4165

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/stellaris-dev-diary-108-2-0-post-release-support-part-1.1079788/

Hello and welcome to another Stellaris dev diary. As we are still in full post-release support mode, until we are ready to get back to regular feature dev diaries, we’re not going to have full-length dev diaries. Instead, we’ll use the dev diaries to highlight certain fixes or tweaks that we feel need highlighting. Today, we’re going to be covering some changes coming to the 2.0.2 beta in regards to War Exhaustion and forced Status Quo.

In 2.0, with the new war system, we added forced status quo peace as part of the new war exhaustion mechanics. We felt that this mechanic was necessary to ensure that limited wars could actually happen and so that the outmatched side in a war still had a reason to fight (pushing the enemy into 100% war exhaustion in order to force peace and reduce their territorial concessions). There were some problems with this mechanic, however, primarily that people felt surprised by a sudden peace in which they might lose systems the enemy has just occupied days ago, and also that certain wars (such as subjugation wars) were very difficult to fully win before being force-peaced out.

After receiving intial player feedback on these issues, we decided to try out a different model of war exhaustion in the 2.0.2 beta, replacing the forced status quo with a penalty at 100% war exhaustion. We have since been playing, testing, tweaking and collecting further feedback, and coming to the conclusion that our original design was correct - forced peace is necessary for the new war system to not simply become a series of single wars to the death, or powerful empires forcing a weaker empire into 100% war exhaustion and refusing to peace while their enemies were crippled by penalties.

For this reason, we will be reintroducing forced status quo peace, and this time it’s here to stay. However, we are not simply going to roll back to exactly the way it is in 2.0, instead it will now work as follows:

  • When a side in a war reaches 100% war exhaustion, they are now flagged as being at high war exhaustion, and get the alert as before
  • Once at high war exhaustion, a 24 month timer will start to tick down for that side in the war. Once the timer is up, that war side can be forced into a status quo peace
  • There will be no penalties for war exhaustion, but we will leave in the functionality for modders, as well as the ability to change the number of months before a forced peace is possible or disable forced peace altogether, so that those who truly hate to the idea of ever being forced to peace can at least change it through modding

These changes should mean that a status quo peace is something that doesn’t come as a sudden surprise, and give the player time to start winding down their war and retake occupied systems when that war exhaustion counter ticks over into 100%.

We are also going to look into the possibility of changing Subjugation and Forced Ideology wars to either provide a clearer path to win such a war when the enemy has allies defending them, or by allowing Status Quo in such a war to achieve a ‘limited victory’ (liberating/subjugating part of the enemy empire instead of the whole).

These changes will not be in the very next version of 2.0.2 (as that is already being internally tested and will hopefully be with you before the end of the week), but we expect to roll them out sometime next week if all goes well.

4166

I was in favor of letting war exhaustion go above 100% and put in a penalty proportional to war exhaustion. I guess this is fine though.

4167

Bringing back the forced status quo peace is a good decision. I’m not sure if I understand the reason for a 24 month timer if there isn’t going to be some penalty applied/accumulated. It’s almost like it’s trying to address players being upset that they were not paying attention to the first War Exhaustion timer.

Definitely need to work in wars of liberation.

Playing NON BETA I tried to vassalize a neighbor with a defensive pact recently and despite having occupied every system and outpost and destroyed his buddy’s fleet the timer buzzed and I got nothing. Looks like they are going to try and address this.

They also need map mode for claims (which should have time limits). Apparently vassals can hate you forever if you have systems which they have claims on. Haven’t seen this myself because I haven’t been able to vassalize anybody yet though.

Still having a really fun time with this when I sit down and play. This is a huge complex simulation.

4168

I agree, the War Exhaustion mechanic as introduced with 2.0 was far superior. There were balance issues with how quickly it would accumulate and how Fanatic Militarists gained exhaustion just as quickly as others. I’m glad they’ve gone back to that, because all the system needed was tweaks, IMO.

For the 24-month timer, I think it’s just so that it doesn’t happen quite so abruptly and gives people a chance to reclaim systems that were just taken, etc. If you have a major fleet battle that tips W.E. to 100%, it could be jarring for the war to suddenly end just as enemy ground troops happened to land on your core world, losing it. This gives a little grace period to clean things up a bit while still forcing an end to the war.

24 months is too long, in my opinion, but I agree with the idea of the timer. I’m just glad that wars have a forced conclusion, because being able to raid enemy territory even while outgunned in order to raise their war exhaustion was a great mechanic.

4169

The beta patch has been updated with a lot of the recently discussed goodness.

Some other items and a bunch of bug fixes, as well. Don’t think the War Exhaustion changes discussed in today’s DD are in yet.

4170

They also added a new system name: Hawking.

4171

I find absolutely insulting that Hawking was not there yet while Covfefe was.

4172

Playing as the United Nations of Earth my first science ship was called the Stephen Hawking.

4173

That’s good to know.

4174

So I played it a bit more, and it is easy enough to lose 3 or 4 hrs just pausing, fixing something (upgrading planets, getting new research) then unpausing.

And repeat forever.

No real goals, just un/pausing to optimise stuff. Fun enough, but it doesn’t feel like much is happening.

I do like that it requires a bit of thinking to colonise planets and expand, and how I need 2 or 3 fleets now that my empire is getting quite large (well the same size as everyone else’s, but I’m not at war and I seem to have a decent buffer zone between myself and the rest, bar one who is equivalent in power to me, and just insulted me…)

4175

I tried Stellaris for the first time, after watching a couple of streams that made it actually appear kind of fun. This was with 2.0.1, since I didn’t realize one was supposed to opt in to a beta-patch for the optimal experience.

Since there seems to be a clear consensus that you need to be willing to roleplay a bit to get anything out of this game, I tried to craft the initial faction based on a real-world analogue, and then make fitting in-game choices when possible. (Basically I was playing a caricature of modern Silicon Valley culture).

The early game was a lot of fun. Though maybe a third of the events that I got I’d already seen on the stream I’d watched, which doesn’t sound great for longevity.

I’d heard there was not much to do in the mid-game, but hadn’t realized just how bad it was. Hours upon hours of nothing at all happening. Sure, I could have declared a war. But I was pacifist, and didn’t really want more territory anyway. And while there are other war goals, they seem to be basically impossible to reach with this system. And around the same time it felt like there were no longer any decisions to be made where the self-imposed RPG backstory would have made any difference. “Should I research a missile, a gun or an afterburner?”.

The factions and pops are irrelevant beyond belief. The factions might as well not have existed beyond giving me a bit of influence. I tried suppressing the space-Nazi faction in my empire for 200 years at a ludicrous influence cost, and it didn’t seem to have any effect at all on their popularity. (Not that there was any gameplay reason to try to get rid of them, it was purely an aesthetic choice).

Uh, and I guess at some point I colonized a new desert planet with a desert dwelling species that only had one planet to live on at the time. Worked great, until all of my Continental Preference species started moving in only to be unhappy about the climate. That really annoyed me. You fuckers have 12 planets to live on, go to one of them instead and leave this one for the poor desert-squids. But it didn’t feel like game had any permanent tools for fixing this, and again it was mostly an aesthetic problem since happiness matters so little.

The War Exhaustion system is broken beyond belief. I had cases of having a single fight within months of a war starting (so no attrition), winning it decisively (2/3rds of the opponent’s fleet destroyed, me left in control of the system), and both sides ending with 100% War Exhaustion. I had maybe 4 wars during the real game, and then another 3 trying to slowly crack an Awakened empire. All of them ended on a Status Quo peace.

Speaking of the end game; I’d heard there was supposed to be some end game crisis. Apparently for me it was some extradimensional invaders, but they were such a wet fart that I didn’t realize it was the actual end game. I was just happy that there was finally an event chain of some sort triggering for the first time in tens of hours. Hey, there is some mid-game content here after all! It got resolved by the whole galaxy stomping the invaders very quickly, and then I fast-forwarded another 100 years hoping for the end-game events to happen. Oh, wait? That was it?

So, not a great success. Maybe I should have given them four years to fix the game, not just two :-/

4176

The Unbidden are fairly lame. They don’t really need much in the way of special ships to beat. The Contingency can be rough because they have four nodes. The hardest I’ve seen is the Preathyorn. They’re just nasty.

4177

Your experiences match mine, but I’ve been fool enough to play multiple games since release. It just doesn’t get any better than you describe.

4178

All your complaints are valid, though some of them fixable. The endgame crisis is set by default to threaten players that have never played a strategy game, let alone Stellaris. You’ve really got to bump its difficulty up a bit AND make it spawn 50 years earlier, or it’ll show up, you’ll have a good laugh and destroy it in a couple years with minimal losses. I mean, assuming you want to be challenged in any way or have a scary event occur, which some people do not. But they set it down to outright toddler difficulty because too many people complained it was too hard.

Other than that, as a peaceful faction you still will need to declare wars to switch other empires over to your ideology, and then you can get them as protectorates or vassals or invite them to your federation. Theres just not enough to do in Stellaris if you are unwilling to declare war. Not that any other 4x’s are much better in this regard, and I’ve played them all. I’ve yet to play a single 4X or grand strategy where a 100% pacifist playthrough felt in any way compelling to me. It would be a cool thing for Stellaris to try and be better at, though.

4179

But it’s war-game potential in Stellaris frankly sucks. I’d much rather play Age of Wonders 3 - or Sword of the Stars, or any number of games - as a war-game.

Even if they could get a decent war-game going, Stellaris bogs you down in these terrible mini-games of ‘build the mining stations’ and ‘build the research stations’ and ‘build the right buildings on the right planet tiles’ which are dull dull dull.

4180

Yeah I’m solidly in the mid game doldrums.

Seems to be a lack of interim interesting decisions.

Played some AoW3 today. Am winning my first war. Interesting decisions every turn.

4181

For a development house with the great political systems and AI from EUIV and the multitudes of event chains and narrative role-playing of CKII I wonder why they didn’t build upon those concepts and systems for Stellaris? They have such a good foundation to start with and it seems they pushed that all aside.

4182

I wonder the same thing @AntediluvianArk I can only guess that after a few more DLC, that stuff will be fleshed out more, small baby steps at a time I suppose. Nonetheless, Stellaris is stupidly empty. EUIV and CKII both feel like an exciting journey. Stellaris feels more like a slog where I try and get my mineral, energy and science to keep trending onwards and upwards.

I’ll wait until the new patch comes out of beta and try and finish a game, but I suspect I’ll end up mired in the same micromanagement hell that going wide inevitably does. Going tall is fine, I did that in a pacifist game to good effect placing down habitats, but I suspect at some point going wide becomes necessary?

4183

And uninstalled again. I needed space for Ni No Kuni 2 and there’s little point in trying to enjoy this right now. I might try again some other day.

4184

The next expansion, maybe…