Stellaris Dev Diary #307 - Leader Experiments

[Shaeliss]

Devs aren’t players and it shows.

So far, the player have predicted 1) Pop growth effectively freezing when you have enough pops, 2) weird strategies needed to counteract the empire growth penalties from having "too many pops" involving micronations you can raid for pops, 3) the microvassal spam meta, and now 4) the issues with leader cap, without even having access to the actual testing versions. These feats have been unreplicated by the actual devs whom actually had the beta version and could have tested anything and everything they wanted.

You're right, when the playerbase can bat pretty close to a hundred predicting exactly how the next update will break the game with only a dev diary and the devs don't even notice how they break the game, it's really obvious the devs aren't players.

And while there were always edge cases and broken exploits (that Aspec made a name for himself demonstrating), exploits you're under no obligation to use in SP games, and can explicitly ban in MP games (and if your friends keep using exploits after pinkie promising to not use them, you need better friends), it's an entirely different thing when the only way to get ahead in SP is to use exploits.

 

[Imp0815]

So far, the player have predicted 1) Pop growth effectively freezing when you have enough pops, 2) weird strategies needed to counteract the empire growth penalties from having "too many pops" involving micronations you can raid for pops, 3) the microvassal spam meta, and now 4) the issues with leader cap, without even having access to the actual testing versions. These feats have been unreplicated by the actual devs whom actually had the beta version and could have tested anything and everything they wanted.

You're right, when the playerbase can bat pretty close to a hundred predicting exactly how the next update will break the game with only a dev diary and the devs don't even notice how they break the game, it's really obvious the devs aren't players.

And while there were always edge cases and broken exploits (that Aspec made a name for himself demonstrating), exploits you're under no obligation to use in SP games, and can explicitly ban in MP games (and if your friends keep using exploits after pinkie promising to not use them, you need better friends), it's an entirely different thing when the only way to get ahead in SP is to use exploits.

(Not to mention the Command Cap tied to Admirals that did not work for obvious reasons, but mistakes are there to learn)

 

[Shaeliss]

(Not to mention the Command Cap tied to Admirals that did not work for obvious reasons, but mistakes are there to learn)

Fair enough, I only mentioned some of the biggest messes that I personally witnessed the forum's Cassandras call out before they happened.

 

[Imp0815]

Fair enough, I only mentioned some of the biggest messes that I personally witnessed the forum's Cassandras call out before they happened.

I just realized what this means:
2) weird strategies needed to counteract the empire growth penalties from having "too many pops" involving micronations you can raid for pops

Is this still a thing? This sounds so goofy. Releasing nations only to raid them every 10 years to "farm" for more pops.

 

[Abdulijubjub]

............. 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.

Regarding #2: if unity upkeep maintained its current scaling, large empires would effectively scale the number of leaders they could support with the same proportional investment with the sqrt of their size.

Ex. Alice is doing just fine with 12 leaders for her small empire and Bob's empire is 4x as big. If Bob does nothing different from Alice (same proportion as Politicians/culture workers, same faction happiness, etc.), Bob should be able to support 12*sqrt(4)=24 leaders, because 4x as much unity is being spent on 2x as many leaders who each have 2x upkeep from the empire being over the limit.

I think that sounds like reasonable scaling, but just wanted to note that there is a bit of scaling without further investment.

Bob is paying 2x as many pops per leader, so he'll hit the point where he'd rather just have more researchers instead of another leader sooner (since leaders very much have finite impact that doesn't scale with empire size). He may not even choose to have 2x as many.

Once again, though, the combination of Feudal and that empire size reduction raises its ugly head. It's not as nasty as before without being % based, but it may still be an issue. Of course, it's an issue 100% caused by devs removing the requirement for feudal governors to be employed to have 0 upkeep (and also planetary governor positions, even if that were changed). So it's easily fixable.

 

[Abdulijubjub]

I just realized what this means:
2) weird strategies needed to counteract the empire growth penalties from having "too many pops" involving micronations you can raid for pops

Is this still a thing? This sounds so goofy. Releasing nations only to raid them every 10 years to "farm" for more pops.

Sorta. The actual impact (in my experience) is that it inflates the relative value of conquest. If two nations grow with the sqrt of time because of growth required scaling, then one conquering the other (doubling its size) at 2250 moves it 150 years ahead along the growth curve, instead of the 50 years you might expect.

It also has the side effect of making robot assembly weaker and weaker as the game goes on, to the point where it's always good to turn it off halfway through. e.g. If the next robot takes 700 growth (25 years for a roboticist, though it will probably be 30 by the time you actually get from 0 to the required amount), then you get effectively 50-70 years of growth immediately by closing the assembly plant and freeing up the Roboticist (and the pops making the 2 alloys/5 energy). And 70 years may be literally after the game ends.

It may be intended for lag reduction and slowing down the game overall, but it warps things strangely.

 

[verybad]

............. 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.

That's why I said "If there is not a soft cap" for unity. Utterly removing it makes the whole point for leaders useless IMO, they're then just a positive number on top of everything else. I like there to be a limit to the leaders. Other's don't. I'm sure the team will end up with a compromise that nobody likes 100%, cry me a river then as well.

 

[Abdulijubjub]

That's why I said "If there is not a soft cap" for unity. Utterly removing it makes the whole point for leaders useless IMO, they're then just a positive number on top of everything else. I like there to be a limit to the leaders. Other's don't. I'm sure the team will end up with a compromise that nobody likes 100%, cry me a river then as well.

While I agree with the point you're making (that having a soft cap of unity prompts strategic decisions, and without that cap you just hire arbitrarily many leaders), you're arguing from an (arguably) incorrect starting assumptions that (I assume) led to people disagreeing with you. We currently have a soft cap on unity and a hard cap on XP (aka, useful leaders), but you're saying there is no hard cap. You could argue that the XP cap is also technically a soft cap (since you can keeping hiring leaders anyway), but I think most players would think of "beyond this number your leaders never level up again and you stop getting to engage with these game mechanics" as a hard cap.

Side note, like I said earlier, leaders already had a resource management system built in: XP. High level leaders were valuable. Leaders with good traits were valuable. But there were a finite number of useful XP opportunities available: surveying, anomalies, and archaeology sites were hard capped (with research assistance being painfully slow). There were a finite number of sectors for governors. You only fought a finite number of battles (and piracy patrol, similarly, was painfully slow) for admirals. And generals were also technically in existence.

That said: "makes you make choices" isn't a good thing by itself. We could add a soft cap to any element of the game, and it would certainly drive strategic decisions. ex. a cap on the number of systems the player can claim: after 10 systems, the starbase/outpost/mining station upkeep starts increasing quadratically, like other soft caps, so that players that want to expand beyond their home sector pay quadratically scaling energy upkeep. It would certainly make players picky about which systems they chose: we'd have endless threads about when it's better to claim intervening systems or skip for the good ones (since you'll have to tear down the weak ones later), what level of excess influence cost is acceptable to avoid wasting alloys with too many outposts in the early game, etc. Lots of strategic discussion. It would also be awful and ruin the core gameplay of Stellaris as a 4x, and result in horrifyingly ugly border gore map (and incompetent AI that can't make rational system claiming decisions because it's not complex enough). And vassal spam would be even worse, as the "correct" way to hold systems would be to give them to vassals who shoulder the upkeep while still paying taxes on their gross income.

That sounds familiar, right? An arbitrary cap which technically adds strategic decisions, but results in nasty side effects and gameplay that clashes with the way that a lot of players play the game? And ugly UI? And the AI can't use it properly? And the best way to get around it is to shard your empire into tiny pieces because an overlord and a vassal can support 2x as much of the capped resource as before the split, despite nothing changing besides the empire name spraypainted on the outpost beacon?

How about a soft cap on the number of pops: everything after 100 pays escalating upkeep costs (or, to be like the leader XP cap: you can keep growing pops, but they stop producing anything from their jobs). Choose which ones you keep carefully! Do you really need that culture worker? Better purge all those pops that can't be made into ideal templates: they're a drag on the empire (I'm sure it will do wonders for roleplay /s). Or a soft cap on the number of mining stations: just think of the possibilities for carefully deciding which ones you want to mine, and which ones you leave empty (to constantly show on the map to complain that you haven't developed them yet)! How about capping the number of construction ships: currently you just make more whenever you ever experience a shortage, and have them randomly hovering around the edges of your empire. Wouldn't the game be more strategic if you had to carefully position them to choose your avenues of expansion and development? Soft cap on the number of clicks per month: you can be strategic about how you interact with the UI too! Tall players won't run into any issues, and wide players get engaging gameplay about... not playing.

Adding a restriction creates choices about what how to use the now limited resource. But "creates choices" isn't enough by itself. It has to be fun, on top of that.

I'm not saying a leader cap can't be a compelling part of gameplay, and I'm especially not telling you what you should/do enjoy. But "it creates choices" isn't enough to justify it.

 

[verybad]

Adding a restriction creates choices about what how to use the now limited resource. But "creates choices" isn't enough by itself. It has to be fun, on top of that.

I'm not saying a leader cap can't be a compelling part of gameplay, and I'm especially not telling you what you should/do enjoy. But "it creates choices" isn't enough to justify it.

Then what is compelling? People just wanting positive numbers on top of their numbers before leaders changed seems boring to me. If there is not a choice, then why have them (leaders) at all? My suggestion has been and is to have 'level 0' leaders doing most of the work with low cost (e.g. outland governors, army leaders, etc.), with picking higher level leaders to do the most important work. People's complaints about having no leaders to run most of their planets, armies etc. would be largely fixed with current envoy like leaders being visible.

I do agree that there should be a change in the way leaders work, but some people's suggestions that a leader cap should be removed entirely doesn't fit well for me. It seems like a lot of players just want an increase in their space jewelry, kind of like how Titans were not really necessary (Battleships with the fleet improvement stuff would have done largely the same job,) but people would scream to the ends of space if they were removed.

 

[Abdulijubjub]

Then what is compelling? People just wanting positive numbers on top of their numbers before leaders changed seems boring to me. If there is not a choice, then why have them (leaders) at all? My suggestion has been and is to have 'level 0' leaders doing most of the work with low cost (e.g. outland governors, army leaders, etc.), with picking higher level leaders to do the most important work. People's complaints about having no leaders to run most of their planets, armies etc. would be largely fixed with current envoy like leaders being visible.

I do agree that there should be a change in the way leaders work, but some people's suggestions that a leader cap should be removed entirely doesn't fit well for me. It seems like a lot of players just want an increase in their space jewelry, kind of like how Titans were not really necessary (Battleships with the fleet improvement stuff would have done largely the same job,) but people would scream to the ends of space if they were removed.

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?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Far be it for me to judge the U/X difficulty stuff, not being a game designer myself, but I feel like two things would have fixed most of those problems.

1: Use more specific terms. "Capacity" refers to the amount you are allowed to use/hold/have. "Staff" refers to the number you DO have, of various classes. "Staff"/"on staff" = leaders actually employed by your empire. "Assigned" = currently doing a job. "Unassigned" = on staff, but NOT currently doing a job. Then there can be no ambiguity about what a term is referring to.

2: Always list maximum capacity in blue. Always list assigned staff in green, unassigned staff in yellow. If going above maximum leader cap is allowed, always list the amount above cap in red. This way, players will always know whether a number means "you can have more of these!" vs "you have these but aren't using them!" vs "you have too many of these!"

So, the example confusing popup would have looked like this:

Our current leader capacity is 3. We currently have 1 leader on assignment, and 0 unassigned staff.

Base leader capacity: 3

Unassigned Envoys: 3

With this setup, all of the relevant information is presented in a clear, concise manner. If blue/yellow or red/green color blindness is a concern, perhaps a different set of colors can be used instead, though the text should help preserve clarity ("leader capacity," "on assignment," "unassigned," etc.) even for those who cannot visually distinguish the colors.

 

[Red Earth]

Maybe it's unnecessary now that federation origin members will be further apart, but I thought they should be given an extra star lane so they would be less likely to be boxed in by allies.

 

[wyldmage]

I've had a lot of complaints since the leader rework, and even though what you tried here didn't end up working out great, I just want to say:

Thanks for trying, and thanks for sharing.

You're trying things that will move leaders back in a direction that I think I will enjoy more, and I look forward to further developments!

 

[Shaeliss]

That's why I said "If there is not a soft cap" for unity.

Practically no one is protesting escalating Unity costs for leaders. THAT is the part of the cap pretty much everyone is okay with. That, just like Naval Cap and Starbase cap, could very well stay up as it is now and no one would have any issue with it.

Pretty much everyone is protesting the crippling impact on leaders themselves with their XP penalty (rather than the impact on the Unity Expenses Account required to keep them around) for going over cap.

Considering this, and the fact you haven't said the "unity" part of the "soft cap" in your post, lead me to the (mistaken) assumption that you were saying the escalating costs wouldn't do a thing to reduce the number of leaders, and reduced XP is needed since it's pretty much the only hotly debated issue here.

 

[RhysTheT00n]

I love the LOTR Pippin reference you threw in there

 

[pikasnoop]

For the leader trouble try this.

Make a rule that if you have one of each leader type then the max leader amount you get is increased by 1.

This will resolve not hiring a general because he takes up a slot that could have been used by something else.

Could be a cool perk for statecraft. Call it "cabinet diversity" or something like it. Also implement some defense against cheese with "filler"- eager leaders.

 

[FleetingRain]

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.

How about Governors govern a Sector, while non-Governors only govern a planet?

 

[Spyre2k]

It's almost as if they don't just want to add more cap size without addressing a cause.

Or, you know, not performing simple fixes to interesting ones.

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.

 

[Imajicus]

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.

 

[Rafss]

Yeah the cap was a huge mistake, just apply an exponential level cost in Unity upkeep like suggested up there and move on to other parts of the game in dire need of experiments and reworks like pop growth.