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Gort
Aug 18, 2003

Good day what ho cup of tea
It'd be weird if you put a game on "normal" difficulty but actually got one that was easier or harder than that because the AI randomly picked good/bad origins. Like you're feeling threatened by a fanatic purifier next door and then their homeworld spontaneously detonates.

I'd have thought the obvious way to balance origins would be by modifying the buildings and pops the homeworld starts with - they do that for starts like mechanist, but don't mention it for stuff like the doomed homeworld or the tomb world start.

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Major Isoor
Mar 23, 2011

Aethernet posted:

In fairness it would be exceedingly hard to make an origin like your HW blowing up balanced, so erring on the side of cool is totally correct here.

Yeah, it's definitely better to have fun/cool origins in addition to more 'balanced'/standard ones, rather than trying to make them all as even/boring as possible. (Boring theme-wise, I mean. You can hardly have a start like your planet blowing up, without it inevitably being a hard campaign)
I mean, I for one am definitely gonna try that 'your homeworld is blowing up' one at some point, and pretend it's similar to Jonas Quinn's homeworld (nearly) blowing up from dodgy naquadria mining in Stargate! :D

Major Isoor fucked around with this message at 10:05 on Nov 15, 2019

canepazzo
May 29, 2006



Gort posted:

It'd be weird if you put a game on "normal" difficulty but actually got one that was easier or harder than that because the AI randomly picked good/bad origins.

Like you're feeling threatened by a fanatic purifier next door and then their homeworld spontaneously detonates.

16 empires, 16 doomdays origins. Every planet you colonize gets the doomsday countdown, shorter each time.

Ladies and gentlemen:

Stellaris: Battle Royale

Gort
Aug 18, 2003

Good day what ho cup of tea
Maybe a good bonus to balance the doomed homeworld would be resettlement being cheap and not making your pops unhappy, since everyone realises that they have to leave the homeworld or die.

Major Isoor
Mar 23, 2011

canepazzo posted:

16 empires, 16 doomdays origins. Every planet you colonize gets the doomsday countdown, shorter each time.

Ladies and gentlemen:

Stellaris: Battle Royale

Only 16? Make that 99 human empires and you've got yourself a Stellaris multiplayer-only spin-off! :D Bonus points if players get to pick where their empire starts in the galaxy along a random line, a la the plane in PUBG, etc.
(Please don't do this Paradox)

EDIT:

Gort posted:

Maybe a good bonus to balance the doomed homeworld would be resettlement being cheap and not making your pops unhappy, since everyone realises that they have to leave the homeworld or die.

Yeah, that's true. Maybe a big temporary boost to happiness for pops who DO make it off in time, due to being among the ranks of 'the lucky ones'. Maybe also include a unique better-than-usual unity building/monument for the loss of the homeworld, once the homeworld blows up.

Major Isoor fucked around with this message at 10:11 on Nov 15, 2019

Splicer
Oct 16, 2006

from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

Preechr posted:

Stellaris 2.6: 20,000 points under the S&P
Stellaris 2.6: You can't cut back on QA! You will regret this!

Aethernet posted:

In fairness it would be exceedingly hard to make an origin like your HW blowing up balanced, so erring on the side of cool is totally correct here.
If this marks a conscious swing away from even pretending to care about competitive multiplayer and toward weird fun galaxy stuff then I'm all for it. If they're just abandoning balance due to lack of resources then that's unfortunate. I hope it's the former.

Hey, where's the plantoid specific origin? Or fungus? Give me my insidious spores.

Splicer
Oct 16, 2006

from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

Gort posted:

Maybe a good bonus to balance the doomed homeworld would be resettlement being cheap and not making your pops unhappy, since everyone realises that they have to leave the homeworld or die.
If migration and decline wasn't broken then just starting with a massive emigration push from your homeworld would do it.

Bloodly
Nov 3, 2008

Not as strong as you'd expect.
I wonder if the Tree Of Life one will have an interaction with the Baol?

Guilliman
Apr 5, 2017

Animal went forth into the future and made worlds in his own image. And it was wild.
one-upping the devs once again :P

MrL_JaKiri
Sep 23, 2003

A bracing glass of carrot juice!
niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice

Gort
Aug 18, 2003

Good day what ho cup of tea
idgi

Guilliman
Apr 5, 2017

Animal went forth into the future and made worlds in his own image. And it was wild.

If you're a megacorp my new events have a unique option. Something they really don't like doing much :P

Splicer
Oct 16, 2006

from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

Guilliman posted:

If you're a megacorp my new events have a unique option. Something they really don't like doing much :P
They really do need to do a content pass where they add unique options to as many events as possible. Less events but with more variability based on your layout is more meaningful content and replayability than more events that always do the same things.

Surviving mars is pretty good about this, most events are two or three options +one or two better option that are greyed out if you don't have the right sponsor/leader.

Gyrotica
Nov 26, 2012

Grafted to machines your builders did not understand.
I feel like the main thing they should be doing is fixing the performance/mod tool issues. I can deal with a lot of jank in this game, but if I literally can't play a game all the way through...

With the game slowdown I'm another one of those "bought all DLC immediately before, now waiting and seeing" folks. Dearly love Stellaris, but I need to be able to A.) play the game and B.) use the mods.

Chikimiki
May 14, 2009
Seems like PDX is taking the same approach to its games that Firaxis takes to the Civ series, now that they have become a bit more known outside of grognard circles: promise bugfixes and finetuning, but actually pump out content as much as possible until the game is dead, which is when you'll release the successor and repeat.

Entorwellian
Jun 30, 2006

Northern Flicker
Anna's Hummingbird

Sorry, but the people have spoken.



nessin posted:

Real talk, did you actually do this? More documentation is generally good although incurs it's own costs but going through the effort to even bother looking up something so minor to the actual game and expecting it to be well documented is... not a developer problem. Either the AI is doing it's job well enough that you're questioning the efficacy of it's choice to build another energy district over a nexus, which any reasonable person probably would never notice or just chalk up to the cost of using AI management, it's flat out not producing any energy despite being on an energy production AI setting in which case you've got a bug to report and not a documentation issue, or you've solved the problem because you've got a planet set to energy production with a sector set to mineral production with the planet producing energy, no wiki needed.


Sword of the Stars solved planetary management by basically not having it. Which is a decision a number of space 4x's have gone with but I don't think really counts as a solution to people who might want some level of management. Also a bad example here considering Kerebos went bust after deciding to drop support for SOTS1 and being unable to make enough money off of SOTS2. You don't have to love Paradoxes model but it's delivered on the original promise and if it gets to the point where the DLC plan creates too many problems then we can only hope Paradox see's and addresses that before they too crash and burn. However there is very little actual evidence to support the doom and gloom in the thread and the best support you've got for the idea that Paradox is intentionally ignoring problems with Stellaris is "capitalism is bad" types and people who are fishing for every conspiracy hint they can find in a semi-public statement. I'm sure Paradox has made their internal calculation on the future of Stellaris and while I hope it's invest the development time to address, as best possible, underlying problems instead of significant amounts of new content if that isn't the case then it's not like Stellaris is a defunct game at the moment and if you really hate the current version you can go back and play the version you liked.

I'm legitimately kind of curious what game you think did it better that doesn't have it's own problems and failure state? Because if SOTS is really your answer then the proper response is you can roll back to 1.9, which is about roughly equivalent to SOTS in terms of development effort and final state.

To the first question: yes I did look it up and there was no answer, and there were other users wondering the same thing when I went to ask. I’m one of those people that used governors in 4x games to automate things outside of my core world’s because I don’t find scrolling through the outliner every 30 seconds to be fun, interesting or necessary. Again distant worlds allowed that level of detail to have control over every little aspect or you could pass it off to the AI and have it either suggest what to do via a report tab or just pass it off entirely to the whims of the computer. In stellaris it feels like I am the ceo of Walmart and I am having to go into each store to rearrange all the shelves, clean the floors and bathrooms, hire and fire staff and change the prices around when that is what managers are for. My own experience is that the Ai will just add security while consumer goods and energy are not being accounted for and spiral out of control. It’s fine at the start of the game but not when you have a hundred planets and habitats and are continually having to intervene. I feel that I am in the tiny minority it of gamers that use the ai to delegate things, and I don’t believe bug reports will address the state of it in the game. You can try it yourself in a new game and see how far you can get with the ai running things outside your initial planet. However, I dont play multiplayer games or on super fast speeds either so I never voiced complaints about its performance and questionable decisions because there are bigger problems that need to be addressed first, like the performance stuff others are experiencing.

I’m not expecting documentation like dominions 5 levels of detail, but there is enough ambiguity and questions being asked out there on here and other forums that are not reflected adequately in the the wiki. With the constant updates and changes, I feel that documentation updates are warranted for the game.

For the second question. Sword of the stars, crusader kings and sins of a solar empire are examples that did planetary/city management stuff just fine. And for crusader kings it was part of the game to delegate at rulers to rule other parts of your kingdom because of logistical and political reasons. The others abstracted the development of your planets enough so that I wasn’t having to check on them after they’ve developed past a certain point. Im having to go through all my planets and stuff every couple of minutes to check if overpopulation is happening, what subspecies I have to reallocate to what planet, changing around sectors and buildings long after the planet has developed, if crime is increasing while I’m getting pop ups for events and organizing fleets around. They aren’t flawless but for a real time strategy game the amount of work you have to do on planets becomes overwhelming and a chore at best. Sword of the stars had sliders and a simple planet morale system that controlled for how efficient your planet would develop, and would be fine on its own if you didn’t touch the sliders but you would just be slower with building infrastructure and getting tax revenue.

Edit: sorry for typos that was all typed on my phone :(

Entorwellian fucked around with this message at 16:49 on Nov 15, 2019

AAAAA! Real Muenster
Jul 12, 2008

My QB is also named Bort

Entorwellian posted:

I’m not expecting documentation like dominions 5 levels of detail, but there is enough ambiguity and questions being asked out there on here and other round that are not reflected adequately in the the wiki. With the constant updates and changes that I feel that documentation updates are warranted for the game.
I have to agree with this 100%. I have friends that just cant get into the game because they think its ridiculous that you have to go to the wiki for 90% of the poo poo going on in the game. The info presented just is not enough for a game in 2019. I am fine with my games being complicated but you have to explain the complex parts at least halfway decently and Stellaris does not do that at all. I should not have to read a dev diary to learn how certain things work - if a game mechanic changes, there needs to be in-game explanation of it.

nessin
Feb 7, 2010

Entorwellian posted:

To the first question: yes I did look it up and there was no answer, and there were other users wondering the same thing when I went to ask. I’m one of those people that used governors in 4x games to automate things outside of my core world’s because I don’t find scrolling through the outliner every 30 seconds to be fun, interesting or necessary. Again distant stars allowed that level of detail to have control over every little aspect or you could pass it off to the AI and have it either suggest what to do via a report tab or just pass it off entirely to the whims of the computer. In stellaris it feels like I am the ceo of Walmart and I am having to go into each store to rearrange all the shelves, clean the floors and bathrooms, hire and fire staff and change the prices around when that is what managers are for. My own experience is that the Ai will just add security while consumer goods and energy are not being accounted for and spiral out of control. It’s fine at the start of the game but not when you have a hundred planets and habitats and are continually having to intervene. I feel that I am in the tiny minority it of gamers that use the ai to delegate things, and I don’t believe bug reports will address the state of it in the game. You can try it yourself in a new game and see how far you can get with the ai running things outside your initial planet. However, I dont play multiplayer games or on super fast speeds either so I never voiced complaints about its performance and questionable decisions because there are bigger problems that need to be addressed first, like the performance stuff others are experiencing.

If your overall point is you'd prefer a system with less management then I agree with you (I'd be happy with something like Sins). However that doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong to have a deeper system, or want one as a player, and that was what I took your other post to mean as you're really comparing apples to oranges if you're looking a Stellaris planetary management as compared to SOTS or Sins, or CK2 for that matter. I didn't talk to Distant Stars because I'm not sure what game you're talking about, Distant Stars is either a old iOS game or Stellaris itself.

quote:

I’m not expecting documentation like dominions 5 levels of detail, but there is enough ambiguity and questions being asked out there on here and other forums that are not reflected adequately in the the wiki. With the constant updates and changes, I feel that documentation updates are warranted for the game.

Stellaris isn't that complex of a game. Sure the actual way it works to achieve a certain result may not be clear but it's the final result that matters. Maybe this is something we could never agree on but if it's easy enough to identify the result in game I fail to see why the extra documentation is necessary for a relatively straightforward game. If you want to talk documentation and say the Command series, with it's insane amount of options that can impact gameplay in ways you don't even realize, or maybe even something like X-Plane/MS Flight, where you can take in-game knowledge and apply it outside so you need to know the differences, then detailed documentation is a must. If you were trying to make a mod in Stellaris and it wasn't clear in the existing file structure how something worked or there appeared to be a conflict with what you could do and what was hard coded, that would be something that would make sense to be documented.

If you can work out what you need to know to figure out what the game is doing in about as much time as just loading the game to see how it works then it just seems unreasonable, kind of against the whole purpose of a game really, to expect a game developer to put that much focus on detailed documentation over that particular mechanic. Based on your first paragraph are you sure the issue isn't that you feel the need to min-max more and thus have to intervene, not that the system can be worked with if you want to ignore it?

Edit:
Actually I just thought of a perfect example here. I've been playing AI War 2 recently and after beating my first game I was browsing through their forums for new setup ideas after the beginner scenario. One thing I saw was a number of people confused how armor works in-game. Every unit has an armor value but it actually does nothing in game, 160mm of armor is no different than 40mm, except as it relates to other abilities. So you'll have a different unit that says it does 50% more damage to units with more than 90mm of armor. So that's what armor does, when a unit with 160mm of armor is taking fire from the unit with does more damage to it, then more damage is done. This is laid out in tooltips and you can see it happen in game, but people expected armor to also be some sort of damage resistance or something else so they wanted detailed documentation on how the armor system worked internally. Granted how the Governor AI decides to build something is more in-depth than that basic example but at a certain point you should be expected to just take the game at face value and not need detailed documentation.

nessin fucked around with this message at 16:40 on Nov 15, 2019

Entorwellian
Jun 30, 2006

Northern Flicker
Anna's Hummingbird

Sorry, but the people have spoken.



Whoops sorry. I meant Distant Worlds :(

And its not the complexity but the quantity that becomes unmanageable. And I do mean what I say about the AI making poor decisions and leading my economy spiraling out of control. Again, try it out yourself and let the AI decide everything if you don't believe me.

The basics are straightfoward for small-scale stuff within your own sector, but when you have to start dealing with large amounts of things it becomes problematic and yes there should be some documentation for new players or people who don't play the game update-to-update. I personally hate it when the documentation doesn't reflect the product I'm using and makes me incorrectly assume that there is a bug or broken feature of the game when in fact it was removed a few patches ago prior to picking the game up, or its something that is hidden from view and not straight forward at all.

Entorwellian fucked around with this message at 16:48 on Nov 15, 2019

AAAAA! Real Muenster
Jul 12, 2008

My QB is also named Bort

nessin posted:

Stellaris isn't that complex of a game.
In certain areas it is some combination of complex and obtuse, though. For example - the trade and piracy system. None of the terms used in it are defined anywhere in the game and there is no explanation of what some of them do; there is even an example of two different terms being used to describe the same thing. It is obviously under-developed and under-loved because its janky as gently caress and not fun to interact with (its just an attention tax). More explanation of what is going on would at least make it less bad and way less of a pain for newbies to figure it out.

Entorwellian
Jun 30, 2006

Northern Flicker
Anna's Hummingbird

Sorry, but the people have spoken.



And gently caress Arcen Games are the worst offenders for changing so much stuff that the original product and the final product are almost two different things altogether. A Valley Without Wind went from an ActRaiser clone to some god awful irredeemable garbage that they had to make the sequel free to as a way of saying "sorry."

Lum_
Jun 5, 2006

Guilliman posted:

There are some glaring launcher issues that have to be fixed BEFORE the big federation update. The sooner they're fixed the less permanent damage to the modding scene tbh. I fear if the launcher mod tools arent improved before then a lot of people will give up on modding.

The broken launcher is a Really Big Deal; it really blocks new mod development and forces current mod authors to jump through hoops (keeping an earlier version installed with a still-working launcher) just to keep their mod updated. I've got a Babylon 5 mod that's pretty detailed (I have most of the old Mongoose RPG sourcebooks which go into ludicrous detail on the milieu) and I'm thinking of just uploading it to ModDB and forgetting about it.

Splicer
Oct 16, 2006

from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

Gyrotica posted:

I feel like the main thing they should be doing is fixing the performance/mod tool issues. I can deal with a lot of jank in this game, but if I literally can't play a game all the way through...

With the game slowdown I'm another one of those "bought all DLC immediately before, now waiting and seeing" folks. Dearly love Stellaris, but I need to be able to A.) play the game and B.) use the mods.
There's a lot of main things

AAAAA! Real Muenster
Jul 12, 2008

My QB is also named Bort

lmao you get Materialist ethics attraction if you have any of the "Natural <ScienceType>" traits on your species. My Spiritualist/Authoritarian/Xenophobe species (which I have done a bunch over the past several months) popped a Technologist faction for the first time ever, which happened to be the first time I ever had Natural Engineers. The Technologist faction, of course, has exactly half of my pops in it :allears:

Armadillo Tank
Mar 26, 2010

PittTheElder posted:

You can do this now with Purifiers and Exterminators.

Bofast posted:

Make a beeline for the colossus?

Neither of these make practical sense for how easy and ubiquitous it should be to sends a planets habitability to 0 (or really low).


nessin posted:

Kerberos bad. SOTS = Stellaris 1.9

Kerberos shooting themselves in the feet and bragging about bad decisions and deleting posts on their internal forums doesn't translate into SOTS 1 being bad. They did a Chris Roberts/Molydeuce/Wil Wright overshot and didn't cut features. The feature bloat killed SOTS 2 and turned into some bizarre development hell that has videos dedicated to unraveling the bullshit. Their rejection and lack of support for SOTS 1 seemed to be more greed and spite (based on dev lead Mecron's behaviour).

The comparison of SOTS 1 to Stellaris 1.9 is so removed from any experience I ever had with either games I'm going to assume spite posting or trolling and move on. I like stellaris because I want a deeper Civ-In-Space game and most 4x games are going away from depth or are painfully hero or weird mechanic focused like Endless.

The points about SOTS relevant to Stellaris is simply: Culture and best practice (per species) should lead to the same conclusion (modified by regional or local goals) on every planet and sector. Picking buildings, job allocations, and similar minutiae don't change anything and in the end don't add depth. They just create click bloat that you do or are punished for. There is no depth to repeating the same process for hundreds of planets. There is no point in micro for jobs on 10-100 worlds. Yes there should be management but it should be for meaningful distinctions between planets or investing to change output etc.

One relevant comparison to arguing against reducing click bloat is even though it is pointless there are people who have tended towards Paradox games that think this is good and meaningful. However reducing it may not attract new people to the game making is ultimately bad for business. I think ultimately Stellaris is a test bed for Non-Europa grand strat games and I assume a stellaris 2 is closer than may be assumed from evidence (or a similar non or pseudo historical game).

Entorwellian posted:

Planet Management

Same mostly. I think maybe just hard coded calculation for given X pops with max stats and Y districts and buildings in sector yield resource Z at so much etc. Yes this means it may be better for every planet to be in a sector. Why not? That is something clearly they are trying to push for in game design. Just codify it and make it straight forward.

Race distinctions are large scale seem to disappear or become less important. I may be wrong about that but it seems like unless you are min maxing the game will balance available planets, resources, and research so that there ends up being slight or less differences in empire economy. I'm not referring to races with specials like devouring swarm.

nessin posted:

Stellaris isn't that complex of a game. Sure the actual way it works to achieve a certain result may not be clear but it's the final result that matters. Maybe this is something we could never agree on but if it's easy enough to identify the result in game I fail to see why the extra documentation is necessary for a relatively straightforward game. If you want to talk documentation and say the Command series, with it's insane amount of options that can impact gameplay in ways you don't even realize, or maybe even something like X-Plane/MS Flight, where you can take in-game knowledge and apply it outside so you need to know the differences, then detailed documentation is a must. If you were trying to make a mod in Stellaris and it wasn't clear in the existing file structure how something worked or there appeared to be a conflict with what you could do and what was hard coded, that would be something that would make sense to be documented.

If you can work out what you need to know to figure out what the game is doing in about as much time as just loading the game to see how it works then it just seems unreasonable, kind of against the whole purpose of a game really, to expect a game developer to put that much focus on detailed documentation over that particular mechanic. Based on your first paragraph are you sure the issue isn't that you feel the need to min-max more and thus have to intervene, not that the system can be worked with if you want to ignore it?

Stellaris is a complex game relative to other strategy games on market. The command series is a niche game that few would recognize or say trite things about its price, graphics, or design looking 90s. Not wanting documentation is just being lovely towards people who don't or can't post on forums or go searching through wikis to find explanations. Cutting back on stuff like this is just lazy and spiteful to players. I am used to this from growing up with games that did this but there is no loving reason to excuse people being lazy, vague, or otherwise lovely about this. It just turns people off the game and I want more people playing Stellaris.

You need to min-max your planets to avoid strange shifts in production and going negative in some resources if your pushing your empire. There is no reason why it has to be like that. It creates an artificial barrier to people playing them game and insists that people invest more time in the game doing something boring and monotonous with no depth over and over again or be punished.

PittTheElder
Feb 13, 2012

:geno: Yes, it's like a lava lamp.

Armadillo Tank posted:

Neither of these make practical sense for how easy and ubiquitous it should be to sends a planets habitability to 0 (or really low).

In terms of realism absolutely, but it would completely destroy gameplay if you could glass a planet just because you occupied a system for a month or two.

Bar Ran Dun
Jan 22, 2006




How are people playing terravores?

Captain Oblivious
Oct 12, 2007

I'm not like other posters

Bar Ran Dun posted:

How are people playing terravores?

It's been a terra-ble experience so far.

Bar Ran Dun
Jan 22, 2006




Yeah im finding it pretty mediocre, just wondering if id missed something.

nessin
Feb 7, 2010

Armadillo Tank posted:

Kerberos shooting themselves in the feet and bragging about bad decisions and deleting posts on their internal forums doesn't translate into SOTS 1 being bad. They did a Chris Roberts/Molydeuce/Wil Wright overshot and didn't cut features. The feature bloat killed SOTS 2 and turned into some bizarre development hell that has videos dedicated to unraveling the bullshit. Their rejection and lack of support for SOTS 1 seemed to be more greed and spite (based on dev lead Mecron's behaviour).

The comparison of SOTS 1 to Stellaris 1.9 is so removed from any experience I ever had with either games I'm going to assume spite posting or trolling and move on. I like stellaris because I want a deeper Civ-In-Space game and most 4x games are going away from depth or are painfully hero or weird mechanic focused like Endless.

You should re-read what I actually wrote, I didn't say SOTS1 was bad, I didn't compare Stellaris and SOTS1 as a game, and why SOTS1 was dropped doesn't change the fact that SOTS1 was dropped which is all I was saying.

quote:

Stellaris is a complex game relative to other strategy games on market. The command series is a niche game that few would recognize or say trite things about its price, graphics, or design looking 90s. Not wanting documentation is just being lovely towards people who don't or can't post on forums or go searching through wikis to find explanations. Cutting back on stuff like this is just lazy and spiteful to players. I am used to this from growing up with games that did this but there is no loving reason to excuse people being lazy, vague, or otherwise lovely about this. It just turns people off the game and I want more people playing Stellaris.

You need to min-max your planets to avoid strange shifts in production and going negative in some resources if your pushing your empire. There is no reason why it has to be like that. It creates an artificial barrier to people playing them game and insists that people invest more time in the game doing something boring and monotonous with no depth over and over again or be punished.

About the most complex Stellaris gets it figure out hit chances between two ships, with is largely pointless because the broad concept is all you need to figure out if something is going to work or not. I was referencing Command as a game needing documentation because it has so many options to impact the game, not for it's complexity nor did I compare it to Stellaris in any way.

nessin fucked around with this message at 05:33 on Nov 16, 2019

TheDeadlyShoe
Feb 14, 2014

pretense is my co-pilot

Demiurge4 posted:

You know thinking back now and how they changed the dev lead when Stellaris released, it kinda seems like maybe Stellaris was just supposed to be a Sengoku type of tech demo, but then it became a best seller and they put a team back on it. It does feel like they never had long term plans for it and it's coming apart at the seams now.

PDX does have a tendency to shove half baked games out the door and fix it later - see Imperator, which by recent accounts has managed to fix most of its issues but may never recover from its launch. But Stellaris problems are more a matter of original sin. Its design was deeply flawed from the start in almost every category. The only thing that held Stellaris together was that the storytelling/exploration worked pretty well.

For example, the combat in Stellaris is just intrinsically bad. It is a weird hybrid of simulated and abstract that manages to have disadvantages of both. Missile and strike craft balance struggled for literal years and years because they were beholden to the simulation; meanwhile combat mechanics are so abstracted that the traditional strengths of simulation combat are all but absent. That is to say, mechanics like ship facings, weapon arcs, situationally strong weapons, formations, and so on. The lack of these mechanics means there isn't much depth to your choices in the ship designer. Or, relatedly, much depth in your combat-related research strategy. It's almost pointless to mod in additional weapons to Stellaris because there's literally nothing for them to do.

For all that angst, the work done patching up Stellaris has been pretty heroic imo. I dunno, the situation frustrates me.

AAAAA! Real Muenster
Jul 12, 2008

My QB is also named Bort

TheDeadlyShoe posted:

I dunno, the situation frustrates me.
Another good thread title idea.

Guilliman
Apr 5, 2017

Animal went forth into the future and made worlds in his own image. And it was wild.

AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:

Another good thread title idea.

Stellaris 2.6: 20.000 complaints on reddit

Stellaris 2.6: 20.000 leagues of frustration

Splicer
Oct 16, 2006

from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

Guilliman posted:

Stellaris 2.6: 20.000 complaints on reddit

Stellaris 2.6: 20.000 leagues of frustration
Stellaris 2.6: 20,000 bugs written in c

children overboard
Apr 3, 2009

Armadillo Tank posted:

Not wanting documentation is just being lovely towards people who don't or can't post on forums or go searching through wikis to find explanations. Cutting back on stuff like this is just lazy and spiteful to players. I am used to this from growing up with games that did this but there is no loving reason to excuse people being lazy, vague, or otherwise lovely about this. It just turns people off the game and I want more people playing Stellaris.

You need to min-max your planets to avoid strange shifts in production and going negative in some resources if your pushing your empire. There is no reason why it has to be like that. It creates an artificial barrier to people playing them game and insists that people invest more time in the game doing something boring and monotonous with no depth over and over again or be punished.

Yes it's thissss. I want to like this game but jumping back in after a few patches it's just... tedious. I learned the old version (pre 2.0) and it was okay at the start but then it got really bloaty and micro-managey and then the slowdown hit so I waited for a bit.

And so I tried the latest patch but in the first hour or so of playing I'm having to alt-tab out a bunch to find out what piracy is, what crime is, what overpopulation is, how job types work, why people are unemployed, why my starbases aren't eating into my starbase capacity count, and a bunch of other things. And every search is extra annoying because I have to double check that the answer is still current.

Like, just as an example: Housing. I assume I'm not understanding something here, because at first glance it looks like on new colonies you need to wait until five population to build your first building, but then you have so many people that first building better be housing. I'm probably missing something and the system isn't actually mean to be that dumb, but after googling the problem, seeing other people asking the same question, and seeing the answers involving things that don't involve my species' traits, or that sound extremely annoying and tedious... my eyes glaze over and I can't be bothered.

I'm at three planets and the amount of stuff I have to read and the amount of micromanagement involved isn't commensurate with how fun the game is. And it is moderately fun, but I don't have time for all that, especially knowing I haven't even gotten to the mid-game slog yet, or the late-game framerate chug.

GunnerJ
Aug 1, 2005

Do you think this is funny?

children overboard posted:

Like, just as an example: Housing. I assume I'm not understanding something here, because at first glance it looks like on new colonies you need to wait until five population to build your first building, but then you have so many people that first building better be housing.

Every basic district type adds some housing.

Edit: Not saying this to shoot down your point, just as info.

Guilliman
Apr 5, 2017

Animal went forth into the future and made worlds in his own image. And it was wild.

GunnerJ posted:

Every basic district type adds some housing.

Edit: Not saying this to shoot down your point, just as info.

Districts can be build to expand housing and base jobs :) It's something I've see many people not figuring out until they've spend some hours into the game.

Shadowlyger
Nov 5, 2009

ElvUI super fan at your service!

Ask me any and all questions about UI customization via PM

Splicer posted:

Stellaris 2.6: 20,000 bugs written in c

I like this one.

AAAAA! Real Muenster
Jul 12, 2008

My QB is also named Bort

nessin posted:

About the most complex Stellaris gets it figure out hit chances between two ships, with is largely pointless because the broad concept is all you need to figure out if something is going to work or not. I was referencing Command as a game needing documentation because it has so many options to impact the game, not for it's complexity nor did I compare it to Stellaris in any way.
Please tell me where in the game I can look up what the low habitability penalty is. Because I sure dont see what it is when looking at one of my slaves that is on a 20% habitability planet.

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children overboard
Apr 3, 2009

GunnerJ posted:

Every basic district type adds some housing.

Edit: Not saying this to shoot down your point, just as info.

Guilliman posted:

Districts can be build to expand housing and base jobs :) It's something I've see many people not figuring out until they've spend some hours into the game.

Ah thank you friends. I couldn't tell from the interface that I could even build districts. This is one of the many things that, sure, does have an answer somewhere, but again it's just feels a bit too tedious that I'm not inspired to do all the homework and find all the answers to learn this really complex game again just so I can progress to the even slower and bloatier parts.

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