Hello,
I wanted to put forth a bit of feedback on patch 4. As of today, I have finished a full run under this patch.
My overall feeling of this version of Stellaris is as follows: I really like the changes conceptually, but there are some design issues, and the technical state of the patch is a complete mess. It needs fixing quick.
I'll start with what I like: In my opinion, the planet, pop, and trade redesign is good. The stacking bonuses make planet specializations very powerful, pops go well with said system, and I don't miss the endless pain of having to suppress piracy from the previous versions. I like trade being an actual resource and serving as the main currency now, as opposed to the weird abstract process it was before. In general, I like how city districts now provide jobs specific to the specialization you chose, so that those jobs are not entirely dependent on building. I feel you can end up with a very powerful economy if you use the district stacking bonuses right.
Now, regarding the problems, I'll start with the most egregious one: performance. I remember having read several times that this patch was meant to drastically improve late-game performance through trade and pop overhaul. The unfortunate reality is that performance is worse than ever. The endgame is almost physically painful to play through. FPS is consistently poor (< 40 FPS), and when selecting large fleets or zooming in on space battles, it drops to single digits. This is on hardware that is well above the recommended specs, and should have no trouble handling a 2016 game at max settings.
Another big issue is the AI. To be fair, AI empires in Stellaris have never been very good at their job, and have always relied on the bonuses given by higher difficulties to be any threat whatsoever to the player. In patch 4 they are absolutely clueless. It seems they don't understand the new game mechanics at all. On my recent run I played the game fairly casually, taking my time to learn the new mechanics, and I started regretting playing a "good guy" empire, because by the mid-game I was so ridiculously ahead of the AI empires I could have declared war on all of them at the same time and conquered the entire galaxy without any meaningful opposition.
In terms of balance, I believe pop growth on low population colonies is far too slow. New colonies seem take an excruciatingly long time to get going because of the logistic curve that's being used for pop growth, and as such, in new colonies growth depends almost exclusively on immigration, which I struggled to get going in decent numbers anyway. Hopefully the devs can consider tweaking the growth curve a bit.
There are also some weird bugs. I regularly started receiving the previous version's message of a pirate fleet spawning on a system, but it was nothing at all (piracy is no longer a game mechanic). It seems to be leftover code from the previous version. Also, recent fixes have introduced new problems as well, such as the now-infamous clone vats disappearing and becoming unavailable for construction.
Hopefully some of this feedback helps in case the devs see it.
Thanks!
I wanted to put forth a bit of feedback on patch 4. As of today, I have finished a full run under this patch.
My overall feeling of this version of Stellaris is as follows: I really like the changes conceptually, but there are some design issues, and the technical state of the patch is a complete mess. It needs fixing quick.
I'll start with what I like: In my opinion, the planet, pop, and trade redesign is good. The stacking bonuses make planet specializations very powerful, pops go well with said system, and I don't miss the endless pain of having to suppress piracy from the previous versions. I like trade being an actual resource and serving as the main currency now, as opposed to the weird abstract process it was before. In general, I like how city districts now provide jobs specific to the specialization you chose, so that those jobs are not entirely dependent on building. I feel you can end up with a very powerful economy if you use the district stacking bonuses right.
Now, regarding the problems, I'll start with the most egregious one: performance. I remember having read several times that this patch was meant to drastically improve late-game performance through trade and pop overhaul. The unfortunate reality is that performance is worse than ever. The endgame is almost physically painful to play through. FPS is consistently poor (< 40 FPS), and when selecting large fleets or zooming in on space battles, it drops to single digits. This is on hardware that is well above the recommended specs, and should have no trouble handling a 2016 game at max settings.
Another big issue is the AI. To be fair, AI empires in Stellaris have never been very good at their job, and have always relied on the bonuses given by higher difficulties to be any threat whatsoever to the player. In patch 4 they are absolutely clueless. It seems they don't understand the new game mechanics at all. On my recent run I played the game fairly casually, taking my time to learn the new mechanics, and I started regretting playing a "good guy" empire, because by the mid-game I was so ridiculously ahead of the AI empires I could have declared war on all of them at the same time and conquered the entire galaxy without any meaningful opposition.
In terms of balance, I believe pop growth on low population colonies is far too slow. New colonies seem take an excruciatingly long time to get going because of the logistic curve that's being used for pop growth, and as such, in new colonies growth depends almost exclusively on immigration, which I struggled to get going in decent numbers anyway. Hopefully the devs can consider tweaking the growth curve a bit.
There are also some weird bugs. I regularly started receiving the previous version's message of a pirate fleet spawning on a system, but it was nothing at all (piracy is no longer a game mechanic). It seems to be leftover code from the previous version. Also, recent fixes have introduced new problems as well, such as the now-infamous clone vats disappearing and becoming unavailable for construction.
Hopefully some of this feedback helps in case the devs see it.
Thanks!
- 3
- 2
