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Author Topic: Stellaris: Paradox Interactive IN SPACE  (Read 1658886 times)

Telgin

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Re: Stellaris: Paradox Interactive IN SPACE
« Reply #9195 on: November 27, 2021, 01:54:29 am »

I'm tempted to get the DLC since it's on sale.  I previously told myself I'd never buy any species packs because I didn't care about the cosmetics and because Paradox's quality control was so bad for so long, but the custodian initiative has changed my feelings on all of that a fair bit.  The species packs are still a little dubious since the civics they've added to the old ones feel like things that should be part of the base game, but I can appreciate that they've started putting effort into improving the old DLC's value and improving the game overall.
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Radsoc

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Re: Stellaris: Paradox Interactive IN SPACE
« Reply #9196 on: November 27, 2021, 03:15:29 am »

I tend to buy them all, because it makes me revisit the game. It some of my most played ones. Without the continued DLCs I would just have deleted it long time ago. However, have been playing ST New Horizons for the most part lately, and they tend to translate DLC features in to that mod nicely.
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Telgin

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Re: Stellaris: Paradox Interactive IN SPACE
« Reply #9197 on: November 27, 2021, 10:31:33 pm »

That's a fair point too and I have over 1,300 hours in the game, so I bought the DLC.  Time to play some federation builders for a change of pace, perhaps, and hope I run into some space water goblins.
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Telgin

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Re: Stellaris: Paradox Interactive IN SPACE
« Reply #9198 on: December 03, 2021, 10:35:23 am »

Has anyone ever had the AI leave a federation they created, and what happens if there are only two empires in a federation and one leaves?  Does the federation dissolve?

I find myself remembering why I like to play isolationists in this game.  I decided to play xenophiles for a change and create a research federation with my neighbors.  Well, the game put opposing ethics near me as usual so out of all of my neighbors, only one would go for it even with envoys improving relations.  One neighbor was close to acceptance before they rivaled the other, and they refuse to join a federation with them.  Fine, whatever.  I still get the federation perks with just one other empire in it.

Fast forward and I completed the special project to revive the Awoken.  Great.  They settled in a single system next to my federation buddies.  I figured I'd be able to invite them too at some point.

Oh, what's this?  A war proposal from my pacifist buddies?  They want to impose their ideology on the Awoken?  Must be because my buddies are spiritualists and the Awoken are robots.  No.  No war, please.

That's been repeating every few years and every time I tell my pacifist buddies to stop trying to declare war on a single system empire that's friendly to us, they get -50 opinion of me.  I figure that's going to stack up enough to matter pretty soon.  I may have to release a sector as a vassal and invite them to the federation.  They'll at least go along with me and hopefully won't be this infuriating to work with.
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Radsoc

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Re: Stellaris: Paradox Interactive IN SPACE
« Reply #9199 on: December 03, 2021, 11:31:22 am »

Yes, the federation dissolves if there is only one nation left. If one founding AI leaves, in other cases, it should still be there.

There tends to be some checkerboard diplomacy due to border friction and what not as well.

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"The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist."

"To punish the oppressors of humanity is clemency; to forgive them is cruelty. The severity of tyrants has barbarity for its principle; that of a republican government is founded on beneficence."

Criptfeind

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Re: Stellaris: Paradox Interactive IN SPACE
« Reply #9200 on: January 25, 2022, 04:56:13 pm »


Oh boy I can't wait to get back to manually deleting my less valuable star systems in the mid game. I do wonder if stellaris devs will ever realize the reason why stellaris is played like a shallow map painter isn't because of some numbers they can tweek, but because it's a shallow map painter.
« Last Edit: January 25, 2022, 04:58:37 pm by Criptfeind »
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axiomsofdominion

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Re: Stellaris: Paradox Interactive IN SPACE
« Reply #9201 on: January 25, 2022, 05:21:25 pm »

I'm hyped about the quality of the Stellaris updates in the last year. Imagine if the information gathering mechanic was truly meaningful. Would make my version much less impressive even if people accepted that it was from 2014 and not a ripoff of Stellaris. Same for their lame Secrets system in CK3.
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Telgin

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Re: Stellaris: Paradox Interactive IN SPACE
« Reply #9202 on: January 25, 2022, 05:23:38 pm »

Yeah, I found the complete circle we've made with admin cap / sprawl to be a little humorous.  Conceptually I liked the fact that you had to dedicate resources to managing sprawl, but the system has always felt weird and the current system eliminated the penalties way too easily.

Maybe people will stop complaining about tall vs. wide as much now.  Being a bigger empire will still always be better and I seriously hope they never introduce janky mechanics that somehow make single planet empires competitive (again), but it's good that they're making it so that there are at least some drawbacks to just grabbing everything in sight.

It occurs to me now that unless they gut most of the game and start over, they'll never fix this problem or a number of others completely.  Vassals are always going to cause logical problems, like how releasing a sector as a vassal suddenly makes your empire research faster and also makes the population grow faster in that sector.  I'm guessing that's going to be the new meta, even more than it already is because of the ridiculous pop growth system.

In other news, I do like the ideas they have for unity.  I'm looking forward to seeing the final version of the patch, and haven't touched the beta.
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axiomsofdominion

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Re: Stellaris: Paradox Interactive IN SPACE
« Reply #9203 on: January 25, 2022, 09:03:53 pm »

There's no interesting way to make wide empires anywhere near equal to tall empires because Paradox games don't simulate the aspect of reality that caused that to be the case. This applies to all their games. Just like they can't allow natural Ottoman style expansion without just making all blobbing too easy in EU4.

No amount of stupid rewrites of of abstract "corruption" mechanics, a style of attempted mechanic going all the way back to early Civ games, is ever going to resolve this issue.
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Nelia Hawk

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Re: Stellaris: Paradox Interactive IN SPACE
« Reply #9204 on: January 26, 2022, 02:50:38 am »

i has hoping that when admin cap cant be increased forever, that larger empires have more problems with unruly planets or rebellions.
more "in empire" problems to deal with that prevent being just a powerhouse because you got so many planets.
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Telgin

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Re: Stellaris: Paradox Interactive IN SPACE
« Reply #9205 on: January 26, 2022, 09:35:56 am »

That's what I and I imagine most of the players were and are hoping for.  Really, the game probably needs both: some system that represents the overhead of such a large empire by making some things like unity generation less efficient, and some mechanic to represent instability due to internal conflict.

For the former problem (sprawl), I guess it's easy enough to represent that by tech and unity cost penalties.  A more realistic system would probably just have different tech levels per planet and some "cost" to propagating it, but I can't see Stellaris ever implementing something like that for sanity reasons.  Unity is such a vague concept that I don't know how it would be implemented differently unless it too was per-planet and factored into planetary stability or something, with the unhappy pops costing unity upkeep like an earlier dev diary proposed.

For the latter problem, people have been screaming for internal politics since the game was released so it's starting to look doubtful that we'll get anything substantial considering the other DLC that's been developed before it.  I have some hope that the "situations" concept that they've proposed in recent dev diaries will give at least some flavor to that, but my guess is that it's not going to be that sophisticated.  It'll probably be something like galactic stock market crashes that cause a big penalty to your trade value or something.  Supposedly it's based on a system from some other game of theirs that I haven't played so it's probably not going to be a real mystery what it will be for anyone who is familiar.

Internal politics will be hard to implement in an interesting and not frustrating way I guess, similar to espionage, meaning it probably won't ever have real teeth.
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axiomsofdominion

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Re: Stellaris: Paradox Interactive IN SPACE
« Reply #9206 on: January 26, 2022, 12:22:10 pm »

That's what I and I imagine most of the players were and are hoping for.  Really, the game probably needs both: some system that represents the overhead of such a large empire by making some things like unity generation less efficient, and some mechanic to represent instability due to internal conflict.

For the former problem (sprawl), I guess it's easy enough to represent that by tech and unity cost penalties.  A more realistic system would probably just have different tech levels per planet and some "cost" to propagating it, but I can't see Stellaris ever implementing something like that for sanity reasons.  Unity is such a vague concept that I don't know how it would be implemented differently unless it too was per-planet and factored into planetary stability or something, with the unhappy pops costing unity upkeep like an earlier dev diary proposed.

For the latter problem, people have been screaming for internal politics since the game was released so it's starting to look doubtful that we'll get anything substantial considering the other DLC that's been developed before it.  I have some hope that the "situations" concept that they've proposed in recent dev diaries will give at least some flavor to that, but my guess is that it's not going to be that sophisticated.  It'll probably be something like galactic stock market crashes that cause a big penalty to your trade value or something.  Supposedly it's based on a system from some other game of theirs that I haven't played so it's probably not going to be a real mystery what it will be for anyone who is familiar.

Internal politics will be hard to implement in an interesting and not frustrating way I guess, similar to espionage, meaning it probably won't ever have real teeth.

The problem with Paradox is they are too multiplayer focused. You can tell because of their extensive use of "Mana". This is basically a boardgame design concept, obviously it isn't actually called "Mana". And boardgames are almost always multiplayer, except some of the nicher economics only games.

Unity is mana. It is a "balance" shortcut as well as a multiplayer thing. In a boardgame the player meta play replaces internal or even external interaction. Same for Dev Clash. No one cares about what the AIs do in big 20+ player Dev Clashes. But even most people who have a normal amount of friends don't have 20 Paradox Bros to play with.

Prestige and Piety are distinct from "Mana" to be clear. You gain them by doing prestigious or pious things and they provide relevant bonuses and in cases where you can "spend" them you do it for flavor relevant reasons. Although I prefer penalties associated with actions that have other costs rather than direct costs for these non-mana resources.

To have good internal politics you need a system just as deep as the combat systems. Which is pretty deep or at least complex given that Paradox games are map-painter war games at their core. The same applies for diplomacy and for espionage.

Another issue is the market. The market for shallow non-combat mechanics on top of core war-games is large. The, current since a really good example could grow it, market for attempts at deep non-combat mechanics is vague and amorphous. Maybe it will coalesce if you make a good politics or diplomacy game or maybe it won't.

Maybe you take that risk if your top guys aren't multiplayer focused but as it happens they are so Paradox won't.
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LuuBluum

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Re: Stellaris: Paradox Interactive IN SPACE
« Reply #9207 on: January 26, 2022, 02:32:21 pm »

To be fair, Paradox's origins with these games were, in fact, board games. Europa Universalis was a board game before it was ever a computer game. They simply migrated it to a computer, and then iterated from there. Everything else they've done has been built from that.
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axiomsofdominion

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Re: Stellaris: Paradox Interactive IN SPACE
« Reply #9208 on: January 26, 2022, 04:02:01 pm »

To be fair, Paradox's origins with these games were, in fact, board games. Europa Universalis was a board game before it was ever a computer game. They simply migrated it to a computer, and then iterated from there. Everything else they've done has been built from that.

Yeah EU1 from the boardgame in 2000. But that limits them when they sell themselves as a company with games that aren't map painters and that are awesome in single player.
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Mephansteras

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Re: Stellaris: Paradox Interactive IN SPACE
« Reply #9209 on: January 26, 2022, 05:30:43 pm »

Part of the issue is that they always end up coming at it from a perspective of "How can we make Tall Empires competitive" rather than "How can we make Tall Empires fun".

I'd rather see a bunch of things done to make Tall Empires better than any nerfs to Wide Empires, because nerfs to make another play style more competitive almost always make whatever you're nerfing less fun.
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