Paradox, IMHO, has the best DLC. Sure they have plenty of superfluous DLC, but their big ones are always (literal) game changers.
If you wait for Steam sales, the DLC are practically tip jars. I put a few bucks in, and get a few reasons to start a new game as a thank you. I can see why it would irritate people, but I think its a good way of supporting the company. Paradox does really needs to get better at providing entryways into their games late cycle other than "See that list? The long one? Buy those. I'd wait for a sale, though."
Paradox, IMHO, has the best DLC. Sure they have plenty of superfluous DLC, but their big ones are always (literal) game changers.
If you wait for Steam sales, the DLC are practically tip jars. I put a few bucks in, and get a few reasons to start a new game as a thank you. I can see why it would irritate people, but I think its a good way of supporting the company. Paradox does really needs to get better at providing entryways into their games late cycle other than "See that list? The long one? Buy those. I'd wait for a sale, though."
My favorite Paradox thing ever is continuing to release EU3 DLC after putting out a Retail Box called EU3: Complete. Nice job, guys.
Being a 4x4 game paradox had some pitfalls to avoid.
1. Wars being to onesided and definitve. Solved with peacedeals and wargoals.
2. Colony micomanagment being to tedious. Solved with mandatory governers.
3. Nothing to do inbetween turns at times. Solved by events.
4. Diplomacy being useless. Not 100 % but very optimistic.
5. Ship combat being unbalanced because of different modules and or the AI not being able to handle the system. Remains to be seen.
6. Ship creation and managment, especially upgrading, being to tedious. Remains to be seen.
So far its looking good but they have some potential game crippling areas left.
I may be reading into nothing, but one of the screenshots in the last dev update had ship counts for empires and they were very low, like 3 or 4 ships per empire. I think ship customization will be less tedious and more fun if you only ever have a hand full to worry about rather than the dozens you end up with in most space 4x games. Low ship counts + limited wars might mean you will be focused on engagements in one or maybe two locations at a time instead of executing multi-system invasions while also keeping defensive fleets in important of worlds.
I would looooove a sci-fi setting where like a starship is an enormous, important, ridiculously expensive and powerful object such that empires can only manage to field a few.
The thing I generally am least interested in in 4X games is micromanaging an army at war in part because straight-up wargames do a better job of that. Having an empire with like 10 super-ships would be neat.
That's how I always played Master of Orion. Choose Psilon, tech ridiculously high, build a way-too-expensive ship outfit with doomsday weaponry, and move it around the galaxy taking over everything.
Sometimes build a second one to defend home planets if an enemy can actually beat my ground force technowizards.
Fleur de Alys on
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Lord_AsmodeusgoeticSobriquet:Here is your magical cryptic riddle-tumour: I AM A TIME MACHINERegistered Userregular
I would looooove a sci-fi setting where like a starship is an enormous, important, ridiculously expensive and powerful object such that empires can only manage to field a few.
The thing I generally am least interested in in 4X games is micromanaging an army at war in part because straight-up wargames do a better job of that. Having an empire with like 10 super-ships would be neat.
I don't know about only having a few ships, but I'm pretty sure they've remarked that ships are supposed to be expensive and take awhile to build, and the upkeep is supposed to be pretty high so you can't just pump out ridiculous warfleets.
Lord_Asmodeus on
Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. - Lincoln
0
AxenMy avatar is Excalibur.Yes, the sword.Registered Userregular
I would looooove a sci-fi setting where like a starship is an enormous, important, ridiculously expensive and powerful object such that empires can only manage to field a few.
The thing I generally am least interested in in 4X games is micromanaging an army at war in part because straight-up wargames do a better job of that. Having an empire with like 10 super-ships would be neat.
I forget which 4x game it was, one of the more recent ones though, anyway there was no "cap" to how much stuff you could fit on a ship. You're only cap was "can you afford the cost and resources". So of course I set about building the most ridiculous ship I could. It took several in game years to build and literally took every fucking piece of currency and resources I had to build it. Once it was completed it cost my entire GDP to operate! Just the one ship! It was a thing of beauty.
Edit- there was this anime I watched, I always forget the name, but I loved it for how it depicted ship combat. Seriously, one of the episodes was pretty much only about them figuring out the math for a firing solution so they could hit a ship on the other side of a solar system. Even after they fired they had to wait like two weeks to find out if they hit.
Anyway, one of the key points to the show was that battleships were stupidly expensive and most planets could only afford to build one or maybe two of them. When in combat ships very rarely fought to the death and would instead surrender, since the loss of a ship would have amounted to the loss of decades of investment. So surrendering was the more "honorable" path and fighting to the death was considered a dick move.
Axen on
A Capellan's favorite sheath for any blade is your back.
I remember bouncing off that a bit but I did love that you could just set ship size to like "THE SOLAR SYSTEM" and it would say alright yeah okay if you insist
I remember bouncing off that a bit but I did love that you could just set ship size to like "THE SOLAR SYSTEM" and it would say alright yeah okay if you insist
I loved Star Ruler's ship construction and economy system. But it had the exact tediousness problems we are talking about in this thread. If you didn't redesign your ships every 15 minutes you would start losing battles, and if you were in a real mid or late game war, you had best be invading a dozen different systems at once because that's what the AI would do to you. Though there was something deliciously sci-fi about having 200 new battleships come off the production line and immediately sending them all across the galaxy to die, then doing it again in 5 minutes.
Star Ruler had some very interesting ship customisation and trade-offs. Very granular control over component sizes and positioning mattered as a destroyed powerplant would be an instant-kill and components took damage based on location against the hit.
But yeah, it was amusing having an orbital artillery platform that could hit targets in neighbouring systems.
I believe a gameplay meta was to have a super-scaled "flagship" and there were discussions of having it as a battleship or some tardis-style super carrier that spewed out smaller tardis carriers
I loved Star Ruler's ship construction and economy system. But it had the exact tediousness problems we are talking about in this thread. If you didn't redesign your ships every 15 minutes you would start losing battles, and if you were in a real mid or late game war, you had best be invading a dozen different systems at once because that's what the AI would do to you. Though there was something deliciously sci-fi about having 200 new battleships come off the production line and immediately sending them all across the galaxy to die, then doing it again in 5 minutes.
Star Ruler also suffered gigantically from the whole "AI governors are literal fucking idiots but haha good luck manually controlling every single colony!" It was piss-simple too. Something like: cities increased your population, and you needed a certain ratio of population to working structures (like mines) for them to operate. So the AI governor would build that many. Except population ALSO acted as a multiplier on all your production (for some stupid reason) and so the ACTUAL ideal strategy was to have some specific ratio of cities to other structures, but the AI would never ever do that.
It's one of those things that even if you say "well whatever I guess I'll ignore it, it's not like the actual AI is doing any better" it still gnaws at you because you know you COULD be doing better if only you were willing to suffer clawing your way through a hundred menus.
I remember bouncing off that a bit but I did love that you could just set ship size to like "THE SOLAR SYSTEM" and it would say alright yeah okay if you insist
You could also use the ship guns to kill stars.
And if you were stupid, the entire galaxy.
Pfft, my systems are strong, independent systems that don't need no galaxy.
+1
Lord_AsmodeusgoeticSobriquet:Here is your magical cryptic riddle-tumour: I AM A TIME MACHINERegistered Userregular
Today’s Dev Diary will be about Multiplayer and what makes it so great in Stellaris.
Let's start with the basics. Players are able to host games with 32 player designed empires and optionally, several extra randomized AI empires. If you have a new person who would like to join an ongoing campaign they can hotjoin into an already existing empire. This also allows the players to leave or take a break from the ongoing multiplayer campaign and leave their empire in the capable hands of the AI. The host may also choose to host a multiplayer game from a save game allowing players to play grand campaigns lasting several weeks.
One of our longstanding issues with multiplayer is that clients desynchronize, which is usually solved by having the host rehost the game, but this can be quite a menace when playing multiplayer with 20+ people, so we’ve decided that this is an issue we should prioritize higher in Stellaris. Thanks to persistent testing and fixing of out-of-syncs as soon as they happen, we’ve managed to make Stellaris our most stable multiplayer experience yet, allowing us to run stable multiplayer with up to and probably more than 32 players. We test our multiplayer stability weekly by playing multiplayer with our betas and the developers on the project, and it’s loads of fun.
We’ve designed Stellaris with a couple of things which affects the multiplayer experience which you might want to know.
One of them is that empires have a relationship value of other empires, but the value doesn’t decide the options a player can take against another empire but decides the responses AI controlled countries gives to your requests, demands and offers.
Another thing which Stellaris has that our other grand strategy games don’t is a symmetrical and randomized start, this means that in a multiplayer game everyone starts on more or less equal terms. This makes the game, in our experience, more competitive and a lot of fun. Will you be able to claim ownership of that specifically resource rich system before your neighbor? Or should you enter an alliance to stop a specific neighbor from expanding in your direction?
One more thing which affects the multiplayer experience on an early stage is that players are anonymous until you have established communications with their empires, making you unable to know whether the first aliens you meet will be your greatest allies or your worst enemies.
Next week is all about the AI.
Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. - Lincoln
Multiplayer is, probably, my least-wished-for feature for this game, but I'm glad it's finally getting the bug-testing attention it deserves if they're going to include it.
32 player online Stellaris seems like it would be the most glorious kind of clusterfuck, matched only by the impossibility of organizing that many people for the length of time a Paradox strategy would demand.
Hah, speaking of things that I really would't want to see implemented, I just had a really dumb thought. What if you could invade other people single player games, similar to Dark Souls, and take over some Kingdom and really mess with people plans that rely on exploiting the AI.
(Please do not gift. My game bank is already full.)
So multiplayer is whatever, and that's kind of a downer for a usually-exciting Dev Diary Monday. How about some juicy dev comments from other threads, then?
The AI won't turn on you due to size alone, but rather will react to conquest by forming alliances and federations to counter the expanding empire's power.
We saw this teased in an earlier diary, but the AI programmer is now confirming this behavior. This is something I hope makes its way into every Paradox strategy title that follows.
I really like The Last Federation. It has its flaws and it certainly isn't a 4x, but it has some really interesting mechanics in the way the game reacts to the player trying to win. I feel strongly that the AI should avoid 'gamey' diplomatic reasoning as much as possible, everyone turning on you because you're winning just shatters your immersion.
That... doesn't really shatter my immersion at all, this is exactly what happens when playing games with people (Twilight Imperium anyone?). But I'm guessing what he's talking about here is that using defensive federations to counter growing threats will feel more natural than just having all the AIs go directly hostile, and that's probably accurate.
I liked a lot of things about Distant Worlds, it was mainly the diplomacy that ruined it for me. Specifically, I got so sick of constantly being asked to trade maps that I broke off all treaties and wiped out any species that dared to try and interact with me diplomatically. Also the resource system was a big ball of pointless complexity.
I haven't played Distant Worlds, but here's one Stellaris developer's opinions of it.
The first thing I did last friday after coming home after a week of long hours at work. I grabbed a cold one and played Stellaris the rest of the evening. So yeah, I think it is fun.
I keep switching between them. All have their pros and cons.
Please deliver on this, please deliver on this, please deliver on this
(I hate when big mechanics like this turn out to be a trap and there's only one "right" answer)
On this same topic:
Welp! Even if they don't deliver, you can still have a different experience by using game settings to force everyone to use one of the inferior options. That's cool. Or make it more fair by forcing the AI to use the right one (along with you).
I was *just* about to replace all diplomacy with quicktime events to cater to new players, but you talked me out of it.
For real though, our aim is to make Stellaris more accessible to new GSG players but that doesn't mean we're gonna cut back on the depth.
I will believe this when I see it. Paradox is bad at interfaces, and the cornerstone of their game design is "everything has a zillion modifiers / components to make up this value, which then affects a zillion other values / components." With all the stuff Stellaris is adding on top of both 4x and GSG games, I see no way this game is going to be remotely accessible to someone who doesn't at least have one foot into Paradox with something like CK2 and another into general 4x games. Fortunately, that list already includes their entire existing audience, so. Picking up new people probably isn't a big concern.
Triptycho: A card-and-dice tabletop indie RPG currently in development and playtesting
I like the idea of a really casual drop in/out multiplayer game with friends. Just let the AI take over when you can't play and pop in to see if your little empire is still around later on.
I kind of like the idea of dipping in and out of a multiplayer game rather than having the harrowing sort of 90 hours of play trying to win would involve.
Edit: I think the reason having everyone suddenly turn on you feels "gamey" is because in actual politics it's not as though there's an end-point. Sweden isn't going to start attacking the US because we grew too powerful and they know the score is tabulated in 2020.
That... doesn't really shatter my immersion at all, this is exactly what happens when playing games with people (Twilight Imperium anyone?). But I'm guessing what he's talking about here is that using defensive federations to counter growing threats will feel more natural than just having all the AIs go directly hostile, and that's probably accurate.
It breaks my immersion. I hate it, and I hope the dev follows through with this promise.
For my money, the winner for best 4x diplomacy model still goes hands down to Civ IV. Each leader has their own personality, so you can know what to expect from a given neighbor, each one gives you tells about how they're likely to engage with you in the future and it never feels like the game says, "Oh, you're winning? Well fuck you then, WAR!"
If you build a relationship with an AI player over the course of a game, they will actually value that relationship and not just decide that it's advantageous in game terms to go to war with you so war it is. It made the game much less about conquest & helped it support subtle narratives.
I hope Stellaris follows that model instead of the more typical, 'let's make the AI feel like a multiplayer opponent, except much less competent,'
If I wanted the feeling of just dunking scrubs in multiplayer, I'd be playing a different game.
Please deliver on this, please deliver on this, please deliver on this
(I hate when big mechanics like this turn out to be a trap and there's only one "right" answer)
lol
Let's not be naïve: there are going to be a lot of right & wrong tech answers, even if (...especially if) the devs think otherwise right now.
The only game that's done a half decent job with balancing different FTL techs is Sword of the Stars, and even that wasn't really very balanced.
If you build a relationship with an AI player over the course of a game, they will actually value that relationship and not just decide that it's advantageous in game terms to go to war with you so war it is. It made the game much less about conquest & helped it support subtle narratives.
But you could remove "in game terms" from this statement and you have a pretty accurate model of politics throughout human history. It doesn't matter how long two nations have been friends; if one of them suddenly looks to be growing stronger to the point where they could become a serious threat to the other, then the other is going to backstab them and join an opposing alliance to counter-balance.
Having a friendly relationship being so valued that neither side would turn on the other out of preservation-motivated self-interest seems to suggest a pretty rosy view of space alien diplomacy. If anything I'd expect space alien diplomacy to be even more cutthroat than within-species diplomacy, even when considering more advanced ethical development of the species. Unless your species is something like the Asari where basically no one is ?racist? against you and everyone thinks you're just the best ever. That always felt contrived to me, but Stellaris is about telling all the space stories, so why not.
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The thing about Paradox games (other than maybe Hearts of Iron) is I don't really play them to win. I mean I try to do my best, but I play more to have fun, create stories, and just see what insanity the game can throw at me. Sometimes just surviving until the end is a win.
Right but at the same time in a lot of games Canada and Switzerland would be sending berserkers to the US because of our being higher up on an arbitrary power scale.
If you build a relationship with an AI player over the course of a game, they will actually value that relationship and not just decide that it's advantageous in game terms to go to war with you so war it is. It made the game much less about conquest & helped it support subtle narratives.
But you could remove "in game terms" from this statement and you have a pretty accurate model of politics throughout human history. It doesn't matter how long two nations have been friends; if one of them suddenly looks to be growing stronger to the point where they could become a serious threat to the other, then the other is going to backstab them and join an opposing alliance to counter-balance.
Sometimes I suppose, but just as often when a nation who is your friend starts to gain in power you go the opposite way, cozying up to them to try and get aid and the benefit of a powerful ally. The way games often work is immersion breaking because the AI in the game acknowledges an objective end-goal and can track your progress towards it, such that no matter what their ideologies or prior beliefs or grievances or friendships if you get close to "winning" they would all gang up on you because they recognize only one person can "win" in that kind of game. Real life doesn't work like that. There isn't an objective end goal and you never "win" the game of life in a finite way. So when your power is ascendant and you're a nation on the rise, those who are ideologically compatible and/or friendly with you are more likely to start being friendly with you to their own advantage, or try and turn your politics in their favor, or use alliance to you as a cudgel to fend off their own powerful neighbors. Not all nations in a real world situation will see your increase in power and technologically as a direct threat to themselves, and even those who do might not immediately become hostile and declare war on you. Life is much more nuanced and having the AI simply check your progress against some objective victory condition and literal power scaling and decide to be hostile to you based on that over and ahead of any differences or similarities of opinion, alliances, or diplomatic relations in unrealistic and breaks your immersion into the world of the game itself.
Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. - Lincoln
But you could remove "in game terms" from this statement and you have a pretty accurate model of politics throughout human history. It doesn't matter how long two nations have been friends; if one of them suddenly looks to be growing stronger to the point where they could become a serious threat to the other, then the other is going to backstab them and join an opposing alliance to counter-balance.
You really, really don't, though. For the longest time it was political & royal dynasties that determined foreign affairs between nations (and in some places this is still largely true), not relative military or economic strength, and wars almost always erupt as a result of some kind of instability that at least one belligerent feels threatened by.
I am wracking my brain trying to think of even one instance where one country or city state took up arms against another because 'they were becoming too powerful', and I'm drawing a blank. Even Rome at it's peak couldn't afford to launch such fickle campaigns, and even something like Iraq's invasion of Kuwait wasn't so much about the power of Kuwait but an overestimation on Saddam's part of how valuable he was seen to be in the west.
That aside, I think it's best that a developer for a single player strategy game comes to terms with the fact that the player is going to eventually git gud, and they are just going to roflstomp the AI after that happens. If you develop the AI to be just a narrative element within this framework, that doesn't actually matter all that much - the experience is more or less just as rich even if it isn't challenging. If you develop the AI to be a 'competitive' adversary, then the game will probably become boring after it's been mastered because there's not much for half baked pure competitor to offer.
The Ender on
With Love and Courage
+2
KetarCome on upstairswe're having a partyRegistered Userregular
32 player online Stellaris seems like it would be the most glorious kind of clusterfuck, matched only by the impossibility of organizing that many people for the length of time a Paradox strategy would demand.
I really want to see someone try.
My favorite space 4x game is MoO2 - easily one of my 5 favorite games of all time. When I was in college I met someone who also loved MoO2, and we realized we had to play it together since abusing the AI had gotten too easy for both of us. It wasn't feasible on the computer labs at school though, and we both lived with our parents and commuted. So we played it direct dial, modem-to-modem. We would have to wait late enough that nobody in either house would want to use the phone, then dial in and get a game started. It would usually be 10-11pm or so before we'd even start, and games could sometimes go until the sun came up if we started far enough apart on larger maps. That was some of my first online multiplayer, after BBS games like TradeWars 2002 or simple stuff like they had on ancient networks like Prodigy or The Sierra Network. We knew other people that enjoyed MoO2, but never did manage to work out any bigger online games mainly due to the logistics of just getting more people connected in addition to the difficulty of organizing people for a long enough period of time.
So looking at everything that's planned for Stellaris, and how it will hopefully evolve the genre, and now contemplating 32 player online? Just...damn. That big of an online game may be a complete trainwreck. It probably will be. But I'll be damned if I don't try it once.
I was *just* about to replace all diplomacy with quicktime events to cater to new players, but you talked me out of it.
For real though, our aim is to make Stellaris more accessible to new GSG players but that doesn't mean we're gonna cut back on the depth.
I will believe this when I see it. Paradox is bad at interfaces, and the cornerstone of their game design is "everything has a zillion modifiers / components to make up this value, which then affects a zillion other values / components." With all the stuff Stellaris is adding on top of both 4x and GSG games, I see no way this game is going to be remotely accessible to someone who doesn't at least have one foot into Paradox with something like CK2 and another into general 4x games. Fortunately, that list already includes their entire existing audience, so. Picking up new people probably isn't a big concern.
I was playing some MoO2 a few days ago and as I picked up and dropped settlers like physical playing pieces, I was wondering why I can't move my merchants this way in EU4
There are thousands of buttons to click in games like EU4 and I feel like there could possibly be more elegant solutions
Hello everyone and welcome to yet another development diary for Stellaris! Today, I'll be talking about AI, and not of the robotic kind. I'm talking of course, of the game AI, which is currently being developed by myself and @merni who is the dedicated Stellaris AI programmer, while I'm just temporarily on the project to flesh out certain aspects of the AI before launch.
Artificial Personalities
A major challenge when making the Stellaris AI has been the randomized nature of the game. With thousands of different combinations of ethoses and traits, there's a risk that every AI Empire ends up feeling the same to the player, or fall into a very basic categorization of 'aggressive aliens' and 'peaceful aliens'. I as the AI programmer might know that an AI with Fanatic Collectivism makes their decisions differently from with plain old vanilla Collectivism, but it might all look the same to a player who doesn't have this foreknowledge.
In order to address this problem, we've implemented a system of AI Personalities that govern almost every aspect of how they behave, such as who they'll pick a fight with, which trade deals they are interested in and how they budget and utilize the resources available to them. This personality is determined by their ethos, government form and traits, and will be shown to the player when diplomatically interacting with that Empire. To feel recognizeable to the player, all of the personalities are rooted in sci-fi tropes, so that you'll immediately know who the Klingons are to your United Federation of Planets.
Personalities naturally have a bigger impact on diplomacy than anything else - if your goal is to form a Federation, it'll be much easier to do so with an Empire of Federation Builders than a bunch of Ruthless Capitalists, and forget getting Xenophobic Isolationists to agree to any such proposal unless they have a very pressing reason. You can tell how an Empire feels about you from their Attitude, which is primarily driven by opinion, and affects factors such as what diplomatic offers they'll consider and how fair a shake they will give you in trade deals.
In addition to the regular personalities, there is also a special set of personalities for Fallen Empires. Instead of the usual mix of Ethoses, each Fallen Empire has only a single Fanatic Ethos - the single remaining ideal they hold to after centuries of seeing what the galaxy has to offer. This Ethos determines their personality, which in turn affects how they view your actions. For example, a Xenophobic Fallen Empire will want nothing to do with you or anyone else and will be very upset if you start encroaching on their borders, while a Spiritualist Fallen Empire will consider themselves the protectors of the galaxy's holy sites, and will not look kindly on your colonists trampling all over their sacred planets. If you think angering a Fallen Empire is harmless because they won't conquer you - think again. Fallen Empires get a special wargoal to force you to abandon planets, and will be more than happy to cut your upstart species down to size if you don't show sufficient respect for your elders.
Threats and Rivals
So what then, is a pressing reason for an AI to go against their personality? Well, one such reason is Threat. Threat is a mechanic somewhat similar to Aggressive Expansion in Europa Universalis 4. Conquering planets, subjugating other Empires and destroying space installations will generate Threat towards other Empires. The amount of Threat generated depends both on how far away the Empire is from what's happening and on their Personality. Xenophobic Isolationists won't care if you're purging aliens half a galaxy away, but if all the planets around them being swallowed up by an expanionistic Empire, they'll definitely take note. Empires that are threatened by the same aggressor will get an opinion boost towards each other, and will be more likely to join in Alliances and Federations - if you go on a rampage, you may find the rest of the Galaxy uniting to take you down, and while Threat decays naturally over time, there's no guarantee that the alliances formed by your imperialism will break up even if you take a timeout from conquering... so expand with care.
Another feature borrowed from EU4 to drive AI behaviour is Rivals. Any independent Empire that are you not allied to can be declared a Rival, up to a maximum of 3 Rivals at the same time. Having an Empire as a Rival will give you a monthly increase of Influence, with the amount gained based on how powerful they are relative to yourself - having a far weaker Empire as your antagonist will not overly impress your population. It is further modified by Ethos, with Militarist Empires benefitting significantly more from Rivalries than Pacifist ones (but paying more influence to be part of an Alliance). Naturally, Empires won't be particularly happy about being declared a Rival, and are pretty likely to rival you right back. Having a Rival will improve relations with their enemies and worsen relations with their friends, so the Rivalry system will act as a primary driver of conflict and alliance in the galaxy.
AI Economics
Finally, I wanted to cover the topic of the AI's bookkeeping. While it may be far less exciting and far less visible to the player than its diplomatic behaviour, having solid economics is one of our biggest priorities for the Stellaris AI, for multiple reasons. Firstly, so that the AI is able to compete reasonably with the player without resorting to outright cheating. True, the AI will never be as good as an experienced player, but there is a big difference between the player being able to outproduce one AI Empire and the player being able to outproduce five of them together. Secondly, because of the Sector mechanic that was covered in DD 21, the AI will actively be making construction and management decisions on the player's planets, and while - again - it will never be as good as an experienced player making the decisions themselves, it needs to be good enough that the player doesn't feel like the AI is actively sabotaging their Empire.
In order to accomplish all this, a huge amount of time has been put into the AI's budgeting system. Every single mineral and energy credit that the AI takes in is earmarked for a particular budget post such as navies or new colonies, with the division between the posts being set according to the AI's personality and what it needs at the time. The AI is only permitted to spend appropriately budgeted resources, so it'll never fail to establish new colonies because it's too busy constructing buildings on its planet, or miss building a navy because mining stations are eating up its entire mineral income. In times of dire need, it can move resources from one budget post to another - if it's at war and its navy gets destroyed, expect it to pour every last mineral into building a new one.
When making decisions about what to construct, the AI looks primarily at what resources it has a critical need for (such as Energy if it's running a deficit), secondarily at what resources it's not producing a lot of compared to what it expects an Empire of its size to produce, and lastly at whatever it deems useful enough for the mineral investment. Sectors have additional logic to ensure they produce more of the resource you've set them to focus on, so an Energy sector will naturally overproduce Energy - you told it to, after all.
Alright, that's all for today. Next week we'll be talking about debris and the fine art of reverse engineering.
But you could remove "in game terms" from this statement and you have a pretty accurate model of politics throughout human history. It doesn't matter how long two nations have been friends; if one of them suddenly looks to be growing stronger to the point where they could become a serious threat to the other, then the other is going to backstab them and join an opposing alliance to counter-balance.
You really, really don't, though. For the longest time it was political & royal dynasties that determined foreign affairs between nations (and in some places this is still largely true), not relative military or economic strength, and wars almost always erupt as a result of some kind of instability that at least one belligerent feels threatened by.
I am wracking my brain trying to think of even one instance where one country or city state took up arms against another because 'they were becoming too powerful', and I'm drawing a blank. Even Rome at it's peak couldn't afford to launch such fickle campaigns, and even something like Iraq's invasion of Kuwait wasn't so much about the power of Kuwait but an overestimation on Saddam's part of how valuable he was seen to be in the west.
That aside, I think it's best that a developer for a single player strategy game comes to terms with the fact that the player is going to eventually git gud, and they are just going to roflstomp the AI after that happens. If you develop the AI to be just a narrative element within this framework, that doesn't actually matter all that much - the experience is more or less just as rich even if it isn't challenging. If you develop the AI to be a 'competitive' adversary, then the game will probably become boring after it's been mastered because there's not much for half baked pure competitor to offer.
Napoleonic Wars vs France are a pretty good example. Much of the 'alliance' against France was based entirely on the fact that Europe was concerned that napoleon would conquer the entire continent. The UK, as the classic enemy of France, led the charge against them and everyone else joined in because they felt France needed to lose. WW1 was about the same too. The whole thing happened because noone could afford to sit out, because if they did, and another side won then the other side would be too powerful in WW1.5.
maybe with the napoleonic wars, but WW1 was a political spiderweb of alliances and deals sprung from the Crimean Wars about 40 to 60 years earlier and it was literally a powder keg waiting to explode.
in the basest and rawest chain of events:
-a prince of Austro-Hungary was murdered by a terrorist
-Austro-Hungary demanded reparations via annexing Serbia to pay for it.
-Serbia called in its favors from Russia to help defend it.
-Austro-Hungary called in its favors with Germany to prevent Russian aggression.
-Russia called in its favors with France and Great Britain because Germany was getting uppity.
-A few years later, the Americans decide to get involved because a German U-boat sunk a cruise liner that was smuggling weapons and supplies to Great Britain.
The Treaty of Versailles, which was supposed to prevent another great war from happening practically guaranteed WW2 because the terms fucked Germany so hard and they were so disenfranchised they would latch onto anything that would restore their pride.
There are a myriad other factors involved with this era, and its quite fascinating how it transitioned into the world we have today.
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If you wait for Steam sales, the DLC are practically tip jars. I put a few bucks in, and get a few reasons to start a new game as a thank you. I can see why it would irritate people, but I think its a good way of supporting the company. Paradox does really needs to get better at providing entryways into their games late cycle other than "See that list? The long one? Buy those. I'd wait for a sale, though."
My favorite Paradox thing ever is continuing to release EU3 DLC after putting out a Retail Box called EU3: Complete. Nice job, guys.
I have vassals. And protectorates.
I hope they use the setting to go crazy with government types. I want to be a fundamentalist hivemind!
Would that be borg?
1. Wars being to onesided and definitve. Solved with peacedeals and wargoals.
2. Colony micomanagment being to tedious. Solved with mandatory governers.
3. Nothing to do inbetween turns at times. Solved by events.
4. Diplomacy being useless. Not 100 % but very optimistic.
5. Ship combat being unbalanced because of different modules and or the AI not being able to handle the system. Remains to be seen.
6. Ship creation and managment, especially upgrading, being to tedious. Remains to be seen.
So far its looking good but they have some potential game crippling areas left.
The thing I generally am least interested in in 4X games is micromanaging an army at war in part because straight-up wargames do a better job of that. Having an empire with like 10 super-ships would be neat.
Sometimes build a second one to defend home planets if an enemy can actually beat my ground force technowizards.
I don't know about only having a few ships, but I'm pretty sure they've remarked that ships are supposed to be expensive and take awhile to build, and the upkeep is supposed to be pretty high so you can't just pump out ridiculous warfleets.
I forget which 4x game it was, one of the more recent ones though, anyway there was no "cap" to how much stuff you could fit on a ship. You're only cap was "can you afford the cost and resources". So of course I set about building the most ridiculous ship I could. It took several in game years to build and literally took every fucking piece of currency and resources I had to build it. Once it was completed it cost my entire GDP to operate! Just the one ship! It was a thing of beauty.
Edit- there was this anime I watched, I always forget the name, but I loved it for how it depicted ship combat. Seriously, one of the episodes was pretty much only about them figuring out the math for a firing solution so they could hit a ship on the other side of a solar system. Even after they fired they had to wait like two weeks to find out if they hit.
Anyway, one of the key points to the show was that battleships were stupidly expensive and most planets could only afford to build one or maybe two of them. When in combat ships very rarely fought to the death and would instead surrender, since the loss of a ship would have amounted to the loss of decades of investment. So surrendering was the more "honorable" path and fighting to the death was considered a dick move.
I remember bouncing off that a bit but I did love that you could just set ship size to like "THE SOLAR SYSTEM" and it would say alright yeah okay if you insist
You could also use the ship guns to kill stars.
And if you were stupid, the entire galaxy.
But yeah, it was amusing having an orbital artillery platform that could hit targets in neighbouring systems.
I believe a gameplay meta was to have a super-scaled "flagship" and there were discussions of having it as a battleship or some tardis-style super carrier that spewed out smaller tardis carriers
Star Ruler also suffered gigantically from the whole "AI governors are literal fucking idiots but haha good luck manually controlling every single colony!" It was piss-simple too. Something like: cities increased your population, and you needed a certain ratio of population to working structures (like mines) for them to operate. So the AI governor would build that many. Except population ALSO acted as a multiplier on all your production (for some stupid reason) and so the ACTUAL ideal strategy was to have some specific ratio of cities to other structures, but the AI would never ever do that.
It's one of those things that even if you say "well whatever I guess I'll ignore it, it's not like the actual AI is doing any better" it still gnaws at you because you know you COULD be doing better if only you were willing to suffer clawing your way through a hundred menus.
Pfft, my systems are strong, independent systems that don't need no galaxy.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
I really want to see someone try.
(Please do not gift. My game bank is already full.)
(I hate when big mechanics like this turn out to be a trap and there's only one "right" answer)
On this same topic: Welp! Even if they don't deliver, you can still have a different experience by using game settings to force everyone to use one of the inferior options. That's cool. Or make it more fair by forcing the AI to use the right one (along with you). I will believe this when I see it. Paradox is bad at interfaces, and the cornerstone of their game design is "everything has a zillion modifiers / components to make up this value, which then affects a zillion other values / components." With all the stuff Stellaris is adding on top of both 4x and GSG games, I see no way this game is going to be remotely accessible to someone who doesn't at least have one foot into Paradox with something like CK2 and another into general 4x games. Fortunately, that list already includes their entire existing audience, so. Picking up new people probably isn't a big concern.
I kind of like the idea of dipping in and out of a multiplayer game rather than having the harrowing sort of 90 hours of play trying to win would involve.
Edit: I think the reason having everyone suddenly turn on you feels "gamey" is because in actual politics it's not as though there's an end-point. Sweden isn't going to start attacking the US because we grew too powerful and they know the score is tabulated in 2020.
It breaks my immersion. I hate it, and I hope the dev follows through with this promise.
For my money, the winner for best 4x diplomacy model still goes hands down to Civ IV. Each leader has their own personality, so you can know what to expect from a given neighbor, each one gives you tells about how they're likely to engage with you in the future and it never feels like the game says, "Oh, you're winning? Well fuck you then, WAR!"
If you build a relationship with an AI player over the course of a game, they will actually value that relationship and not just decide that it's advantageous in game terms to go to war with you so war it is. It made the game much less about conquest & helped it support subtle narratives.
I hope Stellaris follows that model instead of the more typical, 'let's make the AI feel like a multiplayer opponent, except much less competent,'
If I wanted the feeling of just dunking scrubs in multiplayer, I'd be playing a different game.
lol
Let's not be naïve: there are going to be a lot of right & wrong tech answers, even if (...especially if) the devs think otherwise right now.
The only game that's done a half decent job with balancing different FTL techs is Sword of the Stars, and even that wasn't really very balanced.
Having a friendly relationship being so valued that neither side would turn on the other out of preservation-motivated self-interest seems to suggest a pretty rosy view of space alien diplomacy. If anything I'd expect space alien diplomacy to be even more cutthroat than within-species diplomacy, even when considering more advanced ethical development of the species. Unless your species is something like the Asari where basically no one is ?racist? against you and everyone thinks you're just the best ever. That always felt contrived to me, but Stellaris is about telling all the space stories, so why not.
Sometimes I suppose, but just as often when a nation who is your friend starts to gain in power you go the opposite way, cozying up to them to try and get aid and the benefit of a powerful ally. The way games often work is immersion breaking because the AI in the game acknowledges an objective end-goal and can track your progress towards it, such that no matter what their ideologies or prior beliefs or grievances or friendships if you get close to "winning" they would all gang up on you because they recognize only one person can "win" in that kind of game. Real life doesn't work like that. There isn't an objective end goal and you never "win" the game of life in a finite way. So when your power is ascendant and you're a nation on the rise, those who are ideologically compatible and/or friendly with you are more likely to start being friendly with you to their own advantage, or try and turn your politics in their favor, or use alliance to you as a cudgel to fend off their own powerful neighbors. Not all nations in a real world situation will see your increase in power and technologically as a direct threat to themselves, and even those who do might not immediately become hostile and declare war on you. Life is much more nuanced and having the AI simply check your progress against some objective victory condition and literal power scaling and decide to be hostile to you based on that over and ahead of any differences or similarities of opinion, alliances, or diplomatic relations in unrealistic and breaks your immersion into the world of the game itself.
You really, really don't, though. For the longest time it was political & royal dynasties that determined foreign affairs between nations (and in some places this is still largely true), not relative military or economic strength, and wars almost always erupt as a result of some kind of instability that at least one belligerent feels threatened by.
I am wracking my brain trying to think of even one instance where one country or city state took up arms against another because 'they were becoming too powerful', and I'm drawing a blank. Even Rome at it's peak couldn't afford to launch such fickle campaigns, and even something like Iraq's invasion of Kuwait wasn't so much about the power of Kuwait but an overestimation on Saddam's part of how valuable he was seen to be in the west.
That aside, I think it's best that a developer for a single player strategy game comes to terms with the fact that the player is going to eventually git gud, and they are just going to roflstomp the AI after that happens. If you develop the AI to be just a narrative element within this framework, that doesn't actually matter all that much - the experience is more or less just as rich even if it isn't challenging. If you develop the AI to be a 'competitive' adversary, then the game will probably become boring after it's been mastered because there's not much for half baked pure competitor to offer.
My favorite space 4x game is MoO2 - easily one of my 5 favorite games of all time. When I was in college I met someone who also loved MoO2, and we realized we had to play it together since abusing the AI had gotten too easy for both of us. It wasn't feasible on the computer labs at school though, and we both lived with our parents and commuted. So we played it direct dial, modem-to-modem. We would have to wait late enough that nobody in either house would want to use the phone, then dial in and get a game started. It would usually be 10-11pm or so before we'd even start, and games could sometimes go until the sun came up if we started far enough apart on larger maps. That was some of my first online multiplayer, after BBS games like TradeWars 2002 or simple stuff like they had on ancient networks like Prodigy or The Sierra Network. We knew other people that enjoyed MoO2, but never did manage to work out any bigger online games mainly due to the logistics of just getting more people connected in addition to the difficulty of organizing people for a long enough period of time.
So looking at everything that's planned for Stellaris, and how it will hopefully evolve the genre, and now contemplating 32 player online? Just...damn. That big of an online game may be a complete trainwreck. It probably will be. But I'll be damned if I don't try it once.
Which is okay, as I'd be playing single player 99% of the time anyway.
I was playing some MoO2 a few days ago and as I picked up and dropped settlers like physical playing pieces, I was wondering why I can't move my merchants this way in EU4
There are thousands of buttons to click in games like EU4 and I feel like there could possibly be more elegant solutions
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/stellaris-dev-diary-24-ai.912400/
release date?
The want is only getting stronger.
Napoleonic Wars vs France are a pretty good example. Much of the 'alliance' against France was based entirely on the fact that Europe was concerned that napoleon would conquer the entire continent. The UK, as the classic enemy of France, led the charge against them and everyone else joined in because they felt France needed to lose. WW1 was about the same too. The whole thing happened because noone could afford to sit out, because if they did, and another side won then the other side would be too powerful in WW1.5.
in the basest and rawest chain of events:
-a prince of Austro-Hungary was murdered by a terrorist
-Austro-Hungary demanded reparations via annexing Serbia to pay for it.
-Serbia called in its favors from Russia to help defend it.
-Austro-Hungary called in its favors with Germany to prevent Russian aggression.
-Russia called in its favors with France and Great Britain because Germany was getting uppity.
-A few years later, the Americans decide to get involved because a German U-boat sunk a cruise liner that was smuggling weapons and supplies to Great Britain.
The Treaty of Versailles, which was supposed to prevent another great war from happening practically guaranteed WW2 because the terms fucked Germany so hard and they were so disenfranchised they would latch onto anything that would restore their pride.
There are a myriad other factors involved with this era, and its quite fascinating how it transitioned into the world we have today.
Steam - NotoriusBEN | Uplay - notoriusben | Xbox,Windows Live - ThatBEN