Hi all!

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

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

Automated Colony Management

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

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

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

Spoiler: Foundry Automation (Hive) - Click to Expand

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

    prio_districts = {
        district_industrial
    }

    buildings = {
        1 = {
            building = building_hive_capital
        }

        2 = {
            building = building_spawning_pool
        }

        3 = {
            building = building_clone_vats
        }

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

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

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

        7 = {
            building = building_betharian_power_plant
        }

        8 = {
            building = building_mote_harvesters
        }

        9 = {
            building = building_crystal_mines
        }

        10 = {
            building = building_gas_extractors
        }

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

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

    }
}

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

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

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

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

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

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

    crisis = yes

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

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

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

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

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

Urban and Colony Designations

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

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

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

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

Resettlement

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

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

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

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

Slave Resettlement and Worker/Drone/Bio-Trophy Resettlement

Specialist Resettlement and Ruler Resettlement

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

Hey wait, what's that about colony abandonment?

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

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

But we just finished building it!

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

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

They like to move it.

The tooltip effect is a bit of a mouthful.

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

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

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

Yes, Shared Burdens pops demote pretty much instantly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

[HFY]

Nice, I like a lot of these changes.

 

[Benjie164]

Make it a second type of influence and use it to create/expand sectors as well!

That's a good addition!

I mean this could really slip in well to the current format too. Factions in your democratic empires would boost your internal influence, maybe notable 'advisors' or 'members of the royal family' would be a mirror to factions in the dictatorship / Imperial empires.

Then for external influence, I guess rivalries would be your first boost to that, not sure what else but I'm sure someone could think of something to do with that.

 

[Deggial]

It was probably already proposed in this fast growing thread. (It’s late and I am tired, so apologies, if so.)

Anyway, I share the concerns regarding the availability of space stations (which are, in addition, needed in many other strategically more important places) in relation to colonized planets.

Hence my question: Might it be possible to let one space station with a transit hub in the sector capital system manage the whole transfer for this sector?

This would reduce the potential micro, limit the count of needed star bases and still give some control over the transfer - especially, if at some point sector borders will be tweak able (something that at least was intended at some point).

 

[Ragnarok Ascendant]

For God's sake, stop faffing about with micro-intensive new mechanics and just make Greater Than Ourselves how pop resettlement is handled period, maybe with a side of integrating a mod like Carrying Capacity. That accomplishes your goal of making resettlement rare, it doesn't require people to micro the hell out of the game, and it keeps things simple. It doesn't even need any new code if you just go and ask the mod author nicely.

What should the new Spiritualist bonus be? Ethics Attraction - although there is already a Ethics attraction bonus from the faction being active? There's already a Unity boost. Happiness boost? Or reduced Organic upkeep - like how Materialists have reduced Robot upkeep? Reduced Organic upkeep can represent Spiritualist being less materialistic? Or perhaps a Spiritualist counterpart to Academic Privilege - Theocratic Privilege?

I have a suggestion in my signature which involves special Civic slots that let you pick out what elements of spiritualist play you want to adhere to.

 

[King Harkinian]

While there's clearly a lot of promise in the resettlement changes, I already sense a looming danger in that the optimal playstyle might be to use the Civics that remove Influence costs from resettlement and then just carrying on with the endless resettlement micro like before.

It would frankly be better if there was ALWAYS at least a minimum of 5 influence cost of resettling a pop, thus setting a hard limit on how much tedious micro you can do.

And then just make pops automatically move between planets of their own free will unless you restrict their rights. Which is how it already used to work before 2.2 when planet management was better.

 

[DrFranknfurter]

One of the major influence sinks in the game disappeared with the change to toggled edicts, and many empires find themselves at or near the Influence cap a significant amount of the time. Yes, I understand that aggressive and expansionist empires prioritizing claims and outposts may struggle with it.

This particular change felt like malicious compliance/cursed genie wish/comically missing the point. People asked for 'a toggle for edicts' and they got a toggle for edicts... but again, not at all in the way they wanted (backwards and a tad illogical) with lots of unintended consequences.

What the problem was:
1. Clicking the 25+ timed edicts every few years was unnecessary busywork IF you can afford to keep them on continuously (and you will by the end-game, for all except the influence edicts)
2. Annoying Maths when you can't afford to keep them all on continuously (can I afford 2 or 3 edicts with current income? Will they run out at awkward times? I can activate them now but will I be able to afford them again later when my sprawl goes up?)
3. Annoying when edicts drop suddenly, especially in the middle of wars when they're vital to the war effort (I've had the rare resource edicts drop mid battle in the last 3 games I played... even when I'm not at war that often... the edicts seem to naturally synchronize with the war+truce period... I can pause and reapply them instantly but it's still infuriatingly stupid it happens at all)

The solution requested was 'a toggle for edicts' to turn the upfront cost into an ongoing monthly cost that only requires 1 click to turn it on (when you can afford it) and one more to turn it off (when you can't afford it or don't need it).
i.e.
50 influence upfront, plus monthly influence to turn on Influence Edicts
50 Rare resources upfront, plus monthly rare resources to turn on Strategic Resource edicts
1000 energy upfront, plus monthly energy to turn on Campaigns
10,000 unity upfront, plus monthly unity to turn on Ambitions
A small upfront cost stops you from cheaply turning them on and off rapidly when they're useful. The ongoing cost lets you see your resource balance and see that it's going down and you need to increase production or reduce spending/turn off an edict.

New system positives:
1. Can't accidentally have 0 influence generation like some people apparently did before (new players I assume).
But the same protection to new players could have been gained by blocking new edicts when influence generation is below +2/month.
Faction promotion/suppression still has the problem of monthly influence costs that cripples expansion. New players are not protected from obvious misplays involving mismanaging influence that stop them expanding normally.
2. Authority types giving edict capacity.
But that could have been implemented as making the first edict upkeep-free for certain authority types, or reduced costs, or increased effects.

The new system has all the above problems of the old system, but it also added the following new problems:
1. Continuous Edicts too expensive to use early game (map the stars arrives too late to be useful, too large an upfront cost that blocks expansion)
2. Continuous Edicts too limited by soft-cap to use liberally (21 edicts, I'll maybe use 1 now... making 95% of the influence edicts useless/not used)
3. Continuous Edicts now have large penalties (so even if they were completely free you may not want to use them because you can't afford the added costs)
4. Continuous Edicts penalties and benefits are contradictory and make consequences hard to calculate (+20% Technician Output, +0.5 Technician Upkeep - potentially even a net negative with low stability/Declare Martial Law, or a small hard to calculate bonus in all other situations)

And the big new problems that you mentioned:
5. Continuous Edicts were the main influence sink for many empire types. Removing one sink without adjusting the entire system causes knock-on problems (a glut of influence for some empire types which are also significantly weaker as they lost the benefits of running those edicts)
6. Continuous Edicts are not being used despite sitting at max influence capacity (The soft-cap is too punishing and very scary to go above capacity).

So yeah... the edict toggle change is a case of malicious compliance, the genie twisting a wish in the most annoying way possible, or perhaps comically missing the point... I'm not sure how to categorize it but it honestly felt quite frustrating to me (though it sounded great before I experienced the reality of it).


All that said, we used to have an influence cost to resettlement and that was fine because there was also a working automatic resettlement system back in 1.9.1. I assume once pop growth/emigration/automatic resettlement is working again we'll have less need of manual resettlement in general no matter the cost.

Though I'm still always scared the changes will be like the genie wish thing... ask to be rich and you're turned into Richard, or have all wealth transferred to you, or have all wealth but your own removed... there's so many ways all the suggested changes can go wrong that are each so easily avoided, but I hope you can understand people being extremely cautious about any change given the history of things.

 

[OnyxAbussos]

LOVE IT! Thank you.

 

[Benjie164]

It would frankly be better if there was ALWAYS at least a minimum of 5 influence cost of resettling a pop, thus setting a hard limit on how much tedious micro you can do.

Why should there be a limit on how much we can micro? Some people will want to have a heavier hand in the movement of their pops for optimal results, whereas others will be happy for the AI to take control. Why should the players who want to manage their empire be punished and forced the let the AI control their pops for them? It makes no sense to me. It should be a choice per player.

That feels to me like saying "well people are using micro too much in starcraft, so we've limited the apm you can do."

 

[Mímisbrunnr]

Devs, I'd like to offer my feedback on your changes to the authority bonuses. While I am but one person, and you are under no obligation to consider my advice, I think that:

1.) Giving Democracy only a demotion speed bonus is far too weak of a bonus. This compounds an issue that getting generally weaker mandates vs. agendas already tends to harm them.

2.) Giving Oligarchy a Faction Influence Bonus is unfitting given that almost every other Faction Influence bonus is associated with making your society MORE democratic. Making Oligarchy have that as well seems to work against the flavor you've previously established (Egalitarian/Fanatic Egalitarian Bonuses, Parliamentary System).

3.) Giving Dictatorships only Edict cost reductions is far too weak.

My humble suggestions:

1.) Make Democracies have the Faction Influence Bonus from Authorities. Also, consider making the bonus 25% (so that if you go all-in on Democracy, Fanatic Egalitarian, and Parliamentary System you can get exactly doubled faction influence [+100%], which would simply be a really cool benchmark.

2.) Oligarchies are by definition rule by the few, so I think it would be really flavorful to grant Oligarchic authority some kind of perk for ruler-tier pops or for your regular leaders (Governors, Scientists, Admirals, Generals) to reflect their especially prominent and leading role in society [given that they do not need to submit to an autocrat like in the remaining two authorities]. Not quite sure what that would be, but I think this makes far more sense for an Oligarchy than a faction influence bonus.

3.) Dictatorship: The focus of the Dictatorship is on a ruler-for-life who [as an important in-game distinction from Imperial Authorities] is elected. So presumably he/she/it is being chosen over the other candidates for life rulership for some sort of compelling reason, whether they are the wisest statesman or the strongest warlord. I think focusing Dictatorial Authority on providing bonuses to your empire's ruler specially [as opposed to the general ruler-strata] would be flavorful. Maybe let them obtain an extra ruler trait over other rulers, thus letting them confer an additional empire-wide bonus compared to other rules although it could be something else. Alternatively, or perhaps in additional, maybe you could let dictatorships waive the cost for switching Edicts, as some societies like Rome had temporary dictators (like Cincinnatus) who were brought in to solve a crisis and were empowered to make edicts to that end.

4.) Imperial: I like the idea of giving them +1 Edict capacity, though if we end up giving some of the other authorities buffs like I'm suggesting I might suggest giving them a small buff to go alongside them as well.

Hopefully you find my ideas at least vaguely interesting, even if you decide not to use them.

Thanks for taking your time to read this.

 

[Don_Quigleone]

On starbases: I think the solution here is just to grant a starbase for a certain number of pops, say 50 or 100 pops. This way, once a planet gets overpopulated, you should have unlocked a starbase slot. The goal should be that you usually build starbases over the most populated planets for transit hubs.

 

[Critical Ethics]

How dare you expect something that a Dev Diary prior to 2.2 mentioned is going to make it into the game, more than 2 years later.

What's been driving me crazy is that if you had multiple pop growth slots or some other way to turn off migration transformation you wouldn't really need manual resettling. You could just have pops go into decline on "emigration" planets while boosting pop growth for appropriate pops on "immigration" planets. There's a whole bunch of neat things you could do with the decline mechanic if it was safe to actually use.

 

[Lorenerd11]

By the way, can we please finally have some essential QoL features like the ability to sort things like planets, fleets, saved empire designs, etc.? Drag and drop shouldn't be very hard to implement.

I want to be able to sort these things like I sort Discord servers.

 

[HFY]

By the way, can we please finally have some essential QoL features like the ability to sort things like planets, fleets, saved empire designs, etc.? Drag and drop shouldn't be very hard to implement.

I want to be able to sort these things like I sort Discord servers.

Some kind of modal drag-and-drop would be great -- make sure it won't drag when I try to select, though.

Even something more primitive, like the up-down buttons on a planetary build queue, would be sufficient.

I'm not going to re-arrange things often, not nearly as often as I select things.

 

[HighKings_Ruin]

Make sure the transit hub gets a high ai weight, currently the ai can't really handle unemployed pops so making sure they build these will help.

EDIT: Although I agree with what a lot of people have said about making it a planetary decision rather than a starbase building.

 

[Mímisbrunnr]

Make sure the transit hub gets a high ai weight, currently the ai can't really handle unemployed pops so making sure they build these will help.

But not TOO high either, as you want to make sure they still build other needed buildings. Maybe make the weight increase as their planet or pop # increases?

 

[Pellaken]

OMG I love the unemployed-at-the-top thingy

 

[Hansatron]

I hope Eladrin's pop and immigration experiments mature.
Combining this dev diary with a reworked pop system could be the one-two punch that makes this game a lot closer to what it could be. Actually being able to use automation? Gamechanger!

 

[KubiG37]

I love these automation and sector changes, because they won't just help the players, they will also greatly help the AI if done right, as most of its planet building and thus its economy is probably using the same automated/generic system.

 

[GnoSIS]

With DDs planned so far in advance, what we see here by your (developer) standards is already old, and if you can't talk about what you are doing now, then what's the point of any discussion here?

 

[-Marauder-]

While there's clearly a lot of promise in the resettlement changes, I already sense a looming danger in that the optimal playstyle might be to use the Civics that remove Influence costs from resettlement and then just carrying on with the endless resettlement micro like before.

It would frankly be better if there was ALWAYS at least a minimum of 5 influence cost of resettling a pop, thus setting a hard limit on how much tedious micro you can do.

And then just make pops automatically move between planets of their own free will unless you restrict their rights. Which is how it already used to work before 2.2 when planet management was better.

I agree with the first part, I disagree with the second part. People would still be forced into this, you'd just punish them for it. Punishing players for fixing an issue with the game is not the way to go. It just makes the entire experience of playing the game much worse.

As for resettling pops. I wish they would comment on how this will work with slaves. Because currently, the algorithm enslaves unemployed pops, always. Freeing employed slaves for no good reason whatsoever. Thus preventing them all from being resettled. Which means anyone using slavery of any type might get screwed over with this, big time.