Feedback on stability and influence

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rafafelp
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Feedback on stability and influence

#1 Post by rafafelp »

I just played two games with the current version from git (build-2021-08-05). I had already played, about one year ago, so I was familiar with most of the game. Overall the game is still fun and captivating, the music is great, I was hooked quickly. Now, let's talk about the things that worried me. The mechanics of influence and stability add a bit too much complexity in my opinion, and the way they're implemented now make them hard to manage. When a planet has low stability, there's not much you can do, and the few things you can do aren't easy to identify (you can't easily look for a stability bonus in the tech tree). In my second game, once I started conquering planets from other races (which happened late, around turn 170), I couldn't do anything at all with most of them, because they had some dislikes and I couldn't find any way to keep their stability above 5 (apart from the protection focus). For influence, when you run low you just have to switch some planets to influence focus (if I'm not mistaken you should choose the small ones first since influence doesn't scale as well as research or production). It achieves its goal of making reckless expansion less rewarding, but it's not very fun. A lot of my annoyances were certainly due to the fact that I don't know the game well enough, balancing everything is a careful task which requires knowledge and planning. But still, ideally a new player should be able to jump in and make things work without being too frustrated. Adding a few simple techs/buildings would probably help in my opinion. However, my full opinion is that adding both stability and influence is a bit too much, too many things to learn, too many interactions. Have you considered merging them? For example, a planet that has 0 stability in the current game would be a -10 influence tax, at 10 it would be neutral, and above 10 it would produce influence.

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LienRag
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Re: Feedback on stability and influence

#2 Post by LienRag »

The idea is that you're not supposed to conquer all species as soon as you can (as it was in the previous versions).
But yes, it's not easy to understand beforehand how a new conquered Species will fare in the Empire....
A panel to show base happiness for all Species if they were to be brought into the Empire could be useful.

rafafelp
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Re: Feedback on stability and influence

#3 Post by rafafelp »

That panel would be nice, but anyway it's not always possible to pick which species you're gonna conquer based on their projected happiness, war is war and other factors might take precedence. So there will always be situations where you've inherited a bunch of planets full of unstable people who don't like a few of your buildings and policies. With the game as it is today, I don't see much remedies. After some investigation, I found martial law and terror suppression policies. You could also set them independent and use policies and buildings to benefit from them. But just exterminating them would probably be the optimal choice quite often.

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Geoff the Medio
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Re: Feedback on stability and influence

#4 Post by Geoff the Medio »

There is also the Conformance policy, which reduces the effect of species likes and dislikes.

phocas
Space Floater
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Re: Feedback on stability and influence

#5 Post by phocas »

rafafelp wrote: Sat Aug 07, 2021 12:52 pm When a planet has low stability, there's not much you can do, and the few things you can do aren't easy to identify (you can't easily look for a stability bonus in the tech tree).
Hello
same as rafaelp

if you have a malus, at least you can see where it come's from
but if you need a bonus you don't know where to find it

i'm strungling against the 10+ Stability to use all the industrial techs (microgravity, orbital genaration...) who need that level

i bumped on the industrialism ECO-policy (+2 stability) , by luck because it was in the path in the tech tree...

with industry focus i'm locked at 8
+5 empire species
+1 good capital connection
+2 industrialism

the only way seems exploring all the pedia, policy by policy, building by building, and maybe discover something you could grab

2021-08-02.51e34bd to ppa:o01eg/freeorion.

rafafelp
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Re: Feedback on stability and influence

#6 Post by rafafelp »

the only way seems exploring all the pedia, policy by policy, building by building, and maybe discover something you could grab
Yes, and that's something I found too complex and not fun enough. And when you struggle to reach 5 for a foreign species it's even more frustrating. It would be easier if there was ways to search these things easily in the pedia. But anyway, personally I'd prefer to keep the importance of stability and influence rather low, and their management more straightforward, not involving a balance of so many things spread out with so many interactions. It would also be easier to develop competitive AIs: how will an AI decide if a gas generator is worth building, considering that it will be disliked by some, but that can be mitigated by a policy, but the policy has drawbacks and must replace another one, ...

wobbly
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Re: Feedback on stability and influence

#7 Post by wobbly »

To some extent I agree, however 1 thing to note is stability and influence are in early development. The pedia entries for it are nearly non-existent. That will change as it gets more flesh out. Hopefully getting a reasonable base stability will be more straightforward/newb-friendly as the balance gets sorted out.

Good to see a couple more people trying this out, and giving feedback. There's only been a few of us testing/commenting on the balance.

gendalf
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Re: Feedback on stability and influence

#8 Post by gendalf »

I'm not necessarily against civ 5 (influence trees) or civ 6 style influence. But having huge lists of likes/dislikes for each species is a bit too much micro and learning. Also it should say in red that a policy is mutually exclusive with x, y, z.. in the card description.

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LienRag
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Re: Feedback on stability and influence

#9 Post by LienRag »

gendalf wrote: Wed Oct 19, 2022 11:33 pm Also it should say in red that a policy is mutually exclusive with x, y, z.. in the card description.
Yes it should.

gendalf wrote: Wed Oct 19, 2022 11:33 pm But having huge lists of likes/dislikes for each species is a bit too much micro
No it isn't.
gendalf wrote: Wed Oct 19, 2022 11:33 pm and learning.
Yes it is. There is room for improvement here, to make understanding these a bit easier.

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Oberlus
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Re: Feedback on stability and influence

#10 Post by Oberlus »

LienRag wrote: Thu Oct 20, 2022 11:46 am
gendalf wrote: Wed Oct 19, 2022 11:33 pm But having huge lists of likes/dislikes for each species is a bit too much micro
No it isn't.
That is arguably. Other players have expressed the same concerns.

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LienRag
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Re: Feedback on stability and influence

#11 Post by LienRag »

Micromanagement is not "having to pay attention do details", it's having to repeatedly (and per consequence boringly) having to change settings to optimize the global output.
Stability and dislikes implies careful planning (and a learning curve), but no micromanagement.

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Oberlus
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Re: Feedback on stability and influence

#12 Post by Oberlus »

LienRag, I agree with you on what's the right and specific meaning of micromanagement.
But I understand its usage here as "too complex" or "requires too much time or too many things to check" or something similar. I think that is the relevant point to discuss, not semantics.

Daybreak
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Re: Feedback on stability and influence

#13 Post by Daybreak »

LienRag wrote: Thu Oct 20, 2022 4:00 pm Micromanagement is not "having to pay attention do details", it's having to repeatedly (and per consequence boringly) having to change settings to optimize the global output.
You could say, that is what they are saying - isn't balancing likes and dislikes because you want to optimise global output, and for anyone that is new you may be making a lot of changes. You may be right that as they play and learn more then that will go away, but initially...

Its also, not the only micromanagement in the game

Wanting to build a mixed fleet, and having to place ships in a certain order to get that mixed fleet, and then repeating that order, and so on and so on...., because you cant just have ship iterations without losing PP overflow into the next iteration, instead of the following ship in the queue, before you move the following iterations of that built ship to another position, so the following ship goes to top of queue to get full pp.

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Oberlus
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Re: Feedback on stability and influence

#14 Post by Oberlus »

Daybreak wrote: Thu Oct 20, 2022 7:03 pm Wanting to build a mixed fleet, and having to place ships in a certain order to get that mixed fleet, and then repeating that order, and so on and so on...., because you cant just have ship iterations without losing PP overflow into the next iteration, instead of the following ship in the queue, before you move the following iterations of that built ship to another position, so the following ship goes to top of queue to get full pp.
There is an open feature request to solve that: https://github.com/freeorion/freeorion/issues/2855

Daybreak
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Re: Feedback on stability and influence

#15 Post by Daybreak »

Oberlus wrote: Thu Oct 20, 2022 7:31 pm
Daybreak wrote: Thu Oct 20, 2022 7:03 pm Wanting to build a mixed fleet, and having to place ships in a certain order to get that mixed fleet, and then repeating that order, and so on and so on...., because you cant just have ship iterations without losing PP overflow into the next iteration, instead of the following ship in the queue, before you move the following iterations of that built ship to another position, so the following ship goes to top of queue to get full pp.
There is an open feature request to solve that: https://github.com/freeorion/freeorion/issues/2855
Thats fantastic - I was going to write up, the same idea, although I still wanted each ship to be built in order instead of all at same time, so if I needed any of them at an earlier time, I could use them and not wait for the rest of the batch. Still thats great. I hope that gets implemented soon.

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