Episode 425: Stellaris 2.0 & Apocalypse

[Rob Zacny]

Three Moves Ahead 425:

Stellaris 2.0 & Apocalypse
It's a full house as Rob, Fraser, Sean Sands, and T.J. Hafer talk about the large 2.0 update to Stellaris and its Apocalypse expansion. Do you hate planets? Do you often think about blowing them up? Would you prefer another target, a military target? Apocalypse adds big ships and explodable planets just for you. The 2.0 update has added several key features, such as the fleet manager and big changes to starbases. Have all these changes tightened up the midgame and turned Stellaris into a space hit? Listen in to find out.

Stellaris

 

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[Gormongous]

2 hours ago, ilitarist said:

But Stellaris is balanced even though it's random. All the unique anomalies and special resources are within strategic sane boundaries. They're all there to allow you to balance things out, see if you rather want +5% food or +10% speed of energy weapons. It's granular and lifeless. You will never see enemy hold system that you have to fight for.

 

Yeah, I think there's a design philosophy behind Stellaris that will keep it from ever feeling like something truly rare and unique. The game was designed from the ground up to be balanced as a multiplayer sci-fi wargame with 4X elements, and all the species customization and event chains are just a grudging bone thrown to the way that the other nine people out of ten play Paradox games, as engines for emergent singleplayer narratives. There's never going to be anything that could possibly be broken or exploited in Stellaris, at least not intentionally, because it's a game that's meant to be played on an office LAN with you and your closest friends or coworkers over the next six months.

 

And, like you point out, that's also why there's never going to be a midgame, not a real one. The midgame is where the different players, having established themselves, begin to differentiate and specialize to pursue the victory conditions, but Stellaris is designed to keep everyone roughly abreast of each other, given the same availability of resources. The semi-blind research tree works towards this end: because you're just offered a small, random selection from a large pool of tech, there's little point in pushing too far down any one brand of the tree, not when you can't count on the tech you need to come up when you need it. No, better just to advance methodically down the three trees and take whatever's most useful to you at that moment when it comes, keeping every stat safely within 10% or 15% of the other players' stats. It's the same issue as the planets: some planets are rich and some planets are poor, but more planets is always better and their location only matters for defensibility in the end.

 

And that's even not to mention that Stellaris still only has three victory conditions, two of them military and one of them technically diplomatic but, in practice, military. Can you believe that there's a sci-fi strategy game where technology ultimately exists just to give you bigger and more beautiful weapons, not to advance civilization past the use of and need for weapons? I know that the victory conditions don't matter in Paradox games, but they can get away with it in historical grand strategy because the implicit end-state in those games is the present day, while the implicit end-state in Stellaris is... I don't know, the player gets bored? It's design choices like this that make Stellaris so bland once you get past the Star Trek: The Original Series-flavored opening turns. There's nothing to surprise you, and no way for you to surprise the AI besides when you choose to conquer it.

[Rudel]

I had to look up my account for this forum after listening to the Podcast and reading the two comments posted here. Because you two guys are absolutely right. 100%. This is exactly what's the problem with Stellaris. And 2.0 isn't changing anything about it. In my oppinion, they changed Stellaris even more towards the gameplay of EUIV and CK2. My main issue here is that I don't like those games too much. I liked Stellaris because it was different than the other PDX games. After the early game I ALWAYS (!) have the feeling that I need to start the next game because this one is getting boring. And now they even made the early games worse (much slower, tedious). 

 

Stellaris isn't a bad game of course. I spend 200h playing it. But now, I just cannot force myself to launch it. I felt the podcast lacked some sort of criticism. Everything sounded so fantastic and great, only a few minor additions (Fleet Manager, Titans/Colossi) were criticized. 

[Sorbicol]

I love Stellaris - boy oh boy it has it's flaws, but over all there's nothing else like it in the Space 4x genre. If you treat it more as an emergent story telling engine for your fledgling space empire then you get so much more out of it. In 250+ hours of this game I have never reached any of the victory conditions (although I came mighty close with a League of non-aligned worlds once) and you know what? It really doesn't matter. Stellaris's simple, flexible system for building pretty much whatever space empire it is you want to be is an absolute marvel and the entire bedrock that makes the rest of the game what it is. 

 

2.0 both provides considerable more focus to the game on a strategic layer, while at the same time really providing a whole new set of frustrations. It's other issue - the one that I have no idea how they are going to solve, and has been repeated noted above - is that one you get to the mid stage period of the game, your only option to make something happen is to go and declare war on someone. It doesn't matter if you are a Federation building egalitarian United Nations or a slavering despotic race of barbarians, if you don't then you are going to sit there for a very long time (depending on how you have set your sliders) waiting for the War in Heaven and the end game crisis.  Paradox's war system does everything it can to make waging war something both remarkably simple and brain flummoxingly difficult (seriously, even if I take over an Empire's every star system and occupy their every planet I still don't win?) but at least with Apocalypse you get some shiny new toys to do so with. It really needs to do something a lot more interesting with systems that don't have planets in them - seriously, for all the importance of space stations your only real options are to turn them into Shipyards, commercial hubs or anchorages to provide fleet capacity. Turning them into defensive fortresses only works for about half the game and any hope of making them refineries or research stations is limited to one sub-module for each dependent on being in a nebula or in orbit over a black hole - neither option of which will provide more resource that decent planet tile - and is something more they need to look at. 

 

I do think that Stellaris is now the space 4x everything should be measured by - it is a genuine work of greatness within the genre - but that doesn't mean that it's still quite flawed. I wish that it could take a little more inspiration from Sword of the Stars (probably the great unrecognised game in the genre) especially with "outside context problems" - other than the wraiths everything else stays put (Seriously, it makes no sense the stellarite devourer wouldn't move from system to system once in a while) and maybe a little more work on the end game crisis having an pre-invasion stage. That could do quite a bit to pep up the mid stages of the game, while also making those end game crises have a little more context. 

Edited March 25, 2018 by Sorbicol
Spelling & Grammar!

[Gormongous]

The podcast has often talked about their bafflement with the sci-fi 4X community's love of the ship designer. In some ways, I think that Stellaris is the ship designer generalized to the scale of a whole game. You can add bits and bobs to the framework of a "standard" sci-fi 4X faction, making them warlike zealots or peaceful merchants, and have the game respond with customized flavor text that acknowledges the choices you've made, but you can't make or play anything outside of the developers' vision of what a "standard" sci-fi 4X faction can be.

 

I think Sword of the Stars and Endless Space get a lot more criticism because people are much more likely to be nitpicky and critical of other people's creations, especially if they violate expectations or mores, while an identikit faction that they've built themselves gets more of a pass because of a sense of ownership and self-expression. "I did my best to recreate the Starfish from Blindsight in Stellaris and I'm pretty happy with how they turned out! Meanwhile, what the fuck is up with the Cravers from Endless Space 2? I just don't get them." Does that make sense?

[Gormongous]

On 3/26/2018 at 11:04 AM, ilitarist said:

Still it doesn't explain EU4 or CK2 popularity. Here factions are both predefined and have no personality. Of course, gameplay varies much more: European Horde is more different from European Trade Republic than any 2 spacefaring civilizations in Stellaris. But they're much more faceless than Cravers or any other faction, those German duchies or some Finnish craven greedy count are random noise.

 

I think the experience of "touching history" offered by CK2 and EU4 is enough to fill in the gaps for most people. The most detailed sci-fi setting in the world lacks the breadth and impact of real-life history, even dimly apprehended, and so the bare thrill of playing a historical person or polity in an actual location somewhere in the world is always going to be thematically nourishing for the average player.

[Sorbicol]

On 26/03/2018 at 5:04 PM, ilitarist said:

Meanwhile the ship designer part itself is greatly reduced in 2.0. The game actively hated when I tried to make design of my own, I couldn't figure out how to upgrade other ships to that design.

 

You make an interesting point. It's similar indeed. And just like with ship designer I'll be damned if I notice any differences between slapping various versions of tier 3 weapons (I do see those in Endless Space 2 though). Perhaps people are indeed happy to see that some of their decisions give them a unique event or research sometimes even if it affects nothing in a grand scheme of things.

 

Still it doesn't explain EU4 or CK2 popularity. Here factions are both predefined and have no personality. Of course, gameplay varies much more: European Horde is more different from European Trade Republic than any 2 spacefaring civilizations in Stellaris. But they're much more faceless than Cravers or any other faction, those German duchies or some Finnish craven greedy count are random noise.

 

I also remembered a good example of how Stellaris fails to add any alternative strategic problems to a mix. When you play as a normal civilization you have to balance food production so that you don't have starvation and energy production so that buildings do not get turned off (in theory there's also mineral balance but it's rarely goes into red). Then you can play as robots, totally different gameplay! Except no. Robots are built with minerals and they eat energy. For normal people to multiply you have to produce farms from time to time which eat energy. The difference is the amount of micromanagement, exact balance of spent energy and minerals, plus you have an easier time colonizing. Meanwhile see Endless Space 2 robot faction. You have a single build queue so while other factions build and grow at the same time you have to choose. They also colonize planets in an unique way giving them an edge in later colonization efforts. Different strategic consideration, different problems to solve, not just slightly different balance of resources.

 

 

You upgrade other ships to your designs in the fleet manager. It's fairly straight forward. 

Actually what you have done there is highlight another of Stellaris's oddities - that the weapon rock/paper/scissors mechanics don't really work when paired up with the different ship classes. There are some very definite optimal builds (the torpedo corvette being the primary suspect) that the AI just can't counter, and other that are practically useless because the way the AI builds it fleets. The ship designer in Stellaris is functional and understandable but until you reach the endgame crisis/war in heaven, those optimal builds will see you through anything. After that you need to specialise (and get rid of any destroyers & cruisers) when you are up against the FEs and end game crises. 

 

As to your other point - well, yes, but Stellaris doesn't really variate it's empires based on the game economic mechanics, it does so on the traits and civics you give you empire. That impacts how you play your empire a very great deal, and I think you are being a bit disingenuous to imply that it doesn't make any difference. Playing a Federation building xenophile empire is totally different to playing an driven assimilator machine empire. Or fanatical spiritualist. Or pacifist empire. Your interactions with other empires and FEs are going to be completely different. You wouldn't necessarily expect the base mechanics of the economy there to be any different, except for those specific circumstances where, for example, machine empires don't need any food (but sure as hell need to maximise their energy/mineral production).  How that works makes complete sense following Stellaris's own internal logic. 

 

[Sorbicol]

I think you are right about the ship building - to be honest I ignore what the game gives me for the most part and I just build my own. Stellaris does make ship design very simple though, so this isn't a massive burden. A quick update when a good tech is researched, a click of the upgrade button on the fleet list and hey presto, you are done.

 

As for waging war, yeah Paradox's war system is all over the place to be honest. It's certainly something that needs a lot of work. I find it more a source of frustration that I do anything else I would have to agree. 

 

As for the empires - if you go back to my original comment about the game being as much an emergent storytelling engine as a strategy game, well I think it makes a lot more sense. I don't exactly "role play" my empires, but I do make some sub optimal choices at times because I think It fits my empire better that want might be more advantageous at that time. Sometimes that's not a big deal and other times I admit it sucks. The traditions stuff is a great idea but a lot of it doesn't work - yet - and still needs patching. Vassilisation & tributaries should make a militarist empire much stronger, but the points system makes actually vassilising them really difficult, so you just tend to end up much better off conquering them and then giving them their planets back afterwards. Eliminates a lot of  residual resentment too. 

 

 

[Ramblurr]

What about the recurring 3MA observation that space/sci-fi strategy games ultimately feel lifeless and empty because the playing board lacks the geography required to make interesting decisions or generate  visceral reactions?

 

I haven't seen that discussed so far.

 

As someone who has only played Stellaris a relatively small amount early on (before starlanes),  I'm not sure I can really make a judgement.