Stellaris Dev Diary #353 - Cosmic Storms Post-Release

[mrt1212]

Don't want to be rude but, what is the point here? Whatever small chance, as long as it is not 0 will always happen to some player. The only solution here is deleting the thing altogether. And this is a game where this kind of things is supposed to happen. We can't really expect that exploring space and its many mysteries will be an easy task, if anything Stellaris is very forgiving in that regard. In any case, bad things happen, if nothing bad could ever happen then what is the point?

I have heard the gnashing of teeth and have come to a decision - Stellaris must cut 90% of players off to reduce the totality of identical complaints, thus solving the problem entirely.

 

[Thiend]

Don't want to be rude but, what is the point here? Whatever small chance, as long as it is not 0 will always happen to some player. The only solution here is deleting the thing altogether. And this is a game where this kind of things is supposed to happen. We can't really expect that exploring space and its many mysteries will be an easy task, if anything Stellaris is very forgiving in that regard. In any case, bad things happen, if nothing bad could ever happen then what is the point?

The obvious answer, although perhaps not the correct solution, is to implement what quite a few other games actually already have - variable chance. The more [Bad] happens, the lower the odds of [Bad] happening become until [Good] happens, and vice-versa. Optionally this can include changing HOW [Good] or [Bad] such an event will be when it eventually happens, so terrible relative luck for a while could mean when something [Good] does happen, it will be a larger effect.

You don't have to remove random chance to remove frustrating edge cases (that, as observed, will happen a large amount of times with a large playerbase).

Whether it's a good idea to do that, or to adjust the still completely random chances (IE maybe Shroud negative outcomes simply become less likely), or to add other mechanisms to avoid being "RNG-screwed" (Psionic again has a great example, in that you can pay to force shroud events to be Covenant events) is up to the devs, but there are more solutions to "it really sucks to have RNG decide your game is over" than "remove all chance from the game."

 

[Critical Ethics]

Don't want to be rude but, what is the point here? Whatever small chance, as long as it is not 0 will always happen to some player. The only solution here is deleting the thing altogether.

Don't want to be rude but, your entire post is one long false dichotomy that's directly contradicted by the OP of this thread.

We are planning to adjust Nexus Storms in the following way:

• No Nexus Storms in the early game (Mid-game and forward only).
• We will increase their speed of traversal, exact number pending, to make sure they remain destructive but that you can take action once they have passed. They will still bring you close to 100% devastation on any given planet but they won’t then sit on the planet and keep it at 100% forever.

You could argue that this is "deleting getting a nexus storm dropped on your capital in year 10 and sitting there until you quit" from the game, but that'd be missing the forest for the trees. There's a particular set of low-odds scenarios for this overall event that were either overlooked or dismissed because the devs forgot that 1 in 100 chances happen 10,000 times every million games. You're saying there's no problems and no way to fix them in a thread about a dev describing such a problem and how they plan to fix it.

And this is a game where this kind of things is supposed to happen. We can't really expect that exploring space and its many mysteries will be an easy task, if anything Stellaris is very forgiving in that regard. In any case, bad things happen, if nothing bad could ever happen then what is the point?

Simply getting a negative outcome is not what makes something unfun or bad. It's the delivery mechanism. There are ways to add danger and variety, including danger and variety outside the player's control, that aren't a hidden, zero guardrails RNG that comes up "free money" or "lol get wrecked". Binary coin flip rolls are the easiest to implement but they're also the easiest to screw up.

To use the shroud as an example: Going into the shroud and your empire suffering negative consequences for that is not necessarily a bad play experience. Never seeing any of the cool shroud events because every time you try using the shroud you get nothing but failed rolls in a row until your empire collapses, well that's a bad overall play experience with the shroud.

But what are the odds of that happening?

e: Editted to be a bit less mean and confrontational.

 

[Critical Ethics]

The obvious answer, although perhaps not the correct solution, is to implement what quite a few other games actually already have - variable chance. The more [Bad] happens, the lower the odds of [Bad] happening become until [Good] happens, and vice-versa. Optionally this can include changing HOW [Good] or [Bad] such an event will be when it eventually happens, so terrible relative luck for a while could mean when something [Good] does happen, it will be a larger effect.

You don't have to remove random chance to remove frustrating edge cases (that, as observed, will happen a large amount of times with a large playerbase).

Whether it's a good idea to do that, or to adjust the still completely random chances (IE maybe Shroud negative outcomes simply become less likely), or to add other mechanisms to avoid being "RNG-screwed" (Psionic again has a great example, in that you can pay to force shroud events to be Covenant events) is up to the devs, but there are more solutions to "it really sucks to have RNG decide your game is over" than "remove all chance from the game."

A shroud-specific variant of this could be a "shroud-marked" metric which increases every time you dive, with failures and critical failures increasing it faster than successes. How shroud-marked your empire was would need to be visible and have some manner of ongoing effect (a simple modifier on shroud event chances like you described or ideally something more complex like affecting the upkeep and output of psionic pops), but its biggest impact could be as the metric for succesfully gaining a covenant, eventually hitting "guaranteed".

This accounts for the edge case of the person who keeps smacking face first into the failed rolls while keeping the overall danger and mystery intact - every trip to the shroud still has a chance to smack you in the face, but every smack in the face brings you visibly closer to... asking a weakly godlike being to smack you in the face even harder. Is this a positive effect? Hard to say... but it would be a good effect, because it means greater access to content.

That's the key: It's not neccessarily about evening out the quantity and quality of effects, it's about evening out the quantity and quality of content. If the final result of a choice is determined (almost) entirely due to player agency then it's fine for different results to have different levels of content, but if the result of a choice is down to RNG? Then the game needs to make each possible result return roughly equivalent content. And since the randomly derived result that gives you resources and ships innately increases your access to content because they give you more strategic and tactical leverage, the randomly derived result that loses resources and ships to a random roll needs to give you alternative content to compensate, whether that be narrative or otherwise.

 

[Kainser]

Some way to deal with devastation by gaining it slower or losing it faster is the only thing I really want. With devastation previously only really coming from bombing and some very rare events it could mostly be ignored but now it is used often enough that it can be considered a real mechanic you have to manage.

(Or do the relief buildings already make you gain devastation slower? It is not very clear to me.)

 

[Tannhäuser Cake]

Some way to deal with devastation by gaining it slower or losing it faster is the only thing I really want. With devastation previously only really coming from bombing and some very rare events it could mostly be ignored but now it is used often enough that it can be considered a real mechanic you have to manage.

(Or do the relief buildings already make you gain devastation slower? It is not very clear to me.)

Better handling of Devastation was one of the suggestions in a discussion on the Adaptability tradition tree.

 

[GCaelann]

The obvious answer, although perhaps not the correct solution, is to implement what quite a few other games actually already have - variable chance. The more [Bad] happens, the lower the odds of [Bad] happening become until [Good] happens, and vice-versa. Optionally this can include changing HOW [Good] or [Bad] such an event will be when it eventually happens, so terrible relative luck for a while could mean when something [Good] does happen, it will be a larger effect.

The outcome severity adjustment is interesting to me because a lot of things in Stellaris aren't based on random chance but on picking the "right" choices. That means that even someone playing blind would have access to that attenuation feature, as opposed to merely expecting everyone to play by the wiki for anything that has a fixed outcome.

I think a Luck mechanic could be interesting, as a Leader trait perhaps. The more Luck overall you have, be that on the empire scope or the science ship scope for example, the less likely negative outcomes would be. Granted sometimes "negative" is relative so some adjustment might be necessary for Luck to make sense for every roll. The attenuation/pity mechanic might be better overall.

Alternatively, maybe this is really only needed for the storms, like a mercy mechanic that breaks your fall the more you get hit by storms (assuming you're not trying to get hit by them in the first place).

Yea, overall that's an interesting idea, I agree.

 

[Thiend]

The outcome severity adjustment is interesting to me because a lot of things in Stellaris aren't based on random chance but on picking the "right" choices. That means that even someone playing blind would have access to that attenuation feature, as opposed to merely expecting everyone to play by the wiki for anything that has a fixed outcome.

I think a Luck mechanic could be interesting, as a Leader trait perhaps. The more Luck overall you have, be that on the empire scope or the science ship scope for example, the less likely negative outcomes would be. Granted sometimes "negative" is relative so some adjustment might be necessary for Luck to make sense for every roll. The attenuation/pity mechanic might be better overall.

Alternatively, maybe this is really only needed for the storms, like a mercy mechanic that breaks your fall the more you get hit by storms (assuming you're not trying to get hit by them in the first place).

Yea, overall that's an interesting idea, I agree.

Using it to mitigate "correct answers" as plague some anomalies and projects, origins... and a LOT of Astral Rifts had not occurred to me, but would indeed be an excellent use of such a mechanic.

Picked the objective wrong answers? Your chance of more random good things happening goes up. Will it be as good as, say, the Astral relics? Probably not, but it does mean you no longer got an objectively worse reward for not playing with the wiki open.

 

[Markous]

I was wondering what adorable creature is posted with this dev diary and where can I get one?

 

[SCP3821]

I have a question about the text plot.

cstorms.3130.desc.gravity: "Never before has simple movement around been so exhilarating! Gravity increases and decreases without a moment's notice.\n\nParticle manipulation sites scattered across [owner.capital_scope.GetName] reversed the polarity of tachyons, which focused them into crackling balls of energy. As the orbs quickly vanished - [Root.Owner.GetScientistPlural] believe they were sent backward in time - gravity waves rippled in all directions.\n\nThe resulting fluctuations will make working on the planet's surface harder, but could improve jobs on orbiting stations."
Does this mean that the tachyon itself can move backwards in time?Or is it that turning into a ball is the operation of the text, and the time reversal has nothing to do with this, but is the time technology of the Civilization itself?

 

[Alfray Stryke]

Does this mean that the tachyon itself can move backwards in time?

Yes. In the real world, if tachyons were to exist, they would likely travel backwards through time (if I’m remembering my university lectures correctly).

 

[SCP3821]

Yes. In the real world, if tachyons were to exist, they would likely travel backwards through time (if I’m remembering my university lectures correctly).

But that in itself is a relativistic paradox，it is necessary not only to exceed the speed of light without violating the theory of relativity, but also to violate the theorem of the invariance of the speed of light in vacuum, and to realize the backward flow of time under this contradictory condition.So can I understand that the normal motion of the tachyon itself will not produce time rewind, but this phenomenon will occur under some special circumstances, and this does not happen with the tachyon beam.
Or is this tachyon time reversal a common phenomenon?Is one of the many applications of time technology in the world of Stellaris?

 

[SCP3821]

And another question, I saw in the log before that the range of Titan weapons runs through the entire star system, combined with the range data conversion of different weapons, can I calculate the range of all weapons?
Means：All weapons are FTL for use in interstellar warfare.

 

[HFY]

Yes. In the real world, if tachyons were to exist, they would likely travel backwards through time (if I’m remembering my university lectures correctly).

A tackyon is just the inverted representation of a time-reversed classyon.

 

[Anaximatter]

But that in itself is a relativistic paradox，it is necessary not only to exceed the speed of light without violating the theory of relativity, but also to violate the theorem of the invariance of the speed of light in vacuum, and to realize the backward flow of time under this contradictory condition.So can I understand that the normal motion of the tachyon itself will not produce time rewind, but this phenomenon will occur under some special circumstances, and this does not happen with the tachyon beam.
Or is this tachyon time reversal a common phenomenon?Is one of the many applications of time technology in the world of Stellaris?

Tachyons are (real life) theoretical particles, which according to general relativity would necessarily move backwards in time.

In the game context it's just soft sci-fi mumbo jumbo, I wouldn't read too much into it. I also wouldn't read too much into it in real life, especially if you ever find yourself on a grant application committee.

 

[Ilab]

Don't want to be rude but, your entire post is one long false dichotomy that's directly contradicted by the OP of this thread.

You could argue that this is "deleting getting a nexus storm dropped on your capital in year 10 and sitting there until you quit" from the game, but that'd be missing the forest for the trees. There's a particular set of low-odds scenarios for this overall event that were either overlooked or dismissed because the devs forgot that 1 in 100 chances happen 10,000 times every million games. You're saying there's no problems and no way to fix them in a thread about a dev describing such a problem and how they plan to fix it.

Simply getting a negative outcome is not what makes something unfun or bad. It's the delivery mechanism. There are ways to add danger and variety, including danger and variety outside the player's control, that aren't a hidden, zero guardrails RNG that comes up "free money" or "lol get wrecked". Binary coin flip rolls are the easiest to implement but they're also the easiest to screw up.

To use the shroud as an example: Going into the shroud and your empire suffering negative consequences for that is not necessarily a bad play experience. Never seeing any of the cool shroud events because every time you try using the shroud you get nothing but failed rolls in a row until your empire collapses, well that's a bad overall play experience with the shroud.

But what are the odds of that happening?

e: Editted to be a bit less mean and confrontational.

You need to learn what a dichotomy is (not just look it up on a dictionary) and second, it is in no way contradicted by OP statements. There is no way to 'fix' the fact that any non zero chance is going to eventually present itself in a large enough sample. It is simply mathematics, an exact science btw. So, no, no dichotomy, no contradiction. Only facts about it, whether you like them or not.

 

[Critical Ethics]

There is no way to 'fix' the fact that any non zero chance is going to eventually present itself in a large enough sample.

This is correct. Well done on getting 25% of the way there! The other 75% is a bit trickier and the thinky bits are a bit thinkier but I believe in you!

 

[Ilab]

This is correct. Well done on getting 25% of the way there! The other 75% is a bit trickier and the thinky bits are a bit thinkier but I believe in you!

Well I could get 'aggressive' with my answer, but then maybe I will get in trouble. Thankfully, your reaction (mockery and bad comedy) to valid arguments leaves you in such an obvious position that I do not need to ridicule you or anything. You are doing it yourself. In any case, you can believe whatever you want, even if it is dead wrong, but I am not wasting any more time with this.