Stellaris - Paradox new sci-fi grand strategy game

[Ibn Sina]

Stellaris decline into shit began when (((Wiz))) the retard took control of the game and started imposing his vision on how people should play the game. By removing options people paid before, streamlining everything. Before 2.0 the game actually had a workable AI and crises that actually work, not a crises that fizzles out and die after it conquers some territory. Wiz actively took the game to retard land territory. All the shit, bugs and micromanagement hell you are witnessing now is a direct result of his fuckary, before he was removed or was moved into another game.

 

[Average Manatee]

Aye, remember when the justification for the hyperlanes changes was that performance and AI would be better?

 

[lightbane]

It's always a madman that ruins everything for everyone, it seems.

 

[Norfleet]

change your empire accordingly.
one of my proudest creations (through mods): a society of masochists with extremely happy slaves and a very unhappy minority of rulers, because they all like the whip way more than the office desk.
find your own fun, larping is the limit.

That used to be vanilla in the old days, where you could create a combination of empire and ethics that made people happier when enslaved than when free. Also, that awesome whipping noise.

 

[Ravielsk]

Stellaris decline into shit began when (((Wiz))) the retard took control of the game and started imposing his vision on how people should play the game. By removing options people paid before, streamlining everything. Before 2.0 the game actually had a workable AI and crises that actually work, not a crises that fizzles out and die after it conquers some territory. Wiz actively took the game to retard land territory. All the shit, bugs and micromanagement hell you are witnessing now is a direct result of his fuckary, before he was removed or was moved into another game.

I am repeating myself at this point but the real problem is the community surrounding the game. The changes made after 2.0 were retarded but you know what? It could have been salvaged if the community actually stood up and said something about it. Instead you got armies of shills(some no-doubt PDX employees) proclaiming that anyone disliking anything about the changes must a troll or a hater. Even with the recent population growth changes which are just objectively stupid(for a game where the main strat is to spam pops) you can find armies of clowns arguing that its fine. I have posted examples before so I am not going to repost them here but the community is like a rock dragging the game down.
Compare that to Oblivion where the community had no trouble admitting that level scaling was a terrible feature and so at least moders have bothered to fix it in several different ways. With Stellaris that is not happening just because it would be a lot of work for a community that would at best hate you for it.

 

[what am i doing]

IMO the decline began when they replaced the Collectivist - Individualist axis with Authoritarian - Egalitarian.

(Well, technically the decline began when they decided to go with procgen over a handmade galaxy, but post-release decline came with that ethics change).

 

[thesecret1]

It could have been salvaged if the community actually stood up and said something about it. Instead you got armies of shills(some no-doubt PDX employees) proclaiming that anyone disliking anything about the changes must a troll or a hater.

That's because it is by design. Paradox only considers its community to be people on its forums, and they curate it in a way that those who dissent too much (and it's really not hard to dissent too much) will get banned for toxicity. Look at their community rules or however the fuck its called, they basically tell you you're gonna get banned if you don't toe the fucking line. So the community cannot "stand up and say something" about it, because any individuals that would have done this were weeded out long ago. Just read some of their posts sometimes, you can really feel the submissiveness oozing out of it, and when they do try to criticize anything, they need to sugarcoat it to ridiculous levels, and even then they come off as afraid for having voiced it.

 

[Ibn Sina]

That is so true. Paradox has perfectly cultivated such a passive and cucked fanbase for stellaris. I could not think of any paradox game with such a meek fan base whom seem happy to gurgle whatever piss paradox throws their way. The only place where paradox anal game design gets shitted on is on the steam forums unironically.

 

[Ravielsk]

That is so true. Paradox has perfectly cultivated such a passive and cucked fanbase for stellaris. I could not think of any paradox game with such a meek fan base whom seem happy to gurgle whatever piss paradox throws their way. The only place where paradox anal game design gets shitted on is on the steam forums unironically.

Still PDX has paid shills on steam to cover for them. Its the same two or three guys who always show up minutes after any negative post shows up and always repeat the same script. Also steam moderators are absolute cucks and close threads the second the argument goes beyond "wholesome disagreement".

It could have been salvaged if the community actually stood up and said something about it. Instead you got armies of shills(some no-doubt PDX employees) proclaiming that anyone disliking anything about the changes must a troll or a hater.

That's because it is by design. Paradox only considers its community to be people on its forums, and they curate it in a way that those who dissent too much (and it's really not hard to dissent too much) will get banned for toxicity. Look at their community rules or however the fuck its called, they basically tell you you're gonna get banned if you don't toe the fucking line. So the community cannot "stand up and say something" about it, because any individuals that would have done this were weeded out long ago. Just read some of their posts sometimes, you can really feel the submissiveness oozing out of it, and when they do try to criticize anything, they need to sugarcoat it to ridiculous levels, and even then they come off as afraid for having voiced it.

By "saying something" I meant being active outside of PDX forums. There are other venues where Stellaris and grand strategies can be discussed and they should have gone there, posted some videos on Youtube. Maybe refused to buy the new DLC or atleast wait a few days/weeks after launch to put some heat under their asses.
Instead it took like 2 years before a singular Youtuber called out the deteriorating performance after 2.2.

Spoiler

Which suddenly made it a priority problem, despite it officially not existing prior to that video.

 

[Average Manatee]

By "saying something" I meant being active outside of PDX forums. There are other venues where Stellaris and grand strategies can be discussed and they should have gone there, posted some videos on Youtube. Maybe refused to buy the new DLC or atleast wait a few days/weeks after launch to put some heat under their asses.
Instead it took like 2 years before a singular Youtuber called out the deteriorating performance after 2.2.

Spoiler

Which suddenly made it a priority problem, despite it officially not existing prior to that video.

A "priority problem" that they "fixed" by fucking up the pop growth system in the dumbest manner possible.

Not that it's actually fixed. I've heard people say it is but I can't tell a difference. Maybe +/- 20% or something but Stellaris needs 10x that to be adequate. I'm 95% sure that a large proportion of whatever performance was gained by taking an axe to pop numbers was lost by all the new bullshit added and general engine degradation over time due to code bloat.

 

[Lone Wolf]

Individual pops add far too many elements that need constant checks by the game (i.e. calculations) to be worthwhile.

The job management system is annoying and unnecessary and quickly boils down to mindlessness after the early game. In SEIII/IV, a megastructure basically had four dynamic values (like every other habitat): population capacity, construction points, intelligence points and research points. That's it. All the game had to do was check four values every turn, per planet. With Stellaris, the game has to check up to several hundred values (pops, production, jobs, crime, stability) per 'month', per planet.

I'm actually going to go and check GOG to see if SEIII can run on a Windows 10 64 bit system. I like Stellaris, but the gameplay starts crawling 125-150 years in, and I've never finished a game.

 

[Nirvash]

Individual pops add far too many elements that need constant checks by the game (i.e. calculations) to be worthwhile.

The job management system is annoying and unnecessary and quickly boils down to mindlessness after the early game. In SEIII/IV, a megastructure basically had four dynamic values (like every other habitat): population capacity, construction points, intelligence points and research points. That's it. All the game had to do was check four values every turn, per planet. With Stellaris, the game has to check up to several hundred values (pops, production, jobs, crime, stability) per 'month', per planet.

I'm actually going to go and check GOG to see if SEIII can run on a Windows 10 64 bit system. I like Stellaris, but the gameplay starts crawling 125-150 years in, and I've never finished a game.

Pretty sure we already had games with way more "checks" running fine on a pentium decades ago.

We don't need the nasa supercomputer to run checks and variables of a couple thousands pop, stellaris code is just complete garbage.

 

[Storyfag]

Individual pops add far too many elements that need constant checks by the game (i.e. calculations) to be worthwhile.

The job management system is annoying and unnecessary and quickly boils down to mindlessness after the early game. In SEIII/IV, a megastructure basically had four dynamic values (like every other habitat): population capacity, construction points, intelligence points and research points. That's it. All the game had to do was check four values every turn, per planet. With Stellaris, the game has to check up to several hundred values (pops, production, jobs, crime, stability) per 'month', per planet.

I'm actually going to go and check GOG to see if SEIII can run on a Windows 10 64 bit system. I like Stellaris, but the gameplay starts crawling 125-150 years in, and I've never finished a game.

Pretty sure we already had games with way more "checks" running fine on a pentium decades ago.

We don't need the nasa supercomputer to run checks and variables of a couple thousands pop, stellaris code is just complete garbage.

Indeed, a nasa supercomputer would likely not suffice to run Stellaris smoothly.

 

[Ravielsk]

Pretty sure we already had games with way more "checks" running fine on a pentium decades ago.

We don't need the nasa supercomputer to run checks and variables of a couple thousands pop, stellaris code is just complete garbage.

The problem is that the engine Stellaris uses is incapable of supporting a game of this scale. The Clausewitz engine was made to run on Windows 2000 with CPUs that were under 1Ghz in performance. which is a feature that persist in the engine to this day. It effectively cannot run on more than one core and even then it usually does not max out that core. So you might have a massive AMD threadripper in your machine but Stellaris will still only utilize a fraction of its total performance. They used to have a pinned thread on steam forums explaining how the game "totally can do multithreading its just real complicated, ok" which basically revealed that 99% of the game runs on core0 and the rest might sometimes be send to the other cores.
Over the years they have done little to fix up the engine, for example when they switched the game to 64-bit executable they still somehow managed to keep 32-bit a addresses in it so for a while Stellaris had a 64-bit executable that effectively behaved like a 32-bit one. Not sure if they ever fully fixed that but it would not shock me if they did not.
Then there is the fact that the game runs in this weird semi-software mode where everything is loaded into the RAM and somehow even graphical elements that should go through the GPU seem to be still handled by the CPU so that further degrades performance.

Also the coding solutions are just bizarrely hilarious. At one point their pathfinding solution for gateways was literary to basically ping every single gateway and every single system for every single ship individually to determine the optimal path. For pops they had this bizzaro setup where your production and stockpile update only every in-game month but the engine was checking their production every single frame. So basically a script that is supposed to trigger only every say 64000 frames was running on every frame. There is much more but those are the ones that I personally remember.

 

[zapotec]

What game is SEEIII/IV?

 

[Joggerino]

I think its space empires https://af.gog.com/game/space_empires_iv_deluxe?as=1649904300

 

[Norfleet]

The problem is that the engine Stellaris uses is incapable of supporting a game of this scale. The Clausewitz engine was made to run on Windows 2000 with CPUs that were under 1Ghz in performance.

If that were true, why does it run so badly under computers so many times better, even single-core? No, the reason is because the current incarnation is badly written bloatware by people who utilize shovelware coding practices and probably never perform even the most cursory thoughts of run-time complexity in their algorithms.

 

[Average Manatee]

Pretty sure we already had games with way more "checks" running fine on a pentium decades ago.

We don't need the nasa supercomputer to run checks and variables of a couple thousands pop, stellaris code is just complete garbage.

This. Paradox coders are absolutely the worst in the business. According to reports they are paid and treated particularly poorly even for a games company. It should be no wonder that their games get worse all the time in terms of performance. Look at the quality of people they hire, they hired DDRJake on account of being able to stream on twitch and despite promoting him lead developer he quit. I can't imagine how bad it must be to work there, and commensurately how bad the people who will put up with it to keep a job there.

 

[Average Manatee]

Gave Determined Assimilator/Ringworld a try. It's a tad bit busted. Mostly because you can get your energy workers to give 20-22 energy per pop fairly quickly, the actual ringworld districts aren't terribly better than just spamming labs now that you have unlimited build slots. Of course assimilators themselves being OP helps, but a normal empire could conquer almost as quickly (I have 1k influence just sitting there with nothing to use it on). I don't think I've actually lost a single ship all game, I deleted the corvettes and I don't think any cruisers have ever died. Was in the process of colonizing the 2nd ringworld segment too, could probably have had 10k research by 2300.

One of these things is not like the other. One of these things just doesn't belong.

God damn is the AI shit. This is an advanced start GA AI and it's already this far behind in 2283. I mean I could make a dozen fleets, tediously capture every world, then fix their broken worlds and continue until eventually I could fight a disappointing crisis that gets wiped out immediately. But that's like min-maxing punching a baby while also filling out paperwork to legalize your baby punching, except less fun.

 

[zapotec]

The only way to increase naval capacity is to spam anchorage in the starbases?

 

[Ravielsk]

The only way to increase naval capacity is to spam anchorage in the starbases?

Yes and some techs do the same but mostly anchorages.

 

[Storyfag]

The only way to increase naval capacity is to spam anchorage in the starbases?

Soldier jobs too.

 

[TemplarGR]

I don't blame them for using the DLC model, myself. If that's what makes them money and keeps them developing the games, so be it. Its just that these DLCs are so... overpriced for the content they give. Paradox really needs to find a better model, or the only people able to enjoy their games in full will be pirates and the rich.

Problem is, Paradox is not selling you a game, they are selling you the technical pre-alpha of the game, and then they demand regular payments and many years to get the full version. It is a glorified early access model. A game you pay 60$ for should be finished at release, DLCs should only add content and expand the game, not be required to finance the finishing of the game.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[vonAchdorf]

What's the elevator pitch for this game, e.g. compared to CK and EU?