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[ZeroGravitas]

ah yes, a complete overhaul of the game's economic system. i guess this is as good a time as any to do that

source: wiz's twitter teasers

[Telgin]

I'm very much looking forward to the economic revisions, even if many details are speculative at this point.  The plan, at least as far as the community can seem to agree, is to remove the tile system and replace it with more abstract populations and labor pools, while giving more options for said labor pools.  For example, manufacturing was hinted at, which implies that raw minerals will have to be processed into useful materials before use now.  I really like this idea, as well as the idea of luxury goods and the apparent stratified societies that the image above imply will now be possible.

A sizable minority of the posters on Paradox's forums seem to be mad about removing the tile system, but I really think it will be better once it's gone.  It's fun for the first five planets, but it gets really tedious for little point later on.  In my last game I think I had 37 planets in the core sector, all of them manually laid out and upgraded, which takes forever even if you use the shortcut to max upgrade a structure in one click.

The galactic market UI they've teased looks kind of plain and the mechanics a little shallow, but it's already much better than the trader enclaves.  I'd have loved a system like it to be in place in my last game, where I couldn't seem to stop producing hundreds of extra food due to the sector AI.  Selling that food for something would have been nice, and all my neighbors were too much of jerks for me to trade it to them.  Seriously, I tried and they kept telling me to shut up.

[Rolan7]

A sizable minority of the posters on Paradox's forums seem to be mad about removing the tile system, but I really think it will be better once it's gone.  It's fun for the first five planets, but it gets really tedious for little point later on.  In my last game I think I had 37 planets in the core sector, all of them manually laid out and upgraded, which takes forever even if you use the shortcut to max upgrade a structure in one click.

I've never managed to endure the tile-game past midgame, despite typically having like 3-5 core worlds.  It's nifty for maybe a few hours, until you realize just how inane it is.  The only real "choices", prioritizing different resources, are handled by the sector AI (now that it's no longer *completely and literally broken*, just kinda meh).

Other than that it's just fake choices.  Put unity buildings on unresource squares.  Put appropriate buildings on appropriate squares.  Then be forced to check in ever few RL-minutes to make the non-choice to upgrade those buildings.  It's terrible.

And that's without getting into the ridiculous gaminess of managing conquered pops as a devouring swarm/crusader.  That ought to be the simplest thing - they die!  But no, they need to be shipped around lest they rebel.

Sorry - yeah, I'm actually excited for the other features too, I just can't stand the pop system.  And my favorite 4X game is still Alpha Centauri or MoO2, so I am not some newbie to micro.

[Trekkin]

Other than that it's just fake choices.  Put unity buildings on unresource squares.  Put appropriate buildings on appropriate squares.  Then be forced to check in ever few RL-minutes to make the non-choice to upgrade those buildings.  It's terrible.

Maps are an inherently annoying UI for things that don't have geographical relationships, and all Stellaris ever had in that vein were adjacency bonuses that never really felt worth it. Even something as simple as having modifiers affect only subsets of planetary tiles would have helped, but as it stands I wouldn't mind just having a pie chart of percent effort devoted to the production of different resources to manipulate and maps that are wholly intended as eye candy.

[ZeroGravitas]

Other than that it's just fake choices.  Put unity buildings on unresource squares.  Put appropriate buildings on appropriate squares.  Then be forced to check in ever few RL-minutes to make the non-choice to upgrade those buildings.  It's terrible.

Maps are an inherently annoying UI for things that don't have geographical relationships, and all Stellaris ever had in that vein were adjacency bonuses that never really felt worth it. Even something as simple as having modifiers affect only subsets of planetary tiles would have helped, but as it stands I wouldn't mind just having a pie chart of percent effort devoted to the production of different resources to manipulate and maps that are wholly intended as eye candy.

agreed, master of orion 1 did planets better, 20 years ago:

[Rolan7]

In case it isn't clear, that's unironically true.  You set planetary priorities, like some sort of galactic overlord instead of a micromanaging clerk.  It wasn't perfect UI by any stretch, but it was actual grand strategy.

MoO2 the sequel actually added a *lot* of micromanagement, but it added a lot of other stuff that is arguably worth the tedium.

[Mephansteras]

Yeah. The tile system isn't too bad if you use some mods that make the choices interesting, but even then it's a lot of extra work for relatively small gain. And of course the sector AI can't really do it well, so it's mostly wasted.

[ZeroGravitas]

In case it isn't clear, that's unironically true.  You set planetary priorities, like some sort of galactic overlord instead of a micromanaging clerk.  It wasn't perfect UI by any stretch, but it was actual grand strategy.

yep. just pointing towards the sliders. i should have cropped the picture.

MoO2 the sequel actually added a *lot* of micromanagement, but it added a lot of other stuff that is arguably worth the tedium.

yeah, it basically added Civilization-style buildings where nothing like that existed before, and honestly wasn't necessary.

[Persus13]

The main reason I don't like tiles going away is that its another case of the Stellaris team just straight up dumping an aspect of the game instead of trying to improve on it. Sure a lot of stuff with tiles was a waste of time, but they gave planets a little more personality than dots on a map, and that's something that I can guarantee the revamp won't have.

I'm still a little bitter over them making it impossible to play with wormhole FTL from the start.

[Telgin]

I can understand that, but in the end I didn't feel like it gave that much personality to planets anyway.  Technically it does, but... at least in practice I build them all up in the exact same way anyway.  I'd be okay with some way of expanding that, but I really can't think of any way off the top of my head that also helps with the extreme tedium.

I'd comment on the FTL changes, but I didn't start playing until after that, and I know it's been rehashed to death and again.

On the topic of the sector AI, I haven't tried letting it run without the setting requiring it to respect tile bonuses turned on, but how bad is it if you turn that off?  I kind of want to turn it off, because otherwise it keeps developing planets that produce 50+ food when I don't need any more, but I'm afraid it will be intolerably stupid if I do, like building mines on energy squares.  If it respects the designated focus reasonably well it might not matter so much, since I always set my sectors to be research focused and if it builds a lab over a mineral or energy square that's not so bad.

But then, its behavior with even that worries me, since it seems to only want to build engineering facilities.  I can be behind by a fair bit in society research, but it still upgrades 80% of labs to be engineering facilities.  I've seen that in at least two games so far.

[PTTG??]

I think the tiles dated from a period in development where planets had surface maps with the potential to move armies from place to place, and different types of terrain. I remember it used to have contested systems where multiple empires had colonies -- with that,  there could be multiple empires on a given planet!

[Telgin]

That would admittedly be pretty cool.

The only aspect of the tile system that I know was dropped was that there used to be more adjacency bonuses, which were removed late in development from what I understand.  I'm not sure why, but my hunch is that it was either difficult to balance or was difficult for the AI to plan for correctly.  Leaning toward the latter.

[Retropunch]

At it's core, it's the age old problem of Stellaris being a very by-the-numbers 4x which is trying to be a grand strategy game.

Most people seemed to want/expect it to be a grand strategy (CK2 in space) and they didn't deliver that at launch - now they're gradually crawling towards it. Whilst that's a good direction to go in, my issue with that is that I don't think they've got enough substance to back up losing all the 4x micro-manage-y systems.

If they get rid of tiles and just have a high level 'every planet has sliders' aspect, then it'll be even more fast forwarding than it is already.

[Trekkin]

Most people seemed to want/expect it to be a grand strategy (CK2 in space) and they didn't deliver that at launch - now they're gradually crawling towards it. Whilst that's a good direction to go in, my issue with that is that I don't think they've got enough substance to back up losing all the 4x micro-manage-y systems.

I think part of the problem was that people meant very different things by "CK2 in space."

If you play CK2 as a Machiavellian bastardry simulator, Stellaris seems very impersonal by comparison because all the characters within an empire are interchangeable, passive bags of stats executing orders. They don't feel like they make decisions, so there's no point or way to bounce them off each other. Without that, grand strategy just feels kind of dry, so we run into this dichotomy of tedium vs. fast-forwarding.

[forsaken1111]

CK2 in space already exists in the form of the Crisis of the Confederation mod. I'd be quite happy with Victoria 2 in space for Stellaris