Stellaris - Paradox new sci-fi grand strategy game

[Mortmal]

I'm not gonna touch this game until they take another pass at Performance and AI. Performance got better in 2.2.2 but its still inferior to what it was before Megacorp, and we were promised better performance with the end of tiles.

I heard something in Stellaris' code is kind of fucked up, I don't remember - something about Threading and how the game aparently pretty much dumps both running the game and the graphics on the same thread. I'm hearing gringos with super-computers complaining about this game.

Its kind of glaring, considering how CKII Holy Fury runs great, even on my potato.

The AI is also completely braindead, even with Glavius' AI. I got attacked... ONCE, even through my starts usually have me as pretty damn weak. I recently played a game on Grand Admiral with Glavius' AI, and by 2250 I was stronger than all the Nomads and non-Fallen AIs. My fleet power was 1.5k so what the fuck.

Also, Anomaly science boosts are severely underpowered because they increased tech costs.

That's what happened to me , the new system is great on the paper, it's closer to victoria so its incline. Problem is IA cant cope with it, does not build enough fleets, and when it does , does not move them. Only threats are fallen empire and end game crisis. Wasn't attacked once.

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

Seems like the job micro is just as bad or worse than the tile micro since you need to click through more screens to get to the jobs :S

We really need better automation for this game, like pre-set build orders that only are fired when one has enough pops for those jobs.

Also, Sector AI is horrible.

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

Seems like Glavius and mods screwed you over. I play test branch with zero mods and in my current game by year 2260 i have 8k+ fleet, my neighbour with whom i at war have equivalent and some purifirer i see have superior fleet power. From my experience standart empire AI fall short quickly starting from 2300, and AI hive seems doing pretty well up to 2400. AI ME just a joke. If you want ultimate challenge try play as ME vs multiple AI hive.
My usual game config: 1000 systems, 11 empires, max FE, max marauders, grand admiral, progressive.

To be fair, I think Glavius is the only non-music, namelist, nation graphics or performance mod I got.

Then again, I kind of updated my AI mid-game from the previous versions of the mod.

I'm playing 2.2.2 not test branch because I'm a dirty space pirate.

Anyway, not going to even touch this game again until they fix performance back to 2.1 levels and the AI stops being zombie dogshit. Playing Paradox games with subpar speed is a pure time-waste, time I could waste with games that aren't obvious betas using the players as QA.

There's a bunch of stuff that obviously shows that this DLC was launched on a hurry, like the Crisis being bugged, and how MEs are unbalanced because new changes fucked them hard.

 

[Average Manatee]

Seems like Glavius and mods screwed you over. I play test branch with zero mods and in my current game by year 2260 i have 8k+ fleet, my neighbour with whom i at war have equivalent and some purifirer i see have superior fleet power. From my experience standart empire AI fall short quickly starting from 2300, and AI hive seems doing pretty well up to 2400. AI ME just a joke. If you want ultimate challenge try play as ME vs multiple AI hive.
My usual game config: 1000 systems, 11 empires, max FE, max marauders, grand admiral, progressive.

Yeah, that sounds like a mod issue. AI definitely raises decent fleets on grand admiral. Its still incredibly awful at the game, but when it has 4x as many alloys it does something with them.

Problem is that the military AI is still shit as well. AI fails as soon as more than one fleet comes into play. AI will go "My fleet is 10k, I'll go kill your fleet that is 6k" oblivious to the fact that you have 3 6k fleets stacked on top of each other. For this reason it seems that fleet cap boosts are actually bad, if you have a small fleet cap the AI gets aggressive and a large one causes it to be scared and attempt to doomstack to beat you.

Also, Sector AI is horrible.

Sector AI is shit beyond belief. It's not even usable, you have 50 sectors and are expected to give them all minerals in 100 mineral clicks each. It's easier to just go to the damn planets and build the buildings yourself.

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

Yeah, that sounds like a mod issue. AI definitely raises decent fleets on grand admiral. Its still incredibly awful at the game, but when it have 4x as many alloys it does something with them.

Problem is that the military AI is still shit as well. AI fails as soon as more than one fleet comes into play. AI will go "My fleet is 10k, I'll go kill your fleet that is 6k" oblivious to the fact that you have 3 6k fleets stacked on top of each other.

I also hear that the AI pretty much walks into fortified systems, even when the obvious fort + fleet calculation would show that the AI will get pasted.

I also hear that, aparently, the AI just puts its entire fleets in eternal pirate patrols across trade routes.

 

[Riel]

Since 2.2.2 the game is working a lot better.

While in 2.2.0 AI was about as intelligent as a person in coma in my last game the AI has actually provided a challenge, not much tbh, but at least it is able to field decent fleets even if it then has no clue about how to use them in a way that allows it to win a war (I won a war I should have lost just because the AI didn't know know to beat me when it had the upper hand).
In regards to performance so far it is working decently, I am already in 2341 (20K fleets) and so far I have noticed no stutter at all. I am moving to the point when gates/wormholes start opening, I hope the really fixed it.

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

Since 2.2.2 the game is working a lot better.

True, but not good enough. The game is still slow-ass dogshit that makes even dudes with super-computers cry.

Here's a good thread about it:

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/stellaris-performance-analysis-2.1143652/

2.1.2 is still faster than all the subsequent patches.

Results

Bottom line, the performance offenders so far identified in latest beta:

• Wormholes and gateways
• Scourge failing at properly purging
• POPs related routines once enough have been grown

I bet its some bullshit bug that is leaving everyone stumped. This is Paradox after all, of "For instance I discovered late game that huge greek/byzantine empires were slowing down the game because each greek person was evaluating against each other person in the realm "can I castrate?", and this took up like a huge chunk of the performance of the AI. I hink 70% of the AI demands were about castrating or blinding someone when I loaded late-game byzantine saves. fame.

Honestly, even the best performance in Stellaris should be shamed. Stellaris is not that complex of a game, it has no excuse other than bad programming.

Pdox seems to be getting a real Tech Debt problem lately, in general. Is Paradox the next Bethesda?

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

Oh hey, found that weird "Crisis-only" focused game-style:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellaris/comments/a4oq1i/i_found_a_way_to_make_vanilla_challenging_again/

You have 25 years before the Mid-Game Crisis and 50 years before the End-Game Crisis. On the plus point, you don't have the AI to bother you, so you can expand as much as you want for 25 years until Shit Hits the Fan.

If you want more challenge, download latest version of the All-Crisis mod and make sure they all show up in the same game, for a glorious fight to the death against all the Crises in the game.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

All-Crisis mod is a great idea, should shake up things up real good.

 

[Average Manatee]

IIRC the crisis "start" date only starts the signs of the crisis, it still takes ~50 years to arrive. 2300 crises sounds interesting. You'd undoubtedly want to be a fanatic xenophobe empire in order to claim more space quickly.

 

[Olinser]

In case you missed it, dev team finally made a post.

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/dev-team-were-back.1144790/

In which they basically refuse to admit they did anything wrong in releasing a rushed patch with a massive number of bugs, and vaguely promise fixes 'when they feel they're solid'.**

** SOON was unavailable for use as it is officially trademarked by Blizzard

 

[Space Satan]

I don't want to be a devil's advocate but they are right. No amount of QA can provide enough feedback as a playtest. Their mistake was to release a patch witout beta period.

 

[Olinser]

A BASIC amount of QA would have revealed that the AI straight up didn't work in 2.2, or that the crises were broken, or the LUDICROUSLY bad performance issues, or 1-2 planet sectors being the normal, or any of a dozen things that were apparent from just playing a game for a handful of hours.

We're not talking about bugs that only show up infrequently, or for specific builds, or when a specific set of conditions are met. I agree, no amount of testing can eliminate niche bugs.

But we're talking game-breaking bugs that were obvious and present in every game, and they rushed it out for the holidays anyway, and 2 'fix' patches later a huge amount are still present. That's straight up not caring if your game works or not.

 

[Mortmal]

Who's still doing those kind of games ? There's endless space 2 and that's it . With the fan base they have and absolute lack of competition they know they can get away with it. It's not even a lack of care ,it's rushed for a fast cash grab before next fiscal semester, to show good results to the investors .

 

[Destroid]

Don't forget GalCiv!

 

[Jack Of Owls]

I saw some screen shots and video of those Leviathans floating around space. Makes me wanna play it though I suck at "grand strategy" and 4x games, generally. I like the idea that I can play my empire as benevolent ruler, a total power-mad prick or as something utterly inhuman and unhuman. Don't wanna deal with those slowdowns however, so maybe I'll stick with the 2.1.2 version until Le Guin is patched properly. But on the other hand I need the easiest "Daddy, Can I Play?" mode to learn the ropes and only LeGuin supports these pee wee game difficulties with "Cadet" no?

 

[Delterius]

I saw some screen shots and video of those Leviathans floating around space. Makes me wanna play it though I suck at "grand strategy" and 4x games, generally. I like the idea that I can play my empire as benevolent ruler, a total power-mad prick or as something utterly inhuman and unhuman. Don't wanna deal with those slowdowns however, so maybe I'll stick with the 2.1.2 version until Le Guin is patched properly. But on the other hand I need the easiest "Daddy, Can I Play?" mode to learn the ropes and only LeGuin supports these pee wee game difficulties with "Cadet" no?

TBH, the problem with sticking to an older version is that the game is quite different in between these major patches. Each expansion past is an overhaul, pretty much. Of course, you can play pre-Le Guin on cadet and learn the ropes. But I'm sure you'll outgrow it pretty quickly.

 

[Grotesque]

 

[Jack Of Owls]

I saw some screen shots and video of those Leviathans floating around space. Makes me wanna play it though I suck at "grand strategy" and 4x games, generally. I like the idea that I can play my empire as benevolent ruler, a total power-mad prick or as something utterly inhuman and unhuman. Don't wanna deal with those slowdowns however, so maybe I'll stick with the 2.1.2 version until Le Guin is patched properly. But on the other hand I need the easiest "Daddy, Can I Play?" mode to learn the ropes and only LeGuin supports these pee wee game difficulties with "Cadet" no?

TBH, the problem with sticking to an older version is that the game is quite different in between these major patches. Each expansion past is an overhaul, pretty much. Of course, you can play pre-Le Guin on cadet and learn the ropes. But I'm sure you'll outgrow it pretty quickly.

Well, as I said previously, I'm not good at 4X games... at all. I played the original Civilization on my old Amiga 500 on the easiest difficulty... and lost! Now that's bad. "Cadet" might be just right for me... at least initially. Question: are all the previously released DLCs valid for LeGiun? All that additional content looks so tasty.

 

[Delterius]

I saw some screen shots and video of those Leviathans floating around space. Makes me wanna play it though I suck at "grand strategy" and 4x games, generally. I like the idea that I can play my empire as benevolent ruler, a total power-mad prick or as something utterly inhuman and unhuman. Don't wanna deal with those slowdowns however, so maybe I'll stick with the 2.1.2 version until Le Guin is patched properly. But on the other hand I need the easiest "Daddy, Can I Play?" mode to learn the ropes and only LeGuin supports these pee wee game difficulties with "Cadet" no?

TBH, the problem with sticking to an older version is that the game is quite different in between these major patches. Each expansion past is an overhaul, pretty much. Of course, you can play pre-Le Guin on cadet and learn the ropes. But I'm sure you'll outgrow it pretty quickly.

Well, as I said previously, I'm not good at 4X games... at all. I played the original Civilization on my old Amiga 500 on the easiest difficulty... and lost! Now that's bad. "Cadet" might be just right for me... at least initially. Question: are all the previously released DLCs valid for LeGiun? All that additional content looks so tasty.

Yes the content packs are all very much valid.

 

[Olinser]

I saw some screen shots and video of those Leviathans floating around space. Makes me wanna play it though I suck at "grand strategy" and 4x games, generally. I like the idea that I can play my empire as benevolent ruler, a total power-mad prick or as something utterly inhuman and unhuman. Don't wanna deal with those slowdowns however, so maybe I'll stick with the 2.1.2 version until Le Guin is patched properly. But on the other hand I need the easiest "Daddy, Can I Play?" mode to learn the ropes and only LeGuin supports these pee wee game difficulties with "Cadet" no?

TBH, the problem with sticking to an older version is that the game is quite different in between these major patches. Each expansion past is an overhaul, pretty much. Of course, you can play pre-Le Guin on cadet and learn the ropes. But I'm sure you'll outgrow it pretty quickly.

Well, as I said previously, I'm not good at 4X games... at all. I played the original Civilization on my old Amiga 500 on the easiest difficulty... and lost! Now that's bad. "Cadet" might be just right for me... at least initially. Question: are all the previously released DLCs valid for LeGiun? All that additional content looks so tasty.

Yes the content packs are all very much valid.

The only problem you'll have running previous versions is that they're not going to update them anymore. So they get progressively worse as time goes by and they change base coding.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

I saw some screen shots and video of those Leviathans floating around space. Makes me wanna play it though I suck at "grand strategy" and 4x games, generally. I like the idea that I can play my empire as benevolent ruler, a total power-mad prick or as something utterly inhuman and unhuman. Don't wanna deal with those slowdowns however, so maybe I'll stick with the 2.1.2 version until Le Guin is patched properly. But on the other hand I need the easiest "Daddy, Can I Play?" mode to learn the ropes and only LeGuin supports these pee wee game difficulties with "Cadet" no?

TBH, the problem with sticking to an older version is that the game is quite different in between these major patches. Each expansion past is an overhaul, pretty much. Of course, you can play pre-Le Guin on cadet and learn the ropes. But I'm sure you'll outgrow it pretty quickly.

Well, as I said previously, I'm not good at 4X games... at all. I played the original Civilization on my old Amiga 500 on the easiest difficulty... and lost! Now that's bad. "Cadet" might be just right for me... at least initially. Question: are all the previously released DLCs valid for LeGiun? All that additional content looks so tasty.

One nice thing about the Paradox games is that because of the very approachable way their engine works, it's easy to tailor the difficulty and mechanics to your personal preference.

Now, technically speaking Stellaris doesn't have difficulty settings... But all it really takes is a few minutes of simple modding to make your own "difficulty settings" to use in-game.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

Okie, you boys convinced me. I'll go with LeGuin, despite it's many daunting new micro-management features that will probably turn my brain into one giant single wrinkle instead of the many. I prolly won't even make it to mid-late game where the lag supposedly makes it unplayable on 2.2.2. As for the brain dead AI in LeGuin, that's good! I need all the help I can get

 

[Olinser]

Okie, you boys convinced me. I'll go with LeGuin, despite it's many daunting new micro-management features that will probably turn my brain into one giant single wrinkle instead of the many. I prolly won't even make it to mid-late game where the lag supposedly makes it unplayable on 2.2.2. As for the brain dead AI in LeGuin, that's good! I need all the help I can get

Actually I've found that you can get past 2.2.2 with not game-ending lag by playing a Machine Empire.

Almost all of the lag is due to their idiotic trade route coding. Since Machine Empires don't trade, if you own a good portion of the galaxy there's no trade calculations taking place, so no lag.

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

Patch 2.2.3 out, 2.2.4 beta is now available.
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...able-checksums-2-2-3-746c-2-2-4-f25b.1146498/

Hi all, Jamor here. After a good chunk of time in public beta, we are rolling out 2.2.3 as the official live version today. It's got a lot of improvements over 2.2.2 that we don't want to gate behind the beta wall forever, and we'll continue to iterate on it as we progress with post launch support for 2.2/MegaCorp.

Thanks to your help in the beta were were able to correct a few issues with it, and also get a ton of new fixes that we want to try out in the new 2.2.4 beta (more on that in a bit)




We've been in full force debugging mode since we got back, and today are also ready to roll out the next batch of fixes to the stellaris_test beta branch. The objective is to expose them to field conditions before flipping the switch to make this new version, 2.2.4, fully live.

If you want first access to the fixes therein, read on. It's got a ton of fixes, balance tweaks, AI and performance improvements. We got a good jump in YPH (average years per hour) in our overnight test games, and are interested to hear your results.

Also, as a thank you for your help with this version, we're offering you first access to the "Legion" set of 6 new empire emblems:

stellaris_test/2.2.4 contains all the fixes from 2.2.3, and is required if you want to crossplay between Steam and other release platforms.




Also, I can give you a bit of clarity on what we're continuing to work on. Performance and AI improvements are the continuing biggest priority. We also plan usability and readability improvements to the planet management screen, as well as the usual bug fixes and polish. Stand by for more of those, but in the meantime please give this beta a spin.

We'll keep at it and watch for your feedback. Thanks for your support.

Please note stellaris_test is an opt-in patch. You have to choose to activate it.

Steam library -> Right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> Betas tab -> choose "stellaris_test"

Jamor, Today at 16:40
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