Stellaris - Paradox new sci-fi grand strategy game

[chuft]

Last time I tried to play I discovered they added an "intelligence" layer so I could no longer see what was going on because I didn't have spies everywhere in my saved game.

Is it even worth learning the game all over again?

 

[Old One]

It wasn't worth it the first time.

 

[good fucking shit happen]

I just tried this turd since it should have gotten enough DLCs to be playable now and it was awful. This might be the worst fucking 4X game I have ever played. How the fuck did it get so much additional content when it is pure shit? The only thing you do is to micro your planets and get spammed with research projects every now and then. Even Master of Orion 3 was better than this.

 

[Thane Solus]

Over 1.9 is unplayable. 2.14 Has some interesting bits, but it removes the travel jump drives, but the hyperlanes. The most i played was 1.9 which is good, its a copy of Distant Worlds and other games, made in their own way. Of course you got to use a lot of mods, to escape the wokeness of paradox ...

 

[Norfleet]

Any good asymmetrical campaign mods (ie there is an established map and powers and you simply pick who you want to go with ala the other pdox games)? The missed opportunity by pdox to make a space game of their own by making it a 4x just like everybody else is a shame.

This would, again, be a weakness as far as Paradox is concerned: Paradox's strength is in historical scenarios. If you create a preexisting sci-fi space scenario out of things nobody knows or cares about, it doesn't work.

 

[Ravielsk]

Over 1.9 is unplayable. 2.14 Has some interesting bits, but it removes the travel jump drives, but the hyperlanes. The most i played was 1.9 which is good, its a copy of Distant Worlds and other games, made in their own way. Of course you got to use a lot of mods, to escape the wokeness of paradox ...

My biggest gripe with the community is that it likes to bitch about how fucked the game is but will never even consider abandoning the current broken build for the functional older ones. Modders refusing to maintain their mods for a broken version of the game would do a hell of a lot more to fix it than just... well the nothing that PDX community is known for.

 

[thesecret1]

This would, again, be a weakness as far as Paradox is concerned: Paradox's strength is in historical scenarios. If you create a preexisting sci-fi space scenario out of things nobody knows or cares about, it doesn't work.

That's why people make preexisting sci-fi based scenario on estabilished franchises that people already know, like Star Wars or Star Trek

 

[RhodokMasterRaceOfficial]

The game concept would've probably worked if they'd actually made an entire setting instead of going with procgen garbage. That way they might have had the chance to make more interesting scenarios and factions and aliens that we could care about. This, as opposed to endless fields of procgen copy+pasted...

Well... Daggerfall sucks, and fuck you.

 

[IDtenT]

So does Diablo.

 

[chuft]

There is a hilarious cognitive dissonance that occurs when you hear soaring "space empire" music while you spend all your time managing unemployment.

 

[BrotherFrank]

I maintain this game was good once. I mean i pirated it and felt bad for doing so, its the best litmus test there is.

But if I were to pirate it today I’d uninstall it after 20 minutes, when you need to shop around for dozens of mods to undo every fuckup the devs have added something has gone horribly wrong. And then said mods clash with other mods you installed since it’s piles of spaghetti code laid precariously upon each other like a tower of Jenga exarceberating performance issues and it’s like fuck, stop making dlcs and patches for this game you hacks

 

[Norfleet]

There is a hilarious cognitive dissonance that occurs when you hear soaring "space empire" music while you spend all your time managing unemployment.

Sounds realistic to me, this is what you actually would be doing when running a real empire. See: Real Life.

 

[Ravielsk]

There is a hilarious cognitive dissonance that occurs when you hear soaring "space empire" music while you spend all your time managing unemployment.

Sounds realistic to me, this is what you actually would be doing when running a real empire. See: Real Life.

Yes, but you see the problem is that Stellaris is not actually about economic management. Its a war game/exploration game that only had this economic aspect tacked on in patch 2.2 and little was done to expand or fix any of its failures. Because since you have no control over where pops go or what they do the only efficient way to manage economy is to wait just a few ticks before a new pop is spawned to que up a building/job you want it to take, if you dont do this and build ahead of time your pops will take random jobs and your economy will collapse simply because nobody works at the power plant. Now imagine that this is something you have to do with around 30+ planets and now imagine that this is as deep as economic management goes in Stellaris as making sure that your pops are not unemployed is as deep as the system goes.

 

[zapotec]

There is a hilarious cognitive dissonance that occurs when you hear soaring "space empire" music while you spend all your time managing unemployment.

Sounds realistic to me, this is what you actually would be doing when running a real empire. See: Real Life.

Yes, the empire of Mcdonald.

 

[thesecret1]

Yes, but you see the problem is that Stellaris is not actually about economic management. Its a war game/exploration game that only had this economic aspect tacked on in patch 2.2 and little was done to expand or fix any of its failures. Because since you have no control over where pops go or what they do the only efficient way to manage economy is to wait just a few ticks before a new pop is spawned to que up a building/job you want it to take, if you dont do this and build ahead of time your pops will take random jobs and your economy will collapse simply because nobody works at the power plant. Now imagine that this is something you have to do with around 30+ planets and now imagine that this is as deep as economic management goes in Stellaris as making sure that your pops are not unemployed is as deep as the system goes.

Oh, the game actually has a solution for that! It's called "Shitty AI". The AI is so shitty that even if you hand over planet management to "sector AI" and suffer about 70% decrease in output efficiency because of how bad it is, the enemy AI is so garbage that you'll outperform it anyway.

 

[Storyfag]

the only efficient way to manage economy is to wait just a few ticks before a new pop is spawned to que up a building/job you want it to take, if you dont do this and build ahead of time your pops will take random jobs and your economy will collapse simply because nobody works at the power plant

Slavery helps.

 

[Space Satan]

Turnips

Spoiler

Stellaris Dev Diary #218 - Plantoids Gameplay

• Thread startergrekulf
• Start dateToday at 13:00

Hello everyone!

I hope you have had a great summer thus far, and let’s hope we can enjoy the rest of August as well. The team is starting to return from their vacations and we’re eager to start finishing off the Lem Update so that we can ready it for release in September.

As mentioned in dev diary 214, we’re going to Buff the Backlog by adding some gameplay to existing DLC. Today we’re here to talk about an addition coming in the Lem Update, and more specifically what additions we are making to the Plantoids Species Pack.

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New traits and their cost.
Phototrophic: Is mutually exclusive with Radiotrophic, and changes some of your food upkeep into energy upkeep. Requires your species to be Plantoid or Fungoid.

Instagram-friendly?
Radiotrophic: Is mutually exclusive with Phototrophic, and changes some of your food upkeep into energy upkeep. It also makes it more beneficial for your Pops to live on Tomb Worlds, as their energy upkeep is removed. Requires your species to be Plantoid or Fungoid.

Contrary to popular belief, this species does not sustain itself by consuming ancient communication equipment.
Budding: This trait allows you to produce some pop assembly. Multiple Species with this trait can help provide pop assembly on potentially another species. For example, two species with the Syncretic Evolution Origin can together assemble one of the two. This trait can probably be especially great for a Hive Mind species.

New Civics
Let’s continue taking a look at the Civics. Both of these new Civics are available to regular empires as well as Hive Minds. Only Idyllic Bloom requires you to be a Plantoid or Fungoid.

Catalytic Processing: This Civic lets you produce Alloys with Food instead of Minerals. Starting Districts have been adjusted to be balanced when using this Civic. Regular Empires and Hive Minds convert 9 Food into 3 Alloys. Machine Empires turn 12 Food into 4 Alloys.

Catalytic Processing is available to many types of empires, but not all of them.
Idyllic Bloom: This Civic lets you transform planets into Gaia Worlds by building Gaia Seeders and upgrading them. The Gaia Seeders have 4 phases, with the 4th and final phase triggering the terraformation of the planet to a Gaia World. Available to regular empires as well as Hive Minds.

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grekulf · Aug 5, 2021 at 13:00

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grekulf · Aug 5, 2021 at 13:00

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grekulf · Aug 5, 2021 at 13:00

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grekulf · Aug 5, 2021 at 13:00

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That’s all for this week folks! We’ll be back again next week, so until then, stay safe and be well.

 

[Preben]

Meh, more EU-sque +10% abstract modifiers. I wish I could see some actual gameplay improvement.

 

[Ibn Sina]

Meh, more EU-sque +10% abstract modifiers. I wish I could see some actual gameplay improvement.

it will never happen dude. Everything that made empires unique (what little there was to begin with) was removed in order to level the playing field for multiplayer. In its place modifies such as 0.02% growth speed increase -0.05% attack speed decrease were placed. And the autistic community of stellaris seems happy with that shit. For me, i am certainly never giving one $ to paradox again, those slimy liars. the game is so boring, 50 years into the game and everyone is either the same or everyone is pathetic compared to you, there is no real difference between empires, everyone ends up the same. enforcing hyperlanes to remove doom stacking is the biggest lie I ever saw lol, you just doomstack more. its ridiculous.

 

[Space Satan]

Upcoming new tradition tree

 

[Joggerino]

The whole corporation mechanic was a mistake.

 

[Space Satan]

Spoiler

Stellaris Dev Diary #221 - Balance and Quality of Life Improvements

• Thread starterAlfray Stryke
• Start dateToday at 13:00

Hey folks, I’m @Alfray Stryke, a member of the QA team for Stellaris. As part of the Custodians’ work on the 3.1 “Lem” patch, as mentioned in Dev Diary #215, the team has done a balance and Quality of Life pass on various features throughout the game and we’d like to highlight some of the more harder hitting changes. This is not a complete list of all changes, and may contain some not-final numbers. As a reminder, the changes to the Necroids Species Pack were covered in Dev Diary #216, and all of these changes will also be included in the Lem update.

Void Dwellers

We’ve been aware that the implementation of Void Dwellers of having two separate traits, one positive and one negative resulted in behaviour that we weren’t happy with - in particular being able to gene-mod the negative aspects of the trait out of existence. To solve this we’ve made some changes to how the traits work:

• There is now only a single Void Dweller trait, so it can’t be exploited via genetic modification of your species.
• The modifiers on the trait itself have changed, previously it gave:
  • +15% Resources from Worker and Specialist jobs & -10% growth speed (for the positive version)
  • -60% growth speed (for the negative version)
• The new version of the trait is now:
  • +15% Pop Resource Output on Habitats.
  • -15% Pop Resource Output on Non-Artificial Worlds.
  • -10% Growth Speed
  • -30% Happiness on Non-Artificial Worlds.

The new, improved, Void Dweller trait with its modifiers.

What this means is your Void Dwellers pops are most productive and happiest on habitats, have their bonuses removed on ringworlds and have production and happiness penalties if they settle on planets (best to leave those for immigrants or robots!)

Shattered Ring

So before you grab your plasma-pitchforks (yes, plasma-pitchforks are canon now), rebalancing the Shattered Ring origin is something the team has been discussing for a while. We’ve gone through various iterations on decreasing the initial power of the origin, while keeping the player fantasy that it provides in mind and eventually settled on having the progression of the Shattered Ring resemble that of the Remnants origin.

Shattered Ring.png

Mining districts, aka tunnels filled with valuable minerals and alloys.

As a civilization that has only known life on the ring prior to achieving spaceflight, the only resources available to you were those that made up the ringworld itself. Luckily ruined ringworlds are massive and can spare some missing broken materials without falling into their local sun.

As such your mining district on the shattered ring replaces the regular miner jobs with scrap miner jobs with a base job output of 2 minerals and 1 alloy per month.

Of course, as was alluded to above, we wanted the progression for the shattered ring to resemble that of the relic world from the Remnants origin. So once you’ve cleared all the debris from the shattered ring and researched the appropriate technology you can repair it into a fully functioning ringworld segment.

Of course, sometimes a bit of home repair work needs to be done.

Upon completion of this monumental task, the districts on the shattered ring are upgraded into their respective ringworld districts at a 5:1 ratio - so 5 agricultural districts become 1 agricultural segment. Since fixing up the ring means you’ll no longer be clearing out material, the mining districts are removed and the ability to construct research segments is added.

Ecumenopolis QoL Changes

Something we’ve received a lot of feedback on is that when a world is transformed into an Ecumenopolis is the assignment of industrial districts.

Prior to 3.1, all of the industrial districts were assumed to be devoted to alloy production and thus converted into foundry arcologies. No more, in 3.1 industrial districts will convert based off of the planetary designation:

• With the “Foundry World” designation, industrial districts will convert into foundry arcologies, at a 2:1 ratio
• With the “Factory World” designation, industrial districts will convert into factory arcologies, at a 2:1 ratio.
• With any other designation, including the “Industrial World” designation, industrial districts will convert into both foundry and factory arcologies, at a 4:1:1 ratio.

Relic World.png
Alfray Stryke · Aug 26, 2021 at 13:00

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Earth, a bygone relic of a time long past, ready to be restored anew.

Ecumenopolis.png

Pampering will be provided at Floor 314, Room 15 at 9:26 am.


Assorted QoL Changes

As mentioned above, the planetary designation for consumer goods has been renamed to Factory World, because we’ve added an Industrial World designation.

Multiple planetary designations for your various needs

The new Industrial World designation is ideal for planets where you don’t want to focus the Industrial districts on a single job type, instead providing a minor upkeep discount to both Artisan and Metallurgist jobs.

Industrial World Designation

Both Hive Worlds and Machine Worlds have gained an additional bonus to bring them more in line with Gaia Worlds. Hive Worlds now have +1 innate Spawning Drone job and Machine Worlds now have +1 innate Replicator job. The Machine World given by the Resource Consolidation origin starts with a blocker which will need to be cleared to unlock the Replicator job.

Subversive Cults (MegaCorps with both Gospel of the Masses and Criminal Syndicate) no longer have access to the Temple of Prosperity. Instead, they can now establish a Subversive Shrine in their branch offices - increasing both Spiritualist ethics attraction and crime on the planet.

Subvert expectations with deals so good they’re criminal!

With that I’ll pass things over to @Gruntsatwork to discuss some of the changes we’ve made to civics!

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Hello everyone. I am one of Game Designers currently working on Stellaris and on the Custodian Team. While we have been busy with radical changes here and there, new civics and origins, we also wanted to have some more tame but no less important balance changes for our already existing civics, specifically for our outliers and those we felt under- or especially over-utilized.

The following lists all the civics we felt needed a substantial lift up
Regular Empires

• Beacon of Liberty: Gave +15% produced Unity -> Now ALSO also gives -15% Empire Sprawl from Pops
• Imperial Cult: Gave +1 Edict cap -> Now gives +2 Edict cap
• Idealistic Foundation: Gave +5% Happiness -> Now gives +10% Happiness
• Environmentalist: Gave -10% Consumer Goods Upkeep -> Now gives -20% Consumer Goods Upkeep
• Parliamentary System: Gave +25% Faction Influence -> Now gives +40% Faction Influence
• Efficient Bureaucracy: Gave +10% Admin Cap -> Now gives +20% Admin Cap
• Nationalistic Zeal: Gave -10% War Exhaustion Gain and -10% Claim Cost -> Now gives -20% War Exhaustion Gain and -15% Claim Cost
• Functional Architecture: Gave -10% Building and District Cost, -10% Building and District Upkeep and +1 Building Slot -> Now gives -15% Building and District Cost, +2 Building Slots, Upkeep reduction removed

Hive-Minds

• Subspace Ephase: Gave +15% Naval Capacity -> Now gives +20% Ship Speed and ALSO gives +15% Naval Capacity
• Divided Attention: Gave +10% Admin Cap -> Now gives +20% Admin Cap

Machine Intelligences

• Constructobot: Gave -10% Building and District Cost, -10% Building and District Upkeep and +1 Building Slot -> Now gives -15% Building and District Cost, +2 Building Slots, Upkeep reduction removed

We hope those changes, while strictly number tweaks, will give those civics a breath of fresh air and increase their appeal to the wider player-base because, “oh, shiny new numbers” is one hell of a drug.

Now sadly, only strengthening the civics we felt undervalued or under-used doesn’t solve all issues, so we also introduced some slight nerfs to the 2(3) biggest offenders in terms of being “must have” civics.

• Slaver Guilds : Reduced enslaved population from 40% to 35%
• Indentured Assets: Reduced enslaved population from 40% to 35% (Megacorp civic)
• Technocracy: Added 1 Consumer Goods upkeep to Scientist Jobs that create unity because of Technocracy

As you can tell, for the slaver guild civics, this change is relatively minor, compared to the Technocracy nerf. The goal here is to make those 3 civics slightly less good. We have no intention of nerfing them into the ground. Our goal here is to move them from “the best pick, every time” to “could be best pick, depending on circumstances”.

We will be following your feedback here and over all other platforms very closely as well as our own telemetry and we will keep adjusting and tweaking the civics as we go on.

As an extra note, we know that there are several other civics that definitely need a pick me up, we will be looking into them as well, but not for the Lem update.

That’s everything from us this week! Thanks for reading and we’ll be back next week diving into more changes in the Lem Update.

 

[IDtenT]

The whole corporation mechanic was a mistake.

But what about in Stellaris?

 

[CancerUnlimited]

All praise 1.9.1 the only true version!

 

[IDtenT]