The pop mechanism is quite terrible in 3.0

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"I was able to do a thing" != "I was supposed to be able to do a thing".

The 25x Crisis setting always was intended for people who actually want to lose at this point. It was never supposed to be beaten. It was supposed to actually give a Stellaris game an end date.
It's like the end of Halo Reach. You cannot win. The fun is in seeing how long you can survive.


Yes.
Well, not in 3.0, but the fire rate increase has caused them to be fantastically OP in the majority of patch versions since their introduction.
I suppose a player can always picture a setting in the game as one please, but for this matter x25 is no more of something "unbeatable by design" than Grand admiral difficulties. By default it's the hardest level of end game crisis, but there's really nothing else. If you'd prefer to picture something unbeatable just because it's highest difficult, that would be your personal preference.
I started to play Stellaris at 2.2, so I can't really tell what genocidal civics were like when they were released. As under single player setting these genocidal civics haven't been that good since 2.2, which a fairly long time, I'm not sure I get the reference.
 
"I was able to do a thing" != "I was supposed to be able to do a thing".

The 25x Crisis setting always was intended for people who actually want to lose at this point. It was never supposed to be beaten. It was supposed to actually give a Stellaris game an end date.
It's like the end of Halo Reach. You cannot win. The fun is in seeing how long you can survive.


Yes.
Well, not in 3.0, but the fire rate increase has caused them to be fantastically OP in the majority of patch versions since their introduction.
Honestly, nobody care about this crisis thing, it is just that how we are playing, this whole new restriciton'feel' wrong/bad/verypoor.

Funny thing, the shape of the game before 3.0 was not really good or 'normal' too. The crisis x25was beated at the earliest setting possible for a crisis in our Discord in one or 2 week after the patch when the big player decided to try this challenge. But i think she appeared like more around 2340 that at 2325 for us. How dev maked the crisis x25 was a joke... not more ships' only a multiplier for each ship, only more dammage/shield/pv/armor, so you can always 'zerg' them. With a good tech rush in energy tech weapon, aving so many X weapon dammaging directly the pv by bypassing the tons of armor/shield. Bim crisis rekt.

buttttttttttttttt i Couldn't do this at this date with machine and hive mind because of their 'poor' capacity to make tech compare to normal bio. :(
 
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Yes the majority of the economic system is poorly designed in general and doesn't work very well for a game of this scale (or with automation and AI being as poor as it is at least). Actually changing that would be a daunting overhaul of the entire game, however, and it's much easier to slap a lazy equation to bottleneck the whole system and then call it a day.

I wish that was just my own sarcastic thought, but that's what they actually did. It's cringe-worthy. I don't understand what they were thinking and how they didn't realize how unpopular it would be.
What they were thinking? Possibly some variant of, "Desperate times calls for desperate measures" and "Every time we change a major system, people complain and then they adapt and/or stop playing, and some players who haven't played for a long time return to see if this is more to their liking".

It is working as designed, and it isn't as if there wasn't worry about the potential downsides when it was announced, and it isn't as if they can be the least bit surprised - at least those on the team with elemental mathematical knowledge or knowledge of players - of the effects of the S-curve on optimizing players (try to stick to the centre of the curve, regardless of what micromanagement hassle or counterintuitive gameplay is needed to do that), and it isn't as if they don't know perfectly well that the empire-wide increase to growth cost is something that makes no sense at all as an abstraction for population growth, but is simply an effective way of reining in the technical problem of the extreme slowdown issues the game suffered after the last major overhaul years ago, greatly increasing POP numbers.

It certainly does absolutely nothing to address the underlying issue, that the economy is based on POPS doing JOBS (affected by various multipliers) and that so long as this is the case, population increase, by whichever means possible, will remain the most important aspect of the game for empire optimization purposes.

They were very open about how they were going to nerf planetary POP growth, and the only really surprising thing to me is just how high they set the "per pop" multiplier since the diaries focus more on the growth S-shape for planets, something that in the current game quickly becomes fairly irrelevant except for players manipulating per-planet growth to stick to the middle on depopulated planets with massively excessive housing due to the empire wide-penalty.

And I'll admit that setting that multiplier so high that it strongly encourages players to adopt deeply counterintuitive approaches such as having other empires grow your POPs in catch-and-release cycles or stealing them by bombardment acquisition is something I find terribly amusing, but even this I'm pretty sure some on the development team will have considered, and that it simply has been deemed an acceptable cost to restoring the game to a stage where it is possible to play the game to the endgame without slowing to a crawl due to POP numbers. After all, that is something that can be tweaked independently by focusing on those specific game mechanics rather than the underlying POP growth structure.

They are five years past release and desperately trying to shore up a project that is crumbling under its own weight, with every major DLC or fundamental rethink of game mechanics adding at least as many problems as it fixes, but in the cursed spot of development where so long as the DLC sells well enough to keep the project alive, or they need to keep it alive until a successor is made, they have to.

I imagine some of them are even proud of the result, because the code base has got to be tough to work with by now, and every victory counts.


EDIT: Minor edits for clarification.
 
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What they were thinking? Possibly some variant of, "Desperate times calls for desperate measures" and "Every time we change a major system, people complain and then they adapt and/or stop playing, and some players who haven't played for a long time return to see if this is more to their liking".

It is working as designed, and it isn't as if there wasn't worry about the potential downsides when it was announced, and it isn't as if they can be the least bit surprised - at least those on the team with elemental mathematical knowledge or knowledge of players - of the effects of the S-curve on optimizing players (try to stick to the centre of the curve, regardless of what micromanagement hassle or counterintuitive gameplay is needed to do that), and it isn't as if they don't know perfectly well that the empire-wide increase to growth cost is something that makes no sense at all as an abstraction for population growth but is simply an effective way of reigning in the technical problem of the extreme slowdown issues the game suffered after the last major overhaul years ago, greatly increasing POP numbers.

It certainly does absolutely nothing to address the underlying issue, that the economy is based on POPS doing JOBS (affected by various multipliers) and that so long as this is the case, population growth, by whichever means possible, will remain the most important aspect of the game for empire optimization purposes.

They were very open about how they were going to nerf POP growth, and the only really surprising thing to me is just how high they set the "per pop" multiplier since the diaries focus more on the growth S-shape for planets, something that in the current game quickly becomes fairly irrelevant except for players manipulating per-planet growth to stick to the middle on depopulated planets with massively excessive housing due to the empire wide-penalty.

They are five years past release and desperately trying to shore up a project that is crumbling under its own weight, with every major DLC or fundamental rethink of game mechanics adding at least as many problems as it fixes, but in the cursed spot of development where so long as the DLC sells well enough to keep the project alive, or they need to keep it alive until a successor is made, they have to.

I imagine some of them are even proud of the result, because the code base has got to be tough to work with by now, and every victory counts.
Couldn't agree more. Unfortunately this is starting to affect the entire Paradox line of games (especially EU4). The continuous DLC development has it benefits, but the biggest curse in my eyes is that it leads to this sort of shoveling of more sand on top of already shaky foundations into a sort of ramshackle tower of Babel. I think they need to get better at drawing the line and deciding when it's time to be done with a game and move on to making a new one, and base it less on the immediate ROI on DLC, and more on the impact to the quality of the game.
 
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Couldn't agree more. Unfortunately this is starting to affect the entire Paradox line of games (especially EU4). The continuous DLC development has it benefits, but the biggest curse in my eyes is that it leads to this sort of shoveling of more sand on top of already shaky foundations into a sort of ramshackle tower of Babel. I think they need to get better at drawing the line and deciding when it's time to be done with a game and move on to making a new one, and base it less on the immediate ROI on DLC, and more on the impact to the quality of the game.
Three thoughts on that as a player, one as a developer.

As a player, I wish that were the case. Every PDS game since CK2 has followed the same trend - start out well designed with game mechanics reflecting layers of abstraction the player can easily follow and the AI capable of playing most of the game (even if only poorly) and over time and DLC development become feature rich but less coherent and with AI opponents ever worse at actually playing the game - or at least putting up less opposition.

BUT ALSO as a player, I really like how this DLC model has allowed PDS to experiment with game mechanics. The flip side to "many experiments with game mechanics, new features, and the occasional major overhaul makes the whole an incoherent mess mired in technical debt" is "but some experiments work out really well, and the DLC model allows for a lot more experimentation".

And finally as a player: Nobody forces me to continue playing a game past the point where I feel that the abstractions are getting too stupid, the AI opponents too crippled, the game too micromanagement heavy, or the game no longer fun, and with the versions available through Steam I can always choose one particular buggy state of the game and remain fixed at that, should I so desire. (I don't, I'd rather learn to master other games than continuing games I have mastered, but I could)

As a developer, no such thing. A new game is a major undertaking compared to bolting new stuff on an old game. It should be undertaken solely based on a combination of a) cold-hearted financial calculations, and b) the presence of somebody passionate and competent in the company championing it.



Stellaris is actually the PDS game that has held my interest the longest after EU2, playing it for a few games every year since 2016, and without its major overhauls, as mathematically poorly thought out as I consider some of them to have been implemented, it probably wouldn't. At the moment I think this is probably the end of the line for me and that apart from a bit of playing in 3-4 weeks time when the initial flurry of fixes have been done I'll probably only return to the franchise once a sequel exists, but if that turns out to be the case, it'll still have outlasted CK2 (2 years: Rajas of India), EU4 (2 years: El Dorado), and most likely Imperator as well.

Frankly, my staying interested in any game at all for longer than a few weeks and returning to play them again even one year later for reasons other than MP with friends is testimony to just how good PDS is at making strategy games I enjoy playing SP, since generally I play games only until I've played through their story (for campaign and story-based games) or learned their game mechanics and mastered them, and that's usually a question of a few weeks tops where strategy games are concerned.
 
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Yeah, that's the biggest problem here: Expansion into new worlds gets progressively worse.
If it were just using some cheese ability to make worlds BIGGERER, then it would probably seem normal that at a certain point, pops just don't want to fill the ever-higher skyscrapers of your double mega ecumenopoli...but instead what's going on is that having a ton of people over in those built-up planets means nobody wants to have babies in the vast empty frontier either.

In a word: no. This would result in still the exact problem stated above, it would just take 1.66-5x longer to be at the same level where a new planet basically never grows.
It's entirely possible things would be fine if there was just a minimum population amount on every planet before empire-wide per-pop penalties kick in...but then that's basically what carrying capacity already does.
It's worth realizing that there can exist game mechanics where their very existence is a negative on gameplay, no matter what you tweak the number to (aside of the number where it's the same as not existing; in this case that's 0).
And with the pop change, they can't even emigrate to those frontier worlds at a decent speed (unless there's unemployment on your ecumenpoli).
 
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They were very open about how they were going to nerf planetary POP growth, and the only really surprising thing to me is just how high they set the "per pop" multiplier since the diaries focus more on the growth S-shape for planets, something that in the current game quickly becomes fairly irrelevant except for players manipulating per-planet growth to stick to the middle on depopulated planets with massively excessive housing due to the empire wide-penalty.
I read those diaries but but as I've said in other responses, reading their musings and plans is very different than actually seeing the numbers and how they work in a practical sense. I certainly didn't understand that the system they were describing is the one we got, and never in a million years did I imagine they'd just set a flat stacking malus that would head empires directly towards near-zero marginal growth.

I imagine some of them are even proud of the result, because the code base has got to be tough to work with by now, and every victory counts.
I shudder to think anyone there is actually proud of this debacle. They made population growth mechanics obtuse and then slapped a basic diminishing returns equation on Empire growth. If anyone is proud of themselves for that, I'm cringeing.
 
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I read those diaries but but as I've said in other responses, reading their musings and plans is very different than actually seeing the numbers and how they work in a practical sense. I certainly didn't understand that the system they were describing is the one we got, and never in a million years did I imagine they'd just set a flat stacking malus that would head empires directly towards near-zero marginal growth.


[...]

I read every diary, every week, its mostly interesting and has become part of my weekly routine, even if i do not play that much Stellaris anymore. I was actually really excited when i saw the changes to pop growth, that they go down the path of carrying capacity. This is stil the right way to handle the pop system for me, i love the mod for 2.8.x. I havent looked back to the diary yet, but i totally missed the part where they mentioned the empire wide penalty.

And its the same as you thought it: I couldnt imagine that they add such a strange mechanic just for the purpose of empires stop growing...
 
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I read every diary, every week, its mostly interesting and has become part of my weekly routine, even if i do not play that much Stellaris anymore. I was actually really excited when i saw the changes to pop growth, that they go down the path of carrying capacity. This is stil the right way to handle the pop system for me, i love the mod for 2.8.x. I havent looked back to the diary yet, but i totally missed the part where they mentioned the empire wide penalty.
It was the first things they mentioned! My underlining:


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.

Of course, that's not what they focused on in the dev diary; they focused on the less controversial S-curve aspect for planetary growth, something that arguably has some justification as an abstraction for how population growth "really works", than the empire-wide increase to the cost of growth with empire population, which does not in any way, but is more efficient at achieving their overall goal: limiting the number of POPs, whatever it takes.

EDIT: And certainly I was as taken aback as anybody by how high they set the penalty! But I guess it has the advantage that if they later reduce it in post-release balancing, traumatized players will embrace it. Those who haven't already modded in another value, that is.

It is amusing to remember when rereading that diary, how last time they claimed a major overhaul would reduce micromanagement (tiles=>districts overhaul), the result was to greatly increase micromanagement of planets for anybody trying to play well, and this overhaul - so far - appears that it may do so as well, even as, just like last time, the primary objective (districts based economy then, tolerable performance now) is achieved.

Players may end up looking back to the era of mindlessly resettling POPs off planets and building buildings only when needed as a golden era of less micromanagement than getting the most out of the S-curve and performing counterintuitive strategic play to gain POPs from other empires though non-growth and non-conquest - or perhaps that's just my sick sense of humour talking, and instead it'll all end up feeling like playing fallen empires, waiting for the next POP to spawn, but at least not having to actually do anything whatsoever once things are set up right. :D
 
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there's only so many times we can overhaul systems before maybe we should ask some questions about why we keep feeling the need to do that.
I suggest more public beta testing and "spit-balling".

We've had two planetary economy reworks, one galactic economy and resource rework, at least two different sector systems, a war declaration/resolution overhaul, two of the three FTL methods from 1.0 are dead and buried, a diplomacy overhaul which was mostly cosmetic, a ship design overhaul, there's also suggestion of a faction/internal politics overhaul in the trigger docs and cut art work which arrived with 3.0.1.

Recently with Nemesis there were previews of features and forum responses to both Spy Systems and the Galactic Empire were "Wouldn't it be cool if..." followed by "Yeah, we cut it out."

The answer doesn't sound like "more internal testing" to me.
 
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Possibly instead of a straight linear malus affect it as a similar weighted S-curve to the changes to planetary growth equation? More planets and habitats, less malus as there's room to expand in the growing empire?

That would enable it to expand with galaxy size.
 
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I suggest more public beta testing and "spit-balling".

[...]

Yes, a public test branch where they can just give options and sight of what is actually happening could help to avoid such controversial releases.

If the players had a chance to test the pacth of megacorp without the new content it would maybe never be released.
If the players had a chance to test the patch of nemesis without the new content it would never be released.

When we start to play the game, we can sink endless hours into testing and reporting for the devs. The players who will play a test branch will most likely the ones who care, give feedback and discuss problems. Even the concrete heads of Blizzard got that they need a public test realm (PTR) to collect data for new content. Games are to complex today for some douzend people testing it, even if they are the most experienced people to do so.
 
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What if rather than planet capacity and empire-wide penalty per pop, there was an empire-wide capacity value and S-curve for growth?

Basically the current planetary growth curve gets applied to the empire as a whole, taking in consideration available jobs and districts all across the empire to determine remaining capacity.

Imagine you've filled all your planets, so naturally growth grinds to an halt, so you build a ringworld, and suddenly your empire's capacity is much higher, so pops start growing again and resettling to the ringworld automatically.

Do you think this would be a good alternative to the current system?
 
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I'm very new to the game. I had my first game on ensign difficulty to get a feel for it and finished it a day before the 3.0 update. I'm now in my second attempt at captain difficulty with machine mind droids and I just can't figure out how to get them to work.

In my first playthrough I was micromanaging jobs and housing to manage overcrowding and homelessness. In 3.0 I'm micromanaging the few pops for menial jobs to keep the economy going and can hardly assign any to specialized jobs without crashing it. I'm sure a lot is due to my inexperience, but in both the droid playthroughs the game slowly grinds to a halt. With a organic/synthetic mix population I assume the grinding halt will come even sooner.

I don't like it. The new growth cap system feels like a one-size-fits-none solution for a problem that I thought was already being addressed by Administrative Capacity.

The S-curve growth seems fine (and logical) for organics, but instead of stopping reproducing, can't they just emigrate faster?
For synthetics a linear growth seems fine, but maybe have sprawl on a curve?
And Administrative Capacity and sprawl could affect grow and assembly cost, speed and upkeep. Tweak bureaucrats accordingly and with diminishing returns.

And perhaps, until AC can be reworked, have this new growth system as an option in the settings? I never experienced lag and I'm sure it will be a while before I do. I'd like the option to hamstring my pop growth only when it actually becomes a problem in my games.

I have no idea if these proposals are even practical or useful, but the main thing is that this new growth system makes the game grind to a halt long before any lag is able to. And that's not good.

Just the 2 cents of a n00b.
 
Do you think this would be a good alternative to the current system?
Virtually anything would be a better alternative to current system. But the best alternative is to dig into engine to make it better handle pops. I mean, galactic pop count rarely raises above tens of thousands and is unlikely to raise about hundred of thousands during normal gameplay.
 
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The 0.5 increase per pop is too much. Maybe consider changing it to 0.25? Also, increase the carrying capacity just a small bit.
Carrying capacity should already do most of the job. Let growth be per planet instead of empire wide. I get what they what they were going for, as nation's population increases birthrates fall across the board. But it's not based on pure population, but economy. Carrying capacity already achieves some of this. IMHO carrying capacity + S curve + immigration tweaks should be enough
 
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