Stellaris Development Diary # 21: Admin Sectors

Mondays are typically the nastiest day of the week. Waking up after a long Sunday night… Ugh. Luckily, Paradox Development Studio produces the very best Monday cure– another Stellaris dev diary. This week, Stellaris is all about Administration Sectors and micromanagement.

There’s always the same moment in any properly complex strategy game — when enjoyment and stress start to look and feel the same. The team working on Stellaris understands this and they want to change it for the better. In Stellaris, players will have something akin to a “Demense” limit from Crusader Kings II. Instead of controlling the commanding heights of every industry, planet, and peon, you will have a certain limit to the number of planets that you directly control. The rest will be split into administrative sectors.

Doomdark explains more:

A Sector is an administrative region under the control of a Sector Governor. You can control a few planets directly (your “core worlds”), but once you go past the limit, you will start suffering penalties to your Influence as well as Empire-wide income. The exact limit for how many planets you can control directly depends on various factors, like your government type and technologies, but, as with the “Demesne Limit” in Crusader Kings II, it will never be a huge number. At this point, it is best to start dividing your territory into Sectors. You can decide the Sector capital and which planets should belong to it (but they must all be connected to the capital, i.e. form one cohesive sub-region.) You are also allowed to name your Sectors, for fun.

Sectors will always be a part of your empire as long as they are still sectors. These administrative areas can be set to accomplish certain tasks or produce particular goods. At the moment, sectors can’t rebel or try and overthrow the government (something that Doomdark would like to add in a later expansion). This is aided by the fact that sectors do no produce their own military units or technological advances. Everything is given to you.

Even though populations can’t revolt (yet), they can drift ideologically between planets and sectors. This essentially means that if enough of a certain type of ideologically influenced populations move into a certain sector, they can create their own identity. This separate identity in your empire can eventually form a faction which can become an autonomous agent.  More to come on this idea in a future dev diary.

So, what do you think about Admin sectors? Let us know what you think in the comments below.