1701

Yeah, in EU4 there’s no way (unless you power play) to win by painting the map, it is about seeing how well you can do in the given time. Because the time is fixed, there’s interesting stuff happening all along the timeline (baked in changes into the mechanics and new mechanics due to technological progress). the game can be slow and force you to wait at times, but it is constantly evolving.

Since the tech tree is normally finite, in an EU4/Vicky there’s a sense of time pressure to avoid falling behind in the tech race, and then the game is over. Here, not so much, since you eventually hover at pretty much equivalent tech levels once you get into the incremental techs.

Meanwhile this game has victory conditions that are far beyond of where the interesting content ends. And no mechanics to prevent blobbing.

1702

I think they should honestly just drop the idea of “winning” in this game. It’s a space empire simulator. You win by playing, surviving and doing stuff. I think a “high score approach” would be better especially for single player. I can’t imagine playing this multi player. My micro monkey on my shoulder would mutiny and then where would I be.

Also in a simulation like this, conquering more than X% (choose to taste but around 20% I would think) of the galaxy should have severe negative feed back signals. You should have vassals defecting, anti-alliances and fallen powers miffed and raiding you.

1703

When you are in an alliance and someone declares wars, is there a way to add your own war goals? I haven’t seen a way to do that. I can view the war goals, but I can’t seem to add any.

I also must say I hate the sector mechanic. At first I was thinking, if they got rid of the adjacency requirement where different planets need to share territory to be in the same sector, then that might be ok. After all “sectors” are just an administrative thing and there is no realistic reason they need to share / overlap territory. However, after more thought the whole mechanic is unrealistic. It is like saying that the USA can only have 5 cities. Also the individual pools of resources for each sector is nuts. I hope there is some mod at some point to fix this.

1704

Isn’t the USA divided into sectors, apart from the capital? On the subject of separate resource pools, I think that’s needed for the AI to work: each sector has a budget where they save up for various items. If one sector was spending other sector’s budgets or worse, spending your budget, it would result in a bunch of race conditions.

I do agree that there are a lot of problems with the sectors though. Handling of strategic resources, the inability to put resources into a sector but not take them out, problems with observation posts and general AI failures – this can make sectors pretty frustrating currently.

1705

Sectors, in the dev diaries, were promised to be solutions to micro-management. But the implementation is terrible and cause more micro-management as you hop around random lists trying to build fleets with starbases you can’t see on your outliner or trying to find your outposts.

For improving sectors, at least thematically, I saw a good suggestion on reddit that I like:

All planets are in a sector, and you directly control the sector capitals. Thus your planet count scales with your sector count. It’s analogous to CK2’s, how as a King you mange Dukes, and let he Dukes manage the Barons.

Of course, that still relies on the baron-tier planets actually building things properly.

I also saw a suggestion about just asking a sector to build you X number of ships, and it sorts it out.

1706

Dev diary is up.

Now, before we begin the expansion cycle in earnest, we will spend the rest of May and June only focusing on bug fixes and free upgrades to the game. We carefully listen to all your feedback, which has already made us alter our priorities a bit. As a veteran designer of our complex historical games, I was anticipating a fair amount of criticism regarding the mid-game in Stellaris compared to that of our historical games, but I was more concerned with the depth of the economy than the relative lack of diplomatic options, for example. I also find much of the feedback on the Sector system interesting; the GUI and AI concerns will receive the highest priority. One area I was not at all surprised to get flak for is the lack of mid-game scripted content, however. We simply took too long getting all the early and late game stuff in, and neglected a whole category of events called “colony events”, which were supposed to be the bread and butter of the mid-game for the Science Ships.

We’ve been digesting and discussing your feedback and how to best go about improving the mid-game to make it more dynamic, both in the short and long run. Let’s start with our short term plans. When the game was released, we had already proceeded to fix a lot of issues. Together with some other pressing issues that have been reported, the plan is to release the 1.1 update - “Clarke” - near the end of May. We will try to cram as much as we can into this update, but the more fundamental stuff will have to wait until the next update (“Asimov”), which is scheduled for the end of June. The “Clarke” patch will mainly be a bug fix and GUI improvement update. Here are some of the highlights…

1707

100% agree!

1708

Something to distribute large ship orders among starbases would be very nice regardless. Also fleet upgrading at some point tends to overload the capacity of a single starbase.

1709

I think that once the game starts to chug, the issue becomes that the AI goes pretty passive everywhere. Up until I hit about 100 colonies the AI empires were constantly doing stuff to one another, but since then there was been very little movement.

I would chalk this up to a bug, I highly doubt it is intended. For example, last night I ran into another fallen empire, this one just sat there like a lump instead of flinging it’s mighty fleets at me when I refused to abandon any of it’s space.

1710

Is it? Sure you have states, 50 of them, not 5. Then states have counties which vary greatly. Then there are cities too. Are these “sectors”? I do no think so. IF they were then the California sector could not interact directly with the Florida sector, nor could the Federal government manage a national park across “sector” boundaries.

On the subject of separate resource pools, I think that’s needed for the AI to work: each sector has a budget where they save up for various items. If one sector was spending other sector’s budgets or worse, spending your budget, it would result in a bunch of race conditions.

I do agree that there are a lot of problems with the sectors though. Handling of strategic resources, the inability to put resources into a sector but not take them out, problems with observation posts and general AI failures – this can make sectors pretty frustrating currently.

I think they should just get rid of the idea of sectors. There is no need to fix them, it is a bad mechanic.

1711

Yes this is needed. Having to manually split up fleets and manually send them to 6 or 8 different starbases is a bit of a chore.

1712

Another thing that struck me during our discussions is that the normal lack of access to the space of other empires makes the game feel more constricted than intended. It limits your options since you can’t really interact much with the galaxy beyond the borders of your empire, and you only tend to concern yourself with your direct neighbors. This is bad for your Science Ships too, of course, since they might not be able to finish some of the grander “quests”. Compare the situation with Europa Universalis, where you usually have access to the oceans and can thus reach most of the world, or Crusader Kings, where you can even move through neutral territory with your armies.

This “there are no oceans” idea was brought up on the Stellaris forums a couple of months ago, and I thought it was one of the more insightful comments about the game. Lack of access means lack of concern, and it shrinks the game world down so much. They will be switching to open borders being the default in the future.

1713

This is nitpicking. Every analogy has flaws and you introduced this one. The US divided into sectors is closer to the actual situation than every city is run from Washington. A polity having an internal structure makes a lot of sense as a mechanic, it’s just that the first implementation has a lot of problems.

1714

I disagree, I like the idea of limited control, sort of like Vassals in CK2. It feels more interesting to me than directly managing everything, and you could give personalities to governors (ala CK2 vassals).

1715

Oh man, I couldn’t disagree more. I think that’s one of the best ideas to hit the 4X genre in… pretty much ever. They currently have issues and they could be implemented better and fleshed out (the rebellious sectors and governors, for example), but I think they’re fundamental to providing content, conflict, and manageability to the mid/late game in the genre.

1716

On this scale, with this much detail on each planet, Stellaris would be utterly unmanageable without sectors. I think they have to stay, for good or for ill.

It works in SotS because your planet is two or three numbers and you have a single resource - cash. Even then, the micromanagement could be annoying on large galaxies.

1717

Yeah, I really like sectors. If they can get the sector AI to work well that’s all I need.

I really like the road map they outline in the diary. The problem I have no is my huge 250 year game is bust because Steam cloud reverted me to 3 days previous (which was a bitter pill to swallow, but I’m the idiot that turned steam cloud saves on for Stellaris). I didn’t have much more to do in that game anyway (I disagree the game should just go forever - I feel like there needs to at least be an end-date and a score or something so I feel good about starting a new game, and not feel like I’ve abandoned my current game) so I was happy to start a new game.

Did a multiplayer game with ShivaX for 4 hours which was a blast, but I think I may hold off now until at least that first patch hits in a bit. I put 40 hours in and enjoyed it a lot, but it’s only going to get better from here, so I don’t want to burn out on it waiting for these awesome sounding patches, either. Plus it won’t be long before Total War Warhammer is out, and I have Uncharted 4 and Doom to play, so not like I’m hurting for ways to waste my free time. :)

1718

“Pop” management/issues probably needs to be fleshed out a bit more. There’s something interesting going on with ideologies here but it seems like they’re not exactly sure where to go with it right now. I like that populations aren’t slavish cogs in an interstellar empire, but I’m not quite sure it’s there yet.

Honestly I think the direction it needs to go is public v private. Is your faction made up of lots of independent actors and your job is just to direct the ‘wave’ or is everything under your direct control?

1719

It is too easy to suppress factions when you are huge, so that’s an issue. Also there are some weird bugs regarding factions and sectors. I consolidated all my sectors into one super-sector, and 2/3rds of my factions disappeared.

Also the only faction that gives me repeated trouble (by sabotage) is a group on one planet agitating for return to the empire that previously controlled them led by one of the pre-sentient native population that cohabitates with them.

1720

Yes, sectors need to become inneficient at above your directly controlable planet number, to force you to have more sectors and maybe more conflict (once they flesh them out). Otherwise, the ntechs to enhance sector numbre are useless.