Developers, fix your save system

[iheartdaikaiju]

I have been trying to pick this game up and enjoy it for years and every single time, just as I am about to win, something stupid happens. Whether it's a game breaking - yes the save still loads but the game is unplayable with a rebalance - game breaking change that gets itself baked into my autosave, or steam cloud gets messed up and I lose game decades worth of progress, or I play on another computer because I am tired of steam cloud bringing me to tears and laughing at me as the hours I have put in are yet again destroyed and turn off cloud saves only to have some long forgotten autosave uploaded and stop everything... it's a mess. The result is always me getting close to completing a game and the ♥♥♥♥♥♥ save system dunking me. The game is not fun for me without the ability to unlock achievements. I have to ironman to get those and your save system is consistently horrible and fragile enough to prevent me from finishing almost every game. I used to play on higher, more fun difficulties. I play on cadet now because I know I'll just be rebuilding everything. 4X games do _not_ work as roguelikes. The time investment is too much.

I am not going to be the umpteenth person trying to convince you this is a stupid way to prevent cheating that doesn't work and I definitely don't want to deal with the white knights that come out of the woodwork whenever you are stupid enough to even mention this, I have probably already screwed myself this paragraph but it is unavoidable.

What I am going to say is that you need to keep 3 moving backups available, in both cloud and the system. This can be invisible to me, but if you did this it would force you to have a backup resolution and reconciliation mechanism that would prevent all the problems I have experienced. If you were simply taking the most recent autosave from whatever information you have available, I would never end up with ancient saves replacing more recent saves. I would always have a save available on my local system that I could tell steam to stomp the cloud save with. And if you rolled out a breaking change, and set up your save resolution to use autosaves from before a breaking change if I rolled back, I would gain the option to roll back without the damage done from the breaking change being baked into my save file.

I've played this game too much to ask for a refund, asking for a refund due to the game's save system being buggy trash is something I needed to do years ago. But I can at least post a complaint where action will likely be taken, and in my opinion the action I am requesting is ridiculously low effort and would have an insanely high impact.

[Immortalis]

Question: would you classify someone who came with a solution to your issue and an easy way to backup your files locally as a "white knight coming out of the woodwork"?

Because I wouldn't want you to feel as if you were attacked personally

[HappySack]

Are you one of those people that plays this game once a month then complains when an update breaks your savegames because you can't bother to finish one game in like half a year or something?

Also wrong forum if you want anyone remotely important to see and not care about your rant then post this on the Paradox forum.

[iheartdaikaiju]

Originally posted by Immortalis:

Question: would you classify someone who came with a solution to your issue and an easy way to backup your files locally as a "white knight coming out of the woodwork"?

Because I wouldn't want you to feel as if you were attacked personally

I appreciate your answer.

I would not classify that that way at all and I really respect you and your answer. This is absolutely the sort of problem I can solve on my own. I know where the save file is and I have git on my computer. I was obviously frustrated and emotional because I'd lost half my fleet, the federation I joined, and a ton of other stuff that happened during about 40 game years today before deciding the healthiest thing I could do mentally was advocate for my anger.

Your suggestion is respectful, appreciated, and correct. The one beneath yours not so much but I'm better at ignoring snarky generally dissatisfied people. I won't be engaging u/HappySack directly in conversation but mentioning the post is unfortunately necessary and will likely egg that person on, that post is absolutely one I would describe as an immature personal attack that is overly and obviously defensive on behalf of the game.

Thank you for reminding me I have the power to fix this problem myself, I will update this post with instructions for the system I end up putting together.

[Immortalis]

Originally posted by iheartdaikaiju:

Originally posted by Immortalis:

Question: would you classify someone who came with a solution to your issue and an easy way to backup your files locally as a "white knight coming out of the woodwork"?

Because I wouldn't want you to feel as if you were attacked personally

I appreciate your answer.

I would not classify that that way at all and I really respect you and your answer. This is absolutely the sort of problem I can solve on my own. I know where the save file is and I have git on my computer. I was obviously frustrated and emotional because I'd lost half my fleet, the federation I joined, and a ton of other stuff that happened during about 40 game years today before deciding the healthiest thing I could do mentally was advocate for my anger.

Your suggestion is respectful, appreciated, and correct. The one beneath yours not so much but I'm better at ignoring snarky generally dissatisfied people. I won't be engaging u/HappySack directly in conversation but mentioning the post is unfortunately necessary and will likely egg that person on, that post is absolutely one I would describe as an immature personal attack that is overly and obviously defensive on behalf of the game.

Thank you for reminding me I have the power to fix this problem myself, I will update this post with instructions for the system I end up putting together.

It really is quite easy, you just need to go into the folders where your savefiles are located and copy the ironman save you're interested into a backup folder from time to time.
Then, if something happens to the main file, you just replace it with one from the backup. You will inevitably end up losing a few hours but better that than days or weeks.

[iheartdaikaiju]

This is what I came up with and I'm happy with it, it means I have enough metadata to quickly fix the three most common attacks on the savefile with no data loss possible

1. Create a new git branch in /c/Program Files (x86)/Steam/userdata/<your steam ID>/281990/remote/save games/<your save folder> named after the current release. You can find the current release in the main (hamburger, lower right) menu while playing the game. Mine was 3.11.2
2. Exit the game if you are running it and copy your ironman save to <timestamp>.sav . Mine was 2024-05-04T1524-0600.sav
3. Open the game and immediately close it. Repeat step 2. Note : this is a guard against data corruption and empowers you to experiment with the 1st save if you need to follow any instructions such as rolling back, it eliminates the risk in doing so.
4. Open the game and immediately close it once more.
5. Add your two timestamp saves and your ironman.sav to git in the branch named after your current release and commit.

[Razorblade]

To get Achievements, you simply need Steam Cloud enabled for Stellaris in its game properties on Steam. You do not actually have to use cloud saving in-game, however.

Just go into Stellaris' in-game settings and disable "Autosave to Cloud." As all Ironman saves are autosaves, you're not actually using Steam Cloud at all this way. Steam Cloud problem solved.

Yes, it's a dumb system that Steam Cloud needs to be enabled at all, but the worst part of the system is easily avoidable using developer-provided options.

As for updates breaking saves, just make sure you roll back to a previous patch before loading your save. The game even explicitly warns you you shouldn't load outdated saves, so I'm not sure why you ever would.