Stellaris grand strategy space game by Paradox discussy thingy thready thingy

I wouldn’t hate the leader cap if the leaders themselves were interesting at all, but they are literally an exp bar with a couple traits and an age. I realize Stellaris is not and never will be CK2 in space, the scope of Stellaris is really a bit bigger picture than that. But something interesting about them would be nice. Occasionally one of your leaders might ascend to be a Chosen One, or find a Towel (far more rare event than you’d think) and you’ll remember them. But otherwise you roll your eyes when they die and hire a new one.

The new update is looking really amazing though. I know I’ve said it before that the death of the tile system is the best thing that the game could use. Diplomacy is next. I doubt it will all be covered in this next expansion, unfortunately as the scope of these changes seem quite massive. It will be quite a ways off because they release a cosmetic pack and a story pack between each expansion generally, and this upcoming expansion I’ll be surprised to see before mid November.

Yeah, with an entire economic rework and who knows what other features (I know trade is among them), a massive expansion to diplomacy probably isn’t likely. Maybe we will get a bone or two to shore up the trade aspect, if nothing else.

Here’s info on the Galactic Market. Next week will be sector and faction info.

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/stellaris-dev-diary-125-the-galactic-market.1119230/

It all looks good, though an extra 30% on both ends looks pretty pricey! Looking forward to finding out what they are doing with sectors and factions. Dare I hope for some interesting internal politics?

I’m interested in the concept of a civilization with a specialized economy. I think it could open up some interesting gameplay possibilities, especially with civics like Corporate Dominion and stuff like that. They still haven’t discussed Trade yet either, which could add another layer.

I’m really interested in seeing what Sectors and Factions bring. I like both concepts, but the implementation thus far hasn’t lived up anywhere near to the possibilities.

Each segment size 50, no deposit restricts, and no mining.

Also, the infrastructure display has been missing from all the recent screenshots. Maybe infrastructure is gone and housing fills that role now?

I’m so glad that mining of ring worlds and habitats is a thing of the past, haha. It always drove me nuts, although I convinced myself it must be some super duper fancy high tech energy-to-matter conversion going on. :)

I don’t mean to sound like I’m dogging on Henrik Fåhraeus because I think he does good work, but I really wish I could see an alternate timeline where Martin Anward was the original designer for Stellaris. Does the release version in that timeline suffer from a lot of the same problems, or are a lot of them avoided? Because Martin has been nothing short of phenomenal ever since he took over, but I am curious how much of that is lessons learned from 1.0 vs initial disagreements like the different FTL types.

Yeah it would be really interesting to know. I am really happy with the direction Martin has been taking the game. I feel like the original Stellaris hinted at a lot of great concepts, but the actual game was mostly lacking mechanics that could support those concepts. I feel like they are in the process of putting these supporting mechanics in place, but there is just a ton of work to do.

Based on the amount of design work required, I don’t think V1.0 of Stellaris was every going to deliver on everything they talked about. However, effort put into the initial tile system, the interaction of 3 FTL systems and some aspects of real-time combat could have gone toward more Grand-Strategy-like features.

I was initially pretty excited by the elements of SotS that they put in the game but I think in the end most of the innovations they tried to borrow from SotS weren’t a good fit for the type of game they wanted to make.

Massive Sector re-work
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/stellaris-dev-diary-126-sectors-and-factions-in-2-2.1120288/

I like the direction of the changes. It seems to set up a lot possible future improvements. Of course, now I just want to have those future improvements, with real sector and faction politics.

Looking forward to finally learning about the trade model next week.

Martin also said on that first page:

Leader cap is gone, leaders cost maintenance instead, with costs scaling to empire size.

The scaling by empire size is a bit strange to me. A larger empire should have more energy available for leaders, but should also NEED more leaders (more admirals for fleets, more governors). I guess the idea is to impose a governance penalty for large empires so they just aren’t as well-governed (more sectors without governors) and aren’t as well led (more fleets without admirals, more armies without generals).

I guess the proportions in play are going to determine how that works out. If Empire B is twice the size of Empire A but only pays a 25% premium for leaders, that’s not so bad.

Im guessing it is to give an advantage to tall empires?

I don’t know if it will be an advantage, but I think it will probably be a way of slowing the snowballing that occurs in these games.

I realized just after posting we’re likely saying the same thing, just in different ways. Sorry, I haven’t had much sleep!

Looks like trade flows to the capital?

I like the overall setup and the need to divert naval forces to patrol trade lanes. I think this will add some interesting structure to your empire. Overall I’m fairly happy.

I was hoping for something a tad more dynamic, like the potential for trade exists in space and between empires, and you are trying entice the trade to flow through your systems as much as possible (sort of a hybrid of the system they are going with and the system in EU4).

He added a note to the bottom of the dev diary that there is going to be trade between empires, but they’re not ready to talk about the mechanics of how that works. Internal trade only for this DD.