The pop mechanism is quite terrible in 3.0

[sillyrobot]

If it's basically 0.5 per pop, that's a big problem. For example, 600 pops in a tiny galaxy with a few planets is quite a lot. 600 In a huge galaxy with many planets there is little.

I'm playing a huge galaxy with x5 planets. It's still +0.5 growth needed per pop created. A partial way around this is of course to flood the board with growth centres. Each one may take nearly forever, but you're still getting pops every year. It just means you need to colonize everything and make no attempt to use the real estate acquired.

 

[Stein14]

Ich spiele eine riesige Galaxie mit x5 Planeten. Pro erstelltem Pop ist immer noch +0,5 Wachstum erforderlich. Ein teilweiser Weg, dies zu umgehen, besteht natürlich darin, das Board mit Wachstumszentren zu überfluten. Jeder mag fast ewig dauern, aber Sie bekommen immer noch jedes Jahr Pops. Es bedeutet nur, dass Sie alles kolonisieren und keinen Versuch unternehmen müssen, die erworbenen Immobilien zu nutzen.

I don't see that as a fun or sensible solution.

 

[Oculument]

What if the penalty was halved or maybe even smaller? I feel like it would be a lot more bearable then. 200 pops for doubling the growth cost seems way way too drastic.

But empires start the game with more or less 20 pops. Early game: pop increases 10 times before growth drops by half. Growth dropping by half means one additional planet for growth cancels out the penalty. Seems like a plausible design to me.

 

[Mewnine]

I've played a few more years since my previous reaction to this topic, and I'm giving up on this game untill there has been at least some kind of fix to this mechanism.
Late game feels completely off. I would much rather deal with the endgame lag than to deal with this horrible population void.

 

[Oculument]

Sorry but the Empire-wide penalty per-pop is the single worst intended change made for the game. It kills all the fun of actually growing your empire. Whats left after hitting the "now it takes insane amounts of time grow a single pop" stage? Wage war and wait around? But if I enjoy playing isolationist? Just sitt around and wait 20+ years for a single colony to get going a bit?

The problem is that pops don't grow on the rural backwaters/new colonies. I am in the early midgame on a game right now and growing a single pop on a new mining habitat takes 3+ years.

Build the jobs, pops migrate there from other planets. There's your growth: gathered from across your other planets.

 

[Less2]

Seems like a plausible design to me.

I get the impression that a lot of people saying things like this are speculating without playing. Each one of their arguments consistently has misconceptions about how the growth system works in practice, and it's getting tiresome to explain it.

 

[Cymsdale]

Build the jobs, pops migrate there from other planets. There's your growth: gathered from across your other planets.

It's not very intuitive. It seems like what you're supposed to do is intentionally cause unemployment on a planet, build a huge amount of housing capacity, and then those empty houses will somehow grow the pops faster and allow them to push to other planets.

Now instead of planets growing pops (which they still do), empty houses grow pops.

The whole system is nonsense.

 

[Cronos988]

But empires start the game with more or less 20 pops. Early game: pop increases 10 times before growth drops by half. Growth dropping by half means one additional planet for growth cancels out the penalty. Seems like a plausible design to me.

Well, for one, it seems far less plausible when you realise 200 pops may be a single developed planet.

 

[RoverStorm]

I've played a few more years since my previous reaction to this topic, and I'm giving up on this game untill there has been at least some kind of fix to this mechanism.
Late game feels completely off. I would much rather deal with the endgame lag than to deal with this horrible population void.

If you physically cannot play the game with empire-scaled growth, I have a surefire solution. Turning it off.

Navigate to your local files (on Steam, there should be a button you can click, not sure where it installs if you are not on steam, someone else can help), and go to the "common" folder, and then go to the "defines" folder, and open 00_defines.txt in Notepad++ or maybe even normal notepad or whatever text editor you use.

Then scroll down or Ctrl+F and find this:

See where it says "REQUIRED_POP_GROWTH_SCALE = 0.5"? Yeah change that 0.5 to 0, and empire growth increase from pops is gone.

I'll make the simplest mod in existance changing it for steam users as well, since this seems to be highly requested.

EDIT: For those who read this a bit late, uh, you need to scroll down and also set THIS to zero as well:

 

[ciurra]

It's funny, people have been clamoring for total empire pop count affecting growth for over a year. Now that it's here people are angry. LMAO this forum is a gift that keeps on giving

Well it may be that those are different people or that one thing is to desire one another to have.

 

[Alastor]

See where it says "REQUIRED_POP_GROWTH_SCALE = 0.5"? Yeah change that 0.5 to 0, and empire growth increase from pops is gone.

I'll make the simplest mod in existance changing it for steam users as well, since this seems to be highly requested.

Good that this is not hardcoded. Next time I play, if that "mechanic" is still there I'm definitely modding it out.

Shame about the achievements though.

 

[Vernichtere]

Where is the logic? A united galaxy has less growth than a puzzle of independent countries. Why not just reduce the growth around 50% or maybe 70%. in general, when there are issues with stability? Nobody plays longer than 2400 anyways. A unlogical solution for a problem you can solve very easy.

 

[Alkaid98]

Lots of people keep saying how they could lessen the penalty or change it to keep pops growing better, but I'm guessing if they implemented it the way they did it means they couldn't figure out how to address the pop performance issues otherwise. Even if the eventual near halt to growth sucks for gameplay, encourages more warring/vassal creation and re-intrigration cheese or cripples some styles of play, maybe this heavyhanded approach was the only way they found to solve things. And on that front it does sound like they've largely succeeded in fixing performance, but at the cost of making the gameplay suffer a lot.

I had higher hopes than most updates this time, but it feels like we're still far from seeing the major toll mechanics vs performance has taken on this game get resolved.

 

[RoverStorm]

Shame about the achievements though.

The completionist part of me says "NOOOOOOO"

The really brave and cynical side of me says "If I voluntarily install mods that make the game harder and achieve these "achievements" under those circumstances, those bragging rights and screenshots are worth way more than some random sadistic developers trying to punish people who want to use the achievements as a checklist and then have their one ironman save file get corrupted or a bug ruins it"

 

[Sorc278]

I was thinking to get Nemesis and give a new shot at completing campaign but good thing I held out.

How would one play Reaper-like empire of robots on large map now anyway? It would just be tons of empty planets instead of pain of relocating bots because they won't do it themselves.

I might as well wait until 4.0 to play, maybe it will get reworked again

 

[Vernichtere]

Lots of people keep saying how they could lessen the penalty or change it to keep pops growing better, but I'm guessing if they implemented it the way they did it means they couldn't figure out how to address the pop performance issues otherwise. Even if the eventual near halt to growth sucks for gameplay, encourages more warring/vassal creation and re-intrigration cheese or cripples some styles of play, maybe this heavyhanded approach was the only way they found to solve things. And on that front it does sound like they've largely succeeded in fixing performance, but at the cost of making the gameplay suffer a lot.

I had higher hopes than most updates this time, but it feels like we're still far from seeing the major toll mechanics vs performance has taken on this game get resolved.

There is a easy way to solve the problem. Dont tell me people playing a campaign 600 years. Reducing the normal growth rate is a easy solution for stability issues. People stop playing not because growth. People stop playing because there is no domestic politics and around 2400 you already conquered everything you wanted and defeated the crisis. There is nothing to do, expect pushing pops around.

 

[Belkeirun]

Lots of people keep saying how they could lessen the penalty or change it to keep pops growing better, but I'm guessing if they implemented it the way they did it means they couldn't figure out how to address the pop performance issues otherwise. Even if the eventual near halt to growth sucks for gameplay, encourages more warring/vassal creation and re-intrigration cheese or cripples some styles of play, maybe this heavyhanded approach was the only way they found to solve things. And on that front it does sound like they've largely succeeded in fixing performance, but at the cost of making the gameplay suffer a lot.

I had higher hopes than most updates this time, but it feels like we're still far from seeing the major toll mechanics vs performance has taken on this game get resolved.

The pop/job system was always a drain on processing. It is bloated with more and more mechanics which tbh I don't care about. I don't care that the ethics of pop#156343856458957 are pacifist and that they might change sometime in the future. I just care about the total numbers, not the individuals. The dev's designed a system which was never going to be usable endgame in a huge galaxy. The pop's just breed too quick, even if they improved the code and got 25% faster calculations, thats only a few years before you are at the same situation. They needed to change the concept from pop/jobs to planet/jobs or some 'larger' view. Instead they solved the problem, by limiting the number of pops in the game. A very cheap solution. I don't think it's an acceptable solution for a grand strategy 4X game.

 

[Coconut_Cookie]

Last but not least, anyway, the mechanism itself is illogical. If paradox need a galaxy cap, the best cap is the total planet cap * livable planet count. It is reasonable. Why the empire pop will influence newly colonized planet pop growth? Hard to understand.

My guess is that they've made the total empire pop reduce growth to counter act the growth that multiple planets give you which is still way higher than any figure that makes sense. There is no calculation that is based on actual population numbers in Stellaris and planets with only a few pops have growth that comes quite close to planets with way bigger numbers of pops. For example in the from megacorp until 2.8 colonizing your first planet meant that your pop growth would be doubled. The calculation didn't take into account the pops that are already there. This would mean that populated planets would grow fast but starting colonies would stay rather small for the entire game. I haven't played with the new update but from what I've read and seen the S curve that growth now has still allows for really fast growth. My guess is that growth is so high because the game would be very slow if colonies would take centuries to get populations that can be comparable to the home world.

 

[Attitude Adjuster]

This system is way better, genuinely confusing that people would prefer the old system.

Edit: changed my mind - it could use some work!

 

[RoverStorm]

I had higher hopes than most updates this time, but it feels like we're still far from seeing the major toll mechanics vs performance has taken on this game get resolved.

The honest truth is it's not pop growth that causes performance issues. Before the 2.0 (or 2.1, I forget) economic rework, insanely enormous sized galaxies existed and ran smooth with vastly more pops than numbers that would break current Stellaris.

I may just be a modder, but from my testing, the real root of the problem is jobs and ethics.

One of the major speedups was coding shortcuts that reduced how frequently the game checks to see if pops have the jobs they should and if they need to change jobs. It apparently does this rather frequently to all pops. Imagine if you were the computer, manually going to every pop and comparing it to every job on the planet, seeing if it needs to change jobs.

I'm beginning to think that what is truly in order is a hard revisit to resource production and handling of pops.

For example: remove jobs as a concept. Buildings and districts directly increase planetary output while also increasing something called "labor demand". If the "Labor Demand" is higher than the number of pops on the planet, reduce all planetary output and upkeep proportional to the missing pops (e.g. if there was a labor demand of 10 and only 5 pops, reduce all job output by 50%). You could also break it down by stratum, so slaves could completely fullfill worker tier demand, but leave specialist and ruler demands unfullfilled.

Some extreme concepts like that could, in theory, reduce or remove the consequence for having lots of pops. Which would, you now, actually address the problem rather than band-aid the solution.

EDIT: Oh another thing, the developers have explicitly stated they don't like the idea of targeted purges because people would use it on pops with the wrong ethics. So they keep trying to patch loopholes that allow you to target pops of an unwanted faction rather than just doing the actual solution: detach ethics from INDIVIDUAL pops and make it a more empire-wide thing.

Endless Space 2 does something similar. Pops don't have individual ethics; the star system they live in has an "ethic preference" which you can change by building or doing things that encourage an ethic you want. Now before someone mentions that pops in Stellaris can have inherent traits that give them and only them an attraction to a particular ethic, such as Strong increasing Militarist attraction, ES2 has a very similar concept! Their solution is to average between different species. If a system has, say, 50% population that has 100% attraction to militarist, and 50% that has 200% attraction, then the total militarist attraction is halfway at 150% ethic preference.