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Stellaris Dev Diary #211: 3.0.3 Beta Updates

Hi everyone!

Thanks for the tremendous participation within the 3.0.3 beta branch and for all of the feedback that you've been providing.

For those that are interested in joining the beta, 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.

This week we'll be talking about some more changes that we're planning on pushing in the near future to the 3.0.3 beta branch concerning further balance updates, AI, and more. These are highlights of some of the things that will be in the full patch notes and not intended to be a comprehensive list.

Bug Fixes and Further Balance Updates

From fixes to the end of the Cybrex precursor chain to correcting edict deactivation costs, we've fixed a number of issues that you've found and reported during the beta. Thank you for reporting things in the Bug Reports forum.

Regarding the economic changes, one of the common themes in the feedback has been that the sheer number of jobs in the game are too high, and we agree. Clerks are especially notorious for this, since in many cases you would rather actually see them unemployed and moving to a more valuable position elsewhere in the empire. We're taking some preliminary steps to reduce the number of jobs and changing things to focus on increasing productivity instead.

Here are some of the changes you'll be seeing soon:
  • [Balance] Reduced the number of Clerk jobs provided by buildings and districts by 40%.
  • [Balance] Clerk trade value has been increased to 4.
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  • [Balance] Buildings that increased basic resource production and added jobs to basic resource producing buildings or districts (Energy Grids, Mineral Purification Plants, etc.) now increase the base production of the relevant jobs by 1 or 2 based on tier instead of their previous modifiers. Machine empires still gain the extra resource district slots as before.

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Yes, "Livestock" counts as a "Food producing job". (Or minerals, for Lithoids.)
  • [Balance] Manufacturing focus buildings (factories and foundries) no longer prevent the other from being built on non-Ecumenopolis planets, and no longer add jobs to Industrial Districts. They instead increase the base production of alloy or consumer goods producing jobs by 1 or 2, with a corresponding increase in upkeep.
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Secondary resources like Alloys do require more inputs to produce more, however.

Balancing the number of jobs and their output will be an ongoing task, expect future updates to have additional changes.

AI Updates

We're making some updates that will have significant changes to AI behavior that should improve the effectiveness of AI opponents, as well as some changes to reduce the impact to your empire if an AI were to take control of your empire for a short duration in multiplayer.

These changes give the AI a greater focus on economic stability and improves some research related behaviors, but are also a work in progress and will continue to be updated in future patches.

We'll put up a 3.0.3 AI Feedback thread once it's live so you can let us know how you feel about these changes.

Population Growth

We're continuing to make adjustments to the current population growth systems in the game, and are exploring additional changes. Some of these are longer term initiatives, however, so in the meantime we're currently adding a quality of life feature that many people have been asking for.

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Logistic Growth and Growth Required Sliders in Galaxy Configuration

These sliders will allow you to adjust the variables related to the bonus a planet can provide through logistic growth and the amount that pop growth increases per empire pop using sliders in Galaxy Configuration instead of needing to edit defines or use a mod to do so. Please note that these sliders can have major impacts on both performance and balance. Existing saves will use the default values. (Which can themselves be overridden in defines.)

Non-English localization for these changes will not be available in the beta as soon as the changes are up, but will be added shortly afterward. Apologies for the delay!

That's all for this week. Since we're currently in a post-release cadence (as well as next Thursday being a holiday in Sweden), the next Dev Diary will be two weeks from now on the 20th of May.

See you then!
 
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AlphaAsh said:
I've been modding the game since it was released, and have been actively involved with modding performance, amongst other things. I'm not being defeatist. I'm wise to what is and isn't possible. The game can't cope with infinite pops, but it happened. I'm grateful that it is finally being dealt with.
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"Infinite pops/infinite growth" is such a strawman phrase that has only onw use: shut down real discussions, and I think you are wise enough to realize that. You need to acknowledge two facts:
  1. PDX technically can accommodate "infinite pops" by overhauling the pop system, similar to how they abolished the tiles system and went to the job system.
  2. Before 3.0, vast majority of players don't play to a quantifiable "infinite pops" stage in their game to notice performance hits.
There are ideas from mods that PDX can implement better without having players worry about sliders. For example, stop AI's obsession of creating sub-species (even with Xeno Compatibility turned off) and passively merge subspecies to reduce visual clutter and job calculation strain.
 
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COnsidering Clerk jobs, will you also take a look at teh amount of Maintenance drone jobs a Machine Empire has due to large numbers of City districts needed for building slots?
 
kgptzac said:
There are ideas from mods that PDX can implement better without having players worry about sliders. For example, stop AI's obsession of creating sub-species (even with Xeno Compatibility turned off) and passively merge subspecies to reduce visual clutter and job calculation strain.
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This 100 time over, Xeno Compatability adds a ton of late game issues, too many subspecies just adds to the already overwhelmed AI.
The amount of pops isn't the issue, its the amount of different species that might be better suited to a task that the AI has to manipulate.
 
I think that empire sprawl should either increase exponentially, or the effectiveness of bureaucrats should decrease logarithmically. This makes a lot more sense than population mysteriously taking up longer to reproduce and would use an already existing mechanic. Players may even be tempted to let entire planets go so they don't overextend, and wide empires will have a significant penalty to science, unity, etc. that even a ridiculous amount of bureaucrats can't entirely fix, only limit. Tall empires would have no bonus except a smaller percent of their population being bureaucrats and not suffering these penalties. Just my two cents.
 
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I wish we'd keep jobs the same and try having the default pop growth penalty be 0.25.

Originally that was the plan.

With the jobs change this means we're going to have more building slots taken up by the alloy/consumer good buildings. The old "Building = more jobs per district" with halved pop growth penalty might have been adequate.

Granted, this behavior could be a toggle, but having more and more options to balance the game around (0.5 pop growth penalty and less jobs, or 0.25 penalty and current jobs) isn't really good either.
 
I like moving the new alloy foundry and consumer goods factory buildings to be in-line with other boosting buildings: it just increases legibility. Now they all work the same way: you drop them to make those jobs more efficient.

Also, Gestalts seem to have a dramatically excessive number of maintenance drones right now, which sucks because they only give amenities and you don't get much for excess amenities, putting them into a clerk-like place. Oh, and in general, Gestalt civics(especially for Biological Gestalts) are kind of either boringly functional, weak, or both.
 
AI Updates

We're making some updates that will have significant changes to AI behavior that should improve the effectiveness of AI opponents, as well as some changes to reduce the impact to your empire if an AI were to take control of your empire for a short duration in multiplayer.

These changes give the AI a greater focus on economic stability and improves some research related behaviors, but are also a work in progress and will continue to be updated in future patches.

We'll put up a 3.0.3 AI Feedback thread once it's live so you can let us know how you feel about these changes.
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After not playing or buying dlc for this game for over a year, this right here will probably get me to pick this game back up again.
For the longest time it seemed like Stellaris had no intention of building a half compentent A.I. for their game.
 
Elminster12 said:
I like moving the new alloy foundry and consumer goods factory buildings to be in-line with other boosting buildings: it just increases legibility. Now they all work the same way: you drop them to make those jobs more efficient.

Also, Gestalts seem to have a dramatically excessive number of maintenance drones right now, which sucks because they only give amenities and you don't get much for excess amenities, putting them into a clerk-like place. Oh, and in general, Gestalt civics(especially for Biological Gestalts) are kind of either boringly functional, weak, or both.
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Yeah, tried a game with a Gestalt in 3.0.1, and my god I had so many Maintenance drone jobs. The only usefulness was my Unity production skyrocketed once I got those jobs to also provide Unity. Regardless, there's *faR* too many and it clogs up jobs that frankly aren't needed.
 
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Again, I think there are a few issues going on with the pop growth/jobs system.

The population malus is a bad idea; pop growth should be driven solely by how much space/housing/jobs exist; the more open space/housing/jobs, the faster pops should grow. As a planet fills, this would naturally lead to a reduction in growth, without needing an empire wide constant to artificially slow down population growth.

However, by itself this causes problems, mainly a reduction in pops without a corresponding decrease in the number of necessary jobs to fill. Which is the part of the equation the devs didn't bother to address in 3.0.1.

My stance is that long term, the number of jobs per district/building needs to decline, combined with lower overall population growth. Right now, we end up with too many jobs for too few pops by around 2300 or so, leading to a period of stagnation.
 
Please consider Merchant Guilds, giving clerks some unity production on their own without the whole trade value, Also can the Duelist jobs get a buff. Its worthless compared to soldier jobs when it comes to naval cap when soldier jobs could just get unity from citizen service and have no upkeep. Duelist "alloy upkeep". I think something like naval cap per pop would be cool for duelist instead of the job itself giving naval cap. Also can civics that are restricted on origins be changed to not choosable at start or until you have a planet for in the case of civics like Agrarian idyll. Or aleast let Agrarian Idyll be chosen but say not recommend. I just want to be able to roleplay with friends being Agrarian idyll on a ringworld where my planet crashed there as an Agrarian empire and decided to live that lifestyle without having to get everyone to use mods.
 
Less2 said:
I like how clerks now produce 4 whole trade value while my robo tech drones produce 20 energy in 2225. Very balance.
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compare it to bio empire technicians and you'll reach the same conclusion

Just up trade value/job to 5 and create +output clerk job technology and edict so I might at least consider keeping my clerks. Until then, I'll keep deprioritizing clerk jobs from year 2200 to year 2400.


currylambchop said:
Please consider rebalancing ambitions to have costs scaling with empire sprawl, so that spiritualists might become more viable.
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That's not the problem. Psionic ascension is garbage in comparison to the other ascension paths, and Technocracy can match spiritualism's unity production while producing more research. Fix those and Spiritualism might start looking competitive.
 
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This response definitely proves devs ARE listening to our feedback. I just need to see how the AI handles the sliders and if removing the empire wide pop growth breaks them further.
 
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Shoobs said:
:(
The fact that primitives don't work for me and the update is *soon* annoys me immensely. I don't care about anything else than to get primitives to not screw over ai surveying along with my own.
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Are you using mods? I had this same issue, but it was because I had the wrong version of Starnet. Someone else faced a similar problem but with a different mod.
 
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