Stellaris Dev Diary #307 - Leader Experiments

[Letharion]

I can absolutly live without having an unlimited number of leaders who can reach level 10. But being closed out of an important part of the newly invigorated leader game play, leveling up and selecting traits for the leaders short of one exception, through the agenda "Leadershp Conditioning" every few years, negates the benefits of the DLC.

As I proposed elsewhere,let all leaders advance to level 4 but cap the amount above. Costs (Unity, perhaps something rarer, perhaps empire size) may raise with each leader but the chance of advancement beyond level 4 should be rarer the more leaders you’ve got above the cap. If a leader advances beyond level 4, his further development should only be hindered lightly at most by the number of fellow „advanced“ leaders. WIth dedicated "leader game play" you will keep having more high level leaders as without.

To accomplish that, give each young leader the eager trait which changes at level four to a veteran trait or something like arrested development, the later the more often the more leader there are above level 4 as the competitive pressure between your elite increases.

Of course you've got to reserve the stronger traits for level 5 or up this way. On the other hand the traits avaiable trough the lower levels should be on the lower side but generally more useful for particular roles/jobs. This would also match with fewer leader classes and letting simultaneously different leader classes do the same job but in different ways (civil, scientific and military governors / ambassadors, science and military attachés etc).

 

[Chief of Staff]

Envoys being rolled into "diplomats" is great, but you need to separate espionage from them. i like having generals affect espionage, so you should consider splitting it away from "diplomacy" and roll it into military stuff. most of the espionage missions are worse than useless and the envoys are better put to use improving relations or increasing your diplo weight with the galactic community. infiltration and spying makes more sense rolled into "military intelligence" and should just be a separate "agent" leader job. just like diplomacy gives envoys, let subterfuge give "agents" and split up the roles.

to make them actually useful, consider giving us espionage operations to worsen relations between two other empires, or to facilitate/manipulate them closer towards peace, or towards hostility. being able to foment rebellion in the territories of my enemies would be amazing, and also something i'd have to watch out for in my own empire. then you can make generals as important as admirals on the council, and stuff like the domination tradition and the civics and edicts related to a police state and oversight become more important compared to stuff like prosperity

I would say both envoys (or whatever replace that in civilian side) and generals for espionage, because espionage and intelligence is typically performed by both civilian agencies and military organizations in modern states today (think of CIA and NSA/DIA in the United States or MI5/MI6 and DI in the United Kingdom, respectively) and I suspect that such situation will remain true even in the future, at least for the Earth anyway. I would not be surprised if Starfleet's Section 31 in Star Trek's United Federation of Planets also had a civilian counterpart, but you wouldn't know that because that hasn't been established in lore... yet! ;P

I could be mistaken, but I think these days, the military organizations are mainly responsible for signals intelligence whereas civilian counterparts are responsible for human intelligence. This division probably would persist even into the far future, but who knows. Again, all of this is based on human experience and history so far, and it is very well possible that some alien civilizations have completely different ideas of how things ought to work.

 

[PLSKICKME]

Leaders should have dual role capability. Making every leader be an ultra specialized super supreme leader just makes the game easier. There should be some uncomfortable choices made during play.

Tell that uncomfortable choices to those who get random picks, its even worse after 3.8 if you dont own the dlc. you get traits from a bigger pool(compared to pre 3.8) half the time as dlc users...and you get to choose. RNG has nothing to do with choices, you either give up a leader whom you trained for several years to just yeet out the window bcs it got a bad trait. This update made the gaming experience with leaders worse for non dlc owners.

 

[Northernwwater]

Tell that uncomfortable choices to those who get random picks, its even worse after 3.8 if you dont own the dlc. you get traits from a bigger pool(compared to pre 3.8) half the time as dlc users...and you get to choose. RNG has nothing to do with choices, you either give up a leader whom you trained for several years to just yeet out the window bcs it got a bad trait. This update made the gaming experience with leaders worse for non dlc owners.

It's always been random.

There are easy choices you can make during the game to greatly minimize negative traits. That said, I find I can live with some negative traits when I do get them.

I dump some leaders if they are low level though. No big deal.

 

[Abdulijubjub]

It's always been random.

There are easy choices you can make during the game to greatly minimize negative traits. That said, I find I can live with some negative traits when I do get them.

I dump some leaders if they are low level though. No big deal.


View attachment 1010591

The randomness before was limited in scope, and so much easier to mitigate that it's incomparable. You could have 30 spare scientists just assisting research and farming XP/traits for when they (eventually) need to take over as head of e.g. Physics, but that's no longer possible.

For governors, for instance:

• individual traits were 5-10x as powerful (comparing best to best) because of their sector wide effects, and you only got 3 (or 4, if you got 3 then ascended). That means whether a governor was good or bad was decided very early (sometimes literally at recruitment time, if you only needed 1 or 2 traits), and you rarely had to ditch high level governors for e.g. failing to roll Intellectual or rolling Corrupt instead of a positive trait.
• you had 3-15 governors (depending on the size of your empire) and if one rolled poorly, you had immediate replacements on hand and also had many chances to roll well (to pick the very best one for the sectors where you wanted particular traits).

For scientists:

• you had many head-of-research-hopefuls, and 3 positions with different requirements, so you could almost always guarantee someone decent.
• you were encouraged to swap scientists out for different techs and specializations, so even passable scientists could be helpful every once in a while if they covered a specialty no one else had.

Now, by contrast:

• individual traits are significantly weaker for governors (both because of limited scope and also they're e.g. 5% instead of 10-15% in effect because they assume you'll take it 2-3 times), but you get ~1.5x as many of them. It's just an overall reduction in power, while also requiring more things to go right to get a good leader.
• there are many more ways to roll poorly: more dead traits, and even the good ones can be rolled in combinations that aren't helpful (like getting a smidge of research bonus on your governor that otherwise buffs alloys, instead of rolling that final +10% to alloys)
• governors only buff one planet, so governors that get traits for two things are just a waste, instead of potentially covering a sector where you have e.g. both a research planet and an alloys planet.
• negative traits can come at any time: your head of research or ruler can roll -6% research speed for the entire empire after they've been sitting at level 10 for years and you've managed to dodge every other bad roll.

It's always been random, but it hasn't always been lacking the means to mitigate it like it is now, without the DLC.

 

[Starfire Breeze]

First, it's a shame that the leader cap by type didn't work, but it's also appreciated that you shared why it didn't. Given the prominence of the issue, pushing out a 'we recognize this as an issue, we tried, it didn't work because of this reason, and we've an idea on how to approach it forward' is exactly the sort of communication I appreciate, and I'd bet the community will appreciate. This is a productive communication of issues, and intents, and I thank you for it.

Not sure that I have a particular other opinion on the main post's topic, but I'd definitely like to second the part about both positively acknowledging the problems with the existing design, and providing more transparency into explorations, even if they were unsuccessful, at addressing the issues. That's certainly appreciated - thank you to the dev team on that point.

 

[amib]

how you have so many agendas at once?

 

[Northernwwater]

how you have so many agendas at once?

You stack them by clicking the launch button (Rocket). It costs unity and scales with sprawl and decreases the closer to free launch(maturity). The Statecraft tradition also has two selections which increase the duration of an agenda and reduces the time it takes for maturation. The result is stacked agendas. Very powerful.

https://stellaris.paradoxwikis.com/Government#Agendas

 

[Mole204]

My usage of leaders is to find a governor for the 3 or 4 territories I end up with. As many scientists as I need to have science ships, plus the research heads, so about 15 of those. 5 or 10 generals. If you want something to change with leaders, figure out something the admirals that reach level 10 and can then go no further to do. There may be one or two I may want to keep around because of their skill badges like Wrench. But there should be something to do with them since once they reach full level, it's better to swap them out for fresh admirals because otherwise the opportunity to gain experience points just goes to waste. What to do with the old admirals? Why not start enshrining them at the Strategic Coordination Center megastructure to give more +1 somethings?
>What to do when the race is on to start feeding fully trained admirals to The War Machine before they die of old age. Yup, gonna keep grinding +5 Year life tech and war opportunities.

Oh, and I've always wanted a more complete readout about a leader or admiral who dies or is killed. Why not include the age and list of badges in the message?

 

[Skarm Ghelmaad]

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.

​

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.)

View attachment 1009577
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.

Unlike the Habitat Experiment (which I deeply disliked), I like this "leader consolidation idea".

While seems obvious that Governors and Envoys will be consolidated into the "Diplomats" class, I really hope the subclasses available will take in account also the "Envoy" and "Spy" roles and will enhance them. I think would be even nicer if the subclasses were expanded to 6 to allow both to have the Admiral and General subclasses for the Commanders and the Governor (plus Envoy) subclasses, but adding additional subclasses for Scientists...

While Diplomacy and Espionage are fun (although I wished Espionage had more vanilla operations and was a bit faster), I have always felt that having Envoys has a trait-less class that couldn't be purchased sucked so badly!

( I wish there were a bit more Espionage "black ops"...such as kidnapping/"turning" leaders, hijacking ships, assassinating leaders, etc...and possibly if shapeshifting traits was implemented into the game allowing characters to temporary "copy" alien species or even specific leaders and gaining espionage bonuses or assets that way!
Would be also quite cool to be able to define specific portrait phenotypes and potraits via traits, but well...I get that is out of scope for leader experimentation! )

P.S.: Moreover I have a few modder requests:
Would be possible to implement conditions and effects that allow to cycle through all available (vanilla and modded) techs, armies, components, traits, civics, etc...?

My understanding is that Heart of Iron 4 had something like that with technologies (which , if I am not wrong, is able to "read" available technologies as an array) and would be really nice to be able to do what the game seems to be already able to do so in Stellaris!

Would also be nice to be able to create arrays or lists of target objects and/or to have an easy way to create and fill custom gui list boxes!

 

[Kapitalisti]

Why? Diplomats are extremely important and have a totally diferent flavor.

Commanders - military side.
Administrators - civilian side.
Diplomats - foreign relations and espionage.

Logical and eloquent.

No. The only logical and poetic way to divy up the roles is:
Jocks (admiral-generals)
Nerds (SCIENCE)
Pencil pushers (governors and diplomats)

 

[Incompetent]

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.

This is a really interesting idea. For Scientists it would make sense for this to replace the current assist research mechanic (maybe with additional bonuses, since you can no longer stack a yellow leader on top). For Commanders, I'm imagining some sort of "emergency powers" regime, like martial law but with a lot more power to quickly "fix" or overhaul the colony: something like MacArthur in Japan, for example. Could be very useful for example if you conquer an alien homeworld early in the game, and it might give more reason to pick whichever is the "ground-focused Commander" veteran class.

 

[currylambchop]

it's way to easy to put in a million of them when you have high Unity flow.

If the unity upkeep is high enough it won't be easy. Sort of like how you can't run all the ambitions until late game.

 

[currylambchop]

Why not make leader cap ONLY affect upkeep, so that you can go over but it ruins your unity and traditions?

 

[Ikael]

The whole talking about consolidated classes has led me to think that they will go beyond 3 subclasses, or that at the very least, they will have their functions greatly expanded.

I mean, just by looking at the brand new "Diplomat" class that will merge governors and envoys, you have diplomatic, espionage, and governor functions. One more function than the scientists "explore & assist research". This makes me think that they will create new roles for each leader type and that perhaps the whole "council class" will be distributed amongst them.

Something along these lines:

> Commanders
--> Admiral (specialized in space combat). Increases fleet strength like good old admirals
--> General (specialized in land invasions). Increases army strength and rewards for successfully conquering planets
--> Viceroy (specialized in administering vassals and preventing revolts). Increases the loyalty, stability, and combat prowess of their assigned vassal

> Diplomat / Politician
--> Envoy (specialized in diplomacy). Increases their empire's diplomatic prowess like the envoys of yore. Can influence other empires, perhaps?
--> Governor (specialized in sector-wide economic management). Increases economic output in one entire sector rather than a single planet
--> Spymaster (specialized in covert operations). Dramatically decreases operation influence costs, might unlock special operations

> Scientists
---> Explorer (specialized in anomalies). Can perform "survey in depth" action for a chance of finding anomalies in already surveyed systems
---> Analyst (specialized in assisting research). Greatly increases assist research efficiency
---> Dean (specialized in sharing his knowledge with the planetary administration). Greatly increases a single planet's output

 

[verybad]

If the unity upkeep is high enough it won't be easy. Sort of like how you can't run all the ambitions until late game.

That's the whole point, I want a challenge. When leaders are pence, then why be interested with them? There do seem to be a lot of people that have never bothered to post suddenly upset enough with my attempts at trying to convey an idea that they give a negative on it today. They're irritating, but aren't a challenge though, I just ignore them and let them go on doing their magic.

Throughout history, leaders have been the most important thing. I suspect the same thing would be so in the future.

 

[billy yank]

Pencil pushers (governors and diplomats)

*Suits

 

[steampvnc1880]

It would be nice if AI federation members actually, yanno, consistently contributed to the federation... Instead of me having to carry the whole thing every time.

 

[styroler]

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.

Wouldn’t it make more sense for the second category to be politicians. Diplomats seems to be shoehorning that category a bit to much assuming it’s encompassing anyone that isn’t a commander or scientist.

 

[Shaeliss]

Because if there is not a soft cap for leaders, it's way to easy to put in a million of them when you have high Unity flow.

............. How do you get a Unity flow that high again?

Because I can only see three ways to make that happen:

1) You're neck deep in Unity Repeatables, which means you're on the last leg of your journey.
2) You have a lot of pops working Unity jobs (instead of science + alloy jobs), taking an opportunity cost and ACTUALLY MAKING A CHOiCE.
3) You have found a clever exploit that somehow gets you nigh-infinite Unity without actually investing in Unity.