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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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There is probably a synth infiltratior among the PDX stuff that favours robots wherever possible, but they couldn't find out who it is yet.
And yet, Machine Empires still lack their own "Ascension" traits. :(
 
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won't it be more difficult to make progress in the game and get the same amount of resources that we already can get?
(But I love the logistical growth)
Also, how would you figure out the carrying capacity of a planet? Because it couldn't be the amount of housing able to be made when all of the districts, could it?
I do have a suggestion though! You should make it so that the two traits Communal, and solitary have an effect on the planets carrying capacity.
For example, let's say that 50% of the pops have communal which means more of that pop could be on the planet which means more pops in general. So that means that a species with communal or solitary would have a larger effect on the carrying capacity the higher percentage of the populace on that planet the makeup.
 
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Organic Pop Assembly is great! Now you can probably play Spiritualist without using robots at all ( Does Clones have a soul tho? )
You're right! because materialists would be wanting to build robots, not people. I think that empires besides Materialists and Spiritualists should be able to build organics and robots with no buff or special base ethic based modifier. Along with that, I think that Materialists should have a build speed buff on robots but a debuff to building organics and that spiritualists should have a debuff on building robots and a buff to building organics
 
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The line of techs is currently:
View attachment 654316

The higher bonuses are tied to higher tiers of capital buildings, so resource gathering backwaters are less likely to reach maximized production levels than your heavily populated core worlds.
This makes it even more critical habitats, of Void Dwellers are least, actually have all levels of capitol building
 
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So, are the resource requirements for ships, megastructures and tech going to go down to reflect the lower amount of pops generating those resources, or are the jobs going to be tweaked to give more? Or will this just lead to slower games?
 
So, are the resource requirements for ships, megastructures and tech going to go down to reflect the lower amount of pops generating those resources, or are the jobs going to be tweaked to give more? Or will this just lead to slower games?

Personally I wouldn’t mind a smaller number of more powerful, more expensive ships. The Star Trek total conversion mod does this and it’s fun. In the early-mid game you have more of an emotional investments in your ships, and in the late game fleets still feel large without adopting silly looking formations the size of a system.
 
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Do these stack?
If they are doing what i think they are doing (based on the tech names) what ends up happening is the modifier checks if a planet has a certain level of capital. These types of checks exist with building upgrades already. But they do stack in the sense that having a major capital will pass the check for an upgraded one; it's implicitly a "greater than or equal to" type of check.
That makes it easy to work around for habitats, hives, etc who don't have every level. (The only hive capital upgrade counts as a major capital, even though it comes at pop 40 instead of 80.)
So then as you go from ship shelter->capital->upgraded->major the bonus would be 0>10%>30%>60%.
 
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@Eladrin - I might suggest making those effects from the techs you revealed multiplicative bonuses to BASE production and upkeep on those techs rather than an additive modifier. Otherwise, given how much production bonuses can be stacked, you'll accidentally and near-universally create situations in which your alloys, research, etc. is produced LESS efficiently (in terms of output per unit resource cost) than without the tech. Sure, you'll get more resources per pop in total, but it will be less efficient in doing so, which conflicts with the flavor of economies of scale (one of your techs' flavor). My suggestion, if adopted, would help avert that problem.
 
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With building slots reduced, it does seem strange that to have anything you'd focus a planet's jobs come from buildings. I am not getting why science jobs and the like wouldn't come from districts. They don't necessarily need a special district, but using buildings that modify existing districts to add or change jobs makes a lot of sense and fits in with how other things are working than trying to make some sort of other distinctions. If you're spamming buildings on a planet the way you'd spam districts, then it seems like you've failed to make a clear distinction between the two.
 
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With building slots reduced, it does seem strange that to have anything you'd focus a planet's jobs come from buildings. I am not getting why science jobs and the like wouldn't come from districts. They don't necessarily need a special district, but using buildings that modify existing districts to add or change jobs makes a lot of sense and fits in with how other things are working than trying to make some sort of other distinctions. If you're spamming buildings on a planet the way you'd spam districts, then it seems like you've failed to make a clear distinction between the two.
making science complex give city districts a scientist job would be interesting to say the least
 
@Eladrin - I might suggest making those effects from the techs you revealed multiplicative bonuses to BASE production and upkeep on those techs rather than an additive modifier. Otherwise, given how much production bonuses can be stacked, you'll accidentally and near-universally create situations in which your alloys, research, etc. is produced LESS efficiently (in terms of output per unit resource cost) than without the tech. Sure, you'll get more resources per pop in total, but it will be less efficient in doing so, which conflicts with the flavor of economies of scale (one of your techs' flavor). My suggestion, if adopted, would help avert that problem.
100% agreed. It's easy to get 200%+ to things like science output and others. Which cuts the actual efficiency of these in half, if not more. So you'll be paying 1.6x as much upkeep for a 20-25% increase depending on what jobs we're talking about.

Another way to fix this would be to make them increase the BASE value to which all bonuses are then applied afterward. I.e A Scientist for example would produce 4 as the base output, 4.4 with the first tech, 5.2 with the second, and finally 6.4 with the third. Increasing their production by 60% for a 60% upkeep increase. Then you get all your other techs applied to that. Keeping the upkeep and increase equal.
 
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You told that to balance the need for more districts planet's will be 2 districts bigger in average. Did you increase the size of habitats ? Buildings are one thing but habitats are already cramped so if everything is bigger by comparaison it make the problem worse. Maybe make the habitat expantion decision add +3 districts instead of +2 ? EIthe one or both of them (for size 9 or size 10 habitats) ?
 
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100% agreed. It's easy to get 200%+ to things like science output and others. Which cuts the actual efficiency of these in half, if not more. So you'll be paying 1.6x as much upkeep for a 20-25% increase depending on what jobs we're talking about.

Another way to fix this would be to make them increase the BASE value to which all bonuses are then applied afterward. I.e A Scientist for example would produce 4 as the base output, 4.4 with the first tech, 5.2 with the second, and finally 6.4 with the third. Increasing their production by 60% for a 60% upkeep increase. Then you get all your other techs applied to that. Keeping the upkeep and increase equal.

Changing the base would be clearer, since having different kinds of % increases is going to be confusing.
 
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Changing the base would be clearer, since having different kinds of % increases is going to be confusing.
I might be taking it a bit too far. But I honestly think this is the way it should be done and I'd even extend that to traits. We already have a precedent in that with mining guilds. It gives a +1 to base production. Giving a small modifier to base production for traits would keep them relevant long term. Not necessarily for erudite/intelligent. But for the ones that increase resources ala thrifty, industrious, etc.
 
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