Stellaris Dev Diary #325 - 3.10.3 "Pyxis" Released [d2aa] + Further Beta Plans

[Zetesofos]

This is exactly the kind of rebalance to Ship Costs and Tech Speed I was looking for!

Slowing down research should also mean a slowdown in economy growth, which is another field to look at, if you ask me (too many too big boni to production of basically everything)

I also hope for a rebalance in:
- Naval Capacity (the main problem here is the large numbers of it that you can stack without using pops, mainly from Anchorages, Techs and Supremacy Tradition Tree)

- Happiness/Stability (currently it's really too easy to max them even if you are a slaver/purger empire. This kind of Utopia should only be possible for those societies which invests massive amounts of Consumer Goods/Food at the expenses of other resources)

- Espionage (hopefully coming in 3.11)

Agreed. I kind of feel like Amenities have been rather easy to ignore, and there's not a lot of incentives to use them. the Ecumenopolis has a whole district for amenities, and yet if you build more than 1, it seems like a waste.

It feels like getting to 50% stability should be the most common goal (and work for slaver empires), and getting to any stability over 80%+ should require a LOT of specialization/investment.

 

[fourteenfour]

with regards to the excess of bonuses I would like you to consider capping bonuses.

The game really is one of chasing bonuses because to ignore them can penalize the empire.

With a cap on bonuses it allows for more flexibility in game play as now players can choose how they achieve that cap. No longer would players just take a tech, civic, tradition, or even leader, because of the bonus but instead focus on many more quality of life choices. There are literally a ridiculous number of guides and all they do is stack bonuses and chide anyone for doing otherwise.

 

[Haresus]

I forgot to mention that Tech and Tradition sliders will also be broken apart so you can adjust them independently.

Amazing change, I've been hoping for that to happen for probably years now. Keep up the fantastic patches.

 

[-Marauder-]

This is only bad if you see the point of technology is to COMPLETE the tech tree before a game ends. Personally, I feel getting to repeatables should be a rarity due to some exceptional luck, not something that is expected.

Then again, I wouldn't mind seeing something like having the repeatable energy weapons interwoven between major weapon module upgrades, so that getting the next tier of lasers,missles,cannons feels a bit more exciting!

Something like Blue Lazers > Energy Weapons 1 > Energy Weapons 2 > UV Lasers > Energy Weapons 3 > Energy Weapons > 5 > X-Ray Lasers.

That way, when you see a new weapon type, its a more of an 'ow shit, they are a tier above! (Maybe those weapon categories should be always gated through the breakthrough techs?

Sorry, but that's one of the worst takes I've seen in all my time playing games. I can't imagine anything less fun, less exciting, and more restrictive than changing a technology tree that locks mayor features behind it to be never finished within the time frame of a game. And it makes me honestly question if the people celebrating and supporting this even play the game beyond the mid game, because I don't believe they do.

And restricting, removing, and destroying something we already have doesn't make it "more exciting" and "more fun". It's like shooting someone in the leg so they can be excited when it heals enough to walk again. Even now it's frustrating to wait for technologies such as terraforming as they might now show up for quite some time with the RNG system and are a massive game changer.

Further, I've virtually never experienced a game where rubber banding was handled well or a genuine benefit to the game. And the people who celebrate the current changes and whole heartedly embrace them appear to be the same folks who did it for the leader changes. Which had to be massively overhauled several times over.

Sure, there are exceptions, but over YEARS, which is what the game scale takes place at, knowledge and discoveries migrate. Scientists and Researchers make friends, trade notes, and inspire colleges across borders. Major discoveries are rarely ever hoarded by empires successfully for very long. There's also the fact that many discoveries are easy to infer once they results are seen.

A good example is the Nuclear Bomb. There were researchers all across the world that began theorizing how to make a nuclear bomb, even though the US cracked it first. The German Scientist Heisenberg was thought to be right on the heels of Allied researchers, and closing in the tech, but couldn't quite figure it out as fast. BUT, after the US dropped the bombs in Japan, Heisenberg was able to deduce that it must be of one formation and not another because it would have to be the only physics pathway theory that would allow a bomb small enough to be loaded onto a plane.

In short, information is very fluid, and it takes a great deal of effort to contain. Unless an empire takes radical measures to secure its research (I.E. the enegmatic perk), the game assumes (correctly I think), that that understanding will gradually seep out to other empires they are in contact with, and will get around.

Once again, you're comparing countries populated by the same species on the same planet with direct access to each other to space faring empire of aliens who might have zero interactions with each other and no ties whatsoever. Even in case of humanity technology and advancement isn't spreading in the way you're claiming it is, at all. Pretending it would be realistic for aliens is kind of out there.

You point towards the nuclear bomb, ignoring that it was mostly sold by traitors and even nowadays only a small number of countries have the means to produce them and the knowledge how to do it, while even fewer actually did it.

 

[Foxosaur]

Well I think it will be very interesting to try the new open beta. I think we’ll need to make some pretty well written posts of feedback if we want to avoid any disasters like we had the Initial base game changes we saw during GP.

I’m nervous of the tech breakthrough changes though, I’ve long anticipated the game would get slowed down some, I just hope we can avoid making losing that RTS aspect of the game and risk losing people in the process and not burdening players that do play for the power fantasy amongst other ways of playing like my own. Again, I’ve come to like aspects of GP but it did come with me taking a hiatus from the game, this game has long made a lot of systems optional yet offering depths for all levels. Conversely offering independent tech sliders will help.

Glad you are doing an open beta, again.

[Edit] typos - on my phone

 

[ValinShadow]

while I like the spirit of these changes I think this feels a bit like an over-correction rather than just a correction.

imo just removing/changing the ship build cost and ship upkeep leader traits and council positions introduced in paragons along with cutting the agenda and ambition in half would probably be sufficient

like supremacy can probably still give 5 or 10 build cost reduction safely

and psionic supremacy (eater) can probably likewise be cut in half instead of removed entirely



but overall I think these changes are definitely moving in the right direction as the power creep has gotten rather ridiculous over the past few patches



PS: Fleet Supremacy INCREASES ship upkeep, it doesn't decrease it

 

[Dlin369]

I know the goal is to slow down tech speed but I think it would be nice if there was a little more “technological radiation” where more advanced empires slowly and passively boost tech research of techs their neighbors haven’t researched yet but they have. Said radiation would be modified by border status, trade, and research agreements, etc but the idea is those behind can catch up a bit easier (not too easily though).

I think having some of these gateway technologies be easier to unlock if other empires have it is a nice step in that direction

 

[blahmaster6k]

Could we get some commentary from the devs on what their end goal is as far as research speed is concerned? What year do they want empires reaching repeatable tech with default sliders? Both for normal empires that don't focus a lot on tech and for super min-maxed tech rush builds.

I really like that they are removing most of the ship discounts because that was practically impossible to balance, but these tech changes feel like too much. They're triple dipping on nerfs, making research costs exponentially slower while also cutting base output by 25% AND removing all of the bonus research output technologies. I usually start hitting repeatable techs in the 2270s(but I play on .75 tech costs for game speed reasons) which even I agree is probably too early, but my wild guess is that repeatables are pretty much going to be out of reach even for a heavily tech-focused empire until 2450-2500 or more, which is just ridiculous in my opinion.

Just simple math here: Old research was 4 * 1.6 from tech = 6.4 output per pop with no other modifiers. New is just 3. Base cut by one and the three 20% techs removed. In total, tech output is being cut by over 50%, while tech costs are simultaneously going up by more than double. Napkin math says it's going to take about four times as long to get to the end of the tech tree, which would push my empires from 2270 all the way to 2480 on .75 tech cost. The game is going to be absolutely glacially paced if these nerfs are finalized, that number would be more like 2600 with 100% tech cost sliders.

If the developers want the game to last that long, they need to put way more effort into solving endgame lag because the game past 2400 is pretty much unplayable unless you have a top of the line gaming rig. The lategame is also the least interesting part of Stellaris, by that point all that's left is usually mop-up work conquering the rest of the weaker empires and fighting the crisis.

HoI4 managed to implement some really good performance changes in their last update that roughly doubled the game speed on my PC, Stellaris needs to do something similar or the only option players like me will have to have an enjoyable game will be to set the tech slider to 0.25 and get derided as a noob or cheater whenever they post screenshots of builds.

Nerfing tech so much also has meta implications. If tech rushing becomes useless (which my first impression says that it will be), then the best strategy by far is going to be military rush builds with naked corvettes, which I don't think many people find fun either.

I fully expect disagrees for this given the common opinions I've seen in this thread, but I'm very worried about how heavy handed these tech nerfs are. I do not see them being very fun to play with at all.

 

[Millbot]

Curious if the devs are considering the idea of having sprawl impact ship upkeep. Currently, the four big things that impact empire power are:

-tech level, which is throttled by empire size
-number of adopted traditions and perks, which is throttled by empire size
-pop numbers, which in a way is impacted by empire size, given that as an empire gets more pops, it ends up require more to get the next pop.
-naval capacity, which is currently not impacted by empire size in an real way. I mean, you could argue sprawl throttles it indirectly via limiting tech, but a super wide empire can more easily afford to amass a larger fleet than empires that are much, much further ahead on the tech trees.

Having empire size slowly increase ship upkeep or even having the formula setup so that it factors in total systems. Would be something that could both reduce over all ship numbers, while also making it so that getting bigger doesn't end up being as much of away snowball for wide empires over more compact empires; especially, if the formula ignores empire size from population, but factors in systems.

 

[Miuramir]

In general, I like where this seems to be going, with the breakthrough techs etc. In general, I think that the ideal would be that a "non-techy" empire should plausibly be able to win the game without having completed the tech tree, a "normal" empire should more or less finish the normal tree and then be picking up stuff from FEs and Crisis stuff, and a "techy" empire should have gotten somewhat into repeatables.

I am concerned whether the majority of players who are less aware of the forums, meta, etc. will find that it doesn't seem like they get anywhere with research after the first part of the game and get frustrated. I lean into research and alloy far more than the typical person posting for help on Reddit, and I'm well aware that I'm a roleplayer who by meta standards is far behind the folks that play cranked-up or multiple crisis.

Can we perhaps have not only a tech multiplier slider, but also a tech *scaling* slider? Perhaps c * (2^n + x^n) where x is the slider, or some such?

I'm also in general in favor of reigning in subtractive bonuses. They are almost always problematic in the long run for balance, as each subsequent subtraction is worth proportionally more, not less. Defense stacking in City of Heroes, casting time stacking in Lord of the Rings Online, and many other examples where long-running games found that they eventually had serious issues with the fact that going from 100% to 95% is a 5% improvement, but going from 10% to 5% is a 50% improvement.
What you generally want is the opposite, bonuses that can be individually significant, but the more you stack them the more diminishing returns you hit. Something where instead of "ship cost reduction" directly that multiplies bonus%, you get, say, "shipbuilding efficiency bonus", which divides the cost by 1+bonus%. So for example:

10% total bonus: was 90%, now 91%
30% total bonus: was 70%, now 77%
50% total bonus: was 50%, now 67%
90% total bonus: was 10%, now 53%
95% total bonus: was 5%, now 51%
100% total bonus: was free, now 50%
150% total bonus: was free/meaningless, now 40% (if allowed)
200% total bonus: was free/meaningless, now 33% (if allowed)
300% total bonus: was free/meaningless, now 25% (if allowed)

This allows the game to have bonuses that seem significant individually (10%, 20%, even 30% occasionally, rather than weak-seeming 5% here and there), but make it very difficult to stack them to broken levels, and you can easily put a cap at 100% > 50%, 200% > 33%, or wherever just to make sure.

As a general game design rule for anything that might have scale creep (and in a long enough game, that is *everything* ) you want to add (not multiply) things that are better if they get bigger, and divide (not subtract) things that are better if they get smaller. The other way leads to pain, imbalance, and exploits over time.

Aside from all that, I've got some specific quibbles about specific items. IMO:

Master Shipbuilders: should ideally primarily give you *better* ships, but some build speed improvement would be logical and useful.

Shipwright: should be one of the few / main sources of actual cost reduction.

Logistic Understanding, Armada Logistician, and Gunboat Diplomat: having them reduce upkeep while docked is exactly the opposite of what makes sense here. A military logistics expert is primarily someone who excels at getting supplies to the troops/ships while they're out there actually doing stuff, not docked at the pier where the everyday / peacetime / civilian supply lines work as expected. Even more so, a Gunboat Diplomat is someone who is *using* their navy: even more-or-less benevolent empires would be doing port visits and showing the flag. Somewhat more strident empires might be conducting freedom of navigation operations (FONOPs), and a more colonial-overlord empire might engage in a bit of light shelling of the palace of some empire at a lower tech level if they're not respecting their betters (see: Anglo-Zanzibar War ) Commodore Perry did *not* become a legend by reducing the bureaucratic costs of keeping his ships in port!

 

[King Harkinian]

Presumably the breakthrough techs are the same ones flavor-wise that used to be the researcher output techs? I hope those aren't just outright removed, but instead repurposed, just like they were repurposed from research lab specialization upgrade techs to researcher output techs. Ideally though I'd want those branching research lab upgrades back.

Generally though, these changes do seem like they could be overcorrection. The game balance is already really good when playing with 2250 midgame start and 2300 or 2325 endgame start with 2400 victory year, it's just the default years that make things spiral out of control. And as someone who plays only multiplayer with friends, I don't want the game to be 100 years longer and go deep into endgame lag and micromanagement territory.

Hopefully it will be possible to counteract the balance changes by changing other settings like the tech cost slider, but I am a bit worried about the exponential cost increases.

 

[Calvax]

The game balance is already really good when playing with 2250 midgame start and 2300 or 2325 endgame start with 2400 victory year, it's just the default years that make things spiral out of control. And as someone who plays only multiplayer with friends, I don't want the game to be 100 years longer and go deep into endgame lag and micromanagement territory.

With the tech sliders you don't have to in a multiplayer game. Most people play single player though and making the game shorter just to get the play to work as intended isn't great design. The game should play as intended on normal settings with the sliders being for variations outside of the norm.

 

[Blazoran]

I forgot to mention that Tech and Tradition sliders will also be broken apart so you can adjust them independently. Whoops. Well, it does say preliminary notes, right?



This is true. It's pretty easy to get to much higher levels of Naval Capacity these days.

Have you considered giving us this for vassal tax/subsidy too XD

There are so many unique and interesting economic structures that are limited by their grouping and also basic resource tax can get really silly when foodless nations or catalytic nations get involved.

We have a multiplayer game where nobody makes their own food food cos its always like 0.4 or less on the market cos a robot player has a bio prospectorium that is forced to tribute tons of food to the robot nation that just sells it.

I know you could just make an exception for foodless nations but this would be a great chance to actually allow all the systemic freedom that I thought we were going to get when I initially got excited about overlord.

Let me give my scholarium tons of consumer goods for their labs without giving them alloys! Let me have nations that are super specialised towards either energy or minerals! I feel like the system has so much almost realised potential lurking behind the arbitrary resource grouping.

And if the worry is new player confusion, in my experience with my 8ish friends I've gotten into the game, they are more often frustrated by the grouping than feeling overwhelmed by that screen, it's all pretty intuitive.

And if UI clutter is a concern, consider dropdown tabs or an "open advanced tax/subsidy" option?

 

[Torredebelem]

I am enjoying the direction the game is taking regarding the outliner.
Will it be possible in the future to create our own outliner tabs, move/delete the present ones and save our own preferences for immediate use in new games (instead of having to create everything from scratch each new game we start).

Also, is it possible for the game to remember from session to session what were the last sections of the outliner than were expanded and contracted?

 

[-Marauder-]

I really like that they are removing most of the ship discounts because that was practically impossible to balance, but these tech changes feel like too much. They're triple dipping on nerfs, making research costs exponentially slower while also cutting base output by 25% AND removing all of the bonus research output technologies. I usually start hitting repeatable techs in the 2270s(but I play on .75 tech costs for game speed reasons) which even I agree is probably too early, but my wild guess is that repeatables are pretty much going to be out of reach even for a heavily tech-focused empire until 2450-2500 or more, which is just ridiculous in my opinion.

This is a change that hasn't been thought through at all, and where clearly the math hasn't been done on it either. Pushed by people who admitted they don't even factor in the late game and often stop playing way before that point.

It's the leadership change all over again, but several times as worse and then some. And they're unlikely to really test it because once again they don't test on bigger or even medium sized maps and beyond the mid game. Where many of these changes tend to "look fine just a bit slower/more limiting". Then they go live and are a huge mess.

It's people trying to "punish" and "reign in" those at the extreme scale of optimization, trying to balance the game around the top percentile while ignoring how this affects the average and lower skilled players and the game at large to bring them forcefully in line with how they think the game should be played at gunpoint. While they themselves aren't playing on that level and thus fail to really grasp the bandwagong issues.

Do we REALLY have to go through it again, because a certain very loud and influential group (because the new lead dev appears to be part of that group) want to force their vision. Even when it clashes with almost 7 years of Stellaris developement?

 

[Lenk]

Any chance we getting bugfixes to leader in under one rule origin?

 

[Zetesofos]

I know the goal is to slow down tech speed but I think it would be nice if there was a little more “technological radiation” where more advanced empires slowly and passively boost tech research of techs their neighbors haven’t researched yet but they have. Said radiation would be modified by border status, trade, and research agreements, etc but the idea is those behind can catch up a bit easier (not too easily though).

I think having some of these gateway technologies be easier to unlock if other empires have it is a nice step in that direction

I'm pretty sure that's exactly what they included though with Breakthrough Techs. Per the notes: Breakthrough Techs are a lot harder to complete for cutting Edge empires, but once they are researched, other empires have the tech cost to complete reduced (and more so if they have intel on that empire).

Ergo - As empires research key ideas - that information begans to radiate out to other empires, chaining off of neighbors, and gradually speeding up tech development across the galaxy.

 

[Zetesofos]

while I like the spirit of these changes I think this feels a bit like an over-correction rather than just a correction.

imo just removing/changing the ship build cost and ship upkeep leader traits and council positions introduced in paragons along with cutting the agenda and ambition in half would probably be sufficient

like supremacy can probably still give 5 or 10 build cost reduction safely

and psionic supremacy (eater) can probably likewise be cut in half instead of removed entirely



but overall I think these changes are definitely moving in the right direction as the power creep has gotten rather ridiculous over the past few patches



PS: Fleet Supremacy INCREASES ship upkeep, it doesn't decrease it

That's why its a Beta - its easier to go HARD on the correction in a beta, shake out any unknowns, and then add things back in before the patch goes out.

 

[Dr Pippy]

I'll reiterate my earlier question(s) without additional commentary:

• What are the desired goals in terms of the date for completing the tech tree?
• What are the desired dates for hitting milestone techs (e.g. cruisers, habitats, battleships, mega-engineering, etc.)?

It would be a lot easier to have an intelligent discussion about the proposed changes if there's a shared understanding of what it's trying to accomplish, with more specificity than simply "slowing down tech growth."

 

[Abdulijubjub]

This is a change that hasn't been thought through at all, and where clearly the math hasn't been done on it either. Pushed by people who admitted they don't even factor in the late game and often stop playing way before that point.

It's the leadership change all over again, but several times as worse and then some. And they're unlikely to really test it because once again they don't test on bigger or even medium sized maps and beyond the mid game. Where many of these changes tend to "look fine just a bit slower/more limiting". Then they go live and are a huge mess.

It's people trying to "punish" and "reign in" those at the extreme scale of optimization, trying to balance the game around the top percentile while ignoring how this affects the average and lower skilled players and the game at large to bring them forcefully in line with how they think the game should be played at gunpoint. While they themselves aren't playing on that level and thus fail to really grasp the bandwagong issues.

Do we REALLY have to go through it again, because a certain very loud and influential group (because the new lead dev appears to be part of that group) want to force their vision. Even when it clashes with almost 7 years of Stellaris developement?

The answer to your concerns is in the dev diary. They're announcing that change specifically because it's going to open beta before Christmas, and will run for (roughly) a month. And it might not even make it into the next patch (because it's experimental).

I think they made that pretty clear. You cannot even read the patch notes without clicking on the dropdown with its enormous bolded title: Holiday Beta.

The Holiday Open Beta will be a feature branch that contains the following changes, which may or may not go into 3.11 (or 3.12, or any release at all for that matter). Similar to how we handled Industrial Districts several years ago, we're intentionally keeping these separated from core 3.11 development, isolating this in a parallel track.

We’ll have a feedback form set up to collect your thoughts, and the Open Beta will run until the middle of January.

The change might be an overcorrection, but it's not going to be pushed without testing.