Stellaris Dev Diary #34 - Clarke Patch

[Beric]

How about you implement a casus beli system? It's a shame that paradox's stategy game do not have one.

Right, because space aliens follow the European rules of war.

 

[CplKatie]

How about you implement a casus beli system? It's a shame that paradox's stategy game do not have one.

Read the last dev diary before this one. June is when you get what you ask.

 

[LordDamien]

Still nothing about keeping the same Dynasty when ruling as a Despotic Empire or Divine Mandate ?. Since whenever their is a new ruler..It does not keep the Same dynasty

 

[Axe99]

Nice try Axe, someday we'll get someone from Paradox to answer a message settings question . I thought you phrased it very nicely. I just wanted to add that in addition to colonization being a fiddly process of clicking all over the map, so is diplomacy and pop management. Centralized information would be much appreciated for those areas as well as primitives and protos.

Cheers, totally agree on the diplomacy and pop management as well. I suspect they'll get there, sooner or later. I'm going to gently keep mentioning it until it's sorted (or they cease development, I guess - hopefully the former!) - Stellaris is the first strategy game I've felt I had to play with a pen and paper to keep all the info sorted in years. Still a really good game in its current state, let alone what it's likely to become, but no harm in us asking for what's good to be better .

 

[KaleRaven]

There is such a thing as 'Getting in each others way' - To many scientists, to many buildings, can be a hindrance to research. How can you possibly manage say, 200+ scientists, research buildings, and the like? How are those scientists supposed to co-ordinate their efforts to advancing technology? They can't. It becomes to unwieldy; And so many labs would certainly be a nightmare; How are you going to co-ordinate what lab will work on what? How will they share their findings with each other? What if one lab makes a breakthrough - Then every other lab/all the scientists would have to get up to speed - More time wasted.

At some point, more labs just become useless and a waste of space. Kind of a mess of an argument, but still.

Yes, this should be obvious. The larger the organization, really any organization, the more labor tends to be wasted or duplicated. It takes time and energy to coordinate between different teams and departments. Beyond a certain point, there are diminishing returns for each additional person put on a team. You can see this in pretty much any kind of work environment. Getting everyone pulling in the same direction, without stepping on each others toes, can be a major challenge. Technology can mitigate this to an extent, but cannot alleviate it entirely.

 

[EnvyDemon]

I was just thinking last night "I really want to write a biography"

Love it.

 

[Aquila SPQR]

Yes, this should be obvious. The larger the organization, really any organization, the more labor tends to be wasted or duplicated. It takes time and energy to coordinate between different teams and departments. Beyond a certain point, there are diminishing returns for each additional person put on a team. You can see this in pretty much any kind of work environment. Getting everyone pulling in the same direction, without stepping on each others toes, can be a major challenge. Technology can mitigate this to an extent, but cannot alleviate it entirely.

Obvious? Really? So basically you're saying that closing half of the US laboratories would actually speed up their overall research? The less scientists we have working the better? Do you really believe that a country with one university should be more developed than a country with 10 such equallly funded universities? Countries with more research facilities develop new technologies faster and more efficiently than those who have less scientists available and can focus on more projects at a time - that's obvious. And it's obvious and working since the dawn of science.

Especially when we're talking about future with all that presumed hi-tech communication, planning and cooperation techniques.

 

[grommile]

The research performance curve, for game reasons - i.e. the ones that matter - must not be linear with size, or you get a remarkably severe snowball amplification problem.

 

[mindlace]

Like you said - you're just trying to rationalize it. Research is one thing - implementation of the technology - another. I'm already paying additional price to upgrade ships and buildings - then why should I pay for it twice? And actually what you said could've been plausible if I had to pay the price in energy or minerals - but no - I'm paying the price of having too much population in research - so we have to assume that having one additional population in some far away planet somehow makes my scientists a bit dumber. Previously he could calculate something in two days, but now we colonized a new planet 100 light years away and now he has to spend 27 days calculating it.

It's funny you argue logic, when the mechanism of research in all these games is wildly divergent from reality. We don't get production-ready technology from research. We get knowledge. There is generally a gap between when research is completed and when it finally becomes a production-worthy technology - and that transition is rarely done by "research", but rather development.

Like Dalwin said - you're also trying to rationalize the illogical. I'm quite sure that in the future people would easily coordinate their research worldwide. It's not like they have to communicate by sending pidgeons anymore. Besides - it's also not like 50 research centers are working at only three projects at a time. I consider this as a simplification. The more scientists you have the greater is your overall tech progress.

"The Mythical Man-Month" gives a good overview of the problem - when you're talking about an information/knowledge problem, adding more bodies does not magically make it go faster.

Furthermore, coordinating research across a multi-solar-system empire is a wee bit different from "coordinating research worldwide". Another real-world example of how pop num != research output is that China has roughly the same number of scientists as the US but produces < 1/3 the research papers.

 

[Moonshadow101]

One small funcionality I'd like to see in one of the patches is the option to rename planets on conquest. Say, I conquer Xzzzytria and the game prompts me if I want to change it to say, Solaria, or other name matching my colonized worlds.

You can already change the name of any planet you own at any time, just by clicking on the name in the planet info screen.

 

[Sinister2202]

Thank you so much guys, good work.

Question 1
I am looking forward to continuing my saved game (1.0.3). What is the default AI aggressiveness for my save after this update?

Q2
I am glad to hear that military station upkeep is going to decrease. Will you plan any more changes to how defense stations work, in the future?

Q3
Any plans regarding letting players take control of sector stations (especially observation station), and allowing players to micro on sector planets?

Suggestion
I feel that ship mission/building queue notifications need to be more specific. Planet have completed a construction, but there is no way of it reminding the players which building it actually completed or what it did.

 

[Dalwin]

So, if you hold off on the first colony, how do you build your homeworld? I tend to go a mix of research buildings, energy, and minerals myself.

If you don't mind, whats a good amount of planets, if you've found a number, for a tall empire?

My space foxes require more efficiency. Do you build worlds dedicated to industry with a bigger focus on science worlds?

I hope tall empires have become more viable with planet numbers increasing tech costs, while population less so.

I just haven't found a good guide for any of this.

As I said, my version of tall is simply to delay the early expansion. I still try to end up with as many planets as I can reach or conquer in the end. The game's limited victory conditions require this. You can by definition only win by going wide, everything else is role play.

As to the initial planet, I tend to prioritize minerals first since they are needed to build anything else and will be your bottleneck for at least the first 10 years. Try to keep energy barely positive. Do research when you can without hurting the first two items. Planet specialization is a key factor to overall efficiency in Stellaris, but I don't apply it to my home planet. Home has to be a jack of all trades.

 

[Dalwin]

I dunno, I think at the end of the day, some sort more centralized research is going to be more efficient than research being performed scattered across the map (arm, galaxy, whatever). I mean, here on Earth, it can be hard enough coordinating with people in different TIME ZONES let alone if you were separated by days/weeks of travel time to exchange information.


Of course this modifier is an abstraction because it would be in play even if you didn’t generate a SINGLE research point from outside your Homeworld. And in that instance, I wouldn’t find it to be ‘realistic’/plausible. But for the way the game is generally structured (you’re deriving research points from isolate orbiting labs across dozens of star systems and planets) then I think it’s actually quick lenient and more than plausible.

But as many of the more progressive companies have discovered, you cannot get innovation by stifling creative minds with bureaucratic efficiency. Scientists need to be spread out in small groups for most of their work and only occasionally come together to compare approaches.

The research performance curve, for game reasons - i.e. the ones that matter - must not be linear with size, or you get a remarkably severe snowball amplification problem.

This is true, but that actually makes it interesting.
Rampant expansion will force one to fall behind in tech going into the mid-game but it is only a matter of time until raw numbers catch him back up. Those who have taken a more balanced approach to expansion have to actively take advantage of their tech edge before it fades away. To be honest, in spite of how much debate this subject has gotten, I think this is one area that PDX should not have changed.

 

[Dr Zebra]

Thanks alot! you have fixed alot of the bugs i found

 

[Zelius]

Still nothing about keeping the same Dynasty when ruling as a Despotic Empire or Divine Mandate ?. Since whenever their is a new ruler..It does not keep the Same dynasty

https://twitter.com/Martin_Anward/status/733238730400616450

 

[Grönis]

• Numerous fixes to events, including fixing up the Old Gods event chain.

Does this mean the ethics option at the end of the chain will work?

 

[Sahuagin]

I've also had a few bugs with genetic modification: Scientists unable to gene mod any population, going to the research marker the science vessel just sits there and flashes a light on it and the change genetics quest times out.

I've had this too, but I think what you do is go into the situation log and hit the "research" button instead.

 

[Moonshadow101]

I don't get the science complaints. The increase in research costs is totally manageable if you're keeping up with labs.

 

[grommile]

I don't get the science complaints. The increase in research costs is totally manageable if you're keeping up with labs.

Some people want Superhuge-ia to always be able to out-research Tinystan.

 

[LordDamien]

https://twitter.com/Martin_Anward/status/733238730400616450

Sweet !.. That is wonderful Glorious news