Stellaris is There Any Point in Continuing Once You Beat the Map and the Mid Game Crisis
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Complaints like these are valid... for the default game settings. But the problem stops there. It's purely a matter of changing the game settings, and you'll get a really well-balanced game that never gets stale. The developers are really undermining and underselling their own game by not changing the defaults. It's all it takes, really.
Set the endgame start date to 2325 and the victory year to 2400, turn up the difficulty, AI aggressiveness and Crisis strength, and voila, you get a much tighter paced game where big events happen one after another and there's little to no downtime.
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- #11
Complaints like these are valid... for the default game settings. But the problem stops there. It's purely a matter of changing the game settings, and you'll get a really well-balanced game that never gets stale. The developers are really undermining and underselling their own game by not changing the defaults. It's all it takes, really.
Set the endgame start date to 2325 and the victory year to 2400, turn up the difficulty, AI aggressiveness and Crisis strength, and voila, you get a much tighter paced game where big events happen one after another and there's little to no downtime.
The problem then becomes the AI being unable to keep up and getting wrecked by the Tempest/Khan/Crisis because they can't build up fast enough.
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- #12
You also have to mod the AI to something that can actually scale up to mid-game/end-game on a reasonable schedule, such as Starnet.
There's a deeper problem though, which is that Stellaris is inherently a very snowbally game because of how tech works. Big blobs don't just have more pops, hey get *more power per pop* and there's just no way for smaller empires to compete long-term. So in single player, unless the game is very carefully calibrated to your skill level (and even then, luck will get in the way), either you get outpaced, or you outpace the AI, and eventually you can pretty much do whatever you want diplomatically. You can change the pace of this progression by adjusting the tech costs, but you can't really change the underlying dynamics.
Another factor in single player is the lack of teaming up against stronger empires (MP is obviously different as player diplomacy is not limited by game mechanics) and the diplomatic stagnation encouraged by federations (which "level up" based almost entirely on how long they have existed, nothing to do with what the federation actually accomplishes). I mean yes, you can provoke a showdown with the rest of the galaxy with Become the Crisis or whatever. But the boring EU4-style mid-game blob, not genocidal or anything, just steadily vassalizing/annexing across the map (or not so gradually if you unlock Colossus CB) simply isn't going to get this response and will more than likely be allowed to continue taking on enemies one federation at a time. Then when you have enough of the galaxy to outvote everyone else, you just declare yourself Galactic Emperor and the game is over, because the chance of rebellion against the Imperium is effectively nil.
Now, granted, this doesn't stop prescripted enemies being a threat. But because their power level is set at game start, they are at the mercy of the playable empire power curve, and timing becomes absolutely everything: a fleet that would be overwhelming in 2300 will be a joke by 2350, and so on. It's also not really possible for the player to know this before they start the game, unless they've played through several games before (and even then, there are so many variables depending on build, who your starting neighbours are, balance changes due to a new patch, and so on). So hitting that sweet spot of challenging but not impossible is actually quite hard.
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- #14
The AI SHOULD be wrecked by all of those. They are "bosses" for the player(s) to defeat. You aren't supposed to be able to stick your head in the sand and let the AI beat the game for you.
If the AI is ever competitive against crises, that only means you have to turn up the crisis slider more.
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- #15
The AI SHOULD be wrecked by all of those. They are "bosses" for the player(s) to defeat. You aren't supposed to be able to stick your head in the sand and let the AI beat the game for you.
If the AI is ever competitive against crises, that only means you have to turn up the crisis slider more.
As a counterpoint: They are supposed to be crises that all of the galaxy combines to fight, but that can't happen if they spawn at times and strengths where literally every AI put together couldn't even handle one of their fleets, even if the AI could co-operate in such a manner which they can't even manage with their own fleets. And when the player does work to put themselves in to a position to counter the Tempest or the EGCs they are suddenly playing on an entirely different plane of power than the AI. If you have enough power to fight the endgame crisis when it happens you almost certainly have enough power to fight every single other faction in the galaxy simultaneously, twice over.
The Grey Tempest and the Crises also don't have interesting effects on the galaxy because all they do is delete bits of it.
The Grey Tempest is a little bit better because when you defeat them you get nanites which let you undo the damage because you can terraform nanite worlds and generate special resources with them and they happen early enough that you're not growth crippled by pop scaling yet. (But they could still give a few more wide ranging benefits, an empire wide modifier for reaching their trinary system and doing a special project there, a unique ship tech or two maybe, a relic.)
But you don't really gain anything meaningful from having to deal with them other than that they've gone away now.
Meanwhile the Khan can actually be sort of valuable if you respond fast. In my latest game he awoke right next to my two main alloy producing worlds and conquered them, I took them back and he'd put 20 odd extra pops on each one, giving me a free new workforce once I'd beaten him back. And even if he happens on the other side of the galaxy he mostly creates a new empire (even if it tends to be a rubbish one) which means he hasn't removed content and the long term consequences remain something you can interact with.
The endgame crises are even worse, because they don't open up any interesting new options and 2/3 of them cause unrecoverable damage (plus they happen late enough that even if you could recover the planets they delete you would never get any value back out of them because you'd never be able to grow pops onto them in time to fill a meaningful number of jobs.
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- #17
The problem is that once you outpace the AI the game of fighting them ceases to become interesting. Even the War in Heaven doesn't present much challenge to a well-specced endgame empire. Conquering the entire galaxy helps spend time, but past a point its more whack-a-mole than anything. There's a real lull before the game picks up with the crisis, which can be scaled to the point where it's an interesting threat. I pass it by playing planet management sim because I have the perverse kind of personality that enjoys that sort of thing, lol. But I would appreciate some better mid-late game goals beyond just (and before) the Crisis.
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- #18
I agree it's a little backwards that some crisis events can only happen after Year X. Challenge-wise it might be more interesting if
- khan spawns at the earliest of
- midgame year OR
- combined galactic trade value > X (all about that plunder), OR
- combined galactic fleets > Y* FP, with any one empire being > Z%* galactic FP (with khan spawning with Y *1.1x galaxy fleets for example)
*With these being scalar values, tuned to the current difficulty settings (i.e. larger if you've increased crisis multiplier, otherwise lower if you havent)
So that crisis can fire far sooner if the galaxy is "ahead of schedule", rather than waiting till 2300 the khan might appear in 2254 if there's a particularly strong player nearby, or if the overall average size of the galaxy's FP has gotten large - e.g. due to a large AI federation. But there's still the Year-led fall-back if (as is often the case) the AIs are too weak to drag-forwards the crisis date.
Fallen empires do do this, but they do "Endgame year AND Fleet power > Y" rather than Endgame year OR Fleet power > Y" (where Y would be like 0.8x FE FP
Making the Date caps an optional rather than explicit check would lead to the main crisis factions waking up way earlier. This is in the lens of Fleet power.
- You can also have a second criterion for people who are cheesing this by having a %chance to wake up FEs early (with a "vassalisation" rather than warlike mindset) every time anyone researches a T5 or higher tech
- Or in the case of pirates/khan, if anyone is too wealthy.
- This could help offset the more egregious tactics of "zooming" science/economy without a fleet, then massing a fleet and taking out the AE/Khan as soon as you mobilise.
I think somewhere along the way the purpose of crisis events in Stellaris have become twisted: A crisis is something that happens to you - dynamically so you cant always predict exactly when one will arise - it slaps you down, for getting ahead and snowballing too hard. But these days it's something you plan for.
Some mods have made them dynamically scale - and do a good job of it - but due to the mathematical nature of economic snowballing, a crisis will always be more deadly if it hits you when you're hitting 40k FP (and its designed at 50k FP) than if it hits you at 2mil FP (and it scales up to 2.5m FP) - as your industry will usually be near unlimited by that point.
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- #19
Well yes, that "somewhere" was as soon as the first player learned what they would need to plan for.
Stellaris is not a game which effectively supports an outcome where you get "slapped down" and continue the game, there's only one real axis of progress for the player, which is getting ever more swole.
And the problem with the crises is not that they can only happen after X year, the problem is that they exist on a scale that makes challenging them inacessible to the AI and that drags the player up to that higher scale, which is irrevocable because remember there is only one axis of progress. That means that, effectively, if the player can beat the Grey Tempest in 2320 when the AI likes to open the L cluster they can beat every AI put together, because every Grey Tempest fleet is as powerful as any four AI factions entire navies put together and the player is going to have to beat several of them at the same time.
Which means that the entire problem of the player horribly outscaling the AI by whatever means (techrushing at the moment) is enforced by these external factors. If you are not ready for the Grey Tempest in 2320 there is a serious chance that your game ends. If you are not ready for the Unbidden in 2420 there is a serious chance that your game ends. If you are ready for either of those things the AI is so far behind you that it wouldn't catch up even if you let the game run for another hundred years without a single mouse click.
Allowing the crises to happen earlier exacerbates the problems with the rest of the balance.
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Source: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/stellaris-has-become-stale-since-the-midgame-and-endgames-are-just-research-lab-building-simulators-and-nothing-is-done-about-it.1500557/
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