Stellaris Dev Diary #369 - 4.0 Changes: Part 3

[Znikii]

Why would there be a black market if the trade deficit is covered by outside production and logistics?

Could happen in far away sectors and when you stuggle to cover it by outside means...
Because usually covering it by outside prodution and logistics usually entail greatter costs for end user... thus local populace (maybe working class only?) might have hard time buying the things from capital/galactoc market

 

[TrueWolves]

I had a sudden idea for piracy:

If hostile fleets increase trade upkeep locally, have a hidden galactic and/or local situation that increases based on trade upkeep. Once full, it selects a place trade is being used and drops a pirate base on a hyperlane entry point in that system. This lets the base exist without trashing the whole system but out of range of most early and mid game starbases. It can slowly keep increasing the trade upkeep until delt with, eating your trade where it is being used.

If along the borders of your empire, they might even send out raids through their occupied hyperlane, so they might be a problem for your neighbors too.

 

[blahmaster6k]

There's no reason why this would kill the low hab trade builds and I genuinely don't understand why you think it would. Given that clerks are probably going to get a bit of a buff I would expect if anything that it will make them even better.

Low habitability gives a big penalty to resource production, previously trade wasn't affected as it wasn't a resource. So you could set up trade jobs on low habitability worlds and they would be as effective as on a 100 habitability world. This gave you a way to mitigate the downsides of colonizing low habitability worlds such as a shattered ring. With trade as a standard resource you'll now be taking just as much of a penalty to trade as you would another job, which is a nerf.

but once you are in enemy territory you spread out and attack several spots at once like a swarm of locusts, otherwise war exhaustion and the new trade upkeep will make you run out of time before you have achieved anything more than the most basic war goals

also in the late game you often have to defend several borders at once, meaning your doomstack will be broken up anyways

If you put all your eggs in one basket you just get flanked and outmaneuvered and lose half your territory

The basic premise of Stellaris combat is: if your opponent has a fleet somewhere, you need to smash it with a bigger fleet. If your opponent is doomstacked and you're not, you can be defeated in detail (assuming similar total fleet sizes). Unless you can actually capture every planet with armies simultaneously while able to run away from your enemy's fleet that's chasing your small ones, you need to doomstack. Capturing planets also typically requires you to doomstack your armies (especially if your opponent has fortresses), so unless you want to invest way more minerals than is optimal on armies you're going to need to take planets one at a time.

In the late game you have enough fleets that you don't need them all in one place. Of course you don't have to doomstack all fleets when you have millions of fleet power and each AI only has a few tens or hundreds of thousands. But at that point each individual player fleet is basically a doomstack by itself...

Also, in the late game any roughly equal opponent will have a roughly equal fleet and things like gateways and jump drives exist. If you spread out your fleets, you're inviting yourself to be instantly jumped on by however many ships can annihilate your smaller fleets one at a time. If you doomstack you are immune to this tactic. The only way you can stop an enemy doomstack is by meeting it with your own.

You have to put your eggs in one basket because if you don't you can potentially lose all your fleets one by one. Who cares if I temporarily get a few systems captured? If my fleets get behind yours and cut off your escape, I can just trap your fleets in combat with my starbases while my fleet catches up to your smaller ones one at a time and kills them. The only thing that matters in war in Stellaris is who has ships left, because having ships left means you have a chance to win the war. If you spread out and occupy most of my planets but I kill all of your fleets in return, I'm going to win the war and you have no chance of victory.

Almost every war that you win in single player against a superior AI is because the AI split its fleets up and you beat them one by one. If the AI doomstacked that wouldn't happen. If I can only muster 5k in fleet power early in the game and the grand admiral AI has 10k, I have no hope of winning since he can just hunt down my fleet. But if the AI splits off 3k to go bombard one planet, I can send my 5k after his 3k and win with few losses. Now I have 5k and the enemy has 7k. Much easier to defend with that, especially if you have a starbase in a choke point somewhere to help or have a weapon loadout that counters the enemy. Doomstacking is how you guarantee that you win wars. This is probably even more applicable in multiplayer than single player, because an enemy human can intelligently react to what you're doing and maneuver his fleets in the best possible way to counter yours.

 

[1444 Look a Bird]

Please, have the auto-research feature be able to select which types of repeatables to research. In the late game it's a significant quality of life reduction to click tech every month, otherwise auto-research will pick the most useless repeatables. I really wish this to be implemented.

Currently telling auto-research to research certain repeatables can only be done with mods that change the checksum, which in the new version, would still disable achievements.

 

[cryptkeeper]

Also a thought juggernaut should counter the logistic costs as long as they are in the same system as your fleet. This would add another use for them, so if you want to maintain a doomstack you need to invest in a juggernaut and protect it.

 

[Ilab]

It was back in November:

Thanks, I did see the 1st entry, but had not seen the second one

 

[Blackened30]

I'm really going to miss the way trade functioned before. Trade routes were badly implemented, but at least the idea was in the game for future improvement. But I'm going to miss fun builds like trade zombies, The fact that various modifiers didn't affect trade made zombies genuinely fun and useful, and the fantasy of it was fun. I like and appreciate there being a real logistic resource now, but I'm going to miss how trade empires played genuinely differently from a standard energy economy empire. Ah well, it was fun while it lasted. I wish you'd found a solution that allowed you to keep functionality some of us enjoyed rather than ripping a system out, wrapping a whole new concept around it and calling it fixed.

 

[Ilab]

I'm really going to miss the way trade functioned before. Trade routes were badly implemented, but at least the idea was in the game for future improvement. But I'm going to miss fun builds like trade zombies, The fact that various modifiers didn't affect trade made zombies genuinely fun and useful, and the fantasy of it was fun. I like and appreciate there being a real logistic resource now, but I'm going to miss how trade empires played genuinely differently from a standard energy economy empire. Ah well, it was fun while it lasted. I wish you'd found a solution that allowed you to keep functionality some of us enjoyed rather than ripping a system out, wrapping a whole new concept around it and calling it fixed.

This ^ (but without the zombies part xD)

 

[cryptkeeper]

I'm really going to miss the way trade functioned before. Trade routes were badly implemented, but at least the idea was in the game for future improvement. But I'm going to miss fun builds like trade zombies, The fact that various modifiers didn't affect trade made zombies genuinely fun and useful, and the fantasy of it was fun. I like and appreciate there being a real logistic resource now, but I'm going to miss how trade empires played genuinely differently from a standard energy economy empire. Ah well, it was fun while it lasted. I wish you'd found a solution that allowed you to keep functionality some of us enjoyed rather than ripping a system out, wrapping a whole new concept around it and calling it fixed.

I do hope they do something with trade zombies, but I think changing it to logistics resource is better for the style game stellaris is. Maybe in stellaris 2 we can see a better fleshed out trade system. As much as I enjoyed trade overall it was unintuitive and did not work well. Half the time is was just worse then standard empires.

 

[Blackened30]

I do hope they do something with trade zombies, but I think changing it to logistics resource is better for the style game stellaris is. Maybe in stellaris 2 we can see a better fleshed out trade system. As much as I enjoyed trade overall it was unintuitive and did not work well. Half the time is was just worse then standard empires.

It was a bit unintuitive certainly, I went to the wiki and the forums more than a few times to see what rules trade followed and which it didn't, but those difference are where the fun was for me. The problem is once you make it behave just like any other resource it loses that difference. Logistics as a concept is good for the game,it very much needs to matter and be a limiting factor. I'm not sold on combining trade and logistics, since an empire who goes all in on logistics to move armies and ships around the galaxy may not care one bit for trade. They're completely different things to my mind.

 

[Huskermax5]

Can 4.0 team/custodes please do an updated pass over the planetary despoits. unchanged since launch i think.

As for trade not a fan of trade being affected by resourses from jobs. I like habaility not impacting it gives a very unique playstyle. As for ships trade upkeep I think doomstacking is an issue but shouldnt be resolved with trade. If anything trade would decrease due to econ of scale with big ships delivering materials.

Doomstacking is sometimes needed in war to fight either cetana/FEs/genociders. I feel like maybe a better method would be to decrease all commander experience gain based on % of naval cap that is taken up by most domiant design. This should also better the meta of spamming one type of ship maybe 2 if you have a pd and non pd version. A modifier of up to 10% or something would be impactful and encourage players to have diverse fleets but it could be ignored if you wanted which is good for beginners who may not want to look up guides.

I hope trade remains a system where if you "spec" into scales the best and such but otherwise you dont need to pay too much attention.

 

[Cleaving3]

CORPORATE GESTALTS?!

HOLY SHROUD

 

[Imp0815]

Ha, sorry, "perverse incentives" is a specific term to describe when you add an incentive or penalty to something but it ends up rewarding behavior that's not what you intended. Like if a city with a rat problem offered a reward for turning in dead rats but then a bunch of people set up rat breeding farms. It's a very useful phrase and not nearly as extreme as it sounds!

I think they did it with snakes but i'll get your point.

 

[Son of Poland]

Personally, I like the trade update, but there is room for improvement/more to be seen.

I am currently hoping they will fine tune trade so that planets located in frontier space have a higher trade upkeep (harder to transport goods) while well optimized sectors have a scaling trade upkeep with less upkeep/production bonuses depending on factors such as the bureaucracy presence in the sector capital, governor level, and the resources produced across the sector planets. The hope would be sectors across the empire can then help pick up trade deficits rather than focusing on microing planets like how it was during the tile days or from what it seems from today's diary.

This would help RP-wise and gameplay wise by creating an importance for sector capitals (which now feel rather lackluster) and make bureaucratic/clerk jobs more important; making sure planetary build decisions follow "big picture" strategic procedures for sector development, but not by creating bloated micro by trying to optimize the resources on a one-planet-fits-all basis; and helps create a web of interdependent planets which may help forge ahead future internal politic updates.

 

[Huskermax5]

Can any dev answer what the approximate trade upkeep of one battleship is in both mid and late game?

I know numbers are WIP.

Will trade job production numbers be impacted? Aka merchants/clerks?

 

[Huskermax5]

how will trade be converted into trade value ie shared burden campaign?

 

[Khaali]

Criminals can still open Branch Offices without a trade deal, getting the same kind of buildings they have right now and adding 25 crime per building to the planet.
However, they can now get a commercial pact too (if both parties agree), which replaces the buildings with their non criminal variant but every building will add +5 to the crime floor (to a max of +20 crime floor for a fully developed branch office, which is not enough to trigger negative crime effects on its own).
If the commercial pact is broken, the branch office reverts to traditional criminal behavior.

Does that make sense?

Not gonna lie, that all sounds very well thought. Enough lore and mechanics to keep criminal syndicates interesting (heck, they are even more interesting as before). But not make them too obnoxious to be the most hated civic again.

The crime floor idea is a really elegant and simple solution. That way criminal syndicates still get a boost from crime on their buildings, but keeping it below the negative modifiert limit is potentially enough to not being the most hated civic.

Also some nice gameplay implications, like if you are not strong enough to fight the crime, just make a deal with the syndicate and your crime problems are gone.

Now i am hoping for some espionage rework in the furture so a criminal megacorp can specifically target enforcers on worlds without a commercial pact (or should that be called a crime pact?) ti improve their trade gain.


Regular Megacorps will likely still my personal favorite, but criminal syndicates now sound much more exiting!

 

[A2ch0n]

And now my deer friends, one mooo-re surprise for you! The Stellaris 4.0 ‘Phoenix’ update brings ten paws-itively stunning new Mammalian portraits to the base game!

Question: If this is the glorious "Phoenix" update, can we get a dedicated Phoenix Avian Portrait?

...I would even pay for that...

 

[Mineskum]

So can you blockade a planet and cause a trade deficit? like if I bombarded every planet an empire owns it prevents that trade from being collected or causes other issues?

 

[Aoreyzus]

I hope you keep the trade route generation system in the backend for modding. I was going to say that it would be nice if trade routes were automatically generated so that you could simulate blockades during warfare, but I think the simplified model with economic loss from lost planets works well enough.

Wait, wait, with this model doesn't that mean that you could have one big 'trade planet' and cover all deficits with it? So your entire empire's transit system is run by the Trade Moon around your ecumenopolis, and if you lose the Trade Moon your entire economy collapses because you can't maintain your trade routes anymore. Interesting possibilities there...

I think this is why I feel deja vu when thinking about trade; it is like the admin cap of old. Back then a bureaucrat world can produce almost all the admin cap you need for the empire, this trade rework feels very reminiscent of that old admin cap bureaucrat system where one trade world is able to cover all the trade deficit in the empire