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Stellaris Dev Diary #307 - Leader Experiments

Happy Thursday!

This week we’re looking at another of our Summer Experiments, though this one unfortunately didn’t work out as well as we had hoped.

Class-based leader limits.

Why are you looking at this?​

Galactic Paragons reintroduced a limit to the number of leaders you could recruit at one time, and while it was a soft cap that you could exceed, experience gains were reduced and once you hit twice the cap, all leader experience gain stopped. In subsequent patches, we relaxed some of the numbers and added more ways to increase the cap, but it’s still a rather unpopular system that could use some work.

Currently, the presence of a less valuable leader (like a General) takes up the same “space” as something like a Scientist or Admiral, which leads to some unsatisfying gameplay decisions.

I mentioned a few things we were planning on looking at back in Dev Diary #302, along with some of the issues we expected to run into.

So what did you try?​

During our experiments we added the ability to have individual leader caps by class, so that General mentioned above would use up General capacity, but Scientists would be governed by their own limit. “Over cap” effects would likewise be per-class, so if you had too many Admirals, their progression would slow, but other leader classes would be unaffected.

We also experimented with retaining “wild-card” capacity, so you could always get a few over before starting to run into penalties.

Why didn’t it work?​

This experiment largely failed due to UX issues. Stellaris isn’t always the easiest game to parse information from, but this turned out diabolically bad and difficult to fix.

The information transfer is made even harder by Envoys acting as their own “special version” that have their own capacity but behave entirely differently from all of the other leaders.

It says we have 1 leader out of 3, but we actually have 4 out of 5-8. Oh no.
1/1 Admirals, 0/1 Generals, 1/2 Scientists, 2/1 Governors, 0/3 Envoys (but actually 3 Envoys, 0 of which are being used), plus the Wildcards

This could possibly have been shown as something like 1/0/1/2 (+2) | (3), but that’s very confusing.

Five different leader types plus the wildcard was too difficult to explain clearly in the top bar (where the limited space is a major issue) and even in the expanded space available in tooltips.

After several variants and some UX design time, we deemed this variant a failure. We could have continued spending time refining this - but decided that we’d rather pursue a greater rework that we’re hoping to release alongside the 3.10 update. (Custodian initiatives do not generally have hard release dates - if it’s not ready by 3.10 freeze, it’ll move out to 3.11.)

I’ll go into full details after Caelum is released, but the quick summary involves consolidating the five leader classes down to three (Commanders, Diplomats, and Scientists) and reworking how Envoys are used. (As they would be merged into the Diplomat class.)

Commanders, Diplomats, and Scientists

Yes, we've had one, yes, but what about second leader rework?

Until then, we’re planning on making some adjustments to the over-cap formulas to reduce their negative effects until the greater rework is ready.

Tell us about Caelum then!​

Like the Stellaris 3.1 ‘Lem’ update, 3.9 ‘Caelum’ has a lot of general improvements scattered across a great number of game systems.

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.

Common Ground's Federation starting state

We also have some balance changes done for Archaeotechs:
  • Halved the energy upkeep of the Facility of Archaeostudies.
  • Added the Archaeotech Focus admiral trait, which grants increased damage and fire rate with Archaeotech weapons.
  • Decreased the research speed and draw weight for Archaeotech from the Expertise trait, but made it reduce the Minor Artifact cost for ship components.
  • The starting head of research for Remnants empires now has the Expertise: Archaeostudies trait.
  • The Archaeoengineers AP now reduces Minor Artifact cost for ship components by 10%
  • Increased the range of Macro Batteries by 50%.

Expertise: Archaeostudies
Archaeotech Focus

Next week…​

Here are some things that we’ll be talking about in the next few weeks:

Pixelated Collage of lots of tooltips that I figure you'll have deciphered by the end of the day.

We’ll reveal all of these, and more.

We’ll be starting with all the improvements to the Lithoids Species Pack, that are intended on bringing it up to the level of the others..

See you then!
 
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The general traits are actually good though. They steal enemy pops and give you lots of resources

I am referring to the assertion directly from the OP by Eladrin:

"Currently, the presence of a less valuable leader (like a General) takes up the same “space” as something like a Scientist or Admiral, which leads to some unsatisfying gameplay decisions."
 
hoping that means envoy's and espionage system will be separated... as envoy's should be only for diplomacy and have nothing to do with spying and hoping espionage system gets a rework too as its really badly implemented right now and largely ignored/useless ..

I hope that envoys are removed and diplomat’s name is changed to something more relevant to the game

I actually really like Envoys as they are - second string leaders that fit neatly into that 'ambiguous get-stuff-done' slot, as opposed to the big picture people the other leaders are. As for Envoys not having anything to do with spying, Wikipedia has the following to say:

The oldest known classified document was a report made by a spy disguised as a diplomatic envoy in the court of King Hammurabi, who died in around 1750 BC.

Espionage and diplomacy are intimately entwined and pretty much always have been in human history.

Governors will be part of the Diplomat class, but I've been experimenting with letting any of the three govern a planet or sector in different ways.

I'd really like this, actually. It seems super neat to have administrators in that way. Seems like something that could be tied to Ethics/Civics - Technocracies only allowing Scientists to be governors, Martial Culture and Commanders, etc.

With a merger of Governors into other types, is there a plan for populists/career politicians? There isn't really a smooth pathway to the council/leadership for nobility in indulgent empires or priests in spiritualist empires without Governors.
 
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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 we get a specific 'Trade League' start for Megacorps, similar to how Hegemony is separate, which guarantees that Federation members will Not be hiveminds and also that they won't be (competing) megacorps? Maybe also increase the odds that they're running trade-adjacent civics (Anglers, Masterful Crafters, Merchant Guilds -obviously- and Pleasure Seekers)?
 
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Governors will be part of the Diplomat class, but I've been experimenting with letting any of the three govern a planet or sector in different ways.



Leader Consolidation is on a longer timeframe, everything in that image is 3.9.
Huge fan of consolidating leaders down to three classes. Will xenophiles have a bonus to the number of diplomats that they can have, or something new? Or has development not gotten far enough along to really think about bonuses to the system?
 
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Interesting to see what didn’t work out. I hope the feeling of our fleets and sectors being empty is also addressed by a future update. Feels bad that the game is telling you most of your planets, sectors, and fleets are lacking.

Are there any changes to vassal mechanics and multi-party wars? Every single game without fail I eventually end up in some war where the loser is 80% occupied by me, 20% by a third party, and refused to surrender to either as neither have 100% occupation.
 
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obviously spies disguise themselves all the time.. doesn't mean envoy should be able to do 2 jobs... doesn't make sense... we need a clear and useful espionage system and having espionage system being blocked cos u need to use envoys as diplomats (there actual function) doesn't make sense... they need too be separate entirely and then spy system/sabotage tradition/techs can be focused on properly as they all need help in this area
 
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Aw, it is a pity that leader-specific classes did not work out due to UX issues, it sounded so much promising. Perhaps the Leader consolidation would allow it to implement it?

As for leader types, it seems that it would be something along those lines:

Scientists: Good old scientists
Commanders: Admirals + Generals
Diplomats: Envoys +Govenors

That being said, I think that if governors are going to be rolled up with envoys, the term "Politicians" or "Statesmen" would be much more fitting for that class, rather than "Diplomats" (which amongst other things, would not fit at all with genocidal empires).

A for turning envoys into full-fledged leaders, that makes me wonder if an espionage rework is planned in the long term too.

And for Caelum, all things revealed so far seem to be nice!
 
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Really looking forward to the leader rework. While i am fine with the current system, i would much appreciate an improved version. (Also, yay for envoys becoming proper leaders - am looking forward to how spy shenanigans are going to be affected.)

Regarding espionage: Can you reduce the influence cost until you get to the eventual rework? ~50 Influence for operations is WAY too much. If i can get a new star system for ~80 then operation costs are absurdly high. It fundamentally means that i have to significantly slow my expansion if i want to do any operations at all. I don't think that is a reasonable limitation. The current system should never be used unless you are past expansion phase.
 
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We’ll be starting with all the improvements to the Lithoids Species Pack, that are intended on bringing it up to the level of the others..

See you then!
I'm surprised by this. Lithoids feel like the most interesting species pack to me.
 
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I'm not sure that I see how sweeping General traits under the Commander 'rug' will solve the problem of a leader with the traits being undesirable.
I think merging Generals and Admirals may actually be a bad idea.

Despite both being military leaders, they have very different uses. Army traits will be useless on fleets, and ship traits will be useless on armies.
 
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consolidating the five leader classes down to three (Commanders, Diplomats, and Scientists)

If "Diplomats" are going to contain planetary governors and the leader of the empire, might I suggest renaming that leader pool from "Diplomats" to something more general, like "Statesmen"?
 
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Consolidating leaders into those three types has been suggested many times - I think it's a good way to go about it. Instead of having a useless General sitting around, you'll just re-assign an Admiral(Commander) to an army if you're going to invade a well-defended planet. That doesn't happen all that often, so I think the micro of it won't be a big issue.

Espionage envoys should not be removed, instead this is a chance for spymasters to get traits improving them as well, making espionage more interesting. But a suggestion has been to have a single leader assigned to overall espionage, managing every active spy network.
 
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indeed a spymaster but as a leader maybe should be a council default choice and up the council size to 7 and really put some effort into making espionage system good.. after all spymasters have been a thing on councils in GoT etc and in history would have advised kings.. an important role in history for empires .. you even have one as a renown leader the governor lady spymaster.. use her as a base too work off maybe add spymaster as its own leader category that would be better for traits..
 
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I'm interested to see how this leader rework goes, considering that I imagine it's going to look quite a bit different to how leaders work now. It makes sense given that in terms of "abilities" or "tasks" each leader can perform, scientists are a bit over-represented compared to the other leaders. Given that it seems like admirals and generals are going to be combined into 1 and governors and envoys are going to be combined to another, I'm wondering if the per-class leader caps is going to be used for this given that the converging of envoys frees up that special case for the UI and envoy use rework is going to need to increase the total cap from what it is now (8-12). I assume diplomats taking the spots of previous envoy slots will be a lot more powerful than previously.
I'm personally looking forward to what the changes bring because while I do like many of the additions of Galactic Paragons, I will say it is a somewhat awkward experience playing with leaders now if not playing with a leader-focused empire.
I'm also curious to see if the 3 veteran classes will be maintained or if a 4th will be included or if the entire system will be reworked. I can see the rework focusing more on the previous roles making sense. For example, instead of aggressive/defensive admirals, it splits into more of admiral, general, and councillor roles. Same with diplomat, it splits into more of governor, envoy, and councillor roles. I'm curious to see if the scientists do the same by combining the analyst and explorer roles into one and the second being reworked into a espionage/cloaking role and keeping the third councillor role. Although, this might not work well with players that don't own all of the DLC, so that might be a bit difficult to work with.
My only concern is that given the randomized pool of traits, the previous roles would essentially become randomized in the new system. For example, if trying to build an aggressor/raider admiral but you get all the defensive traits rolled instead. I think it might be worth consideration increasing the initial pool size or giving mini-pools of traits where the mini-pools themselves are guaranteed. (And these could correspond to the previous roles currently in the game with Galactic Paragons. For example, the governor having a new planet building mini-pool and the resource focused mini-pool and at least 1 trait from each of these pools is guaranteed or something).
A lot of things up for consideration and having to juggle empires that are focused towards some categories than others, such as militarist empires wanting more commanders, and diplomatic/espionage empires wanting more diplomats.
 
The general traits are actually good though. They steal enemy pops and give you lots of resources
The on-invasion traits are basically the only good ones, and they're broken: you can repeatedly reinvade the same planet to generate all the resources it does, every time, repeatedly. Ex. Invade a size 20 forge world for 2000 alloys/CG three times per month.

The rest of the non-council traits are worthless, and boil down to saving a pittance of minerals. No one, not even the AI, invests in big armies. So any traits that buff the performance of armies are just resource saving and also small in effect.

Ultimately: it's not a meaningful arena of competition because you have to first win (or lose) in the navy arena before armies come into effect at all. Unless you're going for a meme build like subterranean reanimators and plan to just rely on no one ever successfully invading you to hold territory, the resources you put into armies (including leader cap) are better spent on ships (meaning admirals).

I hope the eventual rework removes the dud cases (saving minerals on invasion, or worse, sitting around on a planet, hoping someone will invade you) and keeps some of the more interesting ones, like the win-more mechanic that are on-invasion effects (with their exploits removed or mitigated), the council effects, the martial-law-esque peacetime bonuses, the defense platform buildup throughout the empire, etc.
 
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