Hi all!

As mentioned last week, our plan for today is to go over some changes to automated colony management and pop resettlement. As a reminder, these are still under development, and as such may undergo significant changes and won't be going live for quite some time.

Major goals here were to reduce the micromanagement burden in the mid to late game when individual decisions are less oppressive, and to significantly decrease the need to manually move pops at all. As with the economic changes we were discussing before, a lot of this is still a work in progress to varying degrees.

Automated Colony Management

Some sector management improvements have already been made in the 2.8.1 test branch (you can experiment and leave feedback on it by following the instructions in this thread), but here we’ll be focusing on planetary designations and individual planet automation.

A major pass has been done on automated colony management to improve its effectiveness. After manually setting a colony designation and turning on automated colony management, our intent is for the colony to develop into something you would reasonably expect if you were building it on your own. It should build districts, clear deposits as necessary, and upgrade buildings when there is a need for it.

Planet automation will upgrade capital buildings whenever possible (gotta unlock those building slots!), and will otherwise generally try to build or upgrade from its list if there are less than 3 open jobs. We’ve erred a bit on the side of caution, so it is currently extremely opposed to running deficits. It may require manual intervention if, for example, your energy credits per month are negative, but we figured it was better to leave those sorts of risky economic decisions in the player’s hands.

Spoiler: Foundry Automation (Hive) - Click to Expand

automate_foundry_hive_planet = {
    available = {
        has_designation = col_foundry
        owner = { has_authority = auth_hive_mind }
        free_jobs < 3
        has_building_construction = no
    }

    prio_districts = {
        district_industrial
    }

    buildings = {
        1 = {
            building = building_hive_capital
        }

        2 = {
            building = building_spawning_pool
        }

        3 = {
            building = building_clone_vats
        }

        4 = {
            building = building_hive_node
            available = {
                owner = {
                    hive_node_upkeep_affordable = yes
                }
                num_buildings = { type = building_hive_node value = 0 }
            }
        }

        5 = {
            building = building_foundry_1
            available = {
                owner = {
                    foundry_1_upkeep_affordable = yes
                }
            }
        }

        6 = {
            building = building_galactic_memorial_1
            available = {
                owner = {
                    has_valid_civic = civic_hive_memorialist
                }
                NOR = {
                    has_building = building_galactic_memorial_1
                    has_building = building_galactic_memorial_2
                    has_building = building_galactic_memorial_3
                }
            }
        }

        7 = {
            building = building_betharian_power_plant
        }

        8 = {
            building = building_mote_harvesters
        }

        9 = {
            building = building_crystal_mines
        }

        10 = {
            building = building_gas_extractors
        }

        11 = {
            building = building_chemical_plant
            available = {
                num_buildings = { type = building_chemical_plant value = 0 }
            }
        }

        12 = {
            building = building_hive_node
            available = {
                owner = {
                    hive_node_upkeep_affordable = yes
                }
                num_buildings = { type = building_hive_node value < 2 }
            }
        }

    }
}

This script will attempt to build a forge world for a hive empire. If there are less than 3 free jobs and there is nothing currently in the build queue, it will check to see if there is anything that it can build. Planetary automation has a tendency to favor districts over buildings, but will construct buildings if there are 1.5 times as many districts already built than there are buildings. (This ratio is able to be set in 00_defines.txt as COLONY_AUTOMATION_DISTRICT_PREFERENCE.) When selecting a building, it will move down the list until it finds something that it is capable of building and meets the scripted restrictions. The building’s upkeep is always taken into consideration. The scripted “_affordable” checks are to estimate whether you can afford the jobs it creates as well.

Blockers are fairly low priority for planetary automation, and will only be cleared if they are blocking a district slot that it actively wants to construct, or if there are no free district slots remaining. (Thus it will eventually clear all those random blockers once the rest of the planet is finished.) You can, of course, intervene and clear those Sprawling Slums or sleepy Lithoids earlier.

Buildings (other than the capital) will be upgraded if there are no other things that it wants to build right now, it can upgrade without causing resource deficits, and there are pops available that would want to work there. (Either because they’re unemployed or they prefer it to their current jobs.)

The scripts will attempt to handle various issues that may crop up on a planet such as low amenities, high crime, or failure to build buildings dedicated to extra-dimensional beings that love you and just want to be loved in return. These are tucked away in 00_crisis_exceptions.txt.

Spoiler: Amenity Crisis Exception (Regular Empire) - Click to Expand

automate_amenity_management = {
    available = {
        free_amenities <= -5
        owner = {
            NOR = {
                has_authority = auth_machine_intelligence
                has_authority = auth_hive_mind
            }
        }
        OR = {
            NOT = { uses_district_set = city_world }
            free_district_slots = 0
            has_resource = { type = exotic_gases amount < 75 }
        }
    }

    crisis = yes

    buildings = {
        holo = {
            building = building_holo_theatres
            available = {
                owner = {
                    is_spiritualist = no
                    is_megacorp = no
                }
            }
        }

        temple = {
            building = building_temple
            available = {
                owner = {
                    is_spiritualist = yes
                    is_megacorp = no
                }
            }
        }

        commerce = {
            building = building_commercial_zone
            available = {
                owner = {
                    is_megacorp = yes
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

This "exception" will intervene if a planet’s amenities are -5 or below, and it’s either not an ecumenopolis or if it is an ecumenopolis, it’s either totally full or you’re running low on exotic gases. Based on your ethics and authority, it’ll pick one of the amenity buildings to add to the queue.

A few jobs, buildings, and planet designations have gotten a bit of a touch-up during this pass. Notable examples of designations include the Urban World, which now has a Trade Value bonus, and the Colony, which is now intended to satisfy the needs of a newly colonized world rather than provide pop growth bonuses.

Urban and Colony Designations

The old Colony bonus was changed because it was a bit problematic - growth bonuses made it somewhat stronger than many other more specialized bonuses. We’d greatly prefer if you could flag that newly settled Mining World as such right away and immediately turn on automation, rather than it being optimal to manually develop the world until it reached 5 pops and no longer qualified for Colony.

Due to its inherent terror of deficits, the automation scripts tend to be a little bit more conservative than players may be, but I’ve personally enjoyed the dramatically reduced mental burden my mid to late game colonies require. It’s also convenient that several designations (such as Forge, Factory, Tech, and Urban) will build out colonies that qualify for the Arcology Project decision. In our dev multiplayer games, I've been making a point of using colony automation as much as possible in order to give everyone else a chance get a feel for what it's doing. (Except my capital. I'll admit that I do manually build that so I can take care of sudden shifts in priority.)

If you're using planetary automation but it doesn't seem to be doing anything, the three most common things to check are:

• Is the colony in a Sector?
  • Colonies have to be in a (non-Frontier) Sector in order to use either sector or planetary automation.
• Am I running an energy deficit?
  • Most districts and buildings have energy upkeep. While it's possible for the district or building to theoretically produce enough energy to overcome that and help work off the current deficit, the automation scripts are as light as possible and without deeper analysis can't assume that pops moving into those jobs wouldn't worsen the shortage. Manual intervention is necessary to dig out of an energy crunch.
• Do I have resources in the automation pool for it to use?
  • There's a notification for this, but if the pool is running low it might not be able to afford whatever it is it wants to build. Remember, you can hold Ctrl to change the units moved from hundreds to thousands.
    
    
    
    Save mouse-clicks, use Ctrl.

Resettlement

Manual resettlement and the mitigation of unemployment is a huge burden in mid to late game Stellaris. It is generally our belief that manual resettlement should be an extremely rare occurrence, not something done expected to be done as part of the core game loop. When you must, it should be a simple process, but it should be an unusual act.

One quality of life change we’ve made is to filter Unemployed pops up to the top, and highlighted them. The pops underneath are then sorted from lowest stratum to highest.

You're unlikely to see this specific scenario unless you intentionally create unemployment problems by turning off jobs in every pop strata.

We've also adjusted resettlement costs, and added an Influence cost to many pop types. These influence costs are nominal for worker tier pops, but get fairly expensive when you're forcing Rulers to move.

Slave Resettlement and Worker/Drone/Bio-Trophy Resettlement

Specialist Resettlement and Ruler Resettlement

Slaves and unintelligent robots can still be moved without expending Influence, and certain civics permit you to waive these Influence costs.

Hey wait, what's that about colony abandonment?

Despite their best efforts the Servitors still haven't found a good way to get their Bio-Trophies to shift their consciousness to a different planet using OTA updates, so you still have to pay for them.

Manually resettling the last pop off a colony you own carries an additional influence surcharge in our dev builds. There will very likely be an exception made for Doomed planets and Holy Worlds that are risking initiating a war with a Fallen Empire. A planetary decision to abandon a recently conquered planet is under consideration, though it'll likely use displacement purging to do so. (With the diplomatic penalties associated with it.)

But we just finished building it!

With Federations, we introduced a galactic resolution in the Greater Good line that provided limited automated resettlement called Greater Than Ourselves. As noted by some, that was partially intended as a means to allow Egalitarian leaning empires a way of handling resettlement without forcing it on their pops. There have been many requests to make that core game functionality, but we’ve been somewhat wary of doing so without some restrictions.

We've come up with a way for every empire to have easier access to a similar effect. The following new Starbase Building will handle it, unlocked by the Hyperlane Breach Points tech. (The Hyperlane Registrar has moved to Interstellar Economics.)

They like to move it.

The tooltip effect is a bit of a mouthful.

The Transit Hub will operate as a limited variant of Greater Than Ourselves, moving unemployed low strata pops between planets that are in systems with Transit Hubs. (This will allow movement within a system as well, for example if you have a bunch of habitats in a single system.) We're investigating ways to expand the scope of pops it's willing to move - the original Worker limitation was put into place because while a Worker could promote themselves to fill any free job, a Slave or Specialist might find themselves restricted from the free job on the new planet. We're currently experimenting with a more robust variant - if it works out without performance concerns, the Transit Hub will prioritize high strata unemployment and then move down the ranks.

Building out the Transit network does function best when you have a developed starbase above most of your colonies since it will only move pops between nodes on the network.

Tangentially related, we've also cut demotion time in half across the board, and made some changes to give each Authority type a unique bonus.

Yes, Shared Burdens pops demote pretty much instantly.

We have some other experimental changes going on that have significant effects on the number of unemployed pops in the late game, but we're not ready to talk about them quite yet.

The empire type that perhaps faced the most obnoxious burden of frequent manual resettlement were Terravores, the Lithoid Devouring Swarms. When devouring planets, they occasionally created pops on the consumption world. As a quality of life improvement, when they’ve finished the planet off we now resettle them back to the capital. (Since gestalts can also use the Transit Hub, I highly recommend that Terravores build one in their main system to send those drones someplace where they can be of use.)

Oh, and we also clear that pesky red habitability planet marker from completely consumed planets that was unnecessarily cluttering your map.

HP/MP restored! ...But you're still hungry.

As a reminder, we have an ongoing feedback thread related to AI improvements we have in beta on the stellaris_test branch. We'd love to get more people on it and telling us what they think about them. (Please note that 2.8.1 is an optional beta patch. You have to manually opt in to access it. Go to your Steam library, right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> betas tab -> select "stellaris_test" branch.)

Next week we plan on going through some more of the remaining economic balance changes. See you then!

 

[Benjie164]

Not sure why everyone is so opposed to an Influence cost to Resettlement. Seems fine to me. It makes sense thematically, and due to Edict changes, there's usually an excess of influence.

I cannot imagine a stellaris game when I'm not constantly bouncing of 0 influence. I have never had an "excess of influence".

 

[Benjie164]

Every designer should read as much as they can about what their players say. They're the audience we're making the games for. (That doesn't mean that we'll always do what players suggest, but the information is always valuable.)

Open discussions like these are nice because they provide additional feedback that can trigger other tangential ideas. I've gotten quite a few ideas for new tests to try regarding auto-resettlement and the authority bonuses from this thread.

Yet it feels like the huge amounts of complaints about influence in this game still fall on deaf ears. Even some acknowledgement of the fact that you believe players hit the influence caps, but the players disagreeing with that vehemently, should be a reason for at least some point of discussion or investigation.

 

[Katsue]

I cannot imagine a stellaris game when I'm not constantly bouncing of 0 influence. I have never had an "excess of influence".

It can happen pretty easily. There are lots of ways to reduce the cost of diplomatic pacts to zero or near-zero. Claim costs can be reduced to trivial numbers or you can use the Colossus Project to get a total war casus belli. Edicts are one-and-done - once you've unlocked the Edicts you want to keep, you just establish them and keep them for the rest of the game. There is usually a resolution worth supporting in the Galactic Community without having to introduce your own, and there's a cooldown on introducing new resolutions in the same line anyway. You can build a maximum of three Megastructures at a time, and only the first level costs Influence, so for each Megastructure you go decades without spending Influence. That just leaves Gateways and Habitats, and once you've built out your Gateway network to cover your frontiers and your shipyards, you just don't really need more of them.

 

[ImaTomato]

Horrible.It's like the devs have no clue about the actual game.I resettle hundreds of pops after each war ,do the devs play nothing but pacifist playthroughs?Or do they even play the game at all?


Oh and great job at hiding negativ votes on dev comments.

 

[Katsue]

Horrible.It's like the devs have no clue about the actual game.I resettle hundreds of pops after each war

This is in no way mandatory. I hardly ever resettle any pops after a war.

 

[MichaelJanuary]

This is in no way mandatory. I hardly ever resettle any pops after a war.

It totally depends on the ethics you're playing as. As a slaver, conquering a large new world, its immediately totally unstable (not enough citizens, too many slaves). The only way to fix it is to rapidly resettle citizens IN and slaves OUT. Much the same goes for servitors or assimilators.

There are other scenarios too.

 

[Liggi]

It totally depends on the ethics you're playing as. As a slaver, conquering a large new world, its immediately totally unstable (not enough citizens, too many slaves). The only way to fix it is to rapidly resettle citizens IN and slaves OUT. Much the same goes for servitors or assimilators.

There are other scenarios too.

There's no influence cost to resettle slaves though, so it's not an issue there. And if you want to be able to resettle freely, you can just choose the Corvee System civic.

 

[Benjie164]

It can happen pretty easily. There are lots of ways to reduce the cost of diplomatic pacts to zero or near-zero. Claim costs can be reduced to trivial numbers or you can use the Colossus Project to get a total war casus belli. Edicts are one-and-done - once you've unlocked the Edicts you want to keep, you just establish them and keep them for the rest of the game. There is usually a resolution worth supporting in the Galactic Community without having to introduce your own, and there's a cooldown on introducing new resolutions in the same line anyway. You can build a maximum of three Megastructures at a time, and only the first level costs Influence, so for each Megastructure you go decades without spending Influence. That just leaves Gateways and Habitats, and once you've built out your Gateway network to cover your frontiers and your shipyards, you just don't really need more of them.

I'll refer you to a much longer post that I made earlier on in the thread, but you've ignored a lot of the other influence costs.

Firstly, in the early game, you're constantly expanding and settling colonies, massive influence sink early game. Also in the early game, is discourages you from taking treaties, as each treaty reduces the rate at which you can expand because it's draining your already small influence income.

Not to mention, that yeah sure, you could just support whatever bills are going in the community, but if you want to introduce your own, or veto ones that will negatively impact your empire, or call in support to get an important one passed then you need influence.

Getting leaders in either by democracy or electing a new dictator, influence.

Colossus project is not an option until pretty far into the game, so that's not a valid point unless you want to sit around for the whole early and most of the mid game waging no wars.

Mastery of nature or planetary prospecting, more influence.

Adding yet another influence sink into the game is not going to make things better, even if they remove another one, you're just left exactly where you started, except now you can't even micro your own pops.

I appreciate everyone plays differently, but it is certainly not "easy" in my opinion if you want to take an active role in the game. This is especially true due to the pitiful amounts of influence you earn each month.

 

[Lorenerd11]

Resettling pops in large numbers is basically standard practice for genocidal empires, both to put your own species on the planet to prevent the colony from being abandoned, and to move the purged somewhere with a better capacity to process them.

Although I assume purged pops will basically use the same resettlement cost as Slave pops.

 

[Benjie164]

There's no influence cost to resettle slaves though, so it's not an issue there. And if you want to be able to resettle freely, you can just choose the Corvee System civic.

I believe you ignored the part where he said he needs to move citizens IN. Also why should we have to waste a civic slot to essentially have choice. For the most part civics are small buffs like extra unity or reduced consumer goods usage. By having this civic, you practically give us one less choice for other civics as people who want to manually resettle HAVE to take this civic. This punishes the player for wanting to have a hand in how their empire runs.

 

[Shirasik]

You can build a maximum of three Megastructures at a time, and only the first level costs Influence, so for each Megastructure you go decades without spending Influence. That just leaves Gateways and Habitats, and once you've built out your Gateway network to cover your frontiers and your shipyards, you just don't really need more of them.

You forgot rings. Also, you need to build quite dense gateway network not only to link shipyards to each other and to chokepoints, but more importantly in a long scale - to make shortcuts so a single trade hub could collect all empire's trade value alone, so you free up maybe even dozens of starbases from trade hub and antipiracy bastion roles.
Plus, in very long run you would need to refit all planets into either mining worlds or ecumenopoli, so you will need tons of habitats and rings for everything else.
Therefore influence can't be abundant resource in any empire that never stops to grow. No matter how it goes - wide or tall.

 

[Mealya]

Oh and great job at hiding negativ votes on dev comments.

It seems that the forum only show the three most used reactions. So if disagree is outnumbered you will not see it.

 

[Katsue]

You forgot rings.

I didn't forget Ringworlds at all, because they make Influence management easier. Normally, to have 3 Megastructures in construction, you need to have spent 900 influence, but with a Ringworld you only need to have spent 300 Influence.

As for Ecumenopoli, by the time you have more than a handful you should have already won.

 

[Katsue]

I believe you ignored the part where he said he needs to move citizens IN.

The Land Appropriation policy automatically moves citizens onto new planets in sufficient numbers to prevent revolts. I've played slaver Empires before - both Authoritarian with Slaver Guilds and Xenophobes, and I've never needed to resettle more than one or two pops per planet for stability purposes.

I've seen mass unemployment on newly conquered planets, but hopefully that will be a thing of the past when the new patch comes out.

 

[Yagami913]

Can we get rid of "resource transfer"? This is such an unnecessary hassle. Basicly every mod (what is spending resource) using an empire policy to allow the mod logic to spend money above the selected amount. Its easy and working perfectly.

Inluence is too scarce already, using it to resettle feels terribly wrong.

I like the idea of transit hub, but dont like the idea to build starbase for every planet. What about giving outposts a building slot, or a special upgrade for this.

 

[NMS127]

So I think you could optimize deciding how to migrate pops like this:

- Scan through all the pops in the empire (or just planets eligible for emigration, however that's decided). Calculate some emigration desire score based on a combination of habitability for their species, planet emigration push, and how good they are at their current job (they especially want to move if they're unemployed). Keep track of the highest scoring n pops, where n is the number you can move per update. This scales mostly linearly with number of pops (you also have to sort the ones with a higher score than the current lowest into a list of n items). And you could cache some results per species or per planet.

- Scan the list of planets and narrow it to the ones eligible for immigration that have free jobs.

- Go through the n pops from highest emigration desire to lowest and find the best planet for them. I'm not sure if it's best to narrow by climate, then job type availability, or calculate a score that takes into account habitability, skill at an available job, and immigration pull. It could be expensive to consider every possible job type on each planet, but at least you're doing it for a limited number of pops, so it shouldn't be prohibitive. As planets fill up their jobs, remove them from the eligible list.

This won't be as optimal as considering every possible distribution of pops across all your planets, or anything, but it should make things better every time it runs if there are improvements to be made. It might not move pops who are optimized for specialist jobs to the best places, but that's hard to do without creating new unemployment.

 

[Annihilat0r]

It's still very much in flux. Some of our experiments have included things like adjusting the amount of growth required to build pops, to applying S-shaped logistic growth curves (the wonderful Carrying Capacity mod on the workshop implements something very similar to one of the experiments), but pretty much all of them significantly reduce the number of pops that exist in the galaxy in the late game. (With major economic effects arising from that as well.)

I think it would be fantastic if some of your experiments could focus on empire wide pop growth instead of growth per planet. Right now, having more planets is always better, something that annoys me a lot. Having 10 planets with 10 pops each should not give you 5x the pop growths compared to 2 planets with 50 pops each. Changing this would finally make a "tall" playstyle viable.

In addition, having an empire wide pop growth and distributing this growth amongst all planets, while taking the already existing migration as a modifier, could easily lead to a natural balancing of pops from overpopulated planets to newly colonized ones with lots of housing and jobs. Planets simply get fraction of the growth assigned, in addition to e/immigration, and chose a local pop to grow or decilne based on already existing parameters.

Overall, to me as an outsider, this seems like a pretty straight-forward solution, which does not create too much overhead and elegantly solves multiple problems at once.

 

[permeakra]

but pretty much all of them significantly reduce the number of pops that exist in the galaxy in the late game.

But.... Isn't this a good thing? I though that pop-related things might be a bottleneck in performance late-game.

 

[Calvax]

I think it would be fantastic if some of your experiments could focus on empire wide pop growth instead of growth per planet. Right now, having more planets is always better, something that annoys me a lot. Having 10 planets with 10 pops each should not give you 5x the pop growths compared to 2 planets with 50 pops each. Changing this would finally make a "tall" playstyle viable.

Replying to your comment because one agree react isn't enough. I don't want to feel like I'm playing significantly suboptimally for focusing on a small number of well developed planets.

 

[Troyen]

I appreciate everyone plays differently, but it is certainly not "easy" in my opinion if you want to take an active role in the game. This is especially true due to the pitiful amounts of influence you earn each month.

I've found in other influence discussions that whether or not influence is scarce or overflowing depends a lot on galaxy settings and configuration too. If you're cramped in the middle of a bunch of empires or on a smaller galaxy, you're not burning that much influence on expansion and it's easy to hit the cap in the mid-game unless you're spamming a bunch of claims everywhere. In larger galaxies or if you're bordering a large chunk of uncontested space, it's much easier to be influence-starved.

Maybe some of the influence costs around claims and outposts should scale inversely with galaxy size? It also feels like they could do a pass on some of the influence costs.