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Stellaris Dev Diary #192 : Perfectly Balanced, As All Things Should Be...

Hello!

This week we’re going to look at some more changes we're planning, as well as a review of how some of the experiments mentioned in the last few dev diaries have evolved.

Thank you for the massive amount of feedback in those threads.

Reduction in Pops

Due to the effects on performance and a desire to reduce the micromanagement burden in the mid to late game, some of the things we’ve been deeply looking into are different ways of dramatically reducing the number of pops in the galaxy.

These experiments have generally revolved around modifying the growth (or assembly required) for pops as an empire’s population grows, with some variants trying a logistic pop growth (where growth follows an S-shaped curve as planets develop, based on a carrying capacity of a planet). These experiments have reduced the end date pop count to somewhere around one half of the old numbers with the expected performance improvements.

Organic pops will follow a curve where they begin at standard population growth, increase growth as the approach a midpoint between population and the planetary carrying capacity, then slow down to zero as they reach the top of the curve. Pop Assembly, on the other hand, is generally slow but consistent. The biggest change is that producing a new pop no longer costs a static amount of pop growth - it increases as the empire population does.

A significant reduction in pops has a cascade of major implications for the overall economy, production, and other gameplay effects. As such, these also require a pass on buildings, technologies, and even seemingly minor ripple effects like what the value should be for the trade value generated by pops.

There will be a lot of patch notes.

Most buildings have been standardized to now give 2 jobs per tier rather than the old 2/5/8 progression.

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Just one example of many.

We’ve also changed a few buildings to have new or additional features, such as the Spawning Pool and Clone Vats, which have had their Pop Growth modifiers replaced with the new Organic Pop Assembly. This fills the same slot on the planet as Robotic Pop Assembly, so generally you’ll want to pick one or the other. (Clone Vats also picked up a food upkeep cost to represent simple materials to break down.)

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Pops is Soylent Green!

A few other jobs got minor perks added to them, like the Medical Workers from Gene Clinics making it a little easier to live on less hospitable worlds.

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Doesn't normally produce exotic gas, this one happens to be a lithoid.

And a few new techs have been added to help compensate for lost productivity. One tech line increases both the job production of a planet as well as job upkeep - those fewer pops are still capable of producing the work of more on a developed planet.

Ring Worlds

As part of the balance pass, Ring Worlds have been bumped up to 10 segments from 5, and the jobs per segment have been adjusted.

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The Shattered Ring origin now possesses a warning that it may be a Challenging Origin for Lithoids due to a scarcity of minerals, and now also applies the Ring World Habitability Preference to your pops. We’re considering adding a similar warning for Hives selecting the origin, since the habitability preference change puts a serious crimp in their expansion.

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Put a ring on it?

Their starting blockers have also been adjusted to give a more balanced spread of jobs.

Ecumenopoleis

Like the Ring Worlds, these start with all building slots open. As mentioned before, you can now use the Arcology Project decision on a planet that has a mix of City and Industrial Districts.

Note: Empire has all technologies but no traditions active.
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The ecumenopolis has a unique distinction of being able to have both the Factory and Foundry building lines on the same planet.

Habitats

The changes to Habitat modules are much smaller in scope, but here’s the list of their districts.

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Void Dwellers have gotten a bit of attention as well with some tradition swaps for those that had minimal or no beneficial effects for them.

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Replacing Public Works Division:
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And for Void Dwellers with the Adaptability tree:
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Interstellar Franchising and Imperious Architecture now also function for Habitats.

Updates to Dev Diary 190

Some of these updates may not be new to people following the forum threads, but it's easy to miss things so I figured we should go over them.

Many people requested the ability to fully specialize their foundry and factory worlds. We've modified the Forge and Industrial World planet designations to shift one pop on each Industrial District to the appropriate job if possible.

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We've also upgraded the Food Processing Center, Mineral Purification Hub, and Energy Nexus to provide an extra job to each of their associated resource production districts. (The Food Processing Center will also improve Hydroponics Farms.)

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One of the suggestions made in the thread was to add a civic that increases unlocked Building Slots. Sounded like a great addition to Functional Architecture.

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Functionality increased!

Updates to Dev Diary 191

We’ve explored some additional options regarding the resettlement system we outlined in Dev Diary 191, and after trying a few things, and have settled on some extensive modifications to the system.

All planets with free sapient unemployed pops that are not locked down by migration controls will have a small chance every month of moving one to another planet within their empire that has jobs that they are willing and able to work, housing, and habitability of 40% or higher. This chance is increased if there are multiple unemployed pops that meet the criteria.

The system now prefers to move higher strata pops first, so rulers and specialists will move before workers, and this system also functions for gestalt empires. It will not relocate non-sapient robots or slaves. It will generally prefer to move pops to the planets with the most free jobs.

After some experimentation we’ve chosen to keep the Transit Hubs as Starbase Buildings that provide a system wide buff to the chance of auto-resettlement occurring. (Rather than being essential to have it occur in the first place.)

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Doubles the chance the pops choose to resettle themselves.

Greater Than Ourselves has been rewritten to also massively increase this chance when the edict is active, with a +200% bonus.

We initially had these pops considering destinations available through Migration Pacts as well, but decided against keeping that since it introduced a new Migration Controls micromanagement element that we didn’t find desirable.

We’ve also done a minor update to the Authority bonuses that seemed a little bit weak.

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Democracies now have a bonus encouraging their pops to seek their dreams, and Dictatorships have a bit of an easier time holding things together when they’re a bit overstretched.

Closing Thoughts

One other little quality of life improvement that was just added is this filter on the colonization interface.

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That’s probably long enough for today. We’re looking forward to your feedback on these as well.

Next week w̷e̵'̸l̸l̴ ̴b̸e̴t̵̮̄ǎ̸͈l̷̠̈k̴͔͂i̴̞͒n̷̪͊g̸̳͗ ̸͚̎a̵͉̐b̵̤̿ȯ̴̲ṵ̵̀t̸͇͂ ҈҂▒©╛⅜

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We’ve also changed a few buildings to have new or additional features, such as the Spawning Pool and Clone Vats, which have had their Pop Growth modifiers replaced with the new Organic Pop Assembly. This fills the same slot on the planet as Robotic Pop Assembly, so generally you’ll want to pick one or the other. (Clone Vats also picked up a food upkeep cost to represent simple materials to break down.)

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Pops is Soylent Green!
Oh wow, and here I was talking about Clone Vats adding Cloner jobs that do precisely this, and now you just... went ahead and did it. :D Without the Cloner jobs, but still.
 
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@Eladrin If "Planetary Carrying Capacity" is based of housing, then pre-building housing capacity will become the new meta and building speed bonuses are also pop growth bonuses indirectly!!! :cool::p
 
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Do not forgot than we will have five medical worker per building.
+5 percent in total is correct I think.
But one job still provides +1%, and one job needs one pop. 1% habitability stands for .5% more produce and growth speed, 1% less upkeep. I don't think it worth 1 consume good and one pop (even considering the other produces by medical worker).
 
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We want the unemployed pops to naturally drift over time to the places where there are jobs. They won't voluntarily move to a place with habitability of 40% or lower.

Will there be a policy to Change Migration Rules for your empire or specific species?
Like "Resettle to more then 60% hab. only" while giving effects like a +/- to Migration chance, faction approval or happiness penalty.
Or force resettlement which could Speed Up the process but lowers stability.

Of course only be changeable every 10 years or so.

Imho this would be a nice addition to the new system and the Policy system too.
 
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Alright, I just came with an idea to make the "Slaver guilds" civic a bit more interesting. I would just eliminate the arbitrary 40% of slaved population which always felt artificial and I would still give it the 10% of increased slave production + the ability of slaves to automatically resettle. This would allow authoritarians with this civic to simulate organized guilds distributing slaves among planets with jobs. It would also implies that the civic stops being a "flat percentage civic" to allow certain mechanics to switch from egalitarian to authoritarian. And I would bring back the choice to submit a species (even your founder one) to the caste system.
 
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The biggest change is that producing a new pop no longer costs a static amount of pop growth - it increases as the empire population does.

Wait a second ... can you not actually cheese that quite easily with vassals? Like say you have an emprie with 2 sectors. Tehn you conquer stuff off of another empire and put it in a new sector. You release one of your initial sectors as a vassal and start building up your new sector. Rinse and repeat.
 
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Any news on how the various districts have been adjusted for Gestalts as well?
They're fairly similar. For Industrial things, change all the consumer goods jobs into alloy jobs. If it's a tier 1 resource generating job, hives get more of them.

What's the base chance of pop migration?
Because if it's very small, the double of nearly nothing is not much
10% currently, but the overall chance is multiplied by the number of unemployed pops.

At these numbers, here's the quick chart of "what is the chance that a single unemployed pop will have migrated within x months?"
MONTH
123456789101112
Base Empire10.00%19.00%27.10%34.39%40.95%46.86%52.17%56.95%61.26%65.13%68.62%71.76%
Base Empire + Hub20.00%36.00%48.80%59.04%67.23%73.79%79.03%83.22%86.58%89.26%91.41%93.13%
Base Empire + GTO30.00%51.00%65.70%75.99%83.19%88.24%91.76%94.24%95.96%97.18%98.02%98.62%
Base Empire + Hub + GTO40.00%64.00%78.40%87.04%92.22%95.33%97.20%98.32%98.99%99.40%99.64%99.78%
Democracy15.00%27.75%38.59%47.80%55.63%62.29%67.94%72.75%76.84%80.31%83.27%85.78%
Democracy + Hub25.00%43.75%57.81%68.36%76.27%82.20%86.65%89.99%92.49%94.37%95.78%96.83%
Democracy + GTO35.00%57.75%72.54%82.15%88.40%92.46%95.10%96.81%97.93%98.65%99.12%99.43%
Democracy + Hub + GTO45.00%69.75%83.36%90.85%94.97%97.23%98.48%99.16%99.54%99.75%99.86%99.92%

This also affects every planet now, and as noted above, if you have two unemployed pops on a planet, double these numbers.

Will those bonus also affect Ring world segments and habitat districts ?
Yes.

You mentioned "Planetary Carrying Capacity" but didn't expand upon as this is not in the game. Is this a fixed value as is used and added by several mods, or is it just the current housing? I.e. I build more districts/housing buildings and pop growth increases to match the new S curve. This would make it extremely important to pre-build housing!
This is one of the things that is still in balancing, but currently it's total housing but we include a bonus for undeveloped districts. People living off the land and such. Some planets, like Gaia worlds, get more carrying capacity for their undeveloped districts.

This may change to be a simpler formula largely based on planet size, since there are a couple of quirks I'm not totally happy with right now.

So what the point of Ecumenopolis ?
An Ecumenopolis still has an extremely high carrying capacity so is excellent for population growth, and is also quite effective at producing both jobs and housing from a single district type. It's still borderline OP, don't worry.

I feel like Organic Pop Assembly shouldn't be affected by the s-shape curve stuff, it should be a flat number if there's a lot of space, and the same flat number if there isn't a lot of space. The s-shape curve is because of how living populations live and reproduce. The pop production shouldn't be affected by that.
Pop Assembly doesn't follow the logistic curve, it's (generally) slower but constant.
 
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The Shattered Ring origin now possesses a warning that it may be a Challenging Origin for Lithoids due to a scarcity of minerals, and now also applies the Ring World Habitability Preference to your pops. We’re considering adding a similar warning for Hives selecting the origin, since the habitability preference change puts a serious crimp in their expansion.

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Could you please increase the base habitability of Habitat, Gaia, and Ringworld preference on Dry, Wet, and Cold planets to +20%? It's low enough to make settling these planets challenging, but it should still be easier than settling a Tomb world.
 
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So ships will also become cheaper? Because less pops means less resource output.
OTOH, if overall resource output across the galaxy decreased a bit, it might reduce the need many people have to spike up tech costs and crisis strength by making their relative strength to the baseline larger.
 
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I am really excited by these changes. I agree that the number of pops in the lategame was too high, and resettlement micro should now *finally* not be a thing anymore. Looking forward to playing with these changes. :)
 
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Very interesting changes. Certainly in the early game, if you're an empire that isn't assembling pops, it sounds like the mass colony rush will take a lot longer to pay off than it currently does. I'm wondering how the balance will work between the logistic curve of organic growth, and the job-based progress of pop assembly, particularly the fast and efficient pop assembly (with organic growth on top!) that synthetically ascended empires currently attain on their well-established colonies. Will we see synth populations race even further ahead of organics, or will it be more balanced, because the low organic population of their planets counts against them for the logistic growth curve? (Maybe you'll want to deliberately avoid assimilating too many organics?) How far behind are psi-ascended empires going to be in their population growth potential, compared to bio-ascended and synth-ascended empires?

The +1 job per district on the mineral hub etc is also a pretty big deal; coupled with the overall reduction in pops, it sounds like geography will be much less of a limit on basic worker jobs for non-Gestalts than it currently is. (Gestalts will also be able to pack an awful lot of miners on a single Hive/Machine World.) It makes sense to free up some districts for industrial districts, but it does mean making specialist rural worlds will be much easier, which reduces the opportunity cost in making Ecumenopolises.

Not sure exactly what has happened with the Habitat mining/energy districts, but if they haven't changed too much, then Void Dwellers origin looks pretty nice now. Reduced influence cost for Habitats is a big deal, as it means significantly more Habitats over the course of the game, and there's nothing to stop you colonizing regular planets as well (although you probably want to do it with a non-primary species). Have the quirks in the Void Dweller pop traits been ironed out?
 
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I'm worried about the impact of the Industrial district on Ring Worlds

Yeah. Not sure why Ringworlds need to have industrail districts at all. You can produce enough on planets, ecumenopolises and habitats.

I guess the only reason is to give the Scattered Ring some alloy and consumer goods production from the get go, but couldn't the Arcane Generator give a small amount of alloys and consumer goods? As small as possible because Ringworld origin has no problems colonising other planets, unlike for instance Lifeseeded, (and already get alot of ressources for free via some free district upkeeps - while Lifeseeded has to use 3 building slots + 3 workers to exploit their "free" ressource sites). No reason whatsoever to not give the Ringworld origin some challenges as well - it is extremely strong as it is.

NB! More districts for the Ringworld origin might nerf it a bit hopefully - but depends on how many districts the Arcane Generator now supports. In any case; more districts will make Ringworlds more flexible.
 
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We’ve also changed a few buildings to have new or additional features, such as the Spawning Pool and Clone Vats, which have had their Pop Growth modifiers replaced with the new Organic Pop Assembly. This fills the same slot on the planet as Robotic Pop Assembly, so generally you’ll want to pick one or the other. (Clone Vats also picked up a food upkeep cost to represent simple materials to break down.)


Yay, you did the thing which you announced in a dev diary before 2.2! *claps*

The pop changes sound promising. After all the community has been constantly criticising the old pop growth system. I'm very interested in how it will turn out to be. Maybe Hiveminds will be able to compete with non-Gestalt empires who assemble robots now in terms of pop growth? Maybe Synth Ascension won't overshadow everything in the game by both pop growth and pop efficiency?

Overall very nice changes. Again you are going to rework a fundamental part of this game. So please, keep balance in mind!!

We do not want another "Robot simulator" game like Stellaris was after 2.3, when Machine Empires and especially Driven Assimilators had so insane amounts of pop growth, that it made all other empires obsolete.

We hope that you are going to carefully tinker with pop growth and keep some of the uniqueness of empires, like Hiveminds having very high Organic pop growth but no access to Robots.

We’ve also done a minor update to the Authority bonuses that seemed a little bit weak.

You know whats also weak? Gestalt rulers! Because they have no agendas and their rulers never gain any traits! Apparently Gestalt rulers used to get traits, but at some point you simply took that away, with no replacement.

This is just another annoying functionality in which Gestalts are a gimped version of normal empires, for no reason. So I will ask you again:

Add an ability for Gestalt players to freely select an Agenda, lasting for 20 or so years and change it or keep it every 20 years.

Add a choice for players to choose between traits when the main Gestalt ruler levels up. Something like at level 3,6,9. Gestalt players are missing out on crucual bonuses like a 10% research speed, or 10% mineral output from Agendas and ruler traits like increased exp gain, or decreased building cost, or decreased ship cost.

This will give Gestalts much needed customization options.
 
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Wait a second ... can you not actually cheese that quite easily with vassals? Like say you have an emprie with 2 sectors. Tehn you conquer stuff off of another empire and put it in a new sector. You release one of your initial sectors as a vassal and start building up your new sector. Rinse and repeat.
Yes, and this is a nice applications of Vassals! Unless they get a make-over.

Alternatively, they might use the pop count of vasslas added into your pop count for growth? And the reverse for the vassal as well?
 
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An Ecumenopolis still has an extremely high carrying capacity so is excellent for population growth, and is also quite effective at producing both jobs and housing from a single district type. It's still borderline OP, don't worry.

Well if it is... I'm looking forward to it ! Thx for the answer. :)

Since the pops are having a big rework now. I'm very curious about the impacts on the synth empires... Will they still able to have a crazy speed on their robots assembly ? xD
 
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Some great changes overall. One thing deeply worries me though:
These experiments have generally revolved around modifying the growth (or assembly required) for pops as an empire’s population grows, with some variants trying a logistic pop growth (where growth follows an S-shaped curve as planets develop, based on a carrying capacity of a planet). These experiments have reduced the end date pop count to somewhere around one half of the old numbers with the expected performance improvements.

Organic pops will follow a curve where they begin at standard population growth, increase growth as the approach a midpoint between population and the planetary carrying capacity, then slow down to zero as they reach the top of the curve. Pop Assembly, on the other hand, is generally slow but consistent. The biggest change is that producing a new pop no longer costs a static amount of pop growth - it increases as the empire population does.

I think this change tackles the problem of pop numbers but it drastically increases a different one: That settling a planet is always good because planets produce pops!
Now with this change you not only still want planets as pop generators, you added a nother micro-intense meta where you also want all your planets at the sweet spot in the S-curve to maximize overall pop growth.

Please reconsider this, we absolutely need to grow pops per empire and not per planet. There is also a similar effect with purging, as is, resettling to a purging planet makes sense as one planet only purges one pop at a time.
 
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So ships will also become cheaper? Because less pops means less resource output.
Honestly, I wouldn't mind if the added cost became a feature rather than a problem. Then you could introduce exclusive tech's for quantity vs quality, and either make ships cheaper and faster to field at the expense of less damage/slots per ship, or increase the cost of your ships (and limit its size), and introduce new hull techs to pack more damage/slots per ship, and gain experience faster.
 
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OTOH, if overall resource output across the galaxy decreased a bit, it might reduce the need many people have to spike up tech costs and crisis strength by making their relative strength to the baseline larger.

Consider that BBs are already the latgame meta. And in my current game, I smoked an Awakened Empire while losing four (out of ~120) battleships. I also see no real reason to go to war before BBs because all other units are just so bad. Making it harder to replace losses will only further disincentivice expansion.

Keep in mind that in the game I mentioned I had exactly zero soldier jobs to provide naval cap, it all came from anchorages and a strategic coordination center.

So the pop changes will not affect naval capacity at all, but decrease the ability to absorb losses. Which means BBs will become even more over-centralizing.
 
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