Stellaris - Paradox new sci-fi grand strategy game

[IDtenT]

Oh, I thought it was just real time all the time in multiplayer. Everyone being able to pause sounds... rough.

I can see how that works better for a co-op setup than a competitive multiplayer game.

In real terms nobody pauses. It's an adjustment, but you get used to it. The prevailing rule is to agree on a speed setting.

What about those messages where it automatically pauses the game because you need to make some kind of decision? Is that just turned off? Or does it just pause for everyone?

No pause. By the time most people play multiplayer they already know the larp. It can be overwhelming / annoying, but fast isn't nearly as disorientating as fastest.

 

[Tyrr]

New patch today. Highlight:

* Added the ability to pick your main species' gender during game setup.

No more assuming!

 

[IDtenT]

It's great if it means I can delete wimminz from my gaems.

 

[Morblot]

It's 75% off now. I assume it's not worth it?

 

[IDtenT]

BUY IT AND JOIN THE NEXT CODEXIA GAME!!!

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

a trait which allows a species to specialize on a type of world

if only different planets were actually different...

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

i mean, let me rant again, i know i said this already but it can't be stressed enough. these aliens can build spaceships big as planets, ensnare black holes, bombard billions of people into thin paste in a matter of days, tailor their own genome, fuse their minds into machines, and yet they're totally lost when it's time to turn the ac on or wear heavier clothes. because habitable planets differ for biomes, they're *ALL* *PERFECTLY* habitable. but if the weather is maybe hotter than usual they might stop working (understandable) and fucking (what the fucking fuck?!?! please anyone tell this to africa). it's not a matter of gravity, atmosphere composition or pressure, it's just weather.
spit all you want on moo3, but it got the habitability and terraforming part perfectly right.

 

[Non-Edgy Gamer]

i mean, let me rant again, i know i said this already but it can't be stressed enough. these aliens can build spaceships big as planets, ensnare black holes, bombard billions of people into thin paste in a matter of days, tailor their own genome, fuse their minds into machines, and yet they're totally lost when it's time to turn the ac on or wear heavier clothes. because habitable planets differ for biomes, they're *ALL* *PERFECTLY* habitable. but if the weather is maybe hotter than usual they might stop working (understandable) and fucking (what the fucking fuck?!?! please anyone tell this to africa). it's not a matter of gravity, atmosphere composition or pressure, it's just weather.
spit all you want on moo3, but it got the habitability and terraforming part perfectly right.

Yes. And the most frustrating thing is that it's such an easy fix.

The only reason why I think they didn't make planets and races radically different from the start is due to all the balance work it'd require.

As it was, they had 4 different types of FTL, but they eventually streamlined that into one due to balance laziness. Sad.

 

[Average Manatee]

i mean, let me rant again, i know i said this already but it can't be stressed enough. these aliens can build spaceships big as planets, ensnare black holes, bombard billions of people into thin paste in a matter of days, tailor their own genome, fuse their minds into machines, and yet they're totally lost when it's time to turn the ac on or wear heavier clothes. because habitable planets differ for biomes, they're *ALL* *PERFECTLY* habitable. but if the weather is maybe hotter than usual they might stop working (understandable) and fucking (what the fucking fuck?!?! please anyone tell this to africa). it's not a matter of gravity, atmosphere composition or pressure, it's just weather.
spit all you want on moo3, but it got the habitability and terraforming part perfectly right.

And despite the weather outside doing that, a whole planet of these is 100% habitability

Yes, basically a gaia world. A paradise where every species of the universe can coexist.

The only reason why I think they didn't make planets and races radically different from the start is due to all the balance work it'd require.

Paradox has a really fucking weird relationship with balance. On the one hand its an SP game with an AI that is incredibly shit and there's tons of exploits and balance issues anyway. On the other hand they pretend its not and continually "balance" things like Stellaris is a competitive MP game.

 

[Corbin Dallas Multipass]

i mean, let me rant again, i know i said this already but it can't be stressed enough. these aliens can build spaceships big as planets, ensnare black holes, bombard billions of people into thin paste in a matter of days, tailor their own genome, fuse their minds into machines, and yet they're totally lost when it's time to turn the ac on or wear heavier clothes. because habitable planets differ for biomes, they're *ALL* *PERFECTLY* habitable. but if the weather is maybe hotter than usual they might stop working (understandable) and fucking (what the fucking fuck?!?! please anyone tell this to africa). it's not a matter of gravity, atmosphere composition or pressure, it's just weather.
spit all you want on moo3, but it got the habitability and terraforming part perfectly right.

Yes. And the most frustrating thing is that it's such an easy fix.

The only reason why I think they didn't make planets and races radically different from the start is due to all the balance work it'd require.

As it was, they had 4 different types of FTL, but they eventually streamlined that into one due to balance laziness. Sad.

I only remember 3 ftl types. But yeah, ultimate and literal decline.

They do love their pretend balance for the sake of all those stellaris tournaments i guess. And what easier way to balance 3 things than to remove 2 of them? Imagine the success Starcraft could have been if they just realized all they had to do was remove terrans and zerg.

 

[Non-Edgy Gamer]

I only remember 3 ftl types. But yeah, ultimate and literal decline.

3 starters, the forth was the advanced jumpdrive text that was clearly superior to all of them, so it was something you researched to unlock.

You could also find the tech in the wreckage of enemy ships and reverse engineer it if you killed enough of them.

They do love their pretend balance for the sake of all those stellaris tournaments i guess. And what easier way to balance 3 things than to remove 2 of them? Imagine the success Starcraft could have been if they just realized all they had to do was remove terrans and zerg.

I miss the good old days when imbalance was rightly seen as interesting and not a high crime to be avoided at all costs.

The three different starter techs had different playstyles. Strengths and weaknesses. And if you made one of the ancient races with jumpdrive tech mad, they'd suddenly (literally) teleport behind you and wreck you.

Now everything is the same. Boring.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

Yeah that's something that I noticed about planets; they are all basically the same except for special resource deposits and habitability, which doesn't even matter because of terraforming or hab tech upgrades.
Compare this to Endless Space where planets are different and do give you different resources depending on class, and if up to you if you want to make the planet more habitable or more productive. That's not even getting into anomalies, which are common and mean something as opposed to Stellaris's anomalies which are uncommon and don't really
matter.
"Oh no, this planet with 3 mining districts will give me 25% less minerals! What am I going to do!"

Post-Apocalyptic + Fanatic Purifier is pretty fun. You just nuke the world into oblivion and settle it, and you don't even have to give up a normal planetary preference.
But once again, Tomb Worlds really don't matter. They retain all of the districts from when they were normal, they just have a low habitability score which can be circumvented easily. Stuff like radiation, mutants, whatever isn't really represented.
Give me something like a chance for pops to spawn with deformities, dammit.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

Compare this to Endless Space where

where everything doesn't matter either, with the extremely limited number of systems with an even more limited amount of habitable planets, you're forced to colony every single one of them. it costs almost nothing after all. even civ4 got it better (both vanilla, i still regard civ3 above, even if by now i completely forgot why), with cities which must pull their weight or you're going broke.

Give me something like a chance for pops to spawn with deformities, dammit.

there actually is one, but not in the form you're hoping for.

 

[Average Manatee]

Yeah the differentiation on a lot of stuff is basically cosmetic. Technically, dry worlds are on average able to provide slightly more energy districts, cold ones minerals, and wet ones food. This is still 100% up to RNG, it's just a slight nudge towards the deposits that spawn. Except no one ever runs out of district slots. If you have 5 frozen worlds you'll never actually use 100% of those mineral districts because its unnecessary, it'd produce too much, and it's not like you mine minerals more EFFICIENTLY on cold worlds, you can just stuff more miners there (but you don't because half your population needs to work other jobs anyway). So the whole climate thing basically doesn't exist except to give a penalty to x worlds if y races inhabit them. But you ignore that penalty anyway and settle everything because it's still free economic growth to have more planets. For all the game cares the climates may as well be divided into cookie planets, cotton candy planets, and M&M™ brand chocolate candy planets.

Funny enough the tech system IS imbalanced, but in only one way: neutron launchers and bigger ships rape everything. And there's no way to work around it, which turns the whole game into 1. an economic spreadsheet simulator of who can generate more research quicker, 2. An RNG fest because tech is completely random, and 3. A 200% more autistic spreadsheet simulator because tech isn't actually completely random but instead operates by absurdly stupid and complex hidden rules that requires you to literally memorize all of the game's tech files and do tons of micro constantly to overcome and get certain techs way earlier than anyone else.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

Yeah the tech tree system is a little wonky.
Not only is it random but it also involves prerequisites which the game doesn't tell you about because it doesn't use a proper tech tree like a normal 4x game.

Anyone else feel like there are too many jobs but not enough pops?
If I don't forbid clerk jobs I feel like I won't have enough workers to do something useful. It feels kind of silly.

 

[Average Manatee]

Clerks are 100% useless and should always be disabled ASAP. If this causes pops to be unemployed that means you need to make new jobs. It's basically a filler job that barely creates net resources but if you don't disable it you don't get a warning when you run out of other jobs.

Even if you make a "trade" empire, all your trade should come from the merchants who are like 5x as good as clerks. If you build the building that gives 5 clerk jobs and 1 merchant job then it's because you want 1 merchant and you disable the 5 clerk jobs.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

Clerks are 100% useless and should always be disabled. If this causes pops to be unemployed that means you need to make new jobs. It's basically a filler job that barely creates net resources but if you don't disable it you don't get a warning when you run out of other jobs.

Yep, and I always disable them. Even afterwords I feel like I need more pops, especially if I want to expand like how the game seems to want me to and especially if I start delving into arcologies and ring worlds.
Am I supposed to just have a really well developed core sector and a bunch of shitty frontier worlds that only produce pops? I don't get it.

 

[Average Manatee]

Clerks are 100% useless and should always be disabled. If this causes pops to be unemployed that means you need to make new jobs. It's basically a filler job that barely creates net resources but if you don't disable it you don't get a warning when you run out of other jobs.

Yep, and I always disable them. Even afterwords I feel like I need more pops, especially if I want to expand like how the game seems to want me too.
Am I supposed to just have a really well developed core sector and a bunch of shitty frontier worlds that only produce pops? I don't get it.

Every world produces pops, so the more worlds you have the better. But yes, pop growth is heavily constrained by game mechanics. It takes a long time to "get ahead" even if you colonize a few more planets than another empire. The only way to quickly acquire pops is to conquer them.

And that's another thing weird about Stellaris, conquering pops produces virtually no issues with integrating them unless you are one of the specific empires that outright forces you to purge them. Run an authoritarian slaver empire? You can enslave whole planets and the happiness and stability stays fine because your rulers work the ruler jobs and the slavery policy massively weights the planetary happiness and stability towards rulers. Run an egalitarian empire? Everyone gets along just fine, even if you conquer pops that were just working in a fanatic purifier empire that was hell bent on eradicating all life in the galaxy your pops and theirs just start hugging each other and working together in harmony as soon as you annex them (-20% happiness penalty for all newly conquered pops IIRC but still, that's basically irrelevant). Basically the only distinction is that some empires have worse opinion towards you depending on which you are but it's fucking irrelevant anyway because all empires in the galaxy can just randomly decide to take the 100% arbitrary step of declaring you their "rival" anyway which makes them automatically hate you.

EDIT: Should also point out that creating robots is really expensive and takes a huge amount of time to pay off even if it is technically increasing your growth rate. It's a fairly dubious investment compared to working something else and spending alloys on ships to conquer with.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

Pops do have a recently conquered modifier that decreases their happiness, but yeah after that expires they get along fine. Ethics and factions just don't matter.
Apparently they are going to add internal strife in the game, but I don't know what that's going to be.

 

[Average Manatee]

Pops do have a recently conquered modifier that decreases their happiness.

Thing about that is that it's still pretty irrelevant for two reasons:

1. By default every empire will have a policy to automatically resettle (I think? I don't play hippies that believe resettlement is evil) some of your own pops elsewhere to become the leaders of the new planet. Due to how political power works, a single leader pop can outweigh huge amounts of worker pops. For example slavery gives -75% political power, and stratified economy gives -25% political power and -10% happiness to (non-slave) workers while leaders get +900% political power and +10% happiness. So a single leader's happiness will balance 40 slaves unhappiness or 13 free worker's happiness in terms of planet wide stability. And you'll probably have 3-5 ruler jobs on planets that aren't just recently established colonies. The only other thing happiness does is increase crime a bit which means max 1 or maybe additional 2 police enforcers for really big planets (usually the freely available jobs that come with the planet capital are enough).

2. +10% planet happiness converts to +6% planet stability which converts to +3.6% efficiency in job production. Meanwhile you can research techs that give +20% resource or research production from the start of the game. The only jobs that don't quickly get to a production rate of 200-250% is alloys and CGs. For everything else your production efficiency is so high that a 10% happiness change is literally a rounding error to their production rates.

 

[Ravielsk]

The whole pop thing is direct consequence of 2.2 patch. Paradox basically quadrupled the number of spots you need to fill with your pops but changed very little about how the base system works. In fact currently its borderline broken as when you enable in the game settings a pop growth that is somewhat more sensible the game directly warns you that is will impact performance!(which it does and horribly so)

Its just one of those examples of how PDX does not actually understand their own game. The whole 2.2 update functionally changed nothing besides adding micro-managment and making the system overall more confusing. The diplomacy updates are the same way, they just add an extra window that does exactly the same as the old window except slower and in a more round-about way. For example the whole espionage mechanic is essentially worthless simply because of the time investment it takes to build up enough "spy mana" to perform anything of consequence that might be better than just sending in the fleet to wipe out the other empire. Or the casus belli system which added nothing but made the game slower for everyone besides fanatical purifiers(or their analogs).

Hell, half the modding I do on the game is literary just about speeding things up and disabling pointless features that literary serve no function besides being annoying.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

Anyone else feel like there are too many jobs but not enough pops?

i had one or two mods to dramatically raise pop growth, one of them worked exponentially, the more people you had the more they multiplied, and not only it made sense but also made the whole game work better. until, some decades in, the engine would grind to a halt because it's been coded by drunken monkeys.

 

[Ravielsk]

the engine would grind to a halt because it's been coded by drunken monkeys.

Nah, its just too old. The Clausewitz engine is based on a code base that was meant to run on Windows 3.1 or even older and as such it cannot efficiently handle a game like Stellaris. Especially after the change in pop numbers in 2.2 it just cannot cope because its fundamentally a single core engine.
Just from my personal experience the way it handles multithreading is that one core is running at 90% while the other cores occasionally go to 1-2% load and even that only happens in these weird spikes were its mostly at 30% load only to then jump back to 90% and so on and so forth. It simply cannot handle this sort of a load but overhauling it for a single game is not a option and admitting they fucked up with 2.2... well its paradox so to that is even less of an option.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

yeah, i know it's not properly "the engine" at fault but the game specific code which checks every day for thousands of useless stuff which in the end bog down calculations for no difference or effect whatsoever, but "blame the engine" is much shorter.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

It doesn't help that xeno-compatiblity and gene modding is stupid.
The AI is obsessed with making hundreds of subspecies.