Is Stellaris running out of steam? (pun intended)

[mrt1212]

Cosmogenesis buffs fleet power again by unlocking more or better ways to increase it, and ultimately it heavily relies on fleet power to be successful. You can try to shoehorn your way to victory by playing diplomatically, but that’s just borrowing fleet power from other AIs to protect you. Again, it's all centered around the pivot point of limitless scaling fleet power.

I often purposely tried to avoid a certain playstyle just to see how far I could get with one arm tied behind my back, only to find myself scaling my endless doomstack of fleet power, coming from another source. This is what I meant when I wrote that the curtain was drawn back, the smoke vanished, and the mirrors shattered.

Overall, I really like the concept and the flavor the game provides, and how much fun it is to play multiplayer with friends. The empire management and the amount of it is really neat and engaging, but it all comes crumbling down when warfare starts. The fleet power arms race takes over the game and sucks the fun out of it. That’s why I stuck around so long—because I like the concept and many aspects of it, but the fundamentals are just rotten from my point of view.

This gets to two points then -

How much can you get away from an arms race just for self defense in Stellaris? (and on that point, you generally can't, but the problems with Fleet Power are not exactly being dragged into a bottom line arms race, when other empire's incentive and entire way to take the game revolves around warfare). To me there is a marked difference between 'I have to build a doom stack to go take the game away from the AI and be an active participant' and 'I have to build a doom stack just to keep myself clean, or I have to have 5 vassals with 5 mini stacks to Voltron with me if I'm attacked'. I think this is a hard one to get right to taste, but it should be tried.

I hear ya with Fleet Power being overly dominant, but see it in stuff like Diplomatic Weight and AI evaluations to throw themselves at you to become vassal. This is where its over abundantly doing work to seal the game whether you even want it to or not (Doing No Fed No Vassal playthroughs where I have to basically fend off endless requests, not because I'm totally invested in diplomatic corps, but because I have a big honking fleet because I don't have/want allies.) Thats not strictly about fleet power though, that's about Diplomilitary interaction and needs adjustment in my opinion.

Second point 'Is the composition of Fleet Power interesting or compelling', and this is where I don't really think it is overall even if there are some alternative means. I like Merc Enclaves, but that's not exactly interesting and the ships you get are the ships you get, sidestepping one of the major inflections of fleet composition. Same thing with Nanites - its a sidestep and does what it promises but its not exactly addressing that despite the presentation, the warfare model is kinda basic and functional to resolve conflict despite all these distracting minor knobs and buttons to tweak with it. I don't know what to do about that but it is a dangling out there.

I'm not trying to talk you out of valid criticisms and how the game doesn't jibe for you like it did, especially because I agree with some of them. Also because the flavor and theme do a ton of lifting for me too and is kind of what keeps me playing despite warts and flaws. I'm mostly just trying to flesh out how to keep the game compelling even after you've figured it out and there isn't help coming from the development side in timely fashion. Because some major changes that shake up the staid dynamics are way more difficult to pull off at this mature point.

I think a lot of players aren't wrong about symptoms but the remedies are not really clear nor are they low hanging fruit now. I guess I'm just rambling about how to make do until the high hanging fruit actually blossoms and there's some notion it'll drop when it does.

 

[Thiend]

A big part is having all these dlc mechanics integrated in base game and so can be iterated on in future and can be made to work with each other to greater effect.
e.g. look at how the caravaneers and Ecumenopolis have been largely left untouched since their inception.
Each DLC creates tech debt because they need to take every combination of dlc into consideration when making content, starting afresh wipes it all away

Look at other games with sequels. You aren't gonna get all the DLC integrated into the new base game, you're gonna get years of releasing a new version of what Stellaris already has.

It's a loss for everyone. Paradox spends years developing a game that makes less money on the base game than the several DLCs they could develop in that time. We have to spend years re-buying features before the game is even as good as we already had.

And yes, they'll be re-sold, because it will take as much time to make in a new engine as it did to make it in this one in the first place. Making them won't be free, so obtaining them won't be free. That's just how it works.

The only reason to make a sequel instead of updating features with custodian patches is if it becomes impossible to run the game in the old engine, which it is not. Don't bloat your galaxy with 50 AI empires and 1000 stars and you'll be just fine. Settings have performance implications, I do not play on max settings so that performance is within the range the game is actually designed for and I do not have performance issues.

 

[mrt1212]

Look at other games with sequels. You aren't gonna get all the DLC integrated into the new base game, you're gonna get years of releasing a new version of what Stellaris already has.

It's a loss for everyone. Paradox spends years developing a game that makes less money on the base game than the several DLCs they could develop in that time. We have to spend years re-buying features before the game is even as good as we already had.

And yes, they'll be re-sold, because it will take as much time to make in a new engine as it did to make it in this one in the first place. Making them won't be free, so obtaining them won't be free. That's just how it works.

The only reason to make a sequel instead of updating features with custodian patches is if it becomes impossible to run the game in the old engine, which it is not. Don't bloat your galaxy with 50 AI empires and 1000 stars and you'll be just fine. Settings have performance implications, I do not play on max settings so that performance is within the range the game is actually designed for and I do not have performance issues.

PDX kinda paints themselves into corners with this, but I would like to point out that many of us basically shuffle between PDX games depending on their development cycles and expectations. I played CKII pretty exclusively for a while even after picking up Stellaris because it was a full fledged product that kept getting new stuff, and once that was over, I moved over to Stellaris that was now a more full fledged product that kept getting new stuff. Even though I have CKIII, I played a few times to get a feel and am waiting for more content and Stellaris to be over before I make it my main paid game. Because I have 100 bucks a year to spend on gaming.

And I know I'm not alone by how many other players ask why Stellaris lacks something found in another Clausewitz engine release, which you'd only know by checking out the rest of the portfolio.

 

[PK_AZ]

It's a loss for everyone. Paradox spends years developing a game that makes less money on the base game than the several DLCs they could develop in that time. We have to spend years re-buying features before the game is even as good as we already had.

I stand in position that, with current Paradox development style, advantage of sequel is not that you can add something. Advantage is that you can remove something. For example all the features that seemed ok on paper, and get implemented because why not, and then happened to have so long-term consequences you do not like. Or features that were added in early stage of development, and doesn't really work with the way your team see the game now, but they are so ingrained in the game spirit, that you cannot really remove them.

Don't bloat your galaxy with 50 AI empires and 1000 stars

Don't tell me how to handle my life.

 

[HFY]

Don't tell me how to handle my life.

Ah, a contrarian. In that case:

Don't play Stellaris ever again, and don't post feedback about your experience on this forum.

 

[PK_AZ]

Ah, a contrarian. In that case:

Don't play Stellaris ever again, and don't post feedback about your experience on this forum.

That's actually shockingly nice. You do know we are in internet, right?

 

[HFY]

That's actually shockingly nice. You do know we are in internet, right?

In a society which profits from bigotry and alienation, being a decent person is an act of rebellion.

 

[whateverman111]

I still fail to see what the great big thing that can be done in Stellaris 2 is; so that can't be accomplished in Stellaris 1. I might be an outlier in this, but the whole "better performance/graphics" is wholly irrelevant to me. Especially if it ends up replacing the current nice 2D alien portraits with fugly 3D models. I dunno, I just feel that there is a ton of untapped potential in OG Stellaris. Heck, we just started to have something resembling a victory condition with Cosmogenesis.

This is exactly my feeling - how would Stellaris 2 be different enough from Stellaris to justify the time and cost?

Stellaris 2 could work if Stellaris wasn't a space game, like the 50 Total Wars from different eras (though those got stale super quickly), but space is unbounded so it just works without a sequel.

 

[PK_AZ]

This is exactly my feeling - how would Stellaris 2 be different enough from Stellaris to justify the time and cost?

There was actually threat with things that people wants to see in Stellaris 2, that they don't imagine being done for Stellaris 1. I will just throw my pet peeve
Continuous POPs, as opposed to discrete POPs. So instead of three POPs of workers and two POPs of Administrators, you have 3.876.223X workers and 54.678X administrators.
I foresee you answering that it can be done in Stellaris 1. But can it? For starters, continuous POPs will mean whole system of growth has to be reworked, probably even re-thought. Then, there is Job system, designer and balanced for discrete, same-size POPs. This one also has to be reworked and rebalanced. That will obviously mean economy balance is changed. Especially considering that now increase in output is also continuous (each POP is slightly growing each monthly tick) instead of discrete (when new POP was spawned from time to time). Faction support balance will also changes, as each POP would have percentual support for each ethos, instead of - again - discrete 'one Ethics per one POP' approach.
That is instantly many, many things to rebalance that late in game lifecycle. And we didn't even get to all the stuff keeping track of very small groups of people instantly allows.

 

[3ishop]

Yeah the idea of Stellaris 2 shows the issue of games as service/long life games. It's not easy to follow up after a game getting possibly a decade of post release support.

Of course there always is a simple way to help with the issue being DLC feature bloat...roll the oldest ones in to the base game. Then you can incorporate it better and build on it with other content while also helping to justify the base game price while also reducing the visual load for people to get in to the game.

 

[HFY]

Of course there always is a simple way to help with the issue being DLC feature bloat...roll the oldest ones in to the base game. Then you can incorporate it better and build on it with other content while also helping to justify the base game price while also reducing the visual load for people to get in to the game.

Mashing "Agree" button as hard as I can.

Yeah, roll some of the oldest DLC into the base game. Raise the base game price by whatever their lowest sale price would have been.

Simplify the giant { if { blocks.

 

[Troyen]

A big part is having all these dlc mechanics integrated in base game and so can be iterated on in future and can be made to work with each other to greater effect.

That never happens because it's not practical from a dev perspective. Spend 5ish years getting your new base game engine running (and there's no way they'd stick with Clausewitz when everything else is moving to Jomini) and now you have to port ten years worth of DLC features over, which may not translate cleanly into the new engine or may require engine support. And by the time you're done with that, more DLC will have been released. Even if you did invest the decade plus of developing all that (without making money off of it the entire time), you'd have a mess of a game design on launch and would struggle post-launch because you've already locked your design space down to what the original did.

Sequels are your chance to wipe the slate clean and build foundations for what you'd like to do differently from the original and remove what didn't pan out.

Yeah the idea of Stellaris 2 shows the issue of games as service/long life games. It's not easy to follow up after a game getting possibly a decade of post release support.

Of course there always is a simple way to help with the issue being DLC feature bloat...roll the oldest ones in to the base game. Then you can incorporate it better and build on it with other content while also helping to justify the base game price while also reducing the visual load for people to get in to the game.

Both HoI IV and EU4 have now rolled in some of the oldest DLC into the base game, so there's precedent. I wouldn't be surprised if Utopia became part of the base game in the future considering how many mechanics are locked behind it.

That being said, the Stellaris engine is showing its age. The #1 reason we've been given for e.g. no Branch Office Planner is it's very hard and time consuming to make new UI in the game.

 

[Exasperation]

There was actually threat with things that people wants to see in Stellaris 2, that they don't imagine being done for Stellaris 1. I will just throw my pet peeve
Continuous POPs, as opposed to discrete POPs. So instead of three POPs of workers and two POPs of Administrators, you have 3.876.223X workers and 54.678X administrators.
I foresee you answering that it can be done in Stellaris 1. But can it? For starters, continuous POPs will mean whole system of growth has to be reworked, probably even re-thought. Then, there is Job system, designer and balanced for discrete, same-size POPs. This one also has to be reworked and rebalanced. That will obviously mean economy balance is changed. Especially considering that now increase in output is also continuous (each POP is slightly growing each monthly tick) instead of discrete (when new POP was spawned from time to time). Faction support balance will also changes, as each POP would have percentual support for each ethos, instead of - again - discrete 'one Ethics per one POP' approach.
That is instantly many, many things to rebalance that late in game lifecycle. And we didn't even get to all the stuff keeping track of very small groups of people instantly allows.

Another way to describe this would be "Vic3 style pops" so, while it would require a lot of balancing work, at least a mechanical framework for things like pop growth and job assignment has largely been hashed out already.

 

[mrt1212]

I mean, if the reason to create Stellaris 2 is to get another crack at the UI because of how incomprehensible the current UI is, then I'm all for it. Say what you will about what ails Stellaris, but the UI itself is a net drag on the game because you have to traverse so much of it to do anything. Even accepting that this is a Clausewitz limit and the devs hands are tied in putting cooldown counters in the exact spot where you elect to start cooldown, this is the kind of inane stuff that could possibly make for a more enjoyable experience on the whole.

People always surmise there is no money in UI updates, but I reckon that some of Stellaris potential absolutely took a shiv to the ribs because this UI is a jumbled fractured mess where the nebulous complaint about the game becoming overwhelming and hard to play as the game goes on is about UI presentation and how it just can't keep up with the amount of objects it has to present, and there's not a lot that can be done now - there are kludges and SOPs to get around some of it, but the game is aching for it at this point.

So on new UI alone, Stellaris 2 should be done. The details of gameplay are so debatable to taste and preference but I don't know anyone who is tied to this UI and think its a strong suit of the game. It exists, it present info, it isn't good at it, nor does it follow player gameflows.

 

[HFY]

Another way to describe this would be "Vic3 style pops" so, while it would require a lot of balancing work, at least a mechanical framework for things like pop growth and job assignment has largely been hashed out already.

How do those handle cyborg enhancements / genemodding / necrophage transformation / etc.?

 

[Exasperation]

How do those handle cyborg enhancements / genemodding / necrophage transformation / etc.?

Well, there's already a framework for assimilation into other cultures and religions (which in Vic3 means transforming members of one pop into members of another pop), so presumably the back-end for more sci-fi styles of assimilation would use those mechanics. The Stellaris (sub-)species takes the place of the Vic3 culture/religion combination when it comes to distinguishing between pops (or exists alongside culture/religion as an independent element if you wanted to make cultures and/or religions be a thing in Stellaris 2). Running a gene-modding project or the like, instead of being a thing that does nothing until it completes or is cancelled, would just apply an assimilation rate causing the target pops to gradually transform for as long as the project runs (similar to how the Promote National Values decree works for cultural/religious assimilation). And as a bonus, pops undergoing Vic3-style assimilation can still work jobs and have normal citizenship and living standards.

 

[HFY]

Well, there's already a framework for assimilation into other cultures and religions (which in Vic3 means transforming members of one pop into members of another pop), so presumably the back-end for more sci-fi styles of assimilation would use those mechanics. The Stellaris (sub-)species takes the place of the Vic3 culture/religion combination when it comes to distinguishing between pops (or exists alongside culture/religion as an independent element if you wanted to make cultures and/or religions be a thing in Stellaris 2). Running a gene-modding project or the like, instead of being a thing that does nothing until it completes or is cancelled, would just apply an assimilation rate causing the target pops to gradually transform for as long as the project runs (similar to how the Promote National Values decree works for cultural/religious assimilation). And as a bonus, pops undergoing Vic3-style assimilation can still work jobs and have normal citizenship and living standards.

Do the traits of a culture and/or religion map kinda vaguely to Stellaris species traits?

Honestly I do also want culture & religion and "social" assimilation in Stellaris (alongside the physical / technological assimilations we already have) so if diverse species of space aliens can be handled, then I'm on board for the rest.

 

[Exasperation]

Do the traits of a culture and/or religion map kinda vaguely to Stellaris species traits?

Honestly I do also want culture & religion and "social" assimilation in Stellaris (alongside the physical / technological assimilations we already have) so if diverse species of space aliens can be handled, then I'm on board for the rest.

Sort of, but the cultural/religious trait-equivalents in Vic3 are pretty bare-bones. Cultures have "obsessions" which make them want more of particular goods, while religions have "taboos" which do the opposite. A culture's obsessions can change, while a religion's taboos are fixed. For the most part, cultures/religions in Vic3 are there to determine who is or isn't discriminated against (and as a consequence things like who can get the good jobs, how well they're paid, their political power, and how happy they are).
If I were the boss of Stellaris 2 development, I would set up cultures and religions to be defined by traits the same way species are (and I would say that some existing traits should be in one of the other categories, like "traditional" or "wasteful"). When you create your empire, you create an empire culture (more of a mindset than a culture if you're a gestalt) and religion to go with it (with the possibility of not having an empire religion depending on the values you choose). Refugees, immigrants, conquered pops, etc. would keep their original religion/culture unless/until assimilated (allowing for being able to set citizenship status based on culture or religion instead of species, potential for separatism in unhappy wrong-culture pops, etc.).

 

[Thiend]

Yeah the idea of Stellaris 2 shows the issue of games as service/long life games. It's not easy to follow up after a game getting possibly a decade of post release support.

Of course there always is a simple way to help with the issue being DLC feature bloat...roll the oldest ones in to the base game. Then you can incorporate it better and build on it with other content while also helping to justify the base game price while also reducing the visual load for people to get in to the game.

Yeah, I've actually suggested a few times that both varieties of gestalt should be base-game. I own them both, but I won't feel ripped off if it means they actually get content.

For an example of gestalts not getting content because they aren't base game, putting aside many origins where they get nothing, the best example is Galactic Paragons. Gestalts get, in the DLC Galactic Paragons:
1. No council customization
2. No destiny traits
3. No... galactic paragons...

Fix those defects in the same patch that makes both of their DLCs free and I'll feel like I got an upgrade despite paying for now-free content.

There's probably a few more that could do with that treatment, but those would be first on my list.

 

[3ishop]

Fix those defects in the same patch that makes both of their DLCs free and I'll feel like I got an upgrade despite paying for now-free content.

Yeah my view is the oldest DLCs have been around for a while, most of those that have picked them up will likely have gotten more than their monies worth out of them. So at this point it's making the continued development easier and opening up new paths of expansion for them.

If it's gonna take like 6+ years for a DLC to become base game content, not likely to miss out on many sales with people holding off to get it rolled in either.