I Hate Leader RNG and Want It Gone

[Fnhatic]

I hate it. It's not a good system. The entire thing is designed around just throwing trash at the player and the player making do with the rubbish we're given.

First, there's too many traits, and there's too many random factors at play.

Leadership development in the military and politics isn't random. People are trained and groomed in to these positions. A politician with aspirations to be governor doesn't spontaneously decide he's going to learn to be really good at terraforming worlds (especially when you don't even have that technology yet). It'd be like if the governor of your state or province or whatever suddenly decided to invest in to mining, and your region literally is a giant swamp that has no mining industry at all.

It's terrible. You can literally sit on the leader screen and spam update_leader_pool 50 times looking for a specific type of leader, and not once get it.

You have politicians that were designed for gubernatorial duties suddenly becoming president and they carry over exactly zero useful skills.


You can even have your decorated admiral of your mightiest fleet engaging in battle against the voidworm plague... Suddenly decide he wants to be president and magically gets sucked out of his ship and ruins your entire military strategy.

It's bad. I hate it. We even have these "home planet modifiers" but who the hell cares. The odds of rolling one of those traits is a hundred to one. The odds of that trait being any useful to the planet they're from is like twenty to one. The odds of that planet being better off under your underqualified leader versus whoever is already in charge... And then everything is going fine and BAM the system decides to roll some negative trait on them that makes them a liability.

It's horrible. I hate everything about it.

1) Literally delete like half of the traits outright. Most are trash. Combine them in to fewer, more useful ones. NOBODY in the entire history of this entire game has ever said "hell yeah I got the trait that makes me clear blockers 10% faster!!! YES!" Ans yes, I love rolling this dumb terraforming trait when it's like 2208. Even if you wanted to keep both of those worthless traits why are they not combined?

Why is Prospector, possibly the best trait in the game, competing on the same roll with Observer and Scout, both of which almost do the exact same thing, and both of which are useless anyway?

2) Give players total control over leadership development. Let me assign them to "school" on level up that takes them out of service for a time, but then gives me control over what they get.

3) Delete all the council only traits. Council and Governor traits should be the same thing. Find a way to make it happen. There's no reality in existence where a politician or someone who has relevant experience that could apply in the position of Secretary of State also has zero overlap of they were told to govern a world.

4) Give us "minor leaders", leaders that are exempt from council positions, don't really count against the cap, have zero traits, and their skill levels only count as half. Let me use them to indicate "minor" fleet admirals and "minor" planetary governors. EDIT: In fact, specifically for commanders, this would be a way to improve on the unit experience system which... isn't great and doesn't make much sense (am I supposed to believe that the crew of a ship doesn't change, and is immortal? Does a real-life army unit carry 'experience' from a battle it fought in World War 1?).

5) The entire election system needs an overhaul to reflect a sane world. When theres a real life presidential election, you ever heard of every single general in the entire military announcing their candidacy? That's not even LEGAL in almost any democracy in the first place. You ever heard of the nerd in charge of Fermilab suddenly becoming the most popular presidential frontrunner? In fact, shouldn't something like an Egalitarian Democracy be full of presidential hopefuls who were not leaders in the first place, ie: random popular citizens that didn't hold prior office? Isn't that the very heart of such a system?

6) If your concern is that giving players trait control would be unbalanced, I dunno maybe balance the traits. The truth is they aren't balanced. They're broken. The only balance in them is because it's RNG so you spin the big wheel of infinite bullish and maybe you get exactly what you need, or maybe you get ooooh +amenities!

7) Negative traits can be fun and dynamic. The ones we have are not. Sometimes you get lucky and your president picks up a negative traits that only affects sector governor. Sometimes you get the asinine -5 alloy upkeep which can destroy your economy and is so clownish it's unbelievable. Really? This guy is just stealing a billion spacebucks worth of alloys a year and we're just going to ignore it?

8) Use all of this to make the Aptitude tree better.

 

[Fnhatic]

The devs have this weird fetish for using the RNG for everything, even when it makes no sense.

I think they think it adds variety to the game, when actually it just adds inconsistency.

This is offensively egregious with the "anomalies" mechanic. All anomalies should be procedurally generated with the galaxy creation system, not RNG after the galaxy has already been made.

Every new galaxy is a new game anyway, so why isn't everything set at that point? Why add even more layers of RNG-ness on top of it?

Anomalies was going to be a future post. The anomalies system literally rewards (especially with Prospector in play) metagaming exploration. You're basically trained to explore as little as possible, gate off chunks of space, and wait until you can develop a super-explorer. I literally have that on my current game, a scientist with Meticulous who got the Golden Orb anomaly early on (making them immortal), then he rolled Prospector. Once I gassed Prospector up to level 3 I turned him loose on my backlog and am hitting +3 special resources and getting +9 energy on stars for Dyson Swarms.

It's not good gameplay, in truth.

The thing is Archaeology Sites are not random. You can see them all with Observer mode. There's even an Empire Policy that gives you a random chance to find Archaeology Sites and I don't even think it does anything.

I'd like it if every planet rolled every possible chance for an anomaly on generation. As you "find" anomalies they're taken off of other planets.

Have anomaly discovery level tied to scientist level +3 or something.

Then allow more experiences scientists to RE-SCAN existing worlds looking for the pre generated anomalies. This will give scientists something to do to build XP.

----------


Let me explain that more, I was on my phone. Basically, pick an anomaly, like a specific Level 1 anomaly. The game will roll all the stars in the system, and based on some balance algorithm, it will 'assign' this anomaly to a ton of stars. So in theory it's flagged to appear on 150 stars. This is rolled for every anomaly with certain balancing for rarity (so a level 9 anomaly appears on maybe 40 stars). A given celestial body can have multiple anomalies on the back-end.

You have a Level 1 scientist. Who does not have meticulous because meticulous should not even exist. A level 1 scientist has a 100% chance to find a valid level 1 anomaly, a 50% chance for level 2 anomalies, and 25% for level 3. And maybe like 1% for level 4.

When the scientist scans a planet, he rolls on his exploration top-down. So if he fails on the level 4 (or there is no level 4) it goes to level 3, if that fails, level 2, then 1. Or maybe none.

Once an empire gets that anomaly it's removed from the roll pools for all the other systems he'll ever find, and all other anomalies get cleared from that celestial body (since they can only ever have one).

Later on, his scientist is level 4. This gives him access to find 4, 5, 6 anomalies. He can then tell the scientist to go reanalyze systems, which grinds them up XP, and lets them re-roll to find any anomalies that were already missed for a given level.

In this way, anomalies are fixed, so we don't have to metagame BS with 'meticulous' and 'discovery' perks. This will give players, eventually, all available anomalies in their systems, without them feeling cheated by the RNG. This will let them keep scientists busy and upgrading skills.

As for Prospector, honestly, should be removed. It's such a broken trait. If it's not going to be removed, then it should be exactly the same - the game pre-rolled all the deposits and already determined which ones will get buffed. Prospector no longer has a chance, and only has one level, and when it hits, it hits.

 

[Adaman5280]

Yeah you pretty much hit the nail on the head here. Unfortunately we've all been saying this since paragons released. the trait system has always been unintuitive and worse littered with objectively bad traits as you said.

I've entirely given up on the trait system myself and just put the traits i want on my leaders manually because genuinely screw getting dog water traits on my level 6 or 7 leaders, I'm not gonna start from scratch just because the game rolled poorly.


Plus while were here lets add on the fact that planetary governors take actual CENTURIES to level up, so rolling mediocre traits on them is just mind numbing.



To give credit where its due though, I think they are still trying to combine some of the traits and reduce the spread thankfully, so i might not be a problem forever.

 

[Nyrael]

Removing the RNG so that you can build your perfect leader would be something I'd consider much worse. Making do with cards you were given is meant to be the point here, and getting a good leader with a successful career growth a rarity.

I do agree that the Aptitude tree should make getting better leaders easier, and there should be a button that costs significant (scaling with time) amount of Influence that refreshes your leader poll.

 

[Ishyro]

The only real issues with leader and rng are the destiny trait and the negative traits.

I think you should be able to pick the destiny trait without rng.

For the negative trait, it's more if a balance issue than rng though (remove the +empire size from pops and it's fine).

 

[Adaman5280]

Removing the RNG so that you can build your perfect leader would be something I'd consider much worse. Making do with cards you were given is meant to be the point here, and getting a good leader with a successful career growth a rarity.

I do agree that the Aptitude tree should make getting better leaders easier, and there should be a button that costs significant (scaling with time) amount of Influence that refreshes your leader poll.

Not about building a perfect leader? It's just about building a leader that actually makes sense. I don't need nor want environmental engineer on my archeologists, and visa versa i don't need nor want void tracker on my planetary governors.. See the problem here? The trait picks don't even make sense half the time. Just asking for job relevant traits and for them to combine some of the mediocre traits so they're both not as bad and not cluttering up possible trait picks by being two separate traits, perfectly reasonable requests...



its wishful thinking that the devs would ever actually get rid of the rng. I see no future in which we can craft perfect leaders.

 

[Nakkivene]

I kinda agree. I would accept getting to pick from random traits if the traits would apply to the job. Generals are kinda meh anyway but it's plain silly how this man conquering world after world with his armies learns to better direct bureaucrats and hunt space amobea, before he gets his general veterancy class. Same with a scientist governing a planet, just learns how to inspect black holes up close or smth.

 

[Archael90]

Traits picks rng is bad and needs either overhaul or removal.
I think that every leader trait should have council and leader effects. Maybe commander skills could be united so that every admiral trait have general effect too.

 

[GhostDanny]

The analyst scientist and commissioner commander trees are completely pointless, imo.
Especially the scientist one is extremely bad, when a council scientist actually does better on a planet!

 

[Anzaman]

My basically only annoyance with the leaders is that they refuse to get traits that fit their current job.

Since I totally wanted to get council traits for my fleet commanders or vice-versa.

It's probably why I love gestalt so much, but sadly they can't get the Destiny traits.

 

[Hiksday]

There's definitively too much rng and too many leader traits overall.
Separating councilor from regular leader would help the system a lot.
I would like being able to chose our starting traits at leader recruitement. Perhaps being able to chose a speciality too so we only get traits from a pool related to it , while not allowing perfect leader we would be able to get coherent leader without trouble.
Negative traits are really annoying , they come out of nowhere and some of them are just incredibly nasty, It often lead to an instant dismiss. Some kind of retraining to get rid of them so you don't have to trash otherwise good leader could help. Or alternatively just nerf them so they become a minor inconvenience and not a crisis level damage to your economy (councilor and governor negative traits are crazy)

 

[Fnhatic]

Removing the RNG so that you can build your perfect leader would be something I'd consider much worse. Making do with cards you were given is meant to be the point here, and getting a good leader with a successful career growth a rarity.

What else do you think we should introduce more RNG to? How about the ship designer? After all min-maxxing your fleets can be a balance problem. Let's get rid of that, just make every ship randomly roll whatever loadout. Surprise, make do with what you're given!

The only excuse for RNG leaders is that it """""fixes""""" the terrible balance of leadership traits. You don't have to worry about the potential that a leader could increase alloy production 'too much' when the actual odds of rolling a leader with Scrapper is genuinely something like 3%. The result is that leaders basically can be counted on to have zero traits at all, and frankly, I almost would prefer that to the disrespect they show us with our current offerings. Most of the traits are literally garbage by design that just exist to clutter the trait RNG to specifically spite the player. Like I said, +Terraforming% speed and +Blocker Clear% speed. No serious person has ever wanted those. Nobody cares about those. So why do they exist?

They exist to basically be a 'negative trait' you RNG roll, to troll and dump on the player. So why not do it for everything else?

Because it wouldn't be fun?

So it's fine to sacrifice fun for the leader system, but nothing else? Why? Actually explain, why is it so crucially important for this system, and this system only, to be such a bunch of nonsense. Because I'm going to guess that reason is "because have you ever heard of Stockholm Syndrome?"

getting a good leader with a successful career growth a rarity.

I literally have an empire of billions upon billions of people and you think I'm gonna buy that when it comes to finding politicians, out of BILLIONS OF PEOPLE, that it should feel like trying to organize a society out of the survivors of a plane crash? "Who knows anything about farming? Okay Gladys, well, you grew tomatoes in your backyard once, which is more than the rest of us, so I guess you'll have to do".

That out of billions of people, I really only should get one chance every five years to find a single up-and-coming scientist who is interested in archeological work?

The Naval Academy at Annapolis graduates 1,000 midshipmen a year out of a country of 320 million. Stellaris gives me like eight would-be admirals per decade to pick from, out of an empire of trillions.

Allowing me to fine-tune control over my leaders would accurately simulate that I have near-infinite number of candidates to chose from.

Also let's point out that a "level 1" leader is literally equivalent to a college graduate. We know this because there's random events where you'll have commanders and scientists 'prove themselves' and get promoted from the crew, and when that happens, they're like level 3.

 

[Anzaman]

Let's remove the ship designer too and RNG the loadouts because 'the player can make do with what they're given'.

I want them to randomly design my planets too. Not as an option, but the only way to develop them.

 

[Fnhatic]

Not about building a perfect leader? It's just about building a leader that actually makes sense. I don't need nor want environmental engineer on my archeologists, and visa versa i don't need nor want void tracker on my planetary governors.. See the problem here? The trait picks don't even make sense half the time. Just asking for job relevant traits and for them to combine some of the mediocre traits so they're both not as bad and not cluttering up possible trait picks by being two separate traits, perfectly reasonable requests...

People are defending this system like it makes total sense that the science director at a neurological disease institute, who completed his PhD in neuroscience, and has spent 40 years studying the brain, is just one day randomly going to decide he really really really wants to study rocket engines.

 

[Foxosaur]

I'm not even a fan of leaders and simply enable Auto-Pick on level up each campaign but you have some good points.


2) I think this is an excellent idea. An ability to ask them to level and unassign them for a period of time or maybe to specifically try and get a specific trait. We can stall tech research because we are working on a Situation, so imagine a similar process could be used.

3) This was one of the latent problems with GP and people complained about it having too little overlap, its part of the reason I just no longer bother with governors. It feels a chore to read / understand. I could of course force myself to but the game demands my attention elsewhere.

4) Again latent to GP, I think a few of us said we would settle for generic leaders especially governors. In fact I liked just generally assigning governors to sectors, that was enough for me. So its a good idea

5) In truth, yes, not everyone would want to run and never mind getting to the level required, I guess it plays to a players fantasy of choosing any of their leaders and pushing them for candidacy(endorsing) but maybe it could be better.


I'll leave 6,7,8 (and 1 really) to others, as they are not areas I'm good enough to comment on ^^. Good thread though.

 

[Red Death]

I don't think removing all RNG/randomness from the system would be fun, but I do agree with two things:

1. Traits need a rebalance, some are just bad.
2. All traits need to apply to all positions a leader can potentially hold. Nothing feels worse then getting a governor trait on your admiral. Condense traits into fewer traits if necessary.

 

[Fnhatic]

2) I think this is an excellent idea. An ability to ask them to level and unassign them for a period of time or maybe to specifically try and get a specific trait. We can stall tech research because we are working on a Situation, so imagine a similar process could be used.

Funny thing is this actually already exists in the game, via random events that can happen to both envoys and GC delegates.

 

[DelphineasSD]

Explorers are the most useless veteran class, and I've railed about it when they first announced it.

I don't know, maybe I've been playing wrong for 3 years, but I always set my 3 to 4 scientists to Auto-Survey, when what I should be doing is auto-explore and have my hotkeyed ship doing the surveying. But Exploration as a veteran class always felt bad because by the time you unlock it...YOU DON"T NEED IT! You've met your neighbors, established your borders, and until you unlock cloaking you can't get past hostiles or closed borders or marauders, so...

 

[Fnhatic]

Explorers are the most useless veteran class, and I've railed about it when they first announced it.

I don't know, maybe I've been playing wrong for 3 years, but I always set my 3 to 4 scientists to Auto-Survey, when what I should be doing is auto-explore and have my hotkeyed ship doing the surveying. But Exploration as a veteran class always felt bad because by the time you unlock it...YOU DON"T NEED IT! You've met your neighbors, established your borders, and until you unlock cloaking you can't get past hostiles or closed borders or marauders, so...

This is what is broken about the anomaly/exploration system.

I currently have a 3.14 game I'm still wrapping up, and in it, I rolled a "PERFECT" explorer. With Aptitude, and a starting negative trait, I rolled them with Meticulous 2. Early on they found the Chronofuge anomaly, making them immortal. After a while, they got Prospector and I skilled it up to Level 3. They also got eaten by the Cutholoid, but who cares, they're immortal, so it stacked a ton of council + research skills on top.

I'm also showing my Empire.

This was a wild game, I started off smushed between an extremely hostile Advanced Empire (literally one jump away), and to the 'north' (that sector below the big red circle on top) was their Lost Colony counterpart, who were also aggressive. Additionally, nearly the orange oval on the edge of the core, was a Fanatical Purifier.

So basically I was forced to conquer three empires in the first 30 years.

What this meant is that I ended up "gating off" really big chunks of space I didn't have time/resources to explore. I managed to crush my hostile neighbors quick enough that I could block out their farthest expansion, but I also freed up a ton of systems I never explored. Additionally, because I had to move quick, I didn't 'capture' their systems, most of them self-destructed, destroying the starbase... which meant I could survey them again.

This screenshot is taken around like 2330. You'll notice the big chunks of red still untaken. That's all space I only just explored, because I have my >>>ONE<<< explorer doing it all, and it's all because of the Prospector bonus.

The orange circles are spaces that I had explored with this one guy only after the war.

What I'm getting at is that the game actively encouraged - and rewarded me - to NOT explore, but to instead beef up an explorer with superpowers and then turn him loose to max all the advantages. This is the fault of Anomaly Chance being a %, and Prospector being a %. Any system you survey before then means you're wasting your time.

I do not think it's a good system if this is how it's telling me to play.

 

[PhillipLynx]

I do wish that traits were beneficial both on and off the council. Each trait could have two effects: one that works on the council and one that works when governing a planet or leading a fleet or science ship.

For instance, Reformer (+5% monthly unity on council) could be combined with Unifier (+5% unity from jobs per level). If this was done to all traits then future council members could be trained through their first few levels by governing planets without being completely terrible and biasing their trait pulls to governor traits.

When the devs revisit their plan to move traits to every other level this could really help fix the odds of rolling the traits you want.