Stellaris Dev Diary #211: 3.0.3 Beta Updates

[DrNukeLear]

Will the current version of the Beta remain available (I ask mainly because I want to finish a game, I look forward to the new changes)

I've got a copy of the "common" folder from before these changes, do you want it?

 

[ezno]

The more freedom the player has the better, love the sliders

gj devs

Better than editing your own games files

 

[ruzen]

I'm having a blast with my current playthrough I hope this doesn't effect the current beta saves

 

[LystAP]

To answer a handful of questions that have been asked:

• Patch notes for the bug fixes the latest beta will include should come out alongside when the beta updates.
• The update to the beta will come Soon™, but I can't say when!
• Logistic Growth Ceiling = How much extra growth you gain from the population of the planet. (Currently capped at +3 in the open beta.)
• Growth Required Scaling = How much the growth (or assembly) increases by per Pop you have in your empire. (Currently 0.25x in the open beta.)

So basically reducing the Growth Required Scaling to 0 disables the Empire-wide Pop Penalty?

 

[John MacWhat]

I've got a copy of the "common" folder from before these changes, do you want it?

Thank you, but I'll be fine

 

[Enfield_PDX]

Small updates like this *should* be save compatible, but no promises. It's not really something we consider, too many variables.

 

[Muhrks]

The 2 new growth sliders are a great idea. I don't get the "temporary feature" thingie. Make it a permanent feature, which will make most people happy, I guess.

The reduction on pops sounds nice, but clerks will still be not as important, as an engineer/tech drone. As long as the Energy job makes more energycredits as the clerk, the clerk will be pretty useless.

 

[Cronos988]

I could see how sliders might make it difficult to get uniform, helpful feedback, as they increase the variables between games, particularly in areas that the devs are trying to improve. Devs, are you going to have a new way of getting helpful feedback (e.g. make commenters list their slider details) or do you plan on doing something else to gauge overall opinions, such as developing changes and removing sliders with a future update?

There is also the issue of machine growth. Changing the growth bonus organics get has obvious implications for the balance with pop assembly, so the values would need to be linked.

Imagine playing DE machines in a game with X2 ceiling and 0.25 cost increase per pop versus a game with X1 ceiling and 0 cost increase.

 

[ezno]

I think the data from which parameters players choose should be collected, because what the players like to play is probably usefull for the devs and balance changes

 

[WSC_LU_Artanyx]

Loving the new changes

I do have a question, when you say

Here are some of the changes you'll be seeing soon:

• [Balance] Reduced the number of Clerk jobs provided by buildings and districts by 40%.

how are the city district going to be affected? the clerk jobs are 1 per city district at the start of the game, how would they be reduced?

 

[johnty5]

We're continuing to make adjustments to the current population growth systems in the game, and are exploring additional changes. Some of these are longer term initiatives, however, so in the meantime we're currently adding a quality of life feature that many people have been asking for.

Should the “in the meantime” be taken mean that the sliders are a temporary feature until the other “longer term initiatives” are done?

Or is the intention that the pop growth sliders are a permanent addition to the game? Or is that TBC?

 

[Pancakelord]

What is the target for realistic max pops on a world, with the 3.03 beta?

Lets take an extreme example - a size 25 Ecumenopolis (with all districts built). Should such a world aim to have no more than ~500 pops? 200? 125? 100? less?

There are a few other things in defines like this that may need to be tweaked if the "true celing" for pops is going to be lower

POPS_TO_SHOW_CITY_LEVEL                 = { 1 20 60 100 200 } # Decides how many pops are required to show the next level of city-infrastructure in city_frame

And if pops are going to be less numerous, perhaps killing or capturing them ought to offer more WE - or even Threat [which I dont think considers planet population at all right now? its just as 'threatening' to annex a backwater dump of a farm-world as it is to grab a sector capital, or developed Core World, I think.]

THREAT_PLANET_MULT = 8.0 # Base threat multiplier for planet
THREAT_STARBASE_MULT = 4.0 # Base threat multiplier for system with upgraded starbase
THREAT_SYSTEM_MULT = 2.0 # Base threat multiplier for system

 

[malakhglitch]

Removing the added jobs from advanced buildings and making them improve base production instead is a welcome change.

Will gestalts also get a reduction and improvement of Maintenance Drones?

What happens to the added Artisan Drone job of Organic Paradise? (I really hope the job is removed and production is increased)

 

[Panzerslothen]

Logistic growth ceiling is how big your bonus to pop growth points per month from the per-planet pops vs. capacity calculation is allowed to be.

Growth Required Scaling is how much every pop you own increases the empire-wide modifier to the number of pop growth points needed to spawn a new pop.

Thanks for explaining. So, the incentive is to maintain as much capacity as possible - on worlds which we want to see grow in terms of pops?

 

[secretagentguy]

Hi everyone!

Thanks for the tremendous participation within the 3.0.3 beta branch and for all of the feedback that you've been providing.

For those that are interested in joining the beta, 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.

This week we'll be talking about some more changes that we're planning on pushing in the near future to the 3.0.3 beta branch concerning further balance updates, AI, and more. These are highlights of some of the things that will be in the full patch notes and not intended to be a comprehensive list.

Bug Fixes and Further Balance Updates

From fixes to the end of the Cybrex precursor chain to correcting edict deactivation costs, we've fixed a number of issues that you've found and reported during the beta. Thank you for reporting things in the Bug Reports forum.

Regarding the economic changes, one of the common themes in the feedback has been that the sheer number of jobs in the game are too high, and we agree. Clerks are especially notorious for this, since in many cases you would rather actually see them unemployed and moving to a more valuable position elsewhere in the empire. We're taking some preliminary steps to reduce the number of jobs and changing things to focus on increasing productivity instead.

Here are some of the changes you'll be seeing soon:

• [Balance] Reduced the number of Clerk jobs provided by buildings and districts by 40%.
• [Balance] Clerk trade value has been increased to 4.

View attachment 714974

• [Balance] Buildings that increased basic resource production and added jobs to basic resource producing buildings or districts (Energy Grids, Mineral Purification Plants, etc.) now increase the base production of the relevant jobs by 1 or 2 based on tier instead of their previous modifiers. Machine empires still gain the extra resource district slots as before.

View attachment 714965

Yes, "Livestock" counts as a "Food producing job". (Or minerals, for Lithoids.)

• [Balance] Manufacturing focus buildings (factories and foundries) no longer prevent the other from being built on non-Ecumenopolis planets, and no longer add jobs to Industrial Districts. They instead increase the base production of alloy or consumer goods producing jobs by 1 or 2, with a corresponding increase in upkeep.

View attachment 714970
Secondary resources like Alloys do require more inputs to produce more, however.

Balancing the number of jobs and their output will be an ongoing task, expect future updates to have additional changes.

AI Updates

We're making some updates that will have significant changes to AI behavior that should improve the effectiveness of AI opponents, as well as some changes to reduce the impact to your empire if an AI were to take control of your empire for a short duration in multiplayer.

These changes give the AI a greater focus on economic stability and improves some research related behaviors, but are also a work in progress and will continue to be updated in future patches.

We'll put up a 3.0.3 AI Feedback thread once it's live so you can let us know how you feel about these changes.

Population Growth

We're continuing to make adjustments to the current population growth systems in the game, and are exploring additional changes. Some of these are longer term initiatives, however, so in the meantime we're currently adding a quality of life feature that many people have been asking for.

View attachment 714972
Logistic Growth and Growth Required Sliders in Galaxy Configuration

These sliders will allow you to adjust the variables related to the bonus a planet can provide through logistic growth and the amount that pop growth increases per empire pop using sliders in Galaxy Configuration instead of needing to edit defines or use a mod to do so. Please note that these sliders can have major impacts on both performance and balance. Existing saves will use the default values. (Which can themselves be overridden in defines.)

Non-English localization for these changes will not be available in the beta as soon as the changes are up, but will be added shortly afterward. Apologies for the delay!

That's all for this week. Since we're currently in a post-release cadence (as well as next Thursday being a holiday in Sweden), the next Dev Diary will be two weeks from now on the 20th of May.

See you then!

Please Please Please increase the productivity of soldier jobs, due to population constraints and the buffs other jobs received it is too hard to get enough fleet capacity. I'm aligned with decreasing the overall number of jobs, but certain jobs did not get the increased productivity that other jobs received. Naval capacity has been inadvertently nerfed due to the pop growth changes and it has made it much harder to combat the Khan or Grey Tempest or both at the same time. Please make the soldier jobs get the same productivity buffs other jobs get and increase the base amount of naval capacity soldiers provide at the same time. Thanks!

 

[Shadowstrike]

I do like the option of taking out the empire-wide increase in how much "growth" is necessary to grow a new pop. I'm going to be dropping that down to 0 myself, but I can get why having that option would be a good thing.

Instead of having a logistical growth ceiling slider only, perhaps it would be easier to have two sliders expressing it in terms of minimum and maximum base growth amounts? Like right now, base growth on planets is always 3, and then it goes up to 6 (i.e. logistic growth ceiling of 2x). Could we instead have sliders that just express the minimum and maximum growth amounts? I would like for there to be the option that there is no "base growth", but rather have all growth be based on the number of pops (and migration) entirely.

 

[Echo Candor One]

Great stuff, guys. Love the direction this is headed, and especially like the buffs to clerks. It will make the commerce building a bit more tempting, especially on urban worlds.

 

[AlphaAsh]

Performance improvement can and should always be improved so players are given larger amount of pops to play with before the same level of performance degradation. I find it quite odd for a modder to be this defeatist and declare the base game cannot be fundamentally improved.

I've been modding the game since it was released, and have been actively involved with modding performance, amongst other things. I'm not being defeatist. I'm wise to what is and isn't possible. The game can't cope with infinite pops, but it happened. I'm grateful that it is finally being dealt with.

 

[mial42]

... dramatically increases pop counts in the early- and mid-game, you mean? Because as I recall from 2.8, every planet ended up filled to the brim, and logistic growth can't do worse than that.

Dramatically increases pop counts in the early, middle, and endgame if you play well (constant expansion), and does not reduce counts at all even if you play poorly. Housing (ok, capacity. But the two are almost identical on a built up planet) effectively caps growth with LG. It also did that in 2.8, so while you may have had every planet filled to the brim in 2.8, you'll get exactly the same thing happening with LG, and it will happen much quicker. On default galaxy settings, having every planet filled to capacity (which will happen much quicker with LG then without it) will mean 20K or more pops, and thus horrendous performance unless you have a truly excellent computer. Habitats, ringworlds, and ecus will make that worse of course.

 

[Jman5]

Hey since you guys are increasing trade value of the clerks, perhaps you should take a look at Managers. They are currently putting out 3 trade value, 2 society and 3 unity. Maybe bump that up to 4 trade value to match.

Just seems like kind of a weird to go from 4 trade value with Clerks, then down to 3 trade value with Managers and then back up to 6 trade value for Executives.