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I'd like to quickly say I'm very happy you read out the text on screen in your videos. It makes your videos act as a podcast during long drives I do for my work, and it's greatly appreciated.

I think the Breakthrough Techs should be added to the Available techs rather than remaining in the random rolled lists.

These aren't "tweaks", these are a double barreled shotgun at point blank to the face. These values will surely be adjusted again.

Devs: We´re increasing Research Cost because everyone is just spamming Techbuilds Players: I´m gonna spam Tech even harder

Despite tech costs being obviously too unbearable, I think the problem with tech nerf is they changed tech cost, researcher upkeep, researcher output all at once, while also adding a new breakthrough tech mechanic. I can still see players complaining even without tech cost being scaled as steep as the beta changes. Should’ve implemented these changes one at a time IMO.

Hopefully their intent was to overnerf everything deliberately to see how bad it gets (and to spark discussion like this) so that they know exactly how to tune it back to something more reasonable. I hope that is what is happening at least.

Dev's attack researcher's. Ep3o: "stop, stop, he's already dead".

Why do I get the feeling Research Nerf Removal mods are going to start popping up left right and center if this goes live?

If these Research changes stay, you'll really need to have your empire thousands of years old to get on equal science level with fallen empires (and still not getting dark matter techs)

Every rebalance or change to a fundamental system that could interact with a rebuilt Espionage system both makes me hopeful and wary at the same time. Hopeful that some changes will have that Espionage system in mind, and wary because they probably won't...

It's nearly impossible to tech rush other empires now. The best options appear to be for Xenophile-like empires that get lots of intel from lots of envoys and having research agreements that lead to federations. This has made formerly useless mechanics like espionage now viable, but Xenophobe starts like Inward Perfection are nerfed into the ground. The biggest problem people seem to have are with crisis events like the Khan which still spawn at the same date, only with everyone having much less tech to fight it.

The current changes are just… not good for some things. I think reigning in the build cost reductions, upkeep reductions, and research speed increases is a good thing, but I still think a 50% cap would be better than removing reductions entirely or making tech really expensive. I also think that some of the rebalanced leader Ascension Path bonuses are just plain bad. Any Ascension path trait that gives bonuses to Survey or Archaeology Dig Speed, or increases army or damage just is not worth it. Those generally aren’t things you want or even need boosted by that point in the game. I’ll hold my thoughts on the tech cost changes. Tech is hard because I agree that it is a little easy to rush tech, but I also think that tech should be a powerful and viable tactic to focus on. And it’s important to remember that the game should not be balanced around the builds and exploits the best players use because that will alienate new players. I hope this rebalance is good, but I worry that it’ll damage the game.

I've never had the occasion to roll back a patch, but I'm afraid the changes in this one are going to make research costs exorbitant and render some goals basically impossible (see the 'matching fallen empires' comment below). It's taking too much away and asking too much to reach what we can presently achieve in reasonable time. This sounds like introducing tedium to "fix" the issue. I'll stay back a patch.

The devs are determine to make it so you can't finish that tier list

Minerals are a huge issue with all these changes. It’s nearly impossible to have really high tech now unless you have a ton of dedicated mineral worlds. These changes also make organic reprocessing even more powerful, as you can dedicate the minerals to your researching

my favourite thing about stellaris is how every 2-3 patches it just becomes a new game

I think they are taking it too far in the other direction with all of these nerfs to research. This will add to the player needing even more pops and getting even harsher lag on endgame

I think it's more of a Great Depression than Great Recession

I think the game has reached a point where we have too many modifiers that stack additively. In particular for modifiers that reduce costs, we need to consider the possible need to implement diminishing returns as more modifiers stack on top of each other.

The average player I don't think can beat current crisis.....I think a rebalance of techs will hurt the casual players the most

This update really limits some of my favorite builds, after they removed they empire size percentage from aptitude, and with this new update, i'm getting 11 times more tech cost from empire sprawl, and there isn't much I can do about it now after the aptitude changes.

My main experience from the beta is that the game is a lot easier now. Just don't build research and you can conquer the galaxy even against Grand Admiral AI. The only thing that will be harder is killing high level Crisis, I think my usual 25x All run is pretty much impossible now.

I actually wouldn't mind the MASSIVE time investment into 1 tech if i could actually choose the tech tree i want to go down. It would make sense from a realistic standpoint, by being able to specialize in resaerching a certain type of technology, like being able to bee-line* kenetic weapons. Thats kinda the whole thing they focused on with the First Contact DLC; the idea that primatives can be further developed in one aspect compared to other primatives, who have focused on a different aspect. The problem i see with this is that you could bee-line for all the good techs first. But i have an idea; what if each tech tree had a number of breakthroughs that required other tech to be researched, lest you spend the absurd amount of Research points that would otherwise be reqiured? Basically, lets say you want to bee-line ship armor. Each level of armor will become much more expensive than the last because your researchers are basically trying to make modern computers, whilst they are using computers from the 1960's. But if you were to invest in some kenetic weapons as well, then your researchers would have a better understanding of WHAT they need to improve about ship armor, and thus will have an easier time researching it.

Cant say im too enamored by these changes, in typical fashion, instead of balancing it out they opt for a "Slow the game down further" strategy.

changes to core systems like this can be concerning if they aren't done properly. The game can already be rather difficult if you're not incredibly good/experienced. With just how core research is, and how in the current state of the game, an experienced player's ability to squeeze insane amounts of research out of worlds gives them a massive advantage over newer players... I'm worried they're going to make it harder for experienced players without evening out that slope for players who don't go all in on science and making the difference even worse. Another thing is them not making breakthrough tech cost a separate slider kinda doesn't fix things. Separating tech and tradition costs is a good change, but if the costs of breakthroughs is gonna be such a substantial difference in costs, the slider is either gonna result in most techs being laughably cheap, or breakthroughs being insanely expensive, if you try to change the costs.

happy holidays montu, hope you are doing well :)

Regarding the ship build cost debacle: Personally i think it'd make a lot of real world sense to somewhat emulate contract shipbuilding. E.g. if we consider each starbase to be a ship builder, it would make sense for a batch of ships to be cheaper on a per-ship basis than one at a time. But, if you cancel an order, you don't get all your resources back.

The tech breakthrough mechanic is very similar to Civ V's tech cost catchup mechanic, it had the added effect of letting players estimate their adversaries specific tech progressions to look for timing/tech specific pushes. So people should maybe watch out for that in MP depending on the specifics.

I really hated building my destroyer fleet then immediately unlocking cruisers, switch and a year into cruiser production I get battleships. This will make it so ships actually mean something instead of just speedbumps towards Battleships

I am genuinely looking forward to being excited that I managed to get cruisers before year 2300.

If Research Agreements also would give faster tech spread, that'd be great too.

Montu: "For those of you absolutely besotted with graphs..." Me: "Nerds!"

Reminded me of Starships Unlimited V3 from way back around 2000. Have to at least research the computer tech and 15 techs for each tier to gain access to the next. Nuclear - Fusion - Antimatter - Singularity tech versions.

It seems to me this will be a strong incentive to delay the endgame start date in settings. You don't want the endgame crisis showing uo while you're still under teched.

While +1 pop assembly is good, I think the cyborg -25% upkeep for is really good, especially at late game with high rare resource upkeep + the empire size reduction will be even more important now...

I just hope this won’t hurt new players like me too much, I’m sure you experienced folks can still beat the sh*t out of a 25x crisis at 2300 or something Also, I think that this would really change the multiplayer madness and murderfest events, in a good or bad way, I don’t know yet

I get why they reduced knight's science a little however, I don't see why they also reduced their unity and the amount of defense armies on the habitat. Plus lowering the buff from squires.

As a casual player that has very little idea of Meta Strategies, I am looking at these cost changes in horror man... and my honest thought is "Those Pro/(insert similar Level of Play here) players have made devs nerf everything again..." Is there a way to stay on older versions of the game?

I wish they decoupled anomaly rewards from research output so that early anomaly could supplement an early research economy

they should make semi event without effect that only says something along the lines of you cannot research more without a breakthrough, only because the new players will not really understand at first glace, like the stellaris devs are so focus in the meta game that they forget the high entry barrier for new players like i like this new thing but the only people that i know that plays stellaris are players of the game because a friend or people from discord guide them the first few hour of game.

Finally! Proper tech osmosis.

merry christmas montu :)

Always a pleasure to see such effort to popularize those concepts, sir ! Keep up the good work !

My favorite thing about paradox games is that you need 200 dollars of dlc for it to be balanced

Rollback gang continues to be justified.

Ive always been torn about the 20% fleet cap increase because it just means you get to max fleet cap 20% sooner, and i always hit that anyways.

Great content. Seems to shape things up quite a bit!

Grateful for this video, i was expecting this for a long time 🙏

There should be 'Caps' to cost reduction bonus for various things, which would be easier to implement and encourage getting leaders with a vareity of traits (rather than stacking a certain trait)

Thanks

About the research, that sound like a really nice thing to me, you'll really have to think about which tech you want to unlock and it will make debris field incredibly valuable. The enigmatic tech ascension is going to become much more powerful. It should also be made that capturing world give research the same way debris does if the empire in question have some building tech you haven't unlocked

I feel like a lot of the issues with cost reduction bonuses would be solved if they were multiplicative instead of additive. So 9 -10% bonuses would give you a -60% build cost, or just over 2 for the price of one, instead of 10 for the price of 1.

Yeah Thank God I found this video. Im coming back to the game from 8m hiatus and Im like " its 2300 and I only have 1k research? wtf am I doing? " so this is the reason.. yeah I dont feel like an idiot anymore

I wonder if much like having regular and quick play being an option if they have the updated version but leave the original as a play option for those who don't want the change. It is a big change after all. A really big one it sounds like.

I will greatly enjoy not skipping to megastructues every game. This will make mid game technologies a lot more important, the new plane system will be more impactful, it will be harder to just wait for terraforming instead of colonizing bad planets (and there will be a longer gap between terraforming and in-place terraforming), we won't be unlocking ecumenopolises before we can even fill a planet, leviathans will be a lot more threatening, gray tempest and khan won't be for laughs, getting tech progress from events will be a lot more valuable, critter techs like flagella will be viable for a measurable length of time, components that scale badly with repeatables won't be obsolete quite as soon...

im gonna go on a limb and guess this means a focus on a research type meta depending on your empire focus.

This sounds about as fun as when they took away they different types of FTL travel.

Making a well fought tech edge worth using. Yes, more of this with balancing.

I wouldn't mind the massive tech cost increase if we can have a proper tech tree and choose what tech we want to focus on.

They really should buff space borne research deposits too. Research deposits have remained entirely unchanged since the very very beginning of the game. Meaning you could be paying one energy credit for only 2 extra engineering points. Back in the ancient days of 1.0 where researchers didn’t produce much research to begin with this was amazing, but now this is just very outdated and not worth it. Honestly you probably shouldn’t even build research stations until you have economy rolling.

Coming back to the leader ascension bonuses and honestly psionic only giving a bit of unity is fine considering how fast you can get to it and all the bonuses you get from psionic ascension and the building. No project needed to get those resource bonuses.

Yes!!! Turn my favourite space game into civ marathon level speeds, I will love the endless grind of wars that now take decades

if secrets of cyberx will still give you mega engineering research option without breakthrough restrictions and galactic wonders will give their research options without same restrictions, cyberx would become absolutely overpowerd (even more than it is right now)

Love ya stuff

I actually like the quick techspeeds. I've actually been setting mid and endgame earlier so games can go by quicker.

Could be a good time to make spying good Stellaris!

Merry Space Christmas!

Would be worth to add a setup selection to pick precursor race or keep as random for RPers, I know we have a mod for this but just add this into the base game. For that matter why not add the option for more than one precursor’s ruins to be present from the mid game via diplomacy/archeo/subterfuge etc. would need balancing of course but would give more to do for the mid game.

16:40 So THAT'S why my fanatic purifier neighbour had 40 ships before year 5 when they invaded me, but I could crush them when met at year 35. That's kind of a stupidly high modifier. I worry if some of these rebalancing changes could ratchet the higher difficulties to nigh unbeatable. Personally, I would argue for ship build cost being affected by comparative tech level and scale produced, and keep flat base bonuses besides those to an absolute minimum (-10% to -20% tops). If you are lagging behind and thus your hulls/weapons are commonplace in the galaxy, they should not be that expensive. But if you produce cutting edge weapons, it should have a bit of a premium (at least initially).However, you'd have to rebalance the power of weapons accordingly to that philosophy when implemented, having bigger power gaps between them. I'd argue for a scale cost reduction bonus as well; if you order 40 of the same ship at the Fleet Manager, you should get a (small) discount compared to buying singular ships at each time. Also no full refunds when canceling a ship being built, that just allows for the mechanic to being exploited. Also, I think breakthrough techs should give a small researcher output bonus, if anything to make you research earlier tier techs just a bit more quickly. It should give you a little bit of a reward just to put in that effort first, not? Tech Ascendancy could also be made valuable again by e.g. halving the cost of breakthrough techs.

Honestly, my favorite changes are the separate sliders for tech and tradition costs.

@MontuPlays what I've wanted for a while is a research system that splits research into "Applied" and "Theoretical" types. Applied research would make your existing tech BETTER. Think of it like lasers getting more range, more damage, faster fire rate, lower ship component cost, lower component energy usage...that sort of thing. In a way, it's like repeatables but confined to specific technologies and thus available much earlier but ONLY for that tech. However, you will reach a point of diminishing returns if you stick too long with the same tech. Very similar to WW2 when propeller airplanes reached their pinnacle and the German's leapt ahead with jet technology. That's where Theoretical research comes in. This is for researching entirely new tech branches, like railguns vs. lasers. It forces a difficult choice: stick with the tried and true and gain a temporary advantage? Or spend heavily on a theoretical tech that could produce a "wunderwaffe" down the road but causing a short-term stagnation with your current tech? I'd also love it if tech advancement could depend heavily on having a "genius" researcher who specializes in something. Think Einstein, Oppenheimer, or Teller. Such a researcher would be almost a necessity for a new theoretical research option to become available.

I have really enjoyed thee idea of this beta just not the mid/late game execution. Scale back the insane curve and upkeep costs, and unnerf the Toxic God origin.

Honestly, this is one of my main gripes with Stellaris that I hate, the major reworks of certain game aspects. They usually change things for the better but its also annoying having to adopt or relearn major gameplay elements because they rebalance stuff or just rework it entirely. Comparing the game to what we have now versus the game at release, it feels like there haven't really been any clear concrete version for Stellaris over the years and its a bit frustrating but at the same time I am also glad that they have kept improving the game over the years. Its a double-edged sword I guess. I just hope they take what they learned from Stellaris and make Stellaris 2 an even better game when we finally get there whenever that will be.

I think this is a great direction, instead of just piledriving your way through all the core techs to get all the best stuff as fast as possible it incentivizes you to get all the things that would be useful to you in your current tech tier before investing the time to unlock the next tier, when before you would blast your way down to the end getting the highest tier research and ship sizes and so-on and THEN go back and get all the little nice things before just doing repeatables. You can still be way ahead in tech but its not as easy and requires actual investment and sacrifice.

I honestly just wish they added a tech tree. It makes it better for balance and adds the awesomeness of seeing this massive tree of progression.

Oh great, alloy rushing, which is already the best strat, got even better. Nice

for a player that always played in x5 tech/tradition as myself, that sounds great! :D

I feel like it's a good idea, but has gone too far. Like i appreciate the need for there to be a reduction in tech power, but it feels like it'll hurt more for it. Maybe reducing the pure amount of nerf is needed?

the game honestly feels like such a slog now. Tech progresses so slowly that I literally ran out of jobs for my pops to do because new buildings couldn't be researched in time.

Part of the issue is that we probably had too many techs to begin with and some DLCs have only added more techs. Seems like the solution to some of this is culling, moving techs to other trees, where it might make sense, combing some techs into the same research option and giving some stuff ways to guarantee they get the techs they need. A good example of something that needs that last fix, Life Seeded origin, it needs a way to get being able to terraforming worlds into Gaia worlds without burning a civic slot on idyllic bloom or lucking into Baol. Just get a species or genemode your species shouldn't be the only solutions. I'm really hoping this beta makes them take another look at the techs though because it's really showing how bloated each one has become in some ways. Heck, I see it as a good opportunity to maybe just cull some or all the techs that just increase pop growth and pop assembly. Sure they make you more powerful, but I'd argue they don't really do it in an interesting way and it just makes the end game lag worse. The game seems to run better and I suspect some of that does come down to delaying when empires can increase the rate their pops grow via technology. The other issue is that they need to take a look at warfare. I'm very much in the camp that doesn't like how conquest is one and done, so you get to quickly turn around new gains into optimally productive colonies and systems. I don't think it should be viable to rush down an empire, take over their world and have them serve you until the end of the game (or they get conquered, blown up and/or eaten by someone else). Also there is the whole issue of how you can get unwinnable wars because someone started a separate war from you against the same empire. Finally, not a big fan on how the primary benefactors of a war are the main defender and the main attacker, unless one of the secondary people have a bunch of claims on some one and can make good on getting them. It's just bad design and gets annoying when someone attacks an ally that sets the war goal, while you get to spend resources on a war that might have nothing really to offer you (you might not always want more systems bumping up your sprawl and might not have a way to get pops out of the deal). Anyways, the issue with go alloy monke, is less to do with tech and more to do with conquest being nonsensically easy and nonsensically rewarding.

I f*cking love graphs.

Personally i love the chances in research and Fleet makes 3 things happen 1° choke points are hard to pass in early game making defence in early and mid game a lot more skilfull to counter the defenses because lower Fleet power 2° Makes research worlds better because less upkeep and making a pop getting happier is better vs adding more pops 3° A lot more power play in spy's networks, other civics, mega structures (science nexos) and traditions that make your pops more efficient (happier/edits/stability) vs straightforward reduction in research speed to hit repeated tech

I'm a console player, and since we just got Toxoids what videos/ time frame of your videos would you recommend watching to see what has changed? I'm trying to get back into the game and wondering how much I need to alter my play style.

+x% Research coming with +x% Researcher upkeep along with Research cost being more affected by empire size is harsh. To afford the researcher upkeep you need more infrastructure which needs more resources, more pops, more districts, which pump up the empire size, so you need more research... I'm not sure it is even worth it. A boon for tall/minimal size empires maybe?

Tbh, I much prefer CK3's approach to tech over Stellaris' random-roll system. Let me research everything on a tier at the same time, as a society would, but let me put a focus on one so that it gets a greater proportion of the research points being produced. It other Civs have a tech, ir becomes cheaper for the neighbours. It always felt silly to me that your people would starve because no one randomly has the genius idea of looking into improving food output.

I don’t think there’s any good reason for this rework, it’s just a way to keep our attention until the next DLC comes out.

I think you will still want research speed even if it comes with increased upkeep, don't underestimate a modifier that multiplies with your other modifiers. But yes, planet stability and scientist governors will be much more important for research output than before, assuming that research is still worth doing.

Let's face it when it comes to balancing the first tool is always the hammer, not the scalp.

Expecting the new formula for base tech cost to be toned down a bit. I'd guess by going instead of (2^n + 3^n) something like (2^(n+1) + 3^(n-1)) or maybe even more terms to reduce the cost increase in lower tiers but bring it up to roughly the new cost for t5 like (2^(n+1) - 3^(n-1) + 4^(n-1)). To be honest though, they could just hand pick the base values instead of running a calculation

I think I know what I would like: An insane bramble of a Tech Tree...! There is a game out there called Path of Exile, I have not touched it in ages but I will point to the mess of a skill tree as an example of this concept. Lot of branching pathways to create what looks line an insane web, with nodes of choices clustered together by groupings. While going down a single path, taking the time to unlock the side nodes, will leads to a nice synergy... the more interesting combo's require you to expand down different branches of that web. The only way to do that, with the limited resources you have, is by skipping those side nodes. In some places the nodes touch different branches, and can even act as a branch that becomes a form of 'multi-class.' Now imagine some of the paths can only be unlocked with in game choices, and we are getting close to what is going through my brain. Example of those would be nodes that need story-lines to unlock, others behind traditions, leviathan parts, and even a few really powerful ones need ascensions. Unique weapon unlocks, buildings or even specialized ships designs can be hidden in those clusters, while others are just tucked away towards the outer-edges of the web. Depending what path you take, that is what technology you end up using. The end result I desire: I want, at end game, for each empire to be vastly different to each other in as many ways as possible.

all good and nice that the tech cost goes up and the speed of us hitting crazy tehnology lvls goes up im all for it. But in my eyes this will just increase the late game lage even more then it already does. Slower reaserch=longer game=more pops= more lag time slow..... i enjoy the game but the slowdown late game can be significant even more so when you add some mods to it.

If the goal is to make it take longer to get to repeatables, they could also add in more techs. Why only 5 tiers instead of 8 or 10? More techs gives flexibility to make them less individually impactful so it has potential to balance better too: Right now the first 20% boost you get to things is huge, but if it were 10% in 2 techs it could smooth out the tech tree.

I’m happy as long as we don’t end up having to do bonkers amounts of repeatables

Thank You for informing me of the rework. I'm both glad and annoyed. Glad because I've thought that research snowballs to fast making late game research trivial, with increasing tech cost in the setup settings only delaying the problem. Annoyed because I've been working on a overhaul mod for robots and cybernetics for two months where I've been slightly taking the matter into my own hands. Now I know I'm going to have to rebalance some if not most traits and one very special project.

I think I might opt into the beta after my current game. Be as well get used to this sooner rather than later.

It seems like they're going really heavy on the debuffs to tech. Hopefully it'll mellow out during the beta.

gonna be hard to rush megastructures after this

No wonder they gave Galactic Doorstep buffs - gateway activation/construction are *Tier 4/5* Techs. With these research nerfs, this origin would be just outright useless without at least gateway activation. Though, interestingly enough, wormhole travel is a tier 3 rare tech, and it will take a lot longer to actually get to it normally now (3 times longer at least if we use graph for comparison). Can this actually make Doorstep viable origin?

Ah yes locking all the cool stuff in Stellaris like the megastructures to the far end game. Love how Paradox is allowing us to get some house chores done as we wait for a single month to tick by just to be able to experience endgame tech or all 3 crises in a single game.