Stellaris - Paradox new sci-fi grand strategy game

[Ravielsk]

It has ineresting ideas like crisis, leviatans and so on but they all feel completely artificial and predictable. It would be interesting if for example suddenly flottila of scourge like aliens cut off half of your systems leaving newly colonized planets, that would force players to change their strategy. Alas nothing like this happens. It would be great if for example AI would rise on your systems and they started to fight your pops having effectively inside rebelion. Or you do orbital bombardment in some minor conflict hitting some ancient relic site which activates fleet of nanomachines terraforming few planets in system creating conflict point not only for you but few other nations.

The funny part is that all of what you mentioned is technically in the game as I am typing this but its implemented in such a ass-backwards way that the only way it ever shows up is if you actually fish for it. There are minor crisis mechanics like the great Khan that can cut the galaxy in half but the entire event is setup in such a retarded way that unless you are borderline cheating the great Khan is always stronger than anyone else, thus joining him is the only viable way forward and therefore he is no longer a problem whatsoever. Worse yet, 90% of the time the entire event ends with the Khan randomly dying and creating a hole where his territory was, meaning that dealing with him is at worst entirely a matter of waiting for him to commit sudoku.
Rebellions can occur only when you have extremely low happiness but are effectively always doomed to failure as the rebels are almost always piss weak, meaning that unless the rebellion happens at literary the worst possible moment in the game, its never anything more than a momentary annoyance. The biggest problem the rebellions can cause is that they cost you influence to declare war on the rebels.

The content technically exists but its implementation into the game renders it effectively worthless. If they were to fix the game with their whole "custodian initiative" they would need to release patches at least monthly to to finish before 2023. At the current rate they are going its effectively worthless.

 

[Storyfag]

but the entire event is setup in such a retarded way that unless you are borderline cheating the great Khan is always stronger than anyone else, thus joining him is the only viable way forward

What? I routinely eat the Great Khan for breakfast. I don't think I'm "borderline cheating", the game is just piss easy.

 

[Ravielsk]

but the entire event is setup in such a retarded way that unless you are borderline cheating the great Khan is always stronger than anyone else, thus joining him is the only viable way forward

What? I routinely eat the Great Khan for breakfast. I don't think I'm "borderline cheating", the game is just piss easy.

Oh, yeah I forgot that I tended to play with mid-game setup to start as soon as possible to facilitate at least some challenge so the Khan spawns much sooner and was therefore much stronger. My bad, sorry.

My point still stands though. The Khan is either weak as piss or only an annoyance that solves it self, not a actual threat.

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

Reminds me of the old Glavius times. Great Khan always got BTFO in like five seconds back when..

Personally I feel Stellaris needs more emergent content to keep the game dynamic. Someone said rebellions don't do anything and I agree, the mechanics don't sustain them right now. They rebel and then what, some planet with no fleet decides to go 1x1 against your empire? You're fine as long as you have two planets.

Rebellions shouldn't be just some planets getting pissy, but something more involved, more phased, which eventually gets sprung. Say, your domineering empire oppresses like 10 alien races spread across the galaxy. Eventually your masses of alien slaves, thralls and second-class citizens start conspiring together to overthrown you. So they start doing things like creating cells across planets, smuggling in ships, allying with criminals, pirates, etc... until the day of the Rebellion, upon which they start coups on their planets and fly their own rag-tag rebel fleets.

I think something like CKIII's system might be an appropriate way to make it work. Perhaps fuse it with Stellaris' factions, and have both Legal (Political Factions, Political Parties, etc) and Illegal Factions (Factions made ilegal by the player, Organized Crime, Rebels of all kinds, etc).

It would also need interplay with the Espionage System. The most successful rebellions in history often have foreign backers. Perhaps with diplomatic system as well, with strong enough ilegal factions being "invisible" nations who are capable of conducting diplomacy with other powers?

I think another example would be to have a proper Religion/Ideology/Philosophy system. That would totally shake up the old Spiritualism-Materialism thing, with nations having different religions, ideologies, etc.


In other facts, holy shit Cybrex Warforms are awesome for ground assault. Enemy armies break, but your Warforms literally are not programmed to give a fuck. That Cybrex artifact was totally worth it.

Question: What is the best way to deal with Empire Sprawl? After two wars with a nearby neighbor and their annexation, leaving me as the strongest power in the galactic northeast, I have immense amounts of Sprawl.

Same with resources. Resources are waaaay too distributed effectively making every nation the same. If resources were much more scarnce and randomized then you would have case where lasers are bad router for tech because you don't have resource X but now alien blaster Y you found on some archeogy site would be nice because you have resource Y on other hand someone who doesn't have any resources he would choose to go with quantity and make up difference in firepower with maybe more ships or better defense or making allies etc.

That's true. I think it would be better if special resources could only be purchased if another faction is actually selling them to the market, or directly, not magical resources from galactic market for starters.

 

[Joggerino]

You have pop jobs, (??i think administrators??) that give you more capacity.

 

[Mortmal]

Reminds me of the old Glavius times. Great Khan always got BTFO in like five seconds back when..

Personally I feel Stellaris needs more emergent content to keep the game dynamic. Someone said rebellions don't do anything and I agree, the mechanics don't sustain them right now. They rebel and then what, some planet with no fleet decides to go 1x1 against your empire? You're fine as long as you have two planets.

Rebellions shouldn't be just some planets getting pissy, but something more involved, more phased, which eventually gets sprung. Say, your domineering empire oppresses like 10 alien races spread across the galaxy. Eventually your masses of alien slaves, thralls and second-class citizens start conspiring together to overthrown you. So they start doing things like creating cells across planets, smuggling in ships, allying with criminals, pirates, etc... until the day of the Rebellion, upon which they start coups on their planets and fly their own rag-tag rebel fleets.

I think something like CKIII's system might be an appropriate way to make it work. Perhaps fuse it with Stellaris' factions, and have both Legal (Political Factions, Political Parties, etc) and Illegal Factions (Factions made ilegal by the player, Organized Crime, Rebels of all kinds, etc).

It would also need interplay with the Espionage System. The most successful rebellions in history often have foreign backers. Perhaps with diplomatic system as well, with strong enough ilegal factions being "invisible" nations who are capable of conducting diplomacy with other powers?

I think another example would be to have a proper Religion/Ideology/Philosophy system. That would totally shake up the old Spiritualism-Materialism thing, with nations having different religions, ideologies, etc.


In other facts, holy shit Cybrex Warforms are awesome for ground assault. Enemy armies break, but your Warforms literally are not programmed to give a fuck. That Cybrex artifact was totally worth it.

Question: What is the best way to deal with Empire Sprawl? After two wars with a nearby neighbor and their annexation, leaving me as the strongest power in the galactic northeast, I have immense amounts of Sprawl.

Same with resources. Resources are waaaay too distributed effectively making every nation the same. If resources were much more scarnce and randomized then you would have case where lasers are bad router for tech because you don't have resource X but now alien blaster Y you found on some archeogy site would be nice because you have resource Y on other hand someone who doesn't have any resources he would choose to go with quantity and make up difference in firepower with maybe more ships or better defense or making allies etc.

That's true. I think it would be better if special resources could only be purchased if another faction is actually selling them to the market, or directly, not magical resources from galactic market for starters.

Distant worlds did rebellion a lot better, i remember large part of the empire and many planets , former conquered aliens, seceding with some fleet when you went unethic path. You wotn see stuff like this or anything happen because of their business system, they milk it with dlcs but none of the dlc must be mandatory, so you get shitty superficial stuff.

 

[Ravielsk]

Really all it would take is for the rebellions to take over a chunk of your fleet. There is no need to over-complicate things. Really most problems in Stellaris would be trivial to resolve if PDX wanted, the problem is that at this point I am 100% certain no one working on the game has any idea how it functions and their entire decision making process is based around guessing what would produce the most "clicks".
The lag problem is entirely due to the insane number of pops they ask of you to have. The straight forward solution is to reduce the amount of pops or turn into a regular resource(a.k.a only one variable with one value) because lets face it they already are a resource. But PDX keeps pretending they are not and that somehow individual pops do something in the game besides enabling production.
The AI problem is entirely due to the glacial pace of the game since the AI cannot reasonably plan 3-4 hours ahead. It can "think" in the moment and simply shortening build times and increasing ship speed would do wonders for it. But again, no because we have to pretend this is some super duper deep 4X game.
The empire homogeneity could be entirely solved by bringing back individual labs for each category and letting the player choose what in which field he wants to research. If I want to focus on industry and only use kinetic accelerators I should be allowed to do so, instead of waiting for RNGjesus to randomly offer the option.

Most of these fixes are trivial to implement but they would require PDX to eat humble pie and admit that some decisions they made in the past were for the worse and somehow that is simply not something a company can do these days. For some reason.

 

[Mortmal]

Really all it would take is for the rebellions to take over a chunk of your fleet. There is no need to over-complicate things. Really most problems in Stellaris would be trivial to resolve if PDX wanted, the problem is that at this point I am 100% certain no one working on the game has any idea how it functions and their entire decision making process is based around guessing what would produce the most "clicks".
The lag problem is entirely due to the insane number of pops they ask of you to have. The straight forward solution is to reduce the amount of pops or turn into a regular resource(a.k.a only one variable with one value) because lets face it they already are a resource. But PDX keeps pretending they are not and that somehow individual pops do something in the game besides enabling production.
The AI problem is entirely due to the glacial pace of the game since the AI cannot reasonably plan 3-4 hours ahead. It can "think" in the moment and simply shortening build times and increasing ship speed would do wonders for it. But again, no because we have to pretend this is some super duper deep 4X game.
The empire homogeneity could be entirely solved by bringing back individual labs for each category and letting the player choose what in which field he wants to research. If I want to focus on industry and only use kinetic accelerators I should be allowed to do so, instead of waiting for RNGjesus to randomly offer the option.

Most of these fixes are trivial to implement but they would require PDX to eat humble pie and admit that some decisions they made in the past were for the worse and somehow that is simply not something a company can do these days. For some reason.

yes but its not a good workplace, frat mentality , probably execs with massive ego. They would rather sink than eat the humble pie.

 

[Hellion]

The new species pack seems rather fishy.

Embrace the life of a seafaring civilization as you sail the open expanses of the galaxy with Stellaris' most immersive pack yet: the Aquatics Species Pack! Dive into the Stellaris galaxy with a sea of new choices, and discover new life where you least expect it. Let a wave of new customizable options for your empire crash into Stellaris, with a treasure trove of new species portraits, ship set, origins and more.

 

[Storyfag]

If only it was something of substance, instead of just image packs. So these will have a preference for ocean worlds, big deal. Stellaris needs much more emphasis on habitability preference.

 

[zapotec]

"Arch-Emperor of the Thousand Suns, may i distract you from your meditations? "
"Yes, my humble servitor?"
"Planet BurgerKing needs another clerk"

 

[Corbin Dallas Multipass]

Why people are still playing this garbage game and supporting this garbage company?

I keep hoping they'll say "Hahaha, gotcha! Wow what a long april fools joke that was! OK here are your warp engines back."

But I will never give them another dime. It's hilarious that people are talking about how maybe they'll learn from this and stellaris 2 will be better. Like, how the fuck dumb can a person be? You're gonna shell out another 500 dollars for stellaris 2 and all 250 DLCs? And how do you know they won't just abandon the half finished design they release the game in, and make it a different, shittier, game, like they did with this?

 

[Talby]

Something like the sector governors acting more like vassals with their own agenda would be cool, maybe they form your council with their own goals like in CKII. Also, the great Khan has been a nothingburger in every single game I've played, they always die after just a few years.

 

[Tyrr]

The Stellaris development has no direction. It reminds me of a big software project in high school where every year a new group of students was working on it.

 

[Ravielsk]

To be reasonable, the game IS getting better.

If by better you mean that for every step forward they make two back, then yeah its getting better.

I think a Stellaris 2 would already be superior for a simple reason: It would use the superior code from the newer iterations of the Clausewitz engine. Stellaris' current code is an unoptimized mess.

Optimization is the least of Stelarise's problems. The core issue comes from the devs having no idea what the game is even supposed to be and just running in every direction possible. The current performance issues are 100% the result of them going for a while in the direction of "economy management simulator" and then just stopping. They increased the number of pops by a factor of 10x-20x but changed literary nothing about how said pops function(unless you count cutting the players ability to manually place them) which lead to massive amount of lag as effectively forced a system built around 10-25 pops per planet into a 100-250 pops per planet without really changing anything about the pops themselves. Mind you the planetary management and the resulting complexity of the economy effectively remained the same only now instead of clicking once every 10 minutes to manage a planet you are clicking every 10 seconds to do more or less the same thing.

Same roughly applies to anything else. Influence and admin capacity are just mana bars to hinder the player in early game and irrelevant in late game. Ship customization is worthless as there is never any reason to go for anything besides all-rounders as there are never any enemies that would require a specific build(outside of maybe a crisis if you are not yet powerful enough). Exploration is entirely flaccid because there is factually nothing of value to discover outside of habitable planets. Archaeology is just a bunch of text-boxes layered on top of each other. Diplomacy is just a bribing contest and the galactic community is just an overly long timer for pacifist runs. Unity is just... well to cut it short there is not a single individual gameplay element of Stellaris that is not half-assed and unfinished.

Its the absolute absence of direction that drags Stellaris down, not code optimization. Stellaris 2 could be optimized the run on the NES and it would still be shit because of the complete lack of focus

 

[GrafvonMoltke]

Codex Stellaris game when?

 

[IDtenT]

I'd play, as long as we don't allow the AI to cheat (play above normal difficulty).

 

[Joggerino]

This game can't be good as long as late game performance continues being shit.

 

[Fedora Master]

The main issue with Stellaris from the start has been the lack of any sort of context and the inevitable samey-ness of every playthrough.
A religious death cult society is no different from a peaceful science culture, by and large, and you'll always end up picking the same ascension perks and research ideas either way.

 

[GrafvonMoltke]

The main issue with Stellaris from the start has been the lack of any sort of context and the inevitable samey-ness of every playthrough.
A religious death cult society is no different from a peaceful science culture, by and large, and you'll always end up picking the same ascension perks and research ideas either way.

Still a better RPG than Fallout 4.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

that's because factions and happiness don't work. and also because rebellions never happen. a big empire should need skyrocketing happiness or a strong military presence. at the moment (and since ever) you can piss on your population and guess what? nothing happens. and all you need is ONE troop to conquer a planet after bombardments have empited it of any enemy.
just true rebellions, with fleets, armies and stuff, and system/planetary defenses would improve the game beyond expectations.
long story short, this shitshow is because of multiplayer.

 

[IDtenT]

And multilayer is a shit show, because cheating AI getting farmed becomes the only viable strategy.

 

[Storyfag]

Are there any mods that reduce influence gain or otherwise slow down grabbing turf? I find the exploration phase to be the nicest.

 

[Ravielsk]

Are there any mods that reduce influence gain or otherwise slow down grabbing turf? I find the exploration phase to be the nicest.

None, that I know of but here: https://files.catbox.moe/9urmub.txt

I just increased the cost of expansion to 250. Not sure how that will affect the AI but it could slow it down a little. Just put it into "*game location*\Stellaris\common\defines" and it should work on new game.

 

[holla_cabezas_de_mierda]

Are there any mods that reduce influence gain or otherwise slow down grabbing turf? I find the exploration phase to be the nicest.

this may be a dumb question since I have not played it much, so there could be an obvious reason why this would not work. I do have the game like I said, but have played it maybe 5 hours. Could you make habitable planets rare and slow down the tech tree advancements or some combination of things like that?