Something new related to Stellaris coming:
I’m too lazy to read these specific ones, but I know a lot of Paradox DLC get bad reviews because people think they’re money grabs.
Which is funny, because the Lions of the North for EU4 is the most money-grabby feeling for me($15 for a bunch of mission trees and unit sprites) and is sitting at Very Positive! Whereas a much cheaper event pack for CK3 got review bombed like crazy despite including a bunch of content you’d actually experience in every playthrough.
The Paradox reviews that crack me up are the ones where a poster breaks down how much the DLC “should” cost based on metrics they made up. They go something like:
But, in fairness, things like species, music, and sprite packs are kind of money grabs since they basically change the look of things without meaningfully altering gameplay. To each their own, but I’d rather spend my money on features and additions…
Lions of the North would have been better as $10. Yet, in another sense I think it is much better for the consumer than usual EU4 DLCs.
Everything it adds is so transparent and understandable. It adds mission trees, events, sprites, etc. for specific countries. Any EU4 player can think about whether they want to play a few runs in Scandinavia/Poland in the near future, gauge how many hours of entertainment that is, then figure out if that is worth $15 to them or not. If not, there’s a free update with goodies that apply to any country.
Compare that with a DLC that adds the “glory” mechanic, or “new strategic interactions with your vassals!” or whatever. It is much harder to figure out what that is or whether it will increase your enjoyment or longevity of the game, and whether it actually ruins balance or AI somehow and should be avoided like the plague.
I think that the reason for the high rating is more for the patch that came with it. Game speed and AI behavior were much improved and hard for people who bought it to tell what came with the expansion and what was included in the patch.
That being said. here is my analysis based on features A, B, C, etc…NOT!
Can anyone comment on whether the lithoids DLC is now worth it after the recent updates?
Awesome. I’m due for another binge of this.
Those are some really nice improvements. The Custodian Team remains the MVP for Stellaris. Every single Paradox grand strategy game should be following their example.
Here’s the overview, to save a click:
The forum post goes into more detail on these, without going into full patch-notes mode.
For a while now we’ve been aware of some issues with fleet combat, mainly that:
Artillery Battleships dominate the late-game Disengagement mechanics favor artillery battleships Destroyers and Cruisers have extremely limited uses once the next ship size is unlocked Command Limits are ineffective Doomstacks aren’t funThe last two combat issues were deemed out of scope for this rework and may be explored in future updates.
On the one hand, the way Stellaris does combat with stacks of ships smashing into each other and fighting without further player input is fundamentally broken and if they tinker with roles and balance for the next decade it still won’t make it any better. On the other hand, players complained when Victoria 3 tried a new approach, so maybe we’re stuck.
I don’t know what counts as worth it. It adds a bit more variety to species, but Lithoids don’t play all that different from other species. It’s a small amount of money for a small amount of content.
I mean, is it meaningful or well-done?
I don’t think I’d prefer a system that had player input, TBH. That’s just not the scale of the game. I think that visually it just becomes a furball and while it’s fun to look at, I can’t get any feedback out of it. I think a more fleshed out battle report after the fact would help, and possibly some kind of method where the battle was represented in phases, with a UI that said “current phase: closing with enemy. battleships: action: bombard. targeting enemy X with 20 accuracy, targeted by Y with 10 evasion” or whatever. IIRC Vicky2 had something like that for naval battles but it wasn’t very fleshed out.
Not very meaningful, well-done for what it is.
That’s what I mean, it’s a system with a detailed tactical layer in a game where the player can’t (and shouldn’t) do tactics. There’s that Sid Meier (I think?) quote about the game designer having more fun than the player and here we get all these weapons and defenses interacting with each other like in Master of Orion 2 but it’s the just the computer playing against itself.
So we get a million different ways to build a fleet and none of them feel like they matter because they don’t affect the strategic level at which we’re fighting the war. If Paradox wants to make wars interesting to play, throw that stuff in the garbage and let the player make more strategic decisions.
I think decisions about fleet composition can definitely affect the strategic level. Previously those decisions were pretty simple as the optimal composition would just wreck everything.
Hopefully with the new patch there is more room to design your fleets to counter your opponents. That would make information about enemy fleet composition more valuable. If ship refuting were more limited then build strategy could be fairly interesting.
It would be very hard to get real strategy out of this. Optimizing the true combat power of ships is an obtuse math puzzle, and tailoring them to fight particular enemies isn’t that interesting in practice- if I know my enemy uses missiles I should use point defense weapons, I’m not really solving some strategic dilemma.
What would strategic gameplay look like? Maybe giving ships limited range so we can choose between a powerful fleet that is mostly defensive and a weaker one that can go far into enemy territory. Or make strategic resources actually rare and in short supply so that attacking their production can cripple an opponent. But there’s no point in another +5 to beam weapon range or whatever for the AI playing Homeworld while I watch.
I think fleet composition can be an interesting strategic choice if:
- There are meaningful trade-offs in fleet composition - no single dominant composition
- Getting good information about enemy fleet compositions comes at a significant cost but isn’t impossible. Ideally you’d get the information from spying and waiting until you are actually at war is not ideal because…
- Fleet composition can’t be changed quickly. Ideally you’d have to think ahead of time about who you would need to fight over a longish time horizon and keep tabs on how their fleet composition is evolving. How to counter a ship type may be obvious but how deeply to invest in a particular counter and how to evolve over time to face a shifting set of potential enemies (who are themselves evolving) could be interesting.
Ship customization in Stellaris has always struck me as a system they liked in other games but weren’t sure what to do with in practice. Sword of the Stars was clearly an inspiration for them as they borrowed the varying types of FTL travel from that game. But like ship customization, I don’t think they really knew what to do with it and ultimately decided to yank the entire thing.
For fleet composition to matter in a game like Stellaris, I think there needs to be more to the strategic layer to make it work. Yeah, there’s different weapon and defense types but there’s enough enemy factions that you have to deal with all of them, so you just roll with it. Alternatively, you can make it really easy to switch back and forth but then it just becomes a tedious UI chore to do between each war and doesn’t really offer an interesting decision.
I’d like to have the strategic space be large enough where you could make decisions on what type of fleet to build. A slow and ponderous fleet of battleships effective at winning slugfests and sieging planets or lighter and nimble (or even stealthed) forces that would be effective at raiding infrastructure, disrupting trade, but fare poorly at taking on a defended homeworld or breaking the siege of your planets. That kind of thing. That’s not really possible here, though, because ultimately you need to win those slugfests/sieges. You can’t raid your way to any sort of victory, and the area isn’t large enough for fleets to hide and perform hit and run tactics effectively.
Anyway, to this day Sword of the Stars remains one of the only games where I felt like ship design really added to the enjoyment of the game. You saw a Hiver so you knew what to expect. You saw a Human so you knew what to expect. You had to work with what your tech tree gave you, and ultimately the battles played out tactically where the ship designs could really shine.