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

[Mcgan]

Bugfixes

• Fixed Starbases receiving ship modifiers twice

Nice. Any chance other Starbase / Orbital Ring bugs have been fixed as well?
Such as the looping animation failure and triggered modifiers being disabled each month:
- Orbital Ring animations not looping properly
- Starbase Bonuses disappear each month on day 2

 

[Ajacoba]

Wait, vassalizing is considered an exploit now? What's next, the 'exploit' of taking someone's planets to generate resources for yourself?

Hard to believe this is the reason. Isn't that kind of the entire point of having vassals, to collect resources through vassal terms? That's the entire major selling point of the Overlord DLC.

If the change was to reduce vassal taxes, it doesn't even address the issue. Vassals will still pay the full amount, regardless of any loyalty penalty or their opinion of their overlord. They just won't be loyal, that's all. But they still pay up.

The only thing that changes is that you're shut out of any of the limited benefits of having vassals, like borrowing a fleet, a leader etc., as that requires loyalty as a currency. I haven't heard of that ever being a problem, so I'd really love to know why the devs feel that vassal loyalty requires such a hard nerf.

If anything, making all your subjects disloyal all the time will only serve to impose much harder terms. I mean, if loyalty is at -100 anyway, why even pretend to have fair terms?

If you do enough of something anything can be an exploit
"The dose makes the poison"

Also specialist vassals are highly dependent on loyalty for experience gain, no?

 

[Silens]

If you do enough of something anything can be an exploit

World conquest is an exploit then? Building huge fleets is an exploit then? Getting ahead in tech is an exploit then?

I think our views of what constitutes an exploit differ so widely, I see no common ground here. So let's agree to disagree.

 

[DanielPrates]

Are bros in general happy with this new dlc? To me it just seems like yet another old and stale "collect kajigger/press button/get bonus" type of thing.

InTeRnAl PoLiTiCs for gods sake!

 

[Ajacoba]

World conquest is an exploit then? Building huge fleets is an exploit then? Getting ahead in tech is an exploit then?

I think our views of what constitutes an exploit differ so widely, I see no common ground here. So let's agree to disagree.

I mean, world conquest gets penalised by empire size, not to mention the limiters to pop growth
And huge fleets kill your economy (and are capped by naval capacity)
And while vassals in theory had such a safety net as well it was too easy to avoid, so they fixed that

 

[Silens]

I mean, world conquest gets penalised by empire size, not to mention the limiters to pop growth
And huge fleets kill your economy (and are capped by naval capacity)
And while vassals in theory had such a safety net as well it was too easy to avoid, so they fixed that

Not that I want to go off-topic here, but empire size isn't really a penalty. It only slightly lowers the gains you get from expansion, to keep tall somewhat competitive. But make no mistake here, you outgrow the empire size modifier in almost any scenario, making expansion desirable under any circumstances. If you ever stop expanding to keep your empire size low, you're crippling your economy for no good reason. Unless you go specifically for a tall build, expansion rules supreme.

Which reminds me of the not-so-old and already fixed exploit of playing tall and reducing the empire size modifier into the negative. Or using planetary ascension to reduce job upkeep costs to zero, creating i.e. alloys out of thin air. That is what I consider exploits, they were called out by the devs as such and fixed for that very reason.

But playing the game, conquering stuff, vassalizing others? Or building a fleet for which you have the economy, even if that means you have 70 or 80 fleets? There is no hint of any exploit or misuse of game mechancis here. It's just playing the game, until performance gets bad at some point. (and performance was the reason why pop growth was nerfed)

Same with having vassals, it's a legitimate, less tedious and quite performance-friendly way of doing world conquest. It gives you way less resources than straight conquest, but enough to make diplomacy feel like a good alternative. And for the first time ever, as a xenophobe neighbourhood bully, did I take things like the Shared Destiny AP or the Diplomatic Corps civic. It opened a playstyle for me that was uninteresting before.

The nerf to loyalty doesn't decrease the resources you gain, it only limits the diplomatic loyalty options. As most of the DLC vassal types have their interesting options tied to loyalty trades, I really struggle to understand where the nerf comes from. Because again, it doesn't nerf resource gains one bit, and to my knowledge the Scholarium research bonus modifier stacking was already fixed.

All I ask for is to hear some of the arguments that led to the change, to try and understand why the devs deemed it necessary.

 

[FiddleSticks96]

• The Escape key no longer closes any event windows.

This alone is worth an update to the game and will go up there on my list of top 10 best updates to Stellaris ever.

 

[Cahokia]

You can still have a handful of vassals without dipping into negative loyalty @Silens. The civic and ascension perk make it easier to do so.

It was trivially easy to vassalize the galaxy with no drawbacks. There will now be a malus if you try to have 20-30 pop growth vassals to get around the scaling pop costs. None of the common vassal strategies had a drawback, period. On grand admiral difficulty the resources you could get (due to AI bonuses, even stepped down) were actually pretty crazy. The selling point of Overlord wasn't to vassalize the galaxy and break the game, it was to have a handful of powerful vassals. They haven't nerfed vassals, they have nerfed hoarding vassals. Expecting to vassalize the galaxy with no malus is unrealistic.

Limiting the diplomatic loyalty is the drawback they are adding. Like you mention it isn't that big of a deal. So if you want to vassalize the galaxy you still can. However now there is an actually malus for doing so to bring it in line with other strategies. They don't want to make it unfun to play, but they can't just leave it broken how it currently is. When every run requires an ascension perk it is no longer balanced. (The same could be said for other perks but that isn't what they are addressing here.)

 

[Silens]

When every run requires an ascension perk it is no longer balanced. (The same could be said for other perks but that isn't what they are addressing here.)

Balance goes both ways. What is the gameplay gain, if all options become so low impact, that they stop being good?

It's not like the game doesn't have a history of overdoing it with those swings from one extreme to the other. Like that one time, when Executive Vigor used to double the lifetime of any edict. That was pretty op. Now it gives you 100 edict funds, which doesn't cover even one single edict in lategame. Went from must-have and op to waste of an AP slot.

Detox is another example, why would you want to terraform a small amount of mediocre planets, if you can choose to build an unlimited amount of Ring Worlds (among other things) for the same AP slot cost?

Shared Destiny gave you unlimited subjects, now it's cut down to +1. Why does it have to be such an extreme cut? There is a huge disparity in quality between APs, and somehow they're either too good or not worth it. Why not balance them properly?

And again, if the problem is resource gain, then nerfing loyalty completely misses the mark here. Which makes it worse, if that really was the thought process behind the change. Why not a more creative solution, like having the tributes being transported using existing trade lanes, and piracy would lower it? And no tribute from vassals with no physical connection?

There are viable solutions and alternatives with more interesting gameplay implications, instead of simply reducing a random number and hoping for the best.

 

[mrt1212]

Not that I want to go off-topic here, but empire size isn't really a penalty. It only slightly lowers the gains you get from expansion, to keep tall somewhat competitive. But make no mistake here, you outgrow the empire size modifier in almost any scenario, making expansion desirable under any circumstances. If you ever stop expanding to keep your empire size low, you're crippling your economy for no good reason. Unless you go specifically for a tall build, expansion rules supreme.

Which reminds me of the not-so-old and already fixed exploit of playing tall and reducing the empire size modifier into the negative. Or using planetary ascension to reduce job upkeep costs to zero, creating i.e. alloys out of thin air. That is what I consider exploits, they were called out by the devs as such and fixed for that very reason.

But playing the game, conquering stuff, vassalizing others? Or building a fleet for which you have the economy, even if that means you have 70 or 80 fleets? There is no hint of any exploit or misuse of game mechancis here. It's just playing the game, until performance gets bad at some point. (and performance was the reason why pop growth was nerfed)

Same with having vassals, it's a legitimate, less tedious and quite performance-friendly way of doing world conquest. It gives you way less resources than straight conquest, but enough to make diplomacy feel like a good alternative. And for the first time ever, as a xenophobe neighbourhood bully, did I take things like the Shared Destiny AP or the Diplomatic Corps civic. It opened a playstyle for me that was uninteresting before.

The nerf to loyalty doesn't decrease the resources you gain, it only limits the diplomatic loyalty options. As most of the DLC vassal types have their interesting options tied to loyalty trades, I really struggle to understand where the nerf comes from. Because again, it doesn't nerf resource gains one bit, and to my knowledge the Scholarium research bonus modifier stacking was already fixed.

All I ask for is to hear some of the arguments that led to the change, to try and understand why the devs deemed it necessary.

If the question is 'why is 12 vassals with 1 planet a piece better than 4 vassals with 3 planets a piece' then its holdings most obviously but also potentially diplomatic weight if there is a floor established by tech level. The reason for 4x3 is theoretically more vassal taxes as the composition of districts and buildings for vassals is more focused and less split to cover base vassal needs - an economy of scale and specialization effect in truer sense of the meaning with shared cost and overhead leading to larger productive outputs relatively and absolutely.

I much prefer 12x1 for Influence via Ministry of Truth and since most of them are self created after conquering, slightly less chance to lose out on Branch Offices if the newly created vassal spawns as Megacorp.

Personally, I think something needed to be done about it.

1. Shared Destiny and Franchising work very well for this and eventually if you overdo it, you do encounter a penalty via 'Relative Power of Subjects' but that's way later 20 Vassals Deep. Which is fine and kind of the point but it allowed an Influence racket to grow and grow and grow via Ministry of Truths as first holding until specialization.

2. Subject Taxes get bonkers at scale and are on their own kinda bonkers and should have directly been changed in rate because at the absolute most general, 12x1 and 4x3 don't matter if it's 1200 EC or 1500 EC as that's a lot of absolute ECs. Just on the face of it - tax rates over 50% are absurdities that feel completely off in verisimilitude where there's already several leaps in the game around that...but that's an egregious amount of tax/subsidy one way or another.

3. Skimming free loyalty off vassals via War relations in the Overlord/Vassal agreement if the vassal is in the same Federation as Overlord, exacerbated vassal income yields at scale via more holdings from the start of the agreement - where 12 Ministry of Truths, 12 Aid Centers, and 12 Offworld Foundaries, when operating at full capacity, are nice bumps for Unity and Alloys, and absolutely bonkers for Influence. Much more so than 4 Ministries, 4 Aid Centers and 4 Offworld Foundaries.

So like summing it up, I woulda slashed taxes/subsidy rates, changed the free loyalty from Federated vassals, and made Shared Destiny/Franchising a 'First Half Dozen Are Free' to keep them intact as THEE Vassal AP and Civic respectively. Like, I can probably get by with 4x3 just fine, or 8x3 or whatever, but Shared Destiny made it so I didn't have to get by.

The thing I'm most concerned about is a knock on effect in two places -

Does this make it so only bigger empires are really capable of carrying the cost of more vassals, which means you might pass up voluntary submits to yourself because it'll ding every relation, and then the voluntary submits will go to these larger empires? Or the vassal-to-be will just get outright conquered by adjacent while waiting for someone to save them, and nobody doing so?

What do you do with Secret Fealties and Allegiance War Victories in the case of multiple vassals turning on their overlord and backing you? Release to independence? So they're generally going to be multiple vassal independence wars, and tossed back into the dangerous lake that vassalized them once already? Okay...I guess...but Secret Fealties were a cool new thing I've finally gotten the hang of for effect...

 

[Ajacoba]

Balance goes both ways. What is the gameplay gain, if all options become so low impact, that they stop being good?

isn't that kinda the end goal? that's why they refuse to add more slots for tradition trees and ascension perks despite regularly adding more of them
the meta is supposed to do die and nothing is supposed to be a must-have pick

also shared destiny gives +2 envoys on top of the vassal stuff, no? that's fairly useful for diplomacy build (or a spy build if you wanna swing that way)
Detox is super good when you want to use the child of the toxic god
and executive vigor can still help you early on, doesn't have to be viable all the way into the late game

there's also the opposite problem sometimes, the ascension perk for dyson sphere, "black hole drill" and ring worlds is complete overkill and trivialises a lot of stuff
i mean, if you actually NEED several thousand energy or minerals you messed up somewhere along the way, lol
and ring worlds are at best a resource sink you get just so you never have to take care of unemployment on any of your worlds again because hopefully the game is over before all four segments are filled

 

[Peter Ebbesen]

May I ask what the thought process was behind the change? It seems like a very harsh nerf, one you probably wouldn't introduce just like that without a good reason.

At a guess, because it was a no-brainer choice to include them in vassal oriented gameplay due to their trivializing the intended drawbacks of vassals. This change:

1. Eliminates the possibility of ignoring the vassal loyalty mechanic with one simple civic or perk, which allowed the player to make very one-sided vassal contracts with an arbitrary number of vassals and yet never facing any downsides
2. As an added bonus, kills off micro-vassal strategies for printing influence and stacking specialist bonuses; The spamming of micro-vassals was just silly as an exploit

The second is just a stupid exploit, the first is one of the major reasons that vassal gameplay has been grotesquely powerful since Overlord's release.

The new vassal mechanics of Overlord released with three well thought out balancing mechanisms:

1. The more vassals serve you, the harder they will be to control
2. The more the terms of a vassal contract is in your favour, the harder the vassal will be to control
3. Specialist vassals gain experience through loyalty

The intention was clearly to make the player have to make meaningful strategic choices if he wanted to avoid disloyalty issues, in terms of harshness of contracts and number of vassals. With the option of choosing instead to embrace disloyalty issues and not advancing specialist subjects on the grounds of the Overlord being powerful enough to ignore disloyalty.

The problem being that in practice these balancing factors didn't come into play, or more precisely, were trivial to overcome, because the opportunity cost of picking Feudal Society, Franchising, or Shared Destiny was low compared to the huge benefits of being able to almost completely ignore the balancing factor and just going with as many vassals with harsh vassal contracts you could make while still having maxed loyalty. There's a before and after in every vassal-oriented playthrough: While you don't have FS or SD yet you have to take care (or be strong enough that nobody disloyal acts against you), and once you do, you don't.

So as far as I am concerned, this is a welcome change. It'll make vassalizing the galaxy less of a no-brainer in SP or, at least, something that incurs tradeoffs larger than spending an Ascension perk on trivializing the issue.

EDIT: Time to start focusing on passing the "free holdings" GalCom resolutions and building Overlord Garrison holdings!

 

[mrt1212]

isn't that kinda the end goal? that's why they refuse to add more slots for tradition trees and ascension perks despite regularly adding more of them
the meta is supposed to do die and nothing is supposed to be a must-have pick

also shared destiny gives +2 envoys on top of the vassal stuff, no? that's fairly useful for diplomacy build (or a spy build if you wanna swing that way)
Detox is super good when you want to use the child of the toxic god
and executive vigor can still help you early on, doesn't have to be viable all the way into the late game

there's also the opposite problem sometimes, the ascension perk for dyson sphere, "black hole drill" and ring worlds is complete overkill and trivialises a lot of stuff
i mean, if you actually NEED several thousand energy or minerals you messed up somewhere along the way, lol
and ring worlds are at best a resource sink you get just so you never have to take care of unemployment on any of your worlds again because hopefully the game is over before all four segments are filled

Shared Destiny is basically just for the +2 Envoys now with the 'eventual' benefit for Vassals being so marginal, it seems skippable. Being 1 over the point where it starts to hurt is going to be the difference of what...6 vassals instead of 5? 7 instead of 6?

I took Shared Destiny religiously with 3.9 because the +2 Envoys in the early game are pretty nifty for loading up the Federation Train and getting it out of the station and pays off entirely when Vassals start being created and taken. It was a must take only because Franchising which does similar took away from Piratey Civics -Criminal Syndicate, Letters of Marque, and Refurbishment Division (the eventual spec that I settled on by the end of 3.9.3). The devs created an excellent 'one hand washes the other' dynamic with vassals for Megacorps and it got entirely overwrought but...yeah...1 free is so damn dinky and marginal that I'm probably going to try anything else out as first AP selection (Lord of War probably because generally traversing Supremacy as the 2nd Tradition opens up 50 Fleet Cap by itself and even quicker if you get the card for the first +20 Fleet Cap tech)

 

[currylambchop]

how many priest jobs does the imperial cult give?

 

[Peter Ebbesen]

Shared Destiny is basically just for the +2 Envoys now with the 'eventual' benefit for Vassals being so marginal, it seems skippable. Being 1 over the point where it starts to hurt is going to be the difference of what...6 vassals instead of 5? 7 instead of 6?

Think of it another way: In addition to +2 Envoys, once you have two or more vassals, it allows every vassal contract to be 1 loyalty point harsher without increasing the downsides you face. It does this regardless of the number of vassals you have.

EDIT: It is still a strong early game perk due to the +2 Envoys speeding up first contact influence gain by allowing you to engage in more simultaneously, and though much reduced it does help keep vassals loyal, but at least in 3.10 it won't be a no-brainer choice for non-Feudal Society/Franchising overlords.

EDIT2: Rethinking the issue, I realize that I may have made an error in assuming the function of Shared Destiny. I have been thinking of "1 Subject Exempt from Divided Patronage" the same way @mrt1212 does here, but that is not what being exempt actually means. Being exempt from Divided Patronage would mean that a vassal did not suffer Divided Patronage penalties at all, while all the non-exempt vassals suffered the normal penalties.

 

[mrt1212]

Think of it another way: In addition to +2 Envoys, once you have two or more vassals, it allows every vassal contract to be 1 loyalty point harsher without increasing the downsides you face. It does this regardless of the number of vassals you have.

I mean, that's kind of a graceful sell job but I'm still gonna need to take it around the block on a test drive...

 

[Cahokia]

Some of the points you bring up is why I mentioned several perks were not balanced @Silens. However looking at Shared Destiny by itself, I believe it warrants such an extreme cut. It was simply a nonchoice for the reasons I mentioned previously. At most you could argue for 2 vassals before the penalty is applied to make it better than the civic.

The loyalty is more impactful than you realize because the strength of shared destiny was being able to have an entire galaxy of specialized subjects. (outside of your pop growth areas) You could tax specialized subjects and they could still be further ahead in the chosen category allowing them to build themselves up thereby giving you more taxes further down the road. Taxing normal vassals will just slow them down. With ~70% of the galaxy as scholariums giving you research that doesn't add to your empire size... its pretty broken. (holding cheese is a separate problem)

So loyalty was the main problem area for shared destiny specifically, which is why they nerfed it. Holding cheese will also be more costly (in influence) to pull off with disloyal vassals. You can still vassalize the galaxy and tax them, you just won't get as much. Or you could have a handful of specialized subjects. Which is a good way to balance it.

To be clear when I say tax, the majority of what you should be taxing is research. Basic resources are very low value especially late game. Ascend your alloy/cg worlds and pair with ship cost/upkeep reductions. You can have a 10,000 naval cap fleet cost ~325 total energy in upkeep... However with the upcoming balance changes maybe basic resources will matter more as it will be harder to reach -90% ship build cost/upkeep. We will have to see.

Maybe this is also a critique on how much prospectoriums give you since getting an early one means you are pretty much set for the game.

 

[mrt1212]

Some of the points you bring up is why I mentioned several perks were not balanced @Silens. However looking at Shared Destiny by itself, I believe it warrants such an extreme cut. It was simply a nonchoice for the reasons I mentioned previously. At most you could argue for 2 vassals before the penalty is applied to make it better than the civic.

The loyalty is more impactful than you realize because the strength of shared destiny was being able to have an entire galaxy of specialized subjects. (outside of your pop growth areas) You could tax specialized subjects and they could still be further ahead in the chosen category allowing them to build themselves up thereby giving you more taxes further down the road. Taxing normal vassals will just slow them down. With ~70% of the galaxy as scholariums giving you research that doesn't add to your empire size... its pretty broken. (holding cheese is a separate problem)

So loyalty was the main problem area for shared destiny specifically, which is why they nerfed it. Holding cheese will also be more costly (in influence) to pull off with disloyal vassals. You can still vassalize the galaxy and tax them, you just won't get as much. Or you could have a handful of specialized subjects. Which is a good way to balance it.

To be clear when I say tax, the majority of what you should be taxing is research. Basic resources are very low value especially late game. Ascend your alloy/cg worlds and pair with ship cost/upkeep reductions. You can have a 10,000 naval cap fleet cost ~325 total energy in upkeep... However with the upcoming balance changes maybe basic resources will matter more as it will be harder to reach -90% ship build cost/upkeep. We will have to see.

Maybe this is also a critique on how much prospectoriums give you since getting an early one means you are pretty much set for the game.

This is why a strict +1 limit is so off to me though - it's not the crappy little 1 planet self created vassals that ripped a game asunder with benefit so obviously after a certain point (they start off small and useless bar the Ministry of Truth and a no slot Branch Office and eventually grow into supplementary scale benefits) - its almost always been the first big voluntary submit or the first big subjugation war that adds nitro to what you already had in place to allow the attempt, and that's directly through tax effects as a Subsidiary or Prospectorium.

 

[Silens]

I much prefer 12x1 for Influence via Ministry of Truth and since most of them are self created after conquering, slightly less chance to lose out on Branch Offices if the newly created vassal spawns as Megacorp.

Personally, I think something needed to be done about it.

I understand and yes, exploit-y tactics with countless mini-vassals need some overhaul. I merely think that a solution to a problem should tackle the problem itself, not take a detour and negatively impact legitimate approaches along the way.

Why not introduce diminishing returns, if you get certain buffs/gains from the same source? For example, having the first 3 Ministries of Truth give full benefits, the 4th starts to drop off etc. Or have the building output scale with subject size, realizing full gains if the subject has at least 300 empire size or so. Just to throw out the idea how balancing could look like.

Now? Legitimate players having several normal subjects won't be able to use loyalty anymore, while 20 Ministries of Truth from 20 micro-vassals still do their job like before. In the end nothing was done about the problem, nobody gained anything, the decision didn't make vassal management more fun, nor did it cut back on micro-vassal spam.

It is still a strong early game perk due to the +2 Envoys speeding up first contact influence gain by allowing you to engage in more simultaneously

Then take Diplomatic Corps and remove the civic once you get extra envoys from somewhere else.

You can never take APs back, that is the fundamental problem here. The slots are limited, so they ought to give you something for the rest of the game.

I know, some are stronger early on and some are stronger later on. Be it as that may, +2 envoys just doesn't cut it at any point in the game. Not when you compare it to the things you don't take instead, like a permanent research speed bonus for the rest of the game, extra unity (which translates to faster traditions and later directly into edicts, making it better than Executive Vigor). It doesn't compare to the ability to build powerful megastructures, having access to the Total War CB, to ascending your entire race, unlocking stealing pops.

 

[Critical Ethics]

Seems like you can fail individual choices within a rift, so far it doesn't seem like we can fail a rift over all. At least not in the sense of exploring one to unlock the next astral action

Ah, if it only rolls in the journey rather than the destination that's grand. I was worried that you could go all the way through a rift and then the last hurdle is down to the RNG liking you.