Stellaris Dev Diary #302 - Leaders and 3.8.3 Balance Changes

[TankATron]

I Was trying to come off as professional buuuut to summarise.

We have limited time, limited resources and make calls all the time about where to spend it. I want everyone to have a good time when they boot up this game, it pays my bills sure but it also makes me happy.

It's unfortunate you feel that we aren't listening or doing anything. But..we are? It just takes time.

I could cuss a bit but I'm not sure we're technically allowed to swear on the forums.



Whatever it is when you hit default, I am completely blanking on what that is and don't have the HDD space to install and check Stellaris on my home PC

You want everyone to have a good time? Less than half a dozen scouts, 12-14 total leaders in a 1000 star galaxies, dozens of unmanned fleets and dozens of unmanned sectors.... beg to differ.

I'm just asking you to fix a problem you created. If you're not going to do that maybe just say it clearly so I give up trying to change your minds.

You sir... (directed to me) shall be forever resigned to 3.7.4... and that's final. I may accept it or I may move on, but we'd at least know where we stand.

 

[Scorpio_Shirica]

What I quoted is an empty statement, it has no substance, and is made for the purpose of sating me.

We care about 1000 star system players (when every decision they are making seems to contradict that), but we must be mindful of where we allocate resources (as in, we're not allocating resources to balance the leader cap in ratio to the 1000 star galaxy size)....

More concisely stated... Oh we care about you're happiness... we're just not allocating resources to make you happy. Was happy until the cap was introduced.

It sounds like something blizzard would say to defend gutting PVE from Overwatch 2.

I think you need to take a step back and reread some of what they are doing. We can use mods to remove the cap in the meantime. They aren't removing our galaxy sizes because they do want to support them... but have to prioritize what affects the most players and right now it seems smaller galaxies are easier for them to address pacing on. You seem to be misattributing your anger to folks here unnecessarily.

 

[Cloud_Kestrel]

Heavily dislike the list of changes (and what is not there as well). The overall picture i got from these changes is that a conclusive removal or proper way of increasing the leader cap is still not implemented. So the number of leaders we can get is still not that big, but on top of that most of the changes are just nerfs for most traits and leader-related traditions???

What devs intend to do to admirals is just upsetting, now they don't affect fleet size and most of their traits are less impactful. Like, if this was exchanged for being able to hire twice more of them, that would sorta be fine, but judging from other changes it's not the case, so now i have roughly the same amount of admirals, just less fun and excitement from having and developing them??? Thanks, Paradox.

Planetary/Sector governors really need MAJOR rework, because their state now is just abysmal. With leader cap being this tight you just can't use them at all, but having made one modded playthrough with cap not being an issue, they are still not fun, because then they are just too much micro and busywork that you don't care to do.

Generals are still rather useless and you can be fine having just ONE (no matter the size of the game).

And relation of Galaxy size to leader system is a whole different but very important topic that the devs apparently just won't address as it seems.

Overall all of this is just no fun, devs make us pay for making leaders interesting and then just don't give us a reasonable number of them to play with.

Also, Legendary and Renowned Paragons seem a little lazy and immersion breaking, the latter point is because they belong to species/empires and stories that just don't exist in the universe that you're playing and the former point is because yeah, premade guys are probably easier to make, but i would rather have some procedurally-generated leaders that appear naturally and give me emergent narrative than the always the same premade dudes, I only really liked Beholder.

 

[TankATron]

I think you need to take a step back and reread some of what they are doing. We can use mods to remove the cap in the meantime. They aren't removing our galaxy sizes because they do want to support them... but have to prioritize what affects the most players and right now it seems smaller galaxies are easier for them to address pacing on. You seem to be misattributing your anger to folks here unnecessarily.

You may be right. I was very excited about paragons initially. The cap was devastating to how I enjoy and play the game. I got optimistic today would be the day that that would either be remedied or at last a commitment that it would be remedied would be articulated today. I think it's pretty clear, now, that that's not the case.

I tried.

 

[Meneye]

We've had very different experience of corporate environments if you think the paradox devs sound corporate. There wasn't a single mention of alignment, stakeholders, deliverables, prioritisation..etc

This is why we need to pass buzzword standardization

 

[Eswahrt]

The ship cost reduction traits are nerfed, and that's worse because... now players who want to exploit a discount stacking mechanic to the bitter end have to fish for leaders even harder in order to reach ludicrous discounts?

Yeah brother, cramping 5 governors with the same trait in a system in order to enjoy building "free ships" from a single shipyard is JUST intended gameplay. Not leaning on abusing play-style at all. Paradox fix plz.

Yeah, why not just make most reduction traits non stackable? We have quite a lot of those and at the same time the same trait on two different leaders also stacks. That's what leads to 90% fleet cost reduction. Reduce the number of such traits and make identical to not stack. The approach to just reduce the numbers does not sound like an optimal solution.

 

[MadCatYeet]

I would really love for there to be seperate leader caps so I could make jobs give leader cap through a mod. I don't know whether it would be compatible with current unified cap but yeah

 

[Abdulijubjub]

The ship cost reduction traits are nerfed, and that's worse because... now players who want to exploit a discount stacking mechanic to the bitter end have to fish for leaders even harder in order to reach ludicrous discounts?

Yeah brother, cramping 5 governors with the same trait in a system in order to enjoy building "free ships" from a single shipyard is JUST intended gameplay. Not leaning on abusing play-style at all. Paradox fix plz.

No, it's worse because those who are fully committed to exploiting this mechanic (aka, just using it) now have a huge advantage over those that don't want to do that.

If I have a single Shipwright/Retired Naval Officer governor on my shipyard, a Military Pioneer on the council, the relevant tech, Supremacy, and the agenda, I would have formerly had -80%. My tryhard neighbor who stacked a second governor (or was genocidal) would have had -90%. 2x as many ships. I could match them by adding another -10%.

Now I have -65%. The Devouring Swarm still has -90% (3.5x as many ships), my tryhard neighbor has -85% (2.3x as many ships), though if he appoints another Strategist to the council, that also becomes -90% (3.5x).

The problem isn't that it's hard to "exploit" (using the traits as intended is enough to hit 90). The problem is that it's still trivial to reach -90% if you tailor your empire toward it with admiral positions (3 military pioneers, the tech, supremacy, and the agenda is -65% without a governor at all, -75% if you go up to Architect of War). But for everyone else, it's now extremely hard to compete without radically altering their empire or exploiting.

Having 3 admirals on the council instead of 1 isn't supposed to triple the number of ships you can build. Nor, presumably, would playing a DS/DE. But currently, it does.

If everyone runs up against the cap, everyone is equal. If the default is floating around -40% to -50%, then all other multipliers are doubled (or more) in actual effect on the number of ships you can build. Just Supremacy and the agenda puts you at -30%. There just shouldn't be this many stacking modifiers floating around. -90% ship build cost should not be a thing.

 

[Zentay]

I believe stacking ship build the cost reduction is less impactful in practice than predicted on the forum because of ship upkeep and naval capacity limit. It's still very powerful but going from -50% build cost to -75% is not going to mean twice as many ships.

 

[Muhrks]

Combat width is .... a EU4 thing, right? since when is it relevant to Stellaris?

"Leader traits that have base resource production now produce the market equivalent of 8 energy/month for tier 1 and 32 energy/month for tier 2."
Sounds interesting. So... Unity is now a market thingie? Or how do you math this out?


Frontier Spirit trait maximum effects changed to -10% Colony Ship Cost and +50% Colonization Speed and +1 starting pop for colonies.
Frontier Spirit maximum effects reduced to -10% Colony Ship Cost and +45% Colonization Speed.

ummm... sure...

 

[Abdulijubjub]

I believe stacking ship build the cost reduction is less impactful in practice than predicted on the forum because of ship upkeep and naval capacity limit. It's still very powerful but going from -50% build cost to -75% is not going to mean twice as many ships.

I'm basing this on my experience of doing the thing once, seeing that it made the game trivially easy, and deciding not to touch these traits at all thereafter. It's very, very impactful.

75% vs. 50% means you can build twice as many ships. Your standing navy may not quite be twice as big, but at I said in the original comment: that only matters if you don't fight. If you do, your opponents must match your attrition. If you have a large fleet engagement and both sides lose half their fleet, the ship cost reductions mean you can afford to keep doing it forever, while you opponent can't.

 

[Abdulijubjub]

Combat width is .... a EU4 thing, right? since when is it relevant to Stellaris?

Colony invasions have width that depends on the size of the planet (and leader traits).

 

[FleetingRain]

Didn't someone suggest elsewhere to turn Cost Reduction into Build Efficiency? +90% has a much smaller and scaleable impact than -90%.

 

[Scorpio_Shirica]

Combat width is .... a EU4 thing, right? since when is it relevant to Stellaris?

C'mon man.... I know ground combat as a joke is sort of a meme for this game... but lol

 

[Losttruppen]

I believe stacking ship build the cost reduction is less impactful in practice than predicted on the forum because of ship upkeep and naval capacity limit. It's still very powerful but going from -50% build cost to -75% is not going to mean twice as many ships.

You can throw up to 10 times as many fleets at them in different waves and completely ignore losses which return you under the cap, making it a temporary, calculable risk. With enough Shipyards you would never lose a defensive war.

 

[Foxosaur]

You may be right. I was very excited about paragons initially. The cap was devastating to how I enjoy and play the game. I got optimistic today would be the day that that would either be remedied or at last a commitment that it would be remedied would be articulated today. I think it's pretty clear, now, that that's not the case.

I tried.

In your defence and Abdul agrees in a previous post I can't quote right now (gin in one hand) - I think most people genuinely play on the biggest galaxy their PC can handle, at least going by the forum anyway. I think its natural that players would have an allure to the "biggest sandpit" they can play in, a lot of the time.

And I think we probably also all expected the galaxy size setting to % increase / decrease certain parts of the game but it obviously doesn't or isn't built to do.

I'm unsure of the "cuss" mention by Enfield, hopefully he just means being frustrated about certain things internally, than anything else. Maybe some guys / custodians are effected by things going on across Paradox, I hope not, we have a fine game and the contributions have largely been great the last 2 years which have been positive and I believe in them. Even if right now, a few things are not ideal.

 

[Lude]

Some great changes here but I am concerned about the changes to the traditions that currently give +xp for specific leader types. -10% upkeep and -10% leader recruitment cost is vritually nothing! It amounts to a few hundred / thousand unity per game. For a tradition node that costs unity to unlock! It really makes it unattractive to take the entire tree which they are part of. How about just make them 10% xp and call it a day?

Of course there's other options too. You could try effective level +1 for those leaders, or a free leader slot for a specific leader type. Or perhaps +1 councillor skill for admiral/governor/scientist councillor type. But literally anything would be better than leader upkeep and cost which is to be honest not impactful except in the first 20 years of the game at most, and not at 10%!

 

[Abdulijubjub]

Didn't someone suggest elsewhere to turn Cost Reduction into Build Efficiency? +90% has a much smaller and scaleable impact than -90%.

Changing the way they stack to make every 10% change mean 10% more ships than the baseline would be an excellent solution. The problem is the way the function behaves as it approaches zero. Being able to deeply invest is a good thing. The last -10% having the same impact as the first -50% is the problem.

If there were a civic which just said "-50% ship build cost", with no other such effects in the game, people would rightly call that out as being broken. -10% taking you from -80 to -90 is exactly the same thing, but somehow it's not a big deal, apparently.

 

[Calvax]

Some great changes here but I am concerned about the changes to the traditions that currently give +xp for specific leader types. -10% upkeep and -10% leader recruitment cost is vritually nothing! It amounts to a few hundred / thousand unity per game. For a tradition node that costs unity to unlock! It really makes it unattractive to take the entire tree which they are part of. How about just make them 10% xp and call it a day?

This is true. Particularly as it's per leader cap. You're spending thousands of unity to save, at most, single digit unity per month. In the best case scenario it's going to be centuries to pay that back which is beyond the scope of regular games.

 

[Dragonsteel82]

I think your focusing on the word Optimal too much. Maybe I should have said "Default", Medium is our starting point or baseline.

I do care and we are very much invested in the popular setups being enjoyable. We just have to do so with an eye to where we place our efforts.

I've only ever played on 1000 star galaxies. Have I been doing it wrong and depriving myself of the "intended pacing?" I do get mental fatigue on the large galaxies with trying to manage 30+ planets and all.