2.2.3 Balance

[Dalwin]

- research for bonus minerals from space station is good idea, but it's too weak. There is no way it's enough. I feel like it should be upped from 10% to 20 or even 30 per research. The mineral consumption goes up and up. You have special building to increase mineral production, thankfully, but you don't always have a good mineral-producing planets. Not to mention tall playstyle.

- Idea for upgraded buildings to require rare resources is good, but lack of upgraded versions of rare resource producing buildings really hurts specialized worlds. You could disperse alloy, consumer goods and research all over the empire - and have no real need for rare stuff. Or you could try to specialize - and suddenly you have to pay either lots of money on the market, or lots of minerals, to produce stuff to be able to have lots of t2 and t3 buildings on a single planet. It's not so much a complaint, but rather it's making tall gameplay a lot less enjoyable then it was initially looked.

I have to disagree with you on this bit. This was a problem with how you were playing and not with rare resources per se.

Just because you have a specialized world, let's say 8 alloy foundries for example, does not mean that you should be able to upgrade all of them. If you only have an income of 4 motes then you can probably only upgrade 4 foundries. This is true whether they are all on one planet or spread across four of them. Specialization is still better.

 

[Atreides]

I think Habitability is currently the biggest problem that then spawns off other smaller problems.

There is almost no advantage to high habitability (80+).
The penalty for low habitability is so low as to be meaningless.

Humans therefore colonize every planet, even tomb worlds and exploit the additional resources for profits. The AI stays away from low hab worlds, and falls behind in gross prodution every time.

High habitablity should have a growth bonus so you want those 90+ worlds to grow on.
Low habitablity should have a massive growth penalty so they are no longer a no brainer decision.
Hapiness should also rise and fall with habitability rating so those low hab planets are hotbeds of revolution, and further resources are required to make those planets viable.

Mineral production is fine. If you are really having a problem, take some combination of slavery, Agrarian Idyll, very strong, Industrious and Mining Guilds. Aristocratic Elite is also top notch for production. I have yet to build a matter decompresser in any of my games - it would only lead me to selling minerals on the market at bad prices even faster than I already do.

 

[Slynx]

Downside is that you get a -100 to naval capacity so no building ships for you!

so basically you need to build 3 starbases (they give about 30-36 naval cap). and since building over the cap is usually not an issue - it's an unbalanced thing.
-1000(or even more harsher Naval Cap == 0) would be more fair number

 

[Gratak]

Debatable, at least early-mid game.
Rare resource production building consumes quite bit of minerals, so by building advanced building to pack more people on one planet you are sacrificing a) mineral income (which is a very limited resource as it cannot be harvested from habitats/ringworlds) or b) 1-1.5 district on another planet dedicated to fuel said building.
I'm fairly certain that mid-lategame you don't want advanced buildings consuming rare resources except mineral booster. (it might change once you run enough repeatables for mineral production) I also don't think that you should pack planets with people, all mineral districts and probably most food districts should be built, because again, minerals are a very limited resource.


That said, realistically speaking rare resource production should cost way more energy credits than minerals in my opinion.

It depends on settings and what empire type you are playing.

 

[Raithnor]

My two energy credits:

Rare Resource upkeep for building is too high. Something like 0.5 upkeep would be better. At least then there would be a point to building Synthetic Rare Resource buildings. If one Synthetic Resource building can support two buildings.

The other thing is even though the Administrative Cap penalty don't hurt that much it does seem like you blow through it fair quickly.

That's all I've got, otherwise I'm enjoying the update.

 

[bobucles]

That said, realistically speaking rare resource production should cost way more energy credits than minerals in my opinion.

I'm of the opinion that rares should cost their color matching resource. Motes cost minerals, gases cost food and crystals cost energy. That way an empire can specialize harder on these rare resources and thus open up more market opportunities.

 

[Starcomet]

so basically you need to build 3 starbases (they give about 30-36 naval cap). and since building over the cap is usually not an issue - it's an unbalanced thing.
-1000(or even more harsher Naval Cap == 0) would be more fair number

I need to check again, but in my current game I also have have specializations tech that allows you to ever further the strength of your starbases at the cost to a cumulative -50% to naval capacity. It gets to a point where you cannot have any naval capacity unless you take the one supremacy tree perk.

 

[anamiac]

Many of the issues with 2.2 interrelate. In order of priority:

1. AI is crap.
2. Late game slowness.
3. Lower tolerance for economic mistakes. In previous versions, inefficiency just meant that my economy grows slower. When people started going negative on resources, it was because their fleet was too big, and there was almost never a crisis I couldn't solve by disbanding some ships. Now, inefficiency means my economy collapses, and it's generally got nothing to do with my fleet size, and no quick solution besides the market. I feel that this is one of the contributing factors to #1.
4. Micromanagement. Mostly an issue because of #1 and #3. I don't trust the sectors to handle my economy, as every time I take a planet I observe a mismanaged mess.
5. Population. Planets can support eight times the population as in 2.0, but population still seems to grow at the same rate. I'd like to see population grow faster. Available housing, Available jobs, and large existing population should all exponentially increase population growth rates.
6. Instead of auto-promoting when a building is built, I would prefer for new buildings to get staffed only by unemployed citizens, otherwise remaining vacant until new population are born. This would help with #2 and #3. I should at the very least have this as a policy option.
7. Rare resource production feels boring. I don't enjoy the necessity of building Exotic Gas Refineries and synthetic crystal plants. What I'd love to see is a galaxy with a couple nebula with 4 systems and each of the systems has half a dozen Exotic Gas deposits. If you own one of the nebula, then you can mine it and you don't need to build refineries... although your neighbors might envy your riches. Imagine resources in space worth fighting over besides just planets. Similar clusters would exist for chemical motes and synthetic crystals. Ideally, late game you'd be able to build spaceports in these systems and improve the rate at which you mine the advanced resource.
8. Market feels like a crutch. I feel that it's an offshoot of #3. If the economy were relaxed, the market would not be necessary.
9. Different ethics are not balanced. Word is that hive minds are OP and Artificial Intelligences are weak.

 

[Delthor]

I think the fundamental systems are very well balanced. The balance issues mostly lie in the details. Ascension perks, traits, civics, etc. all have things that are too powerful and not powerful enough.

The worst is the ecumenopolis. It's so much more powerful than Gaia worlds, habitats, and even ringworlds. Machine and Hive worlds are closer, but the ecumenopolis is just way too over the top.

 

[ShaTiK]

Surprised that I have to disagree with almost every single point.
1. AFAIK, minerals from stations research does also increase the amount of rare resources you get. And even without, it is useful if playing with low planet numbers.
2. No, if you don't use the upgraded buildings, you can fit way less people per planet. Thus, you would be way less effective. Though I disagree with their nerf of the tier 3 buildings in 2.2.2
3. See 1.
4. Pop growth with organics and robots together is pretty fast. I think it does make sense to restrict it a bit. Though I don't think that they actually "fixed" what Kaiser Johan did in the dev clash. Having double growth from the start of the game (i.e. assimilators or organics starting with robots) it pretty OP in growth terms.
5. That called random. True randomness appear non-random to humans.
6. See 5.
7. Don't think alloys are the problem anymore. There are much bigger issues with economy (for example energy for robots being much harder to get than food)
8. They do have refunding. IIRC, the machine finisher of diplomacy tree. Though the could really at other ways to get it.
9. That just meant that you did little research focus. Though as I wrote in 2., the T3 buildings are very weak now. They give the same number of jobs per rare research as the T2 ones, so there is really little reason to do the extra research.

1 and 3 - I just cheked, it actually increase the yield of rare resources, it just don't show that it's actually counting it down to 0.1. So having 1.1 production gives you 1 each month for 10 months and 2 in the 11th month. Which I had no idea it does, nor research effect, nor the way game calculates resource. So, I take that back partially. But I was not saying it's useless - I'm saying it would be nice for this research to be more powerful to help more for tall playstyle, so my point still stands.
2 Can't see what this 'No' is about. My point was that if you go wide, real wide - you CAN get around by dispersing advanced resource production all around the empire, naturally mixing it up with workplaces with high building slot per work slot efficiency. That would be a hassle and quite unefficient, but you can get by, plus you will have some rare resources anyway, so having some of them upgraded is totally okay. Alternatively, you could place a lot of high tier buildings on a same planet - but in this case you need a lot of rare resources. Which are, well, rare, costly on market and don't have tiered producing buildings for themselves. And this goes very badly with tall gameplay. Which is what I had experience with - two games with megacorps.
5 Maybe it's random, maybe it's something about algorithms. That's why I'm asking - if there are players that had the same thing happen to them, maybe it's not that random. Or maybe it is
6 You didn't get my point. It's not so much about how many eligible empires for megacorp special features are there - it's more about the fact that I can't get commercial pacts, because AI thinks that mutually beneficial agreement is bad idea. In this case AI behaves like modern russian government, beliving in zero-sum-game. And it would make sense for xenophobes and such to behave that way - but currently every AI does this. It is very similar to EU4 problem with 'too many diplomatic relationships'. Which was, curiously, partially fixed by AI having a special secret reserved slot for human player. But I digress.
7 Maybe. From what I saw, out of all resources, energy have the most ways of producing, so dunno about that one
8 Ehnm.. So, you are saying that thing exists for a single type of empire at the end of the particular unity tree? And that's somehow is an answer to my idea 'let's give everyone a small refund for buildings and districts since they are quite expensive now'? I'm missing something here? This sounds snarky, I don't mean to be rude, but I really can't see the logic here.
9 But that's the thing - the sheer number of research went up. And I honestly don't know whether the 'average' research production went up, compared to per 2.2. If it didn't - then research just got harder, for no particular reason. Given, the whole economy was reworked, so balance is tricky.

 

[ShaTiK]

Many of the issues with 2.2 interrelate. In order of priority:

1. AI is crap.
2. Late game slowness.
3. Lower tolerance for economic mistakes. In previous versions, inefficiency just meant that my economy grows slower. When people started going negative on resources, it was because their fleet was too big, and there was almost never a crisis I couldn't solve by disbanding some ships. Now, inefficiency means my economy collapses, and it's generally got nothing to do with my fleet size, and no quick solution besides the market. I feel that this is one of the contributing factors to #1.
4. Micromanagement. Mostly an issue because of #1 and #3. I don't trust the sectors to handle my economy, as every time I take a planet I observe a mismanaged mess.
5. Population. Planets can support eight times the population as in 2.0, but population still seems to grow at the same rate. I'd like to see population grow faster. Available housing, Available jobs, and large existing population should all exponentially increase population growth rates.
6. Instead of auto-promoting when a building is built, I would prefer for new buildings to get staffed only by unemployed citizens, otherwise remaining vacant until new population are born. This would help with #2 and #3. I should at the very least have this as a policy option.
7. Rare resource production feels boring. I don't enjoy the necessity of building Exotic Gas Refineries and synthetic crystal plants. What I'd love to see is a galaxy with a couple nebula with 4 systems and each of the systems has half a dozen Exotic Gas deposits. If you own one of the nebula, then you can mine it and you don't need to build refineries... although your neighbors might envy your riches. Imagine resources in space worth fighting over besides just planets. Similar clusters would exist for chemical motes and synthetic crystals. Ideally, late game you'd be able to build spaceports in these systems and improve the rate at which you mine the advanced resource.
8. Market feels like a crutch. I feel that it's an offshoot of #3. If the economy were relaxed, the market would not be necessary.
9. Different ethics are not balanced. Word is that hive minds are OP and Artificial Intelligences are weak.

With all due respect, that's not what I'm asking. These are valid points, but only one of them is about balance.

 

[Dalwin]

My two energy credits:

Rare Resource upkeep for building is too high. Something like 0.5 upkeep would be better. At least then there would be a point to building Synthetic Rare Resource buildings. If one Synthetic Resource building can support two buildings.

The other thing is even though the Administrative Cap penalty don't hurt that much it does seem like you blow through it fair quickly.

That's all I've got, otherwise I'm enjoying the update.

Even though a synthetic producing only one means that two building slots get used, it is still worthwhile if you compare it to using a pair of T1 buildings instead.

The synthetic approach gives 6 jobs instead of 4. It also produces 25% more of whatever than the double T1 approach does. I think this is fine. Increasing synthetic production would greatly devalue the natural deposits of rare materials. It is good for these deposits to have real value.

Now if you compare a T3 building plus two synth versus a triple T1 approach, one wonders if the reduction to T3 buildings was a good thing.
Now you get 8 of the end product instead of 6 given by triple T1. That is only a 33% increase when you already were at 25% by going to T2. Before they nerfed it from 10 back to 8, we were looking at a 66% increase in productivity which seems reasonable considering the expense in production and research for getting to this point.

 

[ShaTiK]

market

wtf are you talking about? disperse production and don't need upgrades, or concentrate and do need upgrades?
Wether disperserd or concentrated you don't need to upgrade the buildings at all. Its 100% optional. The only benefit concetrating production/research has is that your planet will get a special tag with a minor production/research bonus. I don't see why you suddenly should pay trough the nose on the market for upgraded buildings if you decide to concentrate production.

You mention market twice - have you played with AI mod, where AI actually uses market and overall does stuff? I did, the prices skyrocket in midgame and stay around 2 to 3 times above their 'normal' price. Which is to be expected when there is a dozen of participants (that's for default number of empires for large map and that's not even a lot). So, yeah, you could compensate stuff with market. It's just not the answer to any balance issue.
The point about concentrating (the part with infinitely hilarious image) - yes, that's what I was talking about. You either have a a consumer goods factory, alloy foundry and research lab on every planet - and don't upgrade them. Or you place 8 t3 labs, research institute and assist research science ship and have a nice concentrated place for all your science. Or you place 8 t3 consumer good/alloy production buildings and place a production ministry, plus ensure the planet have very high happiness and stability. This way this planet would have a lot more then 'a minor bonus'

 

[Gratak]

My two energy credits:

Rare Resource upkeep for building is too high. Something like 0.5 upkeep would be better. At least then there would be a point to building Synthetic Rare Resource buildings. If one Synthetic Resource building can support two buildings.

The other thing is even though the Administrative Cap penalty don't hurt that much it does seem like you blow through it fair quickly.

That's all I've got, otherwise I'm enjoying the update.

The special buildings do produce two rare resources.

1 and 3 - I just cheked, it actually increase the yield of rare resources, it just don't show that it's actually counting it down to 0.1. So having 1.1 production gives you 1 each month for 10 months and 2 in the 11th month. Which I had no idea it does, nor research effect, nor the way game calculates resource. So, I take that back partially. But I was not saying it's useless - I'm saying it would be nice for this research to be more powerful to help more for tall playstyle, so my point still stands.
2 Can't see what this 'No' is about. My point was that if you go wide, real wide - you CAN get around by dispersing advanced resource production all around the empire, naturally mixing it up with workplaces with high building slot per work slot efficiency. That would be a hassle and quite unefficient, but you can get by, plus you will have some rare resources anyway, so having some of them upgraded is totally okay. Alternatively, you could place a lot of high tier buildings on a same planet - but in this case you need a lot of rare resources. Which are, well, rare, costly on market and don't have tiered producing buildings for themselves. And this goes very badly with tall gameplay. Which is what I had experience with - two games with megacorps.
5 Maybe it's random, maybe it's something about algorithms. That's why I'm asking - if there are players that had the same thing happen to them, maybe it's not that random. Or maybe it is
6 You didn't get my point. It's not so much about how many eligible empires for megacorp special features are there - it's more about the fact that I can't get commercial pacts, because AI thinks that mutually beneficial agreement is bad idea. In this case AI behaves like modern russian government, beliving in zero-sum-game. And it would make sense for xenophobes and such to behave that way - but currently every AI does this. It is very similar to EU4 problem with 'too many diplomatic relationships'. Which was, curiously, partially fixed by AI having a special secret reserved slot for human player. But I digress.
7 Maybe. From what I saw, out of all resources, energy have the most ways of producing, so dunno about that one
8 Ehnm.. So, you are saying that thing exists for a single type of empire at the end of the particular unity tree? And that's somehow is an answer to my idea 'let's give everyone a small refund for buildings and districts since they are quite expensive now'? I'm missing something here? This sounds snarky, I don't mean to be rude, but I really can't see the logic here.
9 But that's the thing - the sheer number of research went up. And I honestly don't know whether the 'average' research production went up, compared to per 2.2. If it didn't - then research just got harder, for no particular reason. Given, the whole economy was reworked, so balance is tricky.

6. Well in fact the commercial pacts are bugged and the other party doesn't get anything out of the pact. They also have to pay influence upkeep.
7. Not for machine empires.
8. I did not disagree with you on that point. Just saying that it is already in the game.
9. The admin cap penalty on research is WAY lower than the old penalty. So I was running through techs very fast at some point. I know that the balance is tricky here and I dislike the very slow early game research, but I disagree on it being generally harder.

 

[anamiac]

With all due respect, that's not what I'm asking. These are valid points, but only one of them is about balance.

Alright, I guess that's valid. But I just can't understand how you can discuss balance when the game is in a state where balance is irrelevant. In my last game the AI empires didn't build a single ship for the last 100 years, ergo it didn't matter what designs they used. Balance is the lowest priority, we need a working game first.

 

[ShaTiK]

Alright, I guess that's valid. But I just can't understand how you can discuss balance when the game is in a state where balance is irrelevant. In my last game the AI empires didn't build a single ship for the last 100 years, ergo it didn't matter what designs they used. Balance is the lowest priority, we need a working game first.

That's why I couldn't play for more then 2 games. And that's why I made a thread in the first place. Usually I would just find out how balance is by playing the game. But some people have a large tolerance for slower gameplay, so some people are playing despite very poor performance. As for AI - AI mod is here to help you for now. That became a base line of sorts - the absolute necessity of AI mod, since vanilla AI is 100% inept. Devs are, I guess, are no less aware of the problem, but it takes time to fix it. And no, I have no idea how a single modder could fix in 5 days stuff, while a whole studio of people can't do the same. Things are complicated, sure, but still, that just looks bad

 

[Starcomet]

so basically you need to build 3 starbases (they give about 30-36 naval cap). and since building over the cap is usually not an issue - it's an unbalanced thing.
-1000(or even more harsher Naval Cap == 0) would be more fair number

Okay it is -50% to naval capacity and -10. So it greatly reduces it, but it can be brought back up with tech.

 

[Incompetent]

The point of building upgrades is not just concentrating production on one planet (although there are significant reasons to do so, especially with research). It's that you eventually get to a point where you simply don't have enough space in your entire empire for all the urban jobs you want to create, and you need to start compressing the jobs into fewer building slots.

Say you want to use two building slots for research. Excluding trade, you have two basic options: two level 1 labs, or a level 3 lab and a gas refinery. The latter setup requires 10 minerals and an additional pop as upkeep, but at the end of the day, you're employing twice as many researchers in the same amount of space. (You can actually do a bit better, due to the upkeep discount in Prosperity and getting production bonuses on your refinery.) It's not as spectacular as having 4 times as many researcher jobs, sure, but it's still a real gain. Of course, if you can instead trade for the strategic resources at a good price, you're in even better shape. You'll probably want to max out the deals with the trader enclaves, for instance (admittedly, the max amount they will sell you is pretty small).

Upgraded refineries that employ 2 workers instead of 1 are not a bad idea though, as something provided by a fairly advanced tech. Presumably, the upgraded refinery would not itself consume rare resources, which would make this one of the few building upgrades that is a no-brainer as soon as you have the tech.

 

[TheRomanRuler]

Give space stations point defense by default. They are stationary objects, they need it the most.

I would also like to get higher lever defenses than defense platforms back.
Defenses should also propably be even cheaper (to maintain) than they are atm.

I would also love it if build cap for defense platforms would be made soft cap like fleet cap is. If i want thousand defense platforms on same system, let me do that - if i can afford it. Like with starbases, it should get really expensive if you go over the cap.

 

[Losttruppen]

Mining station output techs, and +% job output techs both affect Strategic Resources as well as the -10% building upkeep from traditions and the Architecture civic. These allow you to almost double your SR use. They also seemed to have buffed the frequency of space spawns in 2.2.3 though I may have just been lucky.

As for mineral shortages, the (Apocalypse only) World Cracker can be absurd on a x5 habitable planet galaxy. Can drop multiple +16 mineral nodes in a single system that are affected by mining output techs.

I'm having a blast on Life-seeded starts with research focusing on my homeworld in the early game into an Ecumenopolis where you don't suffer the huge costs of exponential food and CG use from colonizing all the planets you can. I'm always overwhelming tech compared to 80% of AIs by 2250.