Stellaris - Paradox new sci-fi grand strategy game

[Raghar]

Actively placing a mine field around a planet seems rather futile as theres a lot surface area.

Space mines that rely on enemies to come within a small radius are basically useless. Effective space-mines would basically be pre-launched missiles that hang around in space waiting for something to attack.

Actively placing a mine field around a planet seems rather futile as theres a lot surface area.

An active mine is a mine that shots missile towards the ship, these mines can have quite a long range, and can be placed at either at planet orbit, or into planet resonance points.

If you can't imagine it. Look into surface navy mines that are shooting torpedoes. That's similar stuff. Or you can imagine them as a small automated battlestations placed on the orbit.

To continue my post about active mines and it's usage. There is video which explains a concept of an active mine properly.


Now lets talk about a space active mines.

It's obviously completely stupid to leave just missile out in the space. Hard radiation would damage it and it's obvious characteristic would tell any capable adversary there is something there.
Much better way is to encapsulate a missile into completely innocently looking piece of rock, in reality a lightweight protection cover which keeps it's mass balanced to prevent anyone noticing the missile inside. Now it's not enough a space mine needs a detection device, which would find the approaching ship. When the detection device isn't located on the active mine encapsulation, active mine needs a receiver as well. Both of these can be rather large antenas.
And then there is also problem how to keep active mine sleeping until it needs to activate. 10-20 years is quite long time for an active mine to lay dormant, and radionuclides used for batteries can wear off, and solar panels can have failures.

With current technology, range for active mines is 1/2 AU. But ships have advantage of large endurance and could in some cases outmaneuver missiles.

 

[GarfunkeL]

GarfunkeL that's all over now we can detect gravity waves.

Well yes but it's way too early to say anything about them. It's entirely possible that the gravity wave from a star will "overwrite" the gravity wave from a vessel so that it's undetectable. Or not, who knows.

 

[GrainWetski]

Warning: AngryHoe

 

[Beastro]

And then there is also problem how to keep active mine sleeping until it needs to activate. 10-20 years is quite long time for an active mine to lay dormant, and radionuclides used for batteries can wear off, and solar panels can have failures.

How would it hide?

Big issue with naval mines is how difficult and time consuming it is to clear them to the point where even the mere claim of laying modern mines in a port today would completely shut it down for the weeks, or months, it would take to sweep it.

You can't do that in space and laying any field would result in it being destroyed from range.

The only worth of a space mine field would have would be to restrict and/or channel an enemy into a kill zone during battle to complement your ships maneuvering, but even that runs into the cost of bringing enough mines to accomplish that outweighing the disadvantages or the mass and space taken up to bring them along.

Something I've always thought fit the bill for that kind of thing would be Casaba Howitzers with a good amount of fuel to keep aiming during the battle and possibly a limited anti-missile defense consisting of a handful of small missiles. Sling them to the hulls of warships and have them detach as the ships maneuver and any unused can be recollected and refueled if one wins.

GarfunkeL that's all over now we can detect gravity waves.

Well yes but it's way too early to say anything about them. It's entirely possible that the gravity wave from a star will "overwrite" the gravity wave from a vessel so that it's undetectable. Or not, who knows.

If you're going to throw that into a game, use it as an advanced early warning tech where sensors are eventually good enough to work through the "white noise" of the stars/planets gravity well and can pick out ships.

 

[Norfleet]

It's obviously completely stupid to leave just missile out in the space. Hard radiation would damage it and it's obvious characteristic would tell any capable adversary there is something there.

It's a cold lump of metal in space. It's not the most visible thing until it lights the drive. It looks like just like every other piece of space junk floating in space. There's a lot of fucking space junk. If it never goes off, it will BE space junk. What are they going to do? Open fire on every piece of space junk they see? That will make the problem worse, not better, since destroying space junk creates MORE space junk.

Hard radiation would damage it and it's obvious characteristic would tell any capable adversary there is something there.

As for radiation damage, well...Voyager 1 is still operational after 36 years and is expected to continue to operate until 2025 when it runs out of power.

And then there is also problem how to keep active mine sleeping until it needs to activate. 10-20 years is quite long time for an active mine to lay dormant, and radionuclides used for batteries can wear off, and solar panels can have failures.

Voyager 1, 36 years and counting. This is not future technology. This is OLD technology. And, frankly, it's probably not DESIRABLE for a mine to remain active for that long. By then the war may be over. It's probably designed to intentionally stop working well before then.

 

[Beastro]

It's obviously completely stupid to leave just missile out in the space. Hard radiation would damage it and it's obvious characteristic would tell any capable adversary there is something there.

It's a cold lump of metal in space. It's not the most visible thing until it lights the drive. As for radiation damage, well...Voyager 1 is still operational after 36 years and is expected to continue to operate until 2025 when it runs out of power.

And then there is also problem how to keep active mine sleeping until it needs to activate. 10-20 years is quite long time for an active mine to lay dormant, and radionuclides used for batteries can wear off, and solar panels can have failures.

Voyager 1, 36 years and counting. This is not future technology. This is OLD technology. And, frankly, it's probably not DESIRABLE for a mine to remain active for that long. By then the war may be over. It's probably designed to intentionally stop working well before then.

If you're thinking of making the active mine be a missile then I'd be more worried about what prolonged lack of maintenance would do to the propellant. You mine may wind up exploding on it's own after a few months or might not fire at all by then. This says nothing about what the warhead is made of, especially if it's nuclear which I'm about to get to.

If you're going to make the mine like nuclear, like a Casaba Howitzer, then it comes down to the half life of the nuke at the center of the weapon. Anything thermonuclear that uses tritium will be useless after a few years when enough tritium decays to produce a fizzle when the thing tries to initiate, if it even does that.

It's for that reason that so many warheads were produced in the cold war. The regular maintenance of warheads meant a good 1/3 were expected to not be serviceable in time of a nuclear exchange while another 1/3 were expected to fail to reach their targets due to failures in their systems. When you have 9000 warheads and at least several hundred targets, if not more than a thousand or more, you've got very little to spread around.

 

[kris]

the lack of control over combat is the only thing that really bums me out. That could have been the thing to really move up the addiction level.

 

[Jeff Graw]

Dominus Galaxia

Finally, the codex has noticed us!

Of the above, only Polaris Sector, Endless Space 2 and Stars in Shadow look vaguely interesting, at this point.

/tear

Okay, I'll admit that our website sucks and the screenshots are old and also suck (and will be updated rather soon).

But... we're making progress. The game is, in my heavily biased opinion, already pretty fun, which is something that is oddly rare in the genre. I'll share a few random screenshots laying around on my dropbox that should highlight some progress.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/s5zjmdju7we0s7e/R69xihj.jpg?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/i2zqps20n6xbovj/UI Stuff.png?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/cutg2yfq2ee85a6/ShipDesign4.png?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/33r76h31vcyfdoi/Space Battle.png?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/qh6fwqh8cjxfabv/Spider Scientist Promo.jpg?dl=0

And a few bullet points:

-The AI as it currently stands rapes us like a multi headed abomination, yet does not cheat and is still improving. It's not as if we're bad players either.
-Simulated battles follow the same logic as manually resolved ones.
-Unlike most other recent entries, combat is tactical, hex based, and turn based.
-Space and ground combat support more than two sides at once.
-There are different types of galactic terrain, and more than any other space 4X with point-to-point movement, the galaxy feels like it has form. Each galaxy that you generate feels unique. You can easily add additional shapes for the galaxy generator to use.
-Exploration is heavily emphasized. When you start the game, you do not know where you are in the galaxy or how many opponents you will be facing.
-Almost everything is defined in data, and the game is very moddable.
-The tech tree is a mix of hand crafted and procedural, infinite technologies. You never run out of techs to research.
-Although mechanically we're very similar to MoO 1, there's less busy work and you can manage colonies faster.

While there's still a lot to do, I suppose I should start a dedicated thread sometime soon

 

[GarfunkeL]

You definitely should

 

[Lone Wolf]

Okay, I'll admit that our website sucks and the screenshots are old and also suck (and will be updated rather soon).

There just wasn't a lot to go on, Jeff Graw.

Polaris Sector, for the record, turned out to be pretty good - but 15-20 hours of just pretty good and never 'you can't stop playing this, can you?' level good. Don't regret the purchase, but it's not going to make me come back for more.

Your game sounds fine from a gander at the feature list. The proof will be in the pudding.

 

[Destroid]

Jeff Graw Could you elaborate on what you have done to streamline the already minimal colony management of MoO?

 

[Jeff Graw]

Your game sounds fine from a gander at the feature list. The proof will be in the pudding.

Agreed

Jeff Graw Could you elaborate on what you have done to streamline the already minimal colony management of MoO?

Gladly. It basically boils down to QoL changes and modifications to the slider system.

As far as the slider system goes, there are two big changes: The first change is that every task gets its own slider. There is no slider overloading between, say, shields and missile bases. The second big change is that sliders no longer represent absolute production, but relative production instead. In other words, if all sliders are at 0 except for three that are at 100, production will be evenly divided (33% each) between those three tasks. The end result is that planetary management feels less fiddly, as you aren't fighting against the interface to get production into one task and not another. Another benefit is that if I complete, say, a planetary shield, its slider goes away and all of that production is automatically redistributed to other active tasks as opposed to all dumping into research, proportionally to the slider values of those tasks. In other words, I don't need to periodically move production on my rich ship building worlds from research to ship production after I finish terraforming, controls, shields, etc.

As far as quality of life goes, there's much less need for redistribution in general. For example, after completing terraforming a colony will automatically increase the factory construction slider to the same value that the terraforming slider used to be at (if the factory slider is already higher than the terraforming slider was at, it will not change though). Instead of giving colonies one time BC infusions, you can set a target for how much the colony wishes to infuse itself each turn, and it will take out the appropriate percentage from the reserve if it is available. You can also do the opposite and set the percentage of a colony's production that it will send to the reserve, up to 100%. Waste in MoO 1 was more of a hassle than anything (most games I never actually willingly go into "WASTE"), so that has been abstracted away entirely.

While not colony management, fleets can be moved with one click, and you use sliders to set how many ships you send. This results in significantly faster player input than MoO 1. Because we have wormholes, impassable terrain, and slow terrain, you can automatically assign the fastest path to a fleet instead of a slower (or impossible) direct one. Lastly, there are no more colony ships, and therefore there is no colony ship micro (and this also saves a design slot). Colonization uses the Star Lords (MoO 0) model of simply transporting population to a new world - with one very important exception: New colonies do not extend strategic range, cannot build ships, and cannot send transports until they construct a starport, which is a relatively expensive building. What this essentially means is that the cost of colonization has changed from front loaded to back loaded. We can tweak the overall rate of expansion quite easily by changing the cost of starport construction too.

 

[Norfleet]

-There are different types of galactic terrain, and more than any other space 4X with point-to-point movement, the galaxy feels like it has form. Each galaxy that you generate feels unique. You can easily add additional shapes for the galaxy generator to use.
-Exploration is heavily emphasized. When you start the game, you do not know where you are in the galaxy or how many opponents you will be facing.

I dunno, man. I think you should know where in the galaxy you are. Even WE know where in the galaxy we are in real life, and we're a long way from actually doing anything cool in space!

 

[agris]

Gladly. It basically boils down to QoL changes and modifications to the slider system.

That all sounds great, but I hope once a slider is activated, a box appears wherein we can quickly type the slider's value into it.

Speaking of, how is your UI design taking the keyboard into account? In my above feedback, a game with Good Keyboard Usage would 1) open the box for manual input once I've clicked on the slider, 2) at this point let the arrow keys manually move the value of the slider up/down in increments of one, 3) hitting tab would immediately place a blinking cursor into the box showing the value of the slider's position so that any numeric text entered adjusts the slider and 4) natively support the numpad and enter / numpad enter keys.

 

[Jeff Graw]

I dunno, man. I think you should know where in the galaxy you are. Even WE know where in the galaxy we are in real life, and we're a long way from actually doing anything cool in space!

Gameplay trumps realism, every time (which is why we can forgive the unrealism of small galaxies, stars arranged on a 2D plane, less than appropriate or even one planet per system, non-Newtonian physics, sounds in space, etc. etc.) and the exploration mechanics feel very fun to everyone who has tried to the game so. Personally, I think it adds a new dimension to things.

That said, if this specific form of unrealism triggers you then you're of course free to role play that the FoW isn't hiding stars at all. Rather, there are countless systems that your empire is aware of but isn't interested in. The systems that are visible and selectable as destinations are the ones that your astronomers have deemed most likely to contain habitable worlds, or whatever.

That all sounds great, but I hope once a slider is activated, a box appears wherein we can quickly type the slider's value into it.

Probably not, as keyboard input would end up taking more time than mouse input, while support would consume valuable real estate and complicate the interface for a feature most would not use. That said, We'll likely have some kind of input field for ship selection because it's much more pertinent there. For example, if you have 100,000 ships of a class and want to select 46 of them.

Speaking of, how is your UI design taking the keyboard into account?

While there are a few hotkeys, we haven't gotten around to adding as many as we'd like. Numpad is fully supported for input fields, however it's unlikely that we'll have anywhere near the kind of support that you outlined in respect to sliders.

 

[Jeff Graw]

I should have also mentioned that we have Alex, who did the post release AI work on Pandora, spearheading AI development, and in his view the AI is already more difficult to beat than Pandora's is (I don't think he's managed to win versus the AI for quite a while actually). So the part about the AI raping us like a multi headed monster isn't just an idle boast Anyway, I'll make a dedicated thread later tonight instead of derailing this one further (as if the codex cares in the slightest about thread derailment)

 

[agris]

While there are a few hotkeys, we haven't gotten around to adding as many as we'd like. Numpad is fully supported for input fields, however it's unlikely that we'll have anywhere near the kind of support that you outlined in respect to sliders.

That's great regarding the numpad, but it's awfully hard to dial in the exact amount you want with a slider, unless it's unusually long.

 

[Raghar]

Can we kick him into his own thread, and keep discussion there about EU in space?

 

[Kem0sabe]

One thing I wish more 4x games put emphasis on is planet and deep space oddities and discoveries.

I always enjoy when a 4x game implements these organically into the gameplay, like secrets you can only find with the right tech, strange places and civilizations that you can interact with in a meaningful way, a derelict space ship that while researching it's technology opens a rift that sends through a fleet of hostile ships or a a rogue ai that suddenly takes over a few of your ships and goes on a killing spree.

Making it purely about map painting is boring.

 

[Zarniwoop]

One thing I wish more 4x games put emphasis on is planet and deep space oddities and discoveries.

I always enjoy when a 4x game implements these organically into the gameplay, like secrets you can only find with the right tech, strange places and civilizations that you can interact with in a meaningful way, a derelict space ship that while researching it's technology opens a rift that sends through a fleet of hostile ships or a a rogue ai that suddenly takes over a few of your ships and goes on a killing spree.

Making it purely about map painting is boring.

Most recent 4Xs have that. Endless Space is a good example. Same with Sword of the Stars etc.

 

[Kem0sabe]

One thing I wish more 4x games put emphasis on is planet and deep space oddities and discoveries.

I always enjoy when a 4x game implements these organically into the gameplay, like secrets you can only find with the right tech, strange places and civilizations that you can interact with in a meaningful way, a derelict space ship that while researching it's technology opens a rift that sends through a fleet of hostile ships or a a rogue ai that suddenly takes over a few of your ships and goes on a killing spree.

Making it purely about map painting is boring.

Most recent 4Xs have that. Endless Space is a good example. Same with Sword of the Stars etc.

The events have small consequences tho, would be interesting if you had bigger events mixed with the small discoveries.

 

[Destroid]

I've played a few 4X with storyline events and mostly I didn't like them. The AI revolution in SotS is pretty cool though.

 

[rvm1975]

I've played a few 4X with storyline events and mostly I didn't like them. The AI revolution in SotS is pretty cool though.

eador is example of very good storyline

 

[Red Eye]

 

[Talby]

So, how buggy can we expect this to be on release day? The game looks interesting but I have little faith in Paradox right now.