Paradox Studio Thread

[JJLiautaud]

The Prussian thing is also another example of diplomatic ideology. The biggest diplomatic ideology, surprised I forgot it, in this period is probably British abolitionism. Prime example of a nation becoming absolutely obsessed with, for no strategic reason and to their own detriment, serving another group's interests (kidnap your own citizens and force them, under the lash, to serve on ships so they can stop other ships from kidnapping people and lashing them).

If i may defend the RN for a bit impressment basically ended when the napleonic wars ended and the Africa Squadron didnt really get started till 1820 or so.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

If i may defend the RN for a bit impressment basically ended when the napleonic wars ended and the Africa Squadron didnt really get started till 1820 or so.

This is true, the scenario I described was pretty rare. I first came across it in Tai-Pan but in that novel (which plays fast and loose with historical events) it doesn't seem to be playing it for irony (like the author seems to not realize his indignant abolitionist naval hero was literally enslaved by the government).

 

[Elwin Ransom]

How would a gunboat diplomacy mechanic work for a game? For a player to want to cave when faced with it there has to be some repercussion to not, either very painful damage or a political thing. I'm not real familiar with the history of shelling harbors to secure compliance, just that it did happen (frequently).

Spitballing, a few of the things that would need to be done to make proper gunboat diplomacy work:
1. Granularity in whether a nation is actually at war or not. A ton of diplomatic incidents in this era (leading to war or not) started because of some naval skirmish. Examples: the Battle of Kowloon that kicked off the Opium War, the Panay incident (just outside the era), the entirely unecessary incident that kicked off the Second Anglo-Burmese War. This would be sorta like HOI4 border skirmishes in that local forces are the only ones that can fight. This could be a potential first stage of a diplomatic play that gets further escalated, the British dispatch an expeditionary force, each side adds various demands, and eventually negotiations break down and war happens in earnest.
2. Collapse in public opinion for bombarded cities, major costs to repair them. Also should only really be possible against grossly inferior targets (ships don't do too well against modern forts). Also the government legitimacy should be taking big hits.
3. Incentive to actually surrender rather than fight to the finish. This is why I think removing additions of wargoals was an overall bad decision.
4. "Small wars" being viable, with the number of forces you can deploy limited based on your overall force size and the importance of the region (Britain can't deploy more than ~20,000 to China without escalating) and the goals limited. There were hardly any pitched battles fought in the First Opium War, most of it was blockades and occupation of river and coastal forts.
5. Blockades being potentially crippling rather than a mere inconvenience.
6. War goals being more specific, smaller, and so on - right of movement, opening of different ports, etc.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Spitballing, a few of the things that would need to be done to make proper gunboat diplomacy work:
1. Granularity in whether a nation is actually at war or not. A ton of diplomatic incidents in this era (leading to war or not) started because of some naval skirmish. Examples: the Battle of Kowloon that kicked off the Opium War, the Panay incident (just outside the era), the entirely unecessary incident that kicked off the Second Anglo-Burmese War. This would be sorta like HOI4 border skirmishes in that local forces are the only ones that can fight. This could be a potential first stage of a diplomatic play that gets further escalated, the British dispatch an expeditionary force, each side adds various demands, and eventually negotiations break down and war happens in earnest.
2. Collapse in public opinion for bombarded cities, major costs to repair them. Also should only really be possible against grossly inferior targets (ships don't do too well against modern forts). Also the government legitimacy should be taking big hits.
3. Incentive to actually surrender rather than fight to the finish. This is why I think removing additions of wargoals was an overall bad decision.
4. "Small wars" being viable, with the number of forces you can deploy limited based on your overall force size and the importance of the region (Britain can't deploy more than ~20,000 to China without escalating) and the goals limited. There were hardly any pitched battles fought in the First Opium War, most of it was blockades and occupation of river and coastal forts.
5. Blockades being potentially crippling rather than a mere inconvenience.
6. War goals being more specific, smaller, and so on - right of movement, opening of different ports, etc.

On 1,

1) Agreed, even without a full escalation mechanic like my idea they could at a minimum bring back colonial wars from Victoria 1 and bring in border wars from HOI4.

3) There was no justification for removing them at all. A lot of the changes they made make it impossible to recreate real world wars from that period: no interventions in ongoing wars (so goodbye WW1, and I guess no Trent Affair alternate history scenarios), no multi-sided wars (goodbye Russian Civil War).

5) just requires having a system where nations really are heavily specialized and the supplies do matter. (I hear Victoria 3 incentivizes diversifying the economy more than it does specializing, so this doesn't matter because everyone's the same, exacerbated by colonial governments having barely any interactions with the metropole. You'd think a Communist game would have put a lot more effort into depicting the economic logic of imperialism.

6) Well, a lot of the functions of "sphere of influence" (which doesn't exist anymore, but basically became markets, I guess) could be broken up. Spheres had a major flaw with how they acted like a bilateral free trade zone which is most certainly not what they were, were more like captive markets. Substates were introduced to China to allow specifically for spheres of influence - in their original context - for different countries in different areas. I kind of imagined a thing where you could spend Influence basically just buying trade and diplomatic policies in the country, buying geographical trading monopolies (like state-by-state), so on and so forth, or that Influence gives a sort of cap on how much you can subvert a nation's government (not necessarily rivalrous, but can be), if you were "Cordial" in V2 terms you may only be able to get a few trade concessions where as the equivalent of a Sphereling would bend to pretty much anything, possibly even extending up to (with maximum control) the ability to diplo-puppet a country.

One thing we might think of is, implementing some of my ideas of having treaties as being like contracts that summarize all the different obligations between states, a typical war goal may be to enforce a treaty and the treaty is something that you construct in advance with whatever clauses you want. So basically, any diplomatic status that could be negotiated can also be imposed by war. But it should definitely be possible to demand more once the war starts, like you say, that's even one of the main reasons you dread war (if you resist and lose not only do you lose and get your stuff smashed up, but you might even lose more than they originally demanded), besides which nations "add war goals" in real life all the time.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Something else rather important for Victoria's timeframe, and hence completely ignored by Paradox, is federalism, which I don't think any of their games except CK2 approach.

Spoiler: Federalism

Federalism is extremely important to the New World specifically, as pretty much every single nation in the New World had an armed conflict over their equivalent of states rights in the 1800. Even outside of the New World it was a cause of conflict in Switzerland and some common alternate history scenarios involve the British Empire or Austro-Hungarian Empire federalizing. What it comes down to is that when you establish a federal form of government you are pretty much guaranteed to have a showdown as proponents of regionalism and proponents of central authority test each other's boundaries, and it can go down in flames or the central authority can win. The specific immediate cause varies (slavery, role of Church in the state, etc.), but this is like a rule of nature.

Now, the shittiest and laziest way to portray federalism is as some gay bonus. (Like Paradox did with economic systems!) I'm not going to dignify that here, but if you insist, sure you could have it impact Authority or Bureaucracy or some other state, make some boring trade-off and then have Estates/Ideologies/parties have an opinion on it. No, what makes federalism interesting is the fact that it allows for differences in law across the country; if your federal system doesn't have differences in law from state to state, your federal system really doesn't matter in any meaningful way, any way that isn't just bureaucratic minutiae beneath the scale of the simulation.

So how do you do it? Well, in all of these games we have vassal states of various types, but generally they're not that interactive, sometimes you can build in them (like colonies in EU4) but you just don't really run the vassal state like you do your own country. I guess that can work. I'm a little leery of it, especially for the question of how this applies to a place like the United States, Mexico, or modern Brazil or Russia, in which there are as many provincial divisions as there are countries on their continents. Do you want the player to play as the State of Indiana? I mean, that can be interesting in and of itself, sure I'd play a grand strategy game that's all about playing a state within a federation. But I don't know that that's the way to do it. If you do have dynamic tags, though, you can make it work (just like CK2 makes every single province potentially be a tag on the map). One guy on Paradox Forums once threw out the idea of just having exceptional circumstances be tags, like a big ole Southern States tag that's treated as a vassal of the US. Honestly that would work better than the garbage they've got at the moment, other than that it would fail to reflect that those states ARE the dominant force in government up until shortly before the War.

Paradox games also can be a bit inconsistent with the treatment. The Holy Roman Empire in CK2 is a state, in EU4 is a special diplomatic mechanic that can become a state, and in V2 doesn't exist at all. The Japanese daimyos are independent with a diplomatic mechanic in EU4, and don't exist in V2 unless you have the based PDM mod. Yet federal nations like the Netherlands are portrayed as either a single state, or not at all. What gives?

One way you might do it is have the federal system work as a mechanic where you can have differentiated laws in each state, but perhaps with limitations that you have to work within a separate political process in that state. (Micromanagement hell?) Then you get to set the laws state-by-state - still control everything - but do have to play ball with what the locals want. Federal laws may then just be a range of options, like saying, "you have a min/max/exact this level of this law." In the time of the United States itself, different states has disestablishment of state religion at different times (it was no separation of church and state starting out, it was separation of church and the federal government, states very much had state-level Anglican and Congregationalist churches). Another way is, well, that same CK2 approach, the state just sets its own policies. The more I think about it, the more I favor that (just have generic states and their name changes depending on what tag rules them).

Whatever the case, we need better federalism in the future. It was crucial to the Victorian New World and it's important to many modern powers today. Thank you for coming to my (20th this day) TedEx talk.

Edit: what should drive preference for central government? Ideology aligned with central government, or totalitarian ideology. Also potentially local ideologies.

 

[Rendang]

What utterly annoys me about Stellaris is the lack of reaction the galactic neighborhood has on your decisions. A egregious example would be the Colossus; Instead of the galaxy having a collective "oh fuck" after annihilating billions of people in a few weeks, the only one that really reacts is the victim (-1000), while everyone else shrugs about it.

This is absurd. The Colossus should be equivalent to the nuclear bomb; The entire world reacted to the US annihilating Nagasaki to kickstart their own nuclear programs, not ignore that one of the contenders just lost generations of populations.

Taking a page from this situation, empires should initially react either assured (having a non-aggression pact (+50), defense pact (+100), or federation (+200)) or utterly horrified (neutral (-50, but much more willing to accept non-aggression) to hostile (-100 and bonus +100 rep to other hostile empires)). Such an event begins a decision event to start their own Colossus program (Colossus ascension perk will allow for multiple Colossus to be fielded and requires less pops [25 to 50 pops] per Colossus to field) or advocate for Colossus disarmament (Galactic senate opens options to completely ban them or limit them). This simulates the polarization of the Cold War (First colossus owner can produce a Hegemony or Coalition without needing the diplomacy tradition, and enemies will naturally form an anti-coalition).

I like to think at this point you can branch off to multiple scenarios. A Cold War gone hot, non-proliferation, or even the Cybrex or some precursor empire returning to prevent total annihilation. It would make the Apocalypse DLC actually worth something instead of some shallow fluff.

 

[Serbian Peacekeepers]

So I've had this Hoi4 mod idea and i need to share it somewhere, might start working on it eventually when i finally buy hoi4.

The Year is 1945, the soviet army is at the gates of Berlin, the end for the German Reich draws near...
and Stalin fucking dies.
So now the USSR is in chaos internally as the government tries to figure out how Stalin just died, the delay on the invasion of berlin leads to in fighting between the SS and Wehrmacht eventually leading to near open conflict between the two groups, with the Wehrmacht taking the Reichstag as their main HQ and Hitler being safely locked away in his bunker by the SS. scale wise it would preferably be 1 building is 1 province, and you make Squads instead of Divisions.

 

[HeyYou]

Yeah, I was just being smug. Bit jarring for a "historically-accurate" game to just fully subscribe to the trope of medieval battles being tidal waves of peasants, straight out of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, re-enacting Enemy at the Gates. Doubly so when they went from doing it right to doing it wrong.

Pretty sure they patched it at some point so that levies are specifically referred to as basic light infantry rather than chaff but it's been a few months since I've played it. Still lazy as shit that levies don't change based on culture, but levies in general are very much a feudalistic thing and CK to this day is chained to feudalism which is why the Byzantines are in such a shit state. CK3 tries to get around that by having clan levies be based on how much your vassals like you rather than a contract but it's still not ideal.

And yeah CK3's content output is absolutely abysmal. As nice as the character models and assets are I think they're part of the problem because Paradox is lazy as shit and the CK3 DLC team must be tiny which means that it's far easier to spit out events which only require writing compared to actual new mechanics which are going to require a ton of coding and new clothing/armor assets.

 

[Cringe newfag]

So I've had this Hoi4 mod idea and i need to share it somewhere, might start working on it eventually when i finally buy hoi4.

The Year is 1945, the soviet army is at the gates of Berlin, the end for the German Reich draws near...
and Stalin fucking dies.
So now the USSR is in chaos internally as the government tries to figure out how Stalin just died, the delay on the invasion of berlin leads to in fighting between the SS and Wehrmacht eventually leading to near open conflict between the two groups, with the Wehrmacht taking the Reichstag as their main HQ and Hitler being safely locked away in his bunker by the SS. scale wise it would preferably be 1 building is 1 province, and you make Squads instead of Divisions.

But the Western Allies were predestined to break through the Rhine defences at this point and overrun Germany from the West. Since I assume you mean sometime in February or something, after the Soviet offensive brought them from Poland to in front of Berlin.

So either the Allies, seeing Soviet hesitation (and considering the guy they made all their deals with is dead) just occupy all of Axis territory. Or else whatever troika takes over emergency command in the USSR agrees on sending emergency orders to continue the offensives to stop the Allies getting everything, even as they bicker among themselves.

 

[Serbian Peacekeepers]

But the Western Allies were predestined to break through the Rhine defences at this point and overrun Germany from the West. Since I assume you mean sometime in February or something, after the Soviet offensive brought them from Poland to in front of Berlin.

So either the Allies, seeing Soviet hesitation (and considering the guy they made all their deals with is dead) just occupy all of Axis territory. Or else whatever troika takes over emergency command in the USSR agrees on sending emergency orders to continue the offensives to stop the Allies getting everything, even as they bicker among themselves.

I am still brain storming how i think the Allies should play, probably have 3 main focus trees for the Allies.
1: The Allies leave Berlin to the soviets, not wanting a repeat of Aachen even if the USSR is currently in turmoil.
2:The Allies take berlin from the soviets, the Soviets will never forgive the Allies for taking their prize, but the war is over in Europe.
3: Wacky alt history, the Allies sign a deal with Nazi Germany, ending the war and aligning Germany with the Allies, American Tanks roll through berlin and onwards to Poland. Operation Unthinkable begins.

I have a idea where Zhukov attempted a push into Berlin after Stalin's death, but due to internal politics could only use a small part of his army, and got held back by the Germans, a entire German Army being wiped out but Zhukov is pushed back, he is then sent back to Moscow and shot for going against party orders. No-one wants Berlin to fall before they secure power, as they want it to be a win on their part, so official party orders are to stay out of Berlin until they find Stalins successor.

 

[Snekposter]

I am still brain storming how i think the Allies should play, probably have 3 main focus trees for the Allies.
1: The Allies leave Berlin to the soviets, not wanting a repeat of Aachen even if the USSR is currently in turmoil.
2:The Allies take berlin from the soviets, the Soviets will never forgive the Allies for taking their prize, but the war is over in Europe.
3: Wacky alt history, the Allies sign a deal with Nazi Germany, ending the war and aligning Germany with the Allies, American Tanks roll through berlin and onwards to Poland. Operation Unthinkable begins.

I have a idea where Zhukov attempted a push into Berlin after Stalin's death, but due to internal politics could only use a small part of his army, and got held back by the Germans, a entire German Army being wiped out but Zhukov is pushed back, he is then sent back to Moscow and shot for going against party orders. No-one wants Berlin to fall before they secure power, as they want it to be a win on their part, so official party orders are to stay out of Berlin until they find Stalins successor.

I've had my own weird alt-hist going around in my head where the July 20th plot succeeds and thanks to Rommel and Speer winding up in charge and the Germans successfully escaping before a pocket can be made, Stalin winds up getting pissed at the reluctance of the Western Allies to keep pushing despite the fact its getting bloody now that the Germans are fighting smart, and so they decide to sign a temporary cease-fire if he's so eager to keep throwing men at the problem... that and the successful use of the Me 262 and the fact that under Speer the last of the Germany industry isn't wasted on dumb shit has made the air over German soil far more hostile to the Allies, and they need time to get jets of their own. Naturally the jets mean a nuclear attack on the Germans is off the table, but the Pacific still falls on schedule because Japan was fucked no matter what happened in Europe.

Stalin being Stalin flips out, declares the West is the enemy of proletariat, and begins a second series of purges, starting with Beria because why the fuck not. The USSR is forced to retreat with the end of Lend-Lease and the loss of many experienced officers, and with the Germans basically using the Nazi leadership as scapegoats for everything they managed to get some more Osttruppen recruited, but are forced to reorganize to deal with the fact they're starting to look like the Austro-Hungarian military. The Soviets are forced to sign their own temporary cease-fire with Germany to buy time to un-fuck their domestic situation, same as in 1918. The US and Brits are forced to maintain forces in the East to protect Japan and Korea against Soviet assault, so they're not able to deploy as much manpower as they wish they could to Europe

Fast forwards to 1946 where the US and Brits have successfully re-armed and reorganized for the final push with our own late-war experiments seeing use. The Pershing and Centurion are the primary tanks of the US/Brits, the Pershing making good use of the extra time to get the kinks worked out and a new drivetrain installed and the M20 and M2 Carbine beginning to replace the Garand and Thompson in US service with surplus going to the other Allies. The Germans are deploying the Entwicklungs best they can with a focus on the E50, anything heavier than 50 tons verboten to even think about at the moment but faced with dealing with a bunch of anti-Soviet manpower they can't equip or manage, and with Zhukov getting killed in the purges Rokossovsky is Stalin's new favorite and is desperately trying to unfuck and professionalize the Russian military, which is not an easy task despite the fact he has a free hand since the NKVD got neutered with Beria's passing.

 

[Serbian Peacekeepers]

I've had my own weird alt-hist going around in my head where the July 20th plot succeeds and thanks to Rommel and Speer winding up in charge and the Germans successfully escaping before a pocket can be made, Stalin winds up getting pissed at the reluctance of the Western Allies to keep pushing despite the fact its getting bloody now that the Germans are fighting smart, and so they decide to sign a temporary cease-fire if he's so eager to keep throwing men at the problem... that and the successful use of the Me 262 and the fact that under Speer the last of the Germany industry isn't wasted on dumb shit has made the air over German soil far more hostile to the Allies, and they need time to get jets of their own. Naturally the jets mean a nuclear attack on the Germans is off the table, but the Pacific still falls on schedule because Japan was fucked no matter what happened in Europe.

Stalin being Stalin flips out, declares the West is the enemy of proletariat, and begins a second series of purges, starting with Beria because why the fuck not. The USSR is forced to retreat with the end of Lend-Lease and the loss of many experienced officers, and with the Germans basically using the Nazi leadership as scapegoats for everything they managed to get some more Osttruppen recruited, but are forced to reorganize to deal with the fact they're starting to look like the Austro-Hungarian military. The Soviets are forced to sign their own temporary cease-fire with Germany to buy time to un-fuck their domestic situation, same as in 1918. The US and Brits are forced to maintain forces in the East to protect Japan and Korea against Soviet assault, so they're not able to deploy as much manpower as they wish they could to Europe

Fast forwards to 1946 where the US and Brits have successfully re-armed and reorganized for the final push with our own late-war experiments seeing use. The Pershing and Centurion are the primary tanks of the US/Brits, the Pershing making good use of the extra time to get the kinks worked out and a new drivetrain installed and the M20 and M2 Carbine beginning to replace the Garand and Thompson in US service with surplus going to the other Allies. The Germans are deploying the Entwicklungs best they can with a focus on the E50, anything heavier than 50 tons verboten to even think about at the moment but faced with dealing with a bunch of anti-Soviet manpower they can't equip or manage, and with Zhukov getting killed in the purges Rokossovsky is Stalin's new favorite and is desperately trying to unfuck and professionalize the Russian military, which is not an easy task despite the fact he has a free hand since the NKVD got neutered with Beria's passing.

Somewhere in my idea is the fact that alot of the July 20th plotters got away and Rommel was spared by hitler, Rommel is a potential leader for the Wehrmacht Faction. In general i see the idea being a no win scenario for the germans, either they wipe each other out in the civil war or the Allies or Soviets do.

 

[Knud Lavard]

Edit: Its also 2023 for all we know there will also be romantic events between ward and mentor. So forward thinking!

I completely forgot about something I experienced in one of my games, until I found a screenshot and chopped it up. Enjoy!

Explaination: Player character finds out that a 12-year old boy is secretly a sodomite. This shouldn't be possible since children below 16 are protected from sexual events, but I guess his uncle Rapehard of Kitydidleln got himself a lucky bug. Little Folkhard was also tagged as heterosexual, so his prepubescent pudge-facking probably wasn't consensual.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Since a few of you expressed some interest in information/principle-agent problems, I came up with the absolute perfect setting where that matters: Soviet Union bureaucracy. A system where everybody cheats, lies, and bribes and it is both a huge drain choking the life out of the country and the only way anything could ever get done. (Factory managers basically ended up just lying on everything and conducting private trade with their output as though they were firms. A non-corrupt government couldn't have ever functioned as well as that did.)

The Herculean challenge of trying to get anything done at all as an apparatchik would be compelling.

 

[Agarathium1066]

I completely forgot about something I experienced in one of my games, until I found a screenshot and chopped it up. Enjoy!
View attachment 4558910
Explaination: Player character finds out that a 12-year old boy is secretly a sodomite. This shouldn't be possible since children below 16 are protected from sexual events, but I guess his uncle Rapehard of Kitydidleln got himself a lucky bug. Little Folkhard was also tagged as heterosexual, so his prepubescent pudge-facking probably wasn't consensual.

If he's still tagged as heterosexual its likely a bug but the implications are deeply unpleasant. The kinda realism I'm not sure I really want to end up seeing in CK. In less horrifying instances I've seen young kids already alcoholics or flagellants presumably because they got the shit beaten out of them in the random events. Really I end up seeing way more and more underage kids wounded now and I'm wondering if something is coded wrong or they're all refusing to chance being cowardly.

 

[Zbk3VmLfujjzjxBd43tL]

What utterly annoys me about Stellaris is the lack of reaction the galactic neighborhood has on your decisions. A egregious example would be the Colossus; Instead of the galaxy having a collective "oh fuck" after annihilating billions of people in a few weeks, the only one that really reacts is the victim (-1000), while everyone else shrugs about it.

This is absurd. The Colossus should be equivalent to the nuclear bomb; The entire world reacted to the US annihilating Nagasaki to kickstart their own nuclear programs, not ignore that one of the contenders just lost generations of populations.

Actually that's pretty realistic. The atomic bomb wasn't anything new or scary, it was just a super powerful weapon and it was supposed to have been used multiple times in Korea. It only became a doomsday weapon by the end of the 50s when the "missile gap" became a popular fear and Sputnik 1 caused the American public to believe the Soviets were a major threat.

And in regards to mass murder, Hitler has a positive reputation in India along with much of the Muslim world because his policies didn't affect them.

 

[Rendang]

It only became a doomsday weapon by the end of the 50s when the "missile gap" became a popular fear and Sputnik 1 caused the American public to believe the Soviets were a major threat.

And in regards to mass murder, Hitler has a positive reputation in India along with much of the Muslim world because his policies didn't affect them.

I do think that India and the Muslim think positively of Hitler because he fought against their subjugators. His policies on hating the French and the British were just shared between another. Relating this to Stellaris, It's programmed for nations with shared rivalries for one nation to gain a positive relation modifier. Maybe including nations who lost systems, humiliated, or vassalized by force could be expanded.

I don't disagree on your opinion on nukes though; without jump drives, Colossuses aren't really scary in Stellaris. I can easily deathstack and destroy a Colossus slowly driving to my capital by warping through gateway or hyperrelay (I'm not sure if the torpedo bonus applies to them). The "nuke" becomes much more scary and dickish after you jump your entire fleet and Colossus on the capital. That could be the point where people become scared.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

The only thing that could make Stellaris worth playing (at all) would be having a mode where it generates a universe already populated with history (diplomatic stances, empires of varying sizes including multiethnic ones, varying technology levels) and the player is a OPM that just invented their warp drive.

 

[Kane Lives]

The only thing that could make Stellaris worth playing (at all) would be having a mode where it generates a universe already populated with history (diplomatic stances, empires of varying sizes including multiethnic ones, varying technology levels) and the player is a OPM that just invented their warp drive.

I'm honestly still baffled that this isnt already a thing. I get that they have long designed (or tried to) Stellaris to be a 4X instead of a traditional Paradox map-painter, but the way Stellaris handles screams for exactly such a mode.

Though they'd definitely need to overhaul research to accommodate this. Currently size = better for most part, even with scaling research costs. Any OPM in the current meta is going to be obsoleted very quickly.

 

[Rendang]

Though they'd definitely need to overhaul research to accommodate this. Currently size = better for most part, even with scaling research costs. Any OPM in the current meta is going to be obsoleted very quickly.

If I were to overhaul size, I'd overhaul trade as a whole. Give planets adaptive (or adjustable if you're authoritarian) living conditions, make it so trade also distributes supply towards other planets, and give bonuses or reduce size by adding infrastructure.

Currently, high stability is really easy to obtain. Like a HOI4 focus path, to solve stability, just press the "living conditions" button and keep the happy number up. Having a massive empire means some sectors will typically have varying degrees of livelihoods, and it wasn't simply worth it to develop infrastructure there. Even the USSR couldn't produce enough equity to even give the poorest sectors decent conditions.

Trade, as it currently stands, is a just an electrician who lives in a cubicle. They wave their hands magically and then produce energy/unity/goods. Instead, trade should instead act like a supply line. Clerks allow for the efficient distribution of goods across interstellar lines. The more clerks you have, the greater supply you can give to other planets nearby. Just like how Strait of Malacca was the trade hub between Europe/Middle-east and Asia, a trade planet between an Ecumenopolis and an industrial planet allows for the goods to get to one side to the other. If it's far away, use a gateway or hyperrelay to extend the range. Everyone is usually happier from trade, but also more productive.

High trade gives the planet high stability, but also supports research and government, and everyone else as a whole. Colonies are awful places to live at, lacking in basic goods, but in Stellaris, you suddenly have an entire polytechnic institute in a year. You need trade hubs to bring particle accelerators, microscopes, and other tools to move technology across the area. The same can be applied to everyone. Have a trade hub, and you supply equipment to improve output.

Nearby neighbors would also passively trade with your industrial/trade worlds, and they could sustain your colonies nearby. Having a trade agreement could become a double-edged sword. You can profit much more, but you would share your industrial capacity with a fellow empire. Megacorps can abuse this fact, and harvest industrial capacity, or distribute industrial capacity to other planets. You can play like an asshole and leech any bit of supply, or you can distribute to gain a fraction of any resource.

Overall, actual trade would make "big size = typically bad" by simulating empire sprawl, leading to rebellions, and produce a more organic experience.