Yes! I was hoping they’d have the guts to go hyperlane-only, despite the outrage it was sure to cause among the playerbase. They can really make things interested now, in all the ways they mentioned in the dev diary.
Utopia made huge strides in making the empire building part of the game more enjoyable for me, and making the different races I created feel distinct. The one thing holding things back for me has been the way warfare is handled and I knew that couldn’t be resolved without first completely revamping FTL. I’ve been waiting for this expansion for a long time!
Well, for people like me, it’s great. I would have stopped playing EU4 ages ago once there was nothing left to do/explore. But they keep adding new features and mechanics to the game, which keeps me coming back, which is why I have played that game ludicrously more than any other strategy game. Different strokes, etc, etc.
You’re not going to please everyone, but you’ll have a hard time convincing me that re-working FTL is “un-fun”, when it’s been the primary design issue holding them game back, in my opinion.
You mean as opposed to sticking with broken mechanics and then waiting many years hoping for a sequel that might fix those things (aka 1upt Civ 5 & 6)? I like the model of actually improving the product rather than me wasting my $60. I have about 1,000 hours played in EU IV, Stellaris and HoI 4 (combined) but only 40 in Civ 6. I think it is safe to say which games have provided the better value.
Finally you do not have to pay for it. Every major DLC comes with a free patch that changes those mechanics. So you can get the benefits without buying the DLC. Why is this something to complain about?
I think this style of game is just really difficult to get everything working properly out of the box. It takes a lot of gameplay to figure out the problems. I’m glad they are willing to change major elements if they aren’t working.
The game really needed this change. Go Bold or Go Home. Just hope they make the jump technology rare enough and not OP enough to negate the hyperlane topology.
I’m also happy about the latest DD. Additionally, I was glad to see this from Wiz in a separate post:
In the short term, I’m thinking about removing the Domination victory condition and adding some sort of score system that determines a winner after a player-set game length, based on factors such as economic strength, diplomatic pull, fleet strength, etc al. Would still be able to win a Conquest/Federation victory before the set time is up, though Federation victory would require the entire galaxy being in your Federation.
In the long term, I want to rework victory conditions into something more akin to empire ambitions, like your empire aiming to colonize another galaxy.
Call me weird, but I like striving towards something, and don’t always like making up a goal on my own when gaming. Adding a weighted score within a time is a improvement; adding ‘main quests’ (hopefully specific to empire characteristics) is great.
They’re pulling the right lessons from other games here, in a good way. I see pieces of a lot of good games in that FTL design. This victory condition post reminds me of the victory screen in Distant Worlds.
Yes, this is exactly right. DW’s system (last I tried it) is a good idea, but revamping roughly the same thing into ‘quests’ would feel less sterile and easier to pursue, even if the math of what actions you’re rewarding for the victory ends up fairly similar.
I played EU2 more than 3 and 3 more than 4. It wasn’t changes keeping it fresh that kept me playing them all, it was having good core gameplay that fed into a wildly emergent experience. All the minutiae they added to 4 just makes it a more complicated game, not necessarily a better one.
Strategy games with an excellent design are timeless, which is why so many people still play civ 4 for example.
Wildly changing the game isnt a bad thing, but it certainly represents an initial failure of the game and the developer.
Realistically, we’re 18months post launch(?) and for all the pleasant changes the game isnt all that much closer to having adequate combat or diplomacy, and the improvements to the sector AI hasn’t improved what was fundamentally a bad system to begin with.
How long until the game is ‘done’ by a reasonable metric? This isn’t to rag on Paradox, their post-release support has been good (though some of the monetisation decisions have been disappointing) but post-release support doesn’t, or shouldn’t, make up for what most people eventually agreed was a terrible release.
I guess from my own personal point of view, my response would be “does that matter?”. For me, I’m not looking for a date or benchmark on when the game is going to be done. I loved EU4 from the start, but it’s still not done. I guess my only benchmark is “Am I engaged and having fun?”. The answer to that is going to be very different for everyone, though.
In answer to my own question, I have been to a degree, but there have been issues that are preventing me from going back to the well like I do with EU4. Utopia helped flesh things out for me on the empire building side of the equation, but the waging of war in the game ends up sucking more and more of the enjoyment out of the game until I set it aside. That’s kind of where things have been for me since the Utopia release, where I haven’t picked up Synthetic Dawn yet. I genuinely like the game, but the remaining issues continue to grate on me.
They absolutely flubbed multiple things, design-wise. The most glaring to me has been FTL, as all the systems that hang off of it just haven’t been satisfying. Having the three distinct FTL methods sounded fantastic at first as I absolutely loved that feature in SOTS, but it just fundamentally doesn’t work here. Thankfully, they’ve come to the same conclusion (not that it was any secret, Martin Anward said as much when he took over the project).
The cynical take on that is they shoved a turd out the door and planned to fix it later. My own take on it is that they had a budget, attempted to design a new type of game they hadn’t done before, and fumbled some of the design. While the overarching opinion on Qt3 seems to be that the game had a really poor release, the user metrics and critic reviews were pretty solid (I believe around 80%, if I’m remembering correctly) and the game has maintained a pretty decent playerbase, per Steam stats. I’m not trying to make an appeal to popularity or anything, just pointing out that the game was more well-received outside of our particular nerd-hole of choice. :)
Anyway, that’s just my own take on it, not saying my perspective is any more right than anyone else’s.
By done I mean reasonably feature complete in a blend that creates a compelling strategy game, rather than “No more work ever!”. I had issues with EU4 at launch but I felt like it was a reasonably complete product, which didn’t mean there couldn’t be future additions.
Stellaris still doesn’t feel like a reasonably complete product. A grand strategy game with no real diplomacy or combat/war strategy isn’t complete in my honest opinion!
Stellaris still gets the early game very right. Exploration, meeting space aliens and new races, banging out research at a quick pace and importantly, managing a handful of planets with infrequent building/upgrades. It still doesn’t get any period past that ‘right’ in my mind. The game bogs down very very quickly and the least interesting part of the game (when empires have expanded and the only options become diplomacy and war) is what should be the most interesting part of a grand strategy game.
All the EUs only became boring when ultimate victory was obvious, up until that point they remained compelling whether you were in the early, mid or end-game.
So one change they seem to be playing around with: preventing you from moving military ships into systems that you don’t have any data on. Not a big deal if you have sensors that can reach into the next system, but starting sensors only cover the current system.
That means that until you get improved sensors, you won’t be able to scout with cheap corvettes, and will have to send a science ship instead (maybe the “must have data” rule applies to constructors as well?). So you are risking a scientist and the influence it takes to replace them.
That would make the initial exploration a lot more strategic, rather than covering half the galaxy in the first dozen years or so.
I personally despise the idea of imposed time/turn limits they’re thinking of, but everything else is looking interesting so far. I may dive back in soon.
That sounds really, really contrived. Adding complexity for the sake of it shouldn’t be an aim.
Slowing down jumps and slowing down in-system travel would be a counter to using corvettes to scout most of the galaxy early on. Or adding range. Instead they’re speeding up in-system travel.
Well, they are speed up in-system travel, but ships now have to traverse each system they go through, so overall long-distance travel will be slower (absent wormholes and gates).
I do agree that the not allowing military ships to scout at the start sounds contrived. On the other hand, you need a special leader to open up new sea and land zones in EU.
I agree with KevinC. Who cares? They are updating the game and making it better. How is this a problem?
I disagree with your assessment that Stellaris had a “terrible” release. This has no basis in fact. The reviews were generally good or very good. The Steam reviews from that time are very positive. There is no indication whatsoever that the release was terrible or even mediocre. If there is any impression that the release was anything but decent it is due to the Qt3 echo chamber effect.
I feel that Paradox acted in good faith. The original design had a lot of ambitious ideas, but they’d never really done sci-fi before. It’s turns out that it’s a gigantic learning curve.
3 types of FTL was simply impossible to balance on that scale, let alone make interesting.
As someone who played predominantly as warp at first, getting in a war with a wormhole empire was maddening. Their fleets would literally appear in the middle of my empire without warning, and getting a fleet to react and then chase that enemy fleet was insane. Then I started playing wormhole and, yeah, it’s OP as fuck.
All these changes we’re talking about now, Wiz said are a long way off. The only reason they started the development diaries is because there is so much to talk about. Point being, the game is fun now, but if this new talk is getting you excited to play soon, you might want to wait longer.
…I care that I bought a game 18 months ago that even after 18 months and several expansions still isn’t really functional as a grand strategy game, and doesn’t have a clear roadmap to one day (after another ~€100 of added DLC I’m sure) being a functional grand strategy game? I never said ‘updating and improving the game is a problem’. Either my language skills are well below what I thought they were, or you’re fundamentally mischaracterising what I’ve been saying.
By terrible release, I mean the game was pretty terrible at release. Mediocre if feeling incredibly generous. The fact that Paradox have spent the last 18 months of work almost entirely on changing release features, suggests people who thought it was ‘very good’ at release were wrong - otherwise why would the developers still be fixing or modifying release features?
And, eh, QT3 members were incredibly positive about Stellaris at launch. KevinC for example has ‘mellowed’ massively on Stellaris since then.
I suppose you didn’t see SOTS2 as a problem, since Kerberos supported that game fairly heavily for 2.5 years post launch. shrug
