Rob Zacny

Episode 355: Stellaris

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Turrican, it feels like you're caught up in a fantasy that numerical scores appeal to an objective (or at least shared) reality that descriptive scores do not (and maybe cannot?). The argument that Tom should not be allowed to grade his reaction on a scale from one to five, unless he alloys it with some arbitrary tilt to account for the public's tastes at large, because, despite an easily accessible ratings guide, it might still be conflated with a (nonexistent) numerical metric that is consistent within and between publications is patently ridiculous, most especially because you cop to having no problem with the exact same five-step scale if it used descriptive gradations from "I hated it" to "I loved it."

 

It's really just the fact that it's a number, isn't it, and therefore that it elides some explicit meaning? People who fail to read the text of the review and just look at the number could possibly, in the worst of all worlds, mistake the 1/5 for "bad game" and not "game I didn't like" and...? I don't really see the danger here. If you're trying to protect strategy gamers from poor reading comprehension, attacking the time-honored (albeit often unnecessary) use of numerical scores to sum up personal opinions is a strange place to begin. Isn't it just as likely that, if descriptive scores become broadly accepted in games journalism, the same over-hasty person will just read "game I didn't like" as "game I didn't like (because it's a bad game)" and get the same "wrong impression" as a 1/5 supposedly gives?

 

 

EDIT: I also read the eXplorminate review that you keep referencing and I honestly found it a very weak review, even given the broad range of possibilities in the professional space. It's overwhelmingly a feature list, with occasional interjections about how breadth of options means depth of gameplay. It doesn't even appear that the reviewer reached the endgame, something I did in twenty-odd hours, because he discusses the concept of endgame crises in the purely hypothetical register of "this could be interesting." If this is your gold standard for a good review, Turrican, then I don't think it's possible for us to see eye-to-eye.

 

You're way too in love with the sound of your own voice to be able to consider other views.  It's not about objectivity to me but breadth. For instance, if a reviewer scores a game "Consider Buying" it's more interesting and honest because the rating will reflect the review and leads into understanding how the reviewer has evaluated the game. However, if the score is "This is Street Fighter but I've never liked beat'em ups so I give it 1/10" this is both unfair and will turn readers off reading further.  

 

Nobody has argued that Tom shouldn't be allowed to use whatever score system he wishes, just as nobody has claimed he shouldn't be able to express his opinion.  You keep using strawman arguments.  I am simply expressing my dislike for his system.  I don't know why you say "It's just numbers to you isn't it?", I've already stated that yes, that's exactly what it is. It's not gamers I am concerned for, it's developers and worthwhile games that may not get the interest they deserve if they are rated 1/5 on a site.  You haven't explained why Tom's system has to be wed to numbers at all.  Aren't the stars superfluous?  Why would he need to use two scores, the number and the short description?  You seem to be denying that numbers have any intrinsic value; which to me is as obtuse as it is incorrect.  If a site decided to score games in the reverse, 10 to 1 so that MGSV got 2/10 and Dark Souls got a 1/10, would you think that was cool too (as long as they put a guide to the scores somewhere on a different web page)?

 

Lastly, you've again spent your time arguing against things I haven't said. I didn't critique the Explorminate review, I said that they use a rating system similar to Tom's (only more objective) and don't have the need to pair it with a numerical score. For the record, I thought the review was fine and superior to Chick's which I thought was very poor, regardless of whether his view coincided with my own or not. I understand why you say it is a feature list but because of the space used to describe what the player will actually be doing in the game (as well as the critical opinion) it's actually more informative to a potential purchaser than Chick's screed of why he hated the game so much followed by his own feature list of begrudged positives at the end.  Tom is probably my favourite participant on 3MA and I always find his views interesting to listen to even if I don't agree with them. His written work is more hit and miss for me. I don't feel the same need as you do to see eye to eye, I can accept that people have different opinions - which I thought was kind of your argument in the first place...

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...

Tom gave the review one star out of five, Explorminate also have a five point scale with 'Avoid' at the bottom.  Would you have less of a problem with Chick's review if it said 'Avoid' at the end instead of having a star?  If so, I should inform you that that is a really stupid position to take.

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I feel a little bit like I'm reading Orwellian Newspeak here. Tom complains that the system of randomization for creating alien races produces arbitrary and interchangeable outcomes. Instead, he references the alien races of previous space 4X games for having set traits, many of them asymmetrical in gameplay, that make them distinctive. Your argument is that having those set traits ultimately makes them familiar, rather than strange, which I concede, but Stellaris hasn't exactly solved that problem either. I don't know how many games of the latter you've played, but let me tell you: I would rather have the pre-baked "weirdness" of the Klackons than have the militant spiritualists be parrots in one game and sloths in the next. Because there are a limited number of combinations that produce an even more limited number of personalities, all of which are shared with the player, it still becomes familiar over multiple playthroughs and you still cease to see the races themselves in place of their specific combination of ethics. For me, it has the additional downside of weakening first contact when I encounter an empire of fungi who love me because we believe exactly the same things.

 

Orwellian Newspeak LOL. Thanks for confirming my reading. For me it means that I am presented with aliens that challenge anthropocentric preconceptions, for instance "insectoids" = "hive mind" = "inflexible". Or that every Space 4X game needs to a sandbox to re-enact for the umpteenth time the same tired space opera tropes with planets blowing up, great galactic evils being vanquished, and so on. 

 

Limited combinations? Would you please run some numbers to see how many different combinations you can generate with Stellaris sets of ethics, traits and FLT propulsion methods? There's 4 ethics dimensions and 4 possible levels, that's 256 different "personalities" for you. If you multiply that by the number of FTL propulsion methods, then there's 768 possible different races. If one starts counting possible combinations of traits, positive and negative, that number goes into several thousand (here I am assuming 2 traits max per race). If all your games have 32 empires, I wouldn't be surprised that your neighbours look pretty similar, after 6 or 7 games. 

 

I am playing two Ironman games, about 16 hours in total so far, and I have barely reached the "mid game" on any of them. How many games have you played already to the bitter end? 100? 

 

As for your other question, I'd recommend the scramblers from Peter Watts' Blindsight, the T'ca and Knnn from C.J. Cherryh's Chanur novels, the Presger from Ann Leckie's Ancillary novels, the titular character from John Carpenter's The Thing, and the Weavers from China Miéville's Perdido Street Station. That's off the top of my head, if I were to hit up TV Tropes' "Starfish Aliens" page, I could probably do even better. Even if some of these depictions have small traces of human thought processes, courtesy of being written by human beings, all of them share a fundamental and (ah) inalienable strangeness that makes Stellaris' "rubber forehead" aliens, after Star Trek, something of a letdown.

 

Thanks, that obviously took a fair bit of research. But sorry, of that list only China Mieville's and the scramblers would fit in the same category as Solaris' Planet (or Ray Bradbury's martians). T'ca, Knnn and the Presger could totally be represented by some of Stellaris Fallen Empires - which are not playable though. Have you tried to converse with those? It's quite like talking to a wall. And The Thing from The Thing was a sentient being at all? The movie is deliberately and very effective at remaining ambiguous about that.

 

Now, how does very alien feeling species compare with the Master of Orion "crew of characters"?

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And The Thing from The Thing was a sentient being at all? The movie is deliberately and very effective at remaining ambiguous about that.

 

One of the thing built a spaceship so I'd say they are sentient til they start morphing.  But building a spaceship itself kinda give them understandable 'mind'

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Thanks, that obviously took a fair bit of research. But sorry, of that list only China Mieville's and the scramblers would fit in the same category as Solaris' Planet (or Ray Bradbury's martians). T'ca, Knnn and the Presger could totally be represented by some of Stellaris Fallen Empires - which are not playable though. Have you tried to converse with those? It's quite like talking to a wall. And The Thing from The Thing was a sentient being at all? The movie is deliberately and very effective at remaining ambiguous about that.

 

Now, how does very alien feeling species compare with the Master of Orion "crew of characters"?

 

First, significant part of early sci-fi concentrated on incomprehensible aliens. I'd say later there was a switch from humans being weak underdogs only capable of surviving at best to Star Trek style aliens being substitutes for Earth groups and concepts. There was Lovecraft with aliens you can't understand, even Wells Martians were inhuman and couldn't be talked to or reasoned with. there were more light-hearted yet still incomprehensible alien lives of, say, Sheckley ("The Absolute Weapon": scavengers get into some dead civilization rules and discover they've created lifeform that just consumes everything), Strugacky brothers (STALKER stuff or Ugly Swans) even though they had proper human-like aliens too.

 

I'm not at all convinced we *need* really alien aliens but I don't like mushrooms and ants being not alien. I can understand various humanoids being ultra space Chinese or ultra space Nazis or ultra space Crusaders. With molluscs and floating gasbags my immersion is slightly broken. In future I'd want to see some special rules for different phenotypes both in domestic policies and diplomacy.

 

MoO species were memorable cause they were complete in their stereotype. They each had distinctive look. Gnolams look like a small leprecaun and you know they probably love gold and don't like fighting. Their image is complete, they act as you'd expect and every feature of theirs work for their image. In Stellaris I've just rolled a random race. I got boars under military dictatorship, fanatic xenophiles and militarists under military dictatorship. They live on continental worlds, they are strong warriors and good engineers, they like wormhole travel and kinetics. It's not a bad idea for a race and I could see it becoming a memorable race for me, but I'll see 30 more random race in this galaxy and they'll all become a blur. This is why I'm actually experimenting with a tiny galaxy and minimum number of races now (8 I think) to see if it changes things to be more controllable and observable. Maybe theocratic pacifist mollusks would be more memorable if I don't have 6 more theocracies and 3 more mollusks in the galaxy.

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Orwellian Newspeak LOL. Thanks for confirming my reading. For me it means that I am presented with aliens that challenge anthropocentric preconceptions, for instance "insectoids" = "hive mind" = "inflexible". Or that every Space 4X game needs to a sandbox to re-enact for the umpteenth time the same tired space opera tropes with planets blowing up, great galactic evils being vanquished, and so on.

Limited combinations? Would you please run some numbers to see how many different combinations you can generate with Stellaris sets of ethics, traits and FLT propulsion methods? There's 4 ethics dimensions and 4 possible levels, that's 256 different "personalities" for you. If you multiply that by the number of FTL propulsion methods, then there's 768 possible different races. If one starts counting possible combinations of traits, positive and negative, that number goes into several thousand (here I am assuming 2 traits max per race). If all your games have 32 empires, I wouldn't be surprised that your neighbours look pretty similar, after 6 or 7 games.

One of Chick's complaints is that each race is an arbitrary set of values with an icon attached, rather than an easily recognisable and logical personality. That's not a problem for me because I never liked the old Civ effect of "oh, Alexander's my neighbour, so it'll be war no matter what then" or "the aliens next door are Bears so they will be aggressive and like war". I prefer the idea that every strange new race you encounter could be anyone.

However, Stellaris does have Chick's complaint covered in part because I've read that when the player creates a new race and plays a game with them they are added to the pool of races that appear in future games. So, if you want consistent species, just create them.

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Hey, can we talk more about conception of aliens in sci-fi? Because that's fascinating. The score argument thing has been done to death. Let's just all agree that the sooner Tom is taken to the International Criminal Court at The Hague to pay for his crimes, the better.

The example of the planet in Solaris is a great one: in most SF 4x games this would be treated like a one-time event, and you'd send a science ship, and you'd spend some time and eventually get +15% research and you'd either colonize the planet or not and that would be that. Are there any games where the planet itself could be a major game point that lasted longer than the time it took to read the event log? I haven't played a lot of Stellaris, but this is what I feel it really missed: the ability to actually make events an organic part of the gameplay, rather than something you just read and discarded. There would have to be some way to interact with the planet over the course of the game, and for small changes to be meaningful. In Stellaris, your scientists would all go insane. But Stellaris doesn't make you care about your leaders, and there is no way to make them do things other than just be attached to ships.

Of course, there are a whole bunch of problems - most players would want to just nuke the planet or something.

I'd love to hear about some game that goes more in the Solaris direction.

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In Alpha Centauri the game has an interesting story to tell about the planet you are colonizing. I'm struggling to think of any games on an inter-planetary scale that are like that though. I think we should keep an eye on No Man's Sky and see if people will care about those procedurally generated planets, and if so maybe there will be some lessons strategy games can draw from it.

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Hey, can we talk more about conception of aliens in sci-fi? Because that's fascinating. The score argument thing has been done to death. Let's just all agree that the sooner Tom is taken to the International Criminal Court at The Hague to pay for his crimes, the better.

Agreed on all counts.

I'd echo that Alpha Centauri is both phenomenal and possibly features the alien world as a character in the narrative to a greater degree than other space 4x games. However, I'm not a big player of space 4x generally and I'd imagine it's far easier to make the planet have a story when there is only one planet and you are on ground level as opposed to in its orbit or beyond.

I do think the fact you can observe a planet and the development of its superior species is quite a nice bit of flavour in Stellaris.

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Are there any games where the planet itself could be a major game point that lasted longer than the time it took to read the event log?

It's not uncommon for certain tech advances to have a profound, or at least significant impact on how a game plays out, but I struggle to think of examples of games where random events have the same effect.  It's not random, but I remember Emperor of the Fading Suns having some really unique planets with special tactical considerations.  There was a mod for that game (I think the Hyperion mod?) that among other things added an uncontrolled planet Earth overrun by rebels and space aliens and filled with advanced technological artifacts.  The fact that every planet was basically a self contained civ-like map made the game a pain to play, but really made it feel like you were actually visiting worlds with their own identities.

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Limited combinations? Would you please run some numbers to see how many different combinations you can generate with Stellaris sets of ethics, traits and FLT propulsion methods? There's 4 ethics dimensions and 4 possible levels, that's 256 different "personalities" for you. If you multiply that by the number of FTL propulsion methods, then there's 768 possible different races. If one starts counting possible combinations of traits, positive and negative, that number goes into several thousand (here I am assuming 2 traits max per race). If all your games have 32 empires, I wouldn't be surprised that your neighbours look pretty similar, after 6 or 7 games.

I am playing two Ironman games, about 16 hours in total so far, and I have barely reached the "mid game" on any of them. How many games have you played already to the bitter end? 100?

Actually, most of those permutations amount to distinction without difference. There are only sixteen AI personalities in the game, twenty if you count those exclusive to Fallen Empires, and everything else is just bonuses and maluses to diplomacy and economy: http://www.stellariswiki.com/Artificial_intelligence

You're still getting the inflexible hive mind every game, it's even on that too-short list! It's just that sometimes, that hive mind is made up of pandas now, and that makes it different but also more generic, because there's less impact when anything can be a hive mind.

I don't know, I only played one Ironman game to thirty hours and stopped after the Zerg endgame event bugged out, but I was already seeing repeats: meet the new Hegemonic Imperialists, same as the old Hegemonic Imperialists, except these ones are lizards instead of bugs. It's underwhelming, the Brownian motion of design-through-randomization.

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I'd love to hear about some game that goes more in the Solaris direction.

 

To my knowledge no game went as far as Stellaris did in this direction. Stellaris has several things like this: ancient mining drones (you can read their transmissions to learn about planets with minerals or you can brake them in parts), travelling space amoebas (you can research them in various ways) and so on. Those are not just 1-time events, those are things you interact for a long period of time, probably into late-game.

 

But that's it. We have only several things like that. You can react differently to them depending on your ethos but still you'll encounter drones and amoebas in every game. The game has mechanics to add Solaris or Q collective or Monoliths but those things you can't automatically generate. Also currently all those events have the same result depending on your reaction, you never wonder if attacking amoebas can have unpredicatble reprecussions.

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Good podcast! More than anything it got me curious to try out Stellaris, especialle because of the discussion about how non-agressive the game apparently is. That's a plus to me. I'd love to explore the galaxy without being forced into tough spots all the time.

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Sword of the Stars has some wonderfully diverse alien species. There's a lot of good sci-fi writing and conceptualisation that went into each of them, and it informs how each of them plays. While they're not as inhuman as they might be, they all have societies with very distinct character, without removing the role of individuality within them.

 

I like the ant-like insect hive race- there's no hive mind or non-sentient drones. Even the lowliest worker is a sentient individual, albeit one tending towards fierce loyalty. They make art. They get drunk on human cheese. The telepathic whale species go through a social ritual viewed as being like death when they become spacefaring. They're pacifistic until they decide someone else lacks compassion, at which point they'll use any means to wipe them out.

 

There are strange leftovers from earlier times. These range from annoying obstacles to monstrous entities that threaten all the races. Those tend to have very obscure past and motivations. The Peacekeeper, for example, is a huge, massively powerful ship that can zip just about anywhere in a turn. It shows up for fights and destroys both participants, when it's not tracking down the biggest fleet and destroying that. It's stay for a good few turns, then leave, and you don't know when it'll show up again. 

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In the new beta patch (released today) I believe you can alter the aggression of the AI

That's good to hear; that's one of the reasons I haven't played much of Stellaris. Love the game; just not quiet challenging enough!?

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So just listened to this and it was great.  As someone who loves things like endless space it looks like I would love this but I doubt I would have time to play it ever but will see as my life unfolds.  One question did they ever play the MP game group wise they mentioned in the end of the podcast?  I would love to hear about how it went if they did, and if they haven't ... I would love for them to do so.

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All- 

Is it time to revisit this game?  Or just record Rowan calling everyone sweet summer children for 2 hours?  I have never personally spent more hours playing such a middling game but there is something about the combination of graphics, ease of use, and dumb AI that keeps me coming back.

May I be so bold as to suggest looking at it after the 2.0 patch?  That patch really could put this game into a good path or make it completely unplayable.

 

Best,

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Yeah, 2.0 is going to be changing some pretty fundamental systems. We'll definitely be revisiting Stellaris but it will be after the big update and after everyone on the panel has gotten some time in.

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