In the last dev blog, the devs asked for opinions on the game state, bugs, AI, and balance.
I’ll list my thoughts from what I think is most important to least. If you disagree or agree, let me know.
1. Difficulty and AI
The AI needs a lot of improvements to its economy and combat behavior, but in my opinion that’s not even the biggest problem. The worst part of the AI right now is its passiveness.
The main way the AI makes the game challenging is through war — and that just isn’t happening enough on higher difficulties. Recently, I did an experiment: on Grand Admiral, I rushed Ascension with 0 fleets and 0 diplomacy. Out of 10 games, I was only attacked 3 times before finishing Ascension. That’s terrible. Grand Admiral is supposed to be the hardest the game gets, but the game just let me get away with it.
I understand there should be friendlier AIs, like Federation Builders, that are not aggressive. But can we at least make Hegemonic Imperialists or Despotic Slavers attack you if you have 0 fleet power?
The AI is so passive that changes to its economy or combat logic alone won’t be impactful, because it simply doesn’t do anything. Could we at least make the hardest difficulty actually hard?
2. Performance
We’ve been promised performance improvements. As I understand it, some of the recent changes were groundwork so you could finally fix things that weren’t possible to fix before — and thanks for that. But right now, I honestly don’t see any difference in performance.
3. Fix the AI’s economy and war logic
The way the AI builds its planets is dreadful — it’s just a random mess of buildings. It would also be nice if they fixed how the AI sometimes gets stuck booming one planet for 10 years while I take over its entire empire.
Please also make the AI build ground armies to defend its planets. Right now it mostly uses them as cleanup after the defenders are already wiped out.
4. Balance
We used to talk a lot about tech rushing being too dominant in the meta, and how it would be nice if unity was finally useful. Right now, it’s the opposite. The buffs from Ascensions make it not worth it to attack anyone or even focus on tech. Either slightly tone down the buffs from Ascensions, or maybe adjust empire size penalties, since the wide playstyle is also in a pretty bad spot.
It would also be good to tone down some of these buffs in general. It used to be that an Ascension that gave +20% resources from jobs empire-wide and +50% on one planet was considered great. Now we get even more than that.
What if the special government buffs were more specific, since Ascensions already give a lot? Instead of just more generic resource or stability bonuses, we could get thematic bonuses.
Here are some examples:
Insted of just resource form jobs or stabilty there is way more that can be given. Ship build speed, Unice traits for leaders, new ship componets and even if u whant to just buff resorce output u can make it a specific job like biologis or metalurgis output.
5. Galactic Community
When was the last time you actually cared about the Galactic Community? There are maybe 3 good resolutions in there. It’s mostly because the resolutions are designed to be balanced, and the last tiers add massive negatives.
Honestly, that’s actually good — otherwise we’d just vote for every resolution every game.
So here’s my idea to make players care about politics while still keeping the resolutions balanced. What if, after reaching a tier 5 resolution, a special situation starts for all community members, similar to what we have during Ascension or the Voidworm crisis?
During this, all empires would compete to get the highest score (scores would be visible). We could sabotage each other using spies, get events where we choose buffs or debuffs to steer the situation, and have special projects to complete. It would be time-limited, and afterward rewards fitting the resolution’s theme would be handed out.
Here are some examples of rewards for first place that wouldn’t need a lot of dev time but would be unique enough to make it worth engaging with the community (Other placess should get somethink too):
There could even be a diplomatic mid-game crisis, like around the Greater Good resolution, since that one usually puts half the community in breach once it reaches tier 5. There is a lot that could be done.
6. New Job System
I feel like a lot of the problems we have right now are caused by the new job system. But since there are so many things that impact it, it’s hard to say how to balance it. Is the problem caused by faster pop growth, maybe by ascensions, or maybe by too many buffs that can stack on jobs without enough upkeep? I wonder what your opinion is.
I’ll list my thoughts from what I think is most important to least. If you disagree or agree, let me know.
1. Difficulty and AI
The AI needs a lot of improvements to its economy and combat behavior, but in my opinion that’s not even the biggest problem. The worst part of the AI right now is its passiveness.
The main way the AI makes the game challenging is through war — and that just isn’t happening enough on higher difficulties. Recently, I did an experiment: on Grand Admiral, I rushed Ascension with 0 fleets and 0 diplomacy. Out of 10 games, I was only attacked 3 times before finishing Ascension. That’s terrible. Grand Admiral is supposed to be the hardest the game gets, but the game just let me get away with it.
I understand there should be friendlier AIs, like Federation Builders, that are not aggressive. But can we at least make Hegemonic Imperialists or Despotic Slavers attack you if you have 0 fleet power?
The AI is so passive that changes to its economy or combat logic alone won’t be impactful, because it simply doesn’t do anything. Could we at least make the hardest difficulty actually hard?
2. Performance
We’ve been promised performance improvements. As I understand it, some of the recent changes were groundwork so you could finally fix things that weren’t possible to fix before — and thanks for that. But right now, I honestly don’t see any difference in performance.
3. Fix the AI’s economy and war logic
The way the AI builds its planets is dreadful — it’s just a random mess of buildings. It would also be nice if they fixed how the AI sometimes gets stuck booming one planet for 10 years while I take over its entire empire.
Please also make the AI build ground armies to defend its planets. Right now it mostly uses them as cleanup after the defenders are already wiped out.
4. Balance
We used to talk a lot about tech rushing being too dominant in the meta, and how it would be nice if unity was finally useful. Right now, it’s the opposite. The buffs from Ascensions make it not worth it to attack anyone or even focus on tech. Either slightly tone down the buffs from Ascensions, or maybe adjust empire size penalties, since the wide playstyle is also in a pretty bad spot.
It would also be good to tone down some of these buffs in general. It used to be that an Ascension that gave +20% resources from jobs empire-wide and +50% on one planet was considered great. Now we get even more than that.
What if the special government buffs were more specific, since Ascensions already give a lot? Instead of just more generic resource or stability bonuses, we could get thematic bonuses.
Here are some examples:
- Dictatorial Cloning could let you have multiple copies of the same leader working at the same time.
- Democratic Purity could give extra diplomatic weight.
Insted of just resource form jobs or stabilty there is way more that can be given. Ship build speed, Unice traits for leaders, new ship componets and even if u whant to just buff resorce output u can make it a specific job like biologis or metalurgis output.
5. Galactic Community
When was the last time you actually cared about the Galactic Community? There are maybe 3 good resolutions in there. It’s mostly because the resolutions are designed to be balanced, and the last tiers add massive negatives.
Honestly, that’s actually good — otherwise we’d just vote for every resolution every game.
So here’s my idea to make players care about politics while still keeping the resolutions balanced. What if, after reaching a tier 5 resolution, a special situation starts for all community members, similar to what we have during Ascension or the Voidworm crisis?
During this, all empires would compete to get the highest score (scores would be visible). We could sabotage each other using spies, get events where we choose buffs or debuffs to steer the situation, and have special projects to complete. It would be time-limited, and afterward rewards fitting the resolution’s theme would be handed out.
Here are some examples of rewards for first place that wouldn’t need a lot of dev time but would be unique enough to make it worth engaging with the community (Other placess should get somethink too):
- Ecological Protection: lets the winner terraform one barren planet into a size 30 paradise world ( a Gaia world with 5 good traits we often see on Gaia words).
- Unchained Knowledge: allows the winner to build the first tier of a Science Nexus without needing Mega-Engineering.
- Defense Privatization: creates a special mercenary enclave that can loan fleets to all community members, not just one. The more people hire fleets, the more dividends the owner gets.
There could even be a diplomatic mid-game crisis, like around the Greater Good resolution, since that one usually puts half the community in breach once it reaches tier 5. There is a lot that could be done.
6. New Job System
I feel like a lot of the problems we have right now are caused by the new job system. But since there are so many things that impact it, it’s hard to say how to balance it. Is the problem caused by faster pop growth, maybe by ascensions, or maybe by too many buffs that can stack on jobs without enough upkeep? I wonder what your opinion is.
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