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

[Ajacoba]

If research happening too quickly was a concern, maybe it wasn't the best idea to allow scientists to assist research on entire sectors instead of just one planet like they used to.

I mean, it's not as if all your research worlds will conveniently be in the same sector

Not to mention that sector buffs are halved already

 

[Starfury]

This is the elephant in the room that I'm surprised is not being talked about as much. As someone who routinely plays with 1.5x tech cost specifically because I feel the tech tree goes by too fast, I often hit that abominable lag by the time I do get to the end techs.

The devs need to realize that their tech slowdown is not going to work unless it is paired with significant performance improvements in the late game.

The overall reduction of economic/population growth due to slower tech as well as the removal of ship cost/upkeep reduction will do its fair share of improving performance.

Whether it's going to be enough will have to be seen, as I have to admit I haven't played much beyond 2300 the last couple of years (not because of bad performance but because the game was over so quickly)

 

[Ecclesiasdeez__nutz]

I am definitely not a GA 25x crisis min maxxer, and have in fact never played a game long enough to reach the crisis despite having 100s of hours logged. Maybe the values need to be tweaked, but I am a huge fan of throttling the level of tech advancement to slow down the game. Things become significantly less interesting by end game, in large part because things stagnate once you unlock everything. The lizard part of my brain really enjoys looking forward to things to unlock, and that is basically finished 100 years in regardless of what I do.

Beyond that though, the mid game is way more dynamic and enjoyable than the end game, and I've always wished the game spent more time there. Playing on Commodore, the early and mid game is actually a decent (but winnable) challenge, and you have to make real decisions about what to build or who to invade. I think the game would get a lot more interesting if they delayed all of the specialization technology that makes it so easy for a player to run circles around the AI's economy. At a certain point ship upgrades start happening so fast I lose track of what I'm researching, and just randomly pick stuff. This is one reason I really haven't spent any time customizing ships.

Materialist empires that focus hard on science should feel more advanced compared to other empires, with corresponding trade offs, but how things work now is that it's so easy to stack research that basically every ethics combination plays the same way. Even with spiritualist empires I regularly hit repeatable techs by the mid game point. Granted, a lot of the power creep comes from how powerful vassals are, but slowing the game down will hopefully make it a bit more challenging to collect all of your neighbors like Pokemon.

 

[Thiend]

I am definitely not a GA 25x crisis min maxxer, and have in fact never played a game long enough to reach the crisis despite having 100s of hours logged. Maybe the values need to be tweaked, but I am a huge fan of throttling the level of tech advancement to slow down the game. Things become significantly less interesting by end game, in large part because things stagnate once you unlock everything. The lizard part of my brain really enjoys looking forward to things to unlock, and that is basically finished 100 years in regardless of what I do.

Beyond that though, the mid game is way more dynamic and enjoyable than the end game, and I've always wished the game spent more time there. Playing on Commodore, the early and mid game is actually a decent (but winnable) challenge, and you have to make real decisions about what to build or who to invade. I think the game would get a lot more interesting if they delayed all of the specialization technology that makes it so easy for a player to run circles around the AI's economy. At a certain point ship upgrades start happening so fast I lose track of what I'm researching, and just randomly pick stuff. This is one reason I really haven't spent any time customizing ships.

Materialist empires that focus hard on science should feel more advanced compared to other empires, with corresponding trade offs, but how things work now is that it's so easy to stack research that basically every ethics combination plays the same way. Even with spiritualist empires I regularly hit repeatable techs by the mid game point. Granted, a lot of the power creep comes from how powerful vassals are, but slowing the game down will hopefully make it a bit more challenging to collect all of your neighbors like Pokemon.

It may at least become a challenge. Vassals are harder than before because you have to actually declare war or build trust, what makes it still too easy is how trivial building up a tech lead that gives you a military lead is. With the slowdown, it should be much harder to get overwhelmingly ahead in the years before the AI builds up enough to not be so easily vassalized.

Also, this relates in no way to your own post, but I felt I should address something people have been saying about this making it even more of a difference between experienced and inexperienced players with the tech changes. I politely yet firmly must disagree. Right now, there's a canyon between the two groups because tech is always, literally always the correct answer and newer players don't know that. Now, there will be three main specialist types all of approximately equal value and which you should definitely have at least some of each. Experienced players will optimize that, but that isn't new - what will be new is that a player producing more alloy or unity compared to research is no longer making an objectively incorrect decision, which means there is no longer a right and wrong answer for new players to give the wrong answer to. In a world where research is much slower, even a low-ish tech military buildup will be drastically less bad an idea compared to now when increasing tech will increase your fleet power faster than... actually increasing your fleet.

 

[King Harkinian]

I am definitely not a GA 25x crisis min maxxer, and have in fact never played a game long enough to reach the crisis despite having 100s of hours logged. Maybe the values need to be tweaked, but I am a huge fan of throttling the level of tech advancement to slow down the game. Things become significantly less interesting by end game, in large part because things stagnate once you unlock everything. The lizard part of my brain really enjoys looking forward to things to unlock, and that is basically finished 100 years in regardless of what I do.

Beyond that though, the mid game is way more dynamic and enjoyable than the end game, and I've always wished the game spent more time there. Playing on Commodore, the early and mid game is actually a decent (but winnable) challenge, and you have to make real decisions about what to build or who to invade. I think the game would get a lot more interesting if they delayed all of the specialization technology that makes it so easy for a player to run circles around the AI's economy. At a certain point ship upgrades start happening so fast I lose track of what I'm researching, and just randomly pick stuff. This is one reason I really haven't spent any time customizing ships.

Materialist empires that focus hard on science should feel more advanced compared to other empires, with corresponding trade offs, but how things work now is that it's so easy to stack research that basically every ethics combination plays the same way. Even with spiritualist empires I regularly hit repeatable techs by the mid game point. Granted, a lot of the power creep comes from how powerful vassals are, but slowing the game down will hopefully make it a bit more challenging to collect all of your neighbors like Pokemon.

I truly don't get how people play the game for so long and don't change the game settings to fix the problems when it's so easy to do(with some combination of shortening the game length and increasing tech costs), but it does prove the point that the devs need to do something about it because players can't be relied on to choose settings for their own good even when the option is right there.

 

[Ajacoba]

I regularly play with default tech and year settings and I only barely get ready for the crisis, especially after activating ultimate crisis and having the second and third wave snowball way too hard

Last time I tried buffing the crisis just a little bit so the first wave doesn't die instantly I got the contingency as the second wave and their core worlds were invulnerable because each was guarded by a million fleet power - and since I had actively played against the AI that playthrough with several of their capitals being fed to stareaters the AI couldn't do much either

 

[rubert]

I could see these tech nerfs and slowing down allowing some new mechanics, too. Eg. fairly common trope in science fiction (especially military SF) where enemy empire has some "unknown" tech and the other side needs to figure counter or reverse engineer the tech.

In game terms this could be combination of espionage operations, salvaging debris, research etc. and could either give bonus to researching the higher level tech, some bonuses against it or somethin similar.

Esssentially longer and more detailed version of the current salvage debris ability.

 

[Bakalov]

Edit: Four nerfs on the same thing (tech) is BS. They should start with one.

 

[NotAYakk]

I find this deeply ironic. For years I've been playing Stellaris less and less, as it's a kind of trade-off between time and enjoyment (not helped by a slow rig). As a result, I rarely play beyond 2300, if that.

The latest Astral stuff has reversed this trend, because I've been able to start chomping into "mid-game" type stuff early enough to keep me interested.

Now to me this latest dev diary signals that the devs are going to "slow everything down". Don't get me wrong: I endorse this in theory, as it sounds very good in principle, indeed well thought out! However, for me the personal flip side is it may well push me further away from the game again.

All that said, I've just had a thought. I suppose I can "correct" all this just by messing with the settings, thus accelerating various things like research to "compensate" for this well-thought-out slowdown!

Never mind then, just my 2c...

So, you can set your tech speed to 4x and get to midgame tech early.

The difference is that after doing this, you don't blow through midgame tech and hit endgame tech in a blink of an eye.

The tech *curve* was way off with the degree empires became more efficient over the years of adding features. Pops in stellaris become 10x more efficient after accounting for overheads in the current game; throw in an empire that is 60x larger with only a 3x slowdown due to empire size, and you get 200x faster tech development.

And endgame techs are only 50x as expensive.

So any empire that reaches endgame technology ... blows through it like crazy. Not just repeatables -- you end up with grabbing megastructure techs you have no intention of building because it is cheap to research an entire megastructure type to reset the tech card draw!

When endgame techs are 200x as expensive instead of 50x as expensive, you'll note that endgame techs ... arrive at the same speed as early game techs did. Each one matters and has a cost and heft to it.

This also means that the lower tier techs are comparatively cheaper. In current stellaris, not grabbing mass drivers at all is worth about as much "research points" as your two top-tier tech elsewhere, because top tier + 0.5 top tier (prevoius) + 0.25 top tier (even older) + ... =~ 2 top tier techs.

Ie, an empire that has T4 shields and T4 mass drivers has spent as much on research as an empire with T3 shields, T3 lasers, T3 armor and T3 mass drivers in the current game, but the first empire has ships with 30% thicker defences and 30% higher damage output.

Under the new model, that T4/T4 empire will have spent significantly more than the T3/T3/T3/T3 empire -- for the same total research, the T3 empire can also have T3 missiles, T3 sensors, T3 computers and hull upgrades, or something similar.

 

[Panzerslothen]

I think that if we are going to have such changes - in either test or final incarnations - that there is a case to be made for a base +1 Research Option increase or, at the very least, an additional +1 Research Option Technology (besides the one(s?) we already have). Currently we get 3; I think this could (and indeed, should) be 4.

This is on the grounds that I expect players, in practice, won't mind having to take more time to complete certain Techs if they have a greater degree of agency over which technologies those actually are. I know I sure would.

(Hell, I actually think that the pure card system could be adapted in some way, and given some degree of semi-control, in which players broadly allocate priority levels to the technology sub-categories to determine what card options come up. This is how Space Empires did things back in the early 00's and I always really liked it. However I'm realistic; I get this would be a bridge too far for Stellaris, so I'll take what I can get).

 

[Harvey_James]

any chance of making the research institute worth building at all devs??? the pitiful 1 job it provides and +1 scientist isnt enough to build it over a normal research lab with 6 researcher jobs.. the +1 scientist isnt that impressive .. there are plenty of ways of getting leader increases..

 

[Thiend]

any chance of making the research institute worth building at all devs??? the pitiful 1 job it provides and +1 scientist isnt enough to build it over a normal research lab with 6 researcher jobs.. the +1 scientist isnt that impressive .. there are plenty of ways of getting leader increases..

The research institute gets you better research for the number of pops assigned, in your example you get a slight probable loss of tech output but free 5 pops for other jobs (such as more research elsewhere). It is also of extreme value on ringworlds, where you can have such a large number of researchers.

It's worth it now. It's just no longer possible (and preferred) to build it standalone on worlds with no other tech jobs.

 

[Panzerslothen]

any chance of making the research institute worth building at all devs??? the pitiful 1 job it provides and +1 scientist isnt enough to build it over a normal research lab with 6 researcher jobs.. the +1 scientist isnt that impressive .. there are plenty of ways of getting leader increases..

The Research Institute which gives you +5% Empire Wide Science production regardless of where it is built, and which gives a Science Director (Ruler Strata) job?

That Research Institute?

Not worth building?

Really?!

 

[Peter Ebbesen]

Right now, there's a canyon between the two groups because tech is always, literally always the correct answer and newer players don't know that. Now, there will be three main specialist types all of approximately equal value and which you should definitely have at least some of each. Experienced players will optimize that, but that isn't new - what will be new is that a player producing more alloy or unity compared to research is no longer making an objectively incorrect decision, which means there is no longer a right and wrong answer for new players to give the wrong answer to.

Your statement about unity over science being known by experienced players to be objectively wrong is... objectively wrong (sorry, couldn't resist it), since I am an experienced player and this summer posted a ridiculous unity over science counterexample (unity output > highest of phy, soc, eng output throughout the game), with direct control of around 250 system and 170 planets, that yet managed to be, if not second to none, then second to very, very, few high tech builds, as it achieving shield repeatable 100 in the mid-2330s and had around 70 fleets of 3 million fleetpower each in the early 2340s when I got bored of building ever more ascended research ringworld... in a huge galaxy in unmodded Stellaris with default settings (apart from difficulty). Granted, that game had a really good start and I only expected that level of performance 2-3 decades later based on the earlier games in that test series optimizing the build, but still, it is a counterexample. I thought you had participated in some of those discussions, but perhaps I remember wrong.

Granted, that was a special case and I certainly don't recommend people play with unity over science currently unless they have a really good plan based around ascensionist wide gameplay (but not as ridiculously wide as I did for demonstration purposes, since some of the game mechanics I took advantage of to achieve that were eliminated as part of the 3.10 nerf), but it is an option available to experienced players.

So as far as I am concerned, the interesting thing about this will be to see how forum consensus deals with the unity/science interplay with the changes. Given the extreme reluctance the player base has had embracing unity since 3.3 despite its strong mathematical properties, I am not as sanguine as you are about players embracing a more balanced approach, that is superior even now, or occasionally favouring unity over science, that can be superior now, but generally isn't, rather than doubling down on science.

But I hope you are right. And it will be especially interesting if we end up in a situation where alloys over both unity and science makes sense for some warlike builds. THAT would be awesome.

 

[Vreivai]

The overall reduction of economic/population growth due to slower tech as well as the removal of ship cost/upkeep reduction will do its fair share of improving performance.

Whether it's going to be enough will have to be seen, as I have to admit I haven't played much beyond 2300 the last couple of years (not because of bad performance but because the game was over so quickly)

Just think about where you pop growth comes from, though. Yeah, some comes from tech. But most is gated by unity and number of planets. With all the changes adding up to a truly colossal nerf in the rate of tech acquisition (try doing the math yourself, the nerf is probably a lot bigger than you think), I would not be surprised if most games post-3.11 are abandoned before finishing the tech tree.

The tech *curve* was way off with the degree empires became more efficient over the years of adding features. Pops in stellaris become 10x more efficient after accounting for overheads in the current game; throw in an empire that is 60x larger with only a 3x slowdown due to empire size, and you get 200x faster tech development.

And endgame techs are only 50x as expensive.

Thing is, in this scenario you're not just getting techs going from 50x as expensive as they used to be to 200x as expensive as they used to be. You're getting that, but pops are also going from something like 200x their old efficiency to somewhere from 50-100x their old efficiency.

I definitely agree that slowing research down is a good goal in a vacuum, I just think that from looking at the numbers they overshot the goal by quite a bit. I'm also worried that, with how mid and endgame lag currently is, slowing down the game is not something that currently should be a goal. Something should be done, either to consolidate pops or ships (ships probably a better target than pops), before thinking about slowing down the game's pace.

 

[mrt1212]

Is this a coordinated effort to make the game unwinnable for Grand admiral with crisis multipliers?

Because otherwise these changes don't make sense, unless of course paradox plans to sell more power creep with their next expansion.

But then again, as always, we're free to mod away the game to being fun again.

This is exactly what I mean when I say the player base is so addicted to sweets it thinks it will perish without them and just expects there will be some to compensate for a lack of them. We can and will figure out how to do it if unbound by a time or game date constraint some time in the early 2300s.

Edit: The player base that refuses to consider that adjusting to new paradigms and figuring out the new paradigms as a form of gameplay is gonna hate this one and they're wrong in hating it.

 

[Bakalov]

If changing the tech cost at startup is the solution, we had that before all these mostly unnecessary changes.

 

[Dr Pippy]

Edit: The player base that refuses to consider that adjusting to new paradigms

The game is almost a decade old at this point. At some point it seems reasonable to expect the game design to reach a degree of stability.

 

[mrt1212]

The game is almost a decade old at this point. At some point it seems reasonable to expect the game design to reach a degree of stability.

But to the more crucial point - does it feel like it's 'there' yet, really?

And per the popular meme:

 

[Troyen]

My hypothesis is this is going to help in the mid/late game (because the player gains science faster than tech costs go up on live) but hurt the early game.

I do feel in today's game that the first few techs are already glacially slow to acquire. 2-4 years for a tech seems about right, more than four years feels slow outside of super-special techs. With both increasing the T1 tech cost to 2500 and slightly nerfing researcher output, it'll tack on a year or two for those first techs (baseline, pre-expansion).

If this does indeed turn out to be the case, I think they could just bump up the base research each empire gets (iirc all empires get 10 each) to 20 or so. It means we'd start with slightly more science than live (to counter the +500 tech cost) but wouldn't really make any difference in the mid/late game.