationed there can be factored in during the buildup stage instead.
  • Ideally, a successful rebellion would start a war with the previous owner, but would also be a bit more of a potential threat. We’ll see what we manage to come up with, here.

That’s all for now! Except to add that, since an old version of the cheat sheet for what all Situations can do is actually available to you in 3.3, I’m attaching the new and updated version of this, so that those inclined can make plans for what to do with the system.

And keep an eye out for Eladrin’s dev diary next week. You won’t want to miss it.
 

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u want a actual argument that me and others have already made multiple times to be repeated again ok.
the current sprawls system is a nerf to tall and favours wide as the debuffs to going super wide can be offset and beated by building a few extra science buildings basically replacing the old bureaucrats. how ever where tall before did not need as many bureaucrats they would build extra science instead to stay up to pace with tech using the civs they save by not having bureaucrats taking up the pop.

however with the current meta due to the failed sprawl chance tall if forced to go wide to compete with tech where the already wide players just build more and more science to out pace the debuffs. in tested games during the same time period going wide i have 3 times the output of a tall empire with only a 25% debuff effecting my empire tell me how is that balanced in any way shape or form ? the debuff to balance playing wide is being offset by science buildings and the basically free pop i have gained by not building bureaucrats ie instead of 20+ bureaucrats i gained 20 scientists and tall has gained nothing at all as u did not build more then 2 or 3 bureaucrats at most
It's almost as if this is a very complex problem that can't just be magically solved in 1 patch.
 
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i hope this time then u listen to the people who actually play ur game and did the beta when we told u for over a week how to balance it and what was wrong
You say this as if they don't already. And as if you somehow know better than they do. We call that Dunning-Kreuger around here.
 
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It is nice to hear about new mechanics, but PLEASE, make one update with many bug fixes, there are a ton of new bugs with 3.3, there are tons of bugs which we reported years ago and I continue to repost them getting "duplicated" mark. Please before adding new stuff, there needs to be some bug fixing in my opinion, that would make the game way more enjoyable already even without new content.
>Ignoring the fact that 3.3 itself was literally half bugfixes, and so was 3.2
 
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I’d love for planetary invasions to be more like these Situations. Choices about resources and strategy that affect gain/loss of progress in the invasion - that sort of thing.

Something more interactive than the current build troops>check your number is bigger that theirs>move troops>win system. Lots of room for flavour and events depending on the generals traits, empire’s set-up etc.
 
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That sounds nice - especially the fixes to bancrupcy - but in the end it's just another internal narrative feature added to the mountain of internal narratives we already have.
It wont get rid off [personal opinion!!1] stellaris' biggest problem - that you feel more or less alone in space, when not at war.

What the game desperatly needed is improved narratives for interacting with your neighbours. Their AI has to become much more distinct (not just "evil terminators" or "standard empire"). We need diplomatic incidents where both sides react to the same thing and that leads to war/friendship etc.. We need more diplomatic options so that we can feel betrayed by an ally or thankful that someone helped us out in a war, when we asked and so on and so on.

So it's kinda sad whenever you go back to your comfort zone to add even more stuff your empire can just experience by itself, instead. Those features are a nice distraction, but shouldn't be main narrative focus in a 4X/GSG game.

(This is based on the assumption that the people working on this could also have worked on events happening between empires)
 
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3 is terrible. The use of both directions allows for progress to occur in either direction

Also it's not hard to look at existing issues and spot when they'll come up next.

I agree that deficits should possibly get priority but this sounds a lot like you want the game to track priorities for you. And it seems that the game wants you to do that yourself

Eta: I agree an srchive of situations and such would be neat and allow us to see our history though.
On progressing in two directions.

There's a few obvious issues that I can see from this design choice:
1. Players will pick one direction anyway and stick with it.
  • Because one direction is all bad stuff, the other is all good stuff (a fake choice)
  • Because it'll take 3x as long to go down the right before backtracking down and taking the left (if the timeframe is like federation level 5 that would be impossible, or at least wildly impractical before the game is won).
  • Because going down either the right or the left locks you in (e.g. invading probably stops you from gaining bonuses from peaceful options).
2. Players will game the system and move in one direction only to do a 180' turn at 99% progress and pick up the events and bonuses in the other direction.
  • Because the events are short and activating one doesn't disable the other (like the last mock-up example where you could hit the two events on the left then switch to the right to get the (loveheart dog icon). The situation is like in RPGs, you never take the direct path but always go down the side corridor first to pick up loot.
It's simpler if you have the different directions a situation can progress as multiple entries in the log. In the same way that you galactic resolutions have both advance and repeal a resolution in the list at the same time e.g.

Primitives on Sol III.

Has 5 collapsible options.
1. Kill
2. Trade
3. Study
4. Integrate
5. Uplift
You click on Study and see:
1. Send a survey team (+5/month)
2. Retask observation satellites (+2/month)
3. Build an observation post (+8/month)

You do all 3 things to study the primitives, but then change your mind.

You decide to invade instead. Doing that adds:
1. Invasion +10/month to "Kill Primitives" but also -10/month to each other entry
2. It makes the time to complete 10 months for Kill primitive so that is pushed to the top, down to +5 for Study (even if you've been doing everything to study them).
3. It's a race situation, either you successfully study them before you wipe them out or you wipe them out before you can study them. But you can clearly see which is likely to happen first because it's at the top of the list without you having to do the maths.

On the subject of the next issue being at the top of the list.
Technically the galactic community is mentally easy, you could just keep track of all the voting numbers/diplomatic support for each resolution and know that the highest number will come up next. But it's silly to make the player keep track of all that when you could just have that thing move to the top when the number gets bigger... which they did. And I'm really glad they did.

In the situations example "This is also a mockup."
Assuming the numbers are all out of 100 for simplicity (if it's actually 1000 just multiply the months by 10) you get:
1. Red ~40% +3/month
2. Green ~30% +6.5/month
3. Yellow ~70% +27.5/month
4. Red ~20% -4.8/month
5. Green ~60% +1.5/month

I'd rearrange them thusly, adding and sorting by the time till completion:
3. Yellow ~70% +27.5/month (2 months)
4. Red ~20% -4.8/month (5 months)
2. Green ~30% +6.5/month (11 months)
1. Red ~40% +3/month (20 months)
5. Green ~60% +1.5/month (27 months)

And if entry number 4. Red 20% -4.8/month (5 months) is supposed to be the bankruptcy one, I'd have it clearly separate and big and scary so you can't ignore or mistake it.

I feel like the UI should help you to sort big lists of numbers. If the game just presents them to me as a jumbled list going in lots of different directions it's not being very helpful and I spend far longer trying to work things out than I want to.

I wouldn't mind if the normal progress was for all events to start at 50, advance towards 100 with active effort and degraded to 0 (incurring penalties) with no positive player response to allow situations to be removed from the log or to get worse if ignored. The issue I have is that giving only 2 directions (instead of 4+) for each situation is actually far too limiting for me. My only examples have all had at least 4 different resolution paths not 2, and those were not polar opposites like spiritualist vs materialist but different approaches to the same problem. I dislike that a lot of game options are currently be friendly or kill it, designing around an axis that stretches to either extreme eliminates nuance. Sure I can pick the speed I will murder and reach the extreme option but I'm stuck heading towards extremes rather than picking a different branch entirely.

I hope that helps explain my issues a little more clearly.
 
I feel like a system where, after prolonged slavery/ideological division in planets, a chain reaction forcing you to take a series of decisions result in a larger or lower possibility of a revolt or uprising occurring would be more exciting. A situation system based on loading bars might be too predictable and too easy to deal with as you know more or less specifically when a revolt is going to occur as it fills up.
The way i understood it you get interrupting events that prompt you to change your approach. So i assume that the situation is not a static problem.
I.e. you try to bribe/coexist dissidents instead of suppressing them, but it turns out they take that money to further fund their planned uprising and propaganda instead of seeing this as extending an olive branch.
You could then be prompted whether you want to try to continue showing good will or whether you change your approach to suppresion.

This is how i understood it at least.
 
However, this also makes it easier to know that you should do something about it, so we are also looking at making it a bit more challenging than just changing species right to end the Situation - after all, the robots are still extremely annoyed at you having deprived them of sentience for all these years! We are also looking at making purging the robots a viable if high-risk approach, at least so long as you don’t have too many robots.
Something that most Paradox games fail to portray is any sort of political inertia, where the player knows that a law should be changed, but there is internal opposition to doing so. This might be presented through factions or parliaments or any such system, but alas no such feature of actually effective internal opposition exists in Stellaris.
It does to a certain extent work in the galactic council, where one can see the resolutions to declare priority of stopping a crises get buried under other resolutions that some nations considers more important and push forward.
 
Incidents look nice, but it's not a big deal to fix the lack of resources. I think it'd be better to tight the incident to negative income of some resource depending on how much time is left until there is no resource left, and when there is already no resource then it's a bankrupcy. But i like how you making economy more interesting. Are you going introduce some factional civil war mechanics? Because this system would fit them very well
 
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Sounds great, but I have a little concern about the decision, that energy deficit (or any deficit at all) hits your pop production rate. If you just need more pops to solve an issue (e.g. producing more energy), than less pop production is kinda the opposite way to do it. ;)
 
no it is exactly what you are saying.

1. Showing the numbers means you can see the modifiers.
2. Algebraic math is easy.
3. But moer importantly, you're basically saying this:

A. The game does not display exact months to when it's remaining.
B. Games that do not display exact months to progress lead me to make illformed decisions

And my argument is that "not display exact months to when it's remaining" is functionally equivalent to "over simplify calculations and displays."
By showing numbers, you are able to look at say, what is modifying your number so you can learn from it. Rather than having to go look at a guide somewhere to see what causes "65 months" to drop to "60 months" by doing.



[Citation Required]
uhm... playing the fallen london for more than a year, and collectively seas and skies for about... 500 hours?
 
I do think revolts should be more deadly and dangerous to players. Right now, unless you do deliberate economic mismanagement, it's really hard for a revolt to be actually dangerous to a player. That could help make the game more interesting, rare but very deadly revolts should be more entertaining than the wack a mole that Eu4's revolt system is like.
 
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Any possibility of folding some existing mechanics like terraforming, crime, and/or espionage operations into the situations system? Here's some other things that could involve situations:
To add to that nice table, A random list of variants of revolts:
  • Ethics-driven revolts / colour revolutions
    • (e.g. A planet has > 40% pops that are opposed to your governing ethics - like militarists in a pacifist nation)
    • potentially several distinct kinds here, depending on the dominant "opposition" ethic on the colony, varying from the more pacifistic pops self immolating & protesting, to more hardcore uprisings/seditions or coups by the local planetary defence forces.
    • Communalist parities and
  • "same ethic" strife
    • If the spiritualist faction is left unhappy for too long (e.g. if they're forced to live alongside machines) maybe they splinter, possibly violently. Spawning a "pro-machine" sub faction - potentially useful to materialists, if they can contain the hardline anti-machine zealots.
  • Slave revolts
    • (unhappy worker-tier/chattel slaves & recently enslaved pops that have yet to be "broken in")
  • Separatist/Post-annexation/Nationalist revolts
    • People really don't like a foreigners boot on their head.
  • Ascension-path driven revolts could be a thing (finally).
    • Anti-Gene Editing movements
    • Anti-Psychic movements (witch burnings in the 23rd century??)
    • Anti-Synth sentiments (butlerian-jihad-boogaloo)
    • Anti-terraforming/"Gaia"/Environmentalist movements,
  • Rulers losing public faith
    • Election rigging scandals
    • Imperial pretender/heir challenges
    • Oligarchic and Dictatorial Power struggles (randomly picking another leader as the "nemesis" (that can not be fired).
  • Purge Driven revolts
    • Because some people would fight back against their oppressors - find old pre-invasion arms or call for help from other nearby nations, or whatever.
  • Various other special protests
    • War exhaustion-linked worker/specialist strikes, if youre the aggressor (particularly if you've just sent a billion pops off to die in a Brannigan-esque strategy)
    • Pop-unionisation protests/strikes (e.g. after certain GC pro-worker resolutions are repealed)
    • "leave federation/GC" protests
 
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It's possible. Situations directly involving two countries is something we've avoided, since the framework is set up in such a way that only one empire can be the owner of a single Situation, but starting one and sending the occasional notification back to the initiator is definitely doable.

Please consider it! International situations would make the galaxy feel more dynamic, would help with building character for alien empires, and provide some cool uses for diplo/espionage.

Perhaps the ability to intervene in another's situation, to help or hinder it, could be determined by your treaties, and/or spy network.
 
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I hope there will be a situation generated for when you run out of food. Right now, the penalty for running out of food (assuming your species needs to eat) is just a flat happiness penalty. Granted, this impacts stability and with revolts being more potent, this could cause an issue, but the simple fact of the matter is when people run out of food, they starve to death. I would love for a food deficit lead to a situation where you actually get pops dying if you don't make the right decisions to alleviate it.

I would also say there should be a similar situation for machine empires when they run out of energy. Rather than treating it as a financial crisis, treat it similar to running out of food, since for them, energy IS food (maybe not having machines die off in this case but be "turned off" because there is not enough energy to go around).
 
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Plz, dont remove ground combat, the idea of armies of billions of soldiers fighting is too cool to discard!!! Maybe make it simple, with more expesive and powerfull armies like was said before, or change the system, but allow players to invest in powerfull ground troops and use them both to attack or defend worlds....

Remove ground combat will just turn in a pure fleet game, with a time bar to conquer worlds... will be even more blant and tasteless than it is right now. Its complete plausible that a empire may have a fleet powerfull than its enemy, but be unable to conquer their worlds because of a inferior ground forces.
 
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