I see posts often about people's problems with just how good tech rushing is at the moment and needs to be addressed. I wanted to post my thoughts on it and interested on hearing from others.
Ultimately my feeling is that tech rushing is good because more tech always equals more good. I cant think of a 4x game where that isn't the case. And why shouldnt getting more tech be more good, anyway? I dont think tech rushing is neccesarily the core issue.
I think the core issue is just how easy it is to tech rush AND be aggressive. In most 4x games, you generally have to be a bit choosy in what you want to do.
Like in civ 5 ( I've never played civ 6 ) the meta was generally just rush the top techs to get to the better research speed techs. Military techs were at the bottom and a bit out of the way of the research increases. So you really had to pick and choose what you wanted to do.
But in stellaris Stefan Annon did a fantastic video where he got a dyson sphere started 66 years into the game. Now, he did have a few extremes and his particular way will be dead in the next update, but his strategy LITERALLY relied on high aggression AND high tech.
Stellaris doesnt force you to choose between early aggression and a tech boom. Going to war is generally easy to do without much pre planning. Just hit the declare war button if you have a larger fleet, erase their defenses and wait until your 100 armies finally capture their planets.
Now for the problem solving part.
First of my ideas is to decrease the claims cost reductions in the game, ie if a cost reduction is 15%, reduce that to like 7.5%. I personally dislike this idea, but it was the first idea that came to me.
Also, war needs to be more difficult. It needs to more than what it is. It cant be mindless, and serious thought needs to be given for it. Thought needs to be given on the preparing for war, the war itself, peacetime, and opportunity cost associated with war for instance, etc. Maybe supply lines. Better defenses. Expanded planet defenses. Increasing tech cost limiting people to weaker ships for longer.
Peaceful playstyles are basically non existent. Getting as strong of an economy as a conqueror is difficult to say the least. Maybe make it so the time frame it takes to assimate a conquered people is longer. Maybe bigger penalties for purging, enslaving, displacing, etc? I personally dislike 'punishing' certain playstyles, but we need to slow down early aggression and make it be a trade off with other things you could be doing. Like making your economy stronger or getting your tech up.
Also, peaceful empires just cant remain peacful without falling behind. Both in pops, economy, and tech. Starbases are garbage and is easily beaten cost effectively. Maybe the unyielding tradition tree needs to be mutually exclusive to the supremacy tree. And the unyielding tree needs things in it to allow citadels to threaten battleships requiring titans to take them down. As well as being cheaper to build, and I mean MUCH cheaper AND quicker to build up. And maybe have the defensive platforms deactivate after being beaten but not destroyed.
Also tech is generally pretty easy to get up and running. So maybe decrease the amount of research researchers get you. Also have research labs at lvl 1 get you one researcher, lvl 2 gets you two, and the 3rd tier research labs get you three researchers. As well as increasing the cost of tech in general. And maybe increase the amount of techs required to get to the next tier of research.
And the diplomatic playstyle is pretty weak. And again, military is basically to go to. Diplomatic peacful playstyles are punished if they want to rely on starbases as defense. While militiristic playstyles are rewarded with more diplomatic weight. Maybe have it under the unyielding tree that instead of diplo weight from fleets, you get diplo power from starbases. And if the starbases were buffed better, that would be interesting to see in the senate.
And the last thing I wanted to to bring up. The way tech works in stellaris rewards you to research bigger and better guns. You need like 6 techs to get to a higher tier. So you end up researching specific techs that both, gets you your minimum requirements of what you are gunning for, and the minimum number of techs to get to a higher tier. So, often times, the goal is to gun for one of the ascension paths, robots because they are so good, or the military techs. The benefits to getting more tech is always good. Because these specific techs get you more better everything they always get got ( in the meta. If you rp and dont do robots for instance, that's cool ). I'm not saying this is a bad thing neccesarily. I love the ascension paths. I love mega structures. Etc. I just wanted to point this out specifically to show case what the direction tech rushing goes down. These tech hotspots are particularly powerful.
Maybe we need to introduce the concept of mutually exclusive techs into the game. And an ascension perk required to unlock the exclusive techs back. But THAT will be wildly unpopular.
What are everyone else's thoughts? I'm game for a discussion.
