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Stellaris - Paradox new sci-fi grand strategy game

Space Satan

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Paradox always said they are not happy with current ground warfare but will not remove it from the game. Wiz said they were going to overhaul the system but not in upcoming patch. And according to stream they may even at some point overhaul tile system, which would be cool because the less Stellaris have in common with pile of rotten pus that is GalCiv2-3 the better.
So far:
DRWpKaIXcAI1t0m.jpg:large
 

a cut of domestic sheep prime

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that's funny. do you know how much the earth's mass has decreased during the last few thousand years of human industry?
how would you rather i tackled this?

blahblahblahblahAUTISMblahblahblahblahNUMBERSblahblahblahblahTENDIESblahblahblah
Resources are finite - as in limited - in this video game. You can't just build one troop factory that churns out troops, you need mineral and energy resources. Once your facilities are destroyed from orbit, you can't produce more troops. This video game does not account for the mass decrease of planetary objects, so bringing them up is just pedantic.

Having troops be truly endless is stupid. Having them be invincible is stupid. It completely alters game balance if 3 or 4 planets get to stand against the rest of the galaxy because they ticked muh endless/invincible troops option. Maybe if the rest if the galaxy never ticked the right tech trees, it might seem like that. You might be able to make that exaggeration, but it would be hyperbole.

So I (generously) assumed that no one wold be dumb enough to really be calling for endless/invincible troops as an option, assumed it was an exaggeration based on the game mechanics you just outlined and left the door open for him to clarify.

Take a few less adderall and realize that my half a sentence statement wasn't made in complete ignorance of a game I've played for dozens of hours already.
 

Grotesque

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Divinity: Original Sin Divinity: Original Sin 2
is that people being of any belief or opinion about a topic does not mean shit about their capability to deliver a good game.

Just look at this fuck! :)

He really must be a kid or someone who didn't went through the mill because he would've known that beliefs and opinions even affect the way you wipe your butt after taking a shit, let alone developing a game.
 

thesheeep

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He really must be a kid or someone who didn't went through the mill because he would've known that beliefs and opinions even affect the way you wipe your butt after taking a shit, let alone developing a game.
Then please explain to me how any personal belief will make someone design shitty encounters, make extremely bland stats and abilities like PoE, fuck up basic game mechanics, mess up a save system, create bad world generation...
These things simply cannot be influenced by personal beliefs... other than maybe personal beliefs about rolling dice :lol:

The only strong belief one will find among game (or general entertainment media) developers is SJW stuff.
And that doesn't have any possible connection to any game mechanic.

The only thing anyone can think of in this context is writing/story.
Well... maybe.

But this is a game about big space empires in a procedurally generated universe. The only stories here are the emergent ones and a few events - which nobody ever reads, anyway :lol:
 

Zboj Lamignat

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Well, this is highly offtopic, but you've picked a really bad example (and I don't necessarily disagree with you). Developer's belief that they are really smart and know better than pre-estabilished ideas and standards from actually good games was a huge factor in PoE being as shit as it is.
 

a cut of domestic sheep prime

Guest
Then please explain to me how any personal belief will make someone design shitty encounters, make extremely bland stats and abilities like PoE, fuck up basic game mechanics, mess up a save system, create bad world generation...
Focus, passion, guiding principles. If you're in a social justice cult and are focused on making your game inclusive, your design priorities can be affected in everything from writing to game mechanics.

We've seen the writing of characters and storylines affected by this in everything from games to movies.

It can also affect who you hire, why and what you let them get away with. We've seen games like Dragonspear and ME:A affected by this. People in key positions that either don't have the skill or their vision is clouded by the above. But they knew the right people and believed the right things, so there they are.

And then the game is shit and everyone who points out whose fault it was is just a harassing gamergater.
 
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Grif

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Manual defensive army building is gone
DRf2ykYW0AAObex.jpg:large

Doesn't this make defensive armies even worse? When was it ever better to take a purely defensive building over something that gives you more minerals/energy/food/unity? (The old planetary shield building comes to mind.)
 

Monocause

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He really must be a kid or someone who didn't went through the mill because he would've known that beliefs and opinions even affect the way you wipe your butt after taking a shit, let alone developing a game.
Then please explain to me how any personal belief will make someone design shitty encounters, make extremely bland stats and abilities like PoE, fuck up basic game mechanics, mess up a save system, create bad world generation...
These things simply cannot be influenced by personal beliefs... other than maybe personal beliefs about rolling dice :lol:

The only strong belief one will find among game (or general entertainment media) developers is SJW stuff.
And that doesn't have any possible connection to any game mechanic.

The only thing anyone can think of in this context is writing/story.
Well... maybe.

But this is a game about big space empires in a procedurally generated universe. The only stories here are the emergent ones and a few events - which nobody ever reads, anyway :lol:

You're actually both right. Terrible ideas in games (and generally in software) come both from design by commitee (which is another way of saying 'data-driven'), and from strong, personal beliefs held by the team. Often on the same project.

There's two very human tendencies in software development worth mentioning in this context; they are both very desirable and overall beneficial when applied in modicum to a product, and can completely kill a product when present in excess.

One is the tendency to try to make your decisions as rational as possible. You have your bosses. Development costs a shitton. They ask: "Hey, how much is this going to make", "what are you doing so that this makes more money". If you don't have bosses, you ask these questions to yourself, and you *need* to as they're key to figuring out what people want, what people need and what people are likely to pay for. Making decisions based on data is overall a very important part of any product development, and helps prevent massive loss of time, effort and money on stuff that no one really wants or needs.

Applied in excess, however, it substitutes vision, and becomes a 'cult of data' of sorts. Everyone starts believing that since some study said it's 5% more, it will be 5% more. Methodology stops being carefully scrutinised, common sense stops being applied. "Thus spoke data", and people blindly follow. That's when shit starts hitting the fan as data is gathered from people, by people, and analysed by people. And people are very often wrong. I've particularly noticed a tendency to be wrong when under huge pressure to make data-driven decisions, as that drives a rather mindless urge to demonstrably produce data and consume data; that way if someone starts questioning your product, you just produce charts and stats and confidently say "Data proves it." and shut down the discussion. End result is usually a terribly mediocre product that takes ages to develop and that no one wants.

The other tendency is to trust your hunch, or vision. Applied in modicum, it gives the product a human touch and is the main driving force behind risk-taking and innovation. Sometimes you can't prove with data that something will work, you need to try it out, and that means taking risks and following the vision. These hunches are often key to identify needs and fads that aren't identifiable with data collection, and looking at software I'd wager everything that's dominated the market did so because of a healthy dose of creative, unrestrained madness that went into decision making.

Go to the extreme, however, and you get someone's brainchild that may just have no value for other people. I have a personal example of an averted disaster like this - several months back I was part of a dev team that was brainstorming ideas to present our data set in an attractive shape to our users. We stumbled upon an idea of using maps to illustrate the data; we all fell in love with it. The maps will be so cool, we said. We started patting each other on the shoulders and propping each other up in the idea that the maps are the best thing since sliced bread and all of us were really enthusiastic about it. We immediately moved on to discussing implementation details. It was only a month or two later that someone's fortunately been sober enough to ask about use cases. "How will this be useful", he asked. Not one of us had a good answer, but instead of admitting it outright we got angry at the guy who asked - after all, we were so invested into the idea, and convinced it's the best out there. Took a few days for us to come around and actually admit that yeah, this would probably suck. But we were *this* close to delivering flashy garbage that our users would simply not use, because it didn't offer any tangible value.

I honestly find it hard to believe this happened myself. Looking back I simply can't understand how come not one of us managed, or even made an earnest attempt to spot the elephant in the room. Our brains suddenly clicked together, and did so in a very wrong moment.

My point is - yes, sometimes execs in suits enforce dumb ideas and overemphasise data collection. But data-driven decision making is not bad by itself, and also you don't need money-grubbing execs to ruin a product. All you need is a group of people who participate as a team in a process that's part-creative part-technical and allround confusing, subject to all the group psychological mechanisms all the time. It's really easy to lose sight and go overboard one way or the other in your quest to deliver "the best" and most of these fuckups stem from the simple fact that we're all human and we make mistakes.

EDIT: In video games, there's also another thing that I haven't seen in software - sometimes you have a brilliant design on paper. Everyone feels it's good. Heck, it can even be backed by data. Problem is - quite often only when you implement the idea does it turns out it does not work. It's not fun. It doesn't click together with the other features and systems. It's tedious.

These things are surprisingly hard to predict, and sometimes take a very heavy toll on development. When facing such a situation you have basically two options. One is you redesign pretty much from scratch, but that can be very costly, especially late in development where people are already crunching - and you still have no guarantee that the new redesign will actually work! Two is you take what you have, and hack it, hack, and then hack some more until it somewhat fits together.

Third, hidden option, is that you leave it as it is and talk yourself into believing the impact won't be significant. But either way, seriously, quite often this isn't anyone's fault - games are so incredibly complex nowadays that many systems and designs are very tricky to properly test and prototype in the early stages.
 
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With combat width I doubt you could drop 30 armies at once so each would be more valuable

Once a planet is bombed out you have +100% damage, meaning even the shittiest invasion force should mop up the strongest defense force. Combat width only helps against 300-army doom drops that take planets despite their full non-bombarded defenses

Manual defensive army building is gone
DRf2ykYW0AAObex.jpg:large

Doesn't this make defensive armies even worse? When was it ever better to take a purely defensive building over something that gives you more minerals/energy/food/unity? (The old planetary shield building comes to mind.)

Almost certainly unless unrest is suddenly actually important to keep down. Even then you're only really caring about the cost/benefit tradeoff economically.
 

Space Satan

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Once a planet is bombed out you have +100% damage, meaning even the shittiest invasion force should mop up the strongest defense force. Combat width only helps against 300-army doom drops that take planets despite their full non-bombarded defenses
Look at previous screens, planetary fortification is also gone. So that bombardment bonus could change as well.
 

whatevername

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He really must be a kid or someone who didn't went through the mill because he would've known that beliefs and opinions even affect the way you wipe your butt after taking a shit, let alone developing a game.
Then please explain to me how any personal belief will make someone design shitty encounters, make extremely bland stats and abilities like PoE, fuck up basic game mechanics, mess up a save system, create bad world generation...
These things simply cannot be influenced by personal beliefs... other than maybe personal beliefs about rolling dice :lol:

The only strong belief one will find among game (or general entertainment media) developers is SJW stuff.
And that doesn't have any possible connection to any game mechanic.

The only thing anyone can think of in this context is writing/story.
Well... maybe.

But this is a game about big space empires in a procedurally generated universe. The only stories here are the emergent ones and a few events - which nobody ever reads, anyway :lol:
Mass Effect Andromeda: homos can fuck aliens, homos can fuck homos, aliens can fuck aliens, homos can fuck alien homos. But when you shoot npcs from ~150m they just stand there like dummies. That's 150 meters with a rifle, NOT 150 miles with a scifi big berta. You can also shoot npcs through the door at near point blank range and guess what they do?
YES! You guessed it right!! They just stand there like dummies!!!

Guild Wars 2: trannies with rainbow dyed hair boast they never played Guild Wars 1 and because of that each of your skills does damage, does fire damage, does fire dot damage, heals, removes conditions, removes ally conditions, at the same time.
 

thesheeep

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Mass Effect Andromeda: homos can fuck aliens, homos can fuck homos, aliens can fuck aliens, homos can fuck alien homos.
So? Everyone can have sex with whoever they want. As it should be (as long as consensual, obviously).

But when you shoot npcs from ~150m they just stand there like dummies. That's 150 meters with a rifle, NOT 150 miles with a scifi big berta. You can also shoot npcs through the door at near point blank range and guess what they do?
AI implementation in ME:A sucks. As do a thousand other things. It is a terrible game.

What's your point?
Because time was spent on implementing romances it was not spent on fixing AI bugs?
Man, you do not have a clue about development. These two topics are simply in no way related. Completely different teams within the developer work on them.
One the writing/level design team, the other one is the programming team (and in a team as big as that, there's likely an extra person or team just for AI).

You also couldn't just "have less writers and more programmers". It takes time to build a team and time to change it. And (good!) programmers are notoriously hard to come by.
The writing team in general was probably the only one that had enough time - as is evident by the absurd number of side quests ME:A has.
Most of which suck because they involve playing a thoroughly broken game...

Guild Wars 2: trannies with rainbow dyed hair boast they never played Guild Wars 1 and because of that each of your skills does damage, does fire damage, does fire dot damage, heals, removes conditions, removes ally conditions, at the same time.
You know what this reminds me of?
pchart1.jpg
You're seeing a connection because you want to see one. Nothing else.
Or as Monocause would probably say it: You're human and made a mistake.
 

Space Satan

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DD: Army rework
Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris dev diary. Today's dev diary is about some changes coming to ground combat and armies in the 2.0 'Cherryh' update. This will be the last dev diary before we take a break for the holidays, so there will be no diaries in the next week or the week after that. Stellaris dev diaries return on Thursday January 11th, 2018.

Defense Armies and Fortresses
Constructing Defense Armies have always been largely a meaningless exercise in Stellaris. While they are useful for reducing Unrest and occasionally might be able to beat off an unprepared attacker, the fact that a planet is capped on how many armies can be defending it while the attacker is *not* capped on how many armies are attacking, coupled with the general weakness of defense armies, means that defending a planet against a ground invasion is generally an exercise in futility and will at most delay an attacker by a few weeks. However, if we solved this by just making defense armies a lot stronger or capping the number of attacking units, the result would turn every invasion of a backwater colony into a big affair - something that is not particularly desirable when a war can involve several different actors with hundreds of planets between them.

For this reason, we have decided to rework Defense Armies into something that is actually useful, but requires a significant investment of resources to muster more than a token defense. Instead of being directly buildable by the empire, defense armies are created from certain buildings. The capital building will produce defense armies depending on its level, as will some other planetary uniques like Military Academy. If you want a planet to be well defended, however, you will need to construct Fortress building on its tiles. Fortresses require a pop to work them, do not produce any other resources than a small amount of Unity, but provide a significant amount of defense armies to protect the planet. Armies spawned by Fortresses are also impervious to orbital bombardment, and will not be able to be killed without first ruining the building itself. The armies generated by a building have their species and type set by the pop working it, so a Very Strong Battle Thrall will produce several powerful defense armies if placed on a Fortress, and special pops like Droids will produce their own variants like Robotic Defense Armies rather than the normal ones. Fortified worlds will also be able to be fit with an FTL inhibitor (the exact way they get them is not yet determined) that prevents enemy fleets from leaving the system unless the world is captured, which allows for the creation of Fortress Worlds to protect strategically important systems.
index.php

(Building icon is a placeholder)

One more important change related to Defense Armies is a change to Unrest: Armies on planets no longer reduce Unrest directly. Instead, to handle a planet with high Unrest, you will need to construct Fortress-style buildings or take other measures (such as using Edicts) to reduce the planetary Unrest. This means you cannot simply capture a planet and then spam a dozen defense armies to immediately zero out the Unrest. As part of this, we will be balancing certain events and effect to ensure newly captured worlds do not instantly defect back to their former owner.

Finally, as part of all these changes Defense Armies have received a general buff and there are several new technologies that unlock additional tiers of forts and various improvements to Defense Armies' combat ability, meaning that they will grow stronger alongside the invention of new, more powerful assault armies.

Assault Army Management
A major aim of our changes to armies is to reduce the amount of unnecessary micromanagement of armies. For this reason, and to make Assault Armies' role more explicit, we have decided to change Assault Armies to always be based in space. Whenever not directly engaged in an invasion, Assault Armies will now always automatically embark onto their transports, ready to be used to invade another world. We also aim to fix the minor but immersion-breaking bug where transport fleets are giving endlessly increasing sequential names whenever they land and embark again.

Combat Width, Retreating and Collateral Damage
Another change to ground combat is the introduction of new mechanics in the form of Combat Width. Combat Width is determined by the size of the planet, and decides how many armies can be taking and receiving damage at the same time: For example, if 20 assault armies invade a world held by 10 defense armies with a combat width of 10, all 10 defense armies will be immediately engaged in battle while only half the assault armies will be able to deal and receive damage, with additional assault armies joining the fray as the armies in front of them are destroyed. This means that it is no longer possible to take a well defended world without losses by simply throwing a hundred clone armies at it: If you wish to minimize losses (and thus War Exhaustion), you will need to invest in expensive, high-maintenance elite armies.
index.php

(Interface not final)

We've also added the concept of Collateral Damage: As armies fight on the planet, civilians and civilian infrastructure is caught in the fighting. Each time an army deals damage in battle, it will inflict a random amount of Collateral Damage, which increases Planetary Damage similar to Orbital Bombardment (see below) and can lead to the death of Pops and the destruction of buildings and tiles. Some armies will deal more Collateral Damage than others: For example, Xenomorph armies are highly destructive and cost-efficient, but will wreak immense havoc on the planet, potentially leaving it in ruins in the process of capturing it for your empire.

While working on combat mechanics we also took the time to change the way Morale Damage works, making it something that is suffered by both sides (instead of just the loser) and making the effects of it more gradual, so that armies suffer a drop in combat efficiency once they are <50% morale, and then another, sharper drop when they are broken (0% morale). This should make certain armies, such as Psi Armies, highly effective against low-morale opponents like Slave Armies, but less effective against an unfeeling army of Droids. Finally, we've also tweaked the damage-dealing algorithm so that damage is less evenly spread among combatants, making it so that even an outnumbered force can destroy regiments and inflict war exhaustion on the enemy.
index.php


Finally, we have made some changes to retreats. When an attacker retreats from a ground combat, there is now a significant chance that each retreating regiment is destroyed while attempting to return to space, making retreat a risky endeavour and eliminating the tactic of simply send in the same army again and again in wave attacks, instead making retreats something you do in order to preserve at least some of your army in a poorly chosen engagement.

Orbital Bombardment Changes
Finally, again in the interest of reducing the micromanagement needed during war, we've changed the way orbital bombardment works. Fortifications have been entirely cut from planets, so that there is no need to bombard lightly defended worlds before going in with the ground troops. Instead, we have added a requirement that planets cannot be invaded if there is a hostile Starbase in the system, so that transports cannot snipe worlds that are protected by defensive installations present in the same system. Orbital Bombardment, instead of being something you have to manage and wait for in every single planetary engagement, is now something you do to soften up a particularly well defended target, or simply to wreak havoc on the enemy's planet and drive up their War Exhaustion.

As a planet is bombarded, the fleet will deal Planetary Damage, ruining buildings and killing Pops. Bombarding fleets will also do damage to armies present on the planet (unless those armies are protected by a Fortress), and over a long enough time can decimate a defending force, though doing so will likely cause heavy damage to the planet and may delay the attacker long enough that the owner of the planet has time to build up their forces or inflict enough war exhaustion to force a peace. The rate at which the planet is damaged can also be slowed with the construction of buildings such as Planetary Defense Shield, further dragging out the process.

As part of these changes, we've consolidated the Bombardment Stances into the following:
  • Selective: Deals normal damage to armies/buildings and light damage to pops. Cannot kill the last 10 pops.
  • Indiscriminate: Deals heavy damage to armies, buildings and pops. Cannot kill the last 5 pops.
  • Armageddon: Deals massive damage to armies, buildings and pops. Can turn planets into depopulated Tomb Worlds with enough bombardment. Only available to certain empires such as Purifiers.

Attachments
Finally, on the topic of attachments, we have decided to cut them entirely from the game. We discussed a variety of ways to improve the way you assign them, but ultimately decided that we already have so many types of armies and not nearly enough combat mechanics to justify a significant investment of UI time that could go towards something like the Fleet Manager instead. The technologies that previously unlocked attachments will be changed to give other effects, such as direct buffs to certain army types.

That's all for today! As I said, we're now going on hiatus, so I'll see you again on January 11th with a dev diary about... well, that's a secret, actually. You'll just have to wait and see!
 
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2 unity is fucking nothing though. Especially with a 5 energy upkeep. And a 450 build cost, that's a bit over the top.
 

Jimmious

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Still, these changes specifically are all good, there's no question about it. Ground combat SUCKED BALLS to the extreme.
Generally so far, I feel that 2.0 will be a step forward, it will make the game more interesting and tactical. Maybe less LARPy though :P
 

Blaine

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Grab the Codex by the pussy
TBS, I know you know better than to play this bullshit. Didn't I run a turn of SMAC by email for you one time?
 

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