Depends what you are looking for I suppose. In a 4x space game I don’t want to worry about managing the internal politics of my empire. I want to worry about building vast fleets and conquering aliens.
The current ethics system is basically ignorable. I only check ethics divergence when I’m trying to figure out if a mind control laser is needed for a particular planet or not. The rest of the time it’s not something I care about because there’s nothing I can do about it. Something that I have to pay a lot of attention to and fiddle with to keep my empire from imploding sounds very unappealing.
I get the feeling that someone over at Stellaris dev team got tired of making MOO and is trying to make CK-in-space now.
I’ve never noticed this, because every system needs a starport. They get built immediately once the colony is established, as the number of starports determines your fleet cap. Maxing your fleet cap is critical.
I agree. I’m not interested in this aspect of the game. Happily, someone will mod it into submission.
Interesting. I guess because of my starting traits, ethics has been something I can’t ignore if I want to big a successful empire. It’s what makes the game interesting to me, you can’t just go take over everything, unless you set up your race to do so, which I never do.
How does it make the game interesting? I know when I started the apparent complexity of the system hinted at rich gameplay but as I’ve learned about it I’ve learned that it’s largely beyond player control and hence irrelevant. The only factors in the current ethics divergence system that a player has any control over are the distance from the capitol and the presence/absence of certain ethics impacting buildings/spaceport-modules. It may be complex, but it doesn’t result in any interesting decisions for a player. Literally all a player in the current version of Stellaris needs to know is that an empire above a certain size has constant unhappiness outside a certain radius from the capital, and that certain buildings can extend that range so researching is them good.
In my last game of Stellaris, the one where I got pasted by the awakened FE, I had a lot of fun playing Fanatic Spiritualists / Materialists and pursuing a perfect monoculture. All aliens were purged as planets were assimilated. No ethics divergence ever happened. Outside of purge protesters I never had a single faction form. I really enjoyed that game as it let me focus on expansion.
Yeah, I personally do want more CK2 and Vicky 2 in my Stellaris, and I think that’s always been the intent. I’m not terribly interested in straight galactic conquest, because I feel that’s already been done everywhere else.
Don’t get me wrong, I like smashing space fleets together as much as anyone, but I want it to be one aspect of a game, not the sole focus. My largest complaints about Stellaris have been that the empire/pop management side of things has been too lite / uninteresting, so I’m happy to see that side of things getting improved.
That’s a really legitimate point. One of the selling points of Stellaris for me was that it was the least Paradox-y Paradox game in a long time. I like a nice straightforward game where I can focus on economic optimization, expansion, ship design and use all the above to fuel a galactic conquering machine. If this series starts trending towards EU/CK style constant fiddling with the challenges of just keeping an empire operating then people like me will probably ditch and the EU/CK fans will be delighted. I have no idea of the relative size of the two audiences so maybe this is smart move for Paradox.
I’m on-board with these changes. The current ethics-drift makes no sense and doesn’t seem to be driven by anything but a dice roll. But the drift and impacts from the drifts never really gave me enough reason to build the ethic-drift prevention buildings. The new system might give a reason to sacrifice a little production or power to build a cultural building or two.
I think the promise of Stellaris from the start was a space 4x that paid attention to the challenges of keeping an empire together. I agree that it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but there are a lot of space 4x’s out these days, and this is the niche that Stellaris is aiming for. They didn’t really hit the target at launch, but that’s clearly what they intended to do all along. Ethics and factions were certainly not something that was supposed to be ignorable.
They really need to re-think that mechanic, because starports=fleet cap makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to play tall instead of wide. Plus, here’s another massive pain about starports. Starports are needed to build naval vessels. Naval vessels take a very long time to churn out (particularly cruisers and battleships). So, ideally, you assign starports different assembly yards toward certain classes. I’ve got a dedicated corvette starport, dedicated destroyer starport, etc. The class-specific assembly yards speed-up build time and reduce build cost.
But, due to the fact that you cannot play tall, you almost always have to tuck the planets that those starports orbit around in sectors. Now, there’s no way to access those yards via the right-side nav. You have to zoom in to that planet’s system, manually select the planet, and then issue the build order.
It’s really poor UI, and a PITA. Someone on the Stellaris forums has a good idea that they spin-off shipbuilding to dedicated shipyards that you can construct. Those can stay listed on the right-side nav, so you don’t have to hunt for your assembly yards, even if you have to tuck most of your planets away in sectors.
You assign your factory-starports to hotkey groups (CTRL+1, etc) so you can just jump to them by key. I agree that a nice UI solution in the right hand shortcut bar would be nice, but the hotkey trick makes it very manageable.
In a big empire, you could run into problems though. It would be nice if you could develop a few starports into giant shipyards that can build many ships in parallel (and are worth defending). Same as it would be nice if you could develop a planet into a true hive or forge world.
Amen to that, I liked specialized worlds in MOO2 but it doesn’t seem to be a concept that Paradox designers like. They want a more vanilla empire with a ton more micromanagement apparently.
I still do a bit of specialization of planets, to a degree. I’ve dropped mineral mines on spots that contain a +1 energy bonus a few times. I had a “rich minerals” planet that gave a +50% mineral bonus, dropped a mineral processing plant on it and just went pure mineral + food production, with the exception of a physics lab on a +3 research plot I couldn’t pass up. Same kind of thing for research and energy worlds.
But yeah, I get what you’re saying. There isn’t really a way to increase production of starports, so you don’t have a way to turn a world in to a hammer-producer to increase production speed of ships.
Stellaris’ first expansion takes a page from Civilization V, with Traditions. I should clarify that: this is a new feature coming in the free 1.5 patch, “Banks”,that comes out along with the expansion. No purchase necessary.
There will not be hard caps on the number of Traditions you can acquire, but their cost goes up substantially with each pick.
If you look at the screenshot included in the linked dev diary, there’s an “Ascension Perks” section, which will be covered in the next diary, which will be after the holidays.
It seems like Wiz has been dying to make major changes to the game for a long time. I wonder what the design discussions were like a year or a year and a half before the initial release.
