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There is exactly 0% chance that the ship designer is ever getting cut. Asides from the fact that I personally enjoy it, it's both a 4x staple and something that a lot of people want (we have metrics on this).
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Jan 22, 2017 13:15
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Argas posted:How about the planet grid? The planet grid is... alright. It works but it's too micro-intensive, especially when you're upgrading a lot of buildings. I also don't like how it makes your planets feel like giant mines/farms rather than places people live. Reworking it is not out of the question but it'd be a pretty huge investment of time.
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Jan 22, 2017 13:24
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Enjoy posted:There should be pops that don't fit onto the grid so we can have people fleeing to the colonies to escape their overpopulated urban-hell hives Yeah, that's another issue with it, planets fill up quickly and are full forever.
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Jan 22, 2017 13:38
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Jeb Bush 2012 posted:IMO it's pretty telling that arguments for unit designers never involve a remotely compelling argument about why/how they add to the game and instead end up being "more choice = better" and "everyone does them". What they add is the fun of designing ships and the ability to do things like specialize your fleets for certain enemies to win against an otherwise overpowering foe. If you don't think it's fun to design ships, obviously it's not a selling argument but the playerbase is really split on this. For a lot of people it's like asking what being able to see space battles in progress adds to the game - you could argue technically nothing compared to having two ships poking at each other with lasers PDS mapgame style, but in reality taking them away would be a huge blow to the game. Wiggly Wayne DDS posted:I'm curious on the design rational behind 'the birth of space piracy'. you can't guarantee mil techs as early as it can appear, and forcing an empire to build a fleet early pigeonholes them with strict resource requirements and upkeep costs impact economic flexibility. It's to teach the player to build military ships. It's not like you need military techs to beat the pirates, 6 corvettes will do the job.
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Jan 22, 2017 13:45
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Kitchner posted:I'm sure the pirates were tweaked to make sure the debris contains the first tech of shields, point defence, and armour, three key early game technologies, which means by killing them and scanning the debris you don't have to do what I did for the entire early game once and there there shouting "Where are my loving shields?!" This as well.
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Jan 22, 2017 13:54
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Metrics from self-selected people who are already/still playing a game with a ship designer? If a significant chunk of your playerbase bought a game with a ship designer in it because they wanted to design ships, suddenly taking away the ability to design ships is a terrible, terrible idea, yes.
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Jan 22, 2017 15:36
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oddium posted:it would be a shame to lose the part of the game where you click buttons to make the numbers go up 2%, and instead have to play the part of the game where you manage a politically charged stellar empire I know this is going to come as a severe shock, so brace yourself, but not everyone wants the exact same thing out of their gameplay experience as you. Orv posted:You can't remove it, that's dumb to even suggest, but what kind if time and effort would it take to refactor it to actually be meaningful? It's great that people love a shallow, meaningless system, but I assume at some point that would mean a tech and combat rework as well and simply isn't feasible? I think the idea that it's meaningless is pretty severely exaggerated, a proper ship design has a huge impact on combat effectiveness. I agree it's too fiddly though, but overall it works pretty well so it's more of a system we'll continue to polish than something we'll radically rework.
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Jan 22, 2017 15:50
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kojei posted:I think what a lot of people don't like is the fact that there is a "proper ship design", because that automatically means there is a single correct way to build your ships and if you're doing it another way you're just deliberately gimping yourself. If there's a single correct way to build your ships, why bother having the option to not build your ships that way? Oh yeah, I fully understand why people might not like it and I completely see the arguments against its inclusion. I'm just saying that like it or not, it's here to stay. That's why we included the auto-design option.
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Jan 22, 2017 16:02
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Jeb Bush 2012 posted:I think "should [game] have [feature]" is something people are strongly inclined to answer "yes" to, regardless of how well the feature actually works in the context of the game. Listening too much your players is a mistake, yes. However, not listening at all to your players is an equally big mistake. It seems that you are advocating the latter extreme, and that's just not gonna happen. Sorry.
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Jan 22, 2017 16:21
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kojei posted:I think we can all agree that what the ship designer really needs is a bunch of loving sliders. Sliders improve every paradox game. The real problem is the lack of NATO counters imho.
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Jan 22, 2017 16:46
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Jazerus posted:The ship designer could really benefit from being slightly more fiddly, in that all of the customization feels a little useless without the ability to put particular ship classes into particular places in the formation. As it is I would never want to make a brawler battleship with, say, autocannons for example because they start at the back, whereas if I could put them at the head of the formation to attract the enemy's attention, do tons of damage, and provide cover for the corvettes to zip in from the middle and unleash their torpedoes... The issue with any sort of totally free system where you can design any ship to be any role is that it pretty much always ends up that the biggest ship is best at every role. That's why we have fixed roles now.
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Jan 22, 2017 16:48
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Wiggly Wayne DDS posted:i'm curious if we're not already at this state now given the multitude of options available to battleships Nah, combat behaviour and the lack of small slots means that battleships have some inherent limitations that can be exploited. Some people swear by only battleships and destroyers, but the only ships I've heard anyone say you can get by with only using is cruisers, and I'm skeptical that you couldn't wreck an all-cruiser fleet with enough long-range firepower. As far as I know, there isn't even an established meta that is simply always best since 1.3 came out, and that was several months ago now.
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Jan 22, 2017 16:52
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Orv posted:I only just started playing again so it's possible it changed, but once you get over certain fleet sizes and techs, doesn't a range advantage become less meaningful once a combat is locked in? Speaking of, is it a consequence of Clauswitz that combat can't be free roaming, or was that a design choice? Range advantage only matters for the first part of combat, but stack enough large weapons and bombers and you'll whittle down the cruisers enough before they even get in range that you'll win anyway. Of course, it's a different story if you let the cruisers FTL in right on top of you but then that's your own fault for using your fleet wrong.
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Jan 22, 2017 17:01
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Wiggly Wayne DDS posted:yeah i'm only thinking end-game techs and 400k fleet blobs where rock paper scissors falls apart due to raw numbers Against a player that's designed for versatility, sure. It's still really important when say, fighting an Awakened Empire. It can mean the difference between needing 300k or 500k to beat them.
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Jan 22, 2017 17:02
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Stellaris: Terrible analogies used apparently randomly
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Jan 22, 2017 17:20
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Demiurge4 posted:Honestly Wiz just needs to take a page from Aurora 4X when it comes to ship design. You can't half rear end this stuff. Screw ship design, what we really need to do is recode the game in visual basic.
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Jan 22, 2017 17:26
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Jeb Bush 2012 posted:Nah, I'm just saying that "a majority of players want it to stay in" isn't particularly indicative. I understand why you wouldn't want to remove a major feature after release! I still think the game would be better for it, though. Sure, that's fair, and if I were to start over from scratch I'd certainly sit down and think hard about the pros and cons of ship design and what possible alternatives or compromises could be worked out, but for Stellaris as it stands it's a done deal.
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Jan 22, 2017 17:57
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Beer4TheBeerGod posted:What about the ground game? The army system is basically guaranteed a rework. I really, really don't like the pointless micro. Poil posted:Why is xenomorph army strength dependent on the physical strength of the species living on the planet you train them at? Do they need to be able to use a leash and take them for walkies? Xenomorphs working like a regular army is kind of nonsense to begin with, honestly. They'd be better suited to some sort of infiltration/sabotage mechanic (or dropping a swarm of them to depopulate a planet).
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Jan 23, 2017 19:32
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Baronjutter posted:Yeah I'd love to see more poo poo like that. Make it a bio-weapon and it's use make you both hated and feared. Also a chance of the whole situation getting away from you. Okay, I will. ... on Thursday.
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Jan 23, 2017 19:40
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Libluini posted:What is it with people always wanting to rip out entire features from their games? Is that some weird kind of video game nihilism taking form here? A feature being present in a game does not always make that game better. If I added a QTE minigame that you'd have to play every time you built a building I'm pretty sure you'd be clamoring for that particular mechanic's removal. (That said, I wouldn't want to entirely remove armies from the game. I don't see the need to directly control them as units though.)
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Jan 23, 2017 20:03
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Rakthar posted:Yeah but the thing about going into a game that is really barebones and barely working and demanding that whole swaths of it be dumped seems odd. I don't go into the CK2 threads saying that the game would be better without all that annoying politics and infighting. There is basically no way to add complex ground combat to Stellaris because the scope of the game prevents it - when you're dealing with wars involving hundreds of planets, it's unreasonable to expect the player to have to care about/manage each one. The current mechanics understand this, but at the same time suffer from there being very little actual *point* to micromanaging anything about your armies, because all you actually have to do to win is land enough troops to overcome the defenders. Thus, what you should do is identify the actually worthwhile parts of the army system (the flavor of all the diferent army types and the feeling that you are invading planets with ground forces) and identify how to preserve those while getting rid of the tedious micromanagement of building armies, launching them into orbit, and manually landing them on planets. All that aside, the idea that just because a game is 'barebones' (and Stellaris is not barebones) you should keep features that add nothing but tedium and frustration is simply wrong-headed. Tedious, frustrating features without depth do not make a game deeper, they just make it more tedious and frustrating.
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Jan 23, 2017 20:13
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Conskill posted:It'd be neat if you could keep some of the flavor of it all with a broad-based "army doctorine" setting. Like, even though the micro is a bit much I really like the whole Jedi Knights fighting xenomorphs conceptual slugfest that can go on. I really want to keep the flavor of being able to say "My armies are filled with robotic warriors" even if I don't want to care about the robotic warriors on an army by army basis. This is the one truly good thing about the Stellaris army system. I'm not removing it.
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Jan 23, 2017 20:23
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Bohemian Nights posted:While we wait for that, can we at least get a keyboard shortcut for embarking armies from planets? Anything to save me a click in this process would be greatly appreciated Sure.
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Jan 23, 2017 20:25
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Poil posted:Could we just build transport ships at the space stations and use an army module for them? Xenomorphs as a 'gently caress my own population, nobody's getting off this planet alive' trap card is a neat idea.
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Jan 23, 2017 20:35
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Kitchner posted:Just on a side point to the "xenomorphs as armies doesn't make sense" bit it's worth noting Weyland Yutani were desperate to experiment on them to turn them into an army of perfect killing machines, so I've always viewed the tech as "Weyland Yutani, but successful". It would be cool though if xenomorph armies in sufficient numbers could basically trigger some sort of rebellion where they just eat all the handlers and then everything on the planet. More stuff that is a "risky technology" is always cool. I don't know that anyone said that, but either way no there's no such intention. Besides the current priority being on the midgame much more than the endgame, I really don't think adding another end game crisis is in the cards until we have the ones we already have in the game working well.
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Jan 23, 2017 21:38
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Baronjutter posted:I always imagined it less as removing the thing and more laying the more expensive engineering and infrastructure to mass develop cities and such there, to learn to adapt to them. So you're not removing the mountains, you're just investing in swiss-levels of mountain infrastructure to make use of them. Yeah, I'm honestly not sure exactly how removing an active volcano is supposed to work.
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Jan 23, 2017 22:28
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Bholder posted:To make this argument closer to the ship design one before, I guess I'll be the guy who says "I would not have played Stellaris if there was no ground combat", but Wiz already said it will stay even if reworked, so it really doesn't matter... I just introduced (paid) features for having specific species as battle thralls, so no worries on the front of goat-warriors going away. I also most certainly wouldn't just replace the grid with numbers and sliders, or get rid of pops. Preserving the flavor and feeling of both systems is very important to me, I just think planets don't feel enough like planets even now.
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Jan 23, 2017 22:34
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Arglebargle III posted:Volcano Removal -> Deep Crust Engineering Do I have your permission to steal this?
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Jan 24, 2017 09:14
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Drone_Fragger posted:Yeah, it'd be pretty silly if constructors could "build" population then just bus them to another planet. That's probably why you need the colony ships still. Also it's an easy way to let you select what pop you want to start the colony with.
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Jan 25, 2017 18:58
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CharlestheHammer posted:Not like it matters as Vicky perfectly models a free market just replace morons who get lucky sometimes with a terrible AI that gets lucky sometimes. Gonna start a Kickstarter to fund a clipper factory.
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Jan 25, 2017 23:44
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RabidWeasel posted:If the actual problem is that the director of command economics (i.e. the player) is over-informed then the obvious solution is to remove enough agency from the player that it provides a realistic barrier to just doing whatever you want. People typically do not play games to experience frustrating helplessness.
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Jan 26, 2017 00:10
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GunnerJ posted:A game with a difficulty setting that just makes the UI and all communication of information more and more obscure or confusing the higher it's set. Finally, a game that makes Magna Mundi look good by comparison.
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Jan 26, 2017 00:48
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PittTheElder posted:
I really can't talk about it, unfortunately. I'm sure you can make up your own horror stories about how fun it would've been to QA it though.
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Jan 26, 2017 00:55
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Demiurge4 posted:Space habitats under the current requirement (research level 5 spaceports) is just going to be a mineral inflation mechanic in the mid game that translates into broken levels of economic dominance in the lategame. We already rush up that particular tech tree to get battleships and there is literally no reason not to spam habitats everywhere you can because the research multiplier changed to settled systems rather than individual planets so you'll always be rewarded for filling out systems you've already colonized. I'm going to liken it to the trade system in Sword of the Stars because Wiz himself made a mod to reduce that tedium but now he's putting it into Stellaris. You're right, if you make multiple logical leaps and assumptions then things will turn out exactly as those logical leaps and assumptions predicted.
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Jan 26, 2017 15:32
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Demiurge4 posted:I am right because so far you haven't implied a strategic resource cost to limit the number of orbitals an empire can support. If they are spammable 12 pop planets then they are effectively no different from SotS broken trade system. We do dev diaries on features long before balancing/iteration on those features are done. We're going to be testing, evaluating, and if needed, putting limits in place. It's fine to be concerned about the balance of a feature, it's just tiring when people make 100% certain predictions about how something is going to turn out when that something isn't even done yet. (Also, you're basing your understanding on the game as it stands right now, without considering other limiting factors to population spam such as consumer goods, and how orbitals being bad at mineral production plays into that)
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Jan 26, 2017 15:38
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Bholder posted:I don't see spamming space habitats being something that's cost effective... The argument is essentially that for every habitat you build, you get more resources to build the next habitat, and so on. Eventually the snowball gets so big it's trivial to spam more habitats. However, this ignores the fact that the habitats will cost resources to maintain in the form of consumer goods. It also ignores the influence cost, since there is a hard cap to influence generation.
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Jan 26, 2017 15:47
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Fork of Unknown Origins posted:I only have one. My resource flow is so insane that I'm trading minerals for futures right now (I give you 5,000 minerals, you give me 35/month for 10 years) so I could afford to terraform something, I just don't have the energy capacity. You need both terraforming resources to make Gaia worlds in 1.4. There's more ways to raise storage capacity in 1.5.
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Jan 26, 2017 18:59
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Fork of Unknown Origins posted:Ah, got you. Guess it's time to "liberate" some strategic planets. Keep in mind that they can be traded for, as well.
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Jan 26, 2017 19:02
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Fork of Unknown Origins posted:Well yeah if you hate fun. Why else would I make Paradox games for a living.
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Jan 26, 2017 19:52
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PittTheElder posted:At least on the surface. Mechanics wise it felt nothing alike, plus much worse. Firaxis seems to be incapable of teaching their AI how to play Civ games. Mostly they don't care, because it doesn't really affect sales much and you get about the same amount of poo poo from customers regardless of how good or bad your AI is. It's more important for us because we want to keep people playing for years rather than releasing 1-2 expacks and being done with it.
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Jan 26, 2017 21:57
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