Stellaris Dev Diary #307 - Leader Experiments

[Fulgrymm]

Remove the leader cap!

What drives me raging is that this was shoved down my throat together with the dlc but actually it's part of the 3.8.x patch already so I can't even remove the cap by just disabling the dlc. This was done probably to 'encourage' people to buy the dlc to be not disadvantaged. Shady business tactics.

There are a couple ways around this nonsense, either roll back to an earlier version or download a mod that raises the cap.

 

[Imajicus]

There are a couple ways around this nonsense, either roll back to an earlier version or download a mod that raises the cap.

You mean I should disqualify myself from all future updates or fix the issue myself? I know you mean it well, but let it be understood that I paid for a product that I expect to be in flawless condition. I will not do such a thing. Paradox need to clean up their mess, not me.

 

[Rafss]

The masochist minority which enjoys the Leader Cap should be the ones having to mod that nonsense into the game, not us modding it out.

 

[Echo Candor One]

Common Ground and Hegemony are getting some improvements:

• Your starting federation members no longer own your immediately neighboring systems, allowing both you and them some room for early expansion.
• The Federation now starts with 0 Cohesion (instead of -100) and halfway to Level 2 (600 XP instead of 0 XP).
• The requirements for the Origins have been relaxed to allow non-genocidal Hive-Minds and Machine Intelligences to take them. This also allows your AI federation members to occasionally spawn as Hive-Minds or Machine Intelligences.

Can my multiplayer friends and I start in the same federation now without save-scumming until we get random empires we like and loading in as them?

 

[Gabarius]

Yep. The leader cap is so restrictive that there’s no choice but to minmax—no room to actually RP until the lategame.

I want the leader system, as advertised.

The leader system, as advertised: Choose what your leaders do, and by extension, what your empire is good at.

• Do you want your surveyors to survey quickly, or find more anomalies? Should your head of research focus on physics or engineering? And what specialty within? Do you want your research assistance to ??? (Not actually sure how Analysts are supposed to have meaningful customization beyond "make more research or don't". The idea of putting a scientist on a planet to oversee it as a pseudo governor could sorta work, but it's currently so weak as to be just a trap option).
• Do you want your starting governor to focus on trade/unity/slaver output/food/fast building? And as the game progresses, the choices get more exotic, and also bigger impact: reduced upkeep and sprawl, or just as much alloy production as you can? Grow faster, or produce more with the pops you have? Small bonuses to everything (like for a capital), or a big bonus to just one resource?
• Do you want your admirals to have increased range to get a tactical advantage, or just fire faster and kill more ships (with more losses to yourself)? Or do you just want fast deployment, with better sublight speed (and potentially choose close range weapons because you can close the gap)? Do you want your late game fleets to spec out for artillery, or gunships? Or maybe both: knife fighting corvettes screening for artillery. Do you want the Hammer of the Empire, turning that fleet into a powerhouse that destroys anything it goes up against, or do you want a trickster, doing the part of 3 fleets, swiftly redeploying, disengaging without losses, coming back before your enemies do and going out to fight again, repairing on the way?
• Junior leaders prove their mettle (and hope to survive), and eventually graduate from smaller fleets or individual planets to ruling a sector capital or commanding your elite federation fleet, or ruling the entire empire on the council, so that your empire feels alive and meaningful choices are spread out throughout the entire game as your empire grows and more useful positions open up (more sectors, more planets, more council positions, more fleets).

The leader system, as implemented:

• For tall empires, almost as advertised, except for the parts that are useless junk (Pioneer governors, Protector generals, any traits on Analysts other than Collaborator, the entire Explorer class). And also except that the idea of leaders starting out with small scope and graduating to larger ones is so far off that it's baffling that it was ever presented. You hire a fixed number of leaders to be councilors and slap council traits on them, and they're the boringest stat sticks to ever stat while e.g. managing some sector. You don't risk your councilor admirals in battle (because why would you risk the empire wide bonuses for another +20% fire rate on a single fleet). And unless you're playing very poorly, there's little turnover in the first place, so not a whole lot of new positions opening up.
• For wide empires: leaders are mostly irrelevant beyond the council. You get "choices", but at the scale of a larger empire (and the large amount of e.g. extra research or alloy needed to move the needle), they amount to "+1% to alloy or -.2% to empire size". The council matters, but like for tall empires, it's something you select/customize once rather than something you actively manage. You also get choices about where to put your leaders, but because of the single planet scope and the current structure of planets, that "choice" is "put a governor on your first/second/third/fourth ecumenopolis and spec them for alloys" because everything else is even less relevant. Non-councilor leaders are just barely above a rounding error, and they would be even smaller if you actually used any of the freedom the system is supposed to give to pick anything but "slap it on an ecumenopolis".

If you remove the cap (and make traits more balanced with fewer obviously-better choices), the system functions much closer to "as advertised" than the current implementation.

Suppose they nerfed researchers to only produce 3 base research of each type per job (instead of 4) and slightly nerfed every other job in the game (effectively lowering the overall power level and slowing down the game), but removed the cap on leaders to bring it back up again: would the game be more or less engaging? Would you be more bored by actually being able to appoint governors and choose their traits? Would being able to actually afford a pioneer governor to move around, clearing blockers and growing pops (without sacrificing that slot to an industrialist potentially giving +20% output to 100-200 pops instead of giving grow equal to 1/2 of a single Medical Worker pop or Roboticist) make the game less engaging?

If you have no cap, the cost of assigning a happy little Pioneer to clear out blockers or speed up redeveloping the AI's crappy planets is your attention and some unity. With the cap, the cost is a whole other governor. And so it's not a viable strategic choice. You can do it anyway for roleplay, but if that's your primary concern, then the whole argument about "strategic choices" flies out the window.

And, more importantly, with the cap, the whole discussion becomes academic because the overall effect of your leaders becomes tiny if your empire is large enough. The choice of traits for 5 leaders doing the same job is exactly the same as the choice of traits for 1 leader, except with more clicks. But the former actually matters for a larger empire, while the latter doesn't. It's not like going from 10 to 20 leaders would double the number of meaningful choices (there are only a finite number of different situations where you have to make different choices), but it does make those choices twice as impactful to your empire (if your empire is large enough to need it), at the cost of twice as many clicks.

I can agree that just inflating all the numbers isn't engaging. But why is it somehow more engaging for the system to be so restrictive (and poorly balanced) that there are only a few "correct" choices (depending on your empire type), everything else is non-viable because it involves giving up something more impactful, and none of it matters anyway for large empire because the scope is so small?

 

[Abdulijubjub]

Yep. The leader cap is so restrictive that there’s no choice but to minmax—no room to actually RP until the lategame.

I think that's a different issue.

The freedom is there if you really want to RP: the game is beatable even without leaders at all (aside from surveying, and technically even without that if you're willing to jump through some hoops), so you can certainly choose bad classes, veteran classes, or traits and be fine. But it would certainly be nice if RPing was easier because traits and leader types were better balanced so that not picking the best ones was a mild inconvenience instead of a fairly hefty setback (ex. potentially missing 50% research speed for not having any scientists on the council, or potentially missing 60% resources from jobs if you're psionics and, again, don't have scientists).

Removing the cap gives a release valve from the pressure of those balance issues. Ex. generals may suck, but if you want a general defending your capital, with no cap, you just do it anyway with no opportunity cost. But it doesn't really fix the balance issues, rather it makes them irrelevant by letting you pick both to have your cake and eat it too.

But you can still not-minmax, if you want.

 

[Unpixelled]

improvements to the Lithoids Species Pack, that are intended on bringing it up to the level of the others..

See you then!

I’m rocking with excitement, I’m so ready for this.

 

[Silesian Burd]

So will Envoys finally be recognized as people?

Will Leaders finally be recognized as people, too, and not as cardboard cut-outs with stats taped to their backs?

 

[CometBliss]

Exactly. There’s already pretty hefty unity upkeep for high level leaders, so there’s your expenses, as it had been forever. Plus the fact that they made governors LESS effective, requiring more of them.

Devs aren’t players and it shows.

Got any alternatives? I once suggested to use resources for leaders like energy or something for robots and food for hiveminds something like that. When I look back on it, it seems kinda of a lame idea I made. I could think of only get rulers every year you get to choose from a pool? Idk.

 

[CometBliss]

Also, I feel as if sometimes leaders don't always get to their level cap before they die unless you take traits/traditions to elongate their lives. Progenitor of course can do it quickly of course, but in the communities I am in, some of them refuse to play.

they say the reason is, "gestalt is just inherently stronger than any other build."
I mentioned "Void dweller." because it's been months since I played it.
the response was "You don't, play gestalt."

Nodes are very powerful as they don't die, there is 5 of them (including ruler). Progenitor gets passive XP and rogue servitor... Well I don't play RS so idk.

Not sure how to feel, when I played in the WSC, there was no normal empire. Everyone in the lobby was some form of gestalt, be it progenitor, driven assimilator or rogue servitor. It was crazy to me.

 

[Fas Est]

Shouldnt leaders that are produced - either cloned or assembled (or fast breeding, fleeting etc) be akin to Clone Army (5-20 starting), as is, have young starting age?
Why start at 5 years and not 0?

Maybe an additional, synergising with above, Civic or two to consider "Coming of Age rituals" and "Rule of Elder Councils" that either give younger leaders (so they have more time to rule) or Old guys who come with some levels but have less years to rule.

Those would be redundant eg. with Clone Army Origin (at least CoA part) but enhance eg. Fleeting or Venerable.

 

[Gabarius]

Got any alternatives? I once suggested to use resources for leaders like energy or something for robots and food for hiveminds something like that. When I look back on it, it seems kinda of a lame idea I made. I could think of only get rulers every year you get to choose from a pool? Idk.

As I said, the unity upkeep is enough. As you get high-level leaders they get pretty expensive, and in the early game it can be a big expense to employ starting leaders. It was a system that worked fine, and continues to do so within the further leader cap restriction.

 

[Yonael]

I have a suggestion for how to handle the UI changes for the idea of separate caps.

Governor cap could be shown next to the Pop count, Admiral cap could be shown next to the Naval Capacity, Scientist cap could be show next to the Science "income", General cap could be shown next to the Empire Size, and Envoy cap could be shown next to Influence. All would be shown as (x/y) in brackets next to the main stat they're attached to.

Something like this, only better cause it's not mocked up in five minutes.
Also, Leader caps themselves should be based on gameplay elements: Governor cap should be based on number of Pops. Admiral cap should be based on Naval Capacity. Scientist cap should be based on Science produced (so not counting Science consumed), General cap should be based on number of Planets, and Envoy cap should be based on Influence produced (so not counting Influence consumed).

 

[wyldmage]

But they aren't proposing an "interesting" fix, or even a simple one. They are proposing to throw out the current system in favor of something new.

Also my suggestion both in the post for this thread and the other thread I link to has never really been to simply increase the cap size but rather focused on the reason people dislike the cap is the XP penalty which is multiplicative.

Some interesting fixes would be as follows:

1) Change the XP Penalty to Additive that way a trait/perk/etc that gives you +50% XP gains would offset a -50% XP Penalty from the cap. Thus species that focus more on leadership learning could help negate some of this penalty. As it stands it doesn't matter if you have +0% XP gains or +1,000,000% XP Gains your leaders will no longer get XP when you reach that arbitrary -100% Multiplicative XP Penalty.

2) Increase Leader Upkeep cost based on level. Currently the upkeep is Level*2 which means a level 10 leader is only 20 Unity. I propose an exponential cost increase so upkeep is Level^2. Thus a level 5 leader would cost 25 Unity while a level 10 Leader would cost 100 Unity in upkeep. Then with the multiplier on unity cost to upkeep on going over it can get really expensive really fast to have lots of leaders but at least it's more in player control like SB/Naval cap where if you can afford it you can go over but at high cost.

3) Give Benefits to XP for not having as many leaders in some areas. Like Sector Governers get +10% XP for each planet in their sector without a governor. Admirals perhaps gain XP from fleet kills in their system that don't have an admiral, also maybe give small bonus to fleets without admiral much in the way Sector Govs still give their level bonus to planets even though they don't give trait bonuses. Scientist gain XP bonus based on how much actual assisted research they are doing. Thus if assisting a planet without R&D it's normal XP gains, where as if it's a planet with lots of research they get extra XP. The point of this suggestion is to make it obvious and incentivize players who choose a few high level leaders over lots of small ones as to why they gain faster, rather than punishing XP gains of people who take a lot of leaders.

4) Bring back sector wide Governors. Before traits on your Govs impacted the whole sector and were a nice boost. However in the new system they made each planet need their own Governor which ends up drastically increasing the need for more leaders. Also because of RNG trait picks you end up with Govs that are good at two different things. Like they might be good at Minerals and Consumer Goods. But odds are you CG world is going pure factory so it doesn't need boost to minerals, and same with mineral world as planetary specialization is key to getting most out of pops. However if their bonus applied to a full sector this makes a lot more sense as you could end up with both worlds in the same sector.

The addition of the ability to change sector sizes makes it so these two things work together extremely well and is part of the reason people wanted to be able to make their own sectors. So that they can put governors over specific groups of planets for their bonuses. However that sector wide bonus ended up getting removed around the same time as traits now only effecting one planet. Making the ability now only really useful if you wanna release a vassal so you can be exact in what they get.

5) Planets/Fleets have a "Default Leader" It will be assigned a random level 1 leader from your recruits pool, it has major xp penalty so levels really slowly and it auto picks it's own traits. Players can hire the leader full time thus being able to potentially recruit higher level leaders. Since they are pulled from the leader pool you can't just make 20 fleets and get 20 new leader picks. The player can also fire them in hopes of getting a new better leader but it comes from the pool. Basically at the end of the term when the leader pool refreashes any unhired leaders taken up an open position, thus also if a leader is fired the spot won't fill until the next pool refresh. The player has no control over which of these leaders go where.

This setup makes it so important positions don't just sit empty and it feels more impactful as you now have leaders that are doing their own thing verse the hand picked leaders of your empire that you are guiding along set paths. And if one of the leaders in this independent field stands out you can recruit them full time instead of some rookie in the pool.



The above are all interesting ways to try and fix to the leadership cap issue that people have.

Where as the current approach is "People don't like the cap. How about we make Envoy's Leaders too so they need even more leaders?" and "How about we merge the now 5 Leader roles into 3 by having Admirals get bogged down the General Traits, and Govs get bogged down with new Envoy Traits making RNG for trait roles even harsher." is more akin to complete rework of system rather than a "fix".

The new system is only been a couple months and while rebalancing patches have been helping to fix some exploits it's barely had any time or attempt at fixing and instead they are just throwing it out to rework all in favor of keeping the status quo on how the Cap works. As a result I expect the same complaints to be raised after the rework and in fact be even more extreme given the merging of leaders resulting in harsh RNG with traits.

Back when you could just hire and fire to cycle through your new recruits some traits were so in demand spending a bunch of unity to cycle throw was worth it. Now add on needing to gain several levels for curtain high tier traits and a larger pool to draw from. Odds are we see a lot more complaining about not being able to have extra leaders on the side lines leveling up.

Coming back to this post because it was really well thought out.

I think what we really need is a system with 2 tiers of leaders. S tier are your stand-out leaders. The ones responsible for shaping your empire. And, with a default cap of 6, this is what the leaders we are used to can be.
But they are not the only leaders (as evidenced by the massive pool of recruits you see over the years). There are many other leaders who could be helping, but aren't as noteworthy.

Yet under the current system, you have S tier or nothing. There is no "Well Frank here is a governor, but he's just not THE governor, ya know".
Given the prohibitive leader cap, it should be possible to develop/improve your "generic leaders". The stand-ins who do the work when you don't have a gifted greater leader available.
These guys start at level 1 with no traits. Each time one of your leaders gains a veteran or destiny trait, your generic leaders of that class gain xp. Each time you recruit certain techs, they may gain a trait. Etc.
Eventually, you could have level 3 generic governors with two traits. One that gives them -5 crime, and the other providing +2% to trade value. In addition to the benefits of being a level 3 governor.

So now, despite not having a powerful governor for the planet (whose traits are much stronger), you have SOMEONE for that planet, and no age worries, because when they die/retire/etc, another skilled governor steps up to take their place.

Additionally, this also means that over time, the level your new leaders start at increases. Eventually, maybe you can earn enough experience on them to actually have veteran leaders (level 4-5) available to recruit (though level 4 should probably be soft-capped via the exp system on them).

That said, I'm down with most of the ideas Spyre points out as well. Scientists (explorers) are the leader that bothers me the most. By the time you get their good traits for surveying, there's nothing left to survey.