Rob Zacny

Episode 425: Stellaris 2.0 & Apocalypse

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Three Moves Ahead 425:

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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I think I've figured out ideological problem with Stellaris. They've embraced familiar mechanics from EU4 and made the game even more, so to say, granular: your ships really fly through all this space, you capture each system individually. There's less random stuff here, you don't get to colonize a planet that will add 5 rich systems to your empire. Space becomes more systemic and thus boring. As TJ had said by the dreaded midgame you have uniform blobs bumping into each other. Some blobs may be bigger, some smaller; some have a lot connections to each others, some don't. And when you have 70 systems you don't see other empire special systems as special. Someone mentioned craving enemy's black hole system for physics research. But  why would you if an empty space on any of your planet with any POP on it will produce more research? There's nothing special when everything is so big. I fought wars to get systems with enclaves and access to Leviathans (both added in DLC) but even that doesn't help that much; some of your inner factions become happier. Strategic resources are roughly equivalent to being one step in research ahead and you get plenty of those. Getting new planets and species is hard to notice, that unrest doesn't really affect you. You may use new species to colonize more but your 21st planet is not that exciting anymore and requires too much involvement to get your empire's productivity raised by 4% or something.

So the ideological problem is this: Stellaris doesn't have midgame. It only has endgame. First there's initial stage: you note how starlanes go, you settle first colonies and really get into managing them, you throw pops around, you manage resources. But then immideately comes the endgame. There's no grand battle for deciding the fate of the universe, it's all feels determined when it happens. It feels like mopping up. You already have most of interesting inventions and traditions you really wanted; now you get whatever is presented to you. It's like Civilization after turn 400 when everything is decided and you just have to click end turn to get your spaceship to fly - only you'll have to do it for most of the game and you might not even win. You research future tech and mop around, you fight wars where 90% of the action is capturing systems of an enemy with 0 ships and you still have to manage armies to capture planets. Unlike Endless Space 2 there's species-wide story but... We're all psionics, we took 2 ascension perks for that. Wow, our researches now produce whole 10% more of science and admirals have another 10% bonus - that's a whole new game!.. Really nothing feels like a significant change. Even your relationships with resources are the same - even after 250 years of play you will struggle with energy balance and will be able to use any amount of minerals in a day. It switches from the early game wonder to late game clicking through turns while most 4X like Civilization have a middle game where everything is actually decided, when it's fun to play. Meanwhile in something like Endless Space 2 the game evolves; by the endgame the way of interacting with most mechanics completely changes, you stop caring about one type of resources at all while you need some others and they seem worthy of a galactic-scale war. 

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.

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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.

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Another small point about this boring mid-endgame: it often feels like you've already won and for the most of the game you're mopping up. However on normal difficulty you are decieved. Even if you're hegemon and have a huge federation and can wipe the floor with anything in the galaxy there's still crises. In my only game of 2.0 it felt like I was trolled. For a 100 years I do whatever I want because no one is a match for me, I build space habitats because why not, I build space stations, I conquer some systems. It feels like I'm playing Civilization and trying to entertain myself after I've already won but the actual victory won't come in dozens of turns.

 

And then crisis arrives. And it turns out that even though you've got all the traditions, your tech choices are all boring +5% to shields/+10% food, your only way of spending resources is building habitats and wormhole gates - it's still not enough. You actually had to be prepared for something twice as big as the whole galaxy and now you've lost.

 

Crisis strength doesn't depend on difficulty. Thus there's a paradoxical thing: the game is actually harder on low difficulty. Your federation friends are behind you in tech so research agreement is useless. Your enemies are behind so you gain nothing by stealing their debris. Yeah, you can become bigger but you have no intencive. Sad!

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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. 

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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 by Sorbicol
Spelling & Grammar!

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On 3/25/2018 at 12:03 PM, Sorbicol said:

 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. 

 

As long as you build an empire that expands in the same way as any other, builds 95% of the same buildings, has exactly the same economy (OR is robotic and doesn't use food), has exactly the same diplomacy OR has almost no diplomacy, lays claims like everybody else, researches anomalies in the same way, have almost the same tech - then you can embrace the uniqueness of diplomacy greeting options and being able to get non-military techs 10% more often if you're a pacifist.

 

I'm puzzled by that reaction. Even fans of Stellaris acknowledge it has a lot of problems. Still they like it. But when people discuss, say, Endless Space 2, in the end I hear something like "well it's not a perfect game after all and AI could have much more work and the balance is off" while Stellaris is being praised as definitive 4X while being broken in so many regards. Is that the beauty of ambition? ES2 and other strategies do everything they want to do out of the box; with Stellaris you had a list of plans sitting there on release. Perhaps people who think about Stellaris praise the game it will become in their dreams.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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. 

 

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About fleet design: if you have a ship of certain design you can only upgrade it to that specific design. If you have auto-best design and then you decide you want to make manual changes then you'll have to build new ships for that. At least this is how I understood it.

 

I'm sencere when I say there are not so many ways to play. I think all Paradox games have this problem as there's some sort of optimal play but you have to change it depending on geography and geopolitics. What you chose in traits and civics doesn't really change the way you play. Some things make you unable to pursue diplomatic alliances and trade (though you can still trade with Enclaves, I understand), but apart from making you more or less war-focused there's not much difference. You will always go to war. If you have nowhere to expand and you're not in war you're doing something wrong whether you're pacifist or not. And you wage war in a very similar manner, exterminators have armageddon bombing but it's extremely slow and ineffective. Some nations genocide those they capture but I don't see much point in it apart from adding difficulty (can't colonize many planets).

 

There are numerous things that look like they give alternatives ways to play but they appear too late in tech tree or do not really work. Like there are vassals. There are traits that make vassals more useful but still not to extent to be viable as a tactic while in EU4 using vassals wath an interesting trade-off (economically worse than annexing those lands but they have their own army, if you ever lose a war they'll probably become independent), here they're fringe mechanic. A choice between having multitude of species in your empire and single species looks like an interesting one, but there's clear answer - many species are better. If you're xenophobic then you get some boons that compensate your loneliness but you'll be limited in colonization and... Oh wait, you just build robots and that will mean that there's bigger percentage of energy producign buildings and lower percentage of food production buildings in future. There are ascension paths and they're slightly different, like psionics sometimes giving random buffs or debuffs. And interestingly enough there's a difference there, biological ascension doesn't give you better leaders the way psionics and cyborgs do!.. Only wait, they fixed that in a patch and now biological ascension gives you better leaders too.

 

Every choice feels insignificant. You may be an always-war faction or you may not be an always-war faction, but in any case you'd better always be in war. And see my comment higher up about Endless Space 2 robots. This is obvious, simple change they could do: make robots much more useful but you have to build them in the same build queue as buildings so you have a real interesting choice. Nope, can't have that, have your robots that are as similar to organics as they could be. No wonder AI robots try to buy food from you.

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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. 

 

 

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In regards of storytelling engine - yeah, this makes a lot of my nitpicks invalid.

 

But this is not the way they're going. Wiz seem to want this to be a real strategic strategy game. Hence the removal of many starting options. Few games succesfully sit on both chairs - roleplaying and strategy. I think Master of Orion 2 and Total War Rome 1 was there, those games generated stories while being a decent strategy games, and EU4 is maybe there. Stellaris is stuck in a limbo between those two chairs. It's not just a story generator because it has real victory condition and, most importantly, an existencial threat that doesn't care that you're pacifist xenophobic tall empire so whatever your intentions are you need to have a fleet of certain size by the crisis date. It's not Crusader Kings 2 where there are many ways to expand and get stronger or interesting combination of events and traits can give you strange results. 2.0 certainly makes the game more strategic but it still feels like there are not so many strategic choices, most of my actions are straightforward or insignificant. 

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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.

 

 

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