The Real Problems With Stellaris

[Baldamundo]

Goal the second: they wanted to encourage players to play more tall builds. This was accomplished at the cost of wide empires being nerfed into the ground, as to stay under your administrative capacity you have to build tons of buildings which increase the cap, buildings you don't have space for because building slots are now extremely valuable, meaning you have to either take massive sprawl penalties or forsake your economy in order to keep up with the new system.

Sympathise with a lot of the rest of your points, but this is just flatly false, isn't it? It may have been true in the earlier versions where admin cap was harder to increase, but at present building wide is just always preferable to building tall - arguably it's again not really possible to build tall as a separate strategy.

The basic formula of Stellaris as I've come to understand it is:

1. fleet power is completely decisive
2. fleet power is limited by alloy production & research output
3. max research output & max alloy production is pretty much a linear function of total population
4. max population growth is a linear function of total colonised planets
5. CONCLUSION: optimal strategy invariably is colonise as many planets as possible as fast as possible

In theory there are two barriers to this, but as currently implemented they don't make any impact:

1. ADMIN CAP (BETTER OUTPUT PER POP): the idea being that a large empire will go over its admin cap, taking penalties to research & unity and therefore breaking the otherwise linear relationship between population & fleet strength - giving you a choice between going wide for raw resource production (and therefore total ship numbers) vs going tall for tech & unity (and therefore strength per ship). The trouble with this is that you can just build as many administrative offices as you like to keep your admin cap up. Admin capacity, the thing that is supposed to limit population, is now itself directly proportional to total population. So a wide empire now will have not just double the resource production of a tall empire, but double the research output - the only downside is wasting a few building slots, but this isn't much of a tradeoff.

2. RINGWORLDS/ECUMENPOLI (MORE POPS PER PLANET): In theory a tall empire could have a handful of large worlds, ring-worlds, ecumenopoli, with orders of magnitude higher population than a wide empire with far more planets. But maximum population growth is linearly proportional to number of planets, so the wide empire will always end up with many times greater population growth (often orders of magnitude greater), and therefore many times greater total population vs a tall empire. The only realistic way to fill a ringworld/ecumenopolis in any reasonable timescale is to resettle pops from a high-growth wide strategy.

Since there are no real costs to going wide, no specific advantages to going tall, and not even anything you'd do differently (it's literally just "colonise more worlds & build administrative offices" vs "don't do that (and be weaker)") - it's not just that going wide is always optimal, "going tall" doesn't even really mean anything. Tbh all that's left for it to refer to is building orbital habitats vs expanding your borders (which amounts to just a trade-off of huge amounts of alloys for a more compact empire)

I've spent absolutely ages trying to get my head around this and it seems pretty fundamental - I'm not missing something here, am I?
_____

FTL Changes
This is an aside really, but I think people are missing the point a bit in these often really heated arguments about the FTL changes. People have got strong views on it because some really enjoyed the old system and some hated it, but the last word really is just that it was broken before and it's still broken now.

The old system was a free-for-all doom-stack whackamole click-fest which made terrain/geography/static-defences basically meaningless and which personally I found really annoying and fiddly and tedious.

Whereas the new system is...doom-stack whackamole but more linear & predictable - less options and with less micromanagement, but basically just as tedious & inadequate in the end.

The devs were right that the old system was broken & inadequate. They were also right that the new system would allow at least some possibility of meaningful geography, terrain, fortification. Sadly in aggregate & as-implemented, it's not clear it amounts to much of an improvement - the problems have always been more fundamental.

 

[Oscot]

I don't get why you are all focusing on FTLs.

The game is broken, and putting back old FTL wont fix the AI, multiplayer, the UI UX, and the end game performances.

Title of the thread is "The Real Problems With Stellaris", and there is a persistent strata of 2016ers who remain convinced that the REAL problem with Stellaris is the inability to drop 1M doomfleets right on top of the enemy armada from out of nowhere.
AI? Imperfect but not an important problem.
UI? Imperfect but not an important problem.
Performance? Imperfect but not an important problem.
The important problem is that walls in space are unrealistic (these people have a PhD in FTL physics, don't you know, they know exactly how hyperdrives would work IRL) so having to go through point B to get from A to C is just unconscionable.

On the one hand, I have to defend their right to use a thread with that title to bring up their bugbears; on the other hand, their inability to remember the horror of pre-2.0 warfare and their desire to return to it feels like people campaigning for German remilitarization in 1919. No we just finished dealing with that don't do it again aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.

They're not in the wrong thread, they're just wrong full stop.

(Although to be fair, if performance issues are caused by hyperlane pathing, putting back old FTL might fix end game performance, I'll give 'em that)

 

[bunkerman]

My problem with teh curent state of stellaris mostly boils down to: there is 0 reason not to colonize any colonizable piece of rock because more planets= more pop growth so no meaningful decisions there. And it also forces lots of micro. In teh old system once planet reaches 15-25 pops it would be done maybe except couple upgrades of existing buildings which are pretty quickly done. Now the amount of micro increases directly with how many planets you own as the planets are never done developing and even if they somehow are you still have to manually reettle pops out of them every coupel years. Solution would be to make pop growth per empire not per planet.

Then after that all the planets feel the same after they took out tiles in 2.2, like sure there are some differences but planets back then were much more unique than they are now esepcially with some select mods. But i do like the new more complicated economy, i would have no problem playing an old version of the game but sadly there never was advanced economy on a tile system. At the very least the new system should make buildings and districts share the planet size limit, it would not be as good as bringing back the tile system but would bring back at leats some meaningful choices and differences between planets.

Space resources are mostly irrelevant. In old versions like 5-10 decent planetless systems could be about on par with a midgame fully developed planet, nowadays usually even all systems you own combined do not outperform 1 single semi decent planet. So the space resources vs planet resoruces sorely need rebalance, same for starbase economy modules, in teh past the 3 food from hydroponics bay was pretty decent as it fed like 1/5-1/8 of a planet, now planets eat 100+ each so even if you build hydroponics bay on every single starbase it doesnt make much impact and teh same goes for nebula refineries, black hole observatories. curator think tanks and the art college and lets not even talk about trader enclave systems completely losing any bonus they had while in the past the extra energy from a starbase there was very nice especially on a lwo habitability map.

Lastly i think production bonuses for jobs that convert 1 resource to another should also scale the amount of original resource consumed not just the amount of end product, because current system leads to almost 0 real decisions economywise later on, because the cost of imputs becomes irrelevant by midgame.

As was mentioned a good amount before me market is also kinda a problem, its exteremly volatile and it oversimplifies teh game especially when the pattern it goes volatile in is the same every game at the same time. But here the fix would be very simple, just like we have the no caravaneers check before start of the game just add no market check and all is good.

All in all please paradox stop pumping various new and mostly irrelevant content and fix how your base game works especially economy, because no matter how pretty the house looks if its built on a swamp it will crumble within a couple of years.

 

[balmung60]

I don't get why you are all focusing on FTLs.

The game is broken, and putting back old FTL wont fix the AI, multiplayer, the UI UX, and the end game performances.

Basically because the FTL change is contentious (for the record, I'm relatively centrist on it - I'd prefer it hadn't happened, but had it delivered on its associated additional promises of better strategic gameplay, viable defensive installations, and better strategic AI, I would have considered it an acceptable sacrifice, but as it stands, there has been little or no progress on those and instead the strategic AI is as bad or worse, defensive installations are still insignificant, and strategic gameplay is little improved over just playing hyperlane-only before the change - if there's been one real improvement, it's that not having to calculate distances on the fly makes pathfinding much faster, at least until you have a bunch of wormholes or a large warp gate network), while nobody disagrees that the other things are serious problems. The AI being trash is not a controversial topic, crises not doing anything is not a controversial topic, bad UI/UX (especially scaling) is not a controversial topic, multiplayer not working well is not a controversial topic, the new pop system being micro hell and having numerous issues is not a controversial topic, the game lagging badly late game is not a controversial topic. Nobody disagrees on those to any significant degree, so there isn't much to discuss.

 

[balmung60]

2. Exploration being just a tad more unique such as the L-cluster and the wormhole-only shrouded planet system. A game with warp or wormhole wouldn't be able to accommodate that besides "this system doesn't allow your hyperdrive/warp/wormhole/jump drives to enter !!", which... isn't as fun.

I just want to note, they did that anyway. You can generate galaxies with systems close enough to the L-Cluster that you should be able to access them with jump drive and you still can't access the L-Cluster that way, even after you've opened and explored it. The only way in is the L-Gates or any regular warp gates you build in the L-Cluster once you gain access.

 

[Oscot]

My problem with teh curent state of stellaris mostly boils down to: there is 0 reason not to colonize any colonizable piece of rock because more planets= more pop growth so no meaningful decisions there.

This is the opposite of a problem.
This is a solution.
Stellaris is - in theory - a game of imperialism where you beat up enemies so you can have more stuff yourself.
Planets are strictly advantageous. You always want more clay.
This gives you a reason to beat up your neighbours: you want their clay.
Stellaris needs MORE of this, not less. We perennially complain that we have no real reason to go to war with our neighbours. The galactic market makes local specialist resources obsolete, so you don't need to go to war for oil. Planetary rebellions never happen, so you have no incentive to do the CK strategy of eating a neighbour just so you can give it to your vassal so he hates you less. And the enemy AI is a joke so "I need to take the Xindi's resources so I can fight the Klingons" isn't a consideration (it was kind of a consideration back in the days where the Crisis was functional, but even then it was kind of unsatisfying because "I need to blob so I can fight an enemy I don't know about yet in 150 years" isn't great emergent narrative). There's no EUIV style mission trees or CK2-like grand 'to restore the Roman Empire you need all these provinces' hardcoded locations that you might have to clear others out from. No, the only reason we have to attack someone is "This is a videogame and the objective is to win and the other guy can't win if he's dead".

So your contention that "planets = good" means no meaningful decisions seems like, I dunno, you're trying to solve downstream problem #5 before immediate problem #1. Engineering some subtle balance of EUIV-style aggressive expansion penalty crossed with national unrest metrics weighed against the deliciousness of the clay would be lovely, but at the moment we're kind of on the level of "Oh god another tedious micro planet to resettle everyone from, why do I even care about having more pop growth anyway, it's not like I have any objectives"

 

[Madzai]

That seems doable, but it's probably not simple to balance out -- but it would be awesome.

This is true, and this is why i, personally, didn't participate in whole debate about it. I wasn't fan of Stellaris combat to begin with and cared more about economy\politics\resources system, etc. And balancing 3 FTL types were indeed a hard task. But....

I don't get why you are all focusing on FTLs.

The game is broken, and putting back old FTL wont fix the AI, multiplayer, the UI UX, and the end game performances.

....This. 3 FTL were removing under pretext of easier balance, more fixes and new stuff, due to developers time being redirected from attempting to deal with 3 FTL in other areas. Also space terrain, new strategic depth, easier for AI to handle, bla-bla, yada-yada. Nothing of those happens. So people use this particular situation (along with planets reworks) as an example, that nothing good ever came from those reworks.

 

[Akka le Vil]

I didn't like the removal of FTL diversity, but can you elaborate on "diversity equals more strategy"?

Seems pretty straigthforward to me, the less possibilities one have, the less strategy there is to find. If there is a single path to follow, then what decision is there to take beside, well, following the path ?
Different sort of FTL means different approachs to attack/defense. Of course there need to have then tools to make use of that.
Pro-hyperlane supporters often fall back on the fallacy that warp/wormhole means that one can just land their fleet anywhere and it removes all strategic depth, while that simply shows the dev didn't include movement-impairing/defense systems in the game, which is unrelated to the existence of diversity ; one could theorically increase the amount of hyperlanes per star to the point that every star is linked with every others and you would face the exact same problem, so it's not about something inherent to the FTL systems but simply about balance and tools provided to make use of them.

If Wiz did say somewhere, like in a dev response in a random forum, that he did support a "chokepoints-only" strategy, then no, I don't agree with Wiz. If he didn't say anything of the sort, then okay.

It was precisely in the dev post about this patch, where he tried to justify at length that removing everything but hyperlane was "needed" to be able to provide defense, and that hyperlane ability to create chokepoints was the defining reason why to keep only them and remove the others...
(he does make some good points about how it's more complex to find a system allowing defense against different FLT methods, but it ends up just looking like "we could find a way by thinking about it, but we don't really want to think about it because in the end I'm simply looking for a pretext for a decision I already made").

So my main point was: chokepoints do work, but not 100% of the time, and it rarely worked for me, especially against empires that were stronger than me. The only time I did chokepoint doomstack battles was when I was neighbouring that enemy empire and basically had to hunker for a chokepoint battle because their fleet doesn't have to traverse an entire sector to get to mine.

I'm not saying that chokepoints "do or do not" work, I'm saying that the principle of basing the game on chokepoints, means that doomstacks are encouraged (either to block the enemy or to smash through the blockade. As such, claiming that hyperlanes-only will "fix" the doomstack problem is conceptually absurd, despite this being the main argument of the pro-hyperlanes crowd.

Now back to the actual implementation, the things I did experience when I played 2.0:

1. Galactic terrain feeling "bigger" through border expansion and warfare being on a per-star basis, instead of fleets being able to jump vast distances (in the case of wormholes, higher-tech warp, and "classic" jump drives) and being able to leap-frog straight to the enemy homeworld. The galaxy feeling "bigger" is a matter of perspective, so I get why the slow hyperdrive speed is more frustrating than anything.

You're assuming too much too soon here, the fact that the galaxy feels "bigger" is actually something I enjoy in the post-1.9 game. BUT it's NOT about something specific to hyperlanes, it's just because fleet movement is slower overall. You could slow down all the FTL methods and get this same feeling.
As for leapfrogging, that could be fixed with systems of interdictors, or implementing logistics in the game that would make fleet far from home to endure attrition or be less efficient or whatever.

2. Exploration being just a tad more unique such as the L-cluster and the wormhole-only shrouded planet system. A game with warp or wormhole wouldn't be able to accommodate that besides "this system doesn't allow your hyperdrive/warp/wormhole/jump drives to enter !!", which... isn't as fun.

Again, there is nothing specific to hyperlane here, you could just put the L-cluster far enough that it's not reachable by other FTL methods, and anyway as someone already said, these "out-of-the-way" systems DO have some sort of "jump shielding" when you try to reach them with jump technology.
Again, this is an argument that Wiz used (saying that hyperlane-only allowed to have locations cut from the rest of the galaxy), that was just duplicitious as he tried to infer it was ONLY possible with hyperlanes, even as he implemented way to block a jump drive method (showing that, well actually, it was possible with other FTL systems).

Notice that in stack contrast to what you said in both 1) and 2), galactic terrain and exploration are much LESS unique with hyperlanes, considering everything is just "connected/not connected". Funnily enough, actual galactic configuration has nearly no effect on hyperlanes, while it lead to pretty big changes in warp/wormhole (for example, in "arm" galaxies you were restricted to your own arm until becoming advanced enough to get a range allowing you to "jump" to another arm, and generally getting to "out of the way" stars that were previously unreachable, a dynamic that requires euclidian coordinates and is completely absent from the binary system of hyperlanes).

3. Warfare having multiple distinct "theatres", though this only happened to me when my empire is large and even capable of participating in a galaxy-wide war (like the War In Heaven or the Crisis). There weren't any "advancing/retreating fronts and border skirmishes" like Wiz said, since the AI isn't capable of retaliating in a drawn-out war; their only threat is the initial fleets that they mobilize.

This is just a reformulated 1) here, a consequence of the space travel being slower, and again it's nothing specific to hyperlanes. It's also, again, something I agree with, I do enjoy having different theaters.


All your points are interesting, BUT none of them actually does require hyperlanes-only. All of them can happen with the original three-FTL system. And THAT is my point : the game lost a fundamental and very interesting aspect, to gain... nothing that could not be gained by simply a) slowing down travel (shorter ranges/needing to cross a system to be able to jump to a new one/longer cooldown/warmup/whatever) and b) designing a way to restrict/hamper movement inside enemy territory (logistics/interdictors/whatever).
We lost all this to gain nothing, and it also broke the AI in the process. Yet people still hail it as a good decision, based on... on what ? Wiz claims that were factually false ?

 

[bunkerman]

This is the opposite of a problem.
This is a solution.
Stellaris is - in theory - a game of imperialism where you beat up enemies so you can have more stuff yourself.
Planets are strictly advantageous. You always want more clay.
This gives you a reason to beat up your neighbours: you want their clay.
Stellaris needs MORE of this, not less. We perennially complain that we have no real reason to go to war with our neighbours. The galactic market makes local specialist resources obsolete, so you don't need to go to war for oil. Planetary rebellions never happen, so you have no incentive to do the CK strategy of eating a neighbour just so you can give it to your vassal so he hates you less. And the enemy AI is a joke so "I need to take the Xindi's resources so I can fight the Klingons" isn't a consideration (it was kind of a consideration back in the days where the Crisis was functional, but even then it was kind of unsatisfying because "I need to blob so I can fight an enemy I don't know about yet in 150 years" isn't great emergent narrative). There's no EUIV style mission trees or CK2-like grand 'to restore the Roman Empire you need all these provinces' hardcoded locations that you might have to clear others out from. No, the only reason we have to attack someone is "This is a videogame and the objective is to win and the other guy can't win if he's dead".

So your contention that "planets = good" means no meaningful decisions seems like, I dunno, you're trying to solve downstream problem #5 before immediate problem #1. Engineering some subtle balance of EUIV-style aggressive expansion penalty crossed with national unrest metrics weighed against the deliciousness of the clay would be lovely, but at the moment we're kind of on the level of "Oh god another tedious micro planet to resettle everyone from, why do I even care about having more pop growth anyway, it's not like I have any objectives"

i think the problem is not that there is no reason to go to war to blob up. My problem is that there is no reason not to. I think of this game as more than just a war simulator. Especially when the combat AI always was and still is the worst part of the AI. And like sure more planets is never logically a bad thing but there should be meaningful choice between fewer but highly developed planets with maybe some small pure mining colonies vs a whole bunch of underdeveloped worlds. In current state of game there is only a choice between fewer highly developed planets and more highly developed planets as the planets develop at the same speed no matter how many planets you develop at the same time.

Also you citing CK and EU doesnt help your case much since i consider those games not really well made either but unlike stellaris they also have an uninteresting premise for me. but thats for another discussion

 

[Avian Overlord]

MegaCorp and 2.2

This is where things get sour.

It's also when they changed game directors. Megacorp was Wiz's last update for Stellaris. Probably a connection there.

 

[AndrewT]

A reminder: foul language and misuse of terms like "retard" is not tolerated on these forums. Several posts edited accordingly.

This thread is on a warning and will be closed if any further forum rules are broken here.

 

[Malecord]

Also you citing CK and EU doesnt help your case much since i consider those games not really well made either but unlike stellaris they also have an uninteresting premise for me. but thats for another discussion

EU4 is not a good solution. The system has its own flaws even for its own time period (example Castille sending the whole royal army in America to wipe out Atzecs or to explore the continent) and practical war execution (having armies arriving in Siberia after traveling through Africa, Persia, India and China to siege an useless fort while the war is already been settled in Europe has basically become a Meme gender of its own). Plus attrition mechanic in the game is just tedious rather than actually interesting (it forces you to split the doomstack in two or three and move them manually in column so you can merge them immediately before the battle rather than actually push you to make real strategical choices). In Stellaris equivalence it would be like having to micro fleets so that they are one system away from each other and then merge them only for combat.

Just to say even in EU4 forums people often argue that a supply system or dynamic maintenance costs would be beneficial to avoid extreme inconsistencies. But in EU4 there is the fort system that actually make the warfare interesting reintroducing some strategical and tactical options in an otherwise pure doomstack galore. But it's not a system exportable to stellaris. Also it's ludicrously complex and counter intuitive. When you build a fort is not uncommon to miss some obnoxious edge case and find yourself completely exposed to enemy invasion.

 

[HFY]

...

Why did you quote my post but put someone else's words in the quote box?

 

[grommile]

On the one hand, I have to defend their right to use a thread with that title to bring up their bugbears; on the other hand, their inability to remember the horror of pre-2.0 warfare

2.x warfare has its own horrors, and I enjoyed Warp Only + Four Arm Spiral. It gave the galaxy a very distinctive texture. There is no way to get that texture back. Running at max hyperlane connectivity only does about 40% of the job.

I don't enjoy anything to do with spacecraft movement in Stellaris 2.x. Anything at all.

 

[methegrate]

I'd prefer it hadn't happened, but had it delivered on its associated additional promises of better strategic gameplay, viable defensive installations, and better strategic AI, I would have considered it an acceptable sacrifice, but as it stands, there has been little or no progress on those and instead the strategic AI is as bad or worse, defensive installations are still insignificant, and strategic gameplay is little improved over just playing hyperlane-only before the change - if there's been one real improvement, it's that not having to calculate distances on the fly makes pathfinding much faster, at least until you have a bunch of wormholes or a large warp gate network

This is exactly my position. I didn't like the FTL change, I really liked warp and wormholes, and I strongly disliked how much star lanes feel like "generic space battler X." But if the FTL change had worked the way everyone hoped I would have been perfectly happy.

There's a lot of reasons why I've been disappointed in the new system, but I think the worst is that the starbase system they introduced alongside the FTL change might have really helped to expand strategic options on its own. Bases with dedicated anchorages, shipyards, sensor posts and vital trade posts all make for the kind of targets 1.x lacked. But thanks to the FTL changes nobody can actually reach them.

Doesn't matter that hitting anchorages would be a great way to cripple your fleet or taking out trade posts might bring down your economy. They're all locked behind a border wall and/or handful of chokepoints. If I'm ever in a position to attack those stations then the war's already over anyway.

 

[Lorenerd11]

I've made no shortage of suggestions that would help reduce micromanagement, such as features allowing players to priorize which species should be allowed or prioritized for which jobs, automatically apply species templates by jobs, or set up migration settings for each individual planet.

Paradox didn't seem to have taken up on these suggestions, leading to the continued existence of micromanagement hell.

 

[MichaelJanuary]

I've made no shortage of suggestions that would help reduce micromanagement, such as features allowing players to priorize which species should be allowed or prioritized for which jobs, automatically apply species templates by jobs, or set up migration settings for each individual planet.

Paradox didn't seem to have taken up on these suggestions, leading to the continued existence of micromanagement hell.

Firstly, PDS is under no obligation to take on ANYONE's suggestions, and its a bit egotistical to think that your specific suggestions are the best or right way to go about it.

1. Prioritising species for jobs: No. Just. No. This is what species traits do. Why add another system on top of it? This would just make MORE micro, where you have to edit a species job allocation every time you gene-engineer a species. And this, on top of job prioritization via the Jobs tab (which is itself a crutch meant to support a poorly implemented job assignment algorithm).
2. Migration settings for individual planets? No. Again. More micro. The basic conditions of the planet (hab, happiness, jobs, crime, unemployment) is what should determine the attraction level for migration. Why add another system on top of those? Perhaps a single decision to discourage/encourage migration, but adding more micro is not the answer.

The answer to reducing micro is NOT to add more systems, but to make the current systems work as intended, and to give the player the tools to make decisions that affect those systems.

@PDS (not you).

Example 1: Crime is an existing system. But to manage crime you depend on a popup to warn you where there is crime, but it doesn't tell you how much crime, or give you options on how to respond. You have to manually open the relevant planet, then either queue a building, or make a decision, or prioritise jobs (enforcers) on the planet. To fix this micro hell, planets should have been sortable by crime, so that you can proactively manage crime at a threshold and frequency that YOU decide. A less ideal solution is to have the popup give you all the information and options available, so that you can choose a response directly with one click.

Example 2: Housing is an existing system, but again you are dependent on a popup for which you cant set a threshold, nor does it tell you the scale of the problem, or give you options for fixing it. Once again, being able to sort planets by pop or housing, will let you proactively manage your planets.

Example 3: The planet screen is the most used screen in the game. The fact that you have to resort to it continuously is bad enough (the outliner should be much improved). But the planet screen itself has pertinent information stuck under mouseovers or on secondary tabs. To know which species is growing, how fast its growing, or how far along it is, you have to click multiple times, and mouseover to get all the information. Then when you open the next plant, instead of preserving your view, it reverts to the default view, so you have to repeat the same clicks on each planet.

 

[Lorenerd11]

PDS is under no obligation to take on ANYONE's suggestions

I understand that, it still doesn't make it less frustrating though.

its a bit egotistical to think that your specific suggestions are the best or right way to go about it.

I mean, personally I obviously believe that they are, that's why they're my suggestions.

Prioritising species for jobs: No. Just. No. This is what species traits do. Why add another system on top of it?

Because assigning jobs by traits frequently fails. I can't tell you how often I wanted a Domestic robot to be chosen for Artisan jobs, only for a Mining bot to be taken off a mining job instead.

This would bypass that by allowing players to set it manually on top of existing systems.

This would just make MORE micro, where you have to edit a species job allocation every time you gene-engineer a species.

That would still be better than having to constantly close and reopen job slots in planetary interface on every planet regularly.

Migration settings for individual planets? No. Again. More micro.

It would allow players to have more control in shaping their empire, I don't want completely random species constantly popping up on my Gaia worlds, and forced pop growth is a bad and unreliable feature.

 

[MichaelJanuary]

Because assigning jobs by traits frequently fails. I can't tell you how often I wanted a Domestic robot to be chosen for Artisan jobs, only for a Mining bot to be taken off a mining job instead.

The problem is with the weighting system of the traits, and the threshold required for a change. This is what PDS needs to correctly balance. Sometimes it works, but mostly it doesn't.

I don't want completely random species constantly popping up on my Gaia worlds, and forced pop growth is a bad and unreliable feature.

You can manage this through policies quite effectively.
- Set refugees allowed to No.
- Set migration allowed to No.
- Resettle pops manually, or use internal growth boosts for migration to manage your pops.
- Disallow or avoid cross-breeding of species.
- Once your planets are sorted out, you will never have random species popping up or arriving.
- There are some variation for whether you are authoritarian or egalitarian, or have slavery allowed, but its doable.
- If I go synth ascension, then I just set all species I dont like to 'assimilate'.

I usually make sure I have 4-5 planets restricted to my starter species where I maximise pop growth, and resettle them as needed. These are usually planets where i have some kind of specialist focus (research, forge). For mining/farming planets I usually just dump slaves or robots depending what I am playing.

I then rename planets so that I can distinguish them.

EDIT: I am not saying these systems work. They are frustrating. But I would rather they be adjusted/fixed/balanced, than have bandaids slapped on them (which are then themselves buggy as hell).

 

[Lorenerd11]

- Set refugees allowed to No.
- Set migration allowed to No.

These are empire-wide settings that don't allow proper customization of which pops are allowed or encouraged to migrate to which planets.

- Resettle pops manually

This is part of the tedious micromanagement I'm talking out.