From all reports, the weapon balance is a lot better now. I think wars can be more challenging because the AI is improved. Hopefully they tackle the operational stuff you mention soon.
On my personal scale, I think the improvements since launch have moved it from Meh to Good. Better weapon balance, smarter AI, a variety of ways to play and removal of some pain points is nice.
To fulfill it’s potential, I think it would need to fix operational warfare, get diplomacy closer to EU4 levels, and make internal factions actively dangerous. Oh and a pony. A homicidal robot pony.
Well, if it helps, the robots can be a bit clunky on the mechanics. Also, it might help to wait until they add more powerful robot improvements. Right now a machine empire can get a lot of trait points, but not enough slots to actually spend them all. I’m impressed with the rate of fixes though.
Killbots/SHODANs/Borgs are such a PITA in the early stages. Want to expand? Build robots, since you have no meat sacks to cyborgize. And that’s 100 rock + 1 power drain per bot.
The first game, I went for cheaper robots to try to counteract that. The second game, I went for mining bonuses (both robot and civic level). It’s painful at the start, but you can put robots out faster than organics can normally grow them, and the extra productivity of more pops starts to help. As a killbot, if you can take a target early (like an unciv), then that removes your energy problems for a while.
The teasers are really making the next expansion look like the one we’ve all been waiting for. Well, the one I’ve been waiting for anyway, but as a narcissist that’s all I care about anyway!
The various teasers seem to reveal a completely redone fortress/starpoint/defense system. And in order for that to work, they are going to need to change the way fleet movement and wars are conducted. I cannot wait for the first dev diary next week.
I wonder if I’ll be able to shift or ctrl click when building an army/ship so I don’t have to left click 40 times to build 40 corvettes :(
I got back into this recently after a loooong break complete with all DLC. A lot of improvements, but it feels like tinkering around the edges. I’m not sure if they see the same problems as I (or others here and on RPS seem to), or if they simply aren’t sure where to begin addressing them.
I wonder if the stack of doom problem can be resolved by simply applying fleet capacity elements to Admirals. For example, you might have a Empire Fleet Capacity of 100 but each Admiral can only command 20, forcing you to use 5 fleets. There will obviously be techs which will increase this over time and would involve a bit more micromanagement from the player, but it would make things more interesting IMHO.
Other than the transport/invasion mechanism (why can’t transport fleets appear as Military fleets, why can’t I retake a planet!!), any improvements to the stack of doom problem will help immensely.
That’s the most common “anti-doomstack” suggestion on the forum, but the consensus is that it won’t work because the optimal move will then be to have 5 fleets travelling together in one doom stack.
Personally I think they need to slow down FTL in order to make it harder for doomstacks to intercept smaller raiding fleets, and give the raiding fleets more to do by placing more economic infrastructure in orbit.
You can’t retake a planet? I swear I did that at some point.
Interesting. The larger the fleet, the slower the FTL giving significant bonus to smaller faster fleets.
You cannot bombard your own planets, so therefore any foreign army has all the defenses with them. You can retake planets, you just need a huge majority to do so.
Well, it’s one way to do it. But simply slowing down FTL across the board will also help because it allows a raiding fleet to perform a mission in a system and move on to the next system before a doomstack five systems over can get there.
Basically, to do damage, a raiding fleet has to approach from out of sensor range, fly into the system, destroy/capture an economically valuable target, get back out of the system and flee to FTL. If an intercepting fleet can travel halfway across the galaxy in that time, there’ not much reason to have more than one intercepting fleet. You might have multiple raider fleets but they will probably get wrecked before they do enough damage to be worthwhile (a function of how quickly they can be intercepted and how hard it is to economically cripple an opponent from space).
You’re spot on, Mike. Movement is a few orders of magnitude too fast. I don’t think they can just slow things down enough, because I think it would feel pretty bad. It needs to be paired with some other system changes, whether it’s with fleet caps, attrition, revamped fortresses, and “terrain” of some sort.
Thankfully, Wiz mentioned this as his major issue with the design when he first took over, it was just going to take a lot of design (re)work. so I’ve just been awaiting word that they’re going to tackle it, and the teasers are making it look like that might be happening next. You can’t have effective or interesting fortresses in the current system.
I think they addressed some major issues on the empire building side with Utopia, which to date has been their only real “expansion”, as opposed to a story/flavor pack. The latter definitely seem more geared towards tinkering around the edges, like you say.
My hope is that the next expansion addresses war and diplomacy in the same way that Utopia improved the race/empire side of things.
I still like Stellaris, but I’ve been holding off on sinking a lot of time into it until they address warfare and diplomacy. I’m really hoping to hear some good things when they start up dev diaries again next week. I don’t know if it’ll be enough to swing people’s opinion that really don’t like the game, but for someone like me that already enjoys it, they could potentially bring it from Good to Great. Time will tell.
Maybe if they lessen the amount of time raiding takes. How long should it take to raid a colony or beat a starbase down? This should be measured in hours. Fleets moving from system to system should take days. So they can keep ship movement the same while allowing raiding parties to get in and out before the big fleet arrives. They would just need to tweak the speeds for in-system movement to be a bit faster and movement while in FTL to be a bit slower. The idea being that a fleet of ships can jump into a system, destroy / raid a target and move out again before a fleet several systems away can get there.
Capturing a planet could take considerably longer depending on how well defended it is, and perhaps a large fleet can get there in time to deal with the situation.
I agree that the fundamental issue is speed of in-system events versus speed of FTL. However, I don’t think in-system stuff can be sped up that much. The basic time tick in Stellaris is days (with hidden ticks of a tenth-day), so being able to conduct raids in hours is not going to happen. Right now it’s months I think. I don’t think I would want to see fleets zipping around the inner system much faster than now.
Also, FTL speed in Stellaris is just really fast, compared to most other space 4x games. Within a few years your initial scouts can visit dozens of new stars. I wouldn’t be surprised if your starting three corvettes with hyperlanes could cover the equivalent of a Moo2 large galaxy in the time it takes for starting Moo2 scouts to reach their first destination.
FTL is a problem area for Stellar is in general, and ties back into doom stacks being optimal and warfare being boring.
I still don’t understand how they could draw inspiration from Sword of the Stars without undersranding what made the FTL types meaningful in that game.
I’m sure other players have tried to destroy enemy warp station networks and quickly realised its futile and the enemy constructors will rebuild them just as quickly?
Its also a shame they don’t seem to have looked at how EU deals with doomstacks or defeat. Did they never try a reinforcement and manpower type of system?
I still firmly believe Stellaris would be a much better game if the foundation had have been EU4 in space, and work on modifications from there!
I think all FTL movement but hyperlane movement should be nuked. Hyperlanes are an old-school, tried-and-true wargame convention that create nice chokepoints and actual things to fight over.
(Unrelated note: wow, some the old Marc Miller Imperium stuff can still be downloaded. I loved Dark Nebula.)
Wiz feels the same way, but there are issues with releasing an expansion that “takes away” features from a game. I’m interested to see what they come up with to deal with it. A refactoring of the entire system is in order, IMO.
I do not like the idea of bottle-necks with hyper-lane only. Now you may be forced to attack your neighbors even if your real objective is elsewhere. I can see that as an option when starting a game, but I would not want to be stuck with that when I can experience invasion from any direction, which seems more realistic.
This x1000. I also think they missed a point on weapons as well. In SOTS, if you research and equip the counter to your enemies weapons, you can beat fleets five times your size. In Stellaris, they have such a little impact you just end up aiming for a bigger stack. A 10k fleet of PD versus a 50k fleet of missiles works in SOTS but not in Stellaris and having good armor rendered ballistics almost pointless until researching armor piercing.
