Has anyone been playing Stellaris since Le Guin dropped?
Just wondering what peoples' thoughts are on the most recent total overhaul of the game. I haven't bought the megacorp DLC yet, but I did play a multiplayer game with a friend that did, and I was pretty impressed. Much as I detest tedious micro, the new planet management system is light years ahead of the old one, and represents a much more realistic pace for colony development- no more outpopulating and outdeveloping your homeworld in twenty years. The main issues I've seen so far are poor balancing between raw materials, market balance, and finished goods, and AI. Since nearly all finished goods require minerals exclusively as an input, you get constant mineral deficits and a market that places more value on minerals than the goods made from them.
As for the market, the demand/pricing mechanism is poorly implemented, so you can exploit it for infinite money. Say a good costs 1EC/ea, you put in a bulk purchase order for 10,000 units. You pay 1EC for each of them, but after the order the sell price is boosted to 2EC. You can then immediately dump everything you just bought, selling each for 2EC. They could (and probably will) fix this by considering the price of each unit individually based on whatever formula they use for calculating market demand.
Finally, the AI completely shits the bed with the new administrative cap mechanic, and ends up decades behind any competently managed player empire in both economy and technology. But then I suppose poor AI is nothing new for Stellaris.
Issues aside though, I feel like with this patch, Stellaris has finally taken its place as a worthy successor to the classic Master of Orion 2.
Yep. And as you said it's a bit of a mess right now. The resource and admin cap balance is really wonky, there are a few exploits you can do in the marketplace and elsewhere (even in multiplayer), and there are a few major essentially "game-breaking" bugs (e.g. AI building dozens of precincts for no discernible reason, AI is unable to repair buildings so they tend to collapse after wars where they get heavily bombarded, etc), which I am sure will be fixed eventually. However...
This. So very much this. I only played one game with no mods (well other than 1080p Plus) and that was enough for me. It's painfully obvious how bad the AI is at handling the new systems and even on Admiral, after getting over the initial hump, the rest of my game became trivial because of how bad the AI handles the new resources, ship building, and manages their expansion/admin cap (which effects every other aspect of the game). It's truly atrocious how bad the AI is right now and I honestly have my doubts as to whether Paradox is competent enough at creating game AI to fix it.
Thankfully we have ¡Glavius's Ultimate AI, Better Job Priorities and Precinct Community Patch 1.0 though, which sort most of the major issues out. IMO Paradox should really just hire Glavius, who managed to create a markedly better AI for the new game systems in less than 2 days, when Paradox had months to create and playtest theirs and yet they still failed spectacularly.
Ditto. Vanilla is pretty damn broken at the moment (who really plays Vanilla though anyways, other than while they wait for their favorite mods to be updated?), but IMO the game definitely has way more potential now than with the old overly simplistic planet, pop and resource system.
p.s. Some other essential 2.2 compatible mods right now are:
Old Hotkeys, since the new hotkeys are bloody terrible. I really wish Paradox would just let us rebind them to whatever we want already...
Pre 2.2 Research UI
Job Descriptions (Achievement OK)
Better Faction Info
Trade Button Fix
I know you said you got it figured out already, but if you're looking for a 2.2 update tutorial quill18 has a really good one up that is worth checking out.
And as for the UI/hotkeys, I totally agree. The new UI is worse than the old one and the hotkeys are pretty annoying. Thankfully Old Hotkeys and Pre 2.2 Research UI help a lot with that. Both effect the checksum so are achievement incompatible though (if you care about that). My other comment in here has some more "essential" 2.2 mods in it as well that I would definitely recommend.
I've been playing it a good bit (with my partner out of town this weekend, maybe a lot) and I like it, now that I've gotten a better understanding of the new mechanics.
Aside from a couple of poorly thought-out war declarations, I haven't seen the AI do too poorly, though the Caravaneers have been stuck for 100 years encountering and then fleeing the Enigmatic Fortress at a choke point.
Even on tech? In the multiplayer game I'm in, it's around 2350, and I'm further ahead of the regular AI empires than the fallen empires are ahead of me.
I've been playing a tall Inward Perfection empire, so I was expecting to get ahead of the empires around me. It's possible the AI needs some polish to be able to handle the new economy properly.