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Alright let's sperg out for a bit then, we'll use this planet as the example. If you look on the right side you'll note that it appears they've used farm-city-farm going down. The farm tiles are mountains which means they produce less food, but the city tile is a flat plains tile which means it has bigger base food production and gains bonuses from both of the other farms which comes together into a fuckload of food. Ideally, the player would then terraform the swamp at the top to unlock the tile and build another city there, and then a farm on the left. However I posit that the farm shouldn't boost more than one tile at a time and if you want that kind of bonus again you should put the city in the top center tile and farms on either side again. The farms on the right side would not give each other any bonuses at all. This makes adjacency bonuses significant, but still local and you won't be able to chain a bonus across the entire planet, and you're instead encouraged to put your bonuses where they make the most sense and gain a variety of them which translates into a productive and diversified planet. On the left side we can place a lab underneath the creatures in the tile above and gain some kind of bonus there. The dev diary however notes its best to place reactors next to each other though so I'm going to assume it works the exact opposite and you are encouraged to chain bonuses across the whole planet instead, which leads to specialization, especially if the game has percentage bonuses to one type of production.
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Nov 16, 2015 21:04
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Disco Infiva posted:You guys shouldn't be sad for not getting in, you'll still beta test the game when it comes out. Hey now Pdox have actually been pretty decent about finishing their games before release since CK2. Hearts of Iron interests me much less than Stellaris though, I'm still sperging out about tiles over here 
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Nov 16, 2015 22:51
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Jsor posted:This is really disappointing, tile-grid planets are one of the things I hate the most about space 4X games, right alongside overcomplicated ship builders. I figure if you're going to do planet buildings either go full-on minimal effort and give it the EU4 system, or go whole hog and make each planet its own mini strategic map. These grid compromises always end up being busywork optimization problems. You can't ignore it because there's a "right answer" and it needs to be done, but the work always just ends up mind numbing. I personally thought Star Ruler was over simplified and pretty boring, it was basically the tile system with planets anyway since you were chaining modifiers. Tiles generally suck (see Galciv) and Stellaris's system doesn't look much better but we are aware that the game is supposed to open up in phases and it could be the tile system is simply a part of the early game to give the player something to do and is discarded for another system later.
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Nov 17, 2015 08:52
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I think using planetary governors as default and pushing planet interaction more towards Victoria 2 levels of economic management would be a good idea. The player will unlock slots (just like a national focus) that will let them micromanage planets if they so desire or use them as a passive booster for the governor. This let's the player focus on a few key planets in new or old systems and make them into the jewels of their empire. Heck you can just use the leaders for this instead of a slot. If you want to micro a planet you gotta pay for and install a leader there.
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Nov 17, 2015 10:01
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Wiz posted:Have you guys considered that switching from 'this will be the best ever' to 'this will be the worst ever' because of one DD about tile grid planets is just a little bit on the histrionic side? Eh, like two people said that. The best thing you can do to tiles is to make them interesting, which is a hard sell, but you could probably pull it off. Could you share a snippet the internal argument for why you chose tiles instead of what I'm sure were a bunch of other suggestions?
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Nov 17, 2015 10:43
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Wiz posted:Not my title, so I'm not going to go into design reasoning, only say that I think it works fine, especially with the sector-level stuff. Yeah but we still don't have any info on the later game modes. Most 4x games put the primary focus on planets throughout thr entire game and from what I can see (and paradox 's history) Stellaris is focused on the big picture with planets being a side show once you graduate to empire. Tomn posted:It was pretty funny how the thread went from "Lol look at those Para-nerds whining about a lack of fuel consumption and being all REALISM for MAI YAMATO" to "monoculture planets that specialize in producing a single resource in my space strategy game is UNREALISTIC!" It's not about realism. It's about being boring as poo poo. See every tile based space 4x ever.
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Nov 17, 2015 10:59
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Koramei posted:I'm not sure I like it either, but unless it's a feature that the game is built around, then I'm not too concerned. Paradox is treading lots of new ground here, so I figure they're bound to make a bunch of missteps. If it's something they can get right with an expansion or two down the line then it's not gonna ruin the game for me. If ships have roles and aren't just linear upgrades I'll be happy. Fast flanking destroyers and capital ships to hold the line with smaller support vessels, some using spine mounted weapons to punch up.
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Nov 17, 2015 16:21
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Gwyrgyn Blood posted:I think there's a pretty clear distinction between 'I don't like this mechanic because it doesn't sound fun and I haven't enjoyed it in other games' and 'I don't like this mechanic because IT'S NOT REALISTIC ENOUGH'. Though I suppose from a grodnard's perspective, anything less than perfectly realistic is 'less fun' somehow. Well let me outline my unreasonable dislike of tile systems and endlessly stacking adjacency bonuses. When you play a 4x game your early game is usually devoted to finding colonizeable planets that are favorable to your species, you then develop these to make them productive and eventually they'll net you a positive on your investment. With tile adjacency bonuses you are encouraged to stack a planet wildly in one direction which can often mean that 90% of it's production is one particular resource like science, culture, food etc. What I don't like about this system is that the moment I colonize a planet that has a 20% research modifier and a +2 adjacency research bonus on a pair of tiles I'm obligated to go 100% in that direction. I kinda needed to boost my production a little because my fleets are lagging but if I don't develop this one planet in this direction I lose out in the long term. This means that planets are pre-determined when you find them rather than you developing it in a direction your empire needs at the time. This is further exasperated in games like Galciv where civilization wonders exist that give a flat 50% bonus to one production type on that planet. I would much rather colonize a planet and develop it in a variety of ways, not because it's realistic, but because it's enjoyable. If a planet has a tile bonus that gives extra research then great, I can plop a lab down on it but I'd rather make use of the generic tiles around it for the role I had intended. I outlined on an earlier page how adjacency bonuses can be tolerable (to me) by giving adjacency tiles "slots" so that a mine can only boost one adjacent tile and a factory can at most eat two bonuses from a mine. This discourages chaining one bonus across the entire planet and lets the player diversify.
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Nov 17, 2015 18:33
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Elias_Maluco posted:I dont think Ive ever played a space 4X game ever since MOO 1, but all this talk here is making me want to try. I'm gonna get a lot of poo poo for this but if you want to dip your toes into space 4x having only played the first Master of Orion then Stardrive 2 isn't a bad bet. It's basically Master of Orion 2 in a newer interface and it's quite forgiving to a new player. That said the developer is an idiot who had a full meltdown on these very forums when he abandoned the first game before finishing it.
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Nov 17, 2015 19:02
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Gwyrgyn Blood posted:Looking at it from the other direction, I could see the base tile being the most important number for things like Research and Minerals, and adjacency bonuses give very diminishing returns for tiles that don't provide any themselves. So for example in the first screenshot, even though the planet is giving a +25% Society Research bonus, it's only going to apply to that 1 single tile, so you might build a research facility there, and you have the option to get adjacency next to it, but since nothing adjacent has Society Research you're getting significantly less bonuses, not very optimal. So it looks less about 'figure out how to stack bonuses into infinity' and more about 'figure out the optimal layout so that you can maximize the usefulness of everything the planet has'. And you can tweak your layout based on what things you need the most of, so maybe you would cram in an adjacency bonus building for research if you really needed it, but if you didn't you can instead build a power plant there if you want more energy instead. Some planets you find might be very fixed in what they are good for (nothing but Mineral tiles on this type of planet, for example), but planets like the one in the screenshot look pretty flexible. Yeah I get you. I don't mind specialization but absolute percentage bonuses to an entire planets tiles builds into overspecialization because if every tile gets 20% (with a lab) and every lab gives adjacent ones even more tech, there's very little reason to build anything else. It also skews balance because one civ might find a ridiculous science planet and while the AI might develop it in a balanced way the player can overspecialize it and leap light years ahead in tech in just 20 turns. I do want production planets that have super productive factories but I want to decide whether building another factory in this tile is better than another city or lab because it'll give a significant boost to the planet. Some things that Galciv has done very well were asteroid belts that acted basically like fluid resource tiles that you could assign to any planet in your empire, albeit with reductions based on distance. Another was shipyards that could pull production from multiple planets, though again, with distance modifiers in place. I think they overdid stations though and they weren't a fun mechanic in Galciv 2 or 3.
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Nov 17, 2015 19:47
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Gort posted:We might be arguing over nothing, but Stellaris will have turns just like Europa and Crusader Kings have turns. Just 'cause there are lots of turns doesn't make it a real-time game. They are tick based strategy games. Paradox literally makes pretty browser games!
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Nov 17, 2015 20:36
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Baronjutter posted:A friend asked me what CK2 was and I told them it was a Princess Breeding Game, or medieval eugenics. Princess Maker 2 was the pinnacle of medieval politics sims. Get on it, Paradox.
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Nov 17, 2015 21:21
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Of course that is a thing.
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Nov 17, 2015 21:25
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Gwyrgyn Blood posted:I think you're assuming that stuff like Labs give you a flat increase to research, which might not be the case. Because yeah if labs are just +5 Research then it's how you say. But if they're just +50% to Tile, then it doesn't really benefit you to build a lab on a tile that doesn't have any Research already except for an adjacency bonus. So there's no point in filling up a planet with Labs just because the planet gets a +% bonus to Research, because most of those tiles couldn't generate research anyway. Yeah it's really hard to make hard judgements off a screenshot but I assume the city (is it a city?) gives +1 mineral and maybe +2 food for the tile, bringing it to 2m, 3f. Then each adjacent farm gives it +2f each giving it 7 food. The other tiles probably don't have any base production so I assume the farm is +3f and the adjacency another +2f to give them the total of 5. If I'm right this would mean numerical production outputs for a building and not a percentage bonus. If you cleared the tile to the left of the city and build a lab that gives +3 science that would bring the tile to 7 with the adjacency bonus and another +1.85 (maybe rounded to 2) from the global bonus to society tech but I assume that is added to the total output of the planet and not per tile. Chaining labs all around would therefore give you 3 to 11 science per tile, of course not accounting for mandatory farms for food. The 25% bonus to tech objectively becomes more powerful the more science you produce on the planet, which encourages overspecialization.
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Nov 17, 2015 21:41
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Gwyrgyn Blood posted:Yeah, if it's a flat bonus then definitely. Farms would make sense to be a flat + bonus to production, which is fine because Food is not an exportable resource and required for the planet to develop at all. But maybe the other ones aren't? Minerals wouldn't make sense to be a flat bonus, if you build a mine where there isn't any resources there doesn't magically become some. You could run with the same concept for Research (studying weird things found at the tile) and Power (represents having natural resources specific to generating power on those tiles). I dunno, guess we'll see. It's killing me that we don't have more information because you make a great point in that regard. Food isn't exportable so it does make sense it's flat bonuses. Other resources are more powerful and could conceivably be static and only improvable on that tile alone but we don't know without more information. Maybe a Paradox dev can do a driveby and answer that question. It's still also unanswered if planet tiles actually stay in the game when you graduate. Paradox have been vague on that point but I suspect that planet tiles may just be a temporary mini-game to give the player something to do in the early game until he becomes an empire and you start juggling systems instead of planets.
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Nov 17, 2015 22:18
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Darkrenown posted:Pretty much. SD2 is basically a remake of MoO2. I saw they announced new dlc for the game which implements sectors and makes the galaxy 4 times larger. That's... Basically the graduation mechanic where you move up to managing an empire rather than planets. For all the poo poo I give the SD2 dev he did make a pretty decent game that is very faithful to Moo2.
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Nov 18, 2015 10:35
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Creative was broken as gently caress and a Bad mechanic  I'll admit that the other OP strategy of stacking pop growth with food and subterranean was a lot of tedious micro though and creative was more appealing if you just wanted to gently caress around.
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Nov 18, 2015 12:23
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Koramei posted:Maybe I'm just not thinking about it right, but planetary management being disabled as you get larger sounds like it'll bother the hell out of me. Even when automation in games is practical and makes a lot of sense it still always feels like "well the AI doesn't know how to manage the planets as well as me, why should I hand over control". Especially if a big part of the early game is having nicely optimized planets, and suddenly when you get bigger you find their efficiency hits the toilet. It'll just seem really jarring. I had an idea for using leaders instead of the national focus to let you micro a planet and leave the rest on automation. In a large Empire you would then personally manage probably 3-5 planets through your leaders and min max the hell out of them. The planets you manage might occasionally change depending on whether or not you find a planet with more potential than one you're managing right now or if you like to guide new colonies yourself. I think it's a decent middle ground. It's probably just best to wait for more info though.
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Nov 18, 2015 23:14
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Hearts of Iron 4 is a cool foray into simplifying previously very complex systems and making the gameplay more engaging. The big thing about Hearts of Iron has always been that the economy was arguably more important than the actual combat, which was often very short, brutal and the first few engagements determined the winner very quickly. It's also a major departure in that way from previous titles that embraced that complexity but Hearts of Iron is a WW2 game and the focus on combat is probably the right choice. Stellaris is more of that though. From what we've seen I think it's safe to say that Paradox is making a traditional 4x with very little new and groundbreaking innovations. They are taking the Blizzard path of development where they take previously existing features and game mechanics and refining them. Stellaris could be the WoW of 4x space games. This is personally a little disappointing to me because I was hoping they'd take a very cool leap into Europa Universalis/Victoria 2 in space. When they mentioned the word POPs a lot of us got very excited but it seems so far populations are just numbers of 1 and a population can be 5 humans, 2 alien X and 3 alien Y. Resources are a simple minerals -> production with science, energy and food as additional resources. This is as others have pointed out basically just Civilization with minerals thrown in as an extra strategic resource (global). What I personally would have liked was a Victoria based economy where planets produce a variety of goods that are used throughout your empire where distances become important for supply/demand. Developed industrial worlds could produce components and industrial goods that new colonies require for development but can't produce themselves and receive basic or refined resources in return. As a sector develops and all worlds become fairly self-sufficient the increasing populations would be what drives the economy as asteroid mines, barren worlds and gas giants provide the raw resources that keep the furnaces going to produce luxuries and drive the sectors culture. You would be able to organically develop the economies of your empire. It's not a bad thing that Paradox is doing this because I expect that Stellaris will be very good. It's just disappointing that they seem to be playing it safe in a genre that has been stagnated for over a decade.
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Nov 19, 2015 21:09
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Agean90 posted:eh ill reserve hype until i see actual gameplay footage. prefereably played by ddrjake I'd watch Maddjinn exploit the poo poo out of the game.
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Nov 24, 2015 20:01
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Goons need to stop acting like there's actually a Paradox forum community. Everyone left years ago, it's just Goons trolling Goons.
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Nov 24, 2015 20:20
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I hope Stellaris has events for first contact. I've just been busily strutting along colonizing a few systems and have a good bunch of colonies up that I'm developing. First contacts hit and my xenophobic militarists go nuts, suddenly I'm making GBS threads out fleets and ground troops at a tremendous rate while my civilians are organizing into political blocs 
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Nov 26, 2015 19:31
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Distant Worlds did that with the older galaxies. It would generate small or large empires and generally the AI of a massive 1/8th of the galaxy size empire wouldn't find you at all interesting and leave you alone if you were a minor power. If you could get in on trade early on you could even make friends. That is unless the empire was the spider dudes. gently caress those guys.
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Nov 26, 2015 20:07
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zedprime posted:I assume there is an anthro lizard race in Stellaris to keep dragons abiding by official Paradox dragon canon to avoid such amateurish mods in the future. I'm sure someone will release a Sword of the Stars mod with Suul'ka.
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Nov 29, 2015 21:07
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The tech deck is legit cool and good and I'm actually impressed by how elegantly it solves traditional space 4x tech woes. Good job Paradox.
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Nov 30, 2015 20:59
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You know what would be cool to go with the tech deck? Inventions. Victoria style. Tech's give a preset advantage, it can then randomly roll you additional benefits (or disasters) later on as inventions with certain pre-requisites in place. Paradox, I accept DLC royalties through paypal.
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Dec 1, 2015 19:32
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ThatBasqueGuy posted:A mechanic to send a seeder colony to a far off system and begin anew as a technologically advanced OPM would actually be really cool. Yeah I really want to see one - way event wormholes that are only usable once that you can send colony ships through in the early game. This way you seed the galaxy with your species and could get some really awesome divergent factions based off of your culture in the late game.
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Dec 4, 2015 17:56
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Pikestaff posted:Space Kaiserreich Custom world scenarios are going to be the poo poo!
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Dec 9, 2015 01:15
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Baronjutter posted:I'd love something where on starting a new game you had a sort of pre-warp minigame that shaped how your nation starts the game. Maybe a sort of CYOA style set of choices about how your nation got through it's history and got to where it is when it starts the game. For earth human it would ask actual historical questions, allowing for crazy kaiserreich style histories. Distant Worlds did the pre-warp thing and it wasn't really good at all. At most it's an hour of slowboating it to the relic sites in your system and waiting for the god awful research cost on the first jump drive. Basically once you get through the first two FTL tech's it just broke into the regular old tech tree. If Distant Worlds had better balanced warp drives where the difference between each one isn't miniscule and you can't traverse huge galaxy in 30 seconds in the mid game I think it would have made it a lot more enjoyable and actually given refueling stations a point.
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Dec 9, 2015 01:36
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Manket posted:That's fine as long as there's repercussions to taking that route, like massive negative relation penalties with other empires/races, to the point where basically everyone else in the federation gets a free casus belli on you or they start a union to take down what is clearly a dangerous, wantonly destructive force in the galaxy. Mushrooms aren't people
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Dec 13, 2015 23:44
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Funky Valentine posted:Look, if the filthy potato people of Adsehteb IV didn't want to be blown to smithereens, they should've nicely kissed the boot of the Empire. On that note, I wonder if you can confine a species to its home world as a non-spacefaring species like you're the loving Ur-Quan.
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Dec 14, 2015 00:29
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February already has XCOM2 coming out so I kinda hope it'll get pushed to at least March 
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Dec 15, 2015 20:10
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AdjectiveNoun posted:Sci fi nerds in this thread, what is it about Fungi that make them so common as an alien race in sci fi genres? (Maybe they're not so common and it's just confirmation bias, idk!) Is there some special property of fungus that makes it plausible for a sapient fungoid alien race to exist? What make fungi more suitable than plants for a non-Fauna alien race? Or is it just a case of 'wouldn't it be cool if'? On that note, why is every species humanoid? Even the fungaloids are just 2 arms and 2 legs stuck on a torso with a weird shroom like head.
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Dec 15, 2015 21:18
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popewiles posted:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis I thought that was just in X-Files.
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Dec 15, 2015 22:18
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Question for a Paradox dev. Is the tech deck influenced by your policies? Am I more likely to get certain techs if I have a large amount of stations running studies on primitives?
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Dec 15, 2015 22:53
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ArchangeI posted:God forbid a hard sci-fi writer challenges his readers with something slightly more complex than "this ecosystem is exactly like Earth's, except that the dinosaurs became sentient!" How close a given story is to scientific reality is literally the entire point of the hard/soft sci-fi scale. A sci-fi story in which a scientists calls a new alien species "fungus" with perfect seriousness while claiming to be hard sci-fi is just silly, I'm sorry. Just as silly as people trying to come up with scientific explanations for the Force in Star Wars. See now I perfectly understand why people gave me poo poo in the XCOM2 thread for wanting hosed up cyborgs.
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Dec 16, 2015 08:52
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Mans posted:i hope stellaris takes a lot of inspiration on SOTS's artwork because it was really really good. Bonus trivia: Zuul babies are literally hostile little weasel-rats that eat anything and everything. As they grow the males attain sentience and rudimentary psychic powers while the females grow into lumbering brutes that are used solely for breeding and as shock troops because they actually aren't any more intelligent than canines. They are also born in gigantic litters and have a very high mortality rate (mostly due to violence) and adult males form what is best described as a master/apprentice relationship comparable to the Sith where the young apprentices will gladly eat their master at first opportunity and usurp his harems. All Zuul technology has been "ripped" from the minds of their captives, even their social structure which is based off the Spanish Inquisition (no joke).
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Dec 16, 2015 18:39
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Stop building Skynet, Paradox 
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Dec 18, 2015 20:38
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RabidWeasel posted:If I can't choose to spearhead the progression of my species into a new age of enlightened self improvement then the feature kind of sucks; I'm fairly sure that they will let you do this. It's right here in this screenshot from the leaders dev blog. 
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Dec 21, 2015 21:27
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canepazzo posted:Stellaris is starting to sound more and more like the game we all thought Spore should have been in the space phase, and I'm not sure if it's a good or a bad thing. On the one hand, trust Paradox to pull it off, but on the other hand, the expectations are starting to become unreal. Eh. It's basically EU4 in space with some cool events and a randomized tech tree. Oh and bad planet management 
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Dec 22, 2015 00:32
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