So after reading all these threads the most important thing Stellaris can do is avoid ...

[TheDungen]

You completely ignored the most important aspect of the war. Sovereignty.

The people of Kuwait may not matter, but protecting the very foundation of modern international society on which the UN is built is. The Gulf War represents perhaps the highest expression, and protection of Article 2(4). Further Iraq was violating a jus cogens norm which necessitates a response. I also don't see why ending up 'enriching' presents a problem. All status quo, and non-greedy, states benefited from the Gulf War.

The oil trade is irrelevant in comparison, I'd also note given Iraq needs to sell oil, the war would be entirely unnecessary since they'd have sold Kuwaiti oil.

Not sure I should get in this but according to the membership agreement of the UN the UN has albeit limited, authority that superceeds national soverignity. It was implemented after Rawanda, becuase the UN was accordign to their own rules unable to interfere in the massacre under the old treaty. So a force on a UN mission can actually be present in another country. Also the UN has authority to make decisions on territorial disputes. For an example they ruled that Åland should be part of Finland (for some reason no one understands).

 

[Precursor]

Not sure I should get in this but according to the membership agreement of the UN the UN has albeit limited, authority that superceeds national soverignity. It was implemented after Rawanda, becuase the UN was accordign to their own rules unable to interfere in the massacre under the old treaty. So a force on a UN mission can actually be present in another country. Also the UN has authority to make decisions on territorial disputes. For an example they ruled that Åland should be part of Finland (for some reason no one understands).

R2P comes after Kosovo (and Rwanda, I'm more familar with Kosovo though) and obviously after the Gulf War. It, and Annan, maintain a level of deference and respect for both sovereignty and ensuring that the UNSC maintains its power. I'm unsure exactly what you're getting at though? R2P does not eliminate Article 2(4), nor the concept of Sovereignty.

ICJ is a different matter as IIRC their jurisdiction tends to stem from consent of the states. With many states including reservations about it.

 

[Stormcow]

I think we don't need to look further than Civ 2 (or it might have been civ3) for the stability of having your population suffer from war weariness really quickly in the late game when your government is democracy. You were also restricted by not being allowed to start a war unless the people agreed. if you did not like that you could become Fascists for a massive science penalty. Unfortunately in civ there was nothing to stop you getting all the science as a democracy then switching to Fascism in order to kill everyone.

Also EU4 kind of has a thing. I was watching a mate play EU4 the other day as Japan. he had a large trade fleet (as you would expect), when he went to war with Korea, he used the trade fleet to escort his transport ships. the Koreans sunk them all with their fleet of war ships. So my mate had chosen to make money rather than have a war fleet and failed to properly tool up for war. The war went badly because all wars that start at 2am when you are hammered go badly

 

[TheDungen]

R2P comes after Kosovo (and Rwanda, I'm more familar with Kosovo though) and obviously after the Gulf War. It, and Annan, maintain a level of deference and respect for both sovereignty and ensuring that the UNSC maintains its power. I'm unsure exactly what you're getting at though? R2P does not eliminate Article 2(4), nor the concept of Sovereignty.

ICJ is a different matter as IIRC their jurisdiction tends to stem from consent of the states. With many states including reservations about it.

Using abbreviations just make you look like a jerk. No one here has a doctorate in UN policy. If you can't explain it simple you don't know it well enough.

 

[serpentskirt]

The biggest problem with military in such games is that if you lack one you may be wiped by just any random dude early in the game. There is no option to remove (or defend from) your opponent by means of science/diplomacy on, let's say, turn 50 of 500. Ironically, EU4 is much better in that aspect than most of other games I've played - ally BBB and relax.

I would rather prefer the endgame not being insanely boring because of skipping turns (unpausing) while you're waiting for your diplo/science/whatever victory. Usually my Civ/GalCiv game ends around midgame as the most important part of the game is over and if I've done it well, it's obvious who's winner. That's another plus for CK2/EU4 as countries find themselves in different starting position and it may be interesting to play only 1/4th of the game just to kick some asses (hello, Byz) or get tricky achievement. To be honest I'm rather afraid that Stellaris will be yet another 4X space game.

 

[Precursor]

Using abbreviations just make you look like a jerk. No one here has a doctorate in UN policy. If you can't explain it simple you don't know it well enough.

ICJ- International Court of Justice.
R2P- Responsibility to Protect Called for by Annan in '99, 2000, articulated by ICISS in 2001.
IIRC- If I recall correctly
UNSC- United Nations Security Council. typically abbreviated UN Security Council in the literature, but I like Halo so I use UNSC.

I'm specifically using the ICISS one since I have it with me.

 

[TruckFeet]

The biggest problem with military in such games is that if you lack one you may be wiped by just any random dude early in the game. There is no option to remove (or defend from) your opponent by means of science/diplomacy on, let's say, turn 50 of 500. Ironically, EU4 is much better in that aspect than most of other games I've played - ally BBB and relax.

I would rather prefer the endgame not being insanely boring because of skipping turns (unpausing) while you're waiting for your diplo/science/whatever victory. Usually my Civ/GalCiv game ends around midgame as the most important part of the game is over and if I've done it well, it's obvious who's winner. That's another plus for CK2/EU4 as countries find themselves in different starting position and it may be interesting to play only 1/4th of the game just to kick some asses (hello, Byz) or get tricky achievement. To be honest I'm rather afraid that Stellaris will be yet another 4X space game.

Didn't you see the stuff about the end-game disasters? You're never too strong when it comes to a robot rebellion or an invasion of eldritch abominations.

 

[serpentskirt]

Didn't you see the stuff about the end-game disasters? You're never too strong when it comes to a robot rebellion or an invasion of eldritch abominations.

And that's IMHO just a bad game-design approach. Receiving random penalty of huge impact from nowhere is kind of stupid in a game with mirrored start. Plus, I suppose it'll be just annoying as goddamn one-shot enemies in JRPGS with random encounters. Will only slow down pacing which is really frustrating and not challenging at all 8\

 

[TruckFeet]

And that's IMHO just a bad game-design approach. Receiving random penalty of huge impact from nowhere is kind of stupid in a game with mirrored start. Plus, I suppose it'll be just annoying as goddamn one-shot enemies in JRPGS with random encounters. Will only slow down pacing which is really frustrating and not challenging at all 8\

Given that your choices affect them, I doubt it. If you don't use the warp too much, you won't get invaded. It's a choice you make. If you don't rely too much on AI, you won't have a robot rebellion happen. It's all about what choices you make. If you're xenophobic and refuse to cooperate with other races, AI will be more necessary to supplement your existing capabilities, and you might face a rebellion. If you go fully multicultural, and form a gigantic federation, you'll need to use the warp more in order to get around, and space will be more likely to tear. If you play carefully and don't use the more dangerous techs, you probably won't face disasters, but you'll more vulnerable to mundane threats.

 

[Lemont Elwood]

As I've argued before, the only way you can make a game where it doesn't come down to muh army is by making desirable goals that don't involve the application of an army. And making the process of getting there fun.

Victoria II, for example, is weak in a large number of ways, but it does have such goals in that you may choose to focus on economic health or social engineering instead of conquest... both Victoria II and Europa Universalis IV feature economic systems, but the former has a real ecosystem that reflects reality, while EU4 is press button to make money.

That's the difference. Unless grand strategy games focus on creating detailed economic, diplomatic, or social simulations, all decision-making will ultimately come down to "what puts me in the best position to seize more clay?"

 

[Lemont Elwood]

As I've argued before, the only way you can make a game where it doesn't come down to muh army is by making desirable goals that don't involve the application of an army. And making the process of getting there fun.

Victoria II, for example, is weak in a large number of ways, but it does have such goals in that you may choose to focus on economic health or social engineering instead of conquest... both Victoria II and Europa Universalis IV feature economic systems, but the former has a real ecosystem that reflects reality, while EU4 is press button to make money.

That's the difference. Unless grand strategy games focus on creating detailed economic, diplomatic, or social simulations, all decision-making will ultimately come down to "what puts me in the best position to seize more clay?"

 

[MI24th]

There should be a reward / incentive for something other than military research. A scientific but pacifist empire that uses malware to incapacitate the incoming invasion fleet, like the Cylons did. The economic powerhouse, using an example from Isamov's Foundation series, winning a war because the people of the invading empire get enrages because their iPhone 2152 wont be in stock.

As for a strong military, that will always be a must. Why? Because war, war never changes.

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

As I've argued before, the only way you can make a game where it doesn't come down to muh army is by making desirable goals that don't involve the application of an army. And making the process of getting there fun.

Victoria II, for example, is weak in a large number of ways, but it does have such goals in that you may choose to focus on economic health or social engineering instead of conquest... both Victoria II and Europa Universalis IV feature economic systems, but the former has a real ecosystem that reflects reality, while EU4 is press button to make money.

That's the difference. Unless grand strategy games focus on creating detailed economic, diplomatic, or social simulations, all decision-making will ultimately come down to "what puts me in the best position to seize more clay?"

I do agree with this... if there are no real simulation of realistic economy and both internal and external politics then grabbing more land and crush everything is always the best option. You might be able to play in another way but it always is sub optimal. I do get the feeling this is true for EU4 in may ways. Building a medium sized tall empire is much harder than just keep conquering.

In my opinion the most efficient way to grow a society such as in space should be to do it organically and not by conquest at all. Conquest could be beneficial in the short term for some specific reason but otherwise just be a drain on resources.

The means by which you "defend" yourself should be important both for other civilizations and your own population. If you win a war and manage to completely conquer an enemy and you simply destroy their worlds in order to remove them as a threat it should have diplomatic consequences... perhaps even internal ones depending on your civilization.
It you just win a war and create a friendly government but otherwise leave them bee afterword you should have vastly different reactions from the first. Most likely the second option will be much more beneficial since it will open up opportunity for trade and other diplomatic options. In the first option you destroyed their economy so they are not going to be very good trading partners anymore.

The whole idea of military conquest being more effective than peaceful expansion and trade are just a meta gaming leftover from badly designed games with very little regard to real social, political and economic consideration of player actions. Sure, conquest should be possible and viable... but far from very lucrative in an economical and prosperity sense.

You could argue that if you kill all known alien species and enslave most of your own population that disagrees with you it is a win. Sure it is... but at what social cost to your people or in this case subjects?
This is just one way to look at things and if you feel this is something you like doing that is OK. We all like to play the bad guy at times. But I think that a games scoring system should promote peaceful actions more than military actions, but that is just my opinion on the matter.

 

[serpentskirt]

Given that your choices affect them, I doubt it. If you don't use the warp too much, you won't get invaded. It's a choice you make. If you don't rely too much on AI, you won't have a robot rebellion happen. It's all about what choices you make. If you're xenophobic and refuse to cooperate with other races, AI will be more necessary to supplement your existing capabilities, and you might face a rebellion. If you go fully multicultural, and form a gigantic federation, you'll need to use the warp more in order to get around, and space will be more likely to tear. If you play carefully and don't use the more dangerous techs, you probably won't face disasters, but you'll more vulnerable to mundane threats.

Looks like badboy but spread across several 'entities'.

 

[wolfing]

What if the armies are not necessarily loyal to you? Let's say you have a leadership limit that controls how many troops/ships you can have loyal to you. This is not tied to your military technology, more like to your diplomatic technology and/or other factors (government type, etc). If you go over this limit, there is a chance of an attempt of a military coup or a group of your systems declaring independence. This feels almost like bringing some CK2 concepts too, which would be nice.

 

[Pentel123]

What if the armies are not necessarily loyal to you? Let's say you have a leadership limit that controls how many troops you can have loyal to you. This is not tied to your military technology, more like to your diplomatic technology and/or other factors (government type, etc). If you go over this limit, there is a chance of an attempt of a military coup or a group of your systems declaring independence. This feels almost like bringing some CK2 concepts too, which would be nice.

Could definitely be a part of the social tree, and could come at the cost of some other useful techs, perhaps a xenophic route and a xenophillic route. Once improves your military, the other your ability to interact with other races. Boosting your military makes it harder to make friends/ form federations/ establish trade routes. etc

 

[small.cpu]

As has been mentioned, military and wars are usually the best way to play this games because they're usually the part of the game with the most things to do and where most of the gameplay is.

Almost always all research is about getting bigger and better guns, the things you build are about getting more guns and the diplomacy is about having a reason to use those guns. Its no wonder that these games then mostly play as wargames. There is not much else to do besides waging war.

Having a war is an involved process, you move troops, you build units, you fight, you regroup you win battles and lose battles. You research better units and build improvements so you can get more units and cheaper units or better units. In EU IV about 3/4 of the clicks you will do in a game is about the military, in Victoria 2 maybe half (if you build factories yourself). If you don't plan to go to war, you set some things up and then go to gamespeed 5 as there is nothing to do besides waiting until a research is finished or you have enough money to build something new.

This is by design. So if you add stuff to the game then that makes waging war harder it just annoys the people that like this as you basically remove gameplay for them instead of adding stuff to do. Peace now lasts 15 years? Ok, gamespeed 5 until the truce is over. It doesn't change the mechanics that make waging war the most fun thing to do.

Imo one can imagine other game systems being as powerful as waging war but that would also have to be involving to the player and not just sending a diplomat somewhere and then waiting 5 years until they completed their mission.

Let me fantasize for a moment:



Lets say we have a powerful espionage system. We're space-burgundy next to space-france. They have this huge military and an appetite for our lands. We know that they'll declare war on us soon as our relations are poor. What to do? Normally you'd try to build a big military as possible and ally with as many other big powers as willing. How about a third option?

Thanks to our research in black holes we've developed a device that compresses the core of a star into a neutron star. Due the lack of radiation pressure the outer part of the star will then gravitationally collapse on its center, leading to a huge new fusion reaction that produces a nova. Using this bomb in war would only lead to everybody else declaring on us at its a generally shunted weapon of stellar desctruction.

Conveniently, we have stolen a transport ship from space-prussia a few years ago. We use this ship together with a bribed space-prussian crew to place the bomb on the space-paris system. Boooom. The nova threatens the space-france home system. The nice neighbours we are we just have this huge transport fleet idling with which we help evacutate their populace to our lowly populated outer planets. And to close any loop holes we send a hit-squad to kill the hired space-prussians to prevent any possible leaks.

Result: A devastated space-france that blames space-prussia and we gained a huge population boost and the eternal thanks of the space-french.

Now, it wouldn't be fun for space-france to not have any options of course and to just blow up stars willy nilly would be too powerful. What could have gone wrong?

- Turns out the space-spanish knew we had developed such a bomb and now black-mail us that they would release this knowledge.
- The hired space-prussia crew escapes our hit squad and spills the beans.
- We forgot to build a transport fleet to help the french evacuate and they didn't have enough ships. The death of their people leads them to an angry crusade and they declare war against all their neighbours, including us.
- Space-prussia knew that we had stolen a ship from them and together with our lack of explanation on why we have this huge transport fleet just sitting around they successfully blame us. Space-france and the rest of the galaxy declare war on us.
- Developing the bomb in secret costs tons of money and keeping our knowledge of it secret is hard too, if everybody knows we have this weapon we can't really use it anymore

Each mission would have scale on how well it went and how much other species found out. It would go from "blamed somebody else" to "absolutely undedected" to "conspiracy theory about our involvement" to "we got found out". Depending on that we would get no relation hit to a huge relation hit or if we successfully blame somebody else, they'd get a relations hit.

You would have assets that you'd have to acquire first (like a stolen transport ship) or build (the starburst bomb). You'd have small missions (bribe a foreign crew and afterwards assasinate them successfully) and large preperations to do (build a transport fleet for evacuation) for the large mission itself. You'd have to move your assets in place and research to do. Just like with war.

And a few years later you happily have survived you get reports that on a derelict station in space-paris system there are reports of your transport moving the bomb to the stars and that one of the evacuees has brought a copy of it with them. Better get your assasins after them before the space-french get their own team of investigators on the case.

 

[TheDungen]

War is a very diffrent beast in modern times compared to less than a hundred years ago. Wars of information, as well as terrorism and wars of propaganda must be elements to be considered in any game beyond the modern age.

 

[TheDungen]

I like that idea sure a militant faction may be able to conqer everythign but it will soon enough fall apart again. While a fully peaceful leader is much less likely to fall apart but then again will expand very slowly if at all.

 

[ztoli17]

It will be like the mirror universe in Star Trek. The federation is peaceful, and multicultural, while the Terran Empire was the complete opposite, they were lika a fascist dictatorship. However, even Mirror universe bearded-Spock realized that the empire will be destroyed that way soon, so he tried to do some reforms.

I can imagine that in the game, where you can try and build a big ass empire with heavy military focus, but you will face much harsher social and economical issues in some time, which will force you to either fall apart completely, or slowly "reform".

 

[TruckFeet]

I think the problem with the most warlike and violent groups have, is that they will eventually eat themselves if they have no one else to make their prey.

This is why I can't imagine a huge empire that simply conquered everything to be really good at science, sociological thinking, or any great technological progress really. It will all just be a collective effort to hurdle their way onto another planet or star and when the maximum inclination is reached. They only have themselves to look at when they want to 'grow' even more.

So in my perspective, peaceful space faring nations should have much better technological progress then violent and aggressive species. Since those types tend to have 'larger borders' but are quite backwards thanks to the 'collective en-masse' type of thinking. Which they put themselves through in order to keep expanding themselves even in the face of different alien races inhibiting them.

This also brings up another point that these aggressive empires really don't value the individuals opinion or thought all that much. And probably inhibit it in order to fulfill the needs of the 'greater good' or 'higher order.'

I think they mentioned that your techs will be at least partly dependent on your society's ethics. That could help curb warmongering, if you have to balance it with social technologies to keep order in your society.

 

[TheDungen]

It will be like the mirror universe in Star Trek. The federation is peaceful, and multicultural, while the Terran Empire was the complete opposite, they were lika a fascist dictatorship. However, even Mirror universe bearded-Spock realized that the empire will be destroyed that way soon, so he tried to do some reforms.

I can imagine that in the game, where you can try and build a big ass empire with heavy military focus, but you will face much harsher social and economical issues in some time, which will force you to either fall apart completely, or slowly "reform".

Loved that episode, showed that logic is above good and evil.