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Raenir Salazar posted:In all my games with friends we have tier 4 or 5 modules before the mid game crisis; and to my mind overly large fleets to the point the Khan or the Gray Tempest are trivial. Move the start dates of your crisis forward? Splicer posted:If killing pop growth on a new planet is a requirement then yeah, this is what I've been rooting for. You still have the issue of when to unlock new buildings... again assuming this is a meaningful requirement and that just letting people build buildings whenever they like would meaningfully break the game. I didn't address your issues on buildings because I don't really agree with your stance, but I do agree that the emergent "resettle 8 pops for the rest of your growth" gameplay and stuff like "build 8 specialized moving robots" is weird. Turning that into a policy unlocked by having robots/droids of something like "robot colony construction" that speeds up how fast you get colonies can pull the same idea without being all fiddly. PittTheElder posted:This. If anything I desperately want some sort of earlier gateway/wormhole style tech that we can build on starbases. Still have to slowboat around in enemy space, but quick to respond to some pirates that spawned in the middle of nowhere. It'd be neat if the speed increase from the hyperlane building on starbases was extended out to your trade protection range. Leave the disengagement modifiers and stuff to just that system, and maybe not let them stack, but that'd give a nice boost.
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# ? Jan 9, 2019 16:21 |
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# ? Apr 17, 2024 22:42 |
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Raenir Salazar posted:In all my games with friends we have tier 4 or 5 modules before the mid game crisis; and to my mind overly large fleets to the point the Khan or the Gray Tempest are trivial. I generally suggest running at 2 or 2.5 times tech/tradition cost, and before the patch I would also suggest turning habitable worlds to 0.25 to increase scarcity. However as the patch fucks this up by relying on colonization to retain an interest pace you can't do it any more. But generally the intent is to slow the pace and push you to focus more on interest. Because yes you otherwise end up with tech being trivial and awfully paced compared to wars and resources are utterly meaningless beyond being able to dump waves of poo poo on your enemies. If you radically changed how pop growth worked and added a lot more content it is possible the new approach could give more interest as far as internal development went but you need to fix the busted mechanic whereby it only works properly in a narrow band of colony numbers at the moment. And I would also suggest that the new economy mostly comprises of needless busywork anyway.
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# ? Jan 9, 2019 16:21 |
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I really need to get started on my economy overhaul mod. It won't be for everyone, but one solution to some of the game's problems is to make a more in depth manufacturing chain so that players have to do more work to balance the economy, rather than just "enough food and consumer goods to be in the positive, enough minerals that my building isn't restricted, and ALL THE ALLOYS". The AI will be utter poo poo at it, most likely, but, well, it's not like the base AI is great at the current economy. I'll probably just let them cheat.
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# ? Jan 9, 2019 16:22 |
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Zurai posted:I really need to get started on my economy overhaul mod. It won't be for everyone, but one solution to some of the game's problems is to make a more in depth manufacturing chain so that players have to do more work to balance the economy, rather than just "enough food and consumer goods to be in the positive, enough minerals that my building isn't restricted, and ALL THE ALLOYS". The AI will be utter poo poo at it, most likely, but, well, it's not like the base AI is great at the current economy. I'll probably just let them cheat. I would caution against just adding more steps, because the game already does that and it results in just building another building to fill whatever your deficit is. It's not engaging, just mindless plate spinning. More things like GPM whereby you spend time looking for new resource sites to exploit and how they tie in with your strategic aims is a better option. This is also broadly why I would suggest megastrucutres and especially habitats should be brought far forward into the game because these also could afford a much more wide ranging set of decisions for a player.
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# ? Jan 9, 2019 16:25 |
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As I said, not for everyone. Factorio is an enormously fun game for a lot of people, though, and it's literally just manufacturing chains.
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# ? Jan 9, 2019 16:29 |
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Zurai posted:As I said, not for everyone. Factorio is an enormously fun game for a lot of people, though, and it's literally just manufacturing chains. Factorio works because designing those chains for maximum efficiency is tremendously compelling. If it was just, "I need to queue up three assemblers and two inserters to produce science 3," it would be tedious. With respect, designing similar chains in Stellaris without a spatial component will be less compelling.
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# ? Jan 9, 2019 16:49 |
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Yeah as much as I enjoyed Civ: Colonization for what it was I'm not sure how adding a bigger production chain in Stellaris would actually help its issues. Colonization also actually had you manually set up convoys where you had to ship the raw materials to the manufacturing centers, so the game kinda revolved entirely around the manufacturing chains while working towards a singular goal. For me the primary issues are the late game lag, the AI death spirals where it goes negative food/consumer goods (and yes I saw this before I added Guilli's mod or Glavius's mod to the mix), and a few silly mechanics involving pop-gates and resettling/unemployment. Potentially also machine empires but I haven't actually played one yet to personally experience it, I love playing rogue servitors but have been put off it so far by trying out other things and the complaints.
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# ? Jan 9, 2019 17:04 |
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Someone finally brought up Colonization in the context of the new system, and going off the discussion about the state of the AI: Sid Meier's Colonization? Now THAT was a game with some truly garbage AI.
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# ? Jan 9, 2019 17:07 |
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ZypherIM posted:Move the start dates of your crisis forward? It would be preferable if the crisis was challenging regardless of year, because the game just happened to be adaptable. Also this doesn't address that the interest curve crisii aside, is poor overall and this is about solving more than one particular specific issues, but a host of such issues.
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# ? Jan 9, 2019 17:09 |
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Sure, and I have no desire whatsoever to make anything nearly as complex as Factorio's chains. I would suffer a mental breakdown just trying to do the design work for it. But people like Victoria 2, too, and again, manufacturing chains are a huge portion of that game and it does not have any spatial component. And, yes, I also know there are a lot of other things Vicky does that Stellaris can't emulate. My goal with extending the production chain beyond just alloys is twofold: First, forcing the player to make decisions on how to allocate production. Right now, there's no real decisions to be made, it's just "more alloys = more better". There really isn't any wiggle room in the current game design to change that, either, unless I want to get surreal and have ships built out of consumer goods and unity. I'm adding more steps so that alloys are no longer the end goal and so that you have to actually think about how you're going to spend your alloys and other resources. Different types of ship components will require different manufactured goods -- armor plates for armor components, shield emitters for shield components, etc. This means that your economy, to a point, dictates your ability to actually physically manufacture your fleet. If you're constrained on shield emitters because of a low supply of rare crystals, you're going to have to design your ships with that in mind or secure a new source. Second, it allows for a sense of progression in the game. Right now, you're doing exactly the same thing economically at the start of the game as you are at the end of the game, and that makes no sense from either a simulationist or a gamist perspective. The way my design is currently set up, you use raw alloys to make the basic start-of-game ships (and alloys the whole time through for the actual hull because there's no way to change that based on tech progress), then you start needing basic manufactured items for tier 2 components, then more advanced manufactured items for tier 3-5 components, and for Zro/Dark Matter/Nanite components. As your tech base, and the population to support it, grows, your economy becomes more complex. Now, I'm not saying this will be a silver bullet. It won't be fun for some people. It may not be fun for most people. Hell, it may not even turn out to be fun for me. But I think there's enough merit in the idea to at least get it to a pre-alpha prototype stage where I can test it and see if it actually works or if it's too much work for too little gain.
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# ? Jan 9, 2019 17:17 |
DatonKallandor posted:It's pointless because all it does is make you slightly more efficient - in a game where people complain the AI is already too easy. Why the hell would you bother doing annoying micro to become more efficient against an AI that already isn't playing optimal anyway? You could say the same about a lot of other things too, like assigning governors/admirals/generals, or maybe even letting sector AI automate everything (I don't know how bad sector AI is now though). Or doing anything to deal with piracy, you're probably fine just ignoring pirates and that can be a lot of micro if you have a lot of trade. I don't find it particularly annoying. Doing micro to be more efficient against an AI that doesn't know what it's doing is pretty much the core game play of 4Xs, anyway. Also, nomadic doesn't seem to actually make resettlement cheaper now? Raenir Salazar posted:It would be preferable if the crisis was challenging regardless of year, because the game just happened to be adaptable. Also this doesn't address that the interest curve crisii aside, is poor overall and this is about solving more than one particular specific issues, but a host of such issues. Crisii? Seriously? Are people going to do that poo poo for all wordi now?
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# ? Jan 9, 2019 17:19 |
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Raenir Salazar posted:It would be preferable if the crisis was challenging regardless of year, because the game just happened to be adaptable. Also this doesn't address that the interest curve crisii aside, is poor overall and this is about solving more than one particular specific issues, but a host of such issues. Some people like having a set strength instead of things being leveled to them. Also would you scale to the player, to the galaxy, and how would you gauge all that? There is a lot of things to consider and saying "it should be adaptable" is pretty reductive. Also you can tweak crisis strength up if you think they're too small. Two entire sliders, just to address your complaint!
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# ? Jan 9, 2019 17:25 |
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toasterwarrior posted:Someone finally brought up Colonization in the context of the new system, and going off the discussion about the state of the AI: Sid Meier's Colonization? Now THAT was a game with some truly garbage AI. In Colonization I just turned off the European AI nations and played sandbox in the new world. It was fun for a while, but honestly the war and diplomacy in the game wasn't all that engaging besides sometimes trading with natives. Zurai posted:My goal with extending the production chain beyond just alloys is twofold: Seems like you're entirely focused on ships. But there are other production chains in the game, like using consumer goods to generate unity/science/amenities, and using rare resources to make the setup more efficient. Is the problem that you can sidestep a lot of that? Personally I'd like to see more of the game focused on things other than making more military ships, because I don't find the war to be all that compelling in general anyways.
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# ? Jan 9, 2019 17:34 |
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ZypherIM posted:Some people like having a set strength instead of things being leveled to them. Also would you scale to the player, to the galaxy, and how would you gauge all that? You're not considering what I said overall; techs are too fast, the economy snowballs too quickly out of your control, your ships are meaningless as wars devolve into throwing clumps of ships at another clump of ships because their modules don't matter because of tech being so fast. Crisii are just a convenient benchmark to see this, moving them around is like putting a bandaid on the bleeding spurting stump where your arm use to be. It isn't being reductive, you've basically forgot my previous post exists: quote:Stellaris has the exact same issues that any and every civilization iteration has in which I feel like tech is basically meaningless. It goes by so fast that I never have time to really appreciate my ship designs or current upgrades, by the time I have one module I already see the next one available to be researched. You can't really just bump up techcosts forever because there gets a point you just lose all ability to have actions, ruining your interest curve in a different way. Also multiplayer, just because I can handle the game in a certain way, doesn't mean everyone else in the group can do so, the more extreme end of rule setups actually results in most of my group instantly losing from the get go. By adaptable, I mean two things: (1) You should have the same approximate number of actions per minute 250 years into the game that you do 25 years into the game. As actions are enabled and available, some previous actions are automated away or delegated or abstracted by the new actions. (2) I don't think the end or mid game crisii should be able to be "gamed" by reading the wiki; I think an element of uncertainty should be present, fiddling with start dates is counter productive, I want to be surprised by a crisis, and surprised by its strength. Pay me 80$ an hour and I'm sure I could write up a 30 page design doc that thoroughly details how a more adaptable setting would work; it isn't I think productive to get into discussions of "how would you implement this" that isn't my job.
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# ? Jan 9, 2019 17:49 |
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Magil Zeal posted:Seems like you're entirely focused on ships. But there are other production chains in the game, like using consumer goods to generate unity/science/amenities, and using rare resources to make the setup more efficient. Is the problem that you can sidestep a lot of that? I've been trying to brainstorm what to do with the civilian side of the economy. My ideas for that aren't as solid as for the military side which is why I didn't mention them. Right now I have civilian production just split up into Consumer Goods (used for biological pop upkeep and for unity), Luxury Goods (used for more powerful amenities and trade value producing jobs), and Precision Tools (used for science and robot pop upkeep), but I'm not at all sold on that implementation. I want it to be deeper rather than just wider, but I haven't hit on an implementation that I'm satisfied with yet. As for using rare resources to make manufacturing more efficient, that is something I have designed into the system. For example, for Naval Guns, the basic production chain only uses alloys. However, there's a Zero-G Cannonworks (name temporary, I'm terrible at names) which modifies the naval gunsmith jobs on that planet to use a small amount of consumer goods (because the workers are in orbit and need extra considerations) and extra alloys to produce about 50% more Naval Guns per job, and a Dark Matter Munitions Factory which modifies both naval gunsmiths and munitions factory workers to use a small amount of dark matter to increase the output of their respective manufactured item. This also gives a lot more capability to specialize planets in producing specific manufactured items. Zurai fucked around with this message at 17:57 on Jan 9, 2019 |
# ? Jan 9, 2019 17:50 |
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Magil Zeal posted:In Colonization I just turned off the European AI nations and played sandbox in the new world. It was fun for a while, but honestly the war and diplomacy in the game wasn't all that engaging besides sometimes trading with natives. I've played enough strategy games to know that letting the AI cheat if it can't handle the systems is acceptable as long as it remains a challenge and doesn't gimp your options, but Colonization's AI was so braindead, it would've been vastly improved as a game if the other Europeans literally worked entirely differently to how your colony did in terms of economics and development.
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# ? Jan 9, 2019 17:59 |
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Raenir Salazar posted:Stellaris has the exact same issues that any and every civilization iteration has in which I feel like tech is basically meaningless. It goes by so fast that I never have time to really appreciate my ship designs or current upgrades, by the time I have one module I already see the next one available to be researched.
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# ? Jan 9, 2019 18:03 |
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Raenir Salazar posted:You're not considering what I said overall; techs are too fast, the economy snowballs too quickly out of your control, your ships are meaningless as wars devolve into throwing clumps of ships at another clump of ships because their modules don't matter because of tech being so fast. Crisii are just a convenient benchmark to see this, moving them around is like putting a bandaid on the bleeding spurting stump where your arm use to be. Your issue isn't that techs are too fast, it is that techs aren't impactful enough. This is something a lot of people coming from other 4x games have trouble with, but tech just isn't a huge advantage in this game. Compare it to something like master of orion, where each new weapon tech can make a big difference on its own. Economy snowballing is something else that tends to happen in any 4x, if it is too much or not is more of a matter of taste. I find alloy restrictions pretty good at feeling like I don't have infinite resources to constantly throw into everything. Ship-v-Ship clumps are going to happen with this style of combat. 4x games that avoid it being like this either have a *much* more micro intensive aspect or will pause the over-map action to do a small action battle that both sides can pay full attention to. Adaptable: (1) I don't really agree, but you can already achieve something more along this line as long as you're willing to give control to sectors and not obsess about it. (2) You could conceivably mod in a random toggle for crisis strength and start times. Are you asking that the various crises have random design layouts as well? Hard disagree on that. You'd remove a lot of the feel of how each is different, along with the fact that the end game crises being rather exaggerated in their design direction allows interaction with ship design to make a meaningful difference. I don't need to pay you anything, all I need to do is point out that plenty of people don't enjoy having a big end game event scaled to their level. It removes their ability to, you know, build up and see if they were able to overcome what they know is coming. BTW the plural of crisis is crises.
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# ? Jan 9, 2019 18:11 |
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Jamor's back in town with a confidence inspiring message: "Hey all, just wanted to drop a line and let you know that we're back in action in Stockholm. Had some people working last week, and we're at full strength now. We're going to get back to updating the stellaris_test beta with new batches of fixes (stand by for a new iteration of that soon), and rolling proven fixes in to the live official version. We've got a local experimental performance improvement branch going and we'll merge those changes in to the beta, and ultimately live build, when we feel they're solid. MegaCorp was a massive undertaking. The price of changes that sweeping and dramatic is bugs, but part of our basic philosophy is to always be bold with innovating new things. The evolving experience is one of the things that make us different. Your constructive feedback on the betas has been helpful, please keep it up. Thanks for your patience, and remember: we don't just push something out the door and forget about it, we're Paradox, we support games and the people who play them for the long haul. I have a large amount of post launch support time budgeted where we'll be doing nothing but working on fixes for you guys, and we're going to make the most of it." "Yeah guys we released a mess way too early because it had a lot of features we under-budgeted for, but we'll probably finish more of in the months to come" is about what I got out of that.
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# ? Jan 9, 2019 18:56 |
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Zurai posted:Sure, and I have no desire whatsoever to make anything nearly as complex as Factorio's chains. I would suffer a mental breakdown just trying to do the design work for it. But people like Victoria 2, too, and again, manufacturing chains are a huge portion of that game and it does not have any spatial component. And, yes, I also know there are a lot of other things Vicky does that Stellaris can't emulate. What makes Factorio compelling is logistics - it's not what you produce, it's how you get what you need to the factory and how you get its products to where they need to go. What makes Victoria compelling is that raw resources are what you fight over to fuel your manufacturing. The main key here is the political and military struggle of your empire vs. its rivals, which is something that Stellaris lacks. Changing the base economy would mean un-abstracting minerals, food, and alloys. I'm not sure how much that would add, and it's a very difficult balance to strike. I'd like to see a starting option with empires already in place, similar to the other Paradox titles. That political element is missing from Stellaris, and it feels a lot more like Civ.
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# ? Jan 9, 2019 19:09 |
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Yeah, the resource chains of something like the Anno series are interesting because there's that spacial component. What's the point of having apiaries make wax to combine with brass (with its own production chain) in order to ship all that to a candle workshop to sell fancy candles to your rich people? It's not the chain, it's the spacial aspects that go along with the chain. The focus of the game is on space-planning the physical fields and buildings that every step of the chain needs, synergizing with similar or related steps in order to cut down on transport/logistics, and mostly important, making it all look pretty. Stellaris doesn't have all that, and the AI is already piss-poor at managing the slightly expanded economy. The point of the new economy is to force players to invest in the direction of their empire. In something like MOO2 if you wanted to "respec" a planet from an industrial world to a science world it was as simple as grabbing those 20 worker pops and dragging them into becoming scientist pops. The resource chains in stellaris are there to force you to plan things out a bit in advance. If you want to focus on science you need to plan for the goods and minerals and exotic gas that focus will require. if you want a big fleet you will need the alloy capacity that requires. You have limited raw resources and slots/pops, so the choice is in how you spend that all because it's hard to "re-spec" your empire, your investments are all long term and changing course takes time. Simply adding more steps won't create more compelling gameplay because it's not being paired with new investment priorities, it will just create more busywork. The game currently has the exactly correct number of processing steps required for the actual meaningful long term choices that currently exist in the game.
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# ? Jan 9, 2019 19:30 |
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Then don't download my mod A lot of people making a lot of comments when they should have stopped at "this isn't for me". Or maybe read all the way through to "I acknowledge that this might not actually be for anyone but I'm at least going to alpha test it myself".
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# ? Jan 9, 2019 19:32 |
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Aethernet posted:Factorio works because designing those chains for maximum efficiency is tremendously compelling. If it was just, "I need to queue up three assemblers and two inserters to produce science 3," it would be tedious. With respect, designing similar chains in Stellaris without a spatial component will be less compelling. To expand on this, the equivalent to designing factorio production chains, which is to say including a spatial element, is to rely more on planets and space geography. To include a spatial element, essentially. The economy in stellaris for the most part is presently almost entirely non spatial, you can mine minerals anywhere, send them anywhere, process them anywhere, and spend the results anywhere. What you want is simply more land and more buildings to increase production. If you wanted to add more interest you would be better served by adding a wider variety of harvestable resources or combined sets of resources. GPM does this well with its habitats, because you can build one habitat and get multiple effects stacked on it which provide multiple jobs together which produce resources. So where your economy expands is determined by where you want to site a habitat, and what resource confluences you have. Another good example is the increased specialization mod. Because that adds a much more meaningful choice as to whether you want to theme your planets, producing less of perhaps the resources you want in exchange for producing significantly more of the resources that the planet is best suited to produce. It adds a spatial element in this way because your empire is no longer reducible entirely to a series of districts floating in a void, what you put on what planet now matters more. A mod which added more strategic resources which could not be synthesized, or for which planetary collection was the primary method of acquisition, that would be another example, where what planets have what resources gives you branching options for development. Especially if the distribution was not uniform across space. Your goal should be to add specific places that people might want to capture (another thing GPM does well with its precursor anomalies making certain planets and regions of space especially valuable) and also to make capturing them give specific bonuses, such as particular resources. Within the field of internal development too, where you choose to put certain things should matter as well, because currently it doesn't, really. Any bit of your space is the same as any other except for in a military sense, there is a lot of room for having actual economic concepts of core space and frontier space as well as military ones as well as different areas housing different industries and for good reasons. You could introduce things like synergy bonuses for buildings whereby foundries and factories are more productive when paired with mining districts on the same planet, or where colonies in one system can synergise with each other too, or where lots of colonies together combine to create a "space infrastructure" rating for each system representing how centralized it is, and giving production bonuses to match, representing ease of transport. All of this would serve to add more facets to the decision making which presently is almost entirely reduced to "if number red, then build factory for number somewhere, anywhere" OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 19:41 on Jan 9, 2019 |
# ? Jan 9, 2019 19:33 |
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OwlFancier posted:Another good example is the increased specialization mod. Because that adds a much more meaningful choice as to whether you want to theme your planets, producing less of perhaps the resources you want in exchange for producing significantly more of the resources that the planet is best suited to produce. It adds a spatial element in this way because your empire is no longer reducible entirely to a series of districts floating in a void, what you put on what planet now matters more. Oh you mean this thing which I already said was built in and described an example of? Zurai posted:As for using rare resources to make manufacturing more efficient, that is something I have designed into the system. For example, for Naval Guns, the basic production chain only uses alloys. However, there's a Zero-G Cannonworks (name temporary, I'm terrible at names) which modifies the naval gunsmith jobs on that planet to use a small amount of consumer goods (because the workers are in orbit and need extra considerations) and extra alloys to produce about 50% more Naval Guns per job, and a Dark Matter Munitions Factory which modifies both naval gunsmiths and munitions factory workers to use a small amount of dark matter to increase the output of their respective manufactured item. EDIT: It's worth about as much as the paper it's printed on, but believe it or not I have an actual Bachelor of Science degree in game design and programming. I do have training in game design and I have at least a vague idea of what I'm doing. I'm not posting the entire design document because it's not relevant and it's not done.
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# ? Jan 9, 2019 19:43 |
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Zurai posted:Oh you mean this thing which I already said was built in and described an example of? That's not really the same thing because that's more like just adding mineral processing plants for every production chain. You still don't need to really think about it you're just adding several different buildings that you always want to build on one planet. Which begs the question of why they aren't just one building? Especially as alloys/consumer goods both come from minerals so you're just making it so people have to remember to build a consumer goods building, an alloy building, and the building that makes both turn into guns. It's the same thing as consumer goods > research labs now. There's never really going to be a reason not to build the consumer goods addon building, because it's always (we hope) simply a more efficient converter of minerals into guns. More uses for the rare strategic resources would be appropriate but I would prefer to see that as the focus, not just adding more buildings that run off the same minerals > everything chain. Even the planet specialization mod does it better I think because your choice there is between the three base resources and is heavily influenced by what district slots the planet has. You have to sacrifice one basic resource for another, or for an urban planet. There's an exlcusive choice there and it might change as you acquire more planets. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 20:00 on Jan 9, 2019 |
# ? Jan 9, 2019 19:48 |
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Zurai posted:Then don't download my mod A lot of people making a lot of comments when they should have stopped at "this isn't for me". Or maybe read all the way through to "I acknowledge that this might not actually be for anyone but I'm at least going to alpha test it myself". Not my speed, but you're going to raise your blood pressure trying to apply reason here.
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# ? Jan 9, 2019 19:52 |
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Zurai posted:This would increase the power of defenders and reduce the power of attackers even more than they already are. One of the intended drawbacks of larger empires is that you have to spread your fleets out more. Being able to just keep a single huge fleet in a central location and respond instantly to any portion of your empire goes against one of the main design principles in the 2.0 release (ie it encourages doomstacks instead of discouraging them). Yeah, but in practice this still doesn't ever happen. Yes I'll divide fleets and keep them spread around, but the minute you get into a peer conflict all of those ships need to be centralized, because it's still suicide to throw a smaller fleet into action against a larger one. Even the AI (mostly) understands this, and it would just be nice if wars didn't involve huge stagnant stretches were neither side commits as they each wait for their fleets to converge. Also, a construction ship taking 3 years to fly from one end of an empire to another is just dumb as gently caress. Sure I'll just build another one over there, but I shouldn't have to. ZypherIM posted:It'd be neat if the speed increase from the hyperlane building on starbases was extended out to your trade protection range. Leave the disengagement modifiers and stuff to just that system, and maybe not let them stack, but that'd give a nice boost. PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 19:58 on Jan 9, 2019 |
# ? Jan 9, 2019 19:54 |
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Zurai posted:Then don't download my mod A lot of people making a lot of comments when they should have stopped at "this isn't for me". Or maybe read all the way through to "I acknowledge that this might not actually be for anyone but I'm at least going to alpha test it myself". I think folks are replying from the perspective of stuff that should be included in the base game to help the economy, and you're talking about your mod fleshing out part of the existing game. Dude it's real cool that you want to make a mod that expands the gameplay as you think it should be, that's always legit and I hope it turns out decent, if it's fun I'll run it just like Gulli's mod.
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# ? Jan 9, 2019 19:54 |
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Yeah I think people are more discussion game-design and production-chains in general rather than specifically saying "don't make that mod!!" More people making economic mods and digging into that system is good. My honest main worry is: can the AI handle it. Are some cool but mostly redundant extra steps worth it if it just further cripples the AI?
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# ? Jan 9, 2019 20:00 |
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The AI can't handle it at the moment so it's difficult to see how it could get much more broken. Just throw them more free money or something and abandon the pretense of them being able to have an economy. Turn the entire game into creeper world or something. Actually a version of the game where the primary antagonist is something like the creeper which ran on an extremely simplified economy might actually be a pretty good mod.
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# ? Jan 9, 2019 20:08 |
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quote:Adaptable: (1) I don't really agree, but you can already achieve something more along this line as long as you're willing to give control to sectors and not obsess about it. I never said anything about changing the layouts; I was figuring more fleet strengths under the assumption that they're generally fixed. If I wanted dynamic loadouts on a crisis I'd suggest either reworking the swarm, contingency or adding a whole new crisis that is either Nid'/Borg like in their ability to adapt to you. Which would be a "cool idea" but not one that actually addresses my issues with how Stellaris feels. quote:I don't need to pay you anything, all I need to do is point out that plenty of people don't enjoy having a big end game event scaled to their level. It removes their ability to, you know, build up and see if they were able to overcome what they know is coming. I have no idea how this relates to: quote:"Also would you scale to the player, to the galaxy, and how would you gauge all that? This sounds like you're asking me to give you a flowchart of how mechanically "it" would work; I think we're clearly not at the point where that would be productive part of the discourse and isn't my job, my job is to complain about what sucks. Again, crises aren't important, it isn't what my gripe is at all, it is merely a useful benchmark to gauge the issues I am observing regarding the game's interest curve. To repeat (and clarify): -Techs are too quick. -Wars are still decided ultimately about throwing two clumps of ships at each other. -Ships really arent that much different from each other and don't differentiate themselves, see the clumps above; once you have cruisers fleet battles are just about watching to rave dance parties breakdancing until one side teleports away without any input from you. -Players snowball too quickly not just in respect to the AI, but with respect to other players and to themselves. -There's nothing to distinguish a tall empire from a wide empire. Which is a part of the problem with snowballing, size rewards size until carpel tunnel sets in. While I like the idea of an empire getting so unmanagably large that you start to have to make painful choices to keep things running Stellaris doesn't take advantage of that; leaving half of your empire to rot wt 3,000 pops and 30 worlds and ring worlds and whatever doesnt matter because you've probably won the game; so you just have an unmanageable bloaty thing that is just a load of stress without it impacting you meaningfully. Also I don't think making techs "more impactful" is the solution, because at the end the player is going to be so good that they can still blaze through them so now they're snowballing even harder than before. The problem here about techs being too quick, is that there is no way to sufficiently slow them down without making the game broken, boring, or too difficult in other unintended ways. My preference would be for hundreds of more techs to add increments between techs, and to start off with enough of the major ship/space stuff construction techs so you can still *do* things for the early game, just not very well, cheaply or fast. quote:Economy snowballing is something else that tends to happen in any 4x, if it is too much or not is more of a matter of taste. I find alloy restrictions pretty good at feeling like I don't have infinite resources to constantly throw into everything. Appealing to other 4X's is I think a problem, there isn't a need to, nothing stops stellaris from being its own thing. There are ways to stop snowballing; by making size a real concern with real tradeoffs. Alloys don't go far enough to be honest, I've never had problems upgrading my fleets with the latest patches, but before I go further: quote:is is something a lot of people coming from other 4x games have trouble with, but tech just isn't a huge advantage in this game. This isn't really true, a 20k fleet with the same number of ships as a 10k fleet will always win. The jump from tier n and n+1 weapons, armor, or engines/powerplants are always decently worth upgrading for to squeeze every inch of available fleet power you can. Depending on how upgrades happen I might hold off to upgrade armor from 2 to 4 or something; but the problem is these techs are often back to back and linear. Between alloys not going far enough, techs coming too often, and upgrades not being that difficult; results in one of the biggest issues with wide vs tall: There isn't really enough of a reason to split up your fleet. If you had to have multiple regional fleets, there should be a system where you are strongly encouraged as a wide empire to keep fleets spread apart, comprising of many older ships; then you could have more impactful tech simply as a result of how rare your most advanced warships are, like the Soviet Union having T-64's only for the Germany forces while Allies and Category B divisions had T-72's and T-55s. As an extension of this, it would be nice if there was a spectrum of warfare that enabled proper borderskirmishes and limited wars; like only the bordering sectors can fight with limited reinforcements from your central fleet. quote:Ship-v-Ship clumps are going to happen with this style of combat. 4x games that avoid it being like this either have a *much* more micro intensive aspect or will pause the over-map action to do a small action battle that both sides can pay full attention to. There is clearly room for a revamp, "simplistic light show rave fight dust cloud" can be expanded into a better system. And by redesigning over aspects of the game to be more streamlined, you can focus more actions per minute on warfare; the part of the game people tend to have the most amount of fun with. Basically solar systems should be larger, and have considerably more strategic depth to them to feel more like a video game adaption of The Expanse; where its a more gradual set piece operation to take the system that is more than just "blow up defending fleet, blow up defending station, bombard planet, land marines on planet". But most importantly, have this system be such that the AI can handle the broad gist of it, so you are free to focus on the one or two battles that matter, while other fronts the AI handle for you at a "good enough" level. Raenir Salazar fucked around with this message at 20:13 on Jan 9, 2019 |
# ? Jan 9, 2019 20:11 |
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OwlFancier posted:Actually a version of the game where the primary antagonist is something like the creeper which ran on an extremely simplified economy might actually be a pretty good mod. I really like having other fellow person civilizations on the map playing the same game as me, but a bunch of unplayable enemies I think would do the game good. Stellaris gets stuck in this mindset of perfectly balanced multi-player friendly symmetry when some of the most interesting things in the game (khan, awakened empire/war in heaven, late game crisis) are totally non-playable threats that don't follow the game's base economic rules and can thus be programmed to behave in simple but interesting ways. Anno did this with their first more futuristic version because they couldn't get an AI that played the same game as the player competently. Instead of the AI following the same rules and building the same stuff as you, instead there were various AI forces with their own totally internal set of rules that were active on the map and providing challenges to the player. I really missed having true rivals, but a mix of that would work out so well in Stellaris. Basically create some much more abstract types of opponents that don't need complex internal economies and just function off some really simple rules. Don't design them to be fair or balanced or even playable, they are there to break up the monotony of a map covered in painfully symmetrical space empires that all achieved space travel on the exact same day. Really, I think Paradox knows this and has been slowly adding these sorts of things more and more to the game. From the Khan to L-Gates to the traders we're getting more firmly NPC forces on the map.
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# ? Jan 9, 2019 20:22 |
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Baronjutter posted:I really like having other fellow person civilizations on the map playing the same game as me, but a bunch of unplayable enemies I think would do the game good. Stellaris gets stuck in this mindset of perfectly balanced multi-player friendly symmetry when some of the most interesting things in the game (khan, awakened empire/war in heaven, late game crisis) are totally non-playable threats that don't follow the game's base economic rules and can thus be programmed to behave in simple but interesting ways. Me too, but the benefit of an enemy that doesn't even pretend to obey the fundamental rules that the player does but which is paced to provide a comparable challenge nontheless, is that it often results in a better and more consistent experience. And you can throw in dumb AIs as well, doesn't have to be either/or.
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# ? Jan 9, 2019 20:26 |
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Yeah but the NPC forces invariably break stuff like fleet cap and fleet size, which is why I ask for the 735th time, why are these in the game. It means the AI is having fun playing a 4x and you're dicking around with an economy sim that only affects you and isn't quite deep enough to be fun to begin with. Really, why is there a fleet cap given that ships already have upkeep and you need an econ to support them? I mean, I know why, wiz said in multi you'd be able to roll over your neighbor without caps. I don't agree with that reason.
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# ? Jan 9, 2019 20:27 |
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paradox games are the only ones ive seen where discussions become about deep philosophical questions like what is gameplay??
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# ? Jan 9, 2019 20:33 |
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Having separate naval cap/upkeep costs means you can have a level of ships that you can support and also spare economy. If you didn't have naval cap you'd just build all your ships that you can economically afford at once and obliterate everything. Having a maximum number of ships you can support independent of your economy means that a strong economy dictates your replacement rate, not your actual standing fleet, which means that if an empire can win the initial engagement they then have a standing fleet advantage which lets them fight more evenly against someone who is relying on replacements. It's not perfect but I think it's far preferable to just building a bazillion ships and steamrollering things. The dynamic of losing your standing fleet or knocking out an enemy standing fleet but still having cash for reinforcements is more interesting than just banging your entire respective economies into each other and whoever loses dies.
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# ? Jan 9, 2019 20:34 |
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OwlFancier posted:Having separate naval cap/upkeep costs means you can have a level of ships that you can support and also spare economy. If you didn't have naval cap you'd just build all your ships that you can economically afford at once and obliterate everything. Having a maximum number of ships you can support independent of your economy means that a strong economy dictates your replacement rate, not your actual standing fleet, which means that if an empire can win the initial engagement they then have a standing fleet advantage which lets them fight more evenly against someone who is relying on replacements. Yeah, the thing is you're describing the inherent race condition between building up, expanding, and teching that 4x games typically provide. To have ships you need alloys, to have alloys you need minerals, energy, buildings, and for those you need planets. By having uncapped ships you allow the player to specialize more towards a fleet heavy or an econ heavy build. By having fleet caps you cannot overbuild ships and it excludes every single strat that would involve going heavy military to get a temporary advantage, since you can't go heavier military than your pacifist neighbor can support trivially on their bigger econ. Having a bazillion ships requires that you either have the planets and resources to support them, in which case I ask what was your neighbor doing during that time, or for you to go all in on a gambit, which caps currently don't let you do.
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# ? Jan 9, 2019 20:37 |
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It doesn't exclude them, especially not since 2.2 allowed you to use forts to generate naval cap. What it does is force you to give up more of your economy for marginal gains in naval cap, which is very important when Stellaris often decides fights by quite small margins in fleet power which steamroll very quickly. If you translated minerals to ships without much else you would devolve the entire game basically into nothing but who has more minerals and who built more ships, which it already suffers from, but you'd completely wipe out the balance between war and everything else, especially for civlizations that do not use claims. I would question the enjoyability of having a complex game which is rapidly reduced to one fleet battle per empire determined by who brought more ships. We had something very like that for a long time, it's what 2.0 looked to rectify. It remains eminently possible to be a militaristic empire, but you cannot become trivially more powerful than everyone else, other than in the sense the AI is bad. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 20:46 on Jan 9, 2019 |
# ? Jan 9, 2019 20:44 |
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I think having a 4x game with an elaborate economy sim AND a meaningful combat system is a desirable goal in the game. The war system already feels just about too restrictive for a 4x but acceptable for a paradox game with early influence costs already making early aggression difficult. It would be great if the devouring swarms actually had uncapped fleets and were a real threat to devouring all their neighbors, like they are in say, SOTS. I find that kinda cool to watch the computer steamroll and get stronger and think about how I'm going to deal with them. Compared to the current Paradox system of death by 1000 papercuts, taxes, maluses and penalties which even the AI can't make work, it's a much more enjoyable thing to me. Allowing ships to impact things make ships more important, makes the econ more important, and makes balancing the two more important. Having the combat system be just kinda there, with boring space wars, undecisive fleet battles, planetary conquests that take years and wars that result in planets full of unhappy pops, it's just the oddest mix of ways you'd implement warmongering in a 4x, for me. I don't get the way it's presented like "Without fleet caps you just build a billion ships" - how? Alloy costs scale and ships have an alloy upkeep which is a major limiter, having a giant fleet in 2.2 is not a trivial thing. You can't just decide you want one, you have to build to one. Ham Sandwiches fucked around with this message at 20:51 on Jan 9, 2019 |
# ? Jan 9, 2019 20:48 |
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# ? Apr 17, 2024 22:42 |
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There's a few different game design philosophies out there, and the one paradox follows is generally that gameplay trumps everything. This is a perfectly fine outlook and pretty much the proper outlook, but paradox slowly evolves their games over time and often misses sight of the big picture. Weird limitation X exists because without it, something really bad would happen gameplay wise leading to the game not being fun. It's much easier to just toss a weird, unrealistic, or unintuitive restriction on something than dig deeper into why the system breaks down without. The alternative often requires digging deep down into the foundations of your basic game design and at that point you might as well be making a new game. Basically, it's easier to code a sort of contrived event that forbids old ladies from swallowing a fly than to totally re-do your digestive simulation to give realistic and believable pros and cons to the swallowing of chains of various creatures. On the flip side, my more personal philosophy is to always make realism your guiding philosophy and things will work out naturally. Sure, abstract the poo poo out of reality, bend it, twist it, but make sure every mechanic and system in your game can justify itself as existing to model something real (or at least real within the internal logic of your game/world). But keeping "realism" (or at least internal rules) as a consistent guiding force generally self-balances things. Sometimes those abstractions and solutions will look the same, but sometimes they don't, and generally where they differ is what avoids a cascade of increasingly arbitrary mechanics that all make sense in their specific and immediate mechanical needs but don't add up to make enjoyable or intuitive gameplay.
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# ? Jan 9, 2019 20:56 |