Yeah I wish that was the case for every game… just look at many early access titles where they make stuff up as they go along based on community feedback even for the base game.
Basically I think there’s a large element of this in Paradox DLC too. Appeasing the populace as they go, based on feedback on the design.
Can we just have a separate thread for DLC whining? Those who don’t like it, like to tell us, repeatedly.
In theory, they do now, with Story/Immersion Packs and Expansions, but I’m not sure it works that well.
It varies, but EU4 is now kind of a mess for a game that wondered me such much that I actively started learning history after failing to care for three decades. But that’s a lot on the vocal players who complained every single time devs tried to make map painting have speed bumps.
Only if we can also have a separate thread for whining about DLC whining? :)
-Tom
Ok, that one might have to go into P&R. ;)
For Stellaris very much this. I figured I’d let them get things sorted out and that 2.0 would be a great place to jump in. Based on the patch notes and changes from 2.0 to 2.2+ it seems like they still don’t have any clarity of vision and design…or really poor QA. They are just throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks and what gets pushback from the community.
I thought 2.0 would be a good place to revisit and then shortly after that releases they start overhauling the resource model and economy. Who knows where we will be in a week or month from now. Which model should I learn or should I wait until it’s overhauled again?
Slyfrog has a point. There is something to be said for planning for a logical endpoint that makes sense in the constraint of the original design document. Having a long-term plan and executing on that leading towards a completed coherent design.
While the hardcore Paradox fans love the constant stream of DLC I think there is a point where they compromise their original design and gameplay experience as they just spitball expansion after expansion bolting them on regardless of consequence.
Yeah I’d absolutely agree with that ideal.
But there’s also something to be said for supporting a 5/6 year old game by giving those who are still playing it something new. I mean it’s not like this stuff from the past few years is compulsory, you can still play the base game with the first couple expansions (EU4/CK2).
I mean, for me, many of these things exist to give specific countries and regions more flavor. Russia, Prussia, England, the Americas, China all have had patches specifically to bring in more unique gameplay. And they are for popular and heavily played regions. Because, really, early on there was a gulf between the amount of flavor for some countries, particularly catholic HRE ones, and elsewhere for unique events, decisions, ideas, and so on. So expanding the number of places with that type of flavor is all good for me.
The continued development, and new tweaks, that go with that are worth it for me. Small level changes may not seem important, but when you look over a sweep of a year plus of changes? It makes you alter strategies in fun and interesting ways.
I know not everyone likes that, but for me the greater regional differentiation justifies things for me.
On the actual topic of Stellaris as opposed to Paradox DLC policy, I thought I’d recommend a mod I was playing around with (I am not the author), “Mining/Research Station Built without Construction Ship”. What it does pretty simple, it doubles the mineral cost of outposts to 200, and auto-builds all the mining stations in the system. It does have two side effects; it kind of trivializes pirates and it makes the AI slightly less terrible because they are infamously slow at building their mining stations, but both those things are fine by me.
It reduces a ton of tedious micromanagement that is really only strategically relevant for about 10 years of in-game time. I guess in those first 10 years it does slightly reduce the strategic decision making, because obviously on the shoe-string budget you begin the game on, choosing when and which mining stations to build is actually a decision with some potential consequences. Anyways, worth a try if you want to save yourself a few hundred clicks or just find pirates annoying.
This sounds like a good change.
The new naval rank difficulty levels are weird. They didn’t just simply rename them. I was playing on hard before and not everybody I met was “superior” in all three categories. Now on Commodore early game at least I am always the low guy on the pole. Which makes it tough to keep the more aggressive civs off of me.
AI technology research numbers seem to have gotten a really big boost. I am always way behind and of course now nobody wants to do research agreements. Guess I am going back to captain.
Edit: I should say this is only from having played the new 2.02 for the first 25 years or so a few times and it’s only my impression. Apparently there are some mid game AI problems and the “scaling” ai might not be working correctly.
I had similwr, but caught up with/surpassed all but 1 by the end game.
This is a good example of why people have a problem with Stellaris and it’s DLCs. It just shows how unoptimised the game is, especially the DLCs and how many additional problems each new DLC brings before everything else is anywhere close to being “fixed”. I mean in this case we are talking about MAJOR AI problems that exist since v1.0.
The AI in Stellaris has struggled in ways it doesn’t seem to in their other franchises. EU4’s AI continues to see improvements, as does HOI4 (of course with all things AI, there’s always a laundry list of things to improve or that could be better). Both of those games continue to add new features and change the game with the new features they introduce.
I don’t know if it’s because Stellaris’ AI developers aren’t quite up to the level of the other projects or what, but there have been things that it has struggled with that seem like relatively “simple” problems to fix (always an extremely dangerous/ignorant statement to make when it comes to AI :)).
That being said, the lead-in sentence in that post is pretty stupid.
Bonuses to AI at various difficulty is bog-standard in the 4X genre and it doesn’t indicate that Paradox has “started pursuing the wrong path” because they added additional difficulty options to what existed previously.
And despite having a lot of personal gripes with the AI in Stellaris (moreso than their other games), I’d still rank it above most of the contemporaries in the market. It’s a pretty frequent gripe of mine across the genre, unfortunately. :(
You can’t make good AI when your whole design lacks focus.
No, but when that tactic is used to cover up a lack of effort in fixing A.I. bugs, that’s when people start having issues. Paradox seem to be adding complexity to keep the cash cow rolling which just makes a difficult A.I. programmers job almost impossible. Especially when they keep doing sharp 90 degree turns with overall design strategy as rhamorim points out.
Well, there is added complexity, but I’m wondering if the issue is just not budgeting enough dev time for AI. Many of the things mentioned in that post look like low-hanging fruit.
Agreed, if they can be fixed by mods they’re simple enough. He did mention a few hard coded problems though that he couldn’t fix such as the AI Scrap Loop.
As someone who came to the game fresh with 2.0 (got it in a bundle, never loaded it up largely based on Tom’s review) I feel pretty enthusiastic about it. It’s captured my imagination in a way not a lot of other 4x’s or space games have. I have one “big” solo game going that’s just about to reach the crisis phase, but mainly I’ve been playing multi.
I’m fortunate to have a bunch of gaming pals who have all gotten into it post-2.0, and we’re having a blast. Multi really lets the RP potential (if you’re into that kind of thing) shine. Half the time we’re trading stories and laughing/in awe of the crazy shit happening to us.
I don’t have an issue with the DLC. The DLC wars were fought and lost, what, a decade and a half ago? And I know other’s have made this point already, but at least paradox isn’t gating core gameplay elements to paid DLC. All it takes is a brief google search to figure out what’s essential or easily passed up.
[and in case anyone doesn’t feel like googling:
https://stellaris.paradoxwikis.com/Downloadable_content
and in case anyone doesn’t feel like clicking:
-Plantoids adds art (skipable);
-Leviathans adds space monsters and traders (cool, but not essential);
-Uptopia adds “megastructures” (space habitats, ring worlds, etc.) and hive minds (skipable);
-Synthetic Dawn adds robits (essential, imo);
-Humanoids adds a new ship design (skipable);
-Apocalypse adds capital ships, deathstars, advanced barbarians (jury still out);
The categorizing (“species pack,” “story pack”) is a little opaque. And I don’t understand why something as essential as Synthetic Dawn is half the price of Utopia/Apocalypse, but whatever.]
Last weekend I stayed up all night twice (to 5 am and 7 am, respectively) playing Stellaris with friends. I haven’t done that in over ten years. I saw the fucking sunrise out of my office window with that amazing soundtrack going in the background, and I didn’t feel like I had wasted a minute of my time.