Stellaris - Paradox new sci-fi grand strategy game

[Jimmious]

 

[Jimmious]

Does it mean there will be an option to assassinate leaders?

Holy shit I just noticed that!!!

If the Great Khan is killed in battle, or falls victim to disease or assassination, the Horde will collapse

 

[Preben]

To be fair, it would be rather pointless to assassinate leaders aside from the Khan and perhaps high-level admirals. Other leaders have rather marginal impact on the game, with generals being almost completely useless. If the game was more character-driven, that would be a completely different matter.

 

[Jimmious]

Still, it hints to some more diplomatic options...hopefully

 

[Norfleet]

To be fair, it would be rather pointless to assassinate leaders aside from the Khan and perhaps high-level admirals. Other leaders have rather marginal impact on the game, with generals being almost completely useless. If the game was more character-driven, that would be a completely different matter.

Not only is it pointless, but actually counterproductive, in some cases: If you assassinate the leader of a democracy, they just elect another one, and get even more influence.

 

[thesheeep]

To be fair, it would be rather pointless to assassinate leaders aside from the Khan and perhaps high-level admirals. Other leaders have rather marginal impact on the game, with generals being almost completely useless. If the game was more character-driven, that would be a completely different matter.

Not only is it pointless, but actually counterproductive, in some cases: If you assassinate the leader of a democracy, they just elect another one, and get even more influence.

I knew there had to be some upside to democracy!

 

[Average Manatee]

Sad that Hordes are AI-only. If it's basically just a new randomly wandering monster type then it'll be really lame. Was hoping they were a new playable start with their own playstyle and economy. Without that I expect that they are just spawning in units for free whenever events fire, like the pirate event chain does now. Really it's just the pirate chain powered up to mid game level with the option to pay them to go away/attack someone. No wonder the pirates are also getting "improvements", they probably use the exact same systems.

Can those nomads relocate? I mean they seem a bit boring with the new hyperlane system - should't Nomads be all about going to and from reaving and pillaging, and not staying for long in one place at once, using ships that can not only fight, but also fabricate things?

Yeah... The new Hyperlane/fortification system would seem to fuck up nomads hard. Stellaris galaxies tend to fill up quickly, like 30 years and everything that isn't occupied by super-powered monsters or pirates is controlled. Not much place for raiding, and you'll have your gigantic super-fortified systems on the frontline to stop anything big. Nomads and raiding make way more sense in a much bigger galaxy than Stellaris current supports, where there's lots of empty room between empires for neutrals to move around in and attack from multiple angles.

 

[Jimmious]

Can those nomads relocate? I mean they seem a bit boring with the new hyperlane system - should't Nomads be all about going to and from reaving and pillaging, and not staying for long in one place at once, using ships that can not only fight, but also fabricate things?

Also, I'm surprised Paradox didn't use the Shroud or something to create a "naval" method of galactic travel that works pretty much like ships in Paradox games, but with added "Shroudmarks" like say, regions of Shroud Turbulency.

Would be really awkward if "nomadic FTL societies" can't relocate. Hopefully there is some plan for that

 

[Preben]

Also, I'm surprised Paradox didn't use the Shroud or something to create a "naval" method of galactic travel that works pretty much like ships in Paradox games, but with added "Shroudmarks" like say, regions of Shroud Turbulency.

IIRC Wiz wrote in one of earlier developer's diaries that Jump Drive and Psi Jump Drive will remain in the game. Lore-wise especially the latter is about using the Shroud to travel.

 

[Space Satan]

Psi-Jump will allow players to ignore hyperlanes. But if now they came no disadvantages in the patch there will be a cooldown.

 

[Delterius]

Though I'm very much looking forward to the patch/expansion, I feel like one of the things Stellaris needs the most are things like the Horizon Signal event chain or the tiny special one that Commonwealth of Man gets. Not that I think this should be some sort of Star Trek sim, but those rare but interesting stories give me a reason to customize or roleplay my Empire in ways that I didn't min-max from the start.

When you find out your species was genetically altered by xenos, you might consider going down the biological engineering ascension instead of psionics, even when its not that good of an idea. Etc.

 

[Norfleet]

I knew there had to be some upside to democracy!

They have plenty of upsides in Stellaris, mostly pertaining to Influence Farming. If you're not farming rulermana, you're not playing the Democracy game right. The optimal result is for your leader to be replaced immediately after fulfilling his mandate and getting the payout. Having him frequently killed is one such method.

Yeah... The new Hyperlane/fortification system would seem to fuck up nomads hard. Stellaris galaxies tend to fill up quickly, like 30 years and everything that isn't occupied by super-powered monsters or pirates is controlled. Not much place for raiding, and you'll have your gigantic super-fortified systems on the frontline to stop anything big. Nomads and raiding make way more sense in a much bigger galaxy than Stellaris current supports, where there's lots of empty room between empires for neutrals to move around in and attack from multiple angles.

This is why you don't really see train-based pirates. It's a bit tough to leap from your train to an enemy train, capture it and...drive it off...somewhere...

At best, people plunder trains and then ride off on their horses. But there are no horses, only trains!

If it's an empire instead of some shitty monsters, you can take control of it in the console and play as one.

Maybe, but if they're driven by events instead of game mechanics, then they wouldn't really be playable as such because you couldn't do anything as they're driven by magic events, not gameplay actions.

 

[thesheeep]

I knew there had to be some upside to democracy!

They have plenty of upsides in Stellaris, mostly pertaining to Influence Farming. If you're not farming rulermana, you're not playing the Democracy game right. The optimal result is for your leader to be replaced immediately after fulfilling his mandate and getting the payout. Having him frequently killed is one such method.

I'm afraid that won't be compatible with my space LARPing...

 

[Space Satan]

Some neat features from dev stream:

• Leaders now cost energy, not influence
• There's a new indicator at the side panel notifying that pops cannot grow due to blockers.
• Automatic Exploration moved to tier1 tech.
• Mastery of Nature edicts now allow you toincrease 1-3 tiles to your planet via special planet edict. Smaller the planet the bigger effect
• habitats and ringworlds could be destroyed. Ringworlds should be blasted one section at a time.
• Trader enclaves will no longer allow you to instantly trade thousands of minerals for energy or something like that. All deals are gains per monts, like 50 energy per 100 mineral per month.
• There is a late game tech which allows converting energy to minerals on a massive scale
• Due to hyperlanes Crysis could be locked down if you pile a significant force or build a fortress worlds like Cadia(Wh40K) or Stigmata(Emperor of the Fading Suns)
• Expansion tradition(one of) now increase starbase capacity
• Almost all ascension perks have been changed. Interstellar dominion now provides dicount on starbase INF cost and claim cost etc.
• Due to FTL rework a lot of pathfinding issues have been solved and late game lag is not that severe
• Lots of thing which cost INF previously not cost other resources due to INF rework.
• Xenophobic Fallen Empire will hate you and possibly declare war if you come to a hyperlane connection to them.
• New edicts that cost 1000 energy, like +25% leader exp. gain, +20% growth, -10% consumer goods for 10 years

 

[Preben]

Overall incline. Too bad the Swedes are too busy to work in performance improvement.

 

[Althorion]

Their engine is old and outdated—too much stuff happens linearly, in one process. You can only polish this turd so much, without rewriting the game from scratch.

 

[Norfleet]

It's strange that so many things are so linear, considering how compartmentalized the game is: Everything is broken up into individual starsystems which, you'd think, would have little to no interactions with each other in the immediate term and could be processed independently.

 

[Althorion]

Well, it’s ten years old. That’s the time when your most common CPUs were two-threaded and multi-threading computing was yet to gain traction. It has many virtues, such as very good mod support and I’d guess that it is cleanly written and nicely kept, since they managed to port it to Linux quickly and without much problems, but it is outdated and doesn’t support modern machines as well as it possibly could.

It is not all bad though. Several things, such as daily ticks, are run in parallel. The most annoying thing that doesn’t is the AI—you can clearly notice severe slowdowns when some war is going on.

 

[Hellion]

Stellaris is included in the current Humble Paradox Bundle (along with Pillars of Eternity and a few other strategy titles) for about 9.8€. I think this is the lowest price to date.

https://www.humblebundle.com/games/paradox-bundle-2018?partner=ragequitgr

(felt obliged to shamelessly add my site's affiliation suffix to the URL)

 

[Average Manatee]

Their engine is old and outdated—too much stuff happens linearly, in one process. You can only polish this turd so much, without rewriting the game from scratch.

The UI alone is coded so poorly that looking at certain screens when you have 100+ objects to display will cause FPS to plummet. Paradox has horrific quality control.

 

[Stavrophore]

Their engine is old and outdated—too much stuff happens linearly, in one process. You can only polish this turd so much, without rewriting the game from scratch.

The UI alone is coded so poorly that looking at certain screens when you have 100+ objects to display will cause FPS to plummet. Paradox has horrific quality control.

I remember one guy on the paradox forum who found this shit, there was like 700 thousand lines of loop in the code firing every second. You can imagine the performance.This much code just for UI, that's just craaaazy.

 

[Preben]

Apparently the whole UI is being processed the whole time. No matter what you do, the game keeps calculating all those UI windows in one gigantic loop. Plus, the more features they put into the game, the more resources are being pulled into this.

 

[Space Satan]

I remember a guy run some tests on performance and discovered that fleet sizes does not affect slowdown - UI does, small empires run extremely fast but with vast empire whole game grinds to a halt. Paradox said that they are aware of this problem and trying to fix it.

 

[Preben]

I remember a guy run some tests on performance and discovered that fleet sizes does not affect slowdown - UI does, small empires run extremely fast but with vast empire whole game grinds to a halt. Paradox said that they are aware of this problem and trying to fix it.

Yeah, the guy in question had a game with a massive, sprawling empire and switched via the console into its tiny vassal. In order to ensure that game has the same amount of objects to process, both empires shared their sensors. If it was AI or some other thing that caused the lag, the game should run much slower, because the CPU now had a gigantic empire to manage. It turned out that the game was running significantly faster, meaning that it's the horribly implemented UI to be blamed.

Later on, the Devs in a diary related to Hearts of Iron 4 admitted that there is horrible piece of code regarding the UI that cases a massive loop.

 

[Preben]

Paradox said that they are aware of this problem and trying to fix it.

My impression is that they went passive-aggresive with that. It's like they know they fucked up and don't know exactly how to fix it without basically making the game anew.