Hello everyone!

As promised on the stream last week, I’d write a shorter dev diary to let you know what we’re up to now. As you probably have heard, I have now taken over as the game director for Stellaris, so that Martin can go work on [REDACTED]. Check out Martin’s goodbye message on twitter if you haven’t already!

So what are we doing now then? We have updated the beta branch last week, and will update it again soon before we disappear for a brief while over the holidays. Whenever it's ready, Jamie will be making a post about it. The beta branch should include some performance improvements related to slowdowns caused by gateways and wormholes in later stages of the game.

In the beginning of the next year we will be taking more time for post-launch support by focusing on bugs, improving performance and more quality-of-life stuff. One small spoiler that I can mention is that we’re looking into improving the planet interface, and I’ll probably post some more sneak peeks about it in the beginning of next year

We don’t really have that much more to say right now, but I will try to be back with the next dev on the 10th or 17th of January.

Until then, have a great holiday with family, friends, and of course, the Blorg! Happy holidays!

Blorg celebrating the holidays. Date unknown. Photographer unknown, but most likely the blorg itself.​

 

[AlphaAsh]

Oh god so what is causing day one stuttering hasn't been identified yet. Well, shit

It's the market prices and piracy on trade routes calculations. Both on a daily tick. Both hard-coded.

 

[Strich]

That would make no sense whatsoever...people aren't going to take shitty low wage jobs when they were working in a factory for decent pay or, even, the cushy administrator/noble/whatever of an entire planet. No, having them prioritize higher strata jobs is definitely more appropriate than vice versa.

Not convinced, since you have to wait until a specialist is available in real life for the new high specialized job. If you do the comparison with real life, you lose, because you simply cant explain why a coal miner turn into a rocket scientist in seconds.

 

[Bayes]

Thank you for an amazing patch and expansion pack, it really changed stellaris for me in a big way.(and in a good way)
Happy holidays to all of you!

 

[Serenity84]

It would be great is you extended the bug fixing time for many months and not just moved on to developing the next big DLC right away. One can see something similar with CK2, though in a far, far smaller scale. Sure, there are major bug fixes after the DLC released, but it feels like some longstanding bugs slip through and don't get fixed while the team focuses on the next DLC instead. Stellaris has a lot more issues that have long existed, but were never fixed. And now so many things are broken that it needs a lot more polishing after a release than usual.

 

[Little Green Mensch]

Not convinced, since you have to wait until a specialist is available in real life for the new high specialized job. If you do the comparison with real life, you lose, because you simply cant explain why a coal miner turn into a rocket scientist in seconds.

There should indeed be a transition period for promotion (maybe 1-2 years?); this would give you time to de-prioritize jobs before they are filled, which would allow you to avoid the demotion penalties.

 

[Typee]

Not convinced, since you have to wait until a specialist is available in real life for the new high specialized job. If you do the comparison with real life, you lose, because you simply cant explain why a coal miner turn into a rocket scientist in seconds.

Quite the opposite, we have real life examples of that dynamic, specifically "The Glorious Thirty" in France, where a period of unprecedented economic growth created mass employment opportunities. People got jobs for which they were WAY underqualified. I'm talking a bachelor degree for jobs that today require a PhD/postdoc with several publications.
High demand for workers relaxes qualification criteria immensely.

 

[FoolManChoo]

Happy Holidays and thanks for all the fish!

 

[r3xm0rt1s]

Quite the opposite, we have real life examples of that dynamic, specifically "The Glorious Thirty" in France, where a period of unprecedented economic growth created mass employment opportunities. People got jobs for which they were WAY underqualified. I'm talking a bachelor degree for jobs that today require a PhD/postdoc with several publications.
High demand for workers relaxes qualification criteria immensely.

Were they underqualified, or can employers be excessively picky because we have too many PhDs?

 

[LegacyCWAL]

As promised on the stream last week, I’d write a shorter dev diary to let you know what we’re up to now. As you probably have heard, I have now taken over as the game director for Stellaris, so that Martin can go work on [REDACTED].

If PDX's new game winds up literally being named "Redacted", I will laugh my a** off

 

[Iosue Yu]

Were they underqualified, or can employers be excessively picky because we have too many PhDs?

You know what? We should get the job system from Cities: Skyline. It depends on how much education you are giving your Pops so they will fill up jobs accordingly.

Jokes aside, simply not let Pops promote but only let them grow into a new Job may fix the issues, both the surprise jumps we get, and the surprise jumps computer players also get.

Or, on the other method, is to assign a stratum to the Pop growth and it gets a bonus or a malus according to available job openings of that stratum, and therefore migrating.

But I would love to see a more fluid approach - separate growth for the strata. When you have a new Specialist job, you punish the Worker growth and give a Specialist growth. Planets with unemployed Specialists actually get a Specialist decline as emmigration and the planet with a new job gets immigration growth.

 

[Bayes]

You know what? We should get the job system from Cities: Skyline. It depends on how much education you are giving your Pops so they will fill up jobs accordingly.

Jokes aside, simply not let Pops promote but only let them grow into a new Job may fix the issues, both the surprise jumps we get, and the surprise jumps computer players also get.

Or, on the other method, is to assign a stratum to the Pop growth and it gets a bonus or a malus according to available job openings of that stratum, and therefore migrating.

But I would love to see a more fluid approach - separate growth for the strata. When you have a new Specialist job, you punish the Worker growth and give a Specialist growth. Planets with unemployed Specialists actually get a Specialist decline as emmigration and the planet with a new job gets immigration growth.

I unironically want a education system in stellaris now.

 

[Nighzmarquls]

Unless the promised performance update is rather substantial that means you are effectively leaving us with a game that has crippling performance issues, particularly in the late game, over the holidays.

Kinda hard to be happy about that.

Hey Alastor, check out the post I made regarding massively slow load times and what I did to fix it. Been playing since then and I also noticed a substantial improvement in the smoothness of the galaxy during early game.

Before things were a little shuddery, now it's running as I remember in earlier patches.

Might help you out.

 

[DeadEyeTucker]

When you guys come back, I'd love to see an updated roadmap from pre-Utopia to get an idea of what you're looking at for the future!

 

[SoTAL]

It's the market prices and piracy on trade routes calculations. Both on a daily tick. Both hard-coded.

Goodness. I usually have horrendous stutter from day 1 no matter what on 2.2.2. Tried a large galaxy with ONLY machine empires. Markedly reduced daily tick stutter :O So it appears you might be onto something indeed.

 

[Razzlie]

It's the market prices and piracy on trade routes calculations. Both on a daily tick. Both hard-coded.

Do you think it's still fixable? I suppose it might take a long time to resolve if you're right.

 

[DreadLindwyrm]

Not convinced, since you have to wait until a specialist is available in real life for the new high specialized job. If you do the comparison with real life, you lose, because you simply cant explain why a coal miner turn into a rocket scientist in seconds.

I can explain why a rocket scientist position opening up eventually empties a coal mining job - even if some people don't like the explanation.

A role at NASA (or equivalent) opens up, and so an astrophysicist professor at a university applies for the job; he gets it quite quickly because he's published in the field and respected. This opens up a role for one of his junior lecturers to move up and take his chair - at which point a post-doc student applies for the role of lecturer, and a post grad who is about to get his doctorate fills in his role as a teaching assistant at the university, with consequent space for a batchelors, or new masters student to get the post grad role in the lab. So far this is all hidden as "scientists" in game.

Because the vacancy for a batchelor's degree has opened up, an educated office worker applies for the degree course. Here we have a "clerk" promoting to "scientist".

As there is the empty office role, a factory worker who wants a change of scene and an easier life applies for that role, and the miner, desperate to escape the mine applies for the office role (all shuffling about within the worker caste - and possibly invisible at the level of the game).

The pop doesn't necessarily promote all the way from nothing to the top - but rather individuals who make up the pop move up incrementally, causing it to look like the pop as a whole has jumped one or more levels but this is an illusion caused by the level of granularity that we see.

 

[Playwars]

"The Christmas spirit is mandatory, resistance is futile."

-Transmission from the blorg Santa-class battleship Present to Earth as the 1st Starhugger fleet exited hypespace in Sol.

 

[Fungers]

Now that is a somewhat dissappointing dev diary.

All in all I get the impression the product (both patch and the DLC) was launched prematurely by at least 2 months of development time and thorough QA work. I guess there are two reasons: Get sales for the DLC into Q4 of 2018 and to free Wiz for this secret new project.

I don't know what to make of this yet but this entire affair just doesn't feel right.

Took the thoughts right out of my brain, but I'd like to add one more touch to it.

I think Wiz wanted to leave us with as good a game as he could before he was moved to work on whatever Paradox bought Whitewolf for. In order to do that he chose to rush certain features. This has left us with a game that's barely playable in the short run, but as long as the issues get fixed will be to our benefit in the longer run. Biting off a bit more than he can chew in a certain time period is something he's done since his days making Paradox Mega LPs on the SA forums.

I think Wiz believes that his team will be able to fix the problems . I'll have faith in that judgement until late February.

 

[Iosue Yu]

I can explain why a rocket scientist position opening up eventually empties a coal mining job - even if some people don't like the explanation.

A role at NASA (or equivalent) opens up, and so an astrophysicist professor at a university applies for the job; he gets it quite quickly because he's published in the field and respected. This opens up a role for one of his junior lecturers to move up and take his chair - at which point a post-doc student applies for the role of lecturer, and a post grad who is about to get his doctorate fills in his role as a teaching assistant at the university, with consequent space for a batchelors, or new masters student to get the post grad role in the lab. So far this is all hidden as "scientists" in game.

Because the vacancy for a batchelor's degree has opened up, an educated office worker applies for the degree course. Here we have a "clerk" promoting to "scientist".

As there is the empty office role, a factory worker who wants a change of scene and an easier life applies for that role, and the miner, desperate to escape the mine applies for the office role (all shuffling about within the worker caste - and possibly invisible at the level of the game).

The pop doesn't necessarily promote all the way from nothing to the top - but rather individuals who make up the pop move up incrementally, causing it to look like the pop as a whole has jumped one or more levels but this is an illusion caused by the level of granularity that we see.

Except that Pops don't represent individuals, but a giant number of people.

A new job opening is not as simple as a new job opening in the real world. It means a whole chain of the field gets opened up, a new hole for private business sectors to form and to get people working.

In real life, it would look like you have opened a whole new silicon valley somewhere else and you want more IT guys start working there.

Your social infrastructure will be able to educate more people to work the IT field as your young people now see a future in this field. So they change jobs and flock to work there.

That's why I am all against simple promotions since social stratum of a person doesn't change overnight. New openings should mean new infrastructure for the whole chain, from education to logistics, so that a new generation should grow into the new job.

 

[DreadLindwyrm]

Except that Pops don't represent individuals, but a giant number of people.

A new job opening is not as simple as a new job opening in the real world. It means a whole chain of the field gets opened up, a new hole for private business sectors to form and to get people working.

In real life, it would look like you have opened a whole new silicon valley somewhere else and you want more IT guys start working there.

Your social infrastructure will be able to educate more people to work the IT field as your young people now see a future in this field. So they change jobs and flock to work there.

That's why I am all against simple promotions since social stratum of a person doesn't change overnight. New openings should mean new infrastructure for the whole chain, from education to logistics, so that a new generation should grow into the new job.

That's fair, but the principle applies on a larger scale as well.

Instead of it being one rocket scientist, say it's an entire company in the style of SpaceX that comes into existence - but on a larger scale.
So instead of one scientist moving up, and the chain of roles being filled, it's hundreds, or thousands of jobs, drawing from across the planet, and creating all the (specialist tier) support jobs that are involved.
One "job" is after all an entire echelon of people - potentially millions of people in "science" jobs, or "entertainment", or whatever.

It's also important to note I was answering the specific "miner to rocket scientist" question - not the "miner pop" to "scientist pop" question, because as you say it's more complicated than just one job - but because the game is modelling a huge number of the population as one single job the analogy is probably the simplest way to point out that the pop taking the top scientist job *almost certainly* isn't composed of the same individuals as comprised the ones in the miner pop.