Source
r/Stellaris•
RacoonThe

What happened to Tall vs Wide?

Discussion

Those that played before v1.9 will know what I mean. Back when planets were the seat of territory control and pop growth was split between all of your territories. I understand that it was inherently "gamey" but it did add flavor.

Maybe I just haven't played enough of the new version, but it really feels like playing tall is a shell of what it used to be. There is simply no way you can compete now as pop growth is king.

Does anyone else remember playing tall? What could be done to make it so this balance is back in the game?

Posted Aug 19, 2019, 7:04 PM UTC

1933
ArdennVoid•

The real difference is that right now population growth is king. This kills tall builds because there is no benefit to pop growth for playing tall, and more planets while playing wide can accumulate large growth from migration from other empires that snowballs the bigger and better your empire is.

More pops can produce more of everything, and currently can outpace expenses from going wide. This means that a tall empire will just get zerg rushed by a wide empire currently.

To make up for that difference in production you'd have to have a way to boost pop growth beyond normal planet size, increase migration, or need growth with admin cap. As is theres too little potential to grow admin cap for that to be a reasonable response, and personally I already feel growth is too slow.

The only thing that makes sense to me is to make an isolationist version of the habitat that is 2 or 3 times bigger and better. And then you have to figure how they got so much material and it seems kinda gamey. Maybe you could lower costs for mega engineering projects?

But then you give too much advantage when the tall eventually goes wide to conquer everything.

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RacoonTheOP•

To make up for that difference in production you'd have to have a way to boost pop growth beyond normal planet size

This is an interesting take. I like it. Maybe some sort of unity or cohesion boost?

But then you give too much advantage when the tall eventually goes wide to conquer everything.

I mean, that was always a threat in previous versions. If you're playing wide, you have to hit them when they're weak. Of course, there's a balance to be struck.

3
Meraun86•

iam doing a Tall Playtrough currently and iam in endgame. I had the Problem with not enough Pops to fill all planets and habitat.

Waht help me imense was conquering enemy Empire, Relocate all their Pops onto my Planets and drop the Conquered Planets. Then Trade the system to another Empire. I just move 242 Pops into my Planets and habitats.

2
Meraun86•

Dont underestimate the Much faster research and unity in Tall empires. Iv played tall with a Sienceethic and managed to stay infront of everyone in Tec (Playing scaling with Grand Admirality)

2
Quitschicobhc•

I think you can balance this by reworking the traditions. Instead of the current, shallow tradition trees one could have a lot deeper trees, but with a lot more powerful effects in the later tiers.

1
CountAccountant•

Maybe I just haven't played enough of the new version, but it really feels like playing tall is a shell of what it used to be.

Does anyone else remember playing tall?

Restricting yourself to a handful of worlds has never truly been competitive with rapid expansion from a game optimization perspective. It is true that in pre-v2.0 there were popular tall strategies based on generating a large science output over a small science cost base in hopes of generating rapid tech advancement. These strategies could certainly outperform large AI empires, but they didn't outperform good wide strategies. A skilled wide player could field much larger fleets and still maintain comparable tech through quantity of research labs, at least during the relevant parts of the game. The only arena that the tall player had an indisputable advantage in was unity advancement - which certainly wasn't enough to compensate for the wide players' insurmountable advantages in resource production, etc. And Science Nexus-based strategies fared poorly against people who could control the galaxy long before anyone had constructed a Science Nexus.

I realize this is a contentious issue and some of you will disagree. That's fine. Hear me out.

The key difference between pre-2.0 and now, which I think is what you are really getting at, is that pre-2.0 tall felt like you were following a strategy. In post-2.0 it just feels like you are intentionally crippling yourself. That isn't fun.

The pre-2.0 research cost exploit was nerfed, but believe it or not tall has received considerable love from the devs. In the dev diaries, the game director at the time didn't refer to tall in terms of number of worlds. Instead, he talked about tall as number of districts. In other words, adminstrative capacity. Habitats were originally intended as being a key tool for tall players, and they were designed to allow you to cram a lot of pops into a small number of districts. Likewise, megacorps were intended for players who want to get the most possible resources out of every point of admin capacity. And Admin Capacity penalties are much more transparent than before, in part to help players who want to get the most out of every district make informed decisions.

Tall is still not really competitive with wide from a game optimization numbers perspective. I suspect this is a deliberate design decision to encourage empire conflicts. Competition for territory is probably always going to be a part of the game, and the empires that do it well will generally outperform the ones that do not. But that game optimization aspect hasn't really changed that much since pre-2.0.

You might argue that tall has some big non-numeric advantages in delaying the risk of war and the time that large fleets need to be constructed (i.e. lower payoff because lower risk). I'm ignoring this aspect in my analysis because it's a harder argument to defend. A skilled player can often take big risks and still execute consistently.

However, just because it isn't optimal doesn't mean that it isn't viable. The part where it felt like you were following a strategy with its own strengths and weaknesses is still possible in the new game mechanics. Try giving a tall playthrough another try and see if maximizing the output of districts feels more fun than limiting the number of worlds you have. It may or may not, but hopefully it's at least worth a shot. There's an aspect of the game that you miss and it would be nice if you can recreate it with the tools that are available to you.

Hope this helps.

12
Delthor-lionRogue Servitors•

This is absolutely correct. Bigger is always better in Stellaris, and it always has been. The only reason tall is a thing is because you can customize your difficulty level such that anything can be viable.

If tall strategies were equal to wide strategies, it would eliminate all reason to expand, go to war, and turn the game into a turtle-fest. It's better that in order to get stronger, you need to grow.

Besides, this game really isn't purely about min-maxing. If it was, I doubt anyone would play anything but machine empires and purifiers. I do fine playing taller empires that work with limited territory. It does mean trying to leverage very limited advantages while dealing with significant disadvantages, but I often do the same thing with other aspects of my play in the name of personal preference and roleplay.

3
Darvin3•

Maybe I just haven't played enough of the new version, but it really feels like playing tall is a shell of what it used to be. There is simply no way you can compete now as pop growth is king.

You hit the nail on the head. There are some niche tall strategies that use Nihilistic Acquisition for pop growth, but conventional tall builds just don't have access to any meaningful amount pop growth to keep pace after the early-game. They fizzle out because they don't have enough pops to build a serious economy.

What could be done to make it so this balance is back in the game?

Changing pop growth so it's no longer based on how many planets you control would do wonders. Changing pop growth to be empire wide, possibly following some sort of logarithmic growth based on your current population, would mean a tall empire that has their pops concentrated on a few planets would have the same growth as a wide empire that is spread out across many. This would help keep parity between tall and wide into the mid-game.

However, late-game is a bit harder to solve. There comes a point where tall will saturate its own planets and just won't have room for more pops, while wide has essentially limitless space. Moreover, tech-focused wide builds can raise their admin cap into the thousands so they can stay under admin cap quite easily while still having 80-100 planets, so admin cap does nothing to distinguish tall, either. This would be a much harder problem to solve. The way the metagame currently works out, in the late-game a small empire that stays under admin cap has around 50 planets and 5000 pops. A tall playstyle simply cannot exist in a metagame where that's the norm, and something drastic will need to change to give tall any late-game relevancy.

9
terrycloth3•

Isn't late game what habitats and ringworlds are for?

Also, 'more production' is the classical benefit of going wide, so making pop growth constant regardless of the number of colonies would be going way too far. It would also mean the only way of out-producing your opponents would be to conquer people or otherwise steal pops.

It might be better to look at:

(a) more efficiency per pop from tech -- currently this is true for basic resources but (mostly) not for advanced resources and research

(b) ways to boost growth on specific planets using influence - if you can sign a migration treaty and then slurp down a few dozen pops with an edict, say. Or better yet not have to sign the treaty. q:3 Have refugees jump ship from regimes that make them unhappy even if they aren't being killed off.

(c) 'Running out of space' is mostly solved by habitats and ringworlds, but honestly the limit of 16 buildings per planet also hurts tall play a lot.

Ideally you'd be able to make your planets gigantic mega-planets that people from all over the galaxy would migrate to, like big cities in the world today. Or on the flipside, massive slave-hives where you stash all your kidnap victims. n.n

4
SchmeetheDetermined Exterminators•

Hypothetical- but what sort of ramifications do you see if they both added your idea for empire wide pop growth while also unlocking building slots to a new ceiling based on planet size? Say a size 10 stays at vanilla, while a size 25 planet could have up to 50 total buildings? The total sustainable population of a planet would skyrocket, and a tall empire would have a large incentive to rush growth on a smaller number of urban worlds to unlock building slots...

3
Darvin3•

I'd definitely be interested in seeing how it plays out. It's hard to predict given what a big change it would bring to the meta, but it might very well make single-planet a perfectly viable strategy, at least for the early-game.

2
SchmeetheDetermined Exterminators•

A change like that would really buff life seeded. But yeah, that's a huge change. I'd be curious what it'd break, and a bit skeptical on how one would feed all those pops- you'd probably have to spread fairly wide just for the energy and minerals to feed the buildings while devoting nearly all districts to food and cities. Just a dumb idea, probably would make things worse.

2
RacoonTheOP•

Interesting. Maybe they could have pop growth tied to admin cap?

1
Darvin3•

Remember, there's a repeatable tech that gives +15 admin cap. Changing pop growth to be tied to sprawl penalty would effectively mean we'd have a repeatable pop growth tech. I think that would be a VERY bad idea to have a repeatable pop growth tech (especially since it's already arguably the best repeatable tech in the game as it stands...)

2
JamesDevitt•

The things that would make Tall beat Wide are fuel costs, communications costs, or both. These changes would be so fundamental that we are probably talking Stellaris 3.0 at this point. (There was a little glimmer of what could be when they added trade routes, but they made space pirates trivial.) The reason people pack together is logistics cost. As the game stands you can send you minerals from one side of the galaxy to the other at no cost, instantly. There is no reason not to go wide.

8
jaelerin•

This is a really interesting point. I wonder if expanding piracy type effects to minerals and food would be a way to experiment in this direction. This kind of effect might also offer a reason to build more "self sufficient " world's instead of the bonuses pushing every world to specialize. This would also offer a cost to world's like ecumenopolis and ring world that import a ton.

6
JamesDevitt•

Well the difficulty is that it doesn't make much sense to need to take excess minerals and food to the capital. You could do it as an experiment. But I think to really make it work you'd either need to give the player the ability to manually set up routes or develop a situation where each planet has a certain amount of storage and trade ships automatically develop to try to even out storage. Either could be fun and interesting but would be a lot of effort- thus 3.0

1
Lurkers-gotta-postTechnocracy•

Even given the option of manual routing, I would probably just want my goods traveling the same routes as my trade, so I don't have to protect multiple routes around my empire.

1
MyAntichrist•

In my current play through as materialist empire I was playing tall until the endgame crisis hit, I put everything into research and after building the dyson sphere and matter decompressor I added a bunch of ecus for alloy build up. By 2350 all the fallen empires were pathetic in tech. In 2450 I was in the 30s of repeatable techs. They still complete in less than a year.

So yeah, I guess it still works.

4
RacoonTheOP•

Yeah, you can "sort of" do it now. I guess the point I was trying to get across is that it feels neutered. Did you play tall pre 2.0?

Happy cake day btw :)

2
MyAntichrist•

I did not. I played against some others playing tall in MP and those were a pain. Guess I missed out a lot.

And thanks.

2
PRJack2•

More bonuses for science and tradition research.

3
stopstealmyusername•

I don't think it's a good idea to give boost to tall player just because whynot.

It would be better if wide empire have to manage with internal stability instead of just giving random nerf. If they have to deal with social crisis, corruption, separatism, succession war, civil war, military putsch, etc. on the other end of their empire, they can't go on rampage on their neighbour, because even if they have a tons more of ressource, they have to use it in their empire to avoid it's explosion, and those same ressources could be used against them.

3
gamerk2•

I think this is the correct take. Wide empires should have to deal with corruption (loss of resources) and stability penalties (especially Xenophillic ones). I'd also double the existing penalties for going over the admin cap; right now the only thing that hurts at all is the unity cost for traditions.

5
NathanielBM•

Not sure about late game, but what about adjusting admin cost for planet (+) and districts (+) ? Maybe with harsher sprawl maluses? I feel these are the knobs they left for that balance. It can't be all balanced against very late game, but just halving ressource districts admin cost would be an interesting solution already.

2
BhaktiMeinShakti•

The problem with the pop growth is King paradigm is that pop growth doesn't depend on existing pops. If it did, tall empires could be growing pops as fast a wide empires

2
[deleted]•

I still end up playing tall until 2340 or so. Especially if I am blocked in by hostile Empires who spam Starbases and yet my corvettes can't kill them.

1
WuQianNian•

Tall is when you go wide and spin off your worst sectors as tributaries

1
Ceaser156•

sounds like you aren't making use of tributaries

1
Raxuis•

Honesly wide is kinda better unless you're really on top of things. Because with wide if you settle worlds in waves then you'll have a nice core population to provide immigration to new founded colonies. Although I have found that with more planets its only like .1 immigration if any. So i mean its not a huge thing.

Also it tends to be older worlds produce more advanced resources while newer smaller colonies tend to provide more resources.

1
[deleted]•

[deleted]

1
aDuck117Gas Giant•

I think I've had one of the best starts to a game in this current one. I start playing tall very early on, and power out research. Then, after around 35-50 years (I can't remember when I decided "fuck it"), I just expanded hard. The research I had gotten done at that point meant that I was able to steamroll a bunch of the resource techs, and it made mining and everything very efficient. I am still playing wide, but a tech orientated tall start can lead to a good foundation for wide play.

That being said, I reckon it only really worked because I built robots, so pop growth was effectively doubled when I wanted to start building. I've had to tell all my planets to stop breeding because I can't colonize fast enough to sustain the growth I had.

1
happyunicorn666Evolutionary Mastery•

Play with habitable worlds slider set to minimum. Everybody will have five planets at most.

1
retief1•

Eh, tall exists, it's just "20 planets, a bunch of habitats/ringworlds, and enough admin cap repeatables to get back to 0 research penalty", while wide is "arbitrary planets and fuck admin cap". There is actually a tradeoff there -- the one will be able to get far more effective research than the other, but the other will have vastly more industrial output. However, "tall" still involves a fair amount of expansion and a large industrial base.

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