Todays Livestream Had Some Improvements

[GN_Fighter]

As for the beta, I am fearful of its current state but hopeful because of the (good) direction in which it is moving. Ambivalence is the word of the day, at least for now. Let's see what future betas bring.

In my opinion the worst case has been averted thanks to the beta.

but as i.. and others have pointed out during the course of the last weeks.. the zone-changes where absolutly unnessesary and opened up more construction-sites to fix than actually helped improve the game. and those fixes, even the ones we have now are more band-aid the avert a collapse than intersting mechanics.

housing has essentially become a non-descissionfactor to the point that i was questioning why i should feel something positive for a 75% housing need reduction ( + housing-negative-trait is going to become the new meta ).

amenitys are still a mess due to luxury housing existing in combination with how valueble 100 jobs have become thanks to the 1 zone = 100 job change. In my opinion.. Luxury Housing has to go either completly ( which is my preference ) or nerved into oblivion so players have to actually make a choice between spending a pop on working amenitys or spending a housing-slot on just a small amount of amenitys. in that regard the holo-theatre-line needs to get a look at what else can be done to make it more valuable compared to a gene-clinic-line.

with the change that we now only customize two of the zones and they only produce 100job each pdx has lessened the impact of a upgrading a district on the worker-economy by 2/3 but the impact of the specialist-economy if you have a CG producer and a CG consumer district on the same planet still remains.

In my opinion a game should feel like a well oiled maschine where each part/mechanic fits into another but the current beta feels like a McGyvercontraption that is only working thanks to a lot of duct-tape and two cranks with warhammer 40kOrks operating them.

and this is BEFORE we even see what balance-stupidity those disgustingly OP-looking bioships are going to bring.

<insert an obligatory dev's have lost touch with reality and playerbase-rant>

 

[Kataclyszm]

disgustingly OP-looking bioships are going to bring.

Seriously! Why do they have more X-slots than a cosmogenesis battlecruiser?!

 

[Edorath]

Seriously! Why do they have more X-slots than a cosmogenesis battlecruiser?!

To be fair you need
>the right tech for them to grow
>the ship staying alive for ten years or more or spending ten years building it
for them to reach that point, whereas cosmogenesis can just pump em ad infinitum, FE ships are still better because mass deployment is still far more flexible and overall desirable, not to mention it also gets paradox titans which have two T slots whereas bioship titans are confirmed to just be normal ones

 

[Kataclyszm]

To be fair you need
>the right tech for them to grow
>the ship staying alive for ten years or more or spending ten years building it
for them to reach that point, whereas cosmogenesis can just pump em ad infinitum, FE ships are still better because mass deployment is still far more flexible and overall desirable, not to mention it also gets paradox titans which have two T slots whereas bioship titans are confirmed to just be normal ones

Sure. With all this they might be just on-par with FE ships. (Actually still better because even 'young' ones equal to battlecruisers in terms of X)

So tell me, how're they gonna stack up against their actual intended equals, plain-game battleships? They aren't.

 

[GN_Fighter]

To be fair you need
>the right tech for them to grow
>the ship staying alive for ten years or more or spending ten years building it
for them to reach that point, whereas cosmogenesis can just pump em ad infinitum, FE ships are still better because mass deployment is still far more flexible

yea in theory.. but one of the big issues stellaris has is not that a feature-idea is not viable in theory but that it doesn't work quite as well in praxis when it meets the the rest of the feature. in this case and as far as i have understood it, you also have special corvette-killing modules/ships and growing a ship doesn't change is fleetcommand-value meaning you can end up with quite the overpowered-fleet if you manage to keep the ships alive long enough.

not to forget that "the right tech for them to grow" also has is mirror in getting the crisis to a certain stage and the inability to get the Defender-Perk in turn.

but as i said.. we don't know quite exactly how it play's out yet only that it looks op.

 

[Falrinn]

It's worth noting that a fully grown bioship uses twice the fleet capacity of it's equivalent mechanical ship. So even if individually the ships are much stronger, that isn't necessarily going to translate into a bio fleet being inherently stronger than a mechanical fleet with the same capacity.

And while I wouldn't be surprised if bioships still end up coming out ahead on launch, I can't imagine we'll have a situation where biofleets are just deleting any mechanical fleet they come across.

 

[Kataclyszm]

So even if individually the ships are much stronger, that isn't necessarily going to translate into a bio fleet being inherently stronger than a mechanical fleet with the same capacity.

If memory serves, the bio-battleships use 12 command instead of 8.

At young, that's 3 X-slots. 12/3 = 4command-per-X. More when they mature.

Compare to the 4-command-per-X of Cosmogenesis battlecruisers and the 8 of regular battleships.

It's about the ratios.

 

[Zaacplot300]

I like a lot of what I've seen. It seems the economy is actually somewhat workable now and districts/zones seem more polished than the beta. One thing I did notice though is that leader traits have not been updated yet to the new leveling system. I'm not sure if that means they are still planning on updating the traits and haven't gotten to it yet or if they are no longer planning on it and we'll have to work with massively nerfed leaders.

 

[NorseGod]

I totally without reservation agree that this was all unnecessary. A district slot was fine, and and I wish PDX's time had been spent elsewhere.

But we're in this boat now and it's nice that at least certain elements have been actioned and improved.

I mean, at the same time it can all be undone if the users react to it poorly. It wouldn't be the first time Paradox change how the economy worked in the game "for the better" and then ended up undoing a bunch of it when it didn't work out well. We can all see that a "select 2 district types from a list" is the better solution, and lumping them into City Districts is less granular than just doing them seperately, and it's negatively affecting gameplay.

And as for my issues with Pops, that's an easy x/100 and display to two digits Mod that folks can install afterwards. If the Pops are going to be an abstract number and not an actual value like "1 million individuals" I don't like breaking the 1 Pop needs 1 Food and makes X minerals formula.

 

[Falrinn]

If memory serves, the bio-battleships use 12 command instead of 8.

At young, that's 3 X-slots. 12/3 = 4command-per-X. More when they mature.

Compare to the 4-command-per-X of Cosmogenesis battlecruisers and the 8 of regular battleships.

It's about the ratios.

If I'm reading the dev diary correctly, Stingers (the bio battleships) should use 8/12/16 ship size and have 2/3/4 X slots for the juvenile/mature/elder stages. The ratio of command to X-slots stays right at 4-to-1 as they mature.

That's parity with the cosmogenesis ships, but doesn't exceed it. Which I'll admit still feels OP, but it's possible other variables make up for it.

All that being said, even if bioships are kind of OP, I can't imagine a situation where even a small bioship empire can easily steamroll much larger and nominally more powerful empires that uses mechanical ships would make it to live.

 

[cryptkeeper]

I have mixed feelings about this one. There was certain neatness to having "zones" with urban districts having two "zone slots" while resource districts had one.

On the other hand, it does feel like it will allow some more flavorful "zone" names, as we've seen with Archives, or the Subterranean and Agrarian ones.

Honestly I'm going to miss my death egg zone xD. But i guess the new names make sense.

 

[SirBlackAxe]

I don't really like the look of these research support districts. Since all the penalties can be avoided, they're just encouragement to spam basic resource districts for the +10% research output while disabling all the debuffed miner jobs and using the engineering research specialization so you don't need to pay increased biologist upkeep. It works a little better if that tooltip is wrong and you're paying increased upkeep on engineers rather than biologists, but I still don't like that the correct move is to disable all the miner jobs due to the -30% output and get your minerals from another planet. Maybe it should give a reduction in number of miner jobs provided rather than a penalty to job efficiency?

Here's the livestream, in case anyone needs help finding it since I haven't seen it linked anywhere:

 

[Kataclyszm]

but I still don't like that the correct move is to disable all the miner jobs due to the -30% output and get your minerals from another planet

I think, like, in theory trade deficits would punish this move?

 

[WoodenP]

Honestly I'm going to miss my death egg zone xD. But i guess the new names make sense.

You can still have a "death egg zone" - it's what the specialised district would be called instead. And you'd get a cool story tooltip for it. And hopefully art / icon.

 

[NorseGod]

District Specialization I think is a much better term. Particularly for the rural districts, since it did feel kind of weird that you'd have a single "zone" that encompassed the entire district.

Yeah, "Zone" would have worked as a term if they acted as the box that contained a set of districts, like "Forge Zone" then contained all the Forge Districts and Forge Building Slots.

 

[NorseGod]

I think, like, in theory trade deficits would punish this move?

Unless you build a devoted Clerk/Trader world as a "Trade Hub" which offsets those negatives. I think it's a good solution, going for mono-builds means some extra costs you gotta mitigate in other ways.

 

[NorseGod]

In my opinion the worst case has been averted thanks to the beta.

but as i.. and others have pointed out during the course of the last weeks.. the zone-changes where absolutly unnessesary and opened up more construction-sites to fix than actually helped improve the game. and those fixes, even the ones we have now are more band-aid the avert a collapse than intersting mechanics.

housing has essentially become a non-descissionfactor to the point that i was questioning why i should feel something positive for a 75% housing need reduction ( + housing-negative-trait is going to become the new meta ).

amenitys are still a mess due to luxury housing existing in combination with how valueble 100 jobs have become thanks to the 1 zone = 100 job change. In my opinion.. Luxury Housing has to go either completly ( which is my preference ) or nerved into oblivion so players have to actually make a choice between spending a pop on working amenitys or spending a housing-slot on just a small amount of amenitys. in that regard the holo-theatre-line needs to get a look at what else can be done to make it more valuable compared to a gene-clinic-line.

with the change that we now only customize two of the zones and they only produce 100job each pdx has lessened the impact of a upgrading a district on the worker-economy by 2/3 but the impact of the specialist-economy if you have a CG producer and a CG consumer district on the same planet still remains.

In my opinion a game should feel like a well oiled maschine where each part/mechanic fits into another but the current beta feels like a McGyvercontraption that is only working thanks to a lot of duct-tape and two cranks with warhammer 40kOrks operating them.

and this is BEFORE we even see what balance-stupidity those disgustingly OP-looking bioships are going to bring.

<insert an obligatory dev's have lost touch with reality and playerbase-rant>

Literally this is all I want. It fixes the problem of "too many districts in the UI" by limiting the total number of district types by using limited boxes (which Zones function as) but lets us have granular control to build district by district, and it also allows the Devs to come up with custom "Zone/Districts" for DLCs and unique Planet features.

Unless this solution is somehow MASSIVELY harder for the AI to use (is it?) I don't get why this isn't the better solution.
(thanks to Pootino for the UI mockup)

 

[Kataclyszm]

All that being said, even if bioships are kind of OP, I can't imagine a situation where even a small bioship empire can easily steamroll much larger and nominally more powerful empires that uses mechanical ships would make it to live.

I have no problem imagining this at all.

 

[Newbee53]

Literally this is all I want. It fixes the problem of "too many districts in the UI" by limiting the total number of district types by using limited boxes (which Zones function as) but lets us have granular control to build district by district, and it also allows the Devs to come up with custom "Zone/Districts" for DLCs and unique Planet features.

Unless this solution is somehow MASSIVELY harder for the AI to use (is it?) I don't get why this isn't the better solution.
(thanks to Pootino for the UI mockup)

View attachment 1279890

Because it fails to provide the restrictions that the devs clearly and have all but explicitly stated they want? It's clear they don't want you to be able to build every single 'district specialization' on your planet. They want you to either have to take the generic ones--so you can make a lot of different things--or the specific resource ones, so that you have more focused planets.

Freely being able to build everything on the planet isn't better, because by all appearances the people who get to make that decision consider the restrictions a feature.

I have no problem imagining this at all.

While its easy to imagine, I expect its not going to be that extream of a case. I do expect bio-ships to be overpowered on release. But I doubt it is going to be all that much.

Based on what they've released I expect the intended balance to be something like:

Two fleets of equal 'naval capacity' will have bio-ships being smaller in number, but more powerful than the more numerous mechanical counterparts. (Bio-ships occupy more naval capacity than fleet capacity at larger growth stages.)

Mechanical ships in the early game will have a significant range advantage--and thus win the alpha strike ability. (No L slot weapons before stingers--I think--and G and H slots are limited to Harbingers.)

Bio-ships will have weak close quarters ships and weak long range ships. (Base Maulers have 2 defense slots. Harbingers and Stingers appear to have less hp/armor/shields as well)

Mechanical ships will be more of a 'jack of all trades' type of vessel that can be adapted to whatever situation you need. Bio-ships seem more focused in what they do.

*This is all based on screen shots and minor mentions of how the system works. So its obviously kind of guess work. I'd also point out that because of this apparent intentions, even if perfectly balanced mechanically bio-ships are very likely to feel more powerful overall. such that their is a real risk of people claiming 'bio-ships are overpowered' even when the data show them to be rather equal in power.

I should also point out that bio-ships require food as their primary build and upkeep material. Early game food is limited by number of colonies. Mid-game you are better off, but late game there is a real chance that you are either hurting for food or building agi-habitats. Which is pretty cool given how it will affect things, but also something to note on the 'are they balanced side.'

I've also heard a comment or two that I understand to mean 'conversion from food to alloys catalytic style is more efficient.' This is enterally supposition but it does make a lot of sense give they are clearly going for the 'small in number but mighty' style for the bio-ships.

 

[NorseGod]

Because it fails to provide the restrictions that the devs clearly and have all but explicitly stated they want? It's clear they don't want you to be able to build every single 'district specialization' on your planet. They want you to either have to take the generic ones--so you can make a lot of different things--or the specific resource ones, so that you have more focused planets.

Freely being able to build everything on the planet isn't better, because by all appearances the people who get to make that decision consider the restrictions a feature.

Then limit it to 2-3 types of District per planet. Exactly the same way they did Zones. Right now you can add 2 custom "district types" which can create 4 different Jobs. How would flipping it to the verion I gave, with the restriction that you start with the default City District, and then you can add 1 more from a list at Colonization, and a second later on as the COlony grows.

It's the exact same limitations, but you get better control over what jobs are built when.