Stellaris Dev Diary #328 - New Year, New Beta

[George Fernell]

It's not possible to "balance" personal preferences on what is 'fun' or not.

Then explain to me what was the point of all the tech rebalancing?
The devs have been working and being paid cause "LOL, LMAO" ?
If its "impossible" to tune, ok lets make a sliders for ship costs, building costs,, build speed, leader exp gain, leader max age, give us a slider for everything!
Where do you draw the line?

Under your argument the entire tech rebalancing beta was useless work and they should have just put the slider in the first place.
2 months of wasted work then, congrats.

 

[Juboboman]

Then explain to me what was the point of all the tech rebalancing?
The devs have been working and being paid cause "LOL, LMAO" ?
If its "impossible" to tune, ok lets make a sliders for ship costs, building costs,, build speed, leader exp gain, leader max age, give us a slider for everything!
Where do you draw the line?

Under your argument the entire tech rebalancing beta was useless work and they should have just put the slider in the first place.
2 months of wasted work then, congrats.

You did not understand the context of my post. Continuing the tech example: The developers have to "balance" the default/standard tech speed toward what their internal goals based off playtesting and player feedback show a majority of the playerbase is comfortable with. But being experienced professionals, they also understand that does not mean it is the end of it, as you seem to think it is.

Because even if they "balance" tech to where a majority, say 60% think it should be. The other 40% still hate it, and eventually will stop playing because they no longer find it fun. Your solution is for PDX to tell that 40% "too bad, we don't want your money anyway, go play something else". Thankfully they, again, being experienced professionals and looking across the genre to see how every other adjacent game handles similar situations, instead decide to create customization options so that the 40% can deviate from the "standard balance" and find settings that are fun for them. So by doing it their way, people that find the tech too slow and people that find it too fast will continue playing the game. And continue buying DLCs.

And the most important thing is to understand is that their initial "balanced" standard that they settled on for tech was not set in stone, come down from God. It was simply them basing the default experience around what the majority of their playerbase liked. That does not make it an inherently superior or "correct" balance. Because, to circle around, it's not possible to objectively declare whether fast or slow is better than other. "I like fast games so I can be in and out and start a new empire relatively quickly" is perfectly valid. "I like slow games so I can really experience the life of my empire and soak it in" is equally valid. Paradox has decided it is best to allow both players experience those valid playstyles and enjoy them. But for some, odd, reason you are insisting Paradox should remove that choice, and you have yet to give a compelling reason why except for vague handwaving about "balance".

 

[Maethendias]

"the survey"

again i have to ask, where the F are these ?

they arent on the forums
they arent on the steam news

they arent linked anywhere

 

[George Fernell]

You did not understand the context of my post. Continuing the tech example: The developers have to "balance" the default/standard tech speed toward what their internal goals based off playtesting and player feedback show a majority of the playerbase is comfortable with. But being experienced professionals, they also understand that does not mean it is the end of it, as you seem to think it is.

Because even if they "balance" tech to where a majority, say 60% think it should be. The other 40% still hate it, and eventually will stop playing because they no longer find it fun. Your solution is for PDX to tell that 40% "too bad, we don't want your money anyway, go play something else". Thankfully they, again, being experienced professionals and looking across the genre to see how every other adjacent game handles similar situations, instead decide to create customization options so that the 40% can deviate from the "standard balance" and find settings that are fun for them. So by doing it their way, people that find the tech too slow and people that find it too fast will continue playing the game. And continue buying DLCs.

The "experienced professionals" who you clearly think yourself to be, would know WHAT game are they making and FOR WHO are they making said game.
"Experienced professionals" would not be making dozens of self conflicting game design decisions per patch.
"Experienced professionals" would not implement systems so terrible, so that they have to come up with a way to automate it, for players to never need to touch it.

You are right they they are trying to pander to EVERYONE, but that's is exactly what makes the game into incoherent mess.
There is no vision, no focus, and the ultimate solution is "pay me money but fix it yourself".

EDIT: If you ever played CONTROLL, it doesn't even have difficulty setting, because real experienced professionals know exactly how their game is meant to be played.

 

[Troyen]

"the survey"

again i have to ask, where the F are these ?

I'm only half-paying attention to the conversation, but there was a specific survey linked in the announcement post for each version of the beta. There also was a more general survey that ran over the Christmas holiday found in the launcher (and I think pointed out in the forums by the community team), though that was more open-ended about your PDX experience and what you liked/disliked about Stellaris rather than about tech specifically.

For balancing, presumably they look at the analytics that show what difficulties or settings everyone plays on, where players stop in their games, and such.

 

[grommile]

The "experienced professionals" who you clearly think yourself to be, would know WHAT game are they making and FOR WHO are they making said game.

Paradox want to sell more copies of their games than Slitherine sell of theirs.

It's that simple.

 

[Shark7]

On this issue of the sliders and all the resistance to it.

It would appear that the developers know what they are doing when it comes to allowing players to customize their gameplay experience. I am very much one of the player-base they are appealing to with the sliders. Simply put, If I cannot adjust the game to fit what I find to be fun, then I will be lost as a customer because I will find another game that I do find fun.

But now for an example of where game changes weren't right for me:

The leader changes were bad enough for me that I have thus far refused to buy Galactic Paragons DLC, which means that Paradox has lost a sale. I am not going to force myself to participate in an activity I dislike. And for the record it is exactly what the GP DLC offers that I dislike, that being the fact that I must babysit all my leaders and choose their skills for them...I have no interest in doing that so the DLC offers me nothing of interest or value. Unfortunately, I have been given no choice when it comes to the changes to the core leader mechanic. And I will be honest, this was almost a case of going too far with me.

It's a problem of personal preferences. Sliders to the system would allow me to adjust those changes to suit my preferences.

A good example where I think it was done right are the 3.0 Pop changes. I realize that for the majority of the player base, the pre-3.0 pop system was not working due to too much lag. However, my computer can handle it. The pop sliders allow me to set it to pre-3.0 pop growth (if that is what I desire) while fixing the game for the majority of players. The sliders in this case are a huge win-win, as most of the player base can be happy.

I very much vote with my wallet, as do the majority of customers. Most players will move on to greener pastures if a game changes too far in a direction they do not like. So if the developers can appeal to a larger fan base by allowing us to adjust aspects of the game that make it more fun to a wider group of players, then I think that is a good thing.

 

[Schlafendes Wiesel]

While having those sliders as options is a good thing i really would like to see more combined sliders to easily ajust something like difficulty. How man sliders you have to move to make the game a little bit harder? Difficulty of course but thats online the strength of other empires. So you also need crisis difficuly. Probably tech cost too. The thing is you have to balance all those sliders just to get the same experience but harder. Therefore i want combined sliders and all the other advanced stuff can be in a seperated menu to satisfy all needs.

 

[Merrivale]

On the sliders, this may be an area where having a few presets (that affect multiple sliders) help out folks trying to navigate it. So, just as an example off the top of my head, one could be no AI bonuses, standard base tech costs, and moderate scaling for tech as the game progresses. Another could be slight AI bonuses, above average base tech costs, and moderate scaling for tech, you could have extreme AI bonuses, extreme base tech costs, and extreme scaling for the hardcore players (although they probably don't need the preset help). I'm sure PDS has a good idea of which settings are the most popular, you wouldn't want to make too many of these.

 

[sirodugie]

I feel breakthrough techs need to come back, but they need to be linked to some empire wide buff. As they were, they felt like something you had to do without any miiediate impact. For example:

T1->T2 breakthroughs could expand leader caps by 1 (physics for scientist; biology for official; engineering for commander)
Other breakthroughs could lead to additonal envoys, opening up new council positions, adding a new civic, adding fleet capacity etc.
You could be limited in the amount of sectors you can create depending on breakthroughs (administrative capacity as a feature?)
Planetary capital buildings upgrades could be directly linked to breakthroughs.
Basic diplomatic actions could also be linked - i.e. you can't vassalise until T2 society breakthrough etc.
Maybe new ship types are linked to engineering breakthroughs as this is often the biggest step-up in an empires strength.

This would feel like breakthroughs are not just tech boosts, but are stepping stones in your empires development. It would make some techs redundant, but ideally they could be replaced by civic-specific techs that would add more flavour to different empires.

 

[starchitect]

While having those sliders as options is a good thing i really would like to see more combined sliders to easily ajust something like difficulty. How man sliders you have to move to make the game a little bit harder? Difficulty of course but thats online the strength of other empires. So you also need crisis difficuly. Probably tech cost too. The thing is you have to balance all those sliders just to get the same experience but harder. Therefore i want combined sliders and all the other advanced stuff can be in a seperated menu to satisfy all needs.

Combined sliders are exactly the problem with the current beta- Difficulty Adjusted Technology Scaling is a combination of difficulty and Tech Scaling that makes it more difficult if not impossible to get the combination of difficulty and tech scaling that you want- you cant have civilian or commodore difficulty with high scaling because inexplicably, the slider is modified by your difficulty setting. It would be equally bad if it were just that tech scaling was just combined with difficulty directly, then players who like high difficulties could not play without high tech scaling- which is something some players clearly dislike. Presets and defaults are important, but combining sliders and having them be linked together makes them more confusing and less useful.

 

[fourteenfour]

This could be done with an intelligence-like operation. Let each embassy increase research speed by a small amount (2%) if you are researching something the other empire already has, similar to how a Protectorate works. This would simulate the ambassador or spymaster going out and buying textbooks or copying the local scientific literature. I think I prefer it being the spymaster so that the game doesn't need to total up a large number of 2%s.

No offense but I hate hate HATE espionage in this game. that it uses a very limited resource for many empires, envoys, makes it use very annoying and annoying is never a good feature in a game. I am really get close to the point of just wishing all leaders gone but council and paragons. they are just stat sticks anyway and this game already has too many stat sticks.

 

[fourteenfour]

Another take on having technology break through mechanisms.

The criticism of the old system is here (feel free to skip)
Lets review. The previous open beta had break through technologies with very high to the point of absurd technology costs. There was a mechanism in place to reduce the costs for other empires to acquire this breakthrough provided a set of conditions were met.

Where it fails is that if the fastest researching empire will need X number of years to research it that is X number of years of no other empire having it. Even when one gets it the others are not guaranteed to meet the requirements to earn the discount and to top that off many are likely to be well into those X number of years themselves. So it is all became basically one very over priced tech each tier that everyone stalled on. Given how long higher tiers could take the chance of everyone actually doing at the same time increases meaning even if they did meet the discount requirements it might not have really offered much of a catch up.


The suggestion begins here

The idea here is to instead alter the system that is in place that does throttle moving up a tier. This combined with the ability to not only set the base cost of technology but how the spread in tiers increases will require empires to spend more time per tier to advance without the artificial feel the previous system had.

TL;DR increase required techs from existing tier to advance while providing many more mechanisms for other empires to catch up without having to tech rush themselves. so while we can still tech rush there are more options in place to help others catch up


Currently to have techs from the next tier appear six of the current level must be researched. This should be altered. So each tier requires more technologies from the previous tier to be researched and to spice it up we have can introduce a not only per category requirement but an overall requirement.

We want empires to make it to tier two relatively without issue. So keep the six required in the existing category and require but also require that a total from all categories must be eighteen. which could mean eight in one category and five in both the other two leaving them still locked but the one category now draws cards from the next tier. Once these other categories have their minimum six they move up as well.

The next tier can either increase the number per category or number of across the tier required or both. Even increases in technologies from the previous tier could be required. Example, that jump from T1 to T2 required 18 T1 techs so T2 to T3 requires similar or more T2 but might require a few more T1 added in.. T4 would require the T3 group plus some T2 added in and so on... never reach back more than one tier because we can theoretically run out.



The key is to climb the tiers you need a solid base to build from and even a more narrowly focused empire still needs a good understanding across the board to advance what they are good at. The risk is we need to know how many technologies each tier has to set a limit that is actualy doable.


Catching up. a rising tide does not drown everyone else.

Now for catch up mechanics.

These first two apply only to the cost to research the technology, they do not unlock it, you still need to draw it and normal from the deck of available technologies.

Research Treaties. Currently this reduces the time to research a technology by twenty five percent. The new bonus is for each additional empire a treaty exists with and also has the technology the cost is reduced another ten percent, stacking as many times this condition exists. increases weight to draw a rare technology another empire knows in addition to reducing the cost. I would suggest removing the influence maintenance costs to insure more of these treaties.

Commercial and or Migration Treaties provide a stacking two percent bonus to research costs of unknown technologies. Basically someone is going to bring stuff along they should not have

These three unlock the technology permanently and discount it using the system already in place for debris.

Debris, this one is already solved and it provides the basis for the next two.

Successful invasions. These provide a chance based on size of colony invaded to permanently unlock unknown technologies of your current tier. I would require a size ten colony or higher to have any chance. This could work just like debris and the larger the colony the more technologies you could learn about and unlock. There would be cool down of ten years so you cannot play a trading ownership back and forth to abuse this mechanic.

Espionage. You need to target a colony and the larger the better. This nets a result similar to an invasion but with a much smaller outcome. Just trying to keep it simple. Kidnapping, blackmailing, or similar, a scientist would be a good cover story for how this works.

Last option but may be too exploitable to do.

Diplomacy could allow for technology trades among empires with a non aggression treaty or superior treaty. one for one swaps can occur but only the player can trade a higher tier tech for a lower tier tech. The AI will never do that regardless how many technologies are provided. depending on trust level the AI may require additional items to be given but this is not true at cadet levels - the ai always trades 1 for 1

 

[starchitect]

TL;DR increase required techs from existing tier to advance while providing many more mechanisms for other empires to catch up without having to tech rush themselves. so while we can still tech rush there are more options in place to help others catch up

I think this could be an interesting alternative breakthrough requirement/benefit for going last. Have the intel system on other empires reduce the number of techs of a tier required to advance to the next tier, instead of reducing the cost. Make the base cost of breakthroughs low to even with other techs in that tier. This means the first empire to research a breakthrough has to research nearly all other technologies in that tier, before the breakthrough even appears. The next empire to can see the breakthrough appear when they get to say, 80% of the available techs in that tier. Then 70%, 60%, and so on, until eventually an extremely late empire could draw the next tier breakthrough without having researched any of the techs of the tier before it. This means that breakthroughs are still a gateway mechanism, but because cost is not modified, only the potential to appear, the performance issues of breakthroughs is largely solved. The very high sticker price of an early breakthrough is also no longer there to scare away players, they end up paying the price simply by filling out their tech tree with low tier techs they might otherwise have skipped. A slow tech empire gets to be more tech efficient by skipping more techs they do not need, but ultimately that too has a cost in that they both, do not gain the benefits of the technologies they skip, and those technologies remain in the pool, diluting the draw weight of later, more valuable technologies. Breakthroughs retain their pacing function, but do it in a less punitive way.

 

[grommile]

Research Treaties. These reduce the cost of unknown technologies that the other empire knows by ten percent

Nerfing Research Treaties for anyone who can't afford to spam them is an... interesting design choice.

 

[fourteenfour]

Nerfing Research Treaties for anyone who can't afford to spam them is an... interesting design choice.

My bad, I keep forgetting they currently provide 25% bonus to known technologies. so I will update my suggestion

 

[fourteenfour]

Okay, before we go any further in these betas they need to address early events. Example, getting subterranean civilization where I have two labs constructed by year 2210 on my new colony will take thirty months; I am trying avoid tech rushing but these types of events are painful if not addressed. Hence my society research is toast for two years - BORING. If I went the engineering route of preemptive strike it would be seventy months so over FIVE YEARS. That other event, the party one, is equally if not worse.

Honestly its really hard to assess a beta when it is not properly done meaning if we are to test research throughput all uses of research need to be adjusted.

 

[aerothgow]

Useless rework of a feature that works just fine. How about you do something that will actually improve the game ?

-Fix leaders
-Fix late game lag (maybe bring back the monofleets of battleships. the increase in small ship fleets has impacted late game in a bad way)
-Land battles rework is really needed
-Organic ships

 

[grommile]

-Land battles rework is really needed

Given that we can now induce planetary surrender by bombardment, I would rather have land battles removed entirely than have significant effort spent on them, honestly.

-Organic ships

Given that we can make alloys from food now, the only missing element here is an actual set of "organic" hull skins, which does not need any attention from the engine or game design teams.

 

[BakedPotato]

I believe the galaxy generation UI is getting a bit cluttered. Maybe the team could take a look at the UI to simplify/streamline it ? I imagine as a new player it might be overwhelming, and it doesn't seem very scalable.

I would to add to this post by suggesting a means to save galaxy settings, for quality of life. For now I take screenshots of the settings I like for different playstyles. But it would be nice to have some save slots for convenience instead of having to remember everything. For example, I like to tweak the amount of habitable worlds, hyperlane density, and empire amounts based on galaxy size, galaxy types, origins, or whether or not I'm playing SP or MP.