Stellaris Dev Diary #21 - Administrative Sectors

[Safehold]

It's not the 10-15% of the micromanagers microing their diplomacy push here concerning game features that have been locked in for Stellaris. It's one person doing the push, RickinVA.

While there are other people with similar viewpoints, Rick's micromanagement philosophy is way off on the extreme end of things.

People who have had similar fanatical, extreme, or passionate points of views have learned to mod Paradox's clauswitz engine. They learned to put their obsessive compulsive traits into a positive end result that people might benefit from. Yes the forums here are for people to voice their views and even complaints, but this isn't the general population disagreeing with each other. It's one person pushing his particular viewpoint by micromanaging, and failing, at diplomacy.

In the time Rick has spent on this thread, he could have learned 10% of the event and script language logic of Clausewitz engine for CK2 and EU4 by now.

But changing Rick is not Rick's priority. Changing the world, or by extension Stellaris, is the priority for some. It's a very focused application of two extremes put together.

 

[Santander]

You know, there's something called the "moral high ground" in arguments and discussions. I feel that both sides have voluntarily surrendered it. Let's all take a step back, realize that this is a dev diary for a video game, and try not to attack people because of their opinions. At the end of the day, it's not really that big a deal how this particular discussion plays out; we will all move on with our lives and probably forget all about the debate over micromanagement as soon as the game comes out. In the mean time, there's nothing wrong with having said debate. Is it likely to change anyone's opinion? No. Is it a perfectly good way to spend time waiting? Heck yeah. So what if one side seems predominantly one guy's thoughts and opinions? I say it's great for RickInVA to have an opinion he feels so strongly about. Maybe y'all should try playing "devil's advocate" and swap sides for a while; that way, you'll get a better grasp of where the other side is coming from.

In short, let's all try to remain civil; this isn't a matter of life or death.

(Oh, and if you guys actually decide to go ahead and play devil's advocate, let me know. I'll need to get some popcorn.)

 

[MyLego]

First I have to see the game and:
- check what/how much the penalty is
- check can I do micromanaging myself better than AI
- check the relation between those two things
- estimate is it better to do micromanagement or leave it for AI
- evaluate after few games was estimation right
- make a decission for furthermore

I understand that you are going to evaluate if it is worth it and do what is optimal.

My point is that if, after that evaluation, you find that it is generally better not to micro those parts would you micro them anyway for fun?

 

[Wenla]

I understand that you are going to evaluate if it is worth it and do what is optimal.

My point is that if, after that evaluation, you find that it is generally better not to micro those parts would you micro them anyway for fun?

No.

 

[eruntano22]

I don't agree. It's a very common scenario that people do things that aren't fun but give them some advantage. A player that is willing to micromanage a large number of planets will always be able to squeeze out some advantage over a sector governor. You don't want optimal play to be boring.

Watching LPs of certain people on YouTube are already very much like that.

 

[ZechsMerquise73]

This is a pretty cool element, but if the intention was to clear up micromanagement, why on earth would they penalize you for not using the automated AI? They don't penalize you for not using the theatre AI in HoI, do they?

 

[Cameron122]

Will different government types affect the sector system? For example, a feudal government allowing for a private sector military?
In the sector map mode, will the Central Government be shown?
Can sectors be named something else? In my Space Roman Campaign, I would like to call my sectors Provinces or Prefectures, and call the governors Proconsuls or Prefects!

 

[eternien]

I doubt there's a Sector limit beyond how many systems you control; just like CKII when you could strip away all titles and just have nothing but counts as vassals. And remember, the max size is how many are directly connected to the capital of the sector, and it also means that they will probably need either hyperlanes, wormhole generators, or some sort of trade route established to count as such. So if the map spawns to have 600 systems all directly connected to one other system, then you get a 600 system sector.

Also, why is everyone getting upset about this? It's essentially just the vassal system from CKII; there is still micromanaging as you have to keep sectors happy, have to ensure you aren't putting the wrong governor in place for the policies you want, and you can still choose to build things. It's actually a far better system to truly replicate the strategy required to run an Empire; bureaucracy has to be dealt with, and that's far more of a fun and difficult challenge than just picking exactly what you want to happen where. Besides, we still have the military, economy, diplomacy, internal politics, exploration, and scientific research (not to mention dealing with the impact of the multitude of events) to deal with. There's plenty of micromanaging.

The problem is that we force us to use this system while to give the choice to do it or not would have been much simpler and would not have create so much debate.
Over and above the fact that on 21 DD it is the only option who causes so much problems, thus frankly it is not as if pro-micro had come to every DD to grumble, then say that we can mod it is the easy answer, but if it is so simple to make as much as developers add the basic choice and make the game the perfect 4x with only one little effort.

 

[stripe7]

So are the sector sizes the same for all the different governments? Do the monarchies have smaller sector sizes do the Republics have larger ones?

 

[Tiaexz]

Over and above the fact that on 21 DD it is the only option who causes so much problems, thus frankly it is not as if pro-micro had come to every DD to grumble, then say that we can mod it is the easy answer, but if it is so simple to make as much as developers add the basic choice and make the game the perfect 4x with only one little effort.

Because Sectors are part of the grand-strategy aspect of the game, and ripping it out involves destroying several other systems and interactions present. It would be like complaining that a platformer like Sonic isn't a straight line, then building a straight high-way which goes from start to finish, then wondering why the game is fun after you removed all the monsters, rings, loops, twists and turns, and every other feature in the game just to have it in that way.

So basically, the devs are not 'enabling it as an option' as it is destroys a major aspects of the game, also why people say "just mod it" as they don't want the game destroyed to please people who currently don't understand this.

Also, quick hack'n'slash mod is going in defines and setting your own limit as 9999. Rather simple to do.

 

[KonradKurze202]

Maybe. However, the way Doomdark phrased it sounds like they added it to remove micro-management. Civil Wars might be a side effect of that.

There is never a single reason for any decision. There were no doubt a multitude of reasons PDS decided to go with this Sector system. The most salient reason is that it makes the game more enjoyable for the majority of the audience (note: the majority of the audience does not frequent this forum, so lets not get swept away in a 'but look how many responses are saying evilz!').
A close secondary reason (to my mind) is to make the AI more competitive with the player. In Civ (which has the closest city management setup to this amongst games I am very familiar with) the player, assuming they are moderately skilled, will ALWAYS build better cities than the AI. They are better able to decide where cities should go, they are better able to decide what to produce in a particular city, they are better able to determine an optimal build route. Making an AI that could match humans in this decision making is nigh impossible. By the point we get Game AI that can do this we are getting pretty close to being able to make Sky Net (that or we have computers that can do about 100x more calculations per second than top of the line modern computers). By forcing a large part of our empire to be managed by the AI it makes it impossible for us to snow ball as hard as you can in Civ. A competent Civ player, playing against AI without a handicap (which is what most of the higher difficulty actually does), will easily be an age ahead by the mid game, and be able to have cities that are drastically superior to AI cities.
Luckily, reason 3, is realism. If your space Emprah wants to manually govern 20 worlds then he has to spend money spreading his control to those worlds. Just look at States in the US. If California was any bigger our deficit would be through the roof! There is a limit to what a government can actually accomplish directly. This is included in the game in the form of the soft 'demesne' limit (which apparently is pronounced like Domain, despite its spelling. English is weird [proof is in the rule 'I before E except after C, which is contradicted in the very word I just used]). You can control more worlds than is convenient, but each world becomes increasingly more costly to manually control. Having no demesne limit would be very unrealistic.
Reason 4 (probably the most globally important): working well with other systems in the game. The revolt/rebellion system seems to work through pops. Sectors provide an easily coded (relatively) manner of concentrating these pops in a way that makes their eventual revolt meaningful (if they were spread out across your empire, with each spot of the revolt being 3 jumps away from each other it would be incredibly simple to isolate and contain each one). Internal politics would probably end up meaningless without something like sectors.
I'm sure there are many more reasons that the devs elected to go this route, the one Doomdark listed is just one, and the reason he lists just one is because otherwise Dev Diaries would be 5 pages long and would never actually get written because it would take too long, and expose too much internal decision making and things they don't actually want to expose. Basically adding in Sectors and taking this out of the hands of the players makes the ENTIRE game better. For the Greater Good! Tau'va!

Edit Note: For those of you who don't like this mechanic I suggest you try the game with a mod that takes it out. I am pretty dang sure you will find that taking out this mechanic actually breaks the game. Without Sectors pop migration is going to end up random, rather than focused, and so revolts will be something that happens to other people. The AI is going to end up getting trounced just because you are unrealistically super efficient because you control every world with the fine control of a God. Sectors are not a tacked on feature that is meant to deter overly micro play, it is a full on feature of the game, interacting with the rest of a game in a way that makes everything more cohesive and better.

 

[KonradKurze202]

I love the influence of CK2 (my favorite PI game) on Stellaris.

To be honest, while this system looks superficially like CK2s it seems to be fairly unrelated. Unlike vassals in CK2 you are still the direct owner of the territory. It also looks like Sector Governors cannot rebel themselves, and that sectors are not cohesive units that rebel together. Instead a Sector acts as a lodestone for like-minded pops, and it is the pops themselves who do the revolting. In CK2 it was the Duke or Count who rebelled.
That said it definitely bares aesthetic similarities to CK2, so I imagine it started life as being very similar to CK2's Feudal system, and through subsequent iterations became more and more divergent.
Personally I think this system is pretty dang cool.

 

[KonradKurze202]

I am not a game designer, and the odds are you are not either. It might be very difficult to code these items as options, or it might not be. I do not have any personal knowledge.

I am sure of two things though. 1) Having more options is more likely to entice more purchasers than fewer options.

I am just going to respond to this because it is something I feel incredibly strongly about.
'Having more options is good, it will attract more customers' in the sense I am getting from this section of your post, and it is the reason EA games have gotten so homogenized in recent years. Dragon Age got multiplayer for the first time just because EA decided it was another 'option' that would attract more customers. This logic of 'attracting more customers is good' is why the vast majority of AAA titles stopped making niche games (also: great games) and started making mediocre games that have mass appeal. EA, Activision, Ubisoft, have all elected to make money above all else, and have taken the short sighted route of trying to include as many features as possible in as many games as they can, to try and push sales. Assassins Creed started off as a platforming stealth game with lite action components. The modern incarnations of the series are hardly recognizable from a gameplay stand point. The platforming aspect is almost completely gone, super zip-lines make climbing buildings happen in incredibly unrealistically fast times, stealth is often completely ignored, etc. Many people like these changes, it is why the games sell well, but they are barely in the same genre as their predecessors.
The homogenization of games is not something we should be encouraging. Diversity provides us with the greatest games. It is the reason indie games are growing so popular, those devs are willing to make niche games, and they get tons of sales because the fans of those niches have literally no where else to go. Paradox is hardly an Indie developer any more, but they most certainly cater to a very specific niche of gamers. Thus far they have held their ground against making their games 'too' accessible (they have gotten easier to get into as time goes on, but I feel that is more from better design than it is from dumbing down the systems), and I very much hope they do not go the Bioware route and submit to the evil EA and homogenize their games and remove everything unique and worthwhile they had.

Just to note: the entire purpose of this post was not to disagree with the reasons behind your post (you want to micro every planet, a reasonable desire, even if I don't think it fits the game systems in Stellaris), but to combat the thought process of 'More options is always better', because no, more options is not always better. More options is, in fact, often very, very bad.

 

[KonradKurze202]

Your feelings of guilt and inadequacy are your own responsibility and should not affect game design.

Besides, one way to set it up could be to give certain minor benefits (as outlined earlier in this thread) for creating Sectors.

You do realize that while you are arguing against his personal preferences because they are his personal preferences you are pushing your own preferences for the exact same reason? The height of hypocrisy. His feelings should not effect game design, but yours should.

Please come up with real arguments, rather than 'My way is better because it is mine.'

 

[KonradKurze202]

Are you really reading what I've been saying? I expressed 2 times now. That Sectors would grand bonuses to people who don't want to manage all planets. So that in the end the game is balanced, and doesn't give player who min-max an advantage.

So in the end there would be no advantage or disadvantage of using sectors or managing all... (Unlike Civ)

I myself am not a min-max player... In the end min-maxing is tiring and just not fun. But there are people who genuinely like min-maxing... for them it's fun. So why limit their stile of play?

As I said 1000x now... in the end min-max or sectors would be the same, since using sectors would grand benefits. The game would be balanced. Think like different religions in EUIV, none is inherit better, it's just different benefits balanced, that may fit a certain play stile.

Clearly you've never tried to balance a game before. Star Craft (the original) is a game widely praised for the balance between its 3 factions. Replicating this balance in Star Craft 2 took nearly a decade of work (not all of it was balancing, naturally). Balance is one of the most difficult parts of game development (AI is inarguably the hardest), tiny tweaks can throw balance out the window. What you are asking for is for the devs to come up with a system that is 100% balanced between super micro and AI controlled. That is almost impossible, not least because it involves making the AI good enough to be competitive with a good player.

 

[KonradKurze202]

Real World (if such a label can be used here) Example:

We have 50 states in the United States. However, when the Federal Government wanted to build the Interstate Highway System, they did so, and the States had little to no say in it. Similarly with the Roman Empire road construction was planned by the central government.

And in Stellaris you will have 4 Sector Governors, but when you want to build a Wormhole Gate you will do it where you want, and the Sectors will have no say in it.

Yes, all large political entities have subsidiary political units. They take care of things like speed limits and high school budgets. They do not, by and large, decide national policy matters like where to build military bases.

While it is true that our Federal Government does not tell California where to zone for housing, it can deny permits for power plant placement, and dams and other water projects.

So the idea that no central government tells local areas anything, is simply not true.

And in Stellaris you want Sector Typhon to produce an excess of Energy Creds to support your manufacturies on Surkesh IV, so you tell the Sector Governor to focus on Energy. You then tax the sector for the energy. You divert it to Surkesh IV, and thus your will is done.

From a Stellaris perspective it seems entirely reasonable, IMHO, for a central government to tell any and all planets what resources to focus on exploiting, what local unique flora/fauna to research, and what buildings to build (considering that there are likely only 4-8 building to be built on most planets). They are not trying to tell them what local holidays to have, what color to paint houses, or the proper height of backyard fences.

Because the Federal government told CA to focus on Hollywood and tourism, and Electronics production, and Software Development for the majority of its interstate economic value. Oh, wait, the Federal Government had absolutely no say in that, did they?

Mississippi is one of the poorest states in the Union (sorry, Mississippians, but it is true), they have a high unemployment rate and little exports. This state existed long prior to the recent (within the last decade) crisis'. The federal government cannot tell Mississippi that it should change its focus, tax rates, etc, etc, etc, to improve their economy. Mississippi is the single authority in its economic state, so long as it doesn't violate federal law.
In Stellaris you will actually have MORE control, because if a sector is lagging behind, you can manually take control of some of the planets (either accepting that it takes you over the limit for a few decades, or by giving some other worlds to a sector) and fix their issues. The US federal government literally cannot do this.

Wow, it sounds like Stellaris does everything you want it to do! Isn't that cool!

And if you are fine telling your sector administrator these things, how much more trouble is it to click on each of the five planets individually? The way people talk about this you would think you were being asked to prepare tax returns with a pencil and paper. Is it really that hard?

Other than you just don't want to do it, which I have no problem with and welcome Sector Administration to ease your burden, what is wrong with decisions at that scale?

The main purpose of Sectors is not reducing micro, that is merely a convenient side-effect that is easily marketable. The primary purpose of sectors is to be a feature of the game that interacts with other features (migrations, rebels, factions) to make the entire game more cohesive. If you take out sectors you aren't just flipping a switch, and everything remains the same. You are removing a core gameplay component that many other features rely upon. If you mod out sectors and the demesne limit I suspect the game will not be all that fun to play, as a large number of interesting features will be broken.

 

[AKronblad]

You do realize that while you are arguing against his personal preferences because they are his personal preferences you are pushing your own preferences for the exact same reason? The height of hypocrisy. His feelings should not effect game design, but yours should.

Please come up with real arguments, rather than 'My way is better because it is mine.'

On the contrary: I'm arguing for flexibility, so that each player can choose to his/her own taste and preference. My preference is not limiting any one else's preference.

 

[Yenzen]

On the contrary: I'm arguing for flexibility, so that each player can choose to his/her own taste and preference. My preference is not limiting any one else's preference.

Thank you! Someone finally supports my bid to unlock the Space RPG option to those who prefer that!

 

[AKronblad]

Thank you! Someone finally supports my bid to unlock the Space RPG option to those who prefer that!

You're welcome!

 

[Yenzen]

You're welcome!

Now, I also think we should have a toggle to regress into the stone age era before our civilization reaches the start. It could be a new way for Paradox to explore this time period and would only add about a year to the development cycle, but at least we'll have more choice to fit our preferences.

I also feel like there should be a gameplay mechanic to disable fleet combat, so we can focus more on diplomatic talks between the races, not everyone enjoys war, after all. This, of course, also needs to be balanced with multiple modifiers and have a "diplomatic warfare" sort of mini game where you can lose and gain land from just talking. The mini game needs to be balanced so you can expand equally as with warfare, if you're a really good diplomat.

Hell, I think maybe the tile system is alright, but there should also be an option for a more complicated system like Victoria 2's factories. This will take a while to include in a balanced way compared to the alternative tile system, but it is pretty stupid you can do it in the 1800's game, but not in the future! There's a distinct lact of control that I enjoy in Victoria 2 and demand integrated into this game even though this isn't Victoria 2 in space.

I've got like five or six other ideas for stuff that could really widen the horizon for the game, but most of all I would really like to hear from everyone else. Maybe, sometime around 2020, we could have a really good Space Strategy Game Maker... Sort of like RPG maker, but for strategy in space! - Where we can decide just how the game is supposed to work, instead of having to worry about having a base game which future work can be put in to, without worrying about balancing any changes for 15 fundamentally different ways of playing it.