Stellaris Dev Diary #301 - Galactic Paragons is out, what's next?

[Millbot]

I build a leader heavy empire that is sitting at a cap of 12 leaders. Granted it's on hold until the leader origin issues are addressed.

I'm perfectly fine with the cap and like the idea that leader heavy is a tall empire niche. I'd agree that the current UI is problematic because your leader thin going red and those blank portraits do annoy me. Also legendary leaders not counting towards the cap and the new trait that make them not use capacity below level four should go a long way to alleviate some concerns with the cap, but I do think the design should stick to keeping that niche.

As someone said, having a stateless portrait on your fleets or planets without leaders could go a long way to fixing some of the complaints. It would also give people something to work with for where new leaders come from. Maybe leaderless fleet 12 has a stat less admiral called Johnny Awesome and when you go to hire admirals he shows up there with actual stats and traits and should you hire him to run fleet 5, the name and portrait for fleet 12 changes.

Given the limits the patch is going to have. I won't touch too much on my misgivings with pioneers governors, other than I do see the build cost and blocker removal cost reductions traits as problematic. I don't shuffle leaders around because it's annoying, but I don't think you should have an incentive to move governors around constantly so that you can make building and blocker removal cheaper. Leader shuffling should be a strategic choice and when you move a leader it should be because it's better overall to have the leader in the new spot, not "hey, I want o build something and save some minerals, so in this leader goes and now I select what I'm building before they get switched out again."

Exploration leaders are a bit of problem too but again fixing their main issue is probably beyond the patch. I mean, there is a bit more to it than, add a new tech or two that lets you rescan systems you control and find new deposits and possibly digsites and anomalies. Like the question becomes what are you new odds of finding anything? Do you add new digsites and anomalies that can only be found by having these techs? Do you exclude some existing digsites and anomalies from being found by these techs? Do some existing things get moved to only being found once you run these scans? It sounds simple, just add the tech and people will feel better about those "find more deposit traits" on their exploration scientist, but it likely isn't that simple.

One thing I do think the devs could do is possible expand the trait selection pool to three, given that we technically have 4 pools of traits: councilor, general purpos and the two non-councilor traits. At level two, regardless fo what people might have in the way of builds, they do get a one time selection where they have a trait from each pool. From there they always get presented three options for new traits and each one belongs to a different pool, while also always having the option to increasing a trait they already have (assuming it's not maxed out). This would remove some of the disliked RNG. You might not say always get the traits you want for your head of research, but you'll never feel like you have to select a completely useless trait for them either. You can fine tune it so that their traits are always either a councilor trait or a useful general purpose one.

Gonna second the concept behind Abdulijubjub's suggestion for generals. If they were given some traits to make them useful in peacetime, it would make them more useful. Granted some of their issue also comes down to espionage needing help but that likely behind this patch. Though as an aside it seems like making their classes defensive where they get lots of traits useful during peacetime, offensive where they get lots of trait useful for conquest, army build up and upkeep and then statecraft where they focus on diplomacy and espionage, while on the council. Is probably a good setup. Generals probably could be made more relevant, even if you aren't invading worlds, but right now they are too focused on being at war and that makes they too niche.

Finally, just going to throw out a list of things that feel like oversights, rather than bugs and some of these exist before the latest DLC.

-Pre-FTL robotic uprisings taking the players system. I'm sorry, but if the robots barely managed to beat their masters, I don't see how the remaining and badly damaged warbots are going to get to my station without being blasted to bits. Also really insulted when not only do they take my station, they also take any inhabited worlds in that system, regardless of how many troops they have. I feel this is an oversight because it feels like this is using the code for the regular empire robot uprising and is why the primitive robots are being given a whole system despite only taking one world. Maybe this could be fixed because it's both frustrating and annoying.

-Rogue servitors are not given the option to keep subterranean survivors as biotrophies, should they decide to bomb the subterranean civilization. I mean the event is pretty rare and regardless of how popular rogue servitors may or may not be, that is still only one civic for one type of empire.

-Anomalies that give traits sometimes don't play well with gestalts. Got the one that rewards the statecraft trait, but since my rogue servitor's science drones can't be a node, the one that did the research didn't get the trait even though the game text said they did. I'm of two thought here.

First, for non-gestalts, we probably should get a pop up when we are about to start research anomalies that reward councilor traits telling us that once the research is complete, the leader doing the research will get a councilor trait. That way if we don't want a councilor trait on that leader, we can switch in one that we might want it on, like our head researcher or their successor.

Then for gestalts either that councilor trait is added to our researcher node. Maybe it's a change said node will get it or if we want to avoid RNG, but don't want to give a free trait to the research node, gestalts are given a different reward to offset not being able to get a trait for one of their leaders.

I think there might be a handful of other anomalies that reward traits. Again, I can see how this and maybe all of them got missed because there are a ton of anomalies in the game and I want to see these are all fairly old. So real easy to forget about them and more so with better automation. Actually think the statecraft one is from the special project that pops up after the anomaly is researched. So yeah, need some sort of setup to let people know that there is a trait being handed out at the end and they might want to have that on a specific leader instead of being a useless trait on whoever they tasked to automatically handle that stuff and it doesn't work with gestalts apparently.

 

[Rafss]

What if every finished tradition granted +1 Leader Cap alongside the usual +1 Ascension Perk?
Tradition starter already unlock agendas, tradition finisher increasing the cap is not out of theme. And it scales well.

 

[-Marauder-]

There's a couple of bonuses scattered about:

• Transcendent Learning AP: +2
• Dystopian Society civic: +1
• Pooled Knowledge civic: +1
• Autonomous Drones civic: +1
• Factory Overclocking civic: +1
• Precision Cogs civic: +1
• Colonial Centralization tech: +1
• Collective Self/Embodied Dynamism tech: +1
• Aptitude tradition: +1
• Statecraft tradition: +1
• Chosen of the Composer ruler: +1

Granted not all of these are accessible to all empires, but it should be possible for most to get a leader cap of around 8-10.



Yeah, only the five legendary leaders (Gray, Azaryn, Keides, Sharpbeak and the Beholder) don't count towards the cap.

Way to make it look way more than it is. You guys seem to be really intent on holding onto a bad idea no matter what. Many of these are only available to some Empire types and thus mutually exclusive.

While the Legendary leader change is a good one, it's still only a minor change. Without a change to taking galaxy size into account, and letting leader numbers scale in some way with Empire size this isn't really changing much beyond forcing people to pass up the legendary leaders.

This is all in all a very welcome change, especially given the early comments of some PDX staff. But it feels like you guys are going to walk this back incredibly slowly over time rather than just admit that it needs some overhaul/change to how it currently works.

 

[CocoCincinnati]

The other thing that needs to be fixed is fleets splitting just because the admiral gets elected or disappears or whatever.
It adds nothing except more micro, I configure my fleets, they should stay that way.

Yes I can see this being a major headache at just the wrong times. Maybe make it so that the fleet stays together but has a slight penalty as long as it is commanded by an admiral below the command limit (or, as it seems now, no admiral at all). Not suggesting in any way that we can go above the command limit on purpose, just that in the cases of an admiral dying, the fleet stays together with a slight penalty until those extra ships are destroyed, moved by the player to another fleet or another admiral of the correct level is put in command.

 

[CocoCincinnati]

I've seen a lot of good ideas by a lot of different people in a lot of discussions on this topic but maybe something extremely simple could be the best solution. SImply make leader cap 3 per 100 systems. So a 600 system galaxy (the size I usually play with) would be 18 leader cap, with +2 from tech, that would put me at 20 which I think could work (for me at least). Yes I realize that a 30 leader cap on a 1000 system galaxy is probably more than the Devs seem to want, but I think that number could satisfy most of the critics.

 

[Tannhäuser Cake]

https://stellaris.paradoxwikis.com/images/c/c4/UI_council.png
Would it not be nice if the councillors names were shown? Sure, there are mouseover tooltips, but presenting the councillors as just their level, traits and position comes across as rather impersonal. Surely there is enough room below the titles for their names?

 

[Laaaaan]

Still on the topic of leader cap, what about an agenda to increase it? Those seem to be in fashion now. Ties it to unity too if you decide to pay a few billion for some new slots.

 

[Soranya]

The other thing that needs to be fixed is fleets splitting just because the admiral gets elected or disappears or whatever.
It adds nothing except more micro, I configure my fleets, they should stay that way.

Add a debuff to the fleet if it is over the limit until a new leader is assigned. That would solve exploitative issues. (Scaling multiplicative modifier -50% speed, Firerate and damage and regeneration up to double the actuall fleet capacity)

Oh and please remove the hard cap of 500 fleet size - with the modifiers you can easily reach larger sizes and i really would like to have my 1000 stack slow moving armada

Oh and to make fleet size matter more add a debuff to secondary and tertiary fleet fighting against single fleets/Bases so that stacking is not as powerfull anymore. (like -25% to damage/firerate/hitrate for 2nd fleet -50% for third -75% for fourth and - 90% for fithf and so on)

 

[Millbot]

Also any chance we might get some tweaks to the AI's willingness to get vassalized? I know the auto cannon fix will help things, but it's kind of annoying to be into year 24 of a game and see a pacifist fanatic materialist empire agree to be vassalized by a egalitarian fanatic xenophobe. I have my doubts that they are on good terms and I have doubts that the egalitarian fanatic xenophobe is that far ahead of the other empire, if it is even ahead at all.

The AI being so willing to quickly show it's belly and become a vassal to an empire that they likely don't even like through diplomacy is really killing my interest to play games.

 

[Lenk]

I cannot tell if this is a bug or not, but with the Origin: Under One Rule, why is it that the luminary is not guaranteed to become the chosen one? They're the 'Golden one' doesn't seem to make sense they die 99.99% of the time with the event?

 

[HFY]

Aptitude Tradition "Champions of the Empire" now gives bonus per Leaders' levels.

• Effect is now a flat -2 Empire Size per Governor level

This is small enough that I can't imagine noticing it most games.

Perhaps make the sprawl-reduction a planet-specific effect? Then it could be something significant (-5% per level) but because it's planet-specific you can't overlap multiple governor effects, and you can't cover every planet in a large empire.

Right now it feels like a broken thing was changed into a worthless thing.

 

[Abdulijubjub]

This is small enough that I can't imagine noticing it most games.

Perhaps make the sprawl-reduction a planet-specific effect? Then it could be something significant (-5% per level) but because it's planet-specific you can't overlap multiple governor effects, and you can't cover every planet in a large empire.

Right now it feels like a broken thing was changed into a worthless thing.

-50 -20 empire size for a level 10 governor is substantial not entirely worthless. You have to have more than 2500 1000 empire size in order for it to be less than the 2% you got before.

It will be substantial somewhat useful if it applies the percent reductions from Aturion Efficiency/Gray Eminence. It will be basically nothing if it applies before, though.

 

[HFY]

-50 empire size for a level 10 governor is substantial. You have to have more than 2500 empire size in order for it to be less than the 2% you got before.

It will be substantial if it applies the percent reductions from Aturion Efficiency/Gray Eminence. It will be basically nothing if it applies before, though.

I thought it was -2 per governor level, which would be -20 size at level 10.

Where do you see -5 per governor level?

 

[Abdulijubjub]

I thought it was -2 per governor level, which would be -20 size at level 10.

Where do you see -5 per governor level?

When you just woke up 20 minutes ago and are reading the forums while working on your first coffee, 2*10=50.

Fixed it. I guess you know what number I would find acceptable for flat sprawl per level (5, or 2.5x what we're actually getting).

 

[Soranya]

This is small enough that I can't imagine noticing it most games.

Perhaps make the sprawl-reduction a planet-specific effect? Then it could be something significant (-5% per level) but because it's planet-specific you can't overlap multiple governor effects, and you can't cover every planet in a large empire.

Right now it feels like a broken thing was changed into a worthless thing.

I dont have the feeling the 2% are too much - even with 12 leaders (current regular cap) this onyl about 24% - maybe reduce it to 1,5% and remove the one that gives 20% flat (or reduce it siginficantly to 2% or so) - then in any given game the "cap" would be about 25% total?

 

[Abdulijubjub]

I dont have the feeling the 2% are too much - even with 12 leaders (current regular cap) this onyl about 24% - maybe reduce it to 1,5% and remove the one that gives 20% flat (or reduce it siginficantly to 2% or so) - then in any given game the "cap" would be about 25% total?

The problem is that there is no cap. If all you care about is the flat per-leader bonus and you don't care about the level or trait effects at all, you just hire 50 governors. Feudal even makes it free. If it were artificially capped at -25%, it would actually be fairly reasonable, though still potentially broken by stacking Gray Eminence (letting you get to 0% with 4 governors on the council, rather than 5).

 

[SeekingEtermity]

• Leaders can no longer start the game with traits that produce resources. This should stop machine leaders from keeping a bonsai tree garden as a hobby.

OK, but the start of the game is literally the only time those traits are ever worth having. In the first five years or so, it's arguably worth having a leader trait that is worth not quite a single pop. After that point? Hell no! Leaders are (currently) rare and precious and it is in NO way reasonable to use them for simple resource income when their traits are so much more beneficial than that. The opportunity cost is just flat out not worth it.

Frankly, I'd remove those traits entirely. Yes, also the veteran Scientist ones that provide roughly a single researcher (after bonuses) worth of science. None of them are worth taking; they're overpowered in the first two or so years, minor and not worth the trait point by the end of the first decade, and actively detrimental past that point, to the extent that you're better off firing the leader who has them and hiring a new one who can be built without an unremovable dead trait pick.

If you don't want to remove them, and especially if you want them to be useful at any point other than on your starting leaders, you need to figure out a way to make them scale, and scale hard. There's simply no world in which a leader's trait point - or even TWO trait points (8 energy / month is literally a machine tech-drone's base production) - is only worth as much as a single pop by the time you've got a hundred pops.

Also, preventing the specific scenario you talk about is easy. You already have a script check for whether the empire uses food. You can very easily filter traits out from empires that can't use their output.

... of course, we saw 5+ years of leaders spawning with Slave Optimizations ruler agenda even if you aren't a slaving empire, and that only went away because you removed ruler agendas entirely, so maybe drastic measures are in fact called for here.

 

[Soranya]

The problem is that there is no cap. If all you care about is the flat per-leader bonus and you don't care about the level or trait effects at all, you just hire 50 governors. Feudal even makes it free. If it were artificially capped at -25%, it would actually be fairly reasonable, though still potentially broken by stacking Gray Eminence (letting you get to 0% with 4 governors on the council, rather than 5).

I meant change grey eminence to 2% from 20%

And you are right, this would still be a problem. Artifical caps just feel uneasy to me.

 

[Cosmic Fishering Fleet]

I have done nothing but look at spreadsheets since the release.

Flashbacks from my time in military intensifies.

Stellaris or How I learned to stop worrying and love microsoft excel.

Libre OpenOffice Calc, as implied by weapons stats file. By the way, that file format is outdated, it doesn't have minimum range and other things that are much easier to edit in spreadsheets than in txt.

OK, but the start of the game is literally the only time those traits are ever worth having. In the first five years or so, it's arguably worth having a leader trait that is worth not quite a single pop. After that point? Hell no! Leaders are (currently) rare and precious and it is in NO way reasonable to use them for simple resource income when their traits are so much more beneficial than that. The opportunity cost is just flat out not worth it.

Frankly, I'd remove those traits entirely. Yes, also the veteran Scientist ones that provide roughly a single researcher (after bonuses) worth of science. None of them are worth taking; they're overpowered in the first two or so years, minor and not worth the trait point by the end of the first decade, and actively detrimental past that point, to the extent that you're better off firing the leader who has them and hiring a new one who can be built without an unremovable dead trait pick.

If you don't want to remove them, and especially if you want them to be useful at any point other than on your starting leaders, you need to figure out a way to make them scale, and scale hard. There's simply no world in which a leader's trait point - or even TWO trait points (8 energy / month is literally a machine tech-drone's base production) - is only worth as much as a single pop by the time you've got a hundred pops.

Also, preventing the specific scenario you talk about is easy. You already have a script check for whether the empire uses food. You can very easily filter traits out from empires that can't use their output.

... of course, we saw 5+ years of leaders spawning with Slave Optimizations ruler agenda even if you aren't a slaving empire, and that only went away because you removed ruler agendas entirely, so maybe drastic measures are in fact called for here.

And there I have my entire leader pool tainted with something like +8 food and +6 alloys level IV leaders. And the next. And the next. It was grim century, frankly.

 

[-Marauder-]

This is small enough that I can't imagine noticing it most games.

Perhaps make the sprawl-reduction a planet-specific effect? Then it could be something significant (-5% per level) but because it's planet-specific you can't overlap multiple governor effects, and you can't cover every planet in a large empire.

Right now it feels like a broken thing was changed into a worthless thing.

In typical Paradox fashion, they took a shotgun to something that could've been fixed easily. Hey, at least now the arguments for using governors at all is kinda gone, yay?

OK, but the start of the game is literally the only time those traits are ever worth having. In the first five years or so, it's arguably worth having a leader trait that is worth not quite a single pop. After that point? Hell no! Leaders are (currently) rare and precious and it is in NO way reasonable to use them for simple resource income when their traits are so much more beneficial than that. The opportunity cost is just flat out not worth it.

Sadly, this might very well be how things are now and will remain in perpetuity.