So Stellaris has a new Origin where Plantoid and Fungoid Empires can randomly spread new colonies through Tiyankis.
Turns out, Tiyanki can travel through wormholes, even when you can't. So now I've got new colonies blooming all over the galaxy, including planets I can't actually reach from my core systems. Of course, I could just have let those potential colonies lie dormant and save myself the headache, but where's the fun in that?
IMO based on what I've read, it seems like the habitat change was probably pushed out too soon. I'd say the devs fucked up there because when the overall response from beta testers is that it doesn't feel good to play, that's a sign you should cut the feature from release. Even if you feel you have enough to run with for a live release. Yes, the old habitat setup made warfare fucking awful past a certain point, but I gather the new setup doesn't really make it much better, given that the AI now setups up a central habitat complex in all of it's systems after a certain point. So depending on how big an empire gets, you might still end up having to invade just as many habitats, but instead of them being concentrated in a few systems, it's now spread over over even more systems.
A big complaint I've seen is that it's not particularly great for expanding, which I don't necessarily see as a bad thing, given how problematic the snowballing has become. The real is is that it does a number of void dweller and any other origin where part of your strength is that you have habitat either at game start or fairly early on. VD just gets shat on the most because the penalties they eat when their original pops decide to go planet side and I do dislike how the current setup means that we won't see many non adaptive species builds. The easy fix is probably to give VD something to offset that, maybe their guaranteed habitable systems should come with abandoned habitat complexes. Could do something where some of their pre-FTL ancestors or another alien civilization had built the complex, but died out due to some issue. I don't think the solution is to just call it a challenging origin because it was neve intended to be a challenging origin and it's pretty bad form to do such a change once you release something. IMO rule of thumb is that you can make content easier as it gets older, but you should never go back and make old content challenging, unless you're are releasing that as a new game option alongside an option to not have that content be a challenge mode.
I did mess around with invasive species, void hive and fruitful partnership, that was also a stargazer during beta. I wanted to test the new habitats, but by the time I felt like trying the game again, the beta had a bug that horribly broke habitats. Anyways the setup was pretty fun. I got free colonies, resource stations just build themselves and it was great getting minor amounts of strategic resources without the tech. Also, I did name this species interstellar kudzu and I'm not ashamed of that.
Maybe when they fix the diplomatic stuff, aka the AI instantly wanting to be a vassal to some more powerful empire, and I have some time for stellaris. I'll try that empire type again because I have some ideas on how to better optimize it. A big one is the need for more energy. I will say invasive species makes we wish we had more plantiod/fungoid species traits and that it gave you more points for having single point negative traits, while also changing how you could do genemodding (really feels like one where you should have to go down bio ascension, if you want to remove your negative traits, but give you the option to add on more negative traits once you free up another trait slot.
New Dev Diary talking about the custodian team; what it's original vision was, how it's changed, what they've accomplished and more importantly, what they're planning for the future.
From the “In Progress” section under 3.9 Caelum, we have the Diplomacy and Trust changes that we’ve mentioned a few times. We’ll have a dev diary dedicated to this next week, since these have been accelerated to be included in the 3.9.3 release.
Two weeks from now we’ll be providing more details on the Leader Consolidation that we’ve also talked about in the past. Currently these tasks are in the To Do and In Progress sections of 3.10 Pyxis, grouped by dark blue dashed lines that you can barely see in this image.
Other things on the board without planned release dates include a variety of possibilities. Some are larger scope tasks that involve a large number of Custodians, while others might be the type of thing that can be knocked out quickly.
A handful of them include:
Espionage enhancements
Make Espionage more impactful, but have systems in place to prevent “dog-piling”.
Continued work on concepts and nested tooltips
Provide information in a clearer way, avoiding walls of text.
Improve tutorials
They’re really not good at introducing the concepts new players need to learn the game.
Improve the outliner
Make the Outliner easier to use during different phases of the game.
Do somethingwith the Megastructures UI
As the number of large space constructions grows, it gets harder to find the ones you want to build.
It’s also very confusing to have things that require Mega-Engineering alongside constructions that don’t.
Continue after losing
Pop up the Select an Empire UI from Multiplayer if you lose a Single Player game, in case you want to continue your galaxy’s story, even if your first empire’s has ended.
Improve species modification
Address micromanagement and tedium in species modification.
Pop performance
Pops are one of the greatest sources of late game performance issues. Find ways to reduce their impact.
Ship performance
Ships (and fleets) are another performance issue to investigate.
Investigate number of habitable worlds (and rebalance if necessary)
As more scripted systems get added to the game, the habitable worlds slider becomes less accurate.
Make AI personalities matter more
Review the existing personalities, make them show up in AI weights more often, and differentiate them more.
Also gameplay and details are out for next months Star Trek game. It'll be budget at $30, but also have a $40 edition that comes with the California Class ship and uniforms (Lower Decks reference), an art book, more Star Trek music for the main game, a soundtrack and bizarrely, the Klingon advisor pack. One would expect that to be what you get when you play at the Klingons, so I dunno what up. I initially thought it was going to be IN Klingon, which would be exactly the kind of thing to put into a special edition; but at no point in the description does it say it's in Klingon, just that it's a Klingon advisor.
Another Star Trek dev diary, this time talking about how it's going to be DIFFERENT than Stellaris. Big one to me is the death of hyperlanes, instead introduce warp and warp ranges, but there's other stuff in there, like how the "Principles" system replaces "Ethics," talk of how the map is generated, a "balance of power" system for gauging the strengths of the four major powers, and the different between Major, Minor and Support powers.
Man habitats are so bad now. That was my favorite origin.
Yeah, they'll need to do something with the origin because it sounds like the changes have made habitats more end game things. Only question is if they can do that without bringing back a bunch of the issues that the change did resolve.
From what I can tell, it does somewhat solve the tediousness of invading systems, since you don't get cases where you have 3-6 systems that have like 8+ habitats you have to invade. Kind of sucks for human players because that does kill fortress systems, but I do see several benefits here. One, it does feed into the dev goal of reducing ship numbers, since that was one of the biggest ways to do fortress spam, was to build a bunch of habitats that were full of those. In addition to fix some of the lag from tons of ships existing, it also does do something about lag from pops because the new system does greatly limit the sources of pop growth. You go from a setup where a system with 8 noninhabitable planets, can still get 8 habitats, each with it's own rate of pop, to one where that system can only have essential one habitat with it's on rate of pop growth and well that takes the total potential number of calculations from pops down. Hell, I have to wonder if we're seeing significant processing savings by just reduce the calculations that go into deciding how many pops you get on each colony, how that there are effectively less of them and I don't think that is something the devs are necessarily considering as part of the population calculation lag. Also seems like it solves the issue of trade being too powerful because again, like fortress spam on habitats, a big thing was to spam trade districts on habitats and well that is pretty damn dead now.
I still think they still pulled the trigger on this change too early. They probably should have done more testing to ensure that habitat centric origins didn't get fucked over, namely void dweller, it's not super great for payback or knights of the toxic god, but both of those also are completely reliant on habitats early game the way void dweller is. Seems like there are some other issues that they could have caught with a longer beta than they ran. I do wonder if the company management is to blame here for than anything else because they don't get the idea that sometimes with coding, you don't meet your deadline and sometimes you delay shit because quality is more important than going "look, look, look, I did a thing! It might not be good, but I did it!"
Anyways I'm willing to bet that they'll adjust how many habitable worlds we get because it seems like they are going to lower that. Granted, that's probably to account for changes to terraforming, given that those are determined at game start, rather than usually be anomalies that are rolled. Plus we have detox, which probably would be buffed if the total number of habitable worlds was brought down. I'd also argue that the current number also doesn't factor in the shit ton of worlds we get from the L-Gate, if one gets the ability to terraform nanite worlds and there are like a few that show up outside the L-Gate IIRC. It would go a ways also to solving other issues, such as pops and ships being a massive drain on resources since that means less colonies, which in turn means less ways to get pops and ships via pops or branch offices.
Not particularly happy about how that dev dairy is a hint that the devs seem mostly okay with the current state of brand offices. They'll probably hit the one that gives us fleet capacity with a the nerf bat at most. The whole system really could use a revisit and some love because branch offices are extremely cookie cutter. I'll need to see if the habitat rework means we get to have for branch offices on habitats, which would be an improvement over the old setup of just two. The biggest issue is that our branch office have no fucking synergy with planetary designations or any other aspects of the host empires setup. So you more or less figure out the ideal two-three templates for your build and run with it, with one or two of those mostly being get X of certain thing from your branch offices. Once you hit X, then it's just run with your builds ideal template for all the other branch offices and it's pretty fucking boring and disappointing. Hell, wouldn't mind seeing some synergy added to overlord holdings as well, in attempt to break up some of the cookie cutting. Definitely should be a thing if we ever see them add in federation holdings.
Are you all telling me that Paradox did a big overhaul of one of their systems that was undertested, pushed out early, wound up making the system less fun and more clunky than before, while also handicapping old playstyles that lots of people loved?
The Star Trek dev diary for this week was just talking about the art design, but the Stellaris one was chalk full of info on the new leader consolidation.
Various leader types have been consolidated and even bigger, there's no more dedicated governors; any leader can become a governor. Sadly, this didn't kill envoys even though the new Official leaders will take over for Federation and Galactic Senate boosting. (Meaning you can save those envoys for improving/harming relations)
Each leader type will have multiple specializations to choose from
Commanders - Military Leaders
Admiral - Focuses on Fleets and general naval combat
General - Focuses on taking planets and assaulting static defenses - Armies, Planetary Bombardment, Ground Combat, and attacking defensive structures such as Starbases are the General’s forte
Commissioner - Focuses on Planetary Governance (Martial Law)
Strategist - Focuses on the Council, especially the Minister of Defense position
Officials - Political Leaders
Delegate - Focuses on Federations and the Galactic Community
Industrialist - Focuses on Planetary Governance (Industry and Development)
Ambassador - Council Focus (Diplomacy, Espionage, and First Contact), especially suited for the new Minister of State position
Advisor - Council Focus (Economy)
Scientists - Scientific Leaders
Explorer - Focuses on Surveying and Exploration
Academic - Focuses on Archaeology and Anomalies
Analyst - Focuses on Planetary Governance (Assist Research)
Statistician - Focuses on the Council, especially the Minister of Science position
They're reworking leader traits, including adding traits that benefits sectors for sector governors. Also putting a military governor in charge of a sector puts it into martial law, instead of being a planetary decision now. Leader caps are also put leader type now instead of for all leaders.
They're also looking at doing more with Agendas, more meaningful effects and making them available based on the ethics of council members instead of ethics of your empire.
Next week it sounds like they'll just be talking about the launch of the Star Trek game.
My biggest worry with explorers and academics, is that as the game is currently setup, they'll become irrelevant in the end game and that might result in them essentially being dead classes for most players, even in the early game. The issue is that we do run out of systems to survey, anomalies to study and dig sites to excavate well before the game ends. It also takes a bit to hit level four, when we would spec into those classes. So many players will just pass them out because why invest in something you'll get little use out of when you can spec into the other two classes that will remain relevant.
An easy solution might be to have some sort of setup that result in us being able to resurvey our systems. Perhaps a repeating situation that fires once we meet the right criteria and at the end it allows us to resurvey our systems. I suggest survey because that would allow the player some agency. If they invest more in it, they'll up the payout and investing less might result in the resurvey yielding less, but could have other benefits. Anyways having an explorer could result in a much better payout in that either they result in the situation having a better payout when it completes or in that they'll just make the resurvey more profitable. This can have synergy in that the resurvey could find dig sites and anomalies that were either missed the first go ahead or flagged to require other conditions to be met that are present when the game starts or even in the first few decades of the game. Those anomalies and dig sites in turn result in academics still being worth having.
Also not surprised that agendas are on the table for a review. Some of them are pretty bad and are just flat out ignored or merely used as filler until you unlock a useful agenda that you'd actually want to complete. The exploration agenda is probably a good example, I think the only times I've used it is when I know it'll be a few years before I open up a tradition tree that has a much more useful agenda, that I want to launch ASAP and I don't have other better agendas to partially work on. Usually, I'm still surveying, so there is some value in having it run in the background over having no agenda going. I also do wonder if we'll see agendas start triggering events and situations, since that would be a great way to make them be more impactful without being purely another set of modifiers.
GoodKingJayIIIThey wanna get mygold on the ceilingRegistered Userregular
I think they need to eliminate scientists straight-up. They don't serve any function beyond 1) operating science vessels or 2) providing bonuses to research. Let science vessels function without taking up a precious leader slot, and add research-related bonuses to the possible pool for "Officials."
I think they need to eliminate scientists straight-up. They don't serve any function beyond 1) operating science vessels or 2) providing bonuses to research. Let science vessels function without taking up a precious leader slot, and add research-related bonuses to the possible pool for "Officials."
That first sentence was a woah where am I again until I remembered what thread I clicked on I gotta tell ya.
(PSN: Morninglord) (Steam: Morninglord) (WiiU: Morninglord22) I like to record and toss up a lot of random gaming videos here.
Getting rid of generals is good. they were always a dumb leader type
They were always pretty superfluous because ground combat is just barely there, but it does make some kind of intuitive sense that they're there. Armies need a commanding officer, and Admirals are in charge of fleets, so General's it's gonna be.
Except they use different leader pools now so your scientists don't take away from your military or officials pool.
Did that change go through or is it part of the upcoming patch? I still think they're pointless either way, but that changes my disdain a little bit.
It's part of the upcoming leader consolidation.
Admirals are becoming Commanders and generals are becoming a commander subtype.
Governors are basically gone; replaced with Officials (who also absorbed a little bit of Envoy powers), while any leader can now become a governor, with each of the three types offering different bonuses
Yeah, the current changes just mean that explorers and academics are looking most at risk of being render pointless. Giving the flow of the game, they are at most risk of being ignored by players because people conclude that the time to build them up as such, would be better spend making them into a councilor or governor.
I think jury is still out on general subtype. In a way it might be most at risk in actuality, but I'm hearing that they might have bonuses for assaulting starbases. So possible we're going to get a few additional combat changes that make them worth a damn and actually something where you'll want at least one, if not two, so that you can better deal with starbases. My hope is that this is an indication that they are going to do something that allows us to incorporate our starbases into habitats. The boons could be two fold, beyond just makign generals worth a damn, it means that habitats can be focused into making a system a strongpoint, in the way that habitable worlds with orbital rings can help to make a system a strongpoints. The other thing is that could be a way to make enclaves and marauders a bit more interesting, I really do think they should have some sort of scaling as the game progresses.
I Montu was playing an early access version of Star Trek: Infinite. In that version, only watched like 15-20 minutes, but it still had the old leader setup or at least something very similar. I'll be curious to see if the live version comes with the new leader system because I feel like that would fit fantastically with Star Trek theme.
-Holy shit htis is stellaris.. like it even uses some UI sounds... but it's just different enough to be WEIRD. (Not helped by the fact it's an older version of stellaris without some bells and whistles like the new leader system or automated construction.)
Weirdly, it appears every leader is ship based? Or at least Governors and Spies are. (You actually physically send spies to go do stuff!)
one thing this game absolutely nails is the bonkers-ass anomalies. I just got one that
One of my science vessels had a crewmember somehow open a dimensional rift inside the holodeck.
Honestly, I'm seeing some stuff I kinda want filtered back to Stellaris - You're basically an advanced start, already having a bunch of territory and planets) and I'd like that as an option for the normal game. I'm real curious to see how these spies work and if they're a better espionage system than the on Stellaris currently has.
Taking a look at the Steam reviews for that Star Trek game and it's like...I'm not picking up any ST vibes from it at all. And if I'm just going to play Stellaris, I feel like I'd rather play a Stellaris mod that's going to benefit from continued development rather than this side branch that's probably going to get left behind.
I got StarTrek today and spent about 8 hours playing a Romulan campaign.
-The advanced start is nice, though(at least the Romulans) have a rather dicey resource situation at the start so you still have to spend a few decades setting things up before you can really jump into the action.
-Conquering territory is expensive and time consuming, which I actually like since wars aren't so swingy. In regular stellaris one war is generally enough to completely cripple an empire such that you can finish them off at your leisure. You can't really do that here which keeps the other factions in the game and allows more back and forth.
-Ship equipment is on a much tighter scale so even if you get a tech advantage you aren't going to completely stomp the AI fleets. At game start you have a limit of about 2k fleet power and about 70 years into the game my fleets are only at ~15k or so whereas in regular stellaris they'd be above 100k at the fleet cap.
-Ship equipment is also much more power hungry than stellaris, you won't be able to fit top of line stuff in every slot which makes specializing your ships/fleets actually useful.
-No star lanes, this means there are no choke points but somehow I find myself playing less whack-a-fleet and having to chase small stacks of ships around to prevent them from capping systems in the back of my territory. I'm guessing this is due to a change in the AI but its still nice.
-There being only 4 major powers means scientists are useful much longer, 70 years in I've only explored maybe 3/5ths of the "galaxy".
-Spies are fun, they aren't super powerful or anything(which would make them annoying when used against you) but spreading propaganda throughout your enemies territory to steal their pops is great. As is sabotaging a key starbase right before you declare war.
Overall I'm having a lot of fun with it but there is one major problem.
The game is buggy as all hell.
Constant sound ques for things that aren't actually happening, getting event popups that make no sense(and don't do anything), having random systems that I can't enter for no apparent reason, alerts not alerting when they're supposed to(really annoying when the 'hostile fleet incoming' alert doesn't occur). In fact theres so many bugs that some things I'm not sure if they are bugs or design decisions. Like when I puppet a minor power I get a mission to send a spy there to fully integrate them but the mission has a timer and they get released as independent if the timer hits 0, so as far as I can tell theres no way to just keep them as a puppet which is weird. Also I can't find a way to murder the Nausicaans to stop them from raiding me, which really seems like it should be possible.
Theres a fun game here thats different enough from Stellaris that I think it will be worth the money but it really needs some more dev time.
So far my biggest criticism is that with full development access and resources they should be able to make a lot more fundamental changes to base Stellaris than a mod can to make the mechanics more appropriate to Star Trek. And it doesn't really feel like they've done that. Maybe having all ships be both science and military would be impossible to balance but it really doesn't feel right for the Federation as is.
HamHamJ on
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
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MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
edited October 2023
The federation has both science and military focused ships tho.
Morninglord on
(PSN: Morninglord) (Steam: Morninglord) (WiiU: Morninglord22) I like to record and toss up a lot of random gaming videos here.
The Defiant being the first purpose built Federation warship is a whole thing. So it is the opposite of a good counter example. And it is clearly mechanically possible because I built the Enterprise and it is a military ship that can survey things!
I think that when you have a game like this with a small number of strongly defined pre-existing nations the more asymmetrical you can make them the better. Like unless you specifically do a mission to make Section 31 officially the Federation just shouldn't have spies.
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
The Defiant being the first purpose built Federation warship is a whole thing. So it is the opposite of a good counter example. And it is clearly mechanically possible because I built the Enterprise and it is a military ship that can survey things!
I think that when you have a game like this with a small number of strongly defined pre-existing nations the more asymmetrical you can make them the better. Like unless you specifically do a mission to make Section 31 officially the Federation just shouldn't have spies.
Starfleet has an Intelligence branch. Section 31 is the warcrimes branch.
Starfleet covers both exploration and defense of the Federation. A fair chunk of the ships featured for Star Fleet are clearly filling the dual role of exploration vessel, as well as, being a military vessel. The Constitution class from TOS was not solely a scientific vessel, it was kitted out with a fair bit weaponry and that wasn't just because Star Fleet was worried about encountering hostile alien species. It was also because if they did go to war with anyone, those ships would be on the frontline.
We've also seen what Sat Fleets, more dedicated exploration vessels look like. The Oberth class has almost no weapons systems on it.
The reason that you seldom see Star Fleet vessels referred to as warships and a big reason why the Defiant was mothballed until the Dominion made their intentions clear. Is purely a political thing. Both Star Fleet and much of the Federation's politicians and bureaucrats were very uncomfortable with Star Fleet being perceived as a military power. So you get a bunch of Kabuki, where various members of Star Fleet and the Federation go out of their way to avoid calling their heavily armed science ships, warships. Hell, even the Defiant had a small amount of dedicated exploration equipment included in the design because there are really strong feelings against Star Fleet appearing to a military. So let's give the Defiant, one of the Alpha Quadrants most heavily armed ships, enough of a science lab, that we can pretend that it isn't a warship. "It's totes a science ship, that just happens to be kitted with enough firepower to curb stomp most other power's dedicated warships, possible even take more than one on at a time . . . totally a reasonable thing for a science ship to be able to because we've got to be able to defend ourselves!"
The Constitution class is the one that gets sent to boldly go where no man has gone before. Because there is a fairly reasonable expectation that all those guns are gonna get used at some point. In Stellaris terms those would be your survey ships.
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
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GoodKingJayIIIThey wanna get mygold on the ceilingRegistered Userregular
At first I was a bit disappointed with that announcement. I wasn't sure what I wanted for a new expansion, but jumping into "alternate dimensions" seems a bit weird when they could just enhance the existing galaxy.
But if this is how they're going to put more exploration into the mid and late game, then it might be pretty good.
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Turns out, Tiyanki can travel through wormholes, even when you can't. So now I've got new colonies blooming all over the galaxy, including planets I can't actually reach from my core systems. Of course, I could just have let those potential colonies lie dormant and save myself the headache, but where's the fun in that?
Happiness plumetted so fast
A big complaint I've seen is that it's not particularly great for expanding, which I don't necessarily see as a bad thing, given how problematic the snowballing has become. The real is is that it does a number of void dweller and any other origin where part of your strength is that you have habitat either at game start or fairly early on. VD just gets shat on the most because the penalties they eat when their original pops decide to go planet side and I do dislike how the current setup means that we won't see many non adaptive species builds. The easy fix is probably to give VD something to offset that, maybe their guaranteed habitable systems should come with abandoned habitat complexes. Could do something where some of their pre-FTL ancestors or another alien civilization had built the complex, but died out due to some issue. I don't think the solution is to just call it a challenging origin because it was neve intended to be a challenging origin and it's pretty bad form to do such a change once you release something. IMO rule of thumb is that you can make content easier as it gets older, but you should never go back and make old content challenging, unless you're are releasing that as a new game option alongside an option to not have that content be a challenge mode.
I did mess around with invasive species, void hive and fruitful partnership, that was also a stargazer during beta. I wanted to test the new habitats, but by the time I felt like trying the game again, the beta had a bug that horribly broke habitats. Anyways the setup was pretty fun. I got free colonies, resource stations just build themselves and it was great getting minor amounts of strategic resources without the tech. Also, I did name this species interstellar kudzu and I'm not ashamed of that.
Maybe when they fix the diplomatic stuff, aka the AI instantly wanting to be a vassal to some more powerful empire, and I have some time for stellaris. I'll try that empire type again because I have some ideas on how to better optimize it. A big one is the need for more energy. I will say invasive species makes we wish we had more plantiod/fungoid species traits and that it gave you more points for having single point negative traits, while also changing how you could do genemodding (really feels like one where you should have to go down bio ascension, if you want to remove your negative traits, but give you the option to add on more negative traits once you free up another trait slot.
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/stellaris-dev-diary-314-pi-in-the-sky-ideas.1599477/
Also gameplay and details are out for next months Star Trek game. It'll be budget at $30, but also have a $40 edition that comes with the California Class ship and uniforms (Lower Decks reference), an art book, more Star Trek music for the main game, a soundtrack and bizarrely, the Klingon advisor pack. One would expect that to be what you get when you play at the Klingons, so I dunno what up. I initially thought it was going to be IN Klingon, which would be exactly the kind of thing to put into a special edition; but at no point in the description does it say it's in Klingon, just that it's a Klingon advisor.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1622900/Star_Trek_Infinite/
Game is due out in 3 weeks on October 12th.
Also a Dev Diary talking about the origins of the project and how "Star Trek" to make it.
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/forums/star-trek-infinite.1150/
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/star-trek-infinite-dev-log-2-a-matter-of-perspective.1599774/page-2
Yeah, they'll need to do something with the origin because it sounds like the changes have made habitats more end game things. Only question is if they can do that without bringing back a bunch of the issues that the change did resolve.
From what I can tell, it does somewhat solve the tediousness of invading systems, since you don't get cases where you have 3-6 systems that have like 8+ habitats you have to invade. Kind of sucks for human players because that does kill fortress systems, but I do see several benefits here. One, it does feed into the dev goal of reducing ship numbers, since that was one of the biggest ways to do fortress spam, was to build a bunch of habitats that were full of those. In addition to fix some of the lag from tons of ships existing, it also does do something about lag from pops because the new system does greatly limit the sources of pop growth. You go from a setup where a system with 8 noninhabitable planets, can still get 8 habitats, each with it's own rate of pop, to one where that system can only have essential one habitat with it's on rate of pop growth and well that takes the total potential number of calculations from pops down. Hell, I have to wonder if we're seeing significant processing savings by just reduce the calculations that go into deciding how many pops you get on each colony, how that there are effectively less of them and I don't think that is something the devs are necessarily considering as part of the population calculation lag. Also seems like it solves the issue of trade being too powerful because again, like fortress spam on habitats, a big thing was to spam trade districts on habitats and well that is pretty damn dead now.
I still think they still pulled the trigger on this change too early. They probably should have done more testing to ensure that habitat centric origins didn't get fucked over, namely void dweller, it's not super great for payback or knights of the toxic god, but both of those also are completely reliant on habitats early game the way void dweller is. Seems like there are some other issues that they could have caught with a longer beta than they ran. I do wonder if the company management is to blame here for than anything else because they don't get the idea that sometimes with coding, you don't meet your deadline and sometimes you delay shit because quality is more important than going "look, look, look, I did a thing! It might not be good, but I did it!"
Anyways I'm willing to bet that they'll adjust how many habitable worlds we get because it seems like they are going to lower that. Granted, that's probably to account for changes to terraforming, given that those are determined at game start, rather than usually be anomalies that are rolled. Plus we have detox, which probably would be buffed if the total number of habitable worlds was brought down. I'd also argue that the current number also doesn't factor in the shit ton of worlds we get from the L-Gate, if one gets the ability to terraform nanite worlds and there are like a few that show up outside the L-Gate IIRC. It would go a ways also to solving other issues, such as pops and ships being a massive drain on resources since that means less colonies, which in turn means less ways to get pops and ships via pops or branch offices.
Not particularly happy about how that dev dairy is a hint that the devs seem mostly okay with the current state of brand offices. They'll probably hit the one that gives us fleet capacity with a the nerf bat at most. The whole system really could use a revisit and some love because branch offices are extremely cookie cutter. I'll need to see if the habitat rework means we get to have for branch offices on habitats, which would be an improvement over the old setup of just two. The biggest issue is that our branch office have no fucking synergy with planetary designations or any other aspects of the host empires setup. So you more or less figure out the ideal two-three templates for your build and run with it, with one or two of those mostly being get X of certain thing from your branch offices. Once you hit X, then it's just run with your builds ideal template for all the other branch offices and it's pretty fucking boring and disappointing. Hell, wouldn't mind seeing some synergy added to overlord holdings as well, in attempt to break up some of the cookie cutting. Definitely should be a thing if we ever see them add in federation holdings.
Are you all telling me that Paradox did a big overhaul of one of their systems that was undertested, pushed out early, wound up making the system less fun and more clunky than before, while also handicapping old playstyles that lots of people loved?
I refuse to believe this is possible.
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/stellaris-dev-diary-316-leader-consolidation.1600649/
Various leader types have been consolidated and even bigger, there's no more dedicated governors; any leader can become a governor. Sadly, this didn't kill envoys even though the new Official leaders will take over for Federation and Galactic Senate boosting. (Meaning you can save those envoys for improving/harming relations)
Each leader type will have multiple specializations to choose from
Commanders - Military Leaders
Officials - Political Leaders
Scientists - Scientific Leaders
They're reworking leader traits, including adding traits that benefits sectors for sector governors. Also putting a military governor in charge of a sector puts it into martial law, instead of being a planetary decision now. Leader caps are also put leader type now instead of for all leaders.
They're also looking at doing more with Agendas, more meaningful effects and making them available based on the ethics of council members instead of ethics of your empire.
Next week it sounds like they'll just be talking about the launch of the Star Trek game.
An easy solution might be to have some sort of setup that result in us being able to resurvey our systems. Perhaps a repeating situation that fires once we meet the right criteria and at the end it allows us to resurvey our systems. I suggest survey because that would allow the player some agency. If they invest more in it, they'll up the payout and investing less might result in the resurvey yielding less, but could have other benefits. Anyways having an explorer could result in a much better payout in that either they result in the situation having a better payout when it completes or in that they'll just make the resurvey more profitable. This can have synergy in that the resurvey could find dig sites and anomalies that were either missed the first go ahead or flagged to require other conditions to be met that are present when the game starts or even in the first few decades of the game. Those anomalies and dig sites in turn result in academics still being worth having.
Also not surprised that agendas are on the table for a review. Some of them are pretty bad and are just flat out ignored or merely used as filler until you unlock a useful agenda that you'd actually want to complete. The exploration agenda is probably a good example, I think the only times I've used it is when I know it'll be a few years before I open up a tradition tree that has a much more useful agenda, that I want to launch ASAP and I don't have other better agendas to partially work on. Usually, I'm still surveying, so there is some value in having it run in the background over having no agenda going. I also do wonder if we'll see agendas start triggering events and situations, since that would be a great way to make them be more impactful without being purely another set of modifiers.
That first sentence was a woah where am I again until I remembered what thread I clicked on I gotta tell ya.
They were always pretty superfluous because ground combat is just barely there, but it does make some kind of intuitive sense that they're there. Armies need a commanding officer, and Admirals are in charge of fleets, so General's it's gonna be.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=688086068
Star Trek New Horizons TC for Stellaris, if you haven't tried it yet.
Did that change go through or is it part of the upcoming patch? I still think they're pointless either way, but that changes my disdain a little bit.
It's part of the upcoming leader consolidation.
Admirals are becoming Commanders and generals are becoming a commander subtype.
Governors are basically gone; replaced with Officials (who also absorbed a little bit of Envoy powers), while any leader can now become a governor, with each of the three types offering different bonuses
Scientists are still sciencing.
I think jury is still out on general subtype. In a way it might be most at risk in actuality, but I'm hearing that they might have bonuses for assaulting starbases. So possible we're going to get a few additional combat changes that make them worth a damn and actually something where you'll want at least one, if not two, so that you can better deal with starbases. My hope is that this is an indication that they are going to do something that allows us to incorporate our starbases into habitats. The boons could be two fold, beyond just makign generals worth a damn, it means that habitats can be focused into making a system a strongpoint, in the way that habitable worlds with orbital rings can help to make a system a strongpoints. The other thing is that could be a way to make enclaves and marauders a bit more interesting, I really do think they should have some sort of scaling as the game progresses.
I Montu was playing an early access version of Star Trek: Infinite. In that version, only watched like 15-20 minutes, but it still had the old leader setup or at least something very similar. I'll be curious to see if the live version comes with the new leader system because I feel like that would fit fantastically with Star Trek theme.
-Holy shit htis is stellaris.. like it even uses some UI sounds... but it's just different enough to be WEIRD. (Not helped by the fact it's an older version of stellaris without some bells and whistles like the new leader system or automated construction.)
Weirdly, it appears every leader is ship based? Or at least Governors and Spies are. (You actually physically send spies to go do stuff!)
one thing this game absolutely nails is the bonkers-ass anomalies. I just got one that
Honestly, I'm seeing some stuff I kinda want filtered back to Stellaris - You're basically an advanced start, already having a bunch of territory and planets) and I'd like that as an option for the normal game. I'm real curious to see how these spies work and if they're a better espionage system than the on Stellaris currently has.
-The advanced start is nice, though(at least the Romulans) have a rather dicey resource situation at the start so you still have to spend a few decades setting things up before you can really jump into the action.
-Conquering territory is expensive and time consuming, which I actually like since wars aren't so swingy. In regular stellaris one war is generally enough to completely cripple an empire such that you can finish them off at your leisure. You can't really do that here which keeps the other factions in the game and allows more back and forth.
-Ship equipment is on a much tighter scale so even if you get a tech advantage you aren't going to completely stomp the AI fleets. At game start you have a limit of about 2k fleet power and about 70 years into the game my fleets are only at ~15k or so whereas in regular stellaris they'd be above 100k at the fleet cap.
-Ship equipment is also much more power hungry than stellaris, you won't be able to fit top of line stuff in every slot which makes specializing your ships/fleets actually useful.
-No star lanes, this means there are no choke points but somehow I find myself playing less whack-a-fleet and having to chase small stacks of ships around to prevent them from capping systems in the back of my territory. I'm guessing this is due to a change in the AI but its still nice.
-There being only 4 major powers means scientists are useful much longer, 70 years in I've only explored maybe 3/5ths of the "galaxy".
-Spies are fun, they aren't super powerful or anything(which would make them annoying when used against you) but spreading propaganda throughout your enemies territory to steal their pops is great. As is sabotaging a key starbase right before you declare war.
Overall I'm having a lot of fun with it but there is one major problem.
The game is buggy as all hell.
Constant sound ques for things that aren't actually happening, getting event popups that make no sense(and don't do anything), having random systems that I can't enter for no apparent reason, alerts not alerting when they're supposed to(really annoying when the 'hostile fleet incoming' alert doesn't occur). In fact theres so many bugs that some things I'm not sure if they are bugs or design decisions. Like when I puppet a minor power I get a mission to send a spy there to fully integrate them but the mission has a timer and they get released as independent if the timer hits 0, so as far as I can tell theres no way to just keep them as a puppet which is weird. Also I can't find a way to murder the Nausicaans to stop them from raiding me, which really seems like it should be possible.
Theres a fun game here thats different enough from Stellaris that I think it will be worth the money but it really needs some more dev time.
Uh, that's 'Escort' and 'Exploration' ships, thank you very much.
That they can go toe-to-toe with other races dedicated warships isn't the point.
I don't care what they call it I know a murder boat when I see one!
I think that when you have a game like this with a small number of strongly defined pre-existing nations the more asymmetrical you can make them the better. Like unless you specifically do a mission to make Section 31 officially the Federation just shouldn't have spies.
Starfleet has an Intelligence branch. Section 31 is the warcrimes branch.
We've also seen what Sat Fleets, more dedicated exploration vessels look like. The Oberth class has almost no weapons systems on it.
The reason that you seldom see Star Fleet vessels referred to as warships and a big reason why the Defiant was mothballed until the Dominion made their intentions clear. Is purely a political thing. Both Star Fleet and much of the Federation's politicians and bureaucrats were very uncomfortable with Star Fleet being perceived as a military power. So you get a bunch of Kabuki, where various members of Star Fleet and the Federation go out of their way to avoid calling their heavily armed science ships, warships. Hell, even the Defiant had a small amount of dedicated exploration equipment included in the design because there are really strong feelings against Star Fleet appearing to a military. So let's give the Defiant, one of the Alpha Quadrants most heavily armed ships, enough of a science lab, that we can pretend that it isn't a warship. "It's totes a science ship, that just happens to be kitted with enough firepower to curb stomp most other power's dedicated warships, possible even take more than one on at a time . . . totally a reasonable thing for a science ship to be able to because we've got to be able to defend ourselves!"
Oh, thanks for the reminder. I should buy this game just so I can shoot up cardassians with the Defiant.
In Stellaris news, I can't believe they nerfed habitats again. God, leave them alone.
But if this is how they're going to put more exploration into the mid and late game, then it might be pretty good.