0 Economy exploits are getting more and more out of hand. LEM 3.1 made it WORSE

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doomwarrior

Second Lieutenant
66 Badges
Oct 18, 2006
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Congratulations on introducing THE most ridiculous 0 economy exploit with this new update paradox.

Machine Empire + Cataclysmic processing eliminates the need for minerals all together for your beloved alloys as a machine. Whats the drawback you ask? NOTHING...nada, none, de nada. You get unhappy bio pops, less bio pop growth and beware....less bio pop production. Which means you can magically transform nothing into alloys. You can ignore food alltogether and dominate the game completely.

If this new dev team is meant to balance the game, they need to adress the penalties for not having ressources ASAP. A sneaky player can prevent being discovered doing this for a long time...

We really need updated penalties for not having the ressources you need based on the actual circumstances, races, ethics, civics and such. They need to hurt.
 
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"Cataclysmic Processing" indeed! It makes no sense that the game merely gives you penalties for having 0 of a resource while still letting you "use" that resource for production. If you have no minerals, every building that uses minerals as input should immediately stop working - and the same goes for food and other resources.

Not having food should cause your bio pops to start dying as well, in my opinion.
 
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You don't need energy either as a machine empire since -50% minerals penalty from jobs doesn't apply to mining stations and you can get around -75% Ship weapon damage penalty by selling minerals for energy at the start of battle and then the penalty disappears for 1 month.
 
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If this new dev team is meant to balance the game, they need to adress the penalties for not having ressources ASAP.
I don't agree with this. Yes, this exploit is bad, but it's an exploit - if you don't like it you can just not use it. Fixing it should be a lower priority than fixing actual bugs that can inflict themselves upon people uninvited.
 
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They stil did not changed the lack of food to actually start killing Pops every month...?

And this exploit is easy to fix. Just need an extra "if" statement if the Empire have the Civic and reduce alloy production to 0.
 
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When playing with that civic, i would have wished to have a way to help a transition between food alloy and mineral alloy.

it would be a policy with three tier:

tier 1 : 100 % food / 0 % mineral
tier 2 : 66% food / 34% mineral
tier 3 : 34% food / 66% mineral


that way you can tailor the consumption of food to fulfill your other needs while still saving minerals.

we already have something similar for alloy/consumer goods, so why not having that?

however policies like that should be sliders to give the sense of having the industry taking time to adapt (you should only be able to move, up or down, one tier every 10 years.)
 
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Looks like a candidate for the usual 3.1.2 hotfix patch in a few days.
Together with the digsite, which allows u to nuke a system of ur choice...
MP games for the next days is gettin kinda intense....
 
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If it's only for human players, you could make all the resource shortage penalties extremely punishing while not causing a cascade economic failure: basically no alloys, no science, no pop growth/assembly, no unity, no colony establishment and your ships can't shoot. None of this outright kills the economy, it just makes you dead in the water, so you have to go into pure economic survival mode until the problem is solved. If this is too extreme, large % penalties could also work. Given that the market exists, even fairly inexperienced players can figure out how not to ever be in shortage.

I suspect the reason they don't do this is that if it also applied to the AI, it would reveal that the AI is also running on fumes a lot of the time, in this case due to incompetence + inability to adapt rather than a deliberate exploit, and it would become even more stagnant on tech and so on than it already is.
 
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If it's only for human players, you could make all the resource shortage penalties extremely punishing while not causing a cascade economic failure: basically no alloys, no science, no pop growth/assembly, no unity, no colony establishment and your ships can't shoot.

I suspect the reason they don't do this is that if it also applied to the AI, it would reveal that the AI is also running on fumes a lot of the time, in this case due to incompetence + inability to adapt rather than a deliberate exploit, and it would become even more stagnant on tech and so on than it already is.
The way resource effects currently work is that each one has a list of modifiers that just trigger when 0 in stockpile+ neg income. They don't seem to be selectively applied.

If you added -100% alloy output to food shortages that could also mean that alloys coming from minerals (e.g. in a non catalytic empire, experiencing food shortages) will also be reduced to zero.

To do this (without rewriting how resource shortfalls work - which would be cleaner, but more work) they'd need to add triggered output modifiers to all the jobs in the game if the associated input resources are missing (or looks for an empire modifier).

A more comprehensive solution is to add "Supply Shocks - [Resources] - large/mid/small" as a decaying modifier to an empire, equal to 1.5x the time you were at zero.
This would mean that if you'd been on zero energy for 4 months, and you restored income, it would take 6 months for your fleets and non-energy industries to fully regain their strength (with it going from large/mid/small debuffs every 2 months in this case). Rather than it happening immediately on the subsequent month. [And this would require a bunch of triggered modifiers in jobs and other places, not just the 1 negative stockpile one we have now]

But I agree, this would probably nuke the AI, as you said... Unless you also tweak how upkeep works. So going in debt on minerals for example not only reduces output to 0% but any associated jobs (e.g. artisan) reduce upkeep to 0% too (as they aren't producing), this can scale from 0-100 based on the modifier or how deep in debt you are (e.g. 100% more used than produced). It would need some testing but this might let the AI adapt over time... Or it could lead to situations where most AIs have 3-day weeks and rolling brownouts lol. This may also be a bit more realistic, if you have +200 minerals in and -201 minerals out, there's no reason for everyone to stop making alloys. They can all just do a bit less.
 
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I believe simply noone of the QA checked playtesting a catalytic processing machine empire, because everyone assumed it would be weak and it was not so obvious.
The clone army origin on the other hand was heavily tested to prevent players from tricking the ancient clone vat building limit.
Anyway - thats what the first days after a new patch is released for. So the community discovers the severest bugs which slipped through.
Remember the bug where the ai never declared any wars?
 
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To handle it, the first thing is to shift the alloy production penalty from minerals to food when using catalytic processing.

On top of that, maybe they could do either of:

- Scaling penalties. The worse the shortfall the higher the penalty, until production is cut off completely.

- Differentiate upkeep as hard or soft requirements. For example, minerals are a hard requirement for alloys and consumer goods, but consumer goods are a soft requirement wherever they're used (research, etc). When a resource is a hard requirement, you can't produce more output than what's available as input. For example, if you're producing 8 minerals a month, and alloys take 4 minerals per month each, you can't ever produce more than 2 alloys per month. If multiple things have minerals as a hard requirement, then the minerals are divided proportionate to the number of pops working each job. Soft requirements would work the way they do now.
 
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Its the same thing for swarms with the same ability to turn food into alloys.

In early game you can focus completely on research. This eliminates the need for energy and minerals. The drawback?

EnergyMinerals
-50% Minerals from jobs-50% Alloys from jobs
-75% Army Damage-50% Consumer goods from jobs
-75% Shield hit points-75% Robot build speed
-75% Ship weapons damage-25% Lithoid pop happiness
-75% Lithoid pop growth

For a swarm? none, since you focus on research. You can even ignore alloys if you like.
Its not as severe as the machine exploit but you can techrush like no tomorrow with no drawback, none.

The entire penalty table needs to be fixed, as can be seen here: https://stellaris.paradoxwikis.com/Economy
Its global, everyone gets the same malus for not having something. Some make sense, most dont make any sense at all. In multiplayer this is a real problem. These exploits cannot be detected in early game.
 
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This is a bit of a hysterical post.

It's not a game breaking bug.

Just flag it with the bug team and move on. The AI won't exploit it and if you play multiplayer, just set down some rules.
 
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I think this is one of the cases where it'd be great to have effects that don't alter productivity of "jobs that produce resource X", but also modifiers that alter productivity of "jobs that USE resource X". So if you use food to produce alloys, but don't actually have food, then production of alloys could be reduced by X%. Or potentially, it could even reduce production dynamically, based on how big your deficit is.

That way, all of these edge-case economic exploits could be avoided, because those modifiers would take into account what you're actually doing with those resources.

As a bonus, there's probably a lot of cool stuff that modders could do with these modifiers.

Not sure how feasible it'd be in terms of performance though.
 
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I think this is one of the cases where it'd be great to have effects that don't alter productivity of "jobs that produce resource X", but also modifiers that alter productivity of "jobs that USE resource X". So if you use food to produce alloys, but don't actually have food, then production of alloys could be reduced by X%. Or potentially, it could even reduce production dynamically, based on how big your deficit is.

That way, all of these edge-case economic exploits could be avoided, because those modifiers would take into account what you're actually doing with those resources.

As a bonus, there's probably a lot of cool stuff that modders could do with these modifiers.

Not sure how feasible it'd be in terms of performance though.
No clue on performance till someone tests it but there might be a simple-ish solution for implementing this.

3.1 added triggered pop modifiers for species traits (see voidborn habitability now).

You could have a trigger testing if country is in debt in X resource, then impose -100% output on that specific resource for pops. (Or a scalar affecting upkeep too, with some extra maths/checks). It would mean all species would need 1 trait to hold this test, like how machines have one and lithoids have one (which this trigger can be added to), all biologicals would need some... universal 'biological' trait as a container, which is quick to try.
 
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Congratulations on introducing THE most ridiculous 0 economy exploit with this new update paradox.
Is it? Way I remember it, in 1.5 you could get by without food as a hive-mind (since you only got pop opinion penalty, which is irrelevant), also filling sector(s) with mines to produce loads of minerals (since lack of energy did not affect sector output in any way) and only keep enough energy production to run your fleet and whatever infrastructure you need in the core "sector".
 
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These abuses are nothing new.
The shortage system has just been broken for too long, if not always.

It should be reformed, for example: Shortage - Prosperity : progressive
With a system like this, it's easy to adjust it to accommodate that civic (and possibly others with the same principle of replacing resources) and also to prevent abuse by selling/buying a ridiculous small amount of resource at the start of the month.
 
Well, i just now wrote a little mod trying to at least adress it a little bit so that "everyone" suffers not just some races and others can exploit however much they like. Have a look and give me some feedback if you think this prevents most exploits at least better than vanilla. I asked a couple of my friends to help me with the known exploits so we could counter most of them.

This is just a simple "change the values for everyone" mod. Nothing fancy with event modifiers, but its a start.
For comparison here are the vanilla resource deficits:

0 Economy exploit fix Mod:

Here are the new deficit rules:
### RESOURCE DEFICITS

energy_deficit = {
planet_jobs_produces_mult = -0.5
ship_weapon_damage = -0.75
army_damage_mult = -0.75
ship_shield_mult = -0.75
spy_network_levels_add = -100
pop_amenities_usage_mult = 1
ship_speed_mult = -0.50
}

minerals_deficit = {
planet_pop_assembly_reduction = 0.75
lithoid_pop_happiness = -0.25
lithoid_pop_growth_speed_reduction = 0.75
planet_jobs_produces_mult = -0.5
pop_amenities_usage_mult = 1
}

food_deficit = {
biological_pop_growth_speed_reduction = 0.75
planet_pop_assembly_reduction = 0.75
planet_jobs_produces_mult = -0.5
pop_amenities_usage_mult = 1
}

influence_deficit = {
planet_jobs_unity_produces_mult = -0.5
pop_amenities_usage_mult = 1
}

alloys_deficit = {
ship_armor_mult = -0.75
ship_fire_rate_mult = -0.75
ship_speed_mult = -0.50
}

consumer_goods_deficit = {
planet_jobs_unity_produces_mult = -0.5
pop_amenities_usage_mult = 1
}

volatile_motes_deficit = {
planet_jobs_produces_mult = -0.25
}

exotic_gases_deficit = {
planet_jobs_produces_mult = -0.25
}

rare_crystals_deficit = {
planet_jobs_produces_mult = -0.25
}

nanites_deficit = {
custom_tooltip = nanites_deficit_tooltip
}
 
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the whole shortage mechanic is broken and abusable to the point that some minmaxers use it intentionally. shortages are things that should be avoided at all costs and if the current mechanic isn't encouraging that behavior, the mechanic should be changed.
 
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