So am I stupid or is this game a complete grind to finish once you’ve ‘won’? I can only demand ~3 planets a war, and then there’s a 10 year cool-down on fighting that person again. I can cheese it by declaring war on someone else but demanding another factions planets (which makes no sense to me at all), or by waiting until my allies declare a random dumb war. But even then it’s going to take ages as I have to capture more than three planets to win the war, and the other planets I capture are magically restored to starports and full ground defenses in the two days there was no war on.
At this point if all the fleets in the galaxy were dropped on top of mine I’d win in a few seconds. This is killing me…
I suppose the answer to my question is that I should be going for a conquest victory and not a dominion victory. I really didn’t want to turn against my own allies.
Yep, that’s pretty much it. I think one of three endgame “events” is supposed to trigger at some point. Maybe you can get all of them if you hold out? But otherwise, that’s how Stellaris ends up.
-Tom
I got an event called the Unbidden? Are they supposed to be a endgame event? Because I pretty much just rolled over them. Game did not end. Game may never end.
Stellaris definitely needs some optional ways to reach an end, with a score and graphs and everything. I don’t really want it to just…go on forever. Hopefully that stuff comes with time (and updates).
LeeAbe
2006
Squee
2007
I had that happen too, was kind of funny. I went a week without playing Stellaris then fired it back up. Within a few minutes I had the unbidden open a portal and show up just barely outside of my empire. I mobilized my fleets and wiped all of them out within 10 minutes with no help from allies or vassals, then the next hour of gameplay was running the game at max speed and clicking the occasional anomaly and/or research and/or diplomacy prompt.
Nesrie
2008
I liked this piece because the luck part can be really entertaining or really frustrating, especially in Stellaris. In the same game I talk about above, I started with two Fallen Empires on either side of me that would destroy my pitiful existence if I ever wound up touching their borders with my borders. Okay, that’s tough so just take it as a challenge right… well sure except all those fun random missions you get at the beginning, more than half mine actually wound up in Fallen Empire territory where I have no hopes of ever getting access to them. With Militant Isolationists… they won’t really do anything with you like even trade something as simply as civilian access to their borders.
And while all three of us wound up with some cultist group working against us from the start, I was the only one who couldn’t finish it.
I still really love the start of the game though, starting up, exploring, checking out the nearby planets, hoping to find some primitives to enslave later or bring up into space. I still have hopes for improvement.
I don’t think the events are supposed to end the game. They’re supposed to provide content to the end of the game. I didn’t think they were successful either.
-Tom
At least with that Unbidden event, a lot of how tough they are seems to be just how close you are when they spawn. If you have easy access to them it’s not that tough a fight initially. If you have no border access to reach them they do build up to be a more significant threat as the AI is unlikely (unwilling? does it make a serious effort, I haven’t watched that closely) to take them out.
I still haven’t seen the other events, but the one time I got the Unbidden it was right in my vassal’s territory and it was about a 5 minute event before the 8 hour slog (partially my fault as I was experimenting, could have finished in 2 or so) to finish the only game where I’ve bothered to get the victory condition. I think the Unbidden need some tuning and stronger initial forces if they’re going to appear that late in the game.
Well the present generation i’m sure has it’s problems - though from where i’m sitting it’s mostly their unbearable proclivity towards growing unkempt beards - but to be fair it’s not their willingness or not to ‘read’ a manual, it’s just that gaming has evolved from where we came from. Stellaris’ strengths and weakness have little to do with them.
The thing is looking back at my experiences with 4X space style gaming, my most memorable experience was probably with Master of Orion 1, oh, how many years ago, and i was fighting a losing battle with some terrible invader (which species i don’t honestly remember), sending fleet after fleet and being ground down. I vaguely remember a whole line of ships being produced from a dozen worlds flowing to one mustering point. I remember the sense of drama and narrative the game was creating.
And then… i discovered how to upgrade my ships. All the grand sweep of interstellar space opera existed because i didn’t understand how to play the game.
The point being is that was decades ago, and i’m an older, wiser, more jaded gamer now. But i have to try on those yellowed 13 year old goggles and look at games through those lenses, and i would have found a lot of like with Stellaris, and a lot to question. To put it into Qt3 terms, i’m not interested in the downslope of the Chick Parabola.
I will say that on subsequent games, and your first in that “are we there yet?” stage that playing on fast is good. Esp. when waiting for fleet repairs.
But as to wars and planet grabs. Remember vassals count! Both ways. The planets count for you, and they are no longer independent. I just started a war where I made vassalization of the main leader nation one of my war goals. I also chose for them to cede the one planet where we have a split solar system as the other war goal. The bad part was hitting the “Defender War Goals” bug. And, armies are a real PITA when you have long supply lines.
That vassalization will be a huge step to either goal. It pays to start the war to set your conditions. Either alone, or wait for you to be Federation president. The rotating Federation presidency, and war goals and UI notification when you are president, and what do Federation fleets mean all need to be more clear.
MikeJ
2014
I wondering about the difficulty of really testing the gameplay of something like Stellaris. Thinking back to the Blorg stream, and how much trouble they had maintaining a workable save over the weeks, and that was in the final run-up to release. You really have to sink a lot of hours into a single game for the mid-game and late-game issues to come up. With the AI constantly changing and bugs constantly being squashed and cropping up again, it has to be tough to get a good view of how the later stages of the game play organically in single-player. Especially when it’s a new game and not an iteration on previous games in the same series by the same developer.
Then you get things like the math for how evasion and accuracy works, or how fleet strength is calculated. I don’t understand why the math in games is so often broken.
Broken as not working, or broken as exploitable? If exploitable, answer is that there are far more people trying to break the math than people making the math in the first place, if 10 people are working on balancing the game and 10000 are trying to break that balance, eventually the 10000 will win.
MikeJ
2016
Broken as in “does not achieve design goals”. If you sat down and plotted the function, you’d see it has very undesirable behavior at certain points. The work of exploiters usually boils down to finding the values in the game that can push the parameters of the function toward the undesirable point. Basically it’s like no one ever took limits in math class.
Take evasion. Currently, the game caps accuracy at 100%, and evasion subtracts off your percent to hit from there. Various sources of evasion stack linearly. Do you really need to know any more to see where people wanting to break the system will focus?
This is an example of probably the most common mistake in video game math: boosts to a parameter have increasing returns as the function approaches an asymptote. If there enough available boosts to that parameter, the system blows up completely. The usual response is that the devs didn’t foresee that particular combination of boosts, and nerfing the boosts so they can’t add up to “dangerous” values, but the flaw isn’t in the boosts, it’s in the math.
Another example would be damage reduction mechanics in RPGs (e.g. 75% DR -> 76% DR is 4% reduction, 98%->99% is a 50% one), so you better make sure that the effort required is commensurate with the actual benefit.
And in most modern ARPGs, the systems are set up so that it’s arguably not worth the effort to push past certain points of mitigation.
It took Bethesada many iterations to get it right but I think they finally got the damage in fallout 4 right. The system scales damage in almost linear fashion when armor is 1/2 the level of the weapon damage up to armor twice as much as the weapon damage. However the incremental benefit of more armor rapidly decreases.
It is surprising that Paradox who has generally elaborate damage rules in their games like HOI 3, would make such a rookie mistake and went with such a simplistic approach to evasion. Interestingly enough they could have largely fixed the problem by making armor work they way you expect with straight damage reduction (instead of percent damage reduction). So if a battleship had say 100 points of armor than the corvettes small weapons generally would cause no damage. It would have resulted in a entertaining battles the battleship can hit the corvettes because of the evasion and the corvettes can’t damage the battleship because of armor.
MikeJ
2019
The damage mechanics in the HoI series are certainly elaborate, but I actually still don’t like them. Hits scale up as technology evolves, but there is no countervailing factor (equivalent to tactics in EU) that scales the damage down. Improved defenses don’t reduce damage to the unit in most circumstances, they just move the point at which the unit is overwhelmed. They’ve layered more complexity on top of that with armor mechanics and tons of modifiers, but I still don’t like the basic resolution mechanism.
Interestingly enough they could have largely fixed the problem by making armor work they way you expect with straight damage reduction (instead of percent damage reduction). So if a battleship had say 100 points of armor than the corvettes small weapons generally would cause no damage. It would have resulted in a entertaining battles the battleship can hit the corvettes because of the evasion and the corvettes can’t damage the battleship because of armor.
That’s actually how they had the armor working in Stellaris, but late in development they changed it to the current model. Basically they were having trouble finding the balance and have the AI design intelligently. Here’s hoping they bring that back.
Nesrie
2020
It would definitely encourage the creation of the large ships despite the resources and time… right now it seems pointless to bring out the big guns, so to speak, unless you can slap them on a 100 corvettes.
