Stellaris - 4X/Grand Strategy Hybrid from Paradox

The Game Room
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Okay, so from watching a friend play a bit, it seems there’s something really stupid in the way the game handles war goals. Tell me if I’m wrong.

War score is 0-100, representing a percentage of how badly you’re kicking their ass, basically. If you get to 100% it’s because you completely defeated their military and are wrecking their bases/planets/occupying/etc.

Since it’s a percentage, it scales with empire size. If you’re facing a guy who has 4 planets and 40 ships, then occupying 2 of those planets and destroying 30 of his ships might give you an 85 war score. But if you’re fighting an empire that had 50 planets and 500 ships, doing the same thing might only give you a 15 war score. Okay, makes sense.

Here’s the thing, though: the actual demands like cede planet are fixed value, and not relative. So it costs you like 15-20 war score to cede a planet whether they’ve got 4 planets or 50. So if you want to have them cede 3 planets, it’s going to require a warscore of, say, 50, whether it’s a tiny empire of 4 planets or a huge empire of 50.

Which means you can only peck apart big empires a little bit at a time. The most planets you can demand they cede at any given time is something like 5-6 at once, and you have to completely defeat them. So you utterly destroy them and you get 5-6 of their planets out of 50? Whereas if you were fighting a smaller empire, you’d get 5-6 of their planets even if they only had 6.

It makes no sense. The 0-100 warscore is a relative measure, but the 15-20 warscore requirement to cede planets is a fixed value. It means you can demand much less, and have to more thoroughly devastate, large empires.

So what do you do in the end game against big empires? Demand 5-6 planets, wreck them in a war, come back in a few years, demand another 5-6 planets and repeat?

It should match. Either war score should be a fixed value and not a percentage, or ceding planets should be a percentage of their total empire to match up with the war score as a percentage.

Edit: Or in case I was unclear somehow, if you wanted to go to war with a 50-planet empire, and demand 25 of their planets, it would cost like 400-500 warscore, which is impossible since warscore caps at 100. So you could make such demands of a small empire, but it’s impossible as you get larger because you’re comparing fixed values against a percentage.

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I should add that vassalize always costs 60 warscore, it doesn’t scale up, so clearly this seems like a ginormous oversight. You can vassalize a huge empire if you thoroughly defeat them, but if you want to get at all their planets, you’re going to have to declare war over and over again picking them apart a little bit at a time.

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The upcoming patch is supposed to address this among a number of other things.

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I had thought that the recent patch (Clarke) changed this, so that demanding planets from large empires costs less warscore per planet. It’s still not a great system; I want to be able to demand all the planets from an empire (or even federation), even if it takes a very thorough trouncing to get my warscore high enough to enforce said demand.

Hell, give an option for “fanatic purifiers”, as the game calls them, who just want to wipe out the xenos.

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Started a new game recently. Charismatic, pacifist, fast-learning bird people. Very quickly - in one of the first half-a-dozen systems I explored - I came across the Sol system. My science officer informed me that the natives on Sol 3 had advanced to the machine age, and were locked in a world-wide war. Well, we can’t have that. I promptly put down an observation post and began the process of technologically enlightening them. Fairly soon, the “humans” - militarist nomadic capitalists - had been given FTL technology and made part of my empire.

Then as I looked at the galaxy map, I noticed a blue (allied power) ship randomly flying around the other side of the galaxy. I clicked on it to inspect it. It was a Space Amoeba, belonging to the humans. Somehow the WW-II era humans had a friendly Space Amoeba on their side. Sadly, it died before I could finish fully integrating the humans, so I didn’t get to make it part of my fleet.

This seems to be a recurrent bug - in another playthough I came across a planet with stone-age primitives that also had a space station, belonging to them, in orbit around it. I’m imagining the ISS built with Flintstones technology. It’s a harmless and kind of amusing bug anyway, like some of the better ones from Dwarf Fortress.

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Maybe they reverted to stone age after a war?

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/r/Stellaris has quite a few screenshots of bronze age civs somehow controlling space monsters.

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Gearing up for another campaign and they’ve just released a trailer revealing the first set of DLC:

Plantoids species pack!

Will contain 15 new animated portraits, a new city backdrop and new ship designs to match.

Hopefully it comes out in time for my next game!

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I hope it’s more than cosmetic. Right now the various races don’t seem particularly distinctive.

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Pretty sure it is purely cosmetic.

The distinctiveness of the various race sin any one play-through is supposed to come directly from the existing game mechanics - however a big component of hat is the AI, and that’s being addressed in the next big patch, with AI supposedly taking in more of a personality based on it’s government type and ethos.

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They’ve been continuously releasing patches for this game and updating the community on upcoming improvements and I’m really liking what’s coming with the next big patch.

Along side a slew of improvements and balance passes and free content (they are tyring to beef up the mid and late game), the Heinlein patch is revamping Fallen Empires.

Fallen empires can now awaken! Awaken empires will seek to enforce their will on the Galaxy. Along with it will come another bit of DLC: The War In Heaven. With the DLC when two Fallen Empires awaken they might trigger a Galaxy wide war in which you’ll need to bet on eon or the other, or join a coalition of separatists. The war will not end until one or the other Fallen empire is destroyed, or both are subjugated by the younger races in the galaxy.

Heinlein isn’t do until October, so we’re still a good month+ away :frowning:

On another note, they’ve hired the lead writer for Sunless Sea to work on more story-line content for the game, which also has me excited.

I’m busy with Deus Ex, and Pillars of Eternity (finishing up the expansion now) and Totla War Warhammer, but I’m definitely going ack once Heinlein drops for another campaign or four.

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Now that I missed hearing about; I’m looking forward to it.

The Heinlein patch definitely looks interesting, it’s going to change the game fairly drastically.

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This sounds like a direct import of a game mechanic from Europa Universalis. And that was to try to simulate the sort of peace deals that actually occurred in the era. Countries would go to war, one side would win, and in the peace talks the winner would get a few provinces or such. It wasn’t possible for Spain to just invade France and then annex the whole of France. And wars had to have all sorts of legal justifications, you couldn’t just up and invade France because you wanted to own France, you had to point to how your uncle was the Duke of such and such and that would have made you the heir to so and so, and all that sort of thing.

Anyway, the point is, it’s a gameplay mechanic to try to recreate the sort of historical peace treaties that actually happened, and to prevent one country from just permanently conquering their peers and doubling and then tripling and then quadrupling in size and taking over Europe.

But it does lead to frustrating situations where you crush your enemies and they want to give you some half-assed province that doesn’t provide shit. The game mechanic enforces some sort of historicity, but in a kind of forced way. The real reason nobody could conquer Europe is that you couldn’t really just occupy a whole country and besiege every city and render the enemy helpless. And dynasties fell apart, inheritances got divided, and so on.

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There is a Paradox sale on Steam ATM. Got HOI2 complete for $3. EU4 is 9.99.

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A “Story Pack” DLC has been announced, Leviathans.

Looks interesting, and the trailer is cool. As someone on another forum said, “Looks like somebody failed their Anomaly research roll.”

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I mean, in EU4 that’s kind of simulated too. If you take too much land you almost certainly will implode from rebellions. I’m like 80% of the way to Luck o’ The Irish on EU4 right now, and I had a hell of a time with rebels when conquering Ireland because you have to conquer several small nations whenever the opportunity presents itself or England will take them all instead and you’ll have a bad day.

Anyway, while War Score is partially a historicity thing, it’s mostly a game mechanic. Paradox puts a lot of things in their games (Aggressive Expansion, revolt risk, war exhaustion, manpower) to force you to not just carve a bloody swath through wherever. The slower pacing of their games really sets them apart from, say, Total War where all there really is to do is fight battles all day.

Not to say that Paradox Games are any good whatsoever at “building tall”. They’re total map painting games; every attempt they’ve made to make playing a small country viable has failed spectacularly. If you’re not expanding, and a large part of that needs to be militarily, you’re not going to be doing much, but War Score is one of many mechanics in their games to slow that.

All that said, War Score was kind of badly implemented in Stellaris. War Score should probably be related to the number of tiles and pops on a planet, rather than being a fixed value. This is closer to how EU4 does it where warscore is based on development, and certain ideas and modifiers (like claims) can raise or lower warscore costs.

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I enjoy this game, but it frustrates me.

I’m currently on my second attempt, and things are going well - except now my expansion is blocked on all sides by other empires. And I’m a pacifist, so I don’t want to declare war. I’d love for someone to declare war on me, but I have done everything short of puking on their prime minister and I can’t get ANYBODY to start a fight. Not the xenophobes to the south, nor the militarists to the north, nor the Fallen Empire to the east.

I’ve tried going the other direction - expansion by diplomacy - but even after using Gene Tailoring to remove my Repugnant penalty from my POPs, it remains attached to my government like a scarlet letter. I’ve had exactly one external group join me as a vassal.

I think I’m going to have to start using my Psi Jump drive just to make something happen…

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The for-free Heinlein patch (v1.3) has come out today and then the for-pay Leviathans story pack comes out on Thursday. These have a lot of changes. I’ll try it out after the first hot-fix. :wink:

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The patch is out today?! I thought it was releasing along side the expansion tomorrow.

Patch notes are extensive to say the least:

And it looks like I was right, this isn’t coming out until Thursday. I don’t know what’s going to happen to my marriage when both this and Civ VI come out, but it ain’t going to be pretty.

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I just logged onto Steam and didn’t get the patch. Are you guys actually getting the patch?

I can’t wait for the story pack.