Stellaris - Paradox new sci-fi grand strategy game

[Xamenos]

Maybe those are just in there as a form of self-imposed difficulty.

But there's no way to let a newbie know. He'll keep thinking they're all "simply powerful modifiers that retain significant impact", when the truth is that two are significantly more powerful, one is a roulette, and all the rest are worse than the default.

 

[Seigneur Locklear]

Who gives a crap about balance in Stellaris. It's like complaining about why is France stronger than Denmark in the starting date of EU4. The game should be about flavor, roleplay - the journey itself. In competitive, multiplayer environment certain origins and combinations are commonly banned due to balance issues, but why would you care about any of it in single player where your playthrough experience is nearly fully customizable and should be, in my belief, something beyond merely watching the numbers grow.

 

[Seigneur Locklear]

But there's no way to let a newbie know. He'll keep thinking they're all "simply powerful modifiers that retain significant impact", when the truth is that two are significantly more powerful, one is a roulette, and all the rest are worse than the default.

Well, the newbie can play a game, or two, or twenty and deduce it over time, no? There's definitely fun in experimenting, trying out different civic and government combinations, different origins and all that jazz. It's all a part of a greater experience.

 

[Xamenos]

You really want me to explain the difference between France being powerful in a historical game and some options being vastly more powerful than others in a space 4x? I mean, even a player who wants to play as robot-loving materialists would be better off taking the default origin over the one that's supposedly tailor-made for him. Does this really seem fine to you?

in single player where your playthrough experience is nearly fully customizable and should be, in my belief, something beyond merely watching the numbers grow.

It's all a part of a greater experience.

Goddamnit. Whoever it was who said Stellaris is for larpers was absolutely right. And why the fuck isn't there a "fanboy" button?

 

[Seigneur Locklear]

I'm wondering at the moment, where's the "I'm a fart sniffer who gets autismal personal gratification solely from seeing numbers increase", because I'd be utterly ideal for you.
There's a reason Paradox games - and especially so Stellaris, have a bunch of flavor, aesthetic and story packs, you know. It's because that is an integral part of the experience.

 

[Fedora Master]

The problem of Stellaris has always been that there is zero context to anything. Master of Orion has defined races so you knew what to expect and what they're about. Stellaris has shitty miniscule modifiers and an AI that may or may not act like its traits suggest.

 

[Norfleet]

Goddamnit. Whoever it was who said Stellaris is for larpers was absolutely right. And why the fuck isn't there a "fanboy" button?

Stellaris really is kind of for larpers, because Paradox has never been about creating games for competitive multiplayer balance. If anything, their attempts to shoehorn it into Stellaris are actually detrimental to the game's design.

 

[Theodora]

Goddamnit. Whoever it was who said Stellaris is for larpers was absolutely right. And why the fuck isn't there a "fanboy" button?

Stellaris really is kind of for larpers, because Paradox has never been about creating games for competitive multiplayer balance. If anything, their attempts to shoehorn it into Stellaris are actually detrimental to the game's design.

Johan's influence the past few years was forcing multiplayer to be a leading idea in design for a lot of their games.

Can see this most brutally in the 1.0/launch version of Imperator (thankfully he is no longer in charge of that).

 

[thesecret1]

Johan's influence is absolute cancer every single time. He literally balances the game by having a multiplayer match at the office.
Check out the chucklefuck's view of Imperator at release, his Magnum Opus:

 

[Theodora]

Oh lordy, that's aged poorly.

 

[thesecret1]

Imperator at release was Johan's Magnum Opus. The perfect strategy game. It shook him pretty hard when it flopped – paradox itself said it was a commercial success, but the playerbase dropped like a rock almost immediately (which, for Paradox, translates into a flop. It doesn't matter that the game made enough in preorders to be in green numbers – it's the milking that brings in the real money). He let himself be heard that he wondered whether he should quit the industry, whether he can even still create a game. It's a great tragedy of the gaming industry that he didn't follow these ponderings and didn't finally retire from his quest to make every single strategy game Paradox pushes out worse in some way.

 

[Joggerino]

Imperator at release was Johan's Magnum Opus. The perfect strategy game. It shook him pretty hard when it flopped – paradox itself said it was a commercial success, but the playerbase dropped like a rock almost immediately (which, for Paradox, translates into a flop. It doesn't matter that the game made enough in preorders to be in green numbers – it's the milking that brings in the real money). He let himself be heard that he wondered whether he should quit the industry, whether he can even still create a game. It's a great tragedy of the gaming industry that he didn't follow these ponderings and didn't finally retire from his quest to make every single strategy game Paradox pushes out worse in some way.

Well said, Imperator was a complete dumpster fire at release. (it may still be one)

 

[sser]

Is there some reason Paradox tried to shoehorn multiplayer in as a main drawing feature? Did they find data on that or something? Large 4x-games that take ages to play out don't seem the type for good multiplayer with the exception of maybe HoI.

 

[Theodora]

Imperator at release was Johan's Magnum Opus. The perfect strategy game. It shook him pretty hard when it flopped – paradox itself said it was a commercial success, but the playerbase dropped like a rock almost immediately (which, for Paradox, translates into a flop. It doesn't matter that the game made enough in preorders to be in green numbers – it's the milking that brings in the real money). He let himself be heard that he wondered whether he should quit the industry, whether he can even still create a game. It's a great tragedy of the gaming industry that he didn't follow these ponderings and didn't finally retire from his quest to make every single strategy game Paradox pushes out worse in some way.

Well said, Imperator was a complete dumpster fire at release. (it may still be one)

It isn't. Arheo knows what he's doing. After a series of positive changes, 2.0 looks set to actually be a worthwhile relaunch. (From a classicist perspective, some of the changes are huge.)

 

[Xamenos]

Is there some reason Paradox tried to shoehorn multiplayer in as a main drawing feature? Did they find data on that or something? Large 4x-games that take ages to play out don't seem the type for good multiplayer with the exception of maybe HoI.

Johan's autism and/or convenience. I think they revealed at some point that the % of players who've played multi even once is in the single digits. But you don't need a bunch of testers when you're counting on your office multi games to balance the game, you don't need interesting sp content when you're counting on players to larp together, and you don't need good AI when you're expecting players to provide each other with challenge. Or at least Johan didn't think they needed those things (and I assume the bean counters applauded), and we've all seen the results.

 

[Norfleet]

The problem of Stellaris has always been that there is zero context to anything. Master of Orion has defined races so you knew what to expect and what they're about. Stellaris has shitty miniscule modifiers and an AI that may or may not act like its traits suggest.

That's why I always thought Stellaris would be Paradox's riskiest venture yet, because with all their previous games, they had the historical setting to give people context and expectation, but with Stellaris, they were just up in the air. Or lack thereof, since there's not really air in space.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

The problem of Stellaris has always been that there is zero context to anything. Master of Orion has defined races so you knew what to expect and what they're about. Stellaris has shitty miniscule modifiers and an AI that may or may not act like its traits suggest.

That's why I always thought Stellaris would be Paradox's riskiest venture yet, because with all their previous games, they had the historical setting to give people context and expectation, but with Stellaris, they were just up in the air. Or lack thereof, since there's not really air in space.

That's why Stellaris also is one of the more multiplayer-oriented Paradox titles. You can play SP only so many times before you get bored with both early game exploration & fluff and late game warring.

 

[Norfleet]

Except the structure of the game is terribly weak for multiplayer, because long 4x games that have to be played synchronously run afoul of the uptime problem, where even a small group of the most no-life people imagineable end up having miniscule shared uptime.

Consider: If you have 6 independent players, each of which has no life and thus 60% uptime, the probability of all 6 players being available at once is 0.6^6 = 4.6%. This gives you a session length of 1.12 hours. It only gets worse from there. A game like Dominions, which was structured for multiplayer, circumvents the simultaneous uptime problem by making play asynchronous, making it possible to have much larger games, as players don't have to all simultaneously be available.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

I wouldn't put it in such bleak terms, but I agree with you in regards to the inherent shortcomings of multiplayer 4X gaming. Still, to me it seems that the 'loyalized' Stellaris playerbase tends to be MP-oriented.

 

[Mortmal]

Imperator at release was Johan's Magnum Opus. The perfect strategy game. It shook him pretty hard when it flopped – paradox itself said it was a commercial success, but the playerbase dropped like a rock almost immediately (which, for Paradox, translates into a flop. It doesn't matter that the game made enough in preorders to be in green numbers – it's the milking that brings in the real money). He let himself be heard that he wondered whether he should quit the industry, whether he can even still create a game. It's a great tragedy of the gaming industry that he didn't follow these ponderings and didn't finally retire from his quest to make every single strategy game Paradox pushes out worse in some way.

Well said, Imperator was a complete dumpster fire at release. (it may still be one)

It isn't. Arheo knows what he's doing. After a series of positive changes, 2.0 looks set to actually be a worthwhile relaunch. (From a classicist perspective, some of the changes are huge.)

So can you give us any firm date on 2.0 release yet ?

 

[Joggerino]

Well said, Imperator was a complete dumpster fire at release. (it may still be one)

It isn't. Arheo knows what he's doing. After a series of positive changes, 2.0 looks set to actually be a worthwhile relaunch. (From a classicist perspective, some of the changes are huge.)

That's great news, I'll play it again then after 2.0 is released. Who would have thought the mana system would turn out to be such a disaster when they first introduced it in eu4.

 

[Norfleet]

I wouldn't put it in such bleak terms, but I agree with you in regards to the inherent shortcomings of multiplayer 4X gaming.

That's just it, though: Dominions shows us that multiplayer 4X gaming is entirely possible, as long as you manage to address the simultaneous availability problem...which Dominions accomplishes through asynchronous play: Players don't have to be simultaneously present to submit their moves.

 

[L'ennui]

That's turn-based, though. Maybe the real-time flow of Paradox games could be broken down into distinct "turns" of a set duration – say, a month passes in real-time, you can input new commands, hit "next turn" and the game unfolds for another month or something. That would totally change how players interact with the game, though, and it would severely hamper the ability to finetune military maneuvers and such. Probably best to just make a new game concept from the ground up.

 

[Xamenos]

Well, paradox games use distinct daily steps for the simulation (except for HoI where the steps are hourly). Theoretically you could use these steps as turns in an asynchronous multi game without affecting the gameplay at all, but I don't think there would be many players interested in a game that would go so glacially slow.

 

[Theodora]

Well, paradox games use distinct daily steps for the simulation (except for HoI where the steps are hourly). Theoretically you could use these steps as turns in an asynchronous multi game without affecting the gameplay at all, but I don't think there would be many players interested in a game that would go so glacially slow.

I think the amount of non-combat mechanics (government, research, etc.) is the biggest reason that wouldn't work.