Stellaris Dev Diary #34 - Clarke Patch

[nyah]

Definitely needed since you can only give systems to sectors and not individual planets.

I'm not sure. It seems to me that if you have a number of systems that contain multiple planets (particularly if they're good planets) then you are at an advantage. Allowing an empire to control directly a greater number of planets would simply compound this advantage.

 

[SentosKarum]

Yes! This please! I'm currently having trouble tweaking game to have what I like. First of all - I hate the idea of penalty for having higher population. I suppouse it was introduced to slow down research rate of bigger empires so they won't become too powerful, but it's kinda ridiculous - huge empire with dozens of research centers is worse at research than small, few systems ones. I've seen someone claiming he had battleships by 2260 with few planet-wide empire while I have a 50 planet empire and in 2300 I'm still stuck with destroyers, while having about 250 points a month in every field of research.

That's why I reduced population penalty to zero instead of 2% and... now my techs are being researched in two, three months max. Nope, not good. So I decided to add this penalty back but I lowered it, but that's not a good idea either, because it still is punishing the strong while favouring the weak.

So my aim right now is to remove this penalty once and for all and tweak the research times to make them longer to research. I think I'll just multiply them by 5 or something like that.

You always try and switch on the penalty which is ought to be possible for having planets - it's 0 now but it already exists in defines.lua so should work. (If you are messing with the per pop penalty you already know where to find the per planet penalty, it's three lines or so above)

It is not only about the lab work in developing a new tech. There is no separate step for integrating that tech into your society. Even a new weapon means that all the manufacturers of weapon components need to retool their factories etc. It would take much more time to disseminate the new tech across a larger empire.

Also, yeah it is a HUGE balance feature. It is about the only thing applying breaks to the urge to spread out and plant colonies as rapidly as possible. The game is more interesting when you need to find a balance between tech advance and empire expansion. Having it so expansion were 100% advantageous would remove a key element of strategy, just as having the game almost force doom stack play removes most of the finesse from war.

Sectors are what's currently holding me back from expanding as fast as I can find habitable planets - I can fix the research penalty to my liking (which is 'nearly off') - but I can't do anything about making the Sector AI slightly smarter than bread mold except making sure the planets I hand to it are already developed. And even that is ony really possible once this patch hits, right now I'm using the Core Cap removal mod and will probably use it well after to maintain direct control of the parts of my empire that are interesting.

 

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A planet is the same as a "Holding" in CK2. Some provinces had more holdings than others, just as some systems have more planets than others.

I am soo with you, so I have to declare a war to you in order to integrate your empire and make the voice saying "NOT NEEDED" sound louder.

 

[KiwiNoob]

• End of Combat interface has received a major face-lift.

Can you please make the accuracy on the 'end of combat' interface per weapon type and not an average of them all. Not only would this be way cooler but it would help to quickly identify weapons not living up to their potential

 

[Athmet]

We have released a number of performance improvements in the hotfixes, and we're continuing to look into it for the people who are still experiencing performance issues, but there are only minor performance improvements in Clarke itself as we opted to put them into the hotfixes instead.

Hello, it would appear stuttering is still affecting a lot of people mid/late game. I tried to look for a sticky regarding information gathering by PDX to look into this. Could you point in the direction regarding this specific issue.

I really enjoyed so far PDX games but this stuttering is really taking its toll on how I enjoy playing Stellaris.

Thank you for looking into it.

 

[wergy]

So far so good! I can't wait for Asimov

 

[dutchman00]

Breaking up doomstacks would be great, something along the same lines that prevented doomstacks in EU4 and forced players to break up their armies into more manageable pieces. Even if I wanted to break up my fleets I really can't because the AI will send it their doomstack and obliterate my forces separately.

I'm not sure how that could be managed; there's no manpower and running huge deficits in the game is part of the game. A ship support limit per system would definitely be great in breaking up combat to multiple areas rather than deciding the war in a doomstack vs doomstack mess after playing cat and mouse for 10 years.

 

[Underman]

I noticed a bug where my democratic empire ran out of presidental candidates after 250 years or so, everytime there was an election it instantly ended and picked the current president, i guess because there was noone else running for president? Dont know what happends when he dies because i stopped playing since the game speed was running at 10% or so in late game.

 

[Smiles_]

Sounds good. I'll still probably let a few more patches pile up before digging into Stellaris more. I look forward to many more, and picking it up again in December or so.


Smiles

 

[LordChucky]

I'm not sure. It seems to me that if you have a number of systems that contain multiple planets (particularly if they're good planets) then you are at an advantage. Allowing an empire to control directly a greater number of planets would simply compound this advantage.

The opposite change would work just as well to me - if we could give planets to sector control rather than systems.

The problem I have is one part of the equation works on planets and one works on systems.

It makes for artificial breakpoints where settling the second planet in the system becomes a factor of how good the first planet was, rather than how good the second one is.

I am not sure I understand how having core systems with multiple planets is more of a problem then having multiple systems with Gaia planets, or multiple systems with pre-FTL species.

RNG is RNG.

 

[Andy_Dandy]

I hope we will get a Richard Hoagland patch some day.

 

[Andy_Dandy]

Thank god people who have tons of planets will be penalized on research costs - Now my race of technologically advanced fox people can be happy.

Yep! With potentially very improved sector AIs that change is really needed, I suppose. Makes alot of sense.

 

[rrrokamoka]

if I understand well the "open borders by default" thing will have to wait till Asimov. unfortunately I already have three early-game objectives in the territory of a militaristic fallen empire with 0 trade willingness from their side so.. I guess I'll wait till Asimov

 

[Leerdeck]

That's a shame because playing on the 1000-star galaxy still has major preformance problems late game:

- The game freezes for a second every 5 ot 6 seconds
- Performance seems to be as bad as pre-1.0.3 if you have any of your own units selected. When no units (or neutral/enemy units) are selected, it's fairly smooth, other than the previous point.

Don't get me wrong, it is much better than 1.0.2 ever was, but it's still no fun once all those empires and fleets get going.

I am playing the game on an embarrassingly powerful computer so I'm certain it's not my hardware that's at fault.

I disabled V-Sync in the settings.txt file. My FPS has doubled with that. I run the game under Linux but maybe it gives you a performance boost under Windows too?

 

[Malecord]

Yesterday while I was clearing up some weaklings in a... Lively part of galaxy (a place I actively sought to destabilize and that ended up in a multitude of single system empires) I saw something strange. One of those recently born small empires had a tiny fleet of drones, cristalline entities and amoebas. It was like the circus.

I suppose it's a bug or something? When they engaged my imperial flotte they died.

 

[Taruusch_the_long_lived]

For the Asimov a new technology called psychohistory (from the foundation series) which increases the resource output or technoliogical uplift speed of primitive nations or something like that would be really cool.

 

[Chiron]

Yesterday while I was clearing up some weaklings in a... Lively part of galaxy (a place I actively sought to destabilize and that ended up in a multitude of single system empires) I saw something strange. One of those recently born small empires had a tiny fleet of drones, cristalline entities and amoebas. It was like the circus.

I suppose it's a bug or something? When they engaged my imperial flotte they died.

I've had a primitive civ in my sights for a while, next thing I know I see a fleet of space amoebas parked in their system flagged as owned by them. It just hung around there for about 100 years.

Very odd.

 

[into_the_sun]

Free patch? Why wouldn't it be free?

Usually patches are... patches. Free.
DLCs may be seen as "premium patches with improvements and additions" but I have to say, Paradox patches have allways been free.

 

[into_the_sun]

For the Asimov a new technology called psychohistory (from the foundation series) which increases the resource output or technoliogical uplift speed of primitive nations or something like that would be really cool.

Asimov... too much to add. Really. He gave us just too much innovations and suggestions.

 

[chrisjwmartin]

if you have any questions about the Clarke patch, feel free to ask and I will do my best to answer.

Is the Core limit now calculated based on Systems rather than Planets? If not, is this targeted for Asimov?