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District Overhaul does a lot of this, but the fact it's parallel to the regular building system just underscores the silliness of the base mechanism.
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Aug 4, 2020 18:08
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Schadenboner posted:Lack of synergy is the phrase I was looking for.
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Aug 4, 2020 19:51
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Splicer posted:I like the buildings as a concept tbh. There's definitely some buildings that should be districts, like the natural rare resources should definitely spawn districts rather than building options, but I do like that a farm or mine is tangibly different from a factory. Just don't make building a factory dependent on already having a bunch of farmers. And the rare resource upgrade system for buildings is dumb as heck. So how would you go about fixing the early game "need a bunch of farmers before I can build the factory I wanted"? Just unlock all the building slots on a planet regardless of pop numbers? I could see something like planets having X district slots and X building slots based on planet size and blockers, and they're all available to use from the moment the planet is colonised.
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Aug 5, 2020 11:44
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Gort posted:So how would you go about fixing the early game "need a bunch of farmers before I can build the factory I wanted"? Just unlock all the building slots on a planet regardless of pop numbers? Remove the building slots entirely. Revamp the planet interface to show the various planetary features and make them your building slots, taking back tiles somewhat. Flat grasslands can support farms or any generic building. Mountains can support forts and mines there get a bonus. Extreme planetary features like caves act as blockers (as in need a tech) and can feature stuff like underground cities or special research sites. For each feature you build over you lose district capacity, so developing a planet for specialist jobs is a trade-off. Basically think Master of Orion 3 here.
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Aug 5, 2020 11:49
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Back when tiles were a thing, building upkeep costs were a perfectly meaningful limit on just building every building even before you had pops to use them.
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Aug 5, 2020 12:03
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Gort posted:So how would you go about fixing the early game "need a bunch of farmers before I can build the factory I wanted"? Just unlock all the building slots on a planet regardless of pop numbers?  barrier.Gort posted:I could see something like planets having X district slots and X building slots based on planet size and blockers, and they're all available to use from the moment the planet is colonised. Splicer fucked around with this message at 12:18 on Aug 5, 2020 |
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Aug 5, 2020 12:14
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I think the EU series from Paradox has benefitted from Johan being there for each iteration providing some level of overall vision for the games and their interlocking systems. Doesn't mean it was perfect, though Emperor has fixed up a lot of stuff, with the new world and africa being the only systems that need another pass Stellaris doesn't seem to really have anyone on the team who is taking ownership of this role, it seems like the game in general is in maintenance mode at this point anyway. Idk if that's because of higher-up decisions that lead to the game being a low priority, or if there just aren't enough devs that are invested enough in the game to drive it forward (devs like this definitely exist for EU, HoI, and CK)
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Aug 5, 2020 12:27
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Demiurge4 posted:Remove the building slots entirely. Revamp the planet interface to show the various planetary features and make them your building slots, taking back tiles somewhat. Flat grasslands can support farms or any generic building. Mountains can support forts and mines there get a bonus. Extreme planetary features like caves act as blockers (as in need a tech) and can feature stuff like underground cities or special research sites.
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Aug 5, 2020 12:40
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I keep thinking about the original system they wanted for building slot unlocks, infrastructure. Basically building slots would unlock the more infrastructure a planet had, and different districts added different amounts of it (cities more than others, basically). Not sure what the problem with this is but at this point I'd prefer it to pops (though it's also not really needed because, again, upkeep costs act as a limiter).
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Aug 5, 2020 12:50
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They said that playtesters kept just building ghost districts to unlock the good slots and then complaining about having to pay maintenance on empty buildings. Now I know what message I'd take from this but they apparently went the opposite direction.
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Aug 5, 2020 13:29
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Reading dev notes only reaffirms my opinion that game systems should always be built with AI in mind. If you can't teach a computer how to operate your janky mechanics, then don't make a player do it.
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Aug 5, 2020 14:35
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Splicer posted:That's what I mean about the minimum pop requirement mechanics. Half the middlegame busywork would go away if I could just throw queue up everything for my standard Small Planet Alloy Foundry then wander off until an unemployment message popped up. Same for the AI issues. Yeah, unlocking building slots from the start would be a major improvement.
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Aug 5, 2020 14:48
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Kaal posted:Reading dev notes only reaffirms my opinion that game systems should always be built with AI in mind. If you can't teach a computer how to operate your janky mechanics, then don't make a player do it. At it's simplest level, the economic game has three products - alloys, research, and unity. Everything your empire does - food, consumer goods, amenities, crime-fighting - boils down to producing those three resources. Robot empires bypass a fair bit of the economic game - food and consumer goods - and the AI tends to do better with robot empires than organics. On the other hand, the game would probably get a fair bit of stick for being shallow if you just colonised planets and designated them as alloy, research or unity planets, and then they just produce those in a slowly-escalating-towards-a-final-point kind of way. The AI would play it better, though.
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Aug 5, 2020 14:49
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Kaal posted:Reading dev notes only reaffirms my opinion that game systems should always be built with AI in mind. If you can't teach a computer how to operate your janky mechanics, then don't make a player do it. Did you see the recent CK3 dev diary on performance and AI? I think you will find it interesting: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/ck3-dev-diary-36-gotta-go-fast.1408620/
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Aug 5, 2020 14:56
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Gort posted:At it's simplest level, the economic game has three products - alloys, research, and unity. Everything your empire does - food, consumer goods, amenities, crime-fighting - boils down to producing those three resources. I mean this sort of does bring up an important problem, which is that too much of the player’s interaction with the game is with the military economy and too little is with civilian life. Consumer goods and unity are both abstractions of hugely important concepts, but in the game’s terms they’re ultimately just functions to enhance the player’s ability to research better guns and make more ships to put those guns on. I think the game ultimately, on a bottom line level, doesn’t have enough ways to interact with your civilian population the way you do with your naval forces. Thus civilian resources feel like a chore while military resources are fun and the whole point.
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Aug 5, 2020 15:05
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Gort posted:On the other hand, the game would probably get a fair bit of stick for being shallow if you just colonised planets and designated them as alloy, research or unity planets, and then they just produce those in a slowly-escalating-towards-a-final-point kind of way. The AI would play it better, though. It doesn't have to - it just means that you need to change the paradigm for how planets are managed. MoO has a system like this, as does Sword of the Stars, while Distant Worlds has a sort of hybrid. In MoO, different planets can have modifiers that make them better at research or industry, but there's also just the issue in general that you want to research as much as possible while still keeping yourself safe, which means you're tweaking the sliders fairly often. Shipping pops between planets is also extremely effective, as not only can an industrialized world spend production to grow pops, planets that are half full produce bonus pops every turn. Population is also your invasion force, with invasion being quite strong, as it preserves the infrastructure on the planet and can let you steal technology. Distant Worlds relegates science to being detached from planets for the most part, only really taking place on science stations (which has its own set of problems, but is interesting in that there are few ways to boost how fast science is researched, which can reduce the effect of a runaway technology leader). Shipbuilding is likewise done on the orbital station layer for the most part, except for some very large ships like colony ships. What colonies do is produce the resources you need to actually fund everything in your empire, as well as the cash required to purchase the resources you otherwise don't have access to. There are also buildings/wonders that can be built, but they're fairly anemic and can be automated to be built based on certain thresholds. But yeah, the benefit of those approaches is that the AI is better at handling the planetary layer. I really like the concepts floated earlier of making most major buildings into districts, and having buildings take up a district slot. This gives a neat organic way to grow planets where late game you're specializing planets from the get-go, but in the beginning you're slowly building things out to try to make sure you're not running out of required goods. I'd also really like to be able to pre-plan districts/buildings in advance with a template, and be able to load said template onto a world to be built as resources/pops permit. It is worth noting though that MoO and Distant Worlds don't really focus on the planetary layer much at all - their focus is shifted to the strategic layer. MoO has you building scouting ships from early turns of the game to go out and stake claims on worlds and see what's out there. Distant Worlds has a whole lot of action taking place on the orbital layer, and various options for exploration, building mining bases or colonies, and other such things to expand and build out the empire. Colonies in those games aren't an afterthought, but they are a relatively smaller piece of the strategic level taking place (though border worlds in MoO become hotly contested with missile base construction and trying to stand them up quickly enough).
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Aug 5, 2020 15:30
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Lightning Knight posted:I mean this sort of does bring up an important problem, which is that too much of the player’s interaction with the game is with the military economy and too little is with civilian life. Consumer goods and unity are both abstractions of hugely important concepts, but in the game’s terms they’re ultimately just functions to enhance the player’s ability to research better guns and make more ships to put those guns on. You're not wrong there, which is why I like slavery and stratified economy so much. They have yet to earn those civil liberties!
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Aug 5, 2020 15:36
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Splicer posted:They said that playtesters kept just building ghost districts to unlock the good slots and then complaining about having to pay maintenance on empty buildings. My solution would have been to write a "crumbling"-function which every 2-3 years rolls a dice against all buildings and districts going unused for more then a year and failed rolls would have triggered "failing infrastructure"-events. This would incentivice players even more than just upkeep-costs to not overbuild their planets. Also for gently caress's sake add a development planner already, being worse at planet management than Master of Orion 3 isn't a compliment, Stellaris! 
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Aug 5, 2020 15:53
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Torrannor posted:Did you see the recent CK3 dev diary on performance and AI? I think you will find it interesting: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/ck3-dev-diary-36-gotta-go-fast.1408620/ This kind of thing is absolute mana for me. Particularly the bit where they talk about designing the siege and attrition systems around both AI capabilities as well as the intended feature mechanics. If the computer can perform A, B & C well, but is bad at D, then make sure A-C are fun and important systems that happen all the time, whereas D is neither critical nor a common showcase element. Bringing it back to Stellaris, if jobs and buildings are too complex for the computer to handle then jobs and buildings shouldn't be key elements that the player is constantly engaging with. And this sort of thing is doubly true if those mechanics aren't inherently fun.
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Aug 5, 2020 16:31
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Dirk the Average posted:It doesn't have to - it just means that you need to change the paradigm for how planets are managed. MoO has a system like this, as does Sword of the Stars, while Distant Worlds has a sort of hybrid. In MoO, different planets can have modifiers that make them better at research or industry, but there's also just the issue in general that you want to research as much as possible while still keeping yourself safe, which means you're tweaking the sliders fairly often. Shipping pops between planets is also extremely effective, as not only can an industrialized world spend production to grow pops, planets that are half full produce bonus pops every turn. Population is also your invasion force, with invasion being quite strong, as it preserves the infrastructure on the planet and can let you steal technology. Master of Orion gets a lot of praise for its "elegant" design but frankly I think its boring and dull. Stellaris mods point the way to a better system. Guilli's Planet Modifiers differentiates planets in a way that makes them interesting and makes specialization more viable. EUTAB adds buildings based on empire design that break outside the dull production chains. I want to check out Dynamic Districts, it sounds pretty interesting.
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Aug 5, 2020 16:45
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prometheusbound2 posted:Master of Orion gets a lot of praise for its "elegant" design but frankly I think its boring and dull. Stellaris mods point the way to a better system. Guilli's Planet Modifiers differentiates planets in a way that makes them interesting and makes specialization more viable. EUTAB adds buildings based on empire design that break outside the dull production chains. I want to check out Dynamic Districts, it sounds pretty interesting. You're not wrong - MoO has very little differentiating planets. It's also very much a relic of its time with memory/CPU constraints that reflect that. The overarching emphasis though is that you are the emperor/president/leader/etc. of the empire, and you shouldn't need to deal with the day to day bullshit of where an individual worker on an individual planet works. If you tell your people that this planet should specialize in agriculture or minerals or research or whatever, then the AI should be able to reasonably build a planet that can do that thing. The core issue is that the AI in Stellaris cannot currently do that well, which means that players outperform the AI by extremely large margins, even in situations where the AI receives major bonuses from difficulty level. It's more or less just a matter of time before a player eclipses the AI players so totally and completely that the galactic council is really just one empire deciding everything by virtue of its diplo weight being more than the rest of the galaxy combined. At least with MoO, the AI is extremely challenging on the highest difficulty level, and is capable of out-teching the player, out-producing the player, and generally being very much capable of stomping the player's poo poo in, with players being forced to turtle behind defensive positions and leverage diplomacy/espionage as much as possible to try to snag some advantages here or there before they can open up and start snowballing. Amusingly, the biggest thing holding the AI back in MoO is ship design, and the limited number of design slots afforded to all players. Players build better ships by virtue of specializing them to the situation more effectively than the AI can, and that's the main advantage a player can leverage over the AI to win. When I look at a 4X game like this, I feel like the economy needs to be both automated and subject to strategic decisions. I should be able to direct my empire to develop planets in a certain way, and then go do something else with my time until I decide to go back and tell my planets to develop in a different direction because of something that changed on the strategic level (I found a fanatic purifier next door, or a tempting target and I just hit new weapons tech, or there's no nearby threat and I want to focus harder on tech, etc.). The choice between wanting more mineral or energy output is a useful choice - energy is flexible in that it can buy other resources and is needed for upkeep, but minerals are the basic building blocks of planets/alloys. I want both, and managing that ratio is something that's useful for me to take care of on the strategic level. And yes, different planets should offer opportunities to specialize. If I suddenly find a new planet that would be the best research world ever, then I might slowly start drawing down my existing research world(s) and tooling them up to something that their planet might do better, or to shore up something like an alloy deficit.
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Aug 5, 2020 17:03
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prometheusbound2 posted:EUTAB Checking this out, thanks! I'm not sure what Dynamic Districts is but District Overhaul is extremely good. E: Is Decadence of Sanity still broken/the author still away making  streaming?
Schadenboner fucked around with this message at 17:10 on Aug 5, 2020 |
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Aug 5, 2020 17:05
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Libluini posted:My solution would have been to write a "crumbling"-function which every 2-3 years rolls a dice against all buildings and districts going unused for more then a year and failed rolls would have triggered "failing infrastructure"-events. This would incentivice players even more than just upkeep-costs to not overbuild their planets. Also for gently caress's sake add a development planner already, being worse at planet management than Master of Orion 3 isn't a compliment, Stellaris! Splicer fucked around with this message at 17:12 on Aug 5, 2020 |
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Aug 5, 2020 17:09
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Schadenboner posted:E: Is Decadence of Sanity still broken/the author still away making On that note, for future reference: in order to make Forgotten Queens play nice with plentiful traditions, you’re going to need to rename dlc_jobs.txt to cocoon_jobs.txt and put FQ later in the order. No one asked, but I spent way too much time figuring out how to unbreak the hive assimilation stuff on my own. The unofficial synthetic empires dlc has been great aside from spelling, though
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Aug 5, 2020 23:23
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Splicer posted:Or add a "ghost town" penalty whereby having insufficient people to live in your weird potempkin village leads to higher crime and unrest. Then later in the game have automation techs that allow partial production in empty buildings and reduced penalties so by the time you can afford to open palm slam down an entire city down at once you're also mechanically incentivised to. Playing a machine gestalt right now and juggling amenities vs resources with the only the overly simple job prioritization system is pretty much exactly that ghost town
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Aug 5, 2020 23:30
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CommunityEdition posted:Yes, but all you need to do to at least mostly fix it is put the Choosable Shroud mod after it on load order. I suspect there might be some problems still with bad/nonexistent job weighting, but it’s not like now jobs feature heavily in that mod. I saw that comment but it seems like Choosable Shroud kinda cheaty? Like, the point of The Shroud is that it's  ?Maybe I'm misunderstanding what Choosable Shroud is/does?
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Aug 5, 2020 23:33
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I wish I understood how and also had the time to mod the game. A lot of these mods are fun but are in dire need of text editing. 
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Aug 5, 2020 23:38
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Lightning Knight posted:I wish I understood how and also had the time to mod the game. A lot of these mods are fun but are in dire need of text editing. text is usually in plain textish files
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Aug 5, 2020 23:38
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bob dobbs is dead posted:text is usually in plain textish files Yeah but then I have to go digging and find the files and who knows what happens if the original creator updates the mod.
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Aug 5, 2020 23:41
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Schadenboner posted:I saw that comment but it seems like Choosable Shroud kinda cheaty? Like, the point of The Shroud is that it's No, it does exactly what you think, but honestly the default really is kind of underpowered relative to the other two ascension paths. The disparity only gets worse once you start piling on mods — anything that expands the military options makes the psionic ship parts less relevant, and gene/robo modding gets absurd very quickly because both modification points and mod time reduction stack across mods.
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Aug 5, 2020 23:41
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Lightning Knight posted:I wish I understood how and also had the time to mod the game. A lot of these mods are fun but are in dire need of text editing. I have to smile at whoever made EHOF. Guy clearly put a massive amount of thought and care into his project — then shows it by making each event so verbose that some event descriptions (presumably) run out of characters and cut off mid word
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Aug 5, 2020 23:45
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I love EHOF but I've never actually figured out how to use it? Like, it looks cool as poo poo and I think it's like a wormhole through a planet but I've never gotten it activated?
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Aug 5, 2020 23:49
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Schadenboner posted:I love EHOF but I've never actually figured out how to use it? Like, it looks cool as poo poo and I think it's like a wormhole through a planet but I've never gotten it activated? As far as I’ve gotten, every empire basically gets a private (and very resource rich) L cluster that gets stars added on each time you succeed on a roll with (new) next to it, there’s an elaborate series of excavations leading to some really impressive set piece stuff (and which gate the cluster expansion), a whole lot of incidental engineering research buffs, and two new resources that feed into new ship components that have a huge buff against the extra crisis that will apparently pop after the normal crisis. And there’s a trader who will sell single use relics Oh and there’s a selection of very detailed, multi-stage anomaly/research projects that only show up in the private clusters. Presumably because the creator didn’t want to make a separate event pack mod? Surprisingly, the AI seems to at least take advantage of their clusters, too? To be honest, I’ve yet to try actually using the structure to teleport within the regular galaxy. That function would possibly be the least impactful way to use the mod.
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Aug 6, 2020 00:19
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CommunityEdition posted:No, it does exactly what you think, but honestly the default really is kind of underpowered relative to the other two ascension paths. The disparity only gets worse once you start piling on mods — anything that expands the military options makes the psionic ship parts less relevant, and gene/robo modding gets absurd very quickly because both modification points and mod time reduction stack across mods.
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Aug 6, 2020 00:39
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I say it needs to have some diplomacy-affecting options. Some way to muck with the opinion ratings other empires have with each other.
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Aug 6, 2020 00:47
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CommunityEdition posted:I say it needs to have some diplomacy-affecting options. Some way to muck with the opinion ratings other empires have with each other.
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Aug 6, 2020 00:50
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I'm testing the districts mod that was recommended and this poo poo owns.
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Aug 6, 2020 02:12
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My only gripe with the districts mod is that it removes the bonus housing from non-residential arcologies on ecumenopoli. I count on those to vacuum up excess pop when my primary worlds begin to overflow.
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Aug 6, 2020 03:20
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My gripe is Low Cost Mines and the Geothermal generator
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Aug 6, 2020 04:02
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Yeah it's not a perfect mod but it's a pretty good demonstration of how much better districts could be and I'm now fully convinced they could scrap buildings entirely in favor of districts and it would make for a better experience.
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Aug 6, 2020 04:05
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