Stellaris Dev Diary #329 - Technology Beta Wrapup

[Idle America]

Bad pitch, Memorialists should be able to make tombs worlds and relic worlds resort worlds.

Counter-pitch, Relic Worlds and Tomb Worlds could have their own designation, perhaps called an "Archaeo World"?

Think about it: a whole planet of irradiated ruins or a planetwide husk of a city. There's got to be SOMETHING worth excavating down there! The jobs could produce unity and/or minor artifacts, with districts swapped out for "dig sites" or something. Different planetary features could allow different types of buildings for different excavations or studies.

 

[Idle America]

Well, maybe the world type can have different names depending on the empire type. 'Retreat World?'

Or just a special designation for a Fallen Empire's "Holy Worlds", which could also reduce their negative opinion should you colonize it? I feel they'd be much less angry if you agreed that a sacred world should be designated for pilgrimages.

 

[Harvey_James]

Counter-pitch, Relic Worlds and Tomb Worlds could have their own designation, perhaps called an "Archaeo World"?

Think about it: a whole planet of irradiated ruins or a planetwide husk of a city. There's got to be SOMETHING worth excavating down there! The jobs could produce unity and/or minor artifacts, with districts swapped out for "dig sites" or something. Different planetary features could allow different types of buildings for different excavations or studies.

i love the idea.. i have been pitching new ideas for things for scientists to do beyond the short survey/archeo stage and the mid game astral/spying now assist research is gone.. also on small maps/ less than 20 systems owned u can have long stretches of inactive science ships as there is nothing in your space to research or dig...
i have suggested
- nebulas being researchable deep inside as a neutral research area after all wouldnt a nebula be dangerous for stations and people? ... but plenty of things to research right?
- planets especially colonised planets (having an atmosphere) would be like earth in terms of animals/ prev civs worth of things to find/ some nifty small relics or items
- slow down survey speed more / remove all survey speed bonuses from game and make systems larger so taking longer to move around to survey and in turn give us more range for fleets too kite and move around... along with giving us the ability too to control fleet movement during fight too direct them in certain direction..
- also please stop killing scientists left right and centre.. like seriously i had a game with hostile empires just killing science ships that was anywhere near them with no warning and anomalies and astral rifts kill them in other game.. gets brutal when they high level especially..

 

[Ikael]

Thinking about different interpretations of resort worlds (say, resort worlds in tomb worlds or relic worlds), perhaps a good way to approach it would be for each different type of resort to provide different effects to their leisure workers, something along these lines:

Regular planets --> Regular resort world --> Leisure workers provide Global amenities and increased living standard effects (bonuses if Gaia)
Habitats --> Casino world ---> Leisure workers provide global trade value bonuses (increases if located on ecumenopolis instead of habitat)
Relic & tomb worlds --> Historical site --> Leisure workers provide global unity and monthly minor artifact modifiers (increases with planet anomalies/dig sites)

 

[Abdulijubjub]

1. Resort workers look like fairly efficient jobs, even without the global bonus. 2 unity and 4 trade makes them halfway between a Bureaucrat and a Trader, though, ironically, they need amenity support (unlike either of those). If you're not a trade build though, you need quite a few pops to benefit from the global bonus before they're worth it (as you wouldn't want a trader in the first place, so a half trader/half bureaucrat is not very good).
2. 1% global trade from living standards is really strong for huge empires, but probably unnoticeable when you unlock it (it's 0.2-0.5 TV per resort worker per 100 pops). By contrast, 1% global amenities starts pretty strong and doesn't scale that much more (as amenities become cheaper/less relevant as jobs get more and more bonuses and need stability less).
3. Removing Clerk stacking removes the quadratic scaling that kept trade relevant after you'd unlocked all the unity/federation/tech boosts (after which direct energy, minerals, and unity kept scaling, but trade didn't). If we can still only make one resort world, then trade empires just can't scale anymore after a certain point, though that's a lot less concerning with repeatables being less relevant.

Me likey, overall.

 

[SirBlackAxe]

Removing Clerk stacking removes the quadratic scaling that kept trade relevant after you'd unlocked all the unity/federation/tech boosts (after which direct energy, minerals, and unity kept scaling, but trade didn't). If we can still only make one resort world, then trade empires just can't scale anymore after a certain point, though that's a lot less concerning with repeatables being less relevant.

Since the empire bonuses now scale based on pops in Resort Worker jobs from districts rather that planets with the modifier, I think it could be reasonable uncap them. Two size 12 resorts should be the same as one size 24 one, so the only potential balance issue would be if there's some threshold where having too many Resort Workers is too strong. And even then I feel like I'd prefer an empire limit on Resort Districts rather than Resort Worlds, so you could split them up between a couple smaller planets if that suits your empire better. And it'd make conquering extras less awkward - if the Resort Districts all revert to City Districts you'd end up with a pile of unemployed Specialists (and ruined buildings).

 

[Abdulijubjub]

Since the empire bonuses now scale based on pops in Resort Worker jobs from districts rather that planets with the modifier, I think it could be reasonable uncap them. Two size 12 resorts should be the same as one size 24 one, so the only potential balance issue would be if there's some threshold where having too many Resort Workers is too strong.

For trade builds, that threshold is pretty much "right away". A (Thrifty) trader makes 10 TV and 2 amenities. A bureaucrat makes 4 unity. A resort worker makes 2 unity/5 TV, but another ~.3 TV for every 100 pops in the empire. You'd presumably prefer to do all your trade through resort workers.

They're very binary: either they're not worth having and you don't want to make a resort world at all, or they're better than the alternatives and you'd rather have as many as you can get (at least until you exhaust your need for unity/trade).

Eventually most empires will reach a point where you don't want any more unity, and you'll stop building more. But once you get enough pops in your empire that the trade alone is worth it, you'll just want as many as you can (and ditch all your traders/clerks except the bare minimum for amenities) until you no longer need more energy/CG from trade either.

They'd need some kind of limit or negative feedback loop to keep them from always being the best option and spammable, so that they don't spiral out of control:

And even then I feel like I'd prefer an empire limit on Resort Districts rather than Resort Worlds, so you could split them up between a couple smaller planets if that suits your empire better. And it'd make conquering extras less awkward - if the Resort Districts all revert to City Districts you'd end up with a pile of unemployed Specialists.

Is it possible to have an empire limit on districts? Buildings can be limited, but they have all sorts of complicated scripting available to them. I don't know if that's a thing for districts.

Alternatives:

• Escalating designation cost, like a much more aggressive version of the ascension costs. The first resort is cheap, and adding more resort worlds is possible, but only worth the hefty expense if you have a huge empire and really want those jobs.
• Only one planet, but they bring back pop stacking. If you want to go beyond your base allotment of resort workers, you need to have unemployed pops sitting around (so they're at half efficiency). Bonus points if this is tied to the designation, so tall empires can ascend the planet and get more benefit (so it less explicitly favors wide).
• Escalating resort worker upkeep: each one adds +1% amenities, +1% TV from living standards, and +10% resort worker upkeep. So you can keep expanding your resorts, but your patrons get more and more demanding as they get more and more options. And having two size 12 planets would be identical to having one size 25 planet, since the scaling is purely tied to # of jobs.
• Similarly, they could increase pop upkeep on resort worlds instead. Same story, but just tied to pops instead of the jobs. They're on vacation, after all. Presumably they're living it up.

But with all of these except the ascension one, spammable resorts are an anti-tall feature. It makes your empire much more efficient the wider you are, and gives a bit of effectively quadratic scaling to pops. The more pops you can afford to designate to resorts, the more efficient your amenities are and the more TV you get from each pop just existing. They're already a bit of an anti-tall feature (as the resort workers themselves get more efficient the more pops there are), but it's at least bounded with only one planet. But then, that's what the old resort TV was as well (though it encouraged you to stack pops on a single planet, which made it "tall" compatible).

 

[Dr Pippy]

Much like the first Technology Open Beta, very experienced players formed the bulk of respondents. This time it was closer to 72% of responses coming from players with over 1,000 hours in game. (Only 1.4% said they had less than 300 hours in Stellaris, so the survey skewed very much towards our most passionate players.) Thank you all for your feedback and help.

This time, a majority of players rated technology progress as “just right”, with the remainder almost perfectly evenly split between it being too fast or too slow, with a majority consensus that the changes were beneficial overall.

First off, hope you're feeling better this week!

Secondly, I wonder if you're accounting for what could be a rather sizable sampling bias in your survey results. If the majority of your respondents indicate that tech speed is just right, but a (sizable) majority also has >1000 hours in game, that doesn't suggest that tech speed is just right. It says that it's suitable for people who've amassed a very, very, very large amount of play time. Did you track how the responses varied with playtime? Because (1) it's very likely that newer players struggle to get through the tech tree as quickly as veterans; (2) thus the default settings are probably too slow for new players; and (3) this will therefore make the game less accessible to newbies.

 

[Abdulijubjub]

First off, hope you're feeling better this week!

Secondly, I wonder if you're accounting for what could be a rather sizable sampling bias in your survey results. If the majority of your respondents indicate that tech speed is just right, but a (sizable) majority also has >1000 hours in game, that doesn't suggest that tech speed is just right. It says that it's suitable for people who've amassed a very, very, very large amount of play time. Did you track how the responses varied with playtime? Because (1) it's very likely that newer players struggle to get through the tech tree as quickly as veterans; (2) thus the default settings are probably too slow for new players; and (3) this will therefore make the game less accessible to newbies.

Presumably this is why the default settings leave tech costs completely untouched on beginner friendly difficulties in Beta 2.0.

If someone doesn't touch the settings (and therefore doesn't increase the difficulty), the tech beta changes very little for them besides researcher output.

 

[Dr Pippy]

If someone doesn't touch the settings (and therefore doesn't increase the difficulty), the tech beta changes very little for them besides researcher output.

A -25% debuff to researcher output and doubling the empire size penalty is still a rather significant decrease to tech speed.

 

[Sam Illingworth]

But you're keeping the difficulty adjusted tech cost curve slider?

Why?!

If I want to play on Commadore with the most extreme tech curve why on earth are you preventing that? Just make it a slider that isn't connected to difficulty. That connection makes no sense!

 

[Abdulijubjub]

You can still turn up the base cost (though it's not quite the same).

The aggressive curve makes sense on high difficulties because the AI will produce more and have a more top heavy economy with much higher output modifiers. And the more top heavy their economy is (which also increases with tech level) the more mileage they're getting out of the difficulty modifiers (which are roughly twice as good on specialists as workers). That means the AI can produce disproportionately more research from the same pops, expand faster to get more pops sooner, etc. both on higher difficulties and as the game progresses on higher difficulties. Doubly so with Difficulty Adjusted AI Modifiers.

But if you're not playing on (Grand) Admiral, the AI will have serious stagnation problems when it gets to the end of the tech tree if you keep the extreme scaling.

The connection makes perfect sense: it's there to keep the pacing about the same if you just bump the difficulty without changing any other slider.

Changing the slider to just "tech cost scaling" and having it be "None, Difficulty Adjusted, Extreme" (where Extreme is the same regardless of difficulty) also sounds like it makes sense. But having the default version scale based on difficulty makes perfect sense.

 

[George Fernell]

That is truly unfortunate that breakthrough tech didn't make it through.

It was pretty much the only positive change in this entire patch. Would it be possible to implement them on just individual empire level? Without the whole "galaxy knowledge" system? And also where does it leave us? We still gonna have the "+20%" techs? If you are keeping them AND keeping sticking with increased tech costs it is rather comical.

Big W for the resort world, although not enough to compensate for other disappointment.

 

[Troyen]

We still gonna have the "+20%" techs? If you are keeping them AND keeping sticking with increased tech costs it is rather comical.

The second beta removed them entirely. I wouldn't expect them to still persist once 3.11 goes live.

 

[grommile]

It was pretty much the only positive change in this entire patch.

Funny thing: a bunch of other people had exactly the opposite opinion to you

 

[Kim the Mindcaster]

Thats really stange that we cant make the relic world as a resort
For me relic world its something like ruins of Rome
It could be great tourist designation!

 

[Displacement]

One easy change for new players to the galaxy generation screen would be to group sliders into categories like "Galactic Geography," "Technology," "Difficulty," with preset selections. Something descriptive like:
(For Geography)
"Teeming with Life" - lots of presapients and planets
"Wasteland Warriors" - Fallen Empires and hordes
"Alone in the Dark" - few planets, low hyperlane density, few civs.


You could do the same thing with the tech settings and pop growth settings. This would give new players a few simple choices without loss of customizability.

 

[Peter Ebbesen]

One new change we’ll be making based on some of the data we’ve collected is that we’re moving Ascension Theory to Tier 4 from Tier 5, but it will only be available to empires that have completed at least six tradition trees. As Unity and Research are intended to be “opposing” resources to a degree, we did not want the capstone of Ascension based gameplay to be so strongly tied to the later game tech tree.

@Eladrin

Are you increasing Ascension Theory's weight significantly as well? Over and above moving it to @tier4weight1, @tier4weight2, or @tier4weight3?

The reason I ask is that with its current weight, the player will usually have to fish for it a long time at tier 5, researching many other T1-T5 techs thinning the pool after they are eligible for it due to its rareness, even if they have several additional research options. It is just THAT rare. Moving it to T4 with, presumably, one of the three T4 base weights and still being marked as a rare tech, will unless I've overlooked something at best increase its weight on a draw by 80% compared to current (@tier4weight1 vs @tier5weight2), which still makes it much rarer than anything but other rare T4 and T5 techs.

So moving it to tier 4 with the 6 tradition tree requirement will theoretically on average make it available earlier for players that focus on unity, but in practice it seems unlikely to make much of a difference to normal gameplay since the player will arrive at T4 with a minimal chance of it cropping up on each draw and is extremely likely to qualify for T5 before drawing it unless the player pursues a strategy at T4 of not researching T4 techs in order to exhaust the pool of T1-T3s fishing for Ascension Theory without opening T5 and repeatables, which seems somewhat contrary to overall design intent.

I propose increasing the weight of Ascension Theory substantially for empires that focus on ascension:

• x2 if the player has 5 or more planetary ascensions
• x2 if the player has 10 or more planetary ascensions
• x3 if the player has 20 or more planetary ascensions
• x5 if the player has 40 or more planetary ascensions
• x2 if Harmony traditions completed
• x2 if Holy Covenant tier 3
• x5 if Ascensionist civic (or the corporate or gestalt version)
• x5 if all 7 tradition trees completed

With this change Ascension Theory will remain a late T5-era tech for empires that focus on science due to their slow tradition gain, and a likely mid-T4 to early-T5 era tech for empires that focus on ascension, a tech theoretically available from early T4 that they can get their hands on faster once they qualify EITHER by focusing more on science to churn techs as fast as possible OR by doubling down on playing ascensionist to make it more likely on each tech draw.

 

[wisecat]

Habitable worlds slider is applied earlier in galaxy generation than anything that forces habitable worlds to exist. It does not account for:

young empires' homeworlds
fallen empire scripting
any potential habitables caused by origin scripting
the per-empire guaranteed habitables
habitables created during gameplay by events
etc.

If you are desperate to shaft non-Void Dweller AIs (the AI does not know how to cope with minuscule numbers of habitables), then you need to also set guaranteed habitables to zero and possibly also preftl civs to zero.

Thank you for the explanation. I play with 0 guaranteed habitables and still I see a lot of habitable worlds ("a lot" is of course my opinion).
I always thought that habitable worlds in any space strategy should be the most rare and valuable anything possible.

 

[grommile]

I always thought that habitable worlds in any space strategy should be the most rare and valuable anything possible.

A perfectly reasonable position, but it shafts the AI (and thus is an example of "by making the game harder, you make SP easier".)