Stellaris is a Living Game
This is absolutely still true, and it is why I still play this game after so many years. I seem to clock at least a few hours every week, as it is often my relaxing afterwork game.
Every Game is Different
We desire for players to experience a sense of novelty every time they start a game of Stellaris.
A sense of uncertainty and wonder about what could happen next is core to the Stellaris experience.
... Eh? I mean, there is uncertainty in terms of who your neighbors are, but you can almost design Empire builds around triggering certain events like Alien Box for the traits or saving a Dyson Swarm for Pulsating Stars as you are going to get either a huge energy or physics research result.
While the expansions have added a lot of events and mechanics, the base game events have gotten pretty repetitive and stale and could stand to see a block of additions added to get that feel of novelty back (I know every expansion adds more, but they tend to be limited in scope to just the expansion contents not the "this could happen anywhere" sort of base game ones). It'd be worth my money to see another Distant Stars or Ancient Relics style DLC (as this feels beyond the scope of a Custodian team update) that was just a block of events and stories to help make the pool the game draws from a little bigger.
Also, the weighting on their appearances could be changed (is this something that could be tagged to the map seed and further randomized?) so you don't see the same handful every game. I can't remember the last time that I saw the Brain Slug events or the Worm (years on the Worm, not since before MegaCorp so... years ago) while I also can't remember the last game in which I didn't find the Rubricator (I literally plan around using that Relic world as a Research & Refinery site during most games now).
What is Stellaris to you?
How does this match what you think Stellaris is, and where it should go? Would you change any of these vision statements?
I think the game still matches the vision statement, but also is still in that odd "neither fair nor foul" phase where it has its three feet (you weird three-legged xeno of a game) in the 4X, Grand Strategy, and RPG-Sim sectors and is awkwardly balancing between them. If I had to classify it as any of them I'd probably still call it a 4x game as that is where it feels the game systems are most rooted. It has the scale and scope of a Grand Strategy and some of the customization and narrative you'd expect more in an RPG-Sim, but it still feels like is draws lightly from those genres in ways that almost hurt the core experience more than add to it as it gives a taste of how it could lean heavier into those genres but not enough to feel like it really commits to the ideas.
How important to you are the current systems that use individual Pops and Jobs in the planetary simulation?
I like the current system more than the previous planetary tiles as those felt unnecessarily fiddly without adding any useful mechanical gameplay. Since this is ultimately a space-fantasy sim and not a colonial-government sim. I don't have any suggestions for an overhaul of it, though I would like a view to see how the empire factions are represented within the planetary population - one of the bits of a Faction overhaul suggestion I'll talk more on later.
(Though that could be an interesting Stellaris spin-off, a Stellaris (Sim) Colony where you are a colonial governor of some species and try to manage and improve your planet while the empire at large is off doing galactic-who-knows-what and you are charged with hitting production or output thresholds in your colony while readying it for invasion / worm attack / etc. Maybe even something as simple as a "Reigns" style colony sim maybe, where you swipe cards to enact your factions proposals... )
If we made significant changes to fleets, how much could we alter before it no longer felt like the game you love?
Probably alter it pretty heavily before it felt like a different game. In fact, I'd say that fleet composition and building probably matter less to me in play than the ability to move and command fleets around the map. A change to how fleets are organized feels needed in that a single ship is significant to your fleet in early game, but in later game it feels like anything less than a squadron level of reinforcement is pointless during a war (and tiny reinforcement fleets are easily picked off for annoying War Exhaustion hits), but you still have tasks that using an entire doomstack fleet feels overkill for (like when it comes to mopping up leftover starbases).
I'd like a more granular way to divvy ships up, more then just fleet management but also to other tasks in the empire. I.E. to assign a wing of ships to permanent tasks without them cluttering the fleet UI (like a couple of squadrons attached to a Trade hub that are permanently then on anti-pirate operations, or a border patrol fleet on a Bastion station that could be both defensive and on anti-cloaking assignments). It'd also double as a way to sort of mothball older designs without having to upgrade them or destroy them (or try flying them across the galaxy to a Scrappers enclave), just assign them to a less active as a reserve that is still providing a benefit but maybe isn't eating into Naval Capacity or cluttering the Outliner.
What aspects are most important in defining your civilization?
That's a question with two answers: mechanically in play, and ideally in design.
Design-wise, it is usually the starting Civics that most heavily influence my idea in defining my civilization. Especially some of the "can't be removed after game start" ones as those most radically affect how I'll be able to play the game. Some Origins have a comparable play effect, but the balance between them has me feeling like the Civics matter more as they get used by me more often than the more dramatic Origin starts do. (Plus, I play Ocean Paradise way too much so.. Yeah, Civics.)
Mechanically, especially early game, it is often feels like whatever skills my starting leaders spawned with have the greatest effect. A governor with a starting Unity %bonus means I might have my first Tradition a year or two earlier than one without, and without needing to build another building to force it. Or a Fertility Preacher means I'll have more pop growth early on which can scale things faster. A starting scientist with a +Research trait is a good bonus all game, but a starting scientist with a bonus to Anomaly Discover Chance might produce more science from those anomalies that my empire would otherwise be generating. All of these shake out eventually as tech and traditions build up, but it can feel mechanically significant and shape a lot of my early game experience and how I see my empire in early game.
How do you set goals for yourself during gameplay? When do you set them, and how often do they change as you play?
Usually in the Empire design stage. I'll often design an empire around trying to achieve a specific goal, like some of the Achievements I have yet to attain. This also usually includes an idea of which Ascension path I might head towards, and that is also usually the first thing that changes during play once I run into whatever Precursor or nearby Enclaves I have for that game.
After game start, the goals are usually smaller scope and more actionable: the Mycelium archeology site is way over there so lets expand that way, this neighbor is threatening so let's fortify this side of the empire and get ready for war, etc.
The goals I have trouble with still are tech rush ones as I can never quite remember the requirements for some of the higher tier techs and I don't usually want to bother looking those up during play to sort it out (I swear I'll correctly remember the requirements for Mega-Engineering one of these days...)
How important is the current Trade system, with routes collecting back to your Capital?
When I am playing my Aquatic Trawling Operation/Pharma State (+Naval Contractors) MegaCorp then the Trade System is vitally important. When playing a Hive Mind or Machine Intelligence then it is in no way whatsoever important. This is the problem with Trade as it stands: it feels like you either go all-in or avoid it entirely.
I'd like to see it overhauled into a Logistics system of which civilian Trade would be a component. You shouldn't be able to have a Forge world disconnected from the rest of your empire and still be spending the Alloys it generates without a secure logistics route back to your shipyards. Piracy should still exist for Hive Minds, not as rogue drones but as people stealing shipments of Minerals and Food coming from colonies further out.
The current trade route modifiers could be applied to all planetary production (that is the production that is in excess of the planet's consumption of it's own output) in that you are shipping those resources off-world to a Logistics Hub and then from that Hub back to the Capital. That would open up opportunities and added impact for economic warfare - being able to disrupt trade/logistics and actually give it some bite as it would affect more than just most players tiny bits of energy income (if their empire even uses Trade at all).
The system isn't a bad idea, just is too narrowly focused to matter in most games. Expanding it to cover all colonial production means there is the possibility of adding piracy and privateering mechanics for the players. Being able to have a Mercenary enclave and maybe pay them not to hire their fleet but to pay them to go privateering along a neighbors Logistic route would be an interesting trade-off.
Is colonization too easy? Should habitability and planet climate matter more?
I think it is more boring than easy. This is one of those places where I think the newer Situation mechanics would make all the difference.
Colonizing a planet shouldn't just be "I flung a ship at it and walked away to suddenly have a pop or two a few years later" but a narrative moment - an ongoing situation - where choices and events occur during the colonization rather than just a single pop-up at the end asking you if maybe you want to stop the planet from spinning or not. It should be a story, especially the first couple of colonies, where your people are learning how to do this right (represent this mechanically with a Colony skill modifier like the First Contact skill modifier maybe?) and events can occur where maybe you'll need to throw some more resources at the colony to help them overcome unexpected events or otherwise accept a slight delay to colony completion.
Also, running it as a situation means you could have colonization stances where you invest a bunch of additional income to speed up the colony construction to make it less tedious late game to start colonies (if your empire can blow planets up and wrap buildings around stars, it can probably drop an entire pre-fab city and make colonization a trivial challenge) or spend more time on the process of setting up a colony to increase your chance of those bonus Amenity / Immigration events (take the time to build an aesthetic colony instead of a quickly thrown together one). Again, a place where a Colonization skill modifier (replacing those Colony %speed techs with a bonus to Colonization skill) that ticks away at the Situation timer would make this something that could scale from the start of game to the end of game.
Are there any Origins that should be Civics, or Civics that should be Origins?
Yes, though I have a longer answer to that below as I think the entire Origin system needs a rework.
If you could remove one game system, what would it be?
Probably Ground Combat. It just isn't interesting. A planetary siege mechanic (again, maybe as a situation or something where both sides chose a stance and can change it between rolls, and events and choices fire as it progresses, with the actual speed still being decided by the inequality between forces, etc.). Just needs to be something other and better than "I drop a bunch of icons and they share a UI with enemy icons and health meters deplete and whoever has more icons wins" is... blegh
.
I understand the need for simplicity and speed in it, as it draws away from the Space-Fantasy bits of the game and would be even more of a drag in multiplayer, but there have to be better options than the current system. It's to the point where I am more willing to apocalypse bombard worlds until all the pops are dead than bother hauling armies around some games. Especially in longer or multi-front wars.
Which system would you make the central focus of an expansion?
Factions, the Council, and Internal Politics.
This plays a little into how I'd like to see Ethics, Authorities, Civics, and Origins (and empire creation in general) re-worked but Factions and Internal Politics could use an overhaul. I'd like to see Factions be more significant and the Council better reflect your Empire's values and government.
As part of Empire creation I'd like to have you select the Factions that are part of your government, and represented by your ruling Council, by selecting them from a pool generated by the combination of your Ethics, Authority, and Civics.
Each Faction would provide one of the starting Council jobs of your empire (or in the case of Gestalts, be represented by one of the Nodes) and factions that overlapped would default to you choosing one of their secondary Council seats at game start. (i.e. If you make two Research based Faction choices (like Technocrats (from Technocracy) and Explorers Guild (from Eager Explorers), you'd then have the Minister of Research seat and a choice at the game start between one of the two Faction secondary seats - like Senior Science Director & Minister of Exploration.)
Factions then would have something they were attached to (either an Ethic, an Authority, or a Civic) and have an agenda and values (Ethics) they aspire towards. So from the example above of two different research-based Factions I'd argue that the Technocrats would lean towards Authoritarian and Materialist Ethics and have an agenda towards an increasing number of research jobs / research pacts but the Explorers Guild could provide the same Minister of Research seat but instead lean towards Xenophile & Pacifism and an agenda towards having a number of active science ships and open borders agreements with neighbors. Two factions provide the same Council benefit but encourage different goals during gameplay.
With this you'd have to eliminate the penalty for not having some of the default ones so if you don't choose a Faction with Minister of Defense as an option that should be a valid play choice without penalties but also without the benefits that the Council seat would offer. You'd still be able to use the "Expand Council Seats" agenda to add in the factions secondary seats, or any unused standard Empire seats (like the mentioned Minister of Defense if none of the factions would provide that seat), but it'd be a choice and represent how your government has adapted to galactic life versus something forced on you at game start regardless of which groups are part of your empires foundation. This would result in a Council that feels more representative of your empires actual governing Factions. Letting you choose starting Factions that actually feel like they fit your intent for the empire.
Moving from Factions to Internal Politics, these factions would all then have agendas, similar to the way that Democracy used to have goals (maybe still does, been a long time since I played it as I usually use Oligarchy these days) that the elected leader would have to achieve. Factions should have similar agendas that they want the nation to accomplish alongside something similar to the current policy likes & dislikes.
Unhappy factions should be a bigger influence on population unhappiness and planetary unhappiness. If you have a Faction representing the Marine Industries (i.e. Anglers or Trawling Operations) and a planet that is almost entirely filled with jobs / population that would be represented by / part of that factions then that planetary populations happiness should be affected more by that Factions opinion of your sitting government.
Growing and appeasing factions then could/should have an influence reflected upon your Empires ethics. If you have a Faction that is attached to the idea of Xenophile ethics and you keep appeasing it and it keeps growing in influence it would then follow that your Empire would be seeing a shift in ethics. This could result in event chains where protests and political discussion occur, a Situation where the issue has become so prevalent it has to be addressed and may result in a shift in Ethics and potentially active Council seats, etc.
With this Leaders would also have a visible Faction membership so Factions would want a Leader not just of their Ethic but of their Faction occupying their related Council seat (this would be a hidden drag on Empires that choose to have related Factions that share a Seat at start, like the Minister of Research example above, in that the seat occupant at any time would be a member of one of the two factions that make the seat available but couldn't be part of both so one faction will never be entirely happy about the seats occupant).
This could also involve events where the Factions force an early election with a vote of no confidence in a democratic or oligarchic leader (or even the occupant of a Council seat), or give a much more organic idea of why a rebellion would occur when a faction in your government isn't represented by leaders or has their agendas repeatedly ignored / overlooked. Events and agendas then could represent ways in which the Factions conflict, similar to the Cybernetic Church origin with the different factions conflicting but representing the Factions historical conflicts and current conflicts over how the government assigns and spends resources.
This could also make the Council more dynamic over the course of a game. A Council seat that promotes and provides a benefit to Science Ship exploration is a great thing in the start of a game, but late game where you are running out of things to explore you'd have to look at the Faction and your Council and choose if your government really still wants that faction around. Actions like the current Promote or Suppress Faction actions would be a way to alter your empires Faction & Council make up to support changes in game goals as your empire adapts to the changes in the galactic status quo.
This also could extend Faction mechanics towards the Gestalt empires that currently don't have any sort of internal faction mechanics. This could be represented as the differing nodes of the consciousness having competing drives and impulses. This also adds the idea that not every Gestalt would necessarily have identical nodes. A Devouring Swarm might have a Node that is just "Appetite" and adds some bonuses to things like purging or consuming xenos. A Terravore gestalt might similarly have a node that is weighted towards mineral production and the Consume Planet situation. Changing how Gestalt nodes work to reflect factions would both more variety to Gestalts but also open up the idea of events for Deviancy based more around what a node was doing and the idea that maybe an entire node could go deviant and rebel as a colonial split off faction, etc. This would be something to add more gameplay and events to a slice of empires that feel divorced from a lot of the other game mechanics by adding in the player balancing between the agendas of the nodes programmed priorities/biological urges.
Is there a feature you want to enjoy, but feel the current implementation doesn’t quite work for you?
Empire creation.
I mentioned above how I'd like to see the starting Council changed as part of empire creation, along with making your nations starting Factions part of empire creation. With that I'd like to see a rework on how Civics & Origins are divided up and how Ethics works.
Ethics are the simplest in that I'd like to see opposed Ethics balance as opposed to completely nullify each other. So if you put one pip into Spiritualist, you were limited to one less possible pips into the opposing Materialist (so you couldn't be Fanatic in oppositional elements but could dip your toes into each). So you could have an empire then that was 1 Spiritualist, 1 Materialist, 1 anything else but not 1 spiritualist & 2 fanatic materialist. This would open up the idea of having empires with opposing factions and Ethics within their government. (Which, I'd argue, is pretty representative of national politics today.) Since the strongest benefits are at the Fanatic level currently, this locks those out but could allow for a nation that has internal that sort of oppositional political conflict cooked right into it from game start.
In terms of Civics and Origins the changes I'd like to see are a bit more complicated. I'd like to see Origins split up into three parts:
a) Homeworld Style - What sort of place was it that the empire arose
b) Species Background - How the empire lived as they came to be
c) Agenda (or "Why go to the stars")
Homeworld Style is the simplest:
- Planet
- Habitat
- Ringworld
(- also Mothership, but I'll talk about that below)
This is the starting setup and would see your initial population/district/building values as balanced. Simply being on a Habitat or a Ringworld is a big deal, but it feels less interesting than why your people are on there and having it be the entire Origin always felt limiting in how things could play out in the game. I'll provide some examples below.
Species Background is about how your species came to be the dominant one on the planet. Why is your species the ruling species. For example:
- Prosperous Unification (we all just got along)
- Syncretic Evolution (we are in charge, but look at these cute sidekicks)
- Mechanist (we are in charge and we built robots to make sure we are)
- Lost Colony (we didn't start here but are here now)
- From the Ashes (we used to be great, but are rebuilding from the ruins)
- Subterranean (we built underground to outlast threats)
- Ocean Paradise (all beaches and great waves, all the time)
- Natural Design (we genemodded ourselves into being dominant)
- etc.
And then finally Agenda which is why your species is heading out into space, these are the ones more likely to be limited by the previous choices and are a bit more recognizable.
- any background - Fear of the Dark
- any background - Slingshot to the Stars
- any background -Teachers of the Shroud
- any background - Eager Explorers (this feels like it should be part of your origin and not a political choice)
- any background - Fanatic Purifiers
- any background - Inward Perfection
- any background - Armageddon
- P.U./S.E./M/S/O.P. - Under One Rule (we are number one with the number one boss person!)
- Lost Colony - Finding our Home (traditional lost colony start)
- Lost Colony - Payback (crashed slave ship now seeking payback against the slavers)
- Lost Colony - Broken Shackles (crashed slave ship now seeking emancipation for all)
- From the Ashes - Relic World
- From the Ashes - On the Shoulders of Giants
- etc.
This isn't a complete list but more of an idea of how they could synergize. It isn't a perfect list either (still not sure about where a few of them should be in the list) but I like this idea because it opens Origins up for things like:
Ringworld - From the Ashes - Fear of the Dark
- You have a ringworld start with a species that is climbing back out of a technological dark age and your species has fragmented with you ruling one ringworld segment and the other half ruling another segment and acting out of fear of whatever shattered the ring in the distant past.
Habitat - Lost Colony - Payback
- You start in a habitat with a disabled slave ship in orbit around it as the habitat was originally a slave processing station. Now you seek to learn the technology of the people who grabbed all of you and pay them back from ripping you from your homeworlds.
Planetary - Subterranean - Inward Perfection
- We are quite happy underground by ourselves. Please go away now.
Habitat - Mechanist - Armageddon
- Your species went to space and moved into orbital habitats, which are now falling apart and you lack the tech to repair them. Thankfully your robot servants are pretty sturdy and can help colonize a new home for you in the few years left before your final habitat breaks apart.
Personally I feel that any Civic that is permanent should be something other than a Civic. Either part of the Origin as an Agenda or Background (as above as part of Empire creation) or maybe as an Ascension Perk, but Civics have always felt to me like things that should all be able to be changed during the game as your empires politics adapt to the reality of the universe.
Other Things I'd Like to See:
Espionage needs love badly.
As a simple fix I'd like to see all of the Espionage actions swapped over to being Situations and allow you to run more than one at a time against the same empire. You could handicap it with each additional action against the Empire increasing the difficulty for all active situations taking place that targets them.
Right now only being able to do one espionage action at a time, and some of them taking years to complete, feels very limiting and something I entirely forget I have going most of the time. Putting them into the Outliner as a Situation would make it more visible and again allow for the Situation mechanics to have players make decisions about how the situations are progressing, show progress towards completion, and fire off events at certain thresholds of completion.
Similarly I'd like to see Espionage actions be able to target specific fleets and shipyards for sabotage if you have visibility on them. This would make cloaked fleets more useful as you'd be able to send them into enemy territory to get visibility on enemy targets instead of the current situation of starting a Sabotage espionage act and having it hit a random target somewhere in the empire and never quite being sure where. Plus, requiring visibility allows you to defend against it with anti-cloaking starbases and encryption technologies to reduce enemy vision of your territory. It adds weight to all of those systems and would make it a strategic choice instead of just an influence dump.
Seeing espionage work with more recent DLCs would also be nice. Being able to steal gene data or collection bits from Galactic Archives or have starting a Cosmic Storm be an expensive espionage action instead of something with a science ship (why does every new bit of content seem to be built around science ships?).
Also, a Mothership style starting world / Origin.
Having your species start the game with a Titan-scale mobile habitat that is the ark your species built to leave it's homeworld alongside a pair of science ships and a construction ship. No starting fleet. Starting system would have a Wormhole, or some other anomalous means by which the Mothership arrived in that part of the galaxy far distant from the species original homeworld.
This would start out like a habitat with some pre-built districts (hydroponics for food, recycling to turn minerals into alloys & consumer goods) that would gain additional output by orbiting deposits that it would be able to exploit while it remained in orbit. Give it a single shipyard so it could build colony ships to settle planets but the only weapons the Mothership while be equipped with would be Point Defense weapons.
It'd be a big slow lump of a ship useful in the early game, but since you can't build a second one and it houses your population you wouldn't want to use it offensively (also, slow as molasses).
Again this could be paired with Origin Agendas (see above) like "Armageddon" could have the ship on a timer to breakdown. When the timer ran down it would turn into a broken megastructure site (that you could then later turn into a Science Nexus or Mega-Art Installation or similar after you get Mega-Engineering as you repurpose the mothership framework and skip the initial stage). Similarly, this would happen if it was destroyed or after 100 years for non-Armageddon starts as your technology base moves away from what built the mothership and it just isn't repairable anymore.
Or a Payback start where the mothership was instead used for bulk slave transportation but the slaves took it over, etc.
Or a Clone Army start where it was originally the mobile barracks / training platform for a war they never managed to arrive at.
It'd be another interesting variety to start options, a DLC idea on par with a Species pack sized DLC with art elements for the Mothership ship design and writing and design elements for how it would have unique starting setups and events and situations based upon the ship and its history.
