1741

It might be they become inefficient and the game fails to communicate the inefficiency in a way I paid attention to, but I´ve had sectors much, much bigger than the direct control limit.

1742

Militaristic gets a nice bonus to it, but it’s a good chunk of Influence outside that. I haven’t played a Militaristic race yet but I always set rivals, and the income is very noticeable. There are either aliens that rival me so I return the favor, or I do it for RP reasons (I’m xenophobic, my neighbors are godless, they enslave people, etc).

1743

Yea, i can see that way. You can rival factions across the galaxy, but barely get any points for it. Neighbors work best. Still don’t like how this ties in to recruiting leaders. Oftentimes i barely have enough points to keep a list full leader considering leader attrition (every 30 years or so) and Influence generation rates (1/2 a year with outposts). I’ll need close to 300 influence over 30 years for 10 leaders, which means i almost can’t spend influence on anything but leaders if i’m only pulling in +1 a month.

1744

Maybe you already know this, but the frontier bases will no longer cost 1 influence a month if you add them to a sector.

1745

One of the races I played was Venerable. While it was expensive and I had to take quite a few maluses, the extra 120 years of life made a huge difference. :) There’s a cheaper version of that as well which I’ve thought about playing with. Luckily for me, when I played a race with a normal lifespan, one of my science vessels found the Tree of Life. The aristocracy of course kept that for themselves instead of sharing it with the people, which added a good 30 years or so to their lifespans for the rest of the game.

1746

I actually hit the influence cap (1000) in my current game, which is crazy, as most of the time I’m hovering around 200 desperately wanting more.

1747

Later in the game I had enough influence at +5 or 6 that I was dropping edicts on all my planets to burn it off and get more happiness, energy, minerals, or what have you. Kind of a neat swing.

1748

No. I didn’'t. If that is the case, then that changes everything. Now I can connect my colonies together instead of a bunch of 1 sector places all over. The next question is, what is the best kind of sector focus? I generally have enough minerals and power. Does research really pay off? What does military do? Build “free” fleets?

I also found out that the auto-designer for ships is terrible. It makes some brain dead decisions. Like not putting shields on any of my ships in lew of armor which just adds HP. Its not even choosing good weapons.

Also is there a way to see the current war score and goals? There is a war progressing and I have no idea what the goals are and the current war score.

1749

Keep in mind that the “frontier outposts don’t pay the influence cost when in a sector” is supposedly a bug that might get fixed in a near future patch.

1750

The Armageddon astroid event was kind of a fun. It was a good thing I had a sizable fleet nearby. I am not sure why that brought a smile to my face but it did!

1751

That was very encouraging feedback from the developers. My $.02 to other developers the time spent writing this was time well spent.

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.

I figured they’d have to be tone deaf not to hear all the complaints about the sector.
I like the honest admission about mid game. Many have expressed to the generally feeling of the midgame being watching like paint drying right before the system performance bogs down into the unplayable stage. So it is nice to hear they aren’t surprised.

“CLARKE” HIGHLIGHTS
Fixes to the Ethic Divergence and Convergence issues. Currently, Pops tend to get more and more neutral (they lose Ethics, but rarely gain new ones.)
The End of Combat Summary. This screen looks bad and also doesn’t tell you what you need to know in order to revise your ship designs, etc.
Sector Management GUI: There are many issues with this, and we will try to get most of them fixed.
Diplomacy GUI issues. This includes the Diplomatic Pop-Ups when other empires contact you, but also more and better looking Notifications, and more informative tooltips on wars, etc.
AI improvements: Notably the Sector AI, but also plenty of other things. This kind of work is never “finished”…
Myriads of bug fixes and smaller GUI improvements.
Late game crises bugs. There were some nasty bugs in there, blocking certain subplots and various surprising developments.
EDIT: Remaining Performance Issues. We know about them; they might even be hotfixed before Clarke.
EDIT: Corvettes are too good.

The nice thing about Stellaris is that isn’t missing any features other than arguable diplomacy and trade (hell I’d argue that they could cut a bunch and it might be a better game.) Trade and more diplomacy are perfectly reasonable expansions.

I’m happy with the concept of sectors. There is more micromanagement at planet level in Stellaris than in MOO, way more than in Stellars or GalCiv. So the thought of having to have 200 planets is just crazy. I understand that the AI isn’t going to be as good as I’m managing the planets,and I’m willing to happily accept 10% and even 25% production penalty, but the current AI is unacceptable.

I totally disagree about not having victory conditions. This is a Grand Strategic 4x space game, it is not Kerbal Space Program or Sims in Space. I want achievable victory conditions, and especially an alternative to control 40% of the planets. A diplomatic victory, conquest, and hopefully a tech/build a project victory. Now I’m sure just like in all the Civs, Moo, Sots, GalCiv, Endless Legends … I fully expect that I’ll only play out a very small number of games to the bitter end.

1752

These wo are very different. Traditional Paradox style Grands Strategy has never had victory conditions (just a leaderboard when the timer ends) while traditional 4X games are all about victory conditions (with more min-maxing and less emergent storytelling). They need to choose what they are making. Right now the game is closer to the former, and if it remains so victory conditions seem counterproductive. They could move the game towards a more competitive framework (there´s a lot of that already in there) and then victory conditions would be interesting imho. But they will need to change many systems or add a metric shitload of content to make it work (because right now the game runs out of content about 10 hours before the victory conditions can be met).

1753

Strategy games purporting to be about “emergent storytelling” are the worst thing i’ve ever seen because it makes it so the design ends up being less self-contained, expecting roleplaying to fill in for actually thinking about the incentives that a game mechanic causes.

1754

HOI series definitely has victory conditions and you could customize them in the expansions for HOI. I thought so did Victoria II but I could be wrong its been a long time since I played it. I do agree with you that right now there is a lot of work to make victory conditions meaningful.

1755

My fleets are either FIGHTING, or split amongst 20 different ports “upgrading”. They spend so long upgrading that I often research new tech and add it to the design before they’ve finished. It doesn’t help that the fleet is either “upgraded” or “not upgraded”. It doesn’t seem to do a ship at a time, so you can’t just stop mid way.

I don’t know if this is intentional – i.e. to promote suiciding your ships and simply building new ones, or because the game is basically early access.

1756

Yeah they should definitely upgrade one at a time. Also, higher level starbases should have more upgrade capacity (along with more defenses).

1757

Well I just won my first game. It was happy xenophile human, and I did it getting the 40% condition. Learned a few things:

  • normal difficulty must be their easy, or I was really lucky, or both
  • while I saw some bugs, none were game stopping, but I think that was luck
  • the bugs I did feel the most were ones that shut off quests, and that hurt fun
  • planets controlled by vassals count
  • planets controlled by alliance/federation allies do not count
  • stacks of doom are a thing
  • the AI gets more docile once you have many standing fleets
  • a happy hippy lovefest of many many species gets hard at that size
  • the AI isn’t always deep, but where it does have interesting trade-offs, it isn’t obvious without documentation right now

I don’t the mind the (lack of) difficulty. Base out of the box normal difficulty seems to be accessible, and was a smooth learning experience. It has higher difficulties for challenge, normal is for learning/sandboxing. While the AI got docile, the other federation did set up a trap trying to reclaim a planet I’d stranded. Diplomacy does seem to feature in the 40% planet control scenario. Forcing other small, breakaway or newly “created by wars of liberation goals” nations to submit as your vassal diplomatically was hard, but very much a part of getting this. I never wardeced anyone, and failed the on time I tried to taunt a neighbor into deccing me. So I think it is as passivist as you can get.

It really feels like 40% win goal is for xenophile and stomp goal is for xenophobe. But with the (bug?) on species being hated if you self mod genes, combined with bugs in species drift, xenophobe will feel more hampered. It will probably be less fun too, as fleet combat is an AI weak spot, but government, gene modification, uplift and inter-species relations within and outside your own empire seems well fleshed out. So the xenophobes don’t get to play with most of the better fleshed out AI systems, only the weak ones! Though xenophobe can probably avoid most of the worst sector bugs by going one big sector cheese since acquisitions via conquest are more likely to be contiguous than acquisitions via diplomacy. So now to try a xenophobe for this weeks spare time project …

1758

The good: There is a tech that gives a starbase improvement for faster and cheaper upgrades. The bad: It is also nowhere near good enough with the stacks of doom fleets you end up managing past midpoint.

1759

I think that goes for things like Starbases as well. You can upgrade their defenses, just not enough!

BTW, really impressive you won via 40% as a space hippy!

1760

There’s a 1.03 beta hotfix up, sounds like it includes some performance optimizations for anyone who is struggling on that front:

This Hotfix contains:

  • Fixed Planet capital modifier being spammed.
  • Fixed CTD caused by ground combat side containing invalid armies.
  • Fixed issue with disabling everything in Outliner would render it unusable.
  • Fixed issue with orbital bombardment of swarm invaders.
  • Removed shortcut from “help” button to avoid colliding with fleet “hold” shortcut.
    [B]- Performance optimizations caused by huge amounts of resource stations.
  • Ship designer: List of designs is sorted according to ship sizes.
    [/B]

The last two are the ones that seemed of note to me.