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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.

Code:
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.

Code:
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.

1605094446038.png
1605094456491.png

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.
      1605096055953.png

      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.

1605096681033.png

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.

1605097705361.png
1605096840037.png

Slave Resettlement and Worker/Drone/Bio-Trophy Resettlement

1605097458581.png
1605097513050.png

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.

1605096949504.png
1605097021942.png
1605097088504.png

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.)

1605097811856.png

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.)

1605098298007.png

They like to move it.

1605098342337.png

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.

1605098685353.png

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.

1605094492379.png

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!
 
Because I have 100+ colonies? I don't think I understand the question.
Why do you have 100+ colonies that actually need resettlement? If they're just settled for the extra pop growth, that's you choosing to put that extra work in for it.

And Eladrin has said he might have a pop growth overhaul, so judging this without know how that goes is kinda premature, don't you think?
 
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Since you're updating the Government Authority bonus, any chance you're also looking over the mandate system for Democracy and make them more diverse, like agendas are?

Oh that would be great!

Maybe let's tie policies (since 90% of the time they are only set up at the start of a game and then promptly forgotten) into government elections? Like instead of "Import/Export" agenda of a leader let's make it so once that leader gets elected He changes trade policy to "Wealth Creation".

And have it that every election You can change every policy to whichever You want with the exception of leader policy. And the cooldown for a change is duration of leader term as opposed to current 10 years. Leave the current system for Dictatorial/Imperial, so they could still do something.
 
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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.

See this? That is why i don't care about these DD. These are not Wiz "Non-final-numbers", these are Non-final-designs. They show us this, they wait months and they they roll it up in a patch. By that time we will have another DD with another numbers and iteration of what we have seen. I care about what we are are gonna get, not what be may gonna get once the devs decide to stop playing the game and start designing the game :(

Thanks for your respectfully disagree, they will be welcome :D

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.

This is the one thing that bother me and hope it changes. While this ideas are not bad, if they make it to the game, the influence tax is a bad idea. If the resettlement measures, like the Transit hub fail, then the player must manually settle the pops. Then you are surcharging the player for fixing what the game couldn't fix it self. If all works well this shouldn't be a problem, if things fail people will comply about how they need to resettle pops but they expend all their influence on doing so :(

Also about the transit hub, will it check up for unemployed pops too much? Will it add more calculations for performance? :eek:
 
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By that time we will have another DD with another numbers and iteration of what we have seen. I care about what we are are gonna get, not what be may gonna get once the devs decide to stop playing the game and start designing the game
The rest of us care about what we might get, so we can give ideas and feedback. If you don't want to participate in that, fine, but don't knock on us doing it because you don't want to.
 
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I'm honestly not sure about adding Influence cost to resettlement. I'm already running short on Influence, and now we're going to have to pay 10 Influence for a single Worker pop or 200 to abandon a colony?

Are we going to have more sources of Influence or a higher Influence cap to compensate for this?
Thats why there are some changes to civics. You can reduce/remove the resettlement costs for it. And i think the reason is to make it a little less atractive to conquer everything you see. For me a quite welcome decision. It boosts in addition the value of federations.
 
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I think thats axactly whats intended. The limited slots for starbases help to play as a tall empire but should not manage a galaxy spanning dominion. I think thats a quite good decision!

Locking qol feature for any kind of empire is wrong. It is especially wrong if you make it the hardest to use for those that need it the most and easiest to use for those that barely need it.
 
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These changes look great!

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.



Are some changes for Hiveminds regarding Energy planned? When playing Hiveminds, the player faces constant energy issues. Food is a lot less useful nowadays because the Nutritional Plentitude Edict is unlocked much later. Ironically, its simply better for Hiveminds to produce an abundance of food, which produces with 6 base Production compared to a measy 4 base production of Energy, and then simply sell all excess food in small lumbers to keep the price from falling.

The entire Hivemind Energy economy is build around producing an abundance of food and then selling it, because getting a 15% food bonus on 6 base output is simply much better than making your pops produce 15% more energy on a 4 base Energy output. This strategy works until the galactic market is established. At that point, you cannot keep the food sell price high enough.

Reading through your article, Hiveminds will be especially penalized (again) because automation is set to not work properly while you are running an energy deficit, which is of course a good thing! However, you should consider buffing Hivemind Energy output and maybe reducing food output to 5/5 base output. That way, Hiveminds are able to make use of automation. It will usually take 40-50 years until you have accumulated enough energy output bonuses that you can transition your Economy to have Energy drones instead of food drones.

And of course a reduction in cost and terraform duration of Hive and Machine worlds, just like you reduced the cost and terraform duration of Gaia worlds, is needed aswell. Since you made this change, Gaia worlds are simply the better option because they provide more tempo, cost less, take less time to terraform and therefore pay off earlier. This should not be the case. Gestalts should be using their special terraforming option and not be penalized for doing so because you decided, again, that the things for non-Gestalts need to be stronger.

Edit: Oh about Terravores. You guys really need to adjust the scaling on consuming world rewards. Terravores have pititful lategame because they can't terraform into Hive worlds. But their bonuses from consuming a world seem to scale weird. Maybe it should depend on the size of the world, however your current income, pops etc also needs to be taken into a account. For example, getting 1000 minerals is a lot early on, but come mid-endgame even 10 000 minerals is not much. I think a good solution would be to scale if off of in-game time. So that as the game goes, the rewards get better.
 
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Not completely sold on the Transit Hubs. I get that there are performance issues involved but with many transit hubs in the late game this doesn't help much. Also, the planets with high emigration through this are propably small, resource producing worlds that otherwise doesn't need star bases in their system.

How about making immigration centers instead? A starbase building over select few worlds that attract the resettling pops from the whole empire (and possibly refugees or migrants from other realms as well) That way you would still have every unemployed pop search for a new home, but only a select few possible destinations that you can easily held in cache.

The reverse idea migth be able to solve the issues about slaves: You want them to look only for jobs in their stratum, but they should ideally only grow an a few worlds. Make those worlds build a slave market as a planetary building that might sell slaves from the planet it's on to any world in the empire and sometimes automatically send them to the galactic slave market.
 
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Locking a all feature for any kind of empire is wrong. It is especially wrong if you make it the hardest to use for those that need it the most and easiest to use for those that barely need it.
The point of wide empires is to use all the planets you settle, not have them be breeding grounds to resettle the pops from.
 
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Glad to see this getting addressed, automation and micromanagement are real sore spots in the game at the moment. I have to say though the transit hub doesn't sit well; is it not just another way of gating off a quality of life feature? The player will have to go through the tedium of running through each settled system, building a station and building a transit hub. Worse still that will cost slots and stations that could be used elsewhere.

Moving pops is not supposed to be free, and is a huge part of the stategy early game. I guess developers wanted to keep this aspect of the early game, and at the same time create new tools to ease migration of unemployed pops later game. I totally agree with the Devs in that case.
 
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Adding influence cost makes it impossible to use. It was added to abandon colonies that you conquered by resettling pops instead of crashing your economy by unused districts and buildings. A problem most prevalent in purifier empires.
Unless you remove upkeep from unused districts/buildings this will result in the same problems we had before.

Yes it solves the colony-resettle exploit to get pops, but that is a thing that shouldn't even exist. It was often suggested that colony ships cost a pop to build and the +1 on colonies modifier get removed. 3 pops for a few resources is pretty good, but also doesn't make any sense.
 
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Since you're updating the Government Authority bonus, any chance you're also looking over the mandate system for Democracy and make them more diverse, like agendas are?

And the −10% Edict Cost / −5% Edict Cost for the Spiritualists. Can we have something decent here ? x)
 
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Why do you have 100+ colonies that actually need resettlement? If they're just settled for the extra pop growth, that's you choosing to put that extra work in for it.

And Eladrin has said he might have a pop growth overhaul, so judging this without know how that goes is kinda premature, don't you think?

I really hope the solution isn't just "When overcrowding > 0 popgrowth = 0, there you go guys we fixed late game micro", although I won't be surprised if that's the case.
 
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Unless I will be able to construct *many* more starbases than I can right now, the transit hub will not solve the resettlement problem.
 
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It's a wonderful feeling looking forward to the next diary once again, instead of not knowing when it is or that it'll be marketing diary prepared to sell a DLC feature. With that out of the way ...

I see your Transit Hubs, and I raise you the MinMax player - several starbase slots will be reserved for high-value pop movement planets, with regular up-/downgrading of starbases as needed. This seems ... wrong, somehow. But I guess performance trumps player convenience, and I'm hoping those radical pop growth mechanics changes really come through here. Can't really comment further without knowing more about those.

Regarding automation, it's actually shaping up. The current sector AI changes in the beta already allow me to chuck a mostly-finished sector to the sector AI and not have to deal with it. When this arrives, I'll be one happy camper who isn't as afraid of expanding outside of 2-3 sectors... With one caveat - can we please, please, please have something done about the UI here?? The outliner, as it is, just can't handle more than 10-15 planets.

A quick idea here would be to highlight planet icons (you know, the "free building slot, unemployment, overcrowding" ones) on the tab headers for each sector (possibly with a number, to indicate how many planets in the sector are affected by that), that way you don't lose significant information when you collapse a sector tab. It would also be nice to have a separate piece of UI for this but eh, one step at a time.
 
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I really hope the solution isn't just "When overcrowding > 0 popgrowth = 0, there you go guys we fixed late game micro", although I won't be surprised if that's the case.
Given he calls it an overhaul, I have faith it'll be something more.
 
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The rest of us care about what we might get, so we can give ideas and feedback. If you don't want to participate in that, fine, but don't knock on us doing it because you don't want to.

And you do well. Is important to give the Devs some feedback on what they do. I don't knock on anyone. The thing i say is that i care more for final designs, not for we-have-got-this-idea-we-may-or-not-use. These are just experiments, nobody says us there will be a transit hub on the patch when this features are out. Same for everything else on the DD. The Industrial districts are something they talked about previous DD, they also talked about them in the DD 152. I care about the game, i care about the things there will be on the game, the industrial districts are something they talked about more than a year ago. They haven't implemente yet, and few things have changed between one and the other. That is the kind of things i don't care. Things that may or not exist, maybe in two or three years in a possible patch if maybe probably things go well. That uncertainty is what really bothers me :(

And i know people may or not feel that way, and when i express it they may or not agree. That is the why of my warning. I accept the other people opinion and different view of things. So it's not knock on you, is telling you i know you may not agree and i am okay with that :D
 
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Just give us the authomatic migration option already, this is a bit like Auto-explore option I know the dev team has this grand vision of how Im SUPOSED to play the game, but frankly I'd rather have actual fun with it and just install a mod to do it anyways, it'd be really nice if the playability of the game didnt depend on external sources though.
 
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