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[Descan]

Except there's no industry and barely any politics, two of the main points of Victoria 2. The only thing Vicky-like about Stellaris is the warfare (and a] Vicky2 warfare was kind of shit and really not the main idea of the game, and b] it's a 4x game, they all have warfare) and colonization (which is nowhere near as in-depth as Vicky 2, such as it is; for example, you can't compete with another empire for a planet; even when you didn't need to build an outpost in a system before colonizing it (and you can't compete there either in the same way) whoever set their ship down first won the planet, even if they stalled on energy and a competing empire could finish a colony before).

If there's any Paradox game that I'd call Stellaris (X) In Space, it'd be like... Maybe EU3, or base-game/on-release EU4.

e: may have misread, did you mean you'd be happy if they took that as inspiration going forward on how they want to direct Stellaris? In which case, I fully agree; I have the most fun in 4x games when I have an industry that's more than just 'Rocks What You Build Wit,' 'Food,'  and 'Energy,' and the Victoria 2 politics, while... bare, were at least interesting in that you had to pick a government that had what you want and might be saddled with things you're less keen on but aren't as important. Or deal with an election result, you don't even pick.

It'd be interesting if Stellaris elections were based purely on the factions, and each faction had a platform that changed your policies as each party got into power and went through their agenda.

[forsaken1111]

Yeah I meant I would be happy if it went more towards Vicky style

[Cruxador]

The thing that annoys me about scrapping the tile system is that it basically boils down to the implementation being mediocre. Yes, tiles are tedious without much point. But then instead of building on them to make them good, Wiz instead thinks of something else that could theoretically be good, and uses his finite dev time to rip out the current systems and implement a new mediocre system. I this respect, Stellaris has actually gotten a lot worse, because when you looked at it two years ago, it may have been flawed but you could see the skeleton of an amazing game that it could become with a couple years of refinement an additions. Instead, the policy of substituting mechanics has brought it to a state of fully realized mediocrity.

[ZeroGravitas]

I think it's become pretty clear that tiles weren't a sustainable way of doing things. Either you automate it away through sectors (then why does it exist...) or you require lots of extremely repetitive and shallow player activity on every planet, because you can have a few different types planet types that work in interesting ways but you can't scale that up to dozens of planets.

imagine if you had to go into every eu4 province and build dozens of buildings, as opposed to just a couple ones that mattered (or if raising development in eu4 required like 5 clicks each time).

or imagine if the primary playstyle of ck2 involved clicking on every vassal's holdings and constantly upgrading their buildings, and the vassals could ruin the holdings if you didn't. it would be absolute garbage.

[Trekkin]

I think it's become pretty clear that tiles weren't a sustainable way of doing things. Either you automate it away through sectors (then why does it exist...) or you require lots of extremely repetitive and shallow player activity on every planet, because you can have a few different types planet types that work in interesting ways but you can't scale that up to dozens of planets.

This is, I think, part of why the Stellaris dev process has largely been one of ripping out the flawed stubs of ideas that could have been good. Making tiles interesting would require enough tile content to make every planet meaningfully different, and a huge amount of that effort is going to go to waste in any given game. As soon as there's a standard planet in a game with many hundreds of planets, there is also a standard way to optimize that planet that must then be repeated dozens if not hundreds of times for an ultimate reward per iteration of <1% of the empire's output being optimal until the next time it must be fiddled with.

"Rule over a hundred star systems and manually zone their power plants" does not strike me as a flawed implementation of a good idea. It's just bad through and through, and while some games have tried to make it less painful (SEIV/SEV, for example, or in an odd an incidental way Aurora) I think there's a reason no one has seriously tried to run with that idea to make it more fun before.

[Telgin]

Either you automate it away through sectors (then why does it exist...) or you require lots of extremely repetitive and shallow player activity on every planet

I think this is the ultimate issue.  There may be other ways to make planet terrain interesting, but as far as pops and buildings go, there's no way around this, really.  It either has to be automatable to a point, which will cause friction with those who think it's doing dumb things (and it probably will), or it has to be manual, which is tedious.

Maybe there are ways to make the placement of buildings and pops more strategic, such that a manual organization system is worth the tedium, but that's probably just going to be difficult.  If it comes down to a numbers game of optimizing building and pop placements because of local resources or adjacency bonuses, then it boils down to what we have now where there's arguably only one correct solution anyway.  A greater variety of buildings helps with this, but I'm not sure it solves the fundamental problem.  I guess there's a small element of strategic choice to it now, where for instance you might have a Dyson sphere and decide to overwrite energy tiles with mines for more minerals, but in the end that's not more interesting than just changing sliders to make a planet focus more on mining than energy generation.  The terrain itself still doesn't matter.

I'm not sure how to make the terrain more interesting in general.  Maybe there's potential for ground combat, or for having multiple empires vie for control of the surface like PTTG?? mentioned, but in practice that sounds like it would just be too tedious itself for something that would probably come up pretty rarely, not to speak of the performance implications.

I think that the planets can be given more personality without the tile system or even detailed terrain.  More detailed factions that group up on them would help, for example, especially if it influenced the planet's development in some way.  Greater ability to specialize planets would help too, whatever that ends up meaning.  The ecumenopolis teaser screenshot is kind of an example of what could be done, with planet wide commerce, mining, manufacturing or tourist (for unity I guess?) industries being things you could vie for.

[Trekkin]

I'm not sure how to make the terrain more interesting in general.  Maybe there's potential for ground combat, or for having multiple empires vie for control of the surface like PTTG?? mentioned, but in practice that sounds like it would just be too tedious itself for something that would probably come up pretty rarely, not to speak of the performance implications.e, with planet wide commerce, mining, manufacturing or tourist (for unity I guess?) industries being things you could vie for.

I think the problem with this is one of scale. If I have one planet and I can get 12 minerals per turn instead of 10, that feels significant; it feels like I'm rewarded for being thoughtful with a tangible benefit. If I have 100 planets and can get 1002 minerals per turn instead of 1000 for the same work, it doesn't feel like it's as worth my time.

I'm not sure there's a way to make planetary terrain significant at the galactic scale that wouldn't overwhelm the early game with randomness.

[Telgin]

Pretty much.

I saw some talk on Paradox's forums about how the game should probably transition from a planet economy management game to a sector economy management game, and I feel that that's probably reasonable.  The game already tries to kind of do that by all but forcing you to use sectors once you get too many planets, but of course the sector management AI is suboptimal and you still have to manage the core sector directly.

As usual, I'm not sure what this should mean in practice.

[Trekkin]

As usual, I'm not sure what this should mean in practice.

Maybe just give every planet an exponentially decreasing curve of pop-effort-turns per resource, let the player weight different resources per sector, and have the AI continually adjust the effort allocation per planet to optimize the sum of productions * weights (with bonuses determined by the sector governor)?

I'd also keep the buildings with planet-wide effects and let those be directly buildable, sector or no, but en masse from the planet screen.

[BurnedToast]

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.

The problem is they can't make the tile system better - the AI is already too stupid to handle the incredibly simple system we already have. If they make it more complicated, the AI is just going to fail even harder unless they prop it up with so many cheat bonuses it's playing a totally different game.

[Persus13]

If your AI prevents you from making the game better, maybe they should invest in making the AI better instead of cutting systems.

[BurnedToast]

If your AI prevents you from making the game better, maybe they should invest in making the AI better instead of cutting systems.

They can't do that either - nobody can. Modern AI is just not capable of playing a complex game like stellaris on the level of even a mediocre human player. That's not to say stellaris AI is top of the line and can't be improved, because it's pretty dumb and they could make it better.

But they couldn't make it enough better to get satisfactory results from a more complex tile system.  Especially considering it has to run on consumer level hardware which is an even further limitation on an already hard problem.

[Telgin]

I'm actually kind of curious how difficult it is to really get the AI to work better with the tile system.  Admittedly, upon a quick brush it feels like the choices I make are so mechanical that the AI should be able to pull it off reasonably well, but I know that's deceptive.  There are a lot of factors that influence it, from ethics, civics, tile bonuses, species bonuses, and so on.  It feels like you should be able to form a mathematical model to decide which tile to put down for optimal use based on that, but then I imagine the planning could get tricky.  Especially early on when minerals are scarce, budgeting for an expensive building or upgrade can gum up other plans, and where a human player might decide to abandon saving minerals for that if something comes up, it gets really messy when the AI has to do things like that.

A lot of people speculate that the pop and tile system is also partly responsible for end game lag.  While it's plausible, I'm not convinced that's the case, but if it improves performance to get rid of it then that's also a bonus.

[Trekkin]

I'm actually kind of curious how difficult it is to really get the AI to work better with the tile system.  Admittedly, upon a quick brush it feels like the choices I make are so mechanical that the AI should be able to pull it off reasonably well, but I know that's deceptive.

It also suffers from the problem of going unnoticed unless it works. "Make the AI better" is an easy demand to make, but as you point out, it's hard to fulfill, and even if it's perfect it's hardly something that can be advertised as readily as new content.

[ChairmanPoo]

Lets be honest here: tile system is a relc of bygone days. Few people want to micromanage all that shit. Of course the AI needs work, but I think that moving from planet to sector management, as peoplemhave suggested here, isn't a bad idea.

I'd love more CK2 like features, too, so it would be nice if admirals and sector governors pplayed different roles than before (as to not be hobbled by leader limits that much)  and had their own agendas and personalities.  It would be interesting to have the different mandarins in your empire jockeying for power. Plus minus more possibilities of coups and rebellions. Eg: you made admiral so and so unhappy so he actually started an uprising with one third of the fleet. Governors so and so have joined him im his rebellion


I'd go even further and remove current leader limits. Leaders should spawn whenever you have a new governor/admiral/general position open. The problem would be that, the larger your empire and military, the more likely you'll have stronger factions wanting to do their  own thing