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Well the previous thread generally agreed on a new title. Then, when the new thread was posted, the OP decided to zig instead of zag and went with the Trump joke.
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Jan 20, 2017 18:51
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Chomp8645 posted:God forbid a Games thread not have the correct lame pun/tired meme in it's title. Forums Contrarian Chomp here to tell you that the poo poo you're saying is wrong. Well, cya. *peels out*
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Jan 20, 2017 18:54
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Wiz posted:A feature being present in a game does not always make that game better. If I added a QTE minigame that you'd have to play every time you built a building I'm pretty sure you'd be clamoring for that particular mechanic's removal. Yeah but the thing about going into a game that is really barebones and barely working and demanding that whole swaths of it be dumped seems odd. I don't go into the CK2 threads saying that the game would be better without all that annoying politics and infighting. Stellaris has already invested a ton of time into the ship components, the ship designer, the combat system. The goal is to find a way to make those relevant, aligned to the game, and work to enhance the gameplay throughout. Not to jettison them. This is the right game with the right framework to implement a fun combat system in a Paradox game. Make folks believe - Combat can be fun!
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Jan 23, 2017 20:07
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Wiz posted:All that aside, the idea that just because a game is 'barebones' (and Stellaris is not barebones) you should keep features that add nothing but tedium and frustration is simply wrong-headed. Tedious, frustrating features without depth do not make a game deeper, they just make it more tedious and frustrating. I'm simply saying that if the first approach is "dump it" in a game that people are eager to see fleshed out with expansions, then it's kinda counterproductive. I agree with what you said - the systems should be aligned with the game design so that they facilitate the gameplay / narratives that people want, without tedious micro to get there. I don't think "just axe it" is the solution though, and that seems to be a recurring sentiment in the thread. I don't like the current army system, I don't think it should be entirely scrapped. I'd like to see ship design be more relevant to combat overall, which ideally would tie into the research choices and empire type - and I imagine that's coming with expansions, patches, and mods. So in that sense, simply dumping the ship designer would be unfortunate.
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Jan 23, 2017 20:46
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Enjoy posted:Asynchronous warfare is cool because it's a brake on player expansion without just being another goddamn AE penalty A really awesome thing in Sword of the Stars is when the AI starts sending cloaked cruisers that ruin your planets with bio plagues and if you don't have the ability to see cloaked, welp.
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Jan 23, 2017 20:47
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Wiz posted:Nah, I have a decent bit of insight here and AI simply isn't a priority for most strategy game developers. There are many reasons for this, a big one is that there's simply not a good knowledge base in the industry about how to make strategy game AI. There's tons of people with experience coding FPS bot AI and they tend to be hired to make strategy game AI, but making a bot AI and a strategy game AI are completely different disciplines. There's other issues, like the fact that game developers don't play their own games, but I'm completely honest when I say that players being utterly dreadful when it comes to feedback about AI is no small factor. From the perspective of people who make the decisions, you basically always get the same amount of 'the AI is completely braindead and broken' because people will say this and only this no matter how large or small the issue they encounter is. Like you'll hear it just as much over AI literally ceasing to take any actions as you will over the AI, say, picking something that gives it 5 resources instead of 6. It's utterly toxic and completely discourages companies from giving a poo poo about AI. I'm messing around with Machine Learning stuff in both Keras and Tensorflow. I'm curious what tools game devs typically use to code their AI, and if there's any type of machine learning / deep learning algorithms they tend to prefer. Basically I'm trying to get a sense of which style of neural networks / ML algorithms they implement. It's also really neat to read your description of the issues from the designer perspective, thanks.
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Jan 26, 2017 22:56
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Wiz posted:I've gone into depth on this topic many a time, so I hope this doesn't come off as dismissive, but... as it stands, machine learning is a complete pipe dream for games of any real level of complexity. About the only games that can employ it outside of highly limited/selective implementations is fighting games, and even there it's in its infancy. The belief in technology and algorithms over simple iterative work is actually a huge issue with strategy game AI, people want easy solutions and they just don't exist. It's about hard work, a bit of design know-how and a thorough understanding of the game you're working on. So current strategy game AI is mostly decision trees and hard coded behavior? I'm curious if you feel ML is out of the picture because the game states / decisions are too complex, or if the computing requirements are excessive. I understand the computational concerns, though I think there's aspects that would be interesting to explore. I haven't had a lot of luck finding resources to look at some sample game AIs.
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Jan 26, 2017 23:06
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Sindai posted:There was a good article on behavior tree vs utility AI on gamasutra a while back: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JakobRasmussen/20160427/271188/Are_Behavior_Trees_a_Thing_of_the_Past.php Thanks for the link, this is what I was hoping for!
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Jan 26, 2017 23:26
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Wiz posted:Allow me to explain the biggest problem with something like peaceful annexation of planets through culture: Everyone loves it when they're the one getting planets flipped to them... but when it's the other way around? Yeah, no, not so much. I think this statement is true on it's own. If we look at the requests for the peaceful annexation of planets through culture as "I want empires to be able to influence each other and have reasons to go to war" then I think it makes more sense. Like, in a typical 4x like Civ it's annoying to have culture flipping. In Stellaris, the peaceful hippy utopia is supposed to be available for a species going that route. Presumably other species would be willing to join that, so their way of expanding would be flipping planets over. And then you could have them guaranteed by neighbors so that if you try to declare on them you gotta deal with that, similar to EU4's block alliances. Then it would be cool to have techs that limit enemy influence and various different empires reacting to that. It feels like there should be a conflict of ideologies going on at all times. The warmongers want to conquer. The spiritualists want to ascend. The utopians want to bring everyone into the hugbox. The cyborgs want to assimilate everyone. If there was some way that peaceful dudes could be a threat, that would make them interesting. If culture flipping isn't it that's fine, but it would still be cool if even 'xenophile' 'pacifist' empires represented a serious threat. If Stellaris is willing to have big enemies in the form of Fallen Empires and Crises, I think it also makes sense to deal with enemies that can brainwash / convert your planets. Sword of the Stars, even as a really tactical 4x, included this element to great success. I think the asymmetry between the factions and their abilities to gently caress with each other was a large part of the fun.
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Feb 2, 2017 20:34
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Wiz posted:People are a lot less willing to accept losing planets when they didn't have a chance to fight back. It's the same with say losing territory through espionage/sabotage, things that you can only fight back against 'indirectly' tend to be very frustrating when they have a large impact on the player's experience. Again, I think this is all true in general. In SOTS, people did enjoy the virus warfare and the cloaked stuff. It required you to tech a certain way. If someone went missiles and you didn't research PD, that was a problem. Similarly, if you were researching PD and someone else went cloak + viruses, that was a problem. If you had a way to detect cloak and counter missiles but didn't have good weapons, you'd lose fleet fights. The multiple, competing requirements meant that the player was generally pressed for time, resources, and always had more things to research than they could. With Stellaris, when I hit the 5 planet limit, the game tends to slow down as if it just exited warp. I have nothing to worry about. I settled on habitable planets, my pops are growing, I have some space, and the conflict tends to stop. Once the empires around me have formed their alliances there's little shifting and it tends to turn into long wars for little gain. I believe a more dynamic space where empires were constantly setting up for the next conflict due to competing interests would be interesting. Having a planet converting empire on your borders that you had to deal with as a looming threat, if communicated to the player, would be something interesting to consider other than just colonize planets and fight stellar / ground wars. Ham Sandwiches fucked around with this message at 20:42 on Feb 2, 2017 |
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Feb 2, 2017 20:39
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Baronjutter posted:Some sort of passive "culture points" thing that magically flips planets is not fun. Yeah, I agree with this. That's the fun stuff to play around with. The differing ethos should have differing goals they are pushing towards, and ways that they represent a threat to you. In SOTS each neighbor represents a unique threat that you will have to deal with in a different way. In Stellaris that really doesn't happen, and it would be cool to see more ways to fight for territory and pops. I also think the war system could be loosened up a bit. I really get the sense that the Stellaris world is defined by skirmishes and little battles all over the place. Some fleet running into some menace, some unencountered race seeming hostile. SOTS did a better job of representing this with the encounter events you tended to get in the first 50 or so turns. You've got a ship meeting another ship and you really aren't sure how it's going to go. Stellaris has a different feel, wars are large scale endeavors and offer little meaningful gain. I really wonder how and why it would be harmful to roll back the long truces, the alliance systems etc that are hallmarks of Paradox games. Not to encourage 4x style total war, but to allow skirmishes, battles, and low grade conflicts all across the galaxy. Like the equivalent of privateering, I'd love to be able to send some cloaked ships to gently caress with my neighbor while pretending I have no idea what's going on. Or to try to mind control my neighbor's pops. Or to engineer a bio plague that just targets his dudes and covertly spread it to his planets.
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Feb 2, 2017 21:12
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RabidWeasel posted:I foolishly posted on Reddit in an argument over naming the authoritarian-egalitarian axis (this will never end) and predictably - though I didn't see it coming because I'm not a crazy person - got told my line of reasoning was wrong because the opposite of authoritarianism is actually libertarianism. I am so happy that I don't have to interact with these people in the real world. I'm glad that I get to read a recounting of the argument you had on reddit arguing about the same old labels that have been discussed since release, as well as explaining that your position is the right one because you are not a crazy person.
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Feb 4, 2017 21:31
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Tarquinn posted:I'm just (very slightly) tired of getting the same events over and over again Please consider not using spoilers to deliver punchlines, it feels pretty forced, lots of people find ways to deliver jokes and punchlines without using them. The other thing is I also agree with how little content there is, a few event chains that reoccur on most playthroughs and don't really resolve into anything meaningful, however the game director insists the game is not content sparse. I'm running two mods, Fallen Empires and Stellar Expansion, the game still feels so very sparse. As soon as I reach my planet limit I start thinking about when I can punt planets to the sector, except this is 1.4, so my robot build is going to be all screwed up, and then it's fun stuff like: "Alright I'm capped out, so ok these two will go into the sector pool and before that I'll go one over the cap for a bit, when they release I'll be at 4/5, so then I colonize this planet and build it up and then kick it over to the sector." - BORING And let me reiterate once more: Having the player do all the micro on the planet AND THEN kick it to the sector is the worst of all worlds. You frontload the micro - the building slots and moving pops and assigning pops to buildings and clearing tiles all happens at the start. So I'm clicking and clicking, get rid of this tile, pay for the clearing, build this thing, get the right pop on it. The reward for this 5-10 minutes of tedium per planet is that at the end, you have a cap that forces you to relinquish that planet into a place where it will be used suboptimally. So like, hey nice job building a useful planet. Let's give it to the sector that will mostly do nothing with it. Even if you wanted to have sectors, and pops, and buildings, this sequence is dumb. If the sectors are meant to prevent micro tedium I should be able to throw every new planet into a sector and have it grow pretty much as well as it would have if I was managing it, then colonization and expansion would not be horrific. As it is, I do all the work as if I was going to keep the planet (no reduction in micro) but then I have to dump the planet that I did the work for. It's just bizarre and seems completely backwards. Ham Sandwiches fucked around with this message at 20:31 on Feb 7, 2017 |
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Feb 7, 2017 20:27
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Truga posted:The sector AI isn't so much as dumb as there's not enough settings for it IMO. If you've set up 50 planets and turned them over to the sector, at 5 minutes of pointless clicking per that's 250 minutes of pointless poo poo you've done this run alone. 4 hours of your life spent setting pretend pixels up so that a utility AI can give you about 50-80% use out of them. Why is there a cap whatsoever when you've already made the players do all the work? You could let the player keep the 50 planets they've already done the 250 minutes of crap to get them functional. What are you saving them by making them put it in a sector? Clicking upgrade on the various mineral and energy extractors? An upgrade all button fixes that. You could have a 'auto build upgrades when the que is empty' toggle on planets even. The micro I do on planets is almost 90-95% stuff I do before I give them to the sector. The sector does not cut down on micro or provide meaningful automation, but it does make me feel that taking new planets is pointless. The multiple sectors stuff is incomprehensible to me. They have to be contiguous?? I can't even just throw them in a space sector?? Tedium upon tedium for no reason. Ham Sandwiches fucked around with this message at 21:07 on Feb 7, 2017 |
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Feb 7, 2017 21:05
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Baronjutter posted:Yeah my go to is to build a happiness building, plop down a couple farms, and a mine or two if there's bonuses, and queue up robots for all the mines and farms, then let em loose. Then of course back later to see 2 of the 4 robots working on energy tiles, the monument to purity unstaffed, and 2 humans working the mines instead of the robots There's the precursor to this, where you put the planet HQ down and have to grow it to 5 while building farms on either blank or the wrong tiles. And then there's the issue of moving the HQ or not moving the HQ, since you can't clear tiles for good adjacency bonus use until you place the HQ. I don't get that stuff. The same shuffle on every planet? It's not even "colonize planet, que up what I want, throw to sector" there's a bunch of stuff to get to that point.
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Feb 7, 2017 21:21
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Eiba posted:Jesus man, you're not supposed to do that. On your first 10 or so planets, sure, micromanage the heck out of them. But once you're up to 20 and certainly 50 just throw those fuckers in a sector and don't even think about them. Ok so for the first 10 planets, the player will spend an hour developing stuff that they will largely cede to the sector AI. Then afterward, they will stop caring about new planets that are colonized or conquered - just throw them to the sector AI and let that poo poo handle it. That way you really feel the impact of your conquests, ethics, pop choices, and planet building decisions. Especially per run. All this while constantly juggling a planet cap. I don't understand why one would implement it that way, and hope that the basic flow of these things gets reassessed. Hopefully the food overhaul will help.
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Feb 7, 2017 21:22
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Captain Oblivious posted:Setting aside the issue of whether your complaints have any merit or not: Ok I'm genuinely confused here. I find the process of: Landing on a planet Placing the HQ Shuffling a governor over if I need one Building the farms Growing the pop to 5 Moving or not moving the HQ for adjacency Building the desired buildings Waiting for pop growth Assigning the pops to the buildings Giving the planet to a sector To be dull and repetitive, as you have to do it for each planet, and in a given campaign that can occur many times. I find this sequence tedious and don't enjoy the tedium of doing this task many times during a given playthrough. What's the issue with my usage of the word? Why exactly are we talking about this?
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Feb 7, 2017 21:39
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Hey sometimes my stuff comes across as critical when I don't intend it that way. So I'll just try a quick paragraph to sum it up: I really like that Stellaris has both complexity and automation. I think that's awesome. I would look at the sequencing. Maybe new planets should be colonized and then automatically thrown into a 'colonial sector.' When that happens, you get to select a 'target' for the planet. Kinda like a ship builder. You can clear any tiles you want, assign buildings, set the pops, you can build it the way you want it to look when it's complete - before anything has actually grown there. Then the colonial AI builds the planet the way you want, and when it's done, you get to manage it and it becomes part of your empire. Right now the way it works is, for a 50 planet scenario: Player does 50 planets worth of infrastructure set up AI tries to make interesting decisions with that infrastructure and does not succeed So I suggest inverting it, for a 50 planet scenario: AI does 50 planets worth of infrastructure set up Player gets to make interesting decisions with that infrastructure So I'd remove the planet cap (or raise it by x5 or x10), make all newly colonized or conquered planets go into a colonial sector AI, and have them emerge into your regular empire when they are done building to the blueprint you provided. That's the kind of thing I'd like to see, so that the player gets 50 planets that they can look at the pops, or build cool endgame buildings, or optimize them now that they are done being built and be done with it.
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Feb 7, 2017 21:51
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Wiz posted:Yes but on the other hand eating plantoids is canonically vegan in Stellaris. This is really weird to me, like honestly. I can't tell the joke if it's a joke. Since I haven't played the expansion, do different species types really treat this stuff differently or not? These constant jokes about stuff that hasn't been explained (and GunnerJ straight up making things up to get a response) get tiresome when trying to understand the upcoming features.
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Feb 9, 2017 20:07
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Wiz posted:Okay, let me phrase your question for you: Is there in fact mechanics for the consumption of what alien races are and are not vegan in the next Stellaris update? I have no idea if you guys included "Races eating races" as one of the mechanics in the expansion, as one of the evil things you can do, with some simple checks that similar races don't like eating similar food, similar to religion. So that a plantoid neighbor would be upset if you turned on the cannibalism policy and started eating plantoid pops that you have vs a fungoid, that may not care as much, because you are going cross species.
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Feb 9, 2017 20:15
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Wiz posted:First I need to add the 'gluten free' species trait. It's the same way that you pick up more AE for going to war against people of [x] religion if you have neighbors of that religion. If you can eat enemy pops for food, then I would imagine the neighbors of that race type would get more upset. Unless everyone agreed through the UN that plants or fish don't have feelings, just like they did on earth. Then, fuckem. And I think this goes back to the 'tasty' trait discussion that happened earlier.
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Feb 9, 2017 20:19
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Baronjutter posted:Yeah, I wish everything was more or less open to everyone, just not as useful for certain styles. You could go for psy poo poo as materialists but you'd be fighting an uphill battle and be losing opportunity costs you could be putting into more suitable investments. I agree, the mishmash of technology, psionics, and deep space weirdness was what made Sword of the Stars interesting. Psionics affected most races (to various degrees) and were a major mechanic of conflict with the ascended space dolphin darth vader / C'tan equivalents. A different way to say it is I'm ok with there being generic ways to advance your species during the campaign that are open to everyone, as long as it has corresponding reactions from people with similar / opposite ideologies.
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Feb 9, 2017 23:37
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Coolguye posted:you can dance in and out of various ethics now and keep the various benefits, i really would not worry about your ability to do crazy crap ?? It's nice when Paradox soft locks options instead of hard locks them and I'm simply agreeing with the guy who said the same thing.
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Feb 9, 2017 23:39
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Wiz posted:Soft locking tends to make everything feel very samey. I think people actually like hard locks a lot more than they think they do because they create clear, distinct choices and playstyles. People praise the different FTL styles in SotS but they would never have worked as well if any race could choose any FTL rather it coming along with their other advantages and disadvantages. Well, I'm in favor of clear, distinct choices and playstyles. I would like to see more of that in the game. A more organic reason for the conflict (of ideologies, ways of existence), and more distinct playthroughs for each one seem like a win. I guess if that translates hard locking psionics to make them more distinct then I'm ok with it. I just want playthroughs of Stellaris to feel far more different than they currently do.
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Feb 9, 2017 23:48
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Wiz posted:Keep in mind you'll also be able to change empire ethics in Banks so if you decide that robots aren't for you after all and you'd actually like some space magic, you can work to turn your empire spiritualist. It's just that you can't do that and also keep your robots. This sounds like actual reason to drive map politics and conflict. Along with much more interesting pop weirdness from the wrong kind of pops. Sounds promising.
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Feb 9, 2017 23:51
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Baronjutter posted:I love that I'm too materialistic IRL to even imagine how something like the shroud could be hard for a determined scientific study to uncover. Real world scientists, today, will refuse to investigate any psychic or weird claims they think are too wacky. Go to your local university, psych department, tell them you want help doing an experiment relating to psychic conductivity. Or contact the astronomy department and earnestly ask them to help in your study of Aliens. In every belief system there will be stuff that falls outside of the tenets of that belief system.
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Feb 10, 2017 01:48
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Ein Sexmonster posted:This is just wrong though. Scientists HAVE investigated psychic or weird claims for decades. They just haven't ever found anything that backs up their existence. I'm fine with the current division though. Wiz is right about restrictions being good for variety. Ah, I see. Scientists are impartial knowledge priests thoroughly testing any claims brought to them and doing so without any biases or preconceptions based on their existing understanding of the world. To imply that there's a recursive aspect to what they will test, or how thoroughly they will test or, or how they interpret the data - nope. Also, lol.
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Feb 10, 2017 02:03
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Zurai posted:Talk about biases and preconceived notions. "Maybe the scientists on 2017 earth would have a hard time considering psychic phenomenon as a real thing and would be less receptive to investigating that than something they believe exists, like 10nm processor fabrication" "Ur wrong, scientists investigate EVERYTHING"
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Feb 10, 2017 02:06
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Ein Sexmonster posted:That is, of course, not what you actually said. You claimed scientists 'refuse' to investigate claims about ESP, etc, period. If you're going to paraphrase do it honestly. When I say refuse, I mean "The scientific community is satisfied with an answer that does not satisfy the general public, and is no longer investigating." A really simple example is the current debate about Thimerosal. The scientific consensus says that they have proven it is safe, and basically refuses to do any substantive inquiry otherwise. I believe that Psychic Phenomena, claims of faith healing, and claims of Aliens fall into this category but apparently this is in dispute and credible studies are done on them. Can you please link the last study trying to determine a psychic phenomenon, when it was published, and how many subjects it had?
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Feb 10, 2017 02:18
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Zurai posted:Yeah, scientists totally ignore aliens. SETI is a figment of my imagination, after all. The simple thing I was trying to illustrate is that Scientific inquiry as it is currently done tends to be a little rigid and fall within existing beliefs, and is better at doing inquiry on topics they think are credible than they think are not. Of course, I used the word "Refuse" instead of "Does a lazy, lovely job looking into stuff they don't think exists" and here we are arguing about it. To my mind, when people who actually can look into something choose not to because it falls outside of their existing beliefs, that's refusal. And the guy trolling me about bringing up antivax is a great example, you can't really discuss "issues under scientific vs general dispute" without being labeled as a follower of a camp.
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Feb 10, 2017 02:37
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Baronjutter posted:Do we know if we can "fully" embrace 3 ethos? Why not be fanatical pacifist, materialist, and egalitarian at the same time? So long as the ethos are mutually exclusive it seems reasonable if all choices are more or less equal. ie fantatic X isn't "better" or "higher level" than non-fanatic, it just comes with bigger bonuses but also bigger penalties. Fanatic pacifists get a bigger pacifist bonus, but they also have stricter rules and reactions to war. It's meant to represent archetypes or races. I have had issues with it being on a wheel since the start, though I get the concept of "you can't mix and match stuff from the opposite side" and I get the idea of playthroughs being distinct. I don't think it does a very good job of pushing you towards a playstyle or making your run interesting. I think the idea of locking stuff behind these decisions is to introduce more variation. If you go materialist this run, you'll have robots but you won't get to play with psionics, you'll be using tech to keep your dudes happy, and you'll be using certain approaches to end game crisis. If you do spiritualist next run, robots are gone but you get psionics. If that ties into locking it to certain FTL types, and between the Unity trees and additional content giving each of the archetypes some neat toys and constraints, then I think Stellaris could get much more interesting over time. It could also start tying in to the tech tree, and then perhaps the archetypes would have innate bonuses to ship component stats. I feel like putting ethos on a wheel (same complaint w/ habitability) was an odd way to represent the choices available and what you're choosing between. Limiting it to two seems like you could plan on the player having a 'primary' ethos (one that will be l2) and a supporting ethos that will be l1. I also suspect there could be balancing issues with Tier 1 / Tier 2 talents and how the progression would go. Overall there isn't enough differentiation in Stellaris so I'm ok with it forcing you a ' primary ethos' for each run.
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Feb 10, 2017 20:04
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I would be much happier to do diplomacy if it didn't cost influence. In EU4 you get a diplo limit of how many deals you can have before it costs you dip points. Here every deal costs you influence points. I am ok with some way to express political control or areas of influence. The current system feels weird. I also find placing outposts weird. It feels like it should work differently. In short - I would like to be able to make a few treaties with my neighbors to figure out which ones I'll be friendly with and start building up relationships, and which ones I'll fight. Having a cost to diplomacy discourages that. It would be fun to do those kinda meaningless RP treaties without it feeling like it's costing me points I could use for leaders or outposts or colonies.
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Feb 13, 2017 21:07
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Darth Windu posted:NAPs don't cost influence I don't think. Only defensive pacts Here's the main thing I'm trying to say: I would find diplomacy more interesting with some constraint other than influence costs.
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Feb 13, 2017 21:16
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Wiz posted:The difference is that in EU4 every country is expected to do diplomacy though. There's no Fanatic Purifiers in EU4. To me this means that I can have a perfunctory relationship with my neighbors, but if I expect that relationship to grow into anything useful, I have to pay. Which means that really all I'm doing is buying allies with my influence points, assuming our pokemon ethos align. I guess I don't understand why? If interacting with the other races and empires makes the game more interesting, I don't understand discouraging it.
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Feb 13, 2017 21:17
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Wiz posted:Ships make the game more interesting. We're still 'discouraging' you from building them by making them cost minerals. Feels kinda reductionist. In EU4 there is no cost to diplomatic deals and it creates a tangle of alliances, guarantees, and pretty cool gameplay. Trade in Stellaris is a great example. Can I set up a trade agreement that benefits the two empires in some way? Not really, I can trade resources. That's a resource exchange, not 'trade between empires', so in EU4 there's much richer interaction possible between pretty backwards human empires (fighting over trade value in a node) on one planet vs aliens in space. And yet you can mess with that entire trade system without it costing you any monarch points (barring events). Similarly, you have a 5 diplo deal limit. You can do whatever diplo deals you want up to that limit, and then go over - kinda like the core planet system in Stellaris, much more flexible than the diplo system Stellaris uses. I think having the player engage with their neighbors is good. Having them look at the traits, look at the ethics, look at the portraits of whatever weird alien poo poo rolled up. If the player has more reasons to interact with other empires, I think that makes them more likely to do so. Diplomacy and inter-empire stuff feels kinda stale in Stellaris, even when compared to EU4 which is a game that exists and has very robust diplomacy. The ship cost in stellaris has never discouraged me from building a ship. The rigid fleet cap has, but that's a post for another time. The influence cost has discouraged me every single time I've gone to mess with diplomacy.
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Feb 13, 2017 21:30
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Wiz posted:My point is that saying 'why put a cost on X if I don't want it to have a cost'' is a completely self-centered argument. You can argue that the diplomacy isn't worth the influence cost (and I'd disagree) but your personal feeling that something you should be free because you don't like it having a cost is... not very relevant to the game as a whole. Yeah I'm not stressing about the cost as if it pains me personally to pay the influence. I'm talking about the design in terms of what it encourages the player to do and what it discourages the player to do. I can't speak for all players, but I can speak as to how it affects my decision making. In EU4 I look for allies and pacts at the start of the game. I try to maintain those relationships over time as the trust that we build up is likely to turn into alliances or useful relationships during the campaign. I mess with Diplomacy in 100% of EU4 games. In Stellaris, if I want to do the same thing it will have an Influence cost, which if I recall grows over time. It means that if I don't plan on making defensive alliances or being friendly with my neighbors, I have no reason to touch Diplomacy whatsoever other than checking the diplomatic status of my targets. I rarely mess with Diplomacy in Stellaris, and when I do, I find it kinda boring. I was observing that in one game, the system encourages the player to interact with it, and in the other, there is a cost before you can do so.
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Feb 13, 2017 21:41
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Wiz posted:The influence cost does not grow over time. The difference between EU4 and Stellaris that in EU4, *everyone* has a bunch of allies because there's hundreds of nations on the map. Having 3-4 allies is simply way more powerful in Stellaris than it is in EU4. It also simply wouldn't be practical for everyone to have 3 allies when there's like, 8 empires on the map. I mean, hordes exist in EU4 and they get full diplomacy, right? Here's a series of questions I think the player needs to be able to answer before signing a deal that costs Influence: How can I quantify the cost of a defensive alliance? How long will I need to maintain this deal? How many influence points do I need to set aside? How much influence income do I realistically need before I can comfortably afford this alliance? Will I need to spend Influence on leaders or edicts anytime soon? Will I be able to afford the outposts I need if I sign this? Will doing this defensive pact help me or hurt me overall? Influence absolute values tend to be pretty low (early game we're talking in the low hundreds), influence gain is usally +4 for me, so I have to give up half my Influence income to sign a single defensive deal, and this means a big opportunity cost with hiring generals or replacing my leader or doing an edict if I have to. I guess I personally was trying to express I don't understand tying hiring leaders, placing outposts, edicts and making diplo deals to the same pool, and that I would feel much more free to conduct Diplomacy if it didn't also affect my ability to run my empire.
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Feb 13, 2017 21:49
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Wiz posted:EU4 has a fixed number of countries and there's lots of them. It is a very different game from Stellaris in some ways. Saying that something works in EU4 and therefore it absolutely will work in Stellaris just isn't true. If diplomacy didn't affect your ability to run your empire, you are essentially taking nearly all cost out of that cost vs benefit analysis. It becomes a no brainer for everyone to defensive pact with everyone else that they don't plan on fighting. It would become nearly impossible to wage offensive wars unless we intentionally made the AI really bad at abusing this system. Well it sounds like this is another scaling issue for Stellaris then. I would love to see some other solution to the diplomatic hell than internal costs - like a freebie slot or something, but if that's how it is then so be it. Having played at release when the entire galaxy was in giant alliances, I have no desire for those hell wars to be the norm in Stellaris, that's for sure. So I guess if stale diplo = able to conquer then ok, I'll settle for conquer. I just want to loving play with the diplomacy and make all kinds of treaties with my alien friends while calling other aliens ugly. I hope the galactic UN stuff finds a way to 'feel' the ethos choices and gameplay impacts and insult my neighbors for being alien weirdos. I have more influence in Star Control 2 over my neighbors than in Stellaris. Dill rats indeed.
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Feb 13, 2017 22:02
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Wiz posted:Really my point is just that one player feeling something shouldn't have a cost because they feel it shouldn't have a cost is kind of a nonstarter as an argument. Yeah I was trying to talk about the diplomatic system in general, starting on that note doesn't seem to have helped. I appreciate the discussion, and had thought about making a mod for that as well 
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Feb 13, 2017 22:17
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CompeAnansi posted:After reading this thread for a while I have to say that it's really impressive that Wiz has the patience to still engage with all of you It's always nice when people drop by threads full of content and engaging in lively discussion only to post crap like this. Thanks for your contribution.
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Feb 14, 2017 01:43
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