Stellaris Dev Diary #361 - The Vision

[shadow24772]

1. not sure. Someone did say that it's pretty bad to get new planets the later in the game you get. Maybe rather then the empire wide pop growth, it would be better for it to be planet specific. kinda like how Incubator trait works. pops grow faster on small colonies and the growth slows down the more pops are on said planet? Since currently, if you get in the first 100 years an Ecumonopolis at size 25-30, you need to move just about all your pops on said world to fill it. But you also need the resources from refineries to maintain the cost of running it.

2. i want to be able to MANAGE my fleets from the Fleet management. We seriously can't move them around the order. now with bios coming it'll be even more of a nightmare. let us change the order. i want to be able to put certain fleet at the bottom of the list, or be able to drag 1, 3, 6, and 9 and reorder them into 1,2,3,4 to be able to manage wars on more fronts or when i split them up after beating a big stack of the enemy.

3. Civics and origins. would like more for sure.

4. Usually just look at the achievement list and see what i can do to make them. Or just run into with a build i found interesting online or was recommended and see how it plays out. With that said, they don't really change my gameplay much, If it's xenophobe, enslave all my neighbours to dump'em in my Ecumonopolis( since my pops aren't enough) if xenophile, see who's an xenophobe and get them under a. new, better, management to work on my Ecumonopolis. if it's a Pacifist or mega corp. Federation with me!!

5. don't really bother with it. Since gate tech. gets discovered so lategame now, i don't even bother with trade.

6.don't know if it's too easy but, YES! i would love more diversity to colonization. I found it really weird when i started playing, how just because it's a very hot or cold world, it can't be as well colonized. like, we have deserts and have people who live in them over two thousand years and thrive in them. why can't we, in the future, be able to do even better? same with cold mountainous terrain. Norway anyone? there should be something more to it.

7. Prosperous Unification should be a civic.

8. i'd like better customization for specific planets. for example for an Agri world: let us build them further then just farming districts. give an option like an Ecumonopolis for Food production. For Mining, Energy and Especially Refinery type resources. there are mods that can do that. why can't the game devs themselves give us something like that in the base game? it'd be more balanced too. Or for a mining world, Give an option to be able to mine it deep within. not only an event flavour ( https://stellaris.paradoxwikis.com/Unexpected_Mineral_Seams ) that can spawn on a planet so small we can't make use of it. let us dig a planet all the way to it's core.

 

[Groggeneral]

• If you could remove one game system, what would it be? Which system would you make the central focus of an expansion? Is there a feature you want to enjoy, but feel the current implementation doesn’t quite work for you?

--> Wars in general need a general overhaul. Getting stuck in infinite wars because war fatigue of the other side is weirdly broken is no fun. I encountered it far too often that every system is conquered, yet you can't push your war demands. If an empire is cut in half as a result of a war (no connecting hyperlanes to capital), something like contested sectors/planets should exist. Why can't i fund, support or intervene in other empire's wars more visibly? We have a big, pretty storm weather forecast mode, but the game lacks any war clash map that shows in a visually appealing way who fights with whom in the galaxy and for what reason. Let me directly support another empire with troops, ships and other ressources in a way that lets me see how i make a difference there in exchange for things (decade long trade deals, vassalization if the supported empire white peaces, big relationship boost etc.). Funding and having proxy wars should become possible in a war/diplomacy overhaul and would make pacifist/diplo runs much more viable and interesting as well as contest the approach of heavy militarist empires with interesting alternatives.

--> Overall, both trading with other empires in the diplo screen as well as the trade route system, aren't too engaging. That would be another candidate for a big overhaul. I'd love to see the logistics of all resources being integrated into a trade route system. That would make war logistics and empire building across systems and sectors a lot more interesting. It could help better differentiate between corps. normal empires and hive minds. Balancing individual planets becomes a decision, doing extreme specialization worlds would still carry benefits, but would also bring about risks if their trade routes get blocked. It would add a more strategic dimension to war and empire building if Trade and ressource logistics are reworked / get more complex.

--> Ground invasions / the army just doesn't feel good. It's just pumping army transporters until you have a bigger number than the planet defense number. The different army types do not matter at all gameplay wise. There are no events connected to e.g. only using slave armies or clone troopers. Galactic war is cool, but capturing planets feels like the tedious part compared to capturing systems and fighting enemy fleet.

--> Espionage needs a complete rework badly. it has too little use. Breaking apart / Disrupting federations by intrigue and political manipulation should be possible. Influencing federation politics from the outside with espionage should be possible, influencing internal politics of other empires with espionage should be possible etc. Causing unrest in newly conquered planets of enemies by political intrigue and espionage etc. Of course getting caught eventually should have a price as well.

 

[SeekingEtermity]

• How important to you are the current systems that use individual Pops and Jobs in the planetary simulation?
• If we made significant changes to fleets, how much could we alter before it no longer felt like the game you love?
• What aspects are most important in defining your civilization?
• How do you set goals for yourself during gameplay? When do you set them, and how often do they change as you play?
• How important is the current Trade system, with routes collecting back to your Capital?
• Is colonization too easy? Should habitability and planet climate matter more?
• Are there any Origins that should be Civics, or Civics that should be Origins?
• If you could remove one game system, what would it be? Which system would you make the central focus of an expansion? Is there a feature you want to enjoy, but feel the current implementation doesn’t quite work for you?

I like the pops-and-jobs system, but absolutely abhor the management. Not because I'm opposed to micromanagement, but because the current system is so very bad at assigning pops reasonably. There's a bunch of reasons for this, some of which are easy to solve and some of which aren't:

• Need a way to assign/pin a pop to a job. Every time I make a custom pop that is specifically supposed to work as a Manager with bonuses optimized to match, and you promote some other pop into that slot because it has a generic +10% output from jobs (which should probably be working as a metallurgist!) or some such nonsense, that's a major failure on the game's part.
• The one-year grace period to demote pops solved one of the worst problems of early 2.2 pop management, but the fact that there's no easy way to tell what useless idiot just promoted himself to Scientist without firing all of your specialists, letting time run for a tick, and then opening the slots up again... that's bloody awful, that's what it is. Gets even more annoying when you add both Specialist and Ruler tier jobs at the same time, for example because you upgraded your capitol.
• Need a way to actually de-prioritize - and ideally also prioritize - jobs (plural), not just close them or pick a single priority per tier. Sometimes I want excess pops to be unemployed and emigrate ASAP, but usually I just want you to stop putting every goddamn pop that crawls out of the spawning pool as a Maintenance Drone just because they're Charismatic, while meanwhile my empire limps along on barely-any-surplus minerals and energy because I can't get the damn things to work those jobs except by constantly manually closing all but exactly the right number of Maintenance jobs. Ideally, I'd like to be able to say "never work this job unless you have nothing else to do, or keep these jobs filled before any others, as a less-severe option than closing a job and a more-emphatic option than starring one, respectively.
• Need a way to gene-mod pops in specific jobs, rather than everybody of a given species on a given planet. The auto-modding traits are a better-than-nothing stab at this, but they're too expensive, too slow, too random, don't very well handle jobs that want multiple traits, and provide absolutely no benefit at all for some of the most common jobs like Metallurgist (which is a travesty given their cost). As such, they aren't a lot better than nothing, IMO. Since you can ~always outperform them by micromanaging, they're effectively a tax in pop efficiency that you pay for quality-of-life. Which feels really bad.
• The current weights-based job preference of pops is just... broken. I don't know if there are currently any jobs and/or traits that get absolutely no weights and therefore fill randomly if at all, but it's been such a pervasive part of the Stellaris experience for the last four years that I'll be really impressed if you managed to banish it even temporarily. Meanwhile, we get all kinds of stupid stuff, like pops with output bonuses taking robot assembly jobs while ones without those bonuses work in productive jobs, pops sitting unemployed for a month instead of taking an open and unrestricted job they feel doesn't fit their strengths, pops starving the empire of actual resources because they all want to be Clerks/Maintenance, pops with energy and worker bonuses deciding they want to be Entertainers rather than Technicians... it's a mess. I realize you don't want to solve the computationally-tricky problem of actually optimal allocation, but there are still so many other things that could be improved.

I don't hate the current trade value system, but it feels really lame. Some stuff that would help:

• Make it more interactive, with reasons to tweak paths or do other forms of actual activity with it.
• Make it interact with allies in some form.
• Tie it into some kind of logistical system. It makes little sense right now that TV needs to flow back to the capital to be of any worth, but you know what would make a ton of sense? An ecumenopolis that starves (once the local stockpile runs out) if the food convoys stop coming, because they're blockaded.
• Make pirates actually any amount of threat.

Colonization is too easy, yeah. Honestly I never liked the one-biome planet situation; I don't have a solution that would work well and be easy for players to understand, but the thing where a planet that is covered by mountains and ocean is either Alpine or Ocean, but not both or some subset of each, and which one it is can cause a 60-point swing in habitability. What I'd ideally like to see is new colonies being really hard for a bit as they perform rudimentary terraforming, the effort level required being a function of how closely the planet resembles your homework and what techs you have.

I'd really like to see Origins split into two types - Homeworld origins and Historical origins - and move all "can't be added or removed" civics into one of them. Give players two origin slots (one of each type, obviously). Let me have my Life-Seeded empire that is Under One Rule (although honestly, U1R is a solid candidate for "shouldn't be an origin at all", certainly given the current system of only one slot). Make genocidal civics either actually swappable (they de-facto are toggleable right now for FP, just embrace toward or away from Fanatical Xenophobe, but you have to do Shenanigans to get the slot back) or an indelible part of the empire culture.

 

[Metanaut2]

You're getting a lot of great feedback here. I want to address an aspect of the game instead of a specific system. There are a lot of features to Stellaris, especially when you include all the DLC. Juggling all the different components is really hard, to the point that I sometimes keep a small notepad. If there could be some system for making comments on systems, fleet designs, planets/ designations, etc. that would be helpful. And reminders we could set. In short, systems to help keep track of all the other systems. Stellaris is getting utterly massive, and it needs something to help keep it manageable (e.g. planet management would be impossible for most of the game without planetary automation).

P.s. I think you could make pretty radical changes to all the systems you mention in your question if you have a solid vision.

 

[MordreadRN]

I would love to see more ascendancy options, like 10 or 20 more. I almost always take the same path right now and it's boring.
Also, a lot more precursors and update some of the ones we have today so they are worth it.
Many more anomalies and "story" events.
I love sending out science ships but it doesn't take very long to be boxed in unless you get lucky. So exploration dies off too fast.

 

[Pancakelord]

Oh this should be good

• How important to you are the current systems that use individual Pops and Jobs in the planetary simulation?

I think the thought was in the right place and they made sense on Tiles. But we're not going back to tiles, are we? So they're basically a vestigial design remnant at this point. The jobs system was (from what I remember) meant to make ecumenopoli feel more impressive, as a continental world could have 25 pops - so an ecumenopoli could have (e.g. 50) more and it would lean in to that fantasy. But over the years thats swung way too far (and I appreciate the team has culled jobs a bit over the patches). I went back and played 1.9.1 for perspective (vs live) to write this post. but my average pop count on tiles per colony was about 10-12 pops after 50-60 years. its at least triple that in live. Now obviously economy is wildly different between the two versions but that extra pop count does not really add that much to the game in my opinion.

There are a few critical things that pops do in the simulation though, if one removes pops (outright):

• Species Traits die off in their current incarnation. If you had a (for example) singular population variable for a planet you'd need some sort of pie chart to assign traits as weighted modifiers across the planet (e.g. if strong gives +20% output (for easy maths) and only 40% of the population is strong, then the planet gets a +(0.2*0.4) boost to output)
• Pop political power, mostly driven by class and species rights, also starts to lose meaning and may impact democratic election mechanics (though they arent too deep presently) - it could be solved via bullet 1's pie-method.

The halfway option is to go back (ish) to tile-level-pop levels.

• Districts: remove all +job modifiers from districts, instead (using farms as an example) have 1 farmer job per planet if any farm districts exist on it, rising to 2 if its an agri-world designated world. Then everything else farming related just stacks output, output scales with pops on world, capital tier, ascension level (maybe max ascension makes agri worlds give 2 jobs as a one-off), one from the agri-civic etc.
• Buildings (basic, advanced, strategic resources & research labs) - capped at 1 per world and basically work like a district + 1 extra job. (so in tandem with above a super duper developed farm world... might have 5 farmers on it tops?)
• Buildings (all other): 1 per world, 1 job per building. Amp up their effects.

Species traits still apply (if anything they're going to be a lot stronger with higher base outputs), but performance would be a lot better (from my past modded tests on 3.X builds) pop political power could conceivably be dropped and moved to the aggregate level Imo id like to see planets making more of a decision in the empire rather than pops specifically.​

Number of AIs

The big thing (besides performance) IMO about reducing the focus on pops is to move back to focussing on the empires as these are fundamentally the characters of Stellaris - it may allow for more AI-dense galaxies, which would also help a lot to solve some of the inherent problems with stellaris on the galactic/diplomatic stage. Most galaxies just do NOT have enough AIs in them to work well. If youve got a Ryzen 7800x3D sure you can run 200AI games on say 1400 star maps, and it feels quite different to playing with 30 AIs. The Galactic community doesnt dissolve (as much) into a meme fest, voting is more homogenous, smaller more attackable/digestible power blocks form (as federations are oddly quite well balanced for these massive AI counts, they never get too big - unlike in vanilla games where a fed can include half the AIs on the map)​

• If we made significant changes to fleets, how much could we alter before it no longer felt like the game you love?

So long as you don't change how we command fleets, I don't think it'll be possible to screw up any changes to fleets.

• For reference: I enjoyed Sword of the Stars 1 - its fleet command philosophy was largely the same as Stellaris (barring differences in FTL types and TurnBased vs Real time) - you clicked on them and sent them where you wanted.
• But I really didnt like Sword of the stars 2 which basically forced fleets to have a base and had a convoluted process for launching missions to targeted systems, with fleets returning home after the fact.

To me, since 1.0 fleets have changed quite a bit, and not at all at the same time.

1. The biggest issue IMO is with NAVY sizes(and this isnt even an issue with fleets, directly, its a problem with the economy rampantly inflating after Tiles -> Jobs and lots of power creep),
   • Make Navies smaller (either by driving up fleet cap use per ship, or by increasing fleet costs) and you'll see the calculus of war shift a fair bit, wars with fleets stacked in to 2000 ship death balls behave quite differently to fleet-stacks of say <100 ships. In the latter case, youll need dedicated vessels/sub-fleets to overcome starbases, to counter other fleets and so on.
2. The second biggest issue with fleets (acutally with the AI this time lol) is there is nowhere near enough specialisation by AIs into weapons and defences to make it interesting to counter them with my own designs(e.g. Plasma heavy, shield heavy ships) - I'd want to see either:
   • Like 80% of AIs (and we could figure this out via intel/espionage) have a preference weapon and defence type and heavily stick to that, the other 20% could be mixed.
   • Every commander now has a unique level-0 perk that basically does the above, but on a fleet level - this may be conceptually difficult for the AI to build around, but if I hire an admiral that is a "Laser-phile" (+80% laser [not all energy weapons] damage, -80% all other weapon damage) I'll build around that perk.
     
     My preference would be to handle this at the AI rather than leader level, though.

• What aspects are most important in defining your civilization?

The Flag & empire colour. No really, I look at it for dozens of hours each game. Anything that increases visual personalisation is going have a strong impact IMO. both on me and on the AIs i play with.

• Anything that adds more flavour (graphical or text) to the game will have a big win from me
• E.g. - updating habitats to have unique graphics in line with city styles
• Or district art https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...s-the-ability-to-swap-district-icons.1514363/
• or bringing back tile art https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...those-that-prefer-simple-backgrounds.1490829/
• This stuff all makes the galaxy feel way more lived in.

Going through the major areas:

• Species: this isn't always important unless I am meming - though I have a favourite (my forum pic)
• Species traits: really only matter for the first 10 years of the game
• Government: Imperial because I like that space feudal vibe (made more engaging with a private mod I have for heir selection and training), or oligarchy to rig successor selection.
• Ethics: they set the tone for the first chunk of the game for me but traditions (which yes do somewhat lean on civics and ethics) overtake that later on
• Civics/Origins: important but these are mostly bonuses in the same way you pick up a set-item in an RPG to reinforce a class build IMO. The most interesting types - for me- involve job-swaps.
  • Civic combos
    I also fully appreciate the sheer number of combinations this would involve, but I'd love to see more combo-benefits between civics. maybe tagging them all as "military tradition" "economic focus" "science" "robotics" etc[debatably you can use some of the same tags assigned to technologies], would let a 3rd bonus emerge from different combinations of those tags (e.g. citizen service and distinguished admiralty would both have a "military tradition" tag). Taking a Military Tradition and Science tagged civic might give you some mil-science bonuses. Food for thought.

The big problem I have with defining my civilization is that so much of it is set-and-forget and there are few to no mechanics that make changing my empire engaging. Changing from a democracy to dictatorship doesn't trigger a civil war or protests etc. This means there is no real "national story" it's burn some influence or unity and the thing happens. If there was more mechanical meat around this (beyond that 1 origin that came out with the leader DLC - which felt like a prototype for this system being more widely implemented IMO), I think this would make for more of a fun challenge for some players. I know we got new government forms in machine age but that feels less like changing types, more like further building upwards.

• Changing governments should probably be something done by council agenda and should then set off a generic branching situation (something in the vein of the low stability chain but less penalisation, more decision making).

• How do you set goals for yourself during gameplay? When do you set them, and how often do they change as you play?

I basically decide what to play at empire generation, but my goals don't change much throughout a run (see above section on making it more mechanically interesting to actually change the empire up) - AIs dont change either (for the same reasons - there isnt a mechanical framework to force them to) so I dont actually need to do much in response (and as their fleets are all pretty samey my fleet also doesnt change, so my naval strategy doesnt either - i just DPS mash through with anything that is good enough).

• How important is the current Trade system, with routes collecting back to your Capital?

To me it is basically negligible if i dont focus on it, and a perpetual energy machine if I do. I think there are 2 main problems with the trade system:

1. It has no "diegetic oompf" - you wont see ships buzzing around (even as 3d particle effects rendered in system view, rather than as simulated trader fleets, which would probably clog up the Gal UI), this makes it easy to forget about, when not actively building trade infrastructure out.
2. The galactic market exists and, honestly any future (potential) rework should step away from discrete trade routes and move towards some sort of trade web or heatmap, push and pull of resources on a galactic scale (and the number of nodes/systems you hold) would dictate average buy/sell prices available to you (so if the galaxy had e.g. 50 stars, and you held the 5 stars producing most of the food you'd get wildly different prices from the players holding the other 45 stars).

• Is colonization too easy? Should habitability and planet climate matter more?

Yes, and yes. I get why the OG colonisation techs were gutted (they puffed out the tech tree in addition to the habitability techs), but worlds truly dont feel that distinct any more.

I would take it further than habitability and say climate should probably guide what kinds of districts you see on a world, to give more design space for exaggerating climate effects on the local economy / modifiers

- e.g. Wet tagged worlds swap farms out for sea-farms, mines for oceanic drilling and so on - then climate differences become more intelligible,​

- Now you're in a position to say you see that ocean world with 30% habitability? that's because you're all going to be living on glorified oil derricks - except for the fish people from Vega IV - they're going to have a great time there. ​

I also think that terraforming should be a cornerstone of any future DLC focussed on planets. I was a little disappointed to see that the Grand Archive doesn't focus as much on planets and biomes as I was hoping it would, for reference.

• Are there any Origins that should be Civics, or Civics that should be Origins?

The Toxic Entity:

• I honestly think there is a case to make for Mutagenic tanks/Permutation Pools to be made in to an origin that enables a Toxic-world-only run. I.e. maybe its gestalt only (to get around some of the weirdness of habitability and planet ownership) but a "Oooze" origin that would allow a hive to only live on toxic worlds (or terraform viable worlds in to toxic ones), with pops that will die if taken to non-toxic worlds, that farm and consume gasses... could be interesting. A selection of caustic ship weapons that deal damage over time or to a larger group of ships (would require fleets to be way smaller to actually figure out how to balance it IMO), would be cool too.

The Obsidian Being:

• A lithoid spin on the above, but instead of toxic worlds (only) & gasses, its Molten worlds (only) & crystals. Maybe with the ability to get some unique crystal techs too.

Make Daemonic Incursion playable give it special interactions against anyone with Crusader Spirit lol.


I'd want to see a civic added that makes it more powerful to play with "mixed" planets - maybe via a sort of empire policy - kind of harkening back to the OG tile adjacency benefits. farms boost industries, which boost science etc.

• If you could remove one game system, what would it be? Which system would you make the central focus of an expansion? Is there a feature you want to enjoy, but feel the current implementation doesn’t quite work for you?

Prepare for some hot takes

Removal: Closed borders (and by definition, the option for open borders)

• Closed borders limit AI expansion, warfare and exploration options, leading to static empires and less incentive for engagement, which in turn makes the galaxy in to more of a static hug-box for players.
• With (basically) always open borders, the game would encourage more interactions between AI empires (as honestly one of the biggest issues this system causes is the AIs just sit there - they lack human agency to get borders to open up -- unless going to war with their neighbour, or unless already a vassal or ethics-aligned[friendly]) proximity and territorial disputes. When AIs get stuck in this static loop, they either stay un aligned or join a federation, and then the galaxy basically locks up, becoming un-interesting -- this is one of by biggest gripes with stellaris currently, and its entirely to do with AI inability to decide what to do, because it is constrained by game mechanics (when you rip out the closed borders logic via a mod AIs do some pretty interesting wars).
  
  • Without closed borders, movement and territorial control would rely more on active player decisions, like patrols or fortress systems (the latter would rely on a fleet rework - more navy down sizing, too).
  • It is also one of the two causes for "unending wars" (where warscore slowly ticks up because fighting or conquest cannot occur) - sometimes AIs from the ass-end of the galaxy will join a war with no way to actually get to it. With open borders they can get to the fighting, even if it takes a while.
• The one ... benefit closed borders currently brings is an exploit where you effectively claim systems without actually spending the influence to claim them (by taking choke points then sealing off access to AI construction ships) - this is broken after a war where the truce allows open borders. IMO this should never be an option, as you dont own unclaimed stars - so long as a ship isnt actively hostile it should be able to transit anywhere it likes: This is also how Fallen empire borders work (or continue to work since 1.0).

(Subjective) weak implementation: Gateways and FTL speeds.

• Hyperdrive speeds: In summary: FTL speeds should start slower with longer spool/cool times between jumps, ramping up to where we are now, before finally almost totally removing cool/spool time and (maybe with some advanced/archeotech or special tradition) unlocking the OG hyperdrive that let you jump from anywhere in a system - without needing a hyper relay.
  • Fleet movement is slept on from a mechanical perspective (wait no this isn't about bringing back warp - don't go!) -- back in the mists of time fleets had radically different drives, yes, but they also had radically different drive speeds. And I found it was way more engaging early in the game because your ships didn't move as fast, the galaxy felt bigger, and facing off against advanced start (or god forbit FE) empires was truly a butt-clenching experience with warp drives (imagine hyperdrives moving at say 20% speed vs FE fleets moving at 200% speed). The ability to move fleets around so fast now makes it easier to doom stack wars too, you don't need to split and reserve forces for a big empire, if you can just shift your whole military around quickly.
  • On a thematic level, there is so little done with the base hyperdrive itself (we don't get "micro-jumping carrier ships" or any other weird drive-enhanced weapons for example) for a space opera game that it feels quite weird to me. Yes we got the hyper relay but that isn't really for the ship drives themselves, its its own thing.
• Gateways: Gateways ... should not be buildable, they should be the de facto way to move around the galaxy long distance, fast (till you build out relays i guess). There, i said it.
  • IMO they should spawn "in between stars" (mechanically, this would just be spawned after the rest of the galaxy is generated, into an empty solar system, with just the gateway, that cannot be claimed - so that anyone can activate the gateway) in such a way that (say) half a dozen to a dozen of them cover the whole galaxy, letting you travel from gateway to gateway directly [or only travel to some that are in-range, behaving more like roided-up OG wormhole stations], once one has been activated. Fleets egressing at a gateway will be weakened (much like using a jump drive).
    • They should spawn inactive but activatable and activation should be be treated more like dig sites - or damaged but restorable with a construction ship and megastructure tech. Some interesting story events could be tagged to moving gateways in to their own scripted star systems, too - ruined fleets floating around destroyed relays in deep space has spicy cosmic horror undertones.
  • By constraining how FTL works, you do a couple interesting things:
    • You Create strategy space - now Gateways are a critical thing to hold (they can never be 100% locked down but you can park a fleet there to gun down whatever pops out) in wars. And by making activation Archaeology driven, you have more time to show up and nuke the science ship if you want to keep a gateway inactive, for longer.
    • They shake up not just the later game (when they start getting built in decent numbers) but the early-mid game (if someone goes on a gateway-opening-spree) leading to more interesting "long distance" early game wars - like ranging out to stop people using them, or using them to enslave people far away. usual stuff.
    • Juggernauts with their ability to act like forward bases become highly useful to park over a gateway in deep space, and spam out units long-distance.

For expansion focus: "Flags of the Void" - An expansion focussed on Governments, change and domination

• I'd want to see an expansion focussed on fleshing out:
• "The Aegis Starbase Kilostructure": because every dlc needs the big shiny. Give us the old fortresses back (spiritually) with a new "defensive starbase" that can be built over a planet in the system, and armed to the teeth - planetary rings are halfway there already, this would be 100% military focussed & buildable over barren worlds.
• "my culture" vs "your (inferior) culture".Spreading my culture (peacefully - via religious, propagandic/market driven, or military-occupation) means.
  • Culture is less adding new modifiers and stats, it would be more about dressing up all of my existing ethics, traditions, civics, policies etc in a neatly "exportable package" that could be applied to new territories I control (or have sway over) - so they think like me.
• post war management: no this isnt "rework planetary invasions" dressed up - I want to see more mechanics surrounding what happens after I annex a world - how do i manage the pops and their cultural differences from my own, how to i convert them to my culture (rather than just eating them and so on).
• changes in government (and better ways to conduct changing governments via espionage): changing your government/civics/ethics should be a big thing - scroll back up to my point on a lack of a national story in stellaris currently -
  • focussing on adding more story mechanics around shifting governments opens up (potentially) a design space to influence other governments in a more powerful and structured way via espoionage (boo! yes yes) - if you have a structured object to convey the story (something a bit like a situation or rift site but more integrated in to the "main" empire management UI rather than the outliner/windows) of transforming a government, passing laws and making decisions you also have a vector for doing the same to AIs, starting civil wars, triggering uprisings and other fun things.
• probably more things but that would be the core of it.

Lastly I want to make a point about fleets / warfare reworks:

Fleets are not the problem. Please dont fall in to the trap of thinking fixing fleets, means just changing fleets.

Fleets are a performance hog, yes, due to pathing rendering and probably memory overheads on weaker systems. But this is not the fault of fleets, fleet cap is fine. The problem is:

1. The economy of a galaxy is massively inflated these days (and - as this is a positive usually - the AI is actually able to keep up so it does have big fleets too), making fleet upkeep trivial after a few decades.
2. Naval capacity is massive, as we can afford more starbases to put anchorages on (outright from +starbase modifiers, or by going over the starbase cap and eating the cost from being so rich), more pops to work military jobs (increasing naval cap directly)
   
   Both allow navies to grow and grow and grow.
   
   
3. Closed / open borders - leads to cycles of "boom and busts" fleets build up a lot till AIs can go to war then pump-and-dump their fleets in to conflicts - ive tried modded games where AIs have no closed borders, and are hyper aggressive, they sustain lower fleet sizes through sheer bloodthirsty attrition and unending wars (its interesting really), lower overall lag spikes from pathing calcs being spread over more frames (basically due to sheer randomness of all the AIs fighting) and wars end up being scattered over many more stars and are (IMO) more engaging to strategically manage - even with the current unchanged war mechanics.
   
   
4. Fixing fleets being engaging to design stems less from fleets, and more from having good AI fleets to fight against (you see this more in other genres, there needs to be good enemy design in an RPG to give you a reason to explore new builds - stellaris, in a way lacks enemy design for its "playable empires" (outside of the FEs and crises - the META for those has been solved for years)).
   
   
5. Wars feel samey in the mid-late game, not (imo) just due to fleet design problems (#4) but because on a strategic level one region of the map is much like another.
   1. FTL is too homogenous - there is no macro-scale strategically important area or divide on a star map - there are no oceans and mountains. Whilst we have chokepoints and unusual hyperlane generation patterns, my points (further up) about reworking gateways would add another small layer to waging long distance wars, this in turn may lead to different fleet designs (you might want to prioritise repairs if far from home vs raw dps/h)
      
      
   2. Star systems are too homogenous - way back in the early stellaris days, we had distributed rare resources (some only spawned in some quadrants of the galaxy) - and whilst those resouces had their own design problems (you only needed 1 per month half the time) they did make a cornerstone of my early stellaris wars in to basically securing space oil, space iron (My missile fleets always hungered for Orillium Ore - my beloved) and space... cocaine(engos vapour) I would love to see a new class of resources introduced that compensates for this with weird limited effects - though the grand archive already added a ton of stuff that kind of does that - though not in a way that would promote military strategy. See this for a past writeup I did on resources: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/resources-a-retrospective.1425984/

 

[Soly_mr]

• How important to you are the current systems that use individual Pops and Jobs in the planetary simulation?

Too quantized/not granular enough, especially at the start of the game when colonies start with 1 pop. A pop in the wrong planet or job early on makes a lot of difference. Species traits also barely matter, and having more and specialized species just leads to lag when you can turn everyone to cyborgs or synths for more productivity.

• If we made significant changes to fleets, how much could we alter before it no longer felt like the game you love?

Designing ships is quite fun to me, but even with the fleet command limit changes it's very much throw everything face first into the enemy. Cloaking seemed like an interesting way to try more sneaky warring but still.

• What aspects are most important in defining your civilization?

Civics being more than just a ball of bonuses to tack on. I like civics that you have to lean on in both gameplay and roleplay in exchange for tangible benefits, but some bonusballs are just too good to pass on (think Meritocracy), and some flavorful civics don't offer good enough benefits.

• How do you set goals for yourself during gameplay? When do you set them, and how often do they change as you play?

For the most part it's very much "let's see what happens" while following a loose roleplay according to the civics and ethics I'm playing, so I don't tend to reform those for a specific goal.

• How important is the current Trade system, with routes collecting back to your Capital?

Currently it's the only resource that doesn't instantly transmit across the galaxy. Annoying when the game decides that a trade route *must* pass through a system I don't own even when the number of jumps is the same. Trade is either hyperfocused on or completely forgotten because the economic policies that can make trade work for different matters are locked behind either a tradition (Mercantile) or a civic (Worker Coop). Much like the ability to make a federation, I'd like to see trade policies be a technology you eventually research.

• Is colonization too easy? Should habitability and planet climate matter more?

I can say for sure that terraforming is almost completely forgotten because ascension perks and technologies can completely nullify the penalties of bad habitability. Why bother terraforming a world when you can just not and still have enormous production? That also applies to the Detox ascension perk, which gives the ability to terraform worlds that may or may not be within your borders into worlds with terrible blockers.

• Are there any Origins that should be Civics, or Civics that should be Origins?

My general opinion is that origins should define your starting situation and civics should define your playstyle. So even if things like Fanatic Purifiers cannot be added or removed, they should stay civics, while Eager Explorers for example should become an origin. On the origin side there's Subterraneans, which I think should be a civic since it defines the whole game if you take it, while it doesn't add much on the starting side of things. There are half and half civics like Dark Consortium and the newest civics that have both starter and gamelong effects too.

Origins can be more or less challenging, like Doomsday or Scion, but civics should be relatively balanced against each other to make them feel worth it.

• If you could remove one game system, what would it be? Which system would you make the central focus of an expansion? Is there a feature you want to enjoy, but feel the current implementation doesn’t quite work for you?

Here's the meat of the question, and there are quite a few:

Espionage: I want to enjoy messing with other empires in ways that aren't outright war, and espionage does not allow for much of this. Even if the reason is that being messed with would be too annoying, that's because there is no way to actively counter espionage, only passively through encryption. The current only uses for espionage are stealing technology and obtaining information, which is not exactly out of the purview of espionage, but there's another problem.

Envoys: so limited, but you can't stack them in GalCom for diplomatic weight anymore and their remaining uses aren't that powerful. This just makes espionage feel even worse since you can only be actively spying on 2 or 3 empires, even less if you're doing first contacts or attempting to do some diplomacy things. Which aren't that powerful so I guess they don't really matter.

War and diplomacy: even with direct war being the best way currently to get what you want, the options in both are also massively limited compared to other Paradox games. Even EU3 let you deal individually with each member of the war, making various demands and forcing them out before or after, vassalizing some and leaving others, etc. There's so many unexplored options, like being able to hire a MegaCorp empire to be an ally for your war, target a specific enemy to force them to drop out before others, etc. War exhaustion is also very gamey in that it outright forces the war to end, instead of being something like an escalating stability drop in your colonies so that you're soft capped instead of hard capped. In the same vein the diplomatic options with empires you're not at war are very basic and limited to you and the second party.

Factions: currently there is one faction per ethic except for Xenophobe which has two. Xenophobes are the only ones doing it right, there should be more factions per ethic so that your governing ethics don't necessarily imply you'll have an easy time managing internal politics. The faction demands as they are now can also be a pain in the ass to care for since some factions straight up don't have enough demands, some factions are pigeonholed purely because of the ethic they belong to and some have demands that only show up further into the game with specific conditions. The ways to interact with factions outside of "demands or nothing" are also simplistic because it just deals with the ethic in particular. Faction extortion is another thing like federations or trade policies that shouldn't be locked behind a very specific path, purely because it expands ever so minimally the faction system. This and war/diplomacy need to be focused the most, internal and external politics.

Ground combat: pointless to worry about when what you do is build more assault troops and dump them in the planet of choice. The ships are the ones doing the hard work and there's no planetary shield or counter artillery, so the only choice is to break the siege with a different fleet of yours. The best idea I have is turning invasions into archaeology/astral plane situations where you assign a Commander instead of a Scientist.

Crime: crime is currently a joke that only serves to force you to employ a pop in the enforcer job if it ever gets past a threshold. Pop discontent is already represented in happiness and how it affects stability. Playing Criminal Syndicate exposes how flat the crime system is. I genuinely don't have an idea what could be done to improve other than ripping it out and figuring out a different way to go at it. Same with piracy, which *should* be adjacent to the crime system.

Migration and resettlement: migration works in a way that makes it pointless to care about it. Migration only happens if there is emigration push out of any colony you own or have migration treaty with, which means mismanaged for the most part. It also adds a bonus or penalty to pop growth, which means pop assembly gets screwed (or would if migration mattered to begin with). Migration should be a separate mechanism to gain or lose pops from growth, assembly and decline, should those stay in the game. Resettlement is also quite a bit stronger than migration, as playing with the Synaptic Lathe demonstrates, because why bother with a purge method that slowly displaces pops to the Lathe when you can pay a bit of energy and unity to have them perform instant transmission. Resettlement should make for a forced migration push to transfer a specific pop, but still taking time.

Authorities: much as the new Machine Age was great, the new authorities feel less like actual authorities and more like additional civics (especially Imperial Network being Warrior Culture Neo). If you tell me your population now has implants that allow for instant voting, I'm expecting something like elections taking place every year and lasting a day or two, but none of the actual authority model really changes.

 

[DanielPrates]

So, is Stellaris heading for a DOWNSIZING?

This list of questions feel like a "what could we remove without you complaining too much" type of thing. Lets read again the list:

• How important to you are the current systems that use individual Pops and Jobs in the planetary simulation? (viz, would you mind if we did away with the pop+jobs mechanic somewhat?)
• If we made significant changes to fleets, how much could we alter before it no longer felt like the game you love? (how much could we take away from current fleet management without you feeling the game was stripped of a mechanic you liked?)
• (...)
• (...)
• How important is the current Trade system, with routes collecting back to your Capital? (viz, might we just do away with that too?)
• (...)
• (...)
• If you could remove one game system, what would it be? Which system would you make the central focus of an expansion? Is there a feature you want to enjoy, but feel the current implementation doesn’t quite work for you? (to give something, what could we take away that you wouldnt miss?)

The other questions were about the ubiquitous min/maxing aspects of stellaris., which I wont get into here.

As an "where's my freaking internal politics already?" guy, again I ask, well, internal politics when? Please dont tell me the plan is to dry out the game somewhat, just so that it is possible to fit in 'more civics" so that we can have more "10% more that, 7% less that". Please.

 

[HFY]

How important to you are the current systems that use individual Pops and Jobs in the planetary simulation?

Pops are important. I pay for species packs because I want to see the aliens. This game has good art. Show me the art, including the art I've already paid for. If jobs are holding back the art, then remove jobs. If jobs can be used to showcase the art, then change jobs to do that. Jobs are not important, seeing the pops on my colonies is important.

Jobs are trivia. If they can be made to help, great. If they need to be removed, that's fine.

If we made significant changes to fleets, how much could we alter before it no longer felt like the game you love?

There's a lot about fleets which I have never loved. The original fleet meta very quickly devolved into a few "good" builds, and that's still the case now. The combat rework was mostly a failure -- Frigates are trash -- but at least now there are FOUR worthwhile ship designs (whirlwind cruiser, torpedo cruiser, whirlwind battleship, artillery battleship) rather than just one worthwhile ship design.

So this is a bad question. Fleets need to change a lot before I can love them.

What aspects are most important in defining your civilization?

Distinctive play style. If I play a different empire, I want to make different decisions, and feel rewarded for them.

For example, right now colony specialization is so strongly rewarded -- and so limited -- that domestic choices for every empire feel basically the same. There aren't many actual decisions, let alone distinctive decisions which feel rewarding to replay.

How do you set goals for yourself during gameplay? When do you set them, and how often do they change as you play?

Mostly when I'm rushing a military target.

How important is the current Trade system, with routes collecting back to your Capital?

It's something to work around currently. Trade routes are things to avoid because protection scales poorly and patrols are a bad user experience. There are a number of popular mods to remove or change it already.

Is colonization too easy? Should habitability and planet climate matter more?

Yes to both, and Terraforming is too easy too.

All climates are identical other than background art (except Ocean and Gaia which are special). Every climate should feel distinct. Frostpunk Humans should feel different from Survivor Humans, and both should feel different from basic Continental Humans.

Are there any Origins that should be Civics, or Civics that should be Origins?

Many of the permanent Civics should be Origin components instead. You should be able to take a number of Origin components (zero or more) which don't conflict.

If you could remove one game system, what would it be? Which system would you make the central focus of an expansion? Is there a feature you want to enjoy, but feel the current implementation doesn’t quite work for you?

Genemodding has become worthless in the face of new "locked" traits including Ascension traits and garbage like Self-Modified. It was always a little bit of player tedium but it was previously a bit rewarding because you could consolidate your pops into better templates. Now the tedium is greater since you need tor re-create the template for every combination of locked traits, you can lose the original template so all positive traits become "locked", and with more species from civics like Genesis Guides you have even more clicks per empire.

Remove Genemodding and make a general way to Assimilate-to-template.

 

[EddieDean]

I think this one will be unpopular, but for me-

I always disliked the idea of all your resources going into one bucket. I appreciate that we can assume that goods can be shifted around to where they're needed, but on the planetary scale that'd be difficult, and I like the idea of that challenge being represented. It'd be nice to manage the flow of resources from system to system, with systems sometimes getting cut off by war or other stellar events. This would increase the challenge of sprawl and increase the value of friendly trade, which I think would be interesting to play - or it could be automated for those players with less interest in the system. (Technologies etc would be able to make this more trivial as time went on.)

Similar but not entirely related, I know that habitability is often an abstraction for available water (for most species), but I'd love to see water as a resource consumed by most pops. (Side note: I'd also change food into 'biomatter' since, for example, lithoids' 'food' is minerals.) Biomatter, water, minerals, alloys, energy (credits), and consumer goods feels like the right core resources to me on the interplanetary scale. It would be fun to need to ship water from a superhabitable planet (lowering its habitability) to an asteroid or rocky world (increasing its habitability).

It'd also be interesting to have some modelling for resources which would be practically limited. You can't mine asteroids for minerals forever - at some point you've extracted all that matter. Same deal with pulling energy from stars. Some resources, like biomatter and water, could recycle, but sitting on a mineral-rich system feels like you should eventually run out - quicker if you stripmine for an early boost.

 

[EddieDean]

Likely more popular, I'd love to see more internally, with events for factions and interactions between factions and the council (like many other Paradox GSGs).

I'd also like to see a religion system, with different belief systems impacting relationships. It'd be cool to overcome civic incompatibility with neighbours by using spread religion as a lever. There could be fun internal and external interactions there, and conflicts between spirituality and other 'faiths', such as machine or void worshippers.

 

[SzalonyNiemiec]

forcing the ai to have more fleets is literally the last thing you should to to combat performance issues... since pathfinding IS the reason why performance is so bad lategame... because theres TOO MANY fleets already in the galaxy
also making fleets smaller isnt gonna change the fact that ur gonna run around in doomstacks since... numbers is the only thing that matters in warfare
all its gonna do is make it more annoying to manage your doomstacks
we need a fundamental rework of how warfare works

no I'm not talking about just making fleets smaller, but about also making fleet capacity smaller. (and making individual ships more expensive). What I want is for the number of ships in a given game of stellaris to be smaller. Mechanically this will change very little, but it would make for a better feeling.

 

[D Inbound]

Thanks Eladrin and team for providing this game, and the continued work! I am still enjoying it very much.

1. How important to you are the current systems that use individual Pops and Jobs in the planetary simulation?
Disclaimer: I started playing after the planetary tiles were reworked.
I do enjoy seeing the random "planetary features" and discovering planets with unique planetary features. I think that there should be a pass done on planetary effects. For example, permanent modifiers to a planet should be moved to/displayed as a planetary feature (such as the leviathan parade modifiers) but temporary effects should stay as effects. This would clean up the main planetary UI quite a bit, especially since you can now move all those leviathan defeat parade effects to a single planet.
I think that pops are an acceptable means to an end, my wish is that they should be changed to a more victoria-style "pops" system with building/districts providing X amount of employment for pops instead of a single job for a single pop, however I also think that this would be quite unfeasible to implement.

2. If we made significant changes to fleets, how much could we alter before it no longer felt like the game you love?
Fleets can be changed without much issue for me. I enjoy the designing of each ship more than creating the composition of a fleet, which turns into battleship spam + copy fleet template in the late game. If fleets could be consolidated or some effort could be made to reduce the amount of fleets then it would help with the end game, where I lose track of all the fleets under my command.

3. What aspects are most important in defining your civilization?
Certainly the portrait + species + home planet + naming systems. I enjoy the RP that Stellaris offers and I want to create a civilization that "makes sense". I generally start with choosing an origin if I want to create a new empire when I do not already have a specific idea. Traits are somewhat of an afterthought, and when I create a human civilization I always pick the default human traits from the scripted empire (adaptive, nomadic, wasteful).

4. How do you set goals for yourself during gameplay? When do you set them, and how often do they change as you play?
Initial goals are set during galaxy creation by choosing the amount of empires, what crisis and how strong it is. Then generally I explore as much as possible in the early game. I really like the exploration part of the game which you also stated in the vision as a core part of gameplay. Then I generally just become a fallen empire unless there is some threat that needs dealing with. I do not enjoy engaging in too many wars, I will talk about that below.
Of course the final goal is to survive whatever the game throws at me.

5. How important is the current Trade system, with routes collecting back to your Capital?
Trade is something I mostly ignore unless the pirates spawn. After 1500 hours I still have no idea how piracy suppression works.

6. Is colonization too easy? Should habitability and planet climate matter more?
Colonization is definitely to easy and the games spawns too many planets, even with the habitable planets slider all the way down.
There should be very harsh penalties to pop growth instead in addition to pop output on an uninhabitable planet to limit settling and relocating pops, perhaps something like 10% habitability capping growth out at 10% perhaps?
I also enjoy the planetary diversity mod, especially the old version with the big table for habitability. Where planets of a "Wet" climate would range between "Hot" and "Cold" and have a specific habitability score based on your species preferred climate.

7. Are there any Origins that should be Civics, or Civics that should be Origins?
Origins and civics are fine as-is. But the system becomes a bit confusing with the permanent civics being mixed in.

8. If you could remove one game system, what would it be?
Factions, in their current implementation they do very little aside from generating some unity.

Which system would you make the central focus of an expansion?
Factions and internal politics of an empire. I especially like the eu4 style of depicting the goings-on within a country using randomized events.
I do dislike expansions that add additional buttons for the sake of content. Examples: astral rifts expansion, or the vivarium part of the Grand Archive DLC. But for that same DLC I do enjoy using the archive itself and seeing all my collected specimen (although the system is a bit OP) since it hooks into and expands an existing mechanic: exploration and anomalies.

Is there a feature you want to enjoy, but feel the current implementation doesn’t quite work for you?
The war and peace deal system. As mentioned above I do not engage in war unless I absolutely have to. After a long time I finally figured out how to properly enforce war goals on people: just fully occupy them LOL. But this then also becomes one of the most tedious parts of playing the game, you have to look at every system they own and check to see if you did not miss a planet. Recent QOL improvements like the unoccupied systems breakdown in the war screen and the little indicators on the system icons in the galaxy map help a lot in this regard. But it is still tedious to find an army that has flown off somewhere because I always put them on aggressive nowadays and finish off the remaining planets for what? Like 5 claims that I made.
The only real wars that I participate in are actual vasalization wars, otherwise it feels like too much effort to to a war for a few claims.
The total war scenarios are mostly fine, since they do not require to peace the enemies out to get your stuff.
Improvement suggestions:
1. Allow us to separately peace out any supporting nations in a non-total war war.
2. Decrease the opaqueness of the peace deal options by implementing a system more akin to eu4: where we can choose what claims to take within the limits of the warscore. This could further be refined by only allowing you to take the systems you claimed for example. The current, win everything - white peace??? - lose everything options are quite hard to understand. Especially the white peace part, since it only really applicable to territorial conquest wars, and I do not want to use it to spawn a separate empire with disgusting borders when using a subjugation cb.
3. If the peace deal system is easier to use you can think about adding more cbs, wargoals and options to the peace deal, for example:
- liberating certain planets of occupied pre-ftls or empires
- taking fleets
- dismantling starbases/gateways/megastructures
- enforcing access
- force join/leave federation or galactic community
- straight up stealing resources or "war reparations"
- stealing relics, rights to dig sites, specimens
- make humiliation cb better by providing more things to the initiator if he wins, for example extra diplo weight, influence, unity or whatever.

Other suggestions and feedback I have but could not leave somewhere:
- Allow us to remove picked traditions
- Perhaps tie additional events that can fire to traditions like in eu4, for that extra internal empire flavor.
- Allow us to rename the default three councilor positions (head of research, minister of defense and minister of state) in the empire creation screen like we can with the leader position. So my RP empires will always have special names for them saved right into the template.

Keep up the good work!

 

[Xeridanus]

I feel like ship and space combat could use a bit of a rework. Right now it really just kind of feels like smashing two doomstacks against each other, and I feel there may be room to improve upon that. However, I am personally unsure of how I would fix it.

Now if we are talking about a system that we could remove entirely and make the focus of an expansion... GROUND COMBAT PLEASE! I would really love to see the addons for armies that used to be in the game come back, and I think something like different units such as tanks and ground vehicles alongside your armies would be really cool.

Another thing I find annoying is how difficult it is to build a federation with multiple members. I would really love an interaction to gradually improve relations between two nations that you are on good terms with, so that you could more effectively build a local federation. That would be an amazing diplomatic option.

Are you asking for the "improve relations" action that already exists?

 

[Stellaris-Micah]

I would like for the dev team to make planets feel more unique .
I would like less planets, but each individual planet feel more important, because at the current state planets feel like a chore and feel bland after the first few decades.

 

[FiddleSticks96]

1) How important to you are the current systems that use individual Pops and Jobs in the planetary simulation?

I like the idea of differences between species but the way it is currently implemented doesn't make most species feel different than any other. The machine/lithoid portraits do a better of adding variety than do most species traits. I would like to see more variety and importance added to species through traits and portraits.

I would not be opposed to abstracting pops entirely in the way games like civilization or endless space, so long as the uniqueness of each species remains intact. It is no secret that one of the biggest performance drains in pops and this has been the case ever since we moved away from the tile system. I believe the long term health of the game would likely be improved with an abstracted pop system, though what that would look like is beyond my ability to answer.

2) If we made significant changes to fleets, how much could we alter before it no longer felt like the game you love?

I have been playing since launch. I am used to sweeping changes at this point. I am fine with any changes so long as they are a net positive to the game.

On that note, I would like to see starbases be made more important and for more strategic choices in war. For more info on my thoughts about it, see my post here (https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...on-hard-cap-vs-soft-cap.1703168/post-29880963).

3) What aspects are most important in defining your civilization?

My favorite civilizations are those with civics/origins that fundamentally change how the game is played. Things like using food instead of minerals for alloys, living in habitats instead on planets, or seeking revenge with the Payback origin. These things add uniqueness and personality to otherwise generic empires that all play the same. I would love to see more ways to change how you approach the game.

4) How do you set goals for yourself during gameplay? When do you set them, and how often do they change as you play?

I set my long term goals in empire creation. I have only ever played custom empires and when I make them, I decide what kind of empire it will be. For example, my oldest empire is the Grell Imperium and the royals and nobles will accept nothing less than total submission from the rest of the galaxy. When I play the Grell Imperium, I go into the game with the understanding that I need to prepare for war early and often.

My long term goals never change, buty short term goals change often. An unexpected loss of a major fleet may require my to seek a more stable relationship with a powerful neighbor until I can build it back twice as strong, the discovery of an L-Gate or ruined megastructure may switch my focus from conquest to expansion until I can secure those systems, while the Great Khan may force me to cooperate with my enemies until the mutual threat is dealt with.

Stellaris is a dynamic game and I think this is an important aspect of its design.

5) How important is the current Trade system, with routes collecting back to your Capital?

I can't remember the last time I looked at the trade route menu. Trade Value feels half-baked. It passively works in the background and I rarely ever care about it unless I take the Mercantile tradition to turn TV into consumer goods. It feels like TV should be its own resource that you spend at the market and can do other things with. Seeing actual trade routes between colonies and between empires would be a welcome addition. Inter-empire trade could be established by having a commercial pact, which would improve relationships and generate resources/Trade Value. You could disrupt trade between empires as well. There is so much you could do with this, but that is beyond the scope of this post.

6) Is colonization too easy? Should habitability and planet climate matter more?

I would be interested in seeing how habitability could be made to matter more beyond just adding more penalties to it. It would certainly make differences in species stand out more, but it is also very easy to gene mod/terraform this problem away. I am not sure what this would look like.

7) Are there any Origins that should be Civics, or Civics that should be Origins?

I hate no thoughts on this, but I would REALLY like it if Sovereign Guardianship didn't require the Militarist ethic and could be taken with Inward Perfection. They were made for each other and my IP Void Born would appreciate it if they could take it.

8) If you could remove one game system, what would it be? Which system would you make the central focus of an expansion?

I would love to see an expansion around factions (aka, internal politics). Paragons fleshed out leaders and how they fit in to your empire, but your empire has no personality, so it falls a bit flat. Ironically, factions were much more dynamic and impactful in the early days of Stellaris. These days they amount to nothing more than a few happiness modifiers based on what policies you set. Bringing back more impactful/dynamic factions, perhaps even being affected by your civics as well as your ethics, would go a long way to making your empire feel more alive.

Also, can we get a militarist faction that isn't also authoritarian? My democratic crusader empire always gets the militarist/authoritarian faction and I always have to suppress it constantly as it pops in and out so I don't drift away from my egalitarian ethic.

9) Is there a feature you want to enjoy, but feel the current implementation doesn’t quite work for you?

Espionage. I interact with it almost as little as I interact with trade routes, which is to say, slightly more than "not at all." There is a real danger of making espionage too strong or annoying, but it is currently so toothless that there is no point in using it beyond the steal technology option or if you get the stellarite devourer.

There doesn't have to be options to blow up fleets and starbases, which would likely just annoy/anger the player base. There could instead be options to do things like add temporary empire wide debuffs to military or economy, steal resources, affect stability/crime or a specific colony, reduce cloaking detection, etc...

It will also be important to make counter espionage more impactful. Failing a mission needs to have more risk than just an opinion penalty. Having your own mission turned back on you (in part or in whole) makes it dangerous if you don't invest in encryption/decryption.

 

[alxgvr]

Remove Ground combat mechanic. To much micromanagement. To many mouse clicks. AI constantly spams your systems with transport ships. Very annoying.

 

[Stratoszwei]

• How important to you are the current systems that use individual Pops and Jobs in the planetary simulation?
  Not so much
  
  
• If we made significant changes to fleets, how much could we alter before it no longer felt like the game you love?
  - Reduce number of individual ships.
  - Please let me reorder Fleets
  - Ability to excluded some shipyard from reinforcement
  
  
• What aspects are most important in defining your civilization?
  - Origin
  
  
• How important is the current Trade system, with routes collecting back to your Capital?
  - It can be better but current system is not bad.
  
  
• Is colonization too easy? Should habitability and planet climate matter more?
  - Well yes -

 

[NotoriousTea]

• How important to you are the current systems that use individual Pops and Jobs in the planetary simulation?

Pops have always been vague in what they represent, have been taxing on system performance in the past, and whilst representing political preferences and social strata, they are easily forgotten about during the game. Jobs also do require an explanation to new players, but a little unwieldy to control at times, and again can get forgotten about.

What's good about the current system is that it provides an intrinsic link between population happiness, empire ethics, population upkeep, work output, etc. It also allows the possibility of social changes through events and attractions as well as of course rebellions.

To me, it would be acceptable to somehow simplify the system, probably to have fewer pops representing type rather than number, but still have the benefits found in linked values producing outputs, but improve the system to make pops more present in the game. Whether this is possible or not is another question.

One thing I would like in a rework or replacement of a pops system is to enable planets to have more character in the game, as currently they are simply too resource-focused. If Pops represented social groups I think that would really help bring planets alive. If you could mix this with pops on a planet joining planetary factions, which you could support or mold that would be really interesting. If in the long run, these factions could join other factions from other planets to form power blocs this would again provide Stellaris with a great internal politics upgrade. Especially as I think large expansive empires that are peaceful with other empires should equal more internal politics. It would also make rebellions very interesting.

• If we made significant changes to fleets, how much could we alter before it no longer felt like the game you love?

This could split opinion but I think we need a lot less ships. I don't like stacks and this needs to change.

It would make the game more graphically cleaner without ships piling on top of each other. It think fleets should do more non-miltary things aswell. Right click on things on the galaxy map and passively do various actions, diplomacy, defend gate etc etc. Battleships need more political gravitas if there was a little less of them I would think it would be a good accuse to fix that.

Could we have a battlegroup system? With ships been formed to battlegroups, which belonged to a fleet? This would be good as 1. battlegroups could spread out a bit. 2. you could have a "form the fleet button" which allowed the fleet to jump to a predetermined location. Also a protect the sector button where a battle groups to spread out and auto patrol.

• What aspects are most important in defining your civilization?

Origin, species traits, civics, and ethics are a fantastic system. The species portraits are wonderful. I think story origins are okay, but our scripted and only really allow a couple of run throughs paying as them. I prefer a basic origin with gameplay differences over too scripted stuff, that have a long playthrough time personally.

• How do you set goals for yourself during gameplay? When do you set them, and how often do they change as you play?

I like to play according to the situation the galaxy as thrown me into and let the story play out.

• How important is the current Trade system, with routes collecting back to your Capital?

I like the option to concentrate on trade every so often.

• Is colonization too easy? Should habitability and planet climate matter more?

Yes and yes. I not opposed to mining or refining, maybe the odd military base on a planet with low habitability, thats cool. but I think the planet sizes should be capped depending on habitability or something. Again planets should feel like need more charisma, developing a planet more would be interesting.

• Are there any Origins that should be Civics, or Civics that should be Origins?

Not sure, but I prefer Origins not to have Civic restrictions and Civics not to have Origin restrictions where possible. Ethic restrictions and species restrictions are fine by me though.

• If you could remove one game system, what would it be? Which system would you make the central focus of an expansion? Is there a feature you want to enjoy, but feel the current implementation doesn’t quite work for you?

1.Events with army ships/ construction ships required
2. Internal politics and Factions. Is it time for other Empire types?
3. Space UN needs another look at. And maybe alternatives to the Galactic community need to be looked into as well, different sorts of leagues. or a diplomacy option to leave the UN in federations? To form an upgrade fed? dunno.

 

[poprostumort]

• How important to you are the current systems that use individual Pops and Jobs in the planetary simulation?

I enjoy having pops representing different strata and races, but it does not really matter to me whether they are represented by arbitrary pops token or would they be represented by percentages or some different system that gives me the same information - this should be decided by what mechanic would make game run well. Which currently is only partially true as playing larger galaxies is close to impossible even on beefier systems.

• If we made significant changes to fleets, how much could we alter before it no longer felt like the game you love?

Well, current fleet system is forgettable and basic. You create a design that works, spam the same fleets and doomstack until you can overpower other doomstack. It does its job but I would welcome changes there to make different decisions matter and offer viable playstyle. I would love system where having specialized fleets would be possible - to move the weight of space combat to fleets and make them different tools for different things. Move from building the ships to building fleets and make ships elements to be chosen when creating a fleet. At the same time you can in mid-end game forgo doomstacking 17 fleets with separate admirals and have armadas led by an admiral on capital ship which can have fleets groupped under. Hell tech unlocking armadas and ships can also allow for fleet specialization that affects their behavior in combat. You can also buff mid-late game starbases to have need for starbase-kille fleets, making turtling viable but not OP. Possibilities are endless and many will be better thatn what we have now.

• What aspects are most important in defining your civilization?

Origin, civics and ethics. Those allow you to create an empier that feels yours. But this system has some limitations that feel unneeded. First - Origins. Some of them would have benefited to be taken alongside others or would make seense to be able to be taken alongside others. So why not separate them? Void Dwellers, Shattered Ring, Resource Consolidation etc. - those should be moved from Empire Origin to Planetary Origin as they mainly affect your start, not the idea behind empire. Let people choose them and create simple origins for other planet types. After all empire originating in arctic wasteland will be different from one originating in luch jungle.

Some of those Empire Origins are more aimed at species itself - so why not do the same as with planets? Move them itno separate Species Origin and populate it with few more for different specie types. Those would show how your evolutionary line influences your empire. After all simple choice of evolving from herbivores vs. evolving from carnivores should make a difference, right?

Empire origins are good, epsecially with newer ones giving you specific story chains. I would love for others to get the same treatment (which should be viable after most of simple ones would be moved to Planetary and Species Origin).

So we would have Planet Origin that shows how being born on a speciufic planet type affected your empire, Species Origin that shows how evolution of your species affected your empire and Empire Origin that shows how history of your society shaped your empire and what are your goals in the future. Then on top of that additioanl specie traits, choice of ethics and specific civics would be cherry on top. Every Empire would be its own thing and with more Origins, they can give smaller bonuses, making it less prone to problem of few OP builds, as you could allow different specializations to balance power.

And if we are at topic of balance, throw away positive/negative traits. All traits should be double edged because any of them realistically would have positives and negatives. Traditional society would be more united, but it would rather not adapt to changes as well. Same should be tyrue for all other traits.

• How do you set goals for yourself during gameplay? When do you set them, and how often do they change as you play?

Different games, different stories. Sometimes I have a plan form the start, sometimes I have idea of an empire and see where the galaxy takes me.

• How important is the current Trade system, with routes collecting back to your Capital?

Irrelevant, bordering on annoying. Current trade system makes no sense to me. Just make it broken down with internal trade being modificator to goods/upkeep with some flavor and events and galaxy trade being folded into diplomacy with better ways to sign trade treaties and setting up caravans between empire (that can be raided, can have illegal refugees trickle into your empire or be used in espionage).

• Is colonization too easy? Should habitability and planet climate matter more?

Yes. "Look at habitability, decide if it's worth it, build a colony ship, fire and forget". Why not treat colony ships colonizing a planet in the same way as science ships excavating ruins or exploring rifts? With stages that can have things happening and decisions that would influence the colony. And if we're at it why not be able to modify districts at cost and risk? After all we are at point able to terraform whole planets, so it would make sense that we would be able to artificially create better agriculture or mining of basic resources. At the same time we can have less planets as we don't be as much at risk of "I rolled shit planets in my sector and am crippled". Basic districts should uncap with tech progression and things that should matter are planetary features.

• Are there any Origins that should be Civics, or Civics that should be Origins?

I already talked about origins, but within my 3 tier Origin system some of more thematical civics could be upgraded to one of Origin types. As for civics - they should be cherry on top allowing to further specialize your empire.

• If you could remove one game system, what would it be? Which system would you make the central focus of an expansion? Is there a feature you want to enjoy, but feel the current implementation doesn’t quite work for you?

Remove? I already talked about Trade, but there is also Espionage. It does not make sense as a standalone thing - it would be better to fold it alongside Trade into Diplomacy and make it into a standalone system that can specialize in different paths for your embassies allowing for espionage, focus on GalCom and federations or making money via trade. Coincidentally Espionage is also a feature I want to enjoy, but can't. It's just boring waste of time.

Cental focus of expansion? Ground and Space combat. We already taken a great step with bombardment allowing to capture planets - why not build on top of that? Why not make Marines the core of capturing planets, with specific ship components allowing you to choose what do you have on ships to send down and take important ground targets? Transports should be there to stabilize/pacify the planet or be part of fleet that is specialized in bombardment/sieges. Having a space bus with troops going into warzone to land on a planet that has no fleet locking it makes no sense. This can be also a place where changes to fleets that I have talked about can be made.

I understand that scope of what talked about is more like Stallaris 2 and it might be impossible to implement them all, but I hope that some parts of my rant will give you ideas and insights that would be beneficial for Stellaris future development.