
Summary of Results
As expected, the players that responded to the survey were overwhelmingly passionate players that have a ton of experience with the game. Nearly 70% of responses come from players that have over 1,000 hours played in the game. This is somewhat natural for an opt-in beta over the holidays with an intimidating feedback form, so I wanted to thank you all again for filling it out. There was a strong consensus around the military changes (ship cost and upkeep), so we’ll likely be keeping those mostly as-is. The technology changes were naturally more controversial. Roughly 80% of responses believed that technology (especially at higher tiers) was overall too slow in the beta, but a majority still thought that the changes were beneficial to the game overall. Several of you pointed out that so many simultaneous changes compounded too strongly, and we agree. I was happy to see that your feedback matches our expectations - we expected that the Open Beta was tuned too harshly and that we would want to pull back from it before release. The Open Beta also revealed several technical issues, including some major performance implications from how Breakthrough Technologies interacted with diplomacy.Next Steps
Overall, I view the Technology Open Beta as a great success, and as such am taking the opportunity to update it and let it run for another few weeks, after which we will decide whether or not we want to continue experimentation, integrate it into 3.11 (or 3.12), or discard the initiative. We concur that the original Open Beta went too hard on technology. We liked some of the things we were seeing, such as tier 3 and 4 technologies becoming more valuable for an extended part of the game, but felt that it delayed other critical parts too long. Breakthrough Technologies were interesting as a slowdown mechanic, but if kept would likely need some sort of temporary (non-technology or unity related) bonuses as some form of reward for the frontrunners. The excessively high costs for late tier techs pushed some critical technologies such as Ascension Theory or Mega-Engineering too late in the game, and certain undesirable behaviors (like ignoring research entirely) were too effective. The updated Technology Open Beta should be up on stellaris_test now, with the following changes:TECHNOLOGY OPEN BETA UPDATES
Feature- Difficulty Adjusted Technology Costs slider added to galaxy generation. This slider adjusts technology costs based on tier and game difficulty.
- Removed Breakthrough Technologies.
- Reverted base technology costs to their 3.10.4 values - the increased cost between tiers is now handled by the Difficulty Adjusted Technology Costs slider.
- Removed the majority of Researcher Upkeep Modifiers introduced into the Open Beta.
- Reverted changes to Knights research output from the Open Beta.
- Tweaked the tiers of technologies that increase naval cap and fleet command limit.
- Reduced the amount of Naval Cap granted by technologies.
- Significant changes to Bio-Reactors: [list]
- Bio-Reactors are now a tier 1 rare technology instead of a tier 0 technology
- Bio-Reactors now reduce the food output of farmer jobs and give them a small amount of energy output.
- Added a tier 2 Advanced Bio-Reactor technology and building.
- Advanced Bio-Reactors further reduce the food output of farmers in exchange for a small amount of exotic gas output.
Difficulty Adjusted Technology Costs
One of the frequent points of feedback was that there was concern that newer players would be hit especially hard by the technology cost changes. We also recognize that different players have different desires for the pacing of the game, so we’ve added another slider to galaxy generation. The Difficulty Adjusted Technology Costs slider adjusts the base cost of technologies based on the difficulty of the game. Higher tiers of technology are affected to a greater degree than lower ones, so this slider essentially affects “tier width”. While this does overlap with the Technology Costs slider to a degree, it does so in a different way, so we consider each to have valid reasons to exist as separate sliders.
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