[Dev Team] Astral Planes and Stellaris 3.10.0 "Pyxis" Preliminary Release Notes

[Abdulijubjub]

The balance is fixed by setting the midgame/endgame/victory years much earlier. The defaults haven't been correct for game balance since 2.2, other than for completely new players on the lowest difficulties.

I fear a large percentage of players don't change the defaults and are stuck with horribly broken game balance, where entities like the Khan, Fallen Empires, Leviathans and the Crisis are pathetic because of player and AI snowballing. With midgame start at 2250, endgame start at 2325 and victory at 2400, all of these are a challenge(and so is the AI), you don't spend too long researching repeatables, and endgame lag/micromanagement doesn't get out of hand. The game is MUCH better like that, and I haven't played it any other way since 2.2. The devs really ought to change the defaults, but I think they're afraid of giving newcomers a challenging first experience.

Moving the date forward helps: I usually play with 2225 mid game (to give the Khan even a remote chance of being threatening), and a 2300-2350 end game (depending on how much I feel like messing around).

But that doesn't fix the tree, it just makes the crisis relevant. The last techs still fly by in an instant, the lower tier X slots don't exist (you'll have the upgraded version researched before you finish upgrading a single fleet to use the X slot), all the megastructures are unlocked before you have a single one built, the GC can't finish a line of resolutions before the game is over, etc.

Just moving the date forward doesn't fix all the problems.

 

[Dr_Gentech]

Absolutely should be a Galactic Domain where if half the empires are walking around with this thing (Enigmatic Engineers excluded), it's should be kind of an 'open secret' that it at least exists and has x,y,z to it foundationally with a,b,c being what pulls the technology together into usable form.

Yes, I'm in favour of all of these suggestions to make tech spread after it's already been researched once, with the stipulation that Enigmatic Engineering still prevents your tech knowledge from helping others at all so there is a specific, costly path to tech supremacy if that's more important to you than another Ascension Perk. Of course, that would need to be combined with increasing the scaling on required research as research increases in tiers / increasing the research penalties of Empire size / making the default research numbers higher (or nerfing some of researcher's base output). Otherwise it would just lead to zipping through the tech tree even faster than now.

About the Dev diary, this looks like a really cool update and DLC, I think it's great to add more mid and late game exploration stuff and the Astral actions seem cool, although the Gestalt equivalent civics being strictly worse than the indie civics seems really bad (particularly for the 'tall' one). I hope there's more collaboration with this studio in the future. Unfortunately I was hoping that after Galactic Paragons, Gestalts would not be quite so left out in the next DLC or free update, and it feels like that's not the case. I don't mean the mechanical strength, it seems like that is well balanced between indies and Gestalts or even favouring Gestalts early on (aside from Unity, Rogue Servitors are meant to be the Unity robots and can't achieve even 1/20th of the unity output that indie empires like trade or spiritualists can, it doesn't feel good that Rogue Servitors can barely ever Ascend planets), I mean that Gestalts miss out on a lot of flavour and actually feel worse now that certain concepts (like having a Destiny) are encoded by the game as actual traits Gestalt leaders are forbidden to have, where before leaders were much more equal and you could just roleplay a given Gestalt leader being someone like Kerrigan, Legion, T-800, Abathur, Dehaka, Stukov, Zagara, Locutus of Borg, etc. Now the game explicitly tells you that while you may think you're roleplaying the Geth and sending Legion out into the world, Legion is just a drone and has no Destiny. Ditto for Kerrigan, Locutus of Borg, T-800, Zagara, etc. Immortality being easily achievable for bio empires while machines still die at random makes it even worse for Machines. Plus, Gestalts miss out on a lot of actual content because they can't interact with many of the Paragons - if you're a Tree of Life Hive Mind or Rogue Servitors, Azaryn can't join up with you to protect the sanctity of life? The stuff with Gestalts and the Council is much better now than at Paragon's release, but there are still really big issues with how Gestalts are handled right now.

A suggestion I would put towards resolving this is to put in significantly more events/investment abilities/random chance that Gestalt leaders can gain a Destiny trait so that it will happen at least a few times on a playthrough, significantly relax restrictions on Gestalts who aren't genocidal interacting with Paragons, and add a repeatable tech that removes 5% of the chance for a leader to die every decade until the chance is completely gone, putting Gestalts on a level playing field in terms of being able to role play with leaders.

I know nothing can be done about this until at least the next Custodian patch, so I'll just do what I did when Paragons released and take a break then come back when there's a new DLC to wonder if there'll be anything for Gestalts this time. Appreciate all the work the devs do and best of luck for the launch of the new DLC.

 

[mrt1212]

Moving the date forward helps: I usually pay with 2225 mid game (to give the Khan even a remote chance of being threatening), and a 2300-2350 end game (depending on how much I feel like messing around).

But that doesn't fix the tree, it just makes the crisis relevant. The last techs still fly by in an instant, the lower tier X slots don't exist (you'll have the upgraded version researched before you finish upgrading a single fleet to use the X slot), all the megastructures are unlocked before you have a single one built, the GC can't finish a line of resolutions before the game is over, etc.

Just moving the date forward doesn't fix all the problems.

Tell me if I'm completely off base, but doesn't this just kinda put you on a rail to 'Research or Die?' and lead to meta powergaming fixtures that have their own externalities on experience, like 'I have to have Ultimate Power or I'll lose' even if that's not at all true under anything but goosing the settings so events keep pace with the game state?

Also, doesn't this then tinge perceptions of the game system itself around the meta powergaming fixtures that are 'must dos' simply to overcome a contrivance laid out at the start? Like, what's the actual control sample here - I lean towards 'default settings with broken scripteds' more than 'goosed defaults for on time scripteds and goosed gameplay methods to subdue both'

 

[Thiend]

Moving the date forward helps: I usually pay with 2225 mid game (to give the Khan even a remote chance of being threatening), and a 2300-2350 end game (depending on how much I feel like messing around).

But that doesn't fix the tree, it just makes the crisis relevant. The last techs still fly by in an instant, the lower tier X slots don't exist (you'll have the upgraded version researched before you finish upgrading a single fleet to use the X slot), all the megastructures are unlocked before you have a single one built, the GC can't finish a line of resolutions before the game is over, etc.

Just moving the date forward doesn't fix all the problems.

I still think the proper solution is just removing all the +20%/10% income techs. If research no longer makes research dramatically faster, that might fix the problem right there - both of "focus tech 100% of the time regardless of any other factors" and of it getting relatively faster instead of slower or equivalent as the game goes on.

It's kind of a basic, "why isn't this already the case" thing to be honest. They removed 99% of the unity bonuses in traditions, why does tech have bonuses to tech? The rest just make it worse, because bonuses to any other resources increase the number of researchers you can support.

 

[Harvey_James]

i like making the tech/tradition cost at 2 maybe 2.5 ... and defo bring forward the mid game/crisis/late game forward.. honestly once youve beaten the crisis there isnt much left to do in the game of the factions who didnt get wiped out like.. and everyone ends up with titans etc.. i hate gettting to repeateable techs the game gets boring when their is nothing to reach for and research... so i always in favour of the devs adding techs to the game too delay the repeatables.. there is the problem of early game taking too long too research anything though... tech snowballs too much thats the biggest issue..

 

[Venefcus]

I still think the proper solution is just removing all the +20%/10% income techs. If research no longer makes research dramatically faster, that might fix the problem right there - both of "focus tech 100% of the time regardless of any other factors" and of it getting relatively faster instead of slower or equivalent as the game goes on.

It's kind of a basic, "why isn't this already the case" thing to be honest. They removed 99% of the unity bonuses in traditions, why does tech have bonuses to tech? The rest just make it worse, because bonuses to any other resources increase the number of researchers you can support.

I just think research cost per tech should go up. Research just comes waaaay too fast. Perhaps the empire sprawl penalty should grow faster, or there should be increasing penalties to research cost the more advanced the leaders are compared to the average. Call it the “cutting edge” penalty.

 

[mrt1212]

I just think research cost per tech should go up. Research just comes waaaay too fast. Perhaps the empire sprawl penalty should grow faster, or there should be increasing penalties to research cost the more advanced the leaders are compared to the average. Call it the “cutting edge” penalty.

One of the funniest things about playing games at the slowest pace possible is that

1. Research begetting research still happens, but it is so much more muted at the start but does kind of pull away around midgame in a ~2500/3000 Mid/Late. It does the trick in slowing things down to a snails pace but the snowball emerges.

2. Unity is still a cakewalk you finish by midlate. I was kind of hoping that they'd be more spread, but Trade->Unity->CG->Trade is that freaking good at passively boosting your Unity at scale, and then specific Unity cows on specific planets, and then with all event gains, you're into ambitions without even having the ambitions tech on the horizon.

3. Everything is built up such that you can run into the 'pea shooter' situation where everyone's starbases are 30k monstrosities with all the defensive platforms but you only have cruisers with dink ass weapons and everything kinda bounces off the starbases unless you bring the whole freaking house upon them. Which is fine, but alludes to 'alloys have to go somewhere' when research and unity are generations behind their standard pace and there's not a better use for the glut - not fleets, not habs, not megastructures, all for various yokes and availability issues.

This is all to say, tech cost is part of the entire enchilada in pacing, but Unity has its own quirky behavior, and alloys will go somewhere so long as its produced, so one part of sorting out pacing is just research related with the other two biggies in the game system also needing a look.

 

[Korp]

• The Escape key no longer closes any event windows.

What a lovely day this is.

 

[Venefcus]

One of the funniest things about playing games at the slowest pace possible is that

1. Research begetting research still happens, but it is so much more muted at the start but does kind of pull away around midgame in a ~2500/3000 Mid/Late. It does the trick in slowing things down to a snails pace but the snowball emerges.

2. Unity is still a cakewalk you finish by midlate. I was kind of hoping that they'd be more spread, but Trade->Unity->CG->Trade is that freaking good at passively boosting your Unity at scale, and then specific Unity cows on specific planets, and then with all event gains, you're into ambitions without even having the ambitions tech on the horizon.

3. Everything is built up such that you can run into the 'pea shooter' situation where everyone's starbases are 30k monstrosities with all the defensive platforms but you only have cruisers with dink ass weapons and everything kinda bounces off the starbases unless you bring the whole freaking house upon them. Which is fine, but alludes to 'alloys have to go somewhere' when research and unity are generations behind their standard pace and there's not a better use for the glut - not fleets, not habs, not megastructures, all for various yokes and availability issues.

This is all to say, tech cost is part of the entire enchilada in pacing, but Unity has its own quirky behavior, and alloys will go somewhere so long as its produced, so one part of sorting out pacing is just research related with the other two biggies in the game system also needing a look.

Yeah that’s why I don’t think it should just be set to a higher amount from the outset. Tech comes fine the first few years, but the cost needs to rise much much faster mid game. But hard to say what that would look like without making tech even more vital than it already is. Which is why I’m thinking of increasing tech per tech researched, or relative to how much tech the highest has compared to the average, or increasing penalties to sprawl. Just has to go up toward mid/late game somehow.

 

[Harvey_James]

defo ramping up the cost of each tier by like double what they cost now would help.. maybe even add tier6 to game push some of the techs up a tier.. also techs we could add
- bombers for titans
- add carrier hull as a step-up from battleships without auras.. just uses fighter and bomber hangars for weapons and PD for weapons
- add more starbase modules too research and move us away from anchorages on everything.. repair yards trade mods/anti pirate etc..
- there is a great need to cut down naval capacity as a whole but maybe add some naval cap techs aswell we don't have that many
- spy techs when they do that rework
- power supply on ship techs.. maybe shield power cost reduction techs
- hardening base techs for defences

 

[Bitzo]

• The Escape key no longer closes any event windows.

Best part of the patch notes, hands down.

 

[Venefcus]

Agreed, it’s just a difficult balancing act. If we soley make tech cost more, then we make picking any buildings other than tech have an even greater opportunity cost, and make tech buildings even more vital. Unless of course high end tech is pushed so high in cost that even attempting to research would be a risk. Ultimately the goal is to slow tech gain and space out the game more.

 

[Abdulijubjub]

Agreed, it’s just a difficult balancing act. If we soley make tech cost more, then we make picking any buildings other than tech have an even greater opportunity cost, and make tech buildings even more vital. Unless of course high end tech is pushed so high in cost that even attempting to research would be a risk. Ultimately the goal is to slow tech gain and space out the game more.

If you make tech costs, exclusively, higher, then it makes tech less rewarding for investment. That makes unity and everything-into-alloys-for-conquest much more attractive.

Long term, you always want tech. But just like tech can produce raw economic power, raw economic power can (eventually) produce tech. And if tech is less rewarding, the second option is more attractive.

Time for my "tall" soapbox: Those 3 options are the only 3 options, at the moment. Everything else (mainly pops) is either dispensed at a fixed rate that's difficult to invest in, or very shallow (like spending resources on domestic development).

AFAICT generally what people are asking for, when they say they want to play "tall", is a fourth option, which is "spend lots of resources on internal development in a way that is powerful but doesn't apply if I decide to conquer or colonize more stuff". Teching up and lots of unity are the two internal development paths, but tech applies just as well to conquered territories as unconquered ones (so it's more of a bloom/"tall.... for now" thing), and unity doesn't get its actually tall stuff (ascension) until after it's finished most of the unity-buffing-entire-empire tradition trees (which have the same problem as tech). Plus, if you go all in on unity and ascend your empire, ironically you can ascend conquests extremely cheaply and, in fact, must acquire more planets to ascend or else just waste all your unity.

So it has problems.

 

[Dimka2010]

Hello dear developers!
I would like to wish that changes to the modifiers of planets and any activities on them would not be a low priority for you. I really like it when, after terraforming, I receive a notification about some event on the planet, when some mini-events occur after removing negative modifiers such as “wild nature”. I would really like the planets to initially have a lot of different things to do - so that the player would not just colonize it and immediately start building sectors, but would have a choice - to receive reduced suitability due to disasters on the planet and build sectors, or first get rid of all these disasters so that the planet is more suitable. This is also a good way for the player to kill excess gold, which by the middle of the game there is simply nowhere to put it. And with the colonization of new planets, the player would spend it all on removing negative modifiers and bad areas.
And one more wish - after terraforming, the planet is always without a single cell in distress. Immediately cleared of all problem areas. Out of curiosity, I started terraforming on problem planets - and it was cleared of all problem sectors, which I would one by one “fix” manually. On the one hand, this is logical, on the other hand, I ask you to take some chance that the terraforming went wrong and new problem sectors would accidentally be added, which after terraforming would have to be “repaired” again for gold.

 

[Dimka2010]

And one more thing - during colonization - while the planet is being colonized and displayed with the progress of colonization - I can go into the properties of the sectors on the right and start “fixing” problem areas on the planet with my hands for gold. This is not to say that it is a strong bug, but simply by the time colonization ends at the beginning of the game, when it is slow, I can “cure” up to 4+ problem areas in this way and not feel any difficulties when colonization is completed.
I think this is still a bug. And it is better to remove the player’s ability to influence the planet and the ability to repair problem sectors for gold until colonization is completed.

 

[Critical Ethics]

I would still very, very much like to know what "Astral rift fail probability" means.

But enough of that, onto the important stuff:

Improvements

• Added three new planet modifiers: Abundant Geothermal Activity, Subterranean Wildlife, Rich Microflora
• Added four planetary decisions to be able to remove some negative modifiers without having to terraform the planet: Remove Bleak Planet, Add Dayside Farm, Remove Hazardous Weather, Remove Dangerous Wildlife

Holy heck!!!

 

[Ohirra]

Does the Trade Capital habitat designation now swap a housing district's Clerk job for a Trader job?

Does the Tier 3 habitat building now have a Medical Worker job if you have the Pharma State civic?

 

[Refuel]

So happy that we can choose which planet gets the leviathan parades. This is most appreciated.

Quietly hoping though that the looping orbital ring animation on the 2nd of every month along with its slots not working on that same day may be stealth fixed.

 

[Peter Ebbesen]

I still think the proper solution is just removing all the +20%/10% income techs. If research no longer makes research dramatically faster, that might fix the problem right there - both of "focus tech 100% of the time regardless of any other factors" and of it getting relatively faster instead of slower or equivalent as the game goes on.

It's kind of a basic, "why isn't this already the case" thing to be honest. They removed 99% of the unity bonuses in traditions, why does tech have bonuses to tech? The rest just make it worse, because bonuses to any other resources increase the number of researchers you can support.

Removing the science bonuses to output would neither resolve the issue of the tech rate gain speeding up as the game progressed nor change the idea that focusing on tech (and alloys) is all that matters, as some players aver.

Since the rate of tech gain is determined by the trinity of science output, tech speed, and empire size, and the first two naturally increase over time, while the second becomes easier to control over time, at least if the player knows what they are doing, all getting rid of the science increasing techs would do would be to make more players realize the importance of focusing on the tech-trinity rather than devoting most of their attention to the raw science output.

Still, removing the science output increasing techs would slow down the tech race slightly, but given that it doesn't resolve any of the underlying issues and creates new issues by their absence increasing the relative value of other sources of increased science output (from ascension paths, planetary ascension, etc), it would seem wiser, or at least easier, just to increase the costs of higher tier techs instead to achieve the same level of slowdown without having to rebalance all the sources of increased science output to reflect the new reality of not getting increases from tech.

More generally, removing all the output modifying techs would seem like a serious mistake from a conceptual point of view, since Stellaris is neither dystopian nor depicts a stagnant universe, but is about 4X and more optimistic by nature: Go forth and spread your colonies across the stars while making great advances.

The idea that progress and new technology allows people to do their job better is a strong one narratively as well as familiar from history to most people, and from a game design POV it provides players some nice milestones of progression to frequently make POPs perform their jobs better.

Getting rid of all that for the sake of balance is not something to do lightly, and arguably not at all unless PDS has an equally compelling story to tell with game mechanics to support it. Which is a lot of work compared to fiddling with the issue at the edges, which is what is being done.

So "why isn't this already the case?" you ask? The most likely reason is that the developers are well aware of the issues but are unwilling to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

So I wouldn't expect all the output modifying techs to disappear unless there's another overhaul of the economic system on the scale of the 2.0 change, where their absence would make sense in the new context.

 

[Critical Ethics]

Removing the science bonuses to output would neither resolve the issue of the tech rate gain speeding up as the game progressed nor change the idea that focusing on tech (and alloys) is all that matters, as some players aver.

Since the rate of tech gain is determined by the trinity of science output, tech speed, and empire size, and the first two naturally increase over time, while the second becomes easier to control over time, at least if the player knows what they are doing, all getting rid of the science increasing techs would do would be to make more players realize the importance of focusing on the tech-trinity rather than devoting most of their attention to the raw science output.

Still, removing the science output increasing techs would slow down the tech race slightly, but given that it doesn't resolve any of the underlying issues and creates new issues by their absence increasing the relative value of other sources of increased science output (from ascension paths, planetary ascension, etc), it would seem wiser just to increase the costs of higher tier techs instead to achieve the same level of slowdown without having to rebalance all the sources of increased science output to reflect the new reality of not getting increases from tech.

More generally, removing all the output modifying techs would seem like a serious mistake from a conceptual point of view, since Stellaris is neither dystopian nor depicts a stagnant universe, but is about 4X and more optimistic by nature: Go forth and spread your colonies across the stars while making great advances.

The idea that progress and new technology allows people to do their job better is a strong one narratively as well as familiar from history to most people, and from a game design POV it provides players some nice milestones of progression to frequently make POPs perform their jobs better.

Getting rid of all that for the sake of balance is not something to do lightly, and arguably not at all unless PDS has an equally compelling story to tell with game mechanics to support it. Which is a lot of work compared to fiddling with the issue at the edges, which is what is being done.

So "why isn't this already the case?" you ask? The most likely reason is that the developers are well aware of the issues but are unwilling to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

So I wouldn't expect all the output modifying techs to disappear unless there's another overhaul of the economic system on the scale of the 2.0 change, where their absence would make sense in the new context.

The output-boosting buildings would fill the roll of "progress and new technology allows people to do their job better" - they could add another tier, or attach the % boosts to a second set of buildings. The % boost techs are instantaneous and free; There's no cost or opportunity cost other than spending the tech. Even just tying them to an upgradable building or making them increase upkeep or amenity usage or whatever would slow the snowball a bit.

And this is ignoring how the % boost techs devalue the other % boosts.