Stellaris - misc thoughts on mechanics from previous session and upcoming one

[jack]

Traditions

There's the equivalent of a tech tree for "traditions" which unlock various bonuses supporting particular play styles. It lets you specialise your empire somewhat. Some of the bonuses are a flat +X% to something (in theory enough to always be quite significant, although it doesn't always work like that), others unlock particular abilities (e.g. you can't take other empires as vassals at all unless you unlock the domination tradition).

There's also a mechanic when you finish all the traditions in one category you get an "ascension perk". That *doesn't* have to be related to that category, but there's various other restrictions. It's basically a unique bonus but (at least in theory) more so, sometimes granting a big discount to something like expansion, sometimes unlocking a unique ability like megastructures. Originally this mechanic was only in one of the expansions, but they eventually decided, being able to have thematically relevant ascension perks was so useful for other parts of the game and other expansions, they promoted it to the base game. Some of the snazzier perks (like a lot of bio-engineering, and building new megastructures) are still only in that expansion.

Factions

Something else I happened to like was that your empire has many squabbling factions. These naturally spawn when there's enough draw for your pops to embrace a new one, either one based on your empire ethos (I got pacifists, egalitarians, and 'traditionalists' i.e. religious first), or when something else causes faction support (e.g. wars cause military factions, etc).

They produce one of the most constrained resources, influence. Not in great amounts, but there's almost no sources of it as it acts as a cap on expansion rate. Up to a total maximum, depending on faction happiness (so it's easier to achieve if you have fewer factions to please.)

For a while my egalitarians and pacifists were pretty happy, but my spiritualists stubbornly hovered at 55%, just too low to produce any influence, and I couldn't do much to increase that, other than have a bigger proportion of spiritualists, or adopting 'Harmony' traditions (and I had others I wanted for my empire more). Now things are all over the place, but hopefully after the war everything will settle down rather.

What I did like, the things that please factions are quite specific and not just opposite: a few things are directly opposed like pro- or anti- robot or pro- or anti- war, and you have to pick one or the other, but most are things where they care about different things and you COULD do both, but opportunity cost means you have to prioritise the factions you most care about.

Oh that makes sense now!

I'd seen people talking about stellaris before: about befriending space amoebae or encountering crystalline entities; about getting stuck in their home system; about just *watching*. When I actually played it all those things made more sense.

More richness, more choices

I'm still less than half way through a first game, so unsurprisingly I'm already jumping ahead to form generalisations.

The general backdrop of stellaris, both graphics and mechanics is *glorious*. When I zoom in to a space battle or crystalline entity, I go wow. When I accept refugees fleeing a war, I get a thrill of satisfaction. As when I set all the living standards up to "utopian".

But strangely, it also feels a bit bare. Like, there's lots of potential anomalies you might find by surveying. But most of them are "Here's something weird, insert beautiful description here, click ok to collect a small bonus." There's nothing to *do*. Even a choice "A, get science research, B, get energy" would be more interesting. Many of the events related to planets are better here, although even then, it can be kind of obvious which choice *your* empire would take.

I understand, there's only so much effort for content, especially when there's a lot of effort on the UI and AI and so on at the same time. But it feels like, if you mixed-and-matched some art and some prose, you could make a lot more anomalies that were *interesting*, enough that you wouldn't get the sense of "I've sort of seen that one before."

Obviously it's hard to do that for stuff like space fauna that needs stats, balance, 3d art, etc, etc.

I hear, you can improve this a *lot* with a few mods that specialise in this. Which makes sense -- it's something modders *can* add, whereas improvements to the core game can *only* be done by the core developers. And some of the expansions add more here (and it's fair enough you need to pay for those -- that development time isn't free, if you want a better space game, you need to pay for it, or convince twice as many people to pay for the base game :)). But I think it looks like they mostly add fairly big events -- one or two add more "space species" type stuff and one or two add more anomalies, but it's not the headline thing.

I love how many games ARE making themselves open to mods. Although I wish we'd converge on a norm of "non-exclusive attribution license" or something for that sort of thing, where the game creator can choose to claim the mod if they want (so they're never risking getting locked out of part of their own game because someone else has the IP), but they need to credit the author and the author has the option of taking the stuff elsewhere.

Likewise, my impression is that the mid-game, once empires abut each other, is a bit quiet. Unless a fallen empire wakes up. I'm not sure, because I haven't actually played it yet. I wish there was more that would cause shifting alliances and priorities and borders. I guess wormholes do that somewhat, putting different empires suddenly in touch?

Tardigrade Mod

I joked about making a tardigrade mod with/for Rachel. A Tardigrade starting race. Tardigrade-relevant events and anomalies. Etc. I don't know if I actually will, I don't know how many more projects I need, but it would be really cute to do :)

Comments

[ilanin]

Distant Stars is the expansion that adds more anomalies. They're mostly of the longer quest-type and are definitely fun.

The argument that the mid-game is quiet is often made, but I've never particularly understood it. It's true that sometimes the diplomacy can lock itself down into static webs of alliances that make starting wars essentially impossible; but I don't see how you'd define a diplomacy model that couldn't do that. There's already a penalty to diplomatic relations in the game for being in too many alliances.

For most strong players the mid-game is also not quiet because they're busily annexing as much of the galaxy as they can to maximise their economic base and fleet capacity before they have to deal with an Awakened Empire or a crisis....

It is also worth pointing out that like most Paradox games, Stellaris is in no way finished. Paradox release an MVP and add functionality over time; based on the game director's current twitter posts they seem to be looking at an overhaul of the economic aspects at the moment.

[jack]

Thanks for commenting.

"For most strong players the mid-game is also not quiet because they're busily annexing as much of the galaxy as they can to maximise their economic base and fleet capacity before they have to deal with an Awakened Empire or a crisis"

Yeah, that makes sense. I guess that will be shake things up a lot, and I need to be ready for it.

It's also true, in the early game, everything was utterly new to me, which was quite exciting. Now I've absorbed a reasonable amount about how things "usually" go from forums and wiki. If I *hadn't*, I'd have had no idea what was likely to come, if the fallen empires would have awaken earlier or never awake, or even if there was any sort of late game crisis coming, and when it did, it would have been a lot more "oh shit".

"sometimes the diplomacy can lock itself down into static webs of alliances that make starting wars essentially impossible; but I don't see how you'd define a diplomacy model that couldn't do that"

Well, you were convincing that maybe it isn't as much of a problem as it looks. But I was thinking of things like: mid-game changes (events or techs or just a base mechanic) that make one empire start to prefer different allies so things shift; ditto that make one empire much more powerful (say unlocking some tech they couldn't previously access); wormholes and bigger space fauna already exist.

[jack]

"Distant Stars is the expansion that adds more anomalies."

Good point, I'll probably buy at least one or two expansions if I play again. I haven't quite decided which. Likely utopia, distant stars and/or leviathans?

"like most Paradox games, Stellaris is in no way finished"

Good point. People enjoyed it for ages before 2.0 which I can barely imagine now, and there are more changes coming.

Despite my sometimes ambivalence about games where you don't just buy one thing but get "access", this is a case where I'm actually really glad, I wouldn't want to wait until the game was "finished" to play it, and I assume if people did, they wouldn't have the funding to produce it at all. And offering a fancier game for real fans via DLC actually makes a lot of sense: it would be really hard to sell the base game for the combined cost of all the parts.

[ilanin]

One thing about expansions is that in multiplayer games, the expansions that are enabled are the ones the host owns. So if you want to try some multiplayer at some point in a group that includes me or somebody else who owns a bunch of expansions you could try them out that way...

Of the expansions, I'd say that probably Utopia modifies the gameplay the most, but if you were going to buy three I'd say you'd got the right ones. Expansions in order of desirability for a new player are probaly Utopia, Leviathans, Distant Stars, Apocalypse (higher if you really want to blow planets up, or loved the idea of the slave shield in Ur-Quan Masters, Synthetic Dawn, but the major feature of Apoc is probably marauders and a new player doesn't really want them around...)

"People enjoyed it for ages before 2.0 which I can barely imagine now, and there are more changes coming."

You do realise you don't have to imagine it? All the previous versions of the game are still available to be played (if you've got a Steam install) via the Steam betas tab. If you really want to experience the game as it was on release day (or, more practically, see what the different FTL types were like in 1.9), it's there.....

[jack]

Thank you, yeah, that's helpful. I can easily imagine I might be drawn to blowing up planets but I think I went for dyson spheres first :)

"All the previous versions of the game are still available to be played"

Oh, cool! I probably *won't*, because of time, but that is nice: I hadn't realised, I'd assumed that regular updates meant the previous versions were gone.

I was curious how it worked with different ftl styles, but probably not enough to actually try it out.

[rysmiel]

I am looking forward to when you get to the fallen empire bit; that sounds to me like an interesting mechanic for stirring things up at just the point that an older 4X game would be slowing down or how it was going to end becoming pretty determined.

[jack]

Yeah, I'd forgotten that was likely to come soon, that really will shake things up.

[damerell]

In traditional 4X there's a very big gap between "I am going to win" and "I have won", as you say. I find that is slightly improved by a habit drummed into me by the civfanatics forums; when I'm going to win, go out and win.

If I'm first to Rifling in Civ 4 (Riflemen have a really big advantage over every previous combat unit), I don't sit back and say "I'll probably be first to the spaceship", but beeline Assembly Line so I'll be first to Infantry as well, spend my entire war chest on upgrading existing units to Riflemen, and use that big advantage to crush the biggest AI empire and work down.

This matters more at the higher difficulty levels where being first to Rifling might not mean _being_ first to the spaceship (especially if I beelined Rifling to start the aforementioned crushing process, or if I'm playing One-City Challenge where producing spaceship parts takes forever), but also it does get the game over with sooner and gives me more to do than press Next Turn a lot.

Of course, the really good players do this with War Elephants and Catapults, but I'm not very good. :-)

[rysmiel]

In traditional 4X there's a very big gap between "I am going to win" and "I have won", as you say. I find that is slightly improved by a habit drummed into me by the civfanatics forums; when I'm going to win, go out and win.

Oh, I don't regard this as necessarily a problem, myself; I've always far preferred the building side of such games, and find it quite satisfying to get far enough ahead to be able to focus on goals of that sort.

This matters more at the higher difficulty levels where being first to Rifling might not mean _being_ first to the spaceship (especially if I beelined Rifling to start the aforementioned crushing process, or if I'm playing One-City Challenge where producing spaceship parts takes forever), but also it does get the game over with sooner and gives me more to do than press Next Turn a lot.

Getting the game over with sooner is rarely something that strikes me as a positive, when I am in the mood for such a thing at all; and if it does, I can at this point usually complete a one-city spaceship victory in Civ 1 in about 90 minutes, modulo the sort of strokes of bad luck that make it unwinnable very early. I have played very little Civ 4, a moderate amount of Civ 5, and as yet no Civ 6 at all, and most of what keeps me preferentially coming back to the earlier games is not liking the feeling that a dozen cities is what the later games think of as a large civilisation and a hundred-city empire is not something they are really thinking in terms of.

[damerell]

I see we are still very different people.

I certainly would steer clear of Civ IV, then; it was then that I think (from my point of view) there really was, for the first time, an effective brake on Infinite City Sprawl.

[edrith.co.uk]

I really agree with most of this. I love Traditions and Factions - having played without the first and with the others being less good, they really add a lot to the game. I hadn't thought of it before but you're right, the fact that you could keep a lot of factions happy (in that they're not self-contradictory) but sometimes have other priorities is a really powerful aspect.

I do sometimes wonder if we're all too hard on the mid-game because of how awesome the early game is. I mean, most of classic strategy games like Civ, Lords of the Realm, etc. involves all the different nations being squashed against each other and jostling for position and those are good, but because the early exploration in Stellaris it can seem like a let down. It is true that before wars used to be gruelling but hopefully the new claims/vassalise/total war etc. options (plus better fighting) make it a lot better.

One thing I remember thinking before was that the technological advance didn't seem to make much difference to how the game played, compared to a lot of earth-based games - which was a bit unsatisfying as they had such great names. I'm hoping the new features such as gateways, Dyson spheres and so on might change this now though.

Tardigrades would be cool. :-)

P.S. I'd definitely recommend the expansions.

[(Anonymous)]

One of the more plausible criticisms I've read pertained to the bareness; the empires are a bit like interchangeable ciphers whose differences only turn up in spreadsheet-land; this hasn't mattered in previous Pdox games because they're real countries with a bit of flavour there either in terms of country-specific events or just because it's more interesting to say "hey, Byzantium didn't just survive, but reconquered most of Greece and Turkey, that's because I formed Hindustan and hammered the shit out of the Ottoman Empire" than "hey, the Flerbwits survived ...". (Or because it's CK2 and there's a vast cast of dysfunctional individuals.) It drew a strong contrast with, say, Master of Orion whose aliens are highly differentiated stereotypes, and as a result even 20 years later anyone who's played MOO could tell you what a Klackon is, or a Bulrathi.

On the other hand, your Psychotic Mushrooms and Fanatic Squids seem to have plenty of character, but I dunno how much of that is Stellaris, and how much Jack.

[jack]

"your Psychotic Mushrooms and Fanatic Squids seem to have plenty of character, but I dunno how much of that is Stellaris, and how much Jack."

Thank you! I honestly think, some of both. I think the different empires with different traits is good at creating randomised empires with character, and I would prefer that to ONLY pre-generated races because it feels more open-ended. But even so, the most character they can have is much less than pre-generated ones, and I played it up a lot.

If I'm honest, I remember the funguses well, because I had such a long feud with them. And my two allies, the more-passive foxes, and the more ambitious lobster-plate-faces. But the rest sort of blur together despite my attempts to characterise them. Their AI personalities, determined by their civics, do give different weights for various behaviour, more aggressive, more likely to accept trade, etc, etc.

But I think there might be room for more personality, ideally communicated through behaviour. There's not much opportunity to *learn* their behaviour since usually they're allied or their not. And there's not that much variety: most are "vaguely expansionist" without more specific goals.

[damerell]

Not again! That anon comment about the Flerbwits and Hindustan was me (again)! Please unscreen if you feel it appropriate.

[jack]

OK, I'm trying out unscreening anonymous commenting but adding a captcha (mostly just to remind people they're not logged in). Let me know if it's easy enough to comment?

[damerell]

That sounds good; I'd notice that. I tend not to notice if I'm inadvertently anonymous because most of the time it doesn't work at all so I don't have to beware it...