STELLARIS: New Paradox Game in SPAAAACE

[garbon]

Free changes mentioned this week are interesting (pirates and spacefaring lifeforms) but not really adding up to the shakeup the game needs.

[celedhring]

I like it. Breaking up the core systems of pirates and space entities sounds interesting if the rewards are good enough. Looks like something else to do around midgame.

The game will end up in a pretty good place, imho. It's just becoming apparent that it will take a bunch of evolutionary patches and DLCs.

[Tonitrus]

I dunno..."pirates" seem to been an overused (and sometimes overpowered, with seemingly better resources than the player) schtick for too many of the 4x space games in recent history.

And while I know Stellaris brushes up more towards space opera than space realism, I've always thought the "space pirates" was kinda lame, along with already being rather implausible...unless they were state sponsored, as many of the "classic" pirates were.

[garbon]

I dunno..."pirates" seem to been an overused (and sometimes overpowered, with seemingly better resources than the player) schtick for too many of the 4x space games in recent history.

And while I know Stellaris brushes up more towards space opera than space realism, I've always thought the "space pirates" was kinda lame, along with already being rather implausible...unless they were state sponsored, as many of the "classic" pirates were.

Yeah, but then we've already saw how terribly boring pirates are as state sponsored ones in EUIV.

I think space pirates and space entities being interesting will hang on what sort of events/storylines go with them. Current set of missions/storylines for them are dull as fuck. Same with those abandoned mining colonies. All play out exactly the same way, every game.  Just as some sort of boss raid sounds a bit dull.

[Zanza]

Space pirates that just work like the space monsters are a bit boring. But without a trade system and civil transports represented in the game, piracy makes little sense to me. Pirates - even in space operas - should be a threat to trade, not to military fleets.

[garbon]

Space pirates that just work like the space monsters are a bit boring. But without a trade system and civil transports represented in the game, piracy makes little sense to me. Pirates - even in space operas - should be a threat to trade, not to military fleets.

Yeah agreed. I thought it odd that they said they wanted to expand space piracy even though there isn't a trade system.

[Berkut]

Yep - space piracy at a high level sounds like a cool idea. I like the idea of forcing the player to make choices about fleet builds to handle a particular type of problem that will then potentially make it harder to handle another kind of problem.

In my view, piracy should be a problem that demands that the player do something to resolve it, or at least contain it. The current setup is terribly disappointing. You either have a fleet that can kill them, or you do not. If piracy was that easy to solve, it would never have been the problem it was...

You should not be able to just send a squadron out to some base and kill the pirates - the pirates would never be there when you got there, just like the Royal Navy could not just send a few ships to some port in the Carribbean, have a nice battle, and all the pirates are gone. That would never work, because the pirates would not be there when you arrived, and even if you did manage to catch them, more would sprout up.

Pirates should be a problem that forces the player to spend precious ship slots on cruisers to patrol the trade lanes. If they somehow become wealthy and powerful enough, they could form their own proto-civilizations (like the Barbary Pirates), which would be kind of cool, but hardly something that should always happen.

Different civilizations should have different levels of piracy problems, and different approaches to handling them.

[Josquius]

Pirates are handled badly at current.  A group always seems to appear super early in the game. Before you often have a military beyond what you start with even.
Then nothing.

Agreed on patrolling. Would give a purpose to fleets in peace time.
Maybe they have to visit asteroid belts and gas giants periodically to ensure they're pirate free

[Zanza]

The last bit from Berkut's post is important. A civ that is strongly collective should not have as many home grown pirates as an individualistic civ.

[PRC]

Alexis Kennedy (I don't really know who he is, a sci-fi writer I guess) wrote some new content for Stellaris:

http://weatherfactory.biz/what-ive-just-done-to-stellaris-seven-more-things/

What I've just done to Stellaris: seven more things

I'm winding up a wagon-load of work on Paradox's Stellaris. This is about what I wrote, and what I learnt while I was writing it.

Paradox gave me a very open brief, but stories of unwise trespass and cosmic horror are what I'm known for – and that's what I saw people anticipating in the comments here. So I've gone full-on space-ghost-story – Event Horizon meets the Twilight Zone.

They did, however, ask me to do a linked series of events, and I can see why – even though Stellaris thrives on a healthy mesh of little unrelated events that you encounter some of on each playthrough. There is so much content in the game that adding a three dozen more beans to the stew wouldn't make much odds, whereas adding, as it were, a rich and spicy sausage is something you'll notice. So it's a substantial sausage – an interactive novelette in size.

Here's some things I found useful when I was putting it together.

1. If a narrative event runs as an interrupt, make sure the first sentence is a grabber. When you're playing Stellaris, you spend much of your time with the (real-time) game running at high speed, mentally juggling multiple goals, waiting for a planet to get colonised or a fleet to reach its destination. If a window pops up to say SOMETHING SOMETHING FLAVOUR, it's immediately tempting to mouse over the reward and click 'OK' without following the detail. The first sentence needs to justify its presence – give the player a cue for urgency ('EVERYTHING IS ON FIRE on Pharos III'), for exaample, or just a strong image. I like the intro for one of the vanilla events in Stellaris: "Immense, ragged planes of shadow drift across Pharos II's face." Concrete, intriguing, unfussy.

2. Choices engage attention. Much more simply, when that text event pops up, if there are two choices whose outcome isn't immediately obvious, that will slow you the hell down and encourage you to engage. One-button click-to-advance is a billboard by the road – it might catch your attention, but it's telling you it's disposable. Two buttons, though, is a fork in the road.

3. People forget... especially in strategy games. Once again, it's worth pointing out that when someone is playing a strategy game, especially a 4x, their brain is busy.

Players rarely remember as much of the copy or the story as game writers want them to. We have to review, gloss, repeat in different formulations. It can feel patronising to say 'Pharos III, where the asteroid hit the nun that one time', but the player might have forgotten all about that nun. They will likely welcome a quick reminder; and this will also often give them the reason to care from (1).

4. If you're working with an unfamiliar toolset, double your time estimates, right out of the gate. I stumbled a bit on my initial estimates for Stellaris, because I was so used to writing so fast in the Failbetter CMS; I knew there'd be spin-up time, but it was a little worse than I expected. It's not just the technology (and I had a very helpful in-house expert); it's the whole concept, the approach, the conventions. It's easy to underestimate what you don't know. Fortunately, I didn't get much behind, because

5. There's no substitute for familiarity with the game. I've got 75 hours in Stellaris, and it made all the difference, especially with the last point. I've been on both sides of this fence, as both client and contractor. I know now that decent familiarity can't be faked. I know too that hiring people who know and like your game is a big deal. It's not a substitute for competence, but it means they get it, it means they'll take much less prep, and it means there's a good chance they actually want to work for you and aren't just filling in time between deadlines.

6. Beg, borrow or build characters. I said in my previous post that it was hard to write a story with no characters. Of course that was shorthand. There are characters in Stellaris, or things that perform those functions – the player / their empire, rival empires, free-floating space beasties. But they don't have distinct motives and arcs in smaller stories.

But Stellaris does have named leaders with quirks. They're more like equippable items than characters, but wherever I could, I made one into a mini-protagonist or antagonist. Clausewitz, the Paradox scripting engine, is sophisticated enough to support this (and it isn't a novel approach – original Stellaris did similar things sometimes too.) This immediately gives the narrative, however short, someone to hinge around.

7. Name meaningful names. So you've got three hundred words, split into several chunks over time to tell a story about the discovery of a mysterious alien corpse. The player will be switching between this and other stories, and the primary game. How do you help them keep track of what was going on?

Well, one thing: for God's sake don't keep referring to 'the mysterious alien corpse' if you can help it. It's vague, it's clumsy and it pumps your word count up needlessly. Sometimes you just have to (see point 3: people forget) but wherever possible, find a label that will stick.

I tend to prefer evocative real words or phrases. The corpse I put in Stellaris, for instance, is the Messenger. You can overdo this (and I have overdone it sometimes), and invented words, especially if they have some aesthetic or etymological relevance, are fine – like the Cybrex in vanilla Stellaris, or peligin [from pelagic/fuligin] in Sunless Sea. But this is the first work I've done that's going to be localised, and I didn't want to make life any harder for the translators than necessary.

So I favoured poetry over neology: the Coils of God, the Horizon Signal, the Worm-in-Waiting. I'm reasonably confident those phrases will be memorable.

[Zanza]

Sounds good. They should get some more authors to build some story arcs into the game.

[Legbiter]

Looks promising.

[Josquius]

Played with the star trek mod and it sort of let's you found the federation. Nice.
But mid game -
Nobody wants to do anything

[celedhring]

The guy says he wrote for Sunless Sea. God, I love the writing on that game so it is promising.

[PDH]

I have to be honest here.  I still love the opening part of this game more than any other 4x space game I have played.  I will probably get a couple of hundred hours in just designing races and playing the first 50 years of games.

For that, and for me, it was worth the money spent.