2.2 is not too much micro...It's just the tools to micro are bad

[M3anB0b]

To preface I really think 2.2 is the right way for Stellaris. Doing something besides just mashing the upgrade button between wars is actually amazing and gives a lot more room for interesting game play. However, I think all of the complaints in this forum about how annoying the micro is or how bad the economy is in 2.2 can easily be fixed by a more robust planet management UI. The fact that you have to click through each planet and look at housing, unemployment, etc. is bad.

I haven't tried to use sector management in this patch, but I never trusted it so my opinion is to just give players more information (if they want it) instead of abstracting away planet management. Basic things like telling you how many months until the next pop grows on a planet, telling you when there will be a housing shortage, or I think, the biggest thing, is to tell you the underutilized jobs on the planet and the resources they would produce if filled from a high level outside of the planetary management screen.

Basically, if the sector management screen had A LOT more information or if there was a new interface, I think a lot of the headaches from 2.2 could be fixed without changing the awesome core mechanics Paradox introduced in 2.2.

I've always wished the outliner provided just a little bit more information. That may be all it needs, giving you at least some of the info I wished for above so you don't have to constantly click through each planet to get the most out of your empire.

Thoughts?

 

[Fourthspartan56]

Considering that today's dev diary mentioned that they plan to make some changes to the planet interface I think the devs agree with you.

Personally, I completely agree. The UI makes things worse then it would be otherwise and gives an impression of more micro then there actually is.

 

[~Robbie]

I'm all for additional micro if the micro leads to interesting decision-making or strategy.

The micro present in the game right now isn't that, though. It's just busy work. There's absolutely no thought that goes into it, you just do it because you have to do it to succeed.

 

[Apollon]

What makes it worse is that the planet UI is so tiny, hard to read and tedious to navigate.
There's no way of telling whether a building is staffed by looking at it. You have to go over to the population tab, click the microscopic plus symbol to expand the class, scroll through the various jobs, scroll up again because you likely missed what you were looking for and because only 3 rows at a time can be displayed, and finally guess at which buildings are staffed and which ones are understaffed if you have several.
This kind of information should really be present on the same tab. Clicking a building opens a side panel that displays what pops are working in it, how many worker slots it has, and what it produces and consumes - not as a tooltip, but right there on the panel, in plain view.
The population tab should be reserved for things that pertain to society: Crime, demographics, a second pie chart that breaks down the population according to faction membership, housing, amenities, consumer goods consumption, and maybe a button that expands a side panel displaying every pop on the planet on a single table.
And for Zeus's sake, enable us to choose manually which pop gets to work in which building!

 

[Kypamop]

I'm totally agree with topicstarter but also in my own experience the sector AI is still bad.
And sector AI is the thing that should be used to remove that micromanagement stuff in lategame.
I've tried to use it in my latest game but after a few decades when I checked the planets that were under sector AI government I was shocked. Had to disable it completely and solve all the problems personally.
But the fact is that when I did not look at those sectors I had only 2 core sectors under my direct control and I did not feel that it was too much micro. Was boosting my ecumenopolis and having fun.

 

[nuyu]

Give pop-up at top screen like other notifications when house is empty, jobs are filled and decisions buff is out.
So when I clicked that pop-up it will redirect mt to that planet.

 

[kmh42]

I agree!
I need a usefull planet list. With 30 planets the outliner is hard to view at and the sector view is quite useless with half of the sectors only containing 1 planet.
My plante view would integrate: Name, Sector, Type, size, resources, pops, building slots, notifactions about housing etc..., colonization date, when aquiared, govenor and other usefull stuff. But most importatly this list should be sortable. I have no need for a list where I cannot sort things.

I said this on another thread but it fits here as well.

 

[Delthor]

I think the best idea that's been kicking around is always showing an icon for employment and housing in the outliner, showing green for spare jobs/housing, yellow for exact parity, and red for unemployment and overcrowding. This may lead to a bit more of the "Oh god, get rid of the yellow and red!" syndrome that's been causing people to think they need to stay under the admin cap, but I think it might be worth it, since it makes the most important information available at a glance, especially since the 0 mark is the ideal place to take action in most situations. Improving the planet UI would be great, too, but I think this outliner change would be the best way to reduce the manual checking.

However, no amount of UI changes will be enough if they don't improve the sector controls and AI. We need manually drawing sectors (with certain limits), the ability to send them resources monthly up to a cap, and better AI so they can build something that's reasonable. I also think that we should be assigning the build priority on a planet level, rather than a sector level. If I have two planets in the same system with one having a research boost and few useful districts while the other has a mineral boost and tons of mining, I'd like to be able to tell the sector AI to specialize one in research and the other in minerals. The sector-level job can perhaps be a default if you haven't set something on the planet level.

 

[maxp779]

I don't need more information or a better UI. I need working sector's that can be fully automated.

 

[MNOne]

Yes. Whilst, as someone above said, a lot of the micro is just tedious busywork, the major problem is terrible AI, and UX design that makes absolutely no sense. As in, how did anyone think this was a good idea?

On the AI side:
-Pop growth (especially robots, which are basically just tools which shouldn't have demographic pressures other than what's useful) is terrible. I have species which have no presence on a planet growing, despite the fact that it has a 20% habitability rating for them. Bots designed for maximising unity output are mining, whilst the enforcer jobs they're suitable for are taken up by generic bots with only an Efficient Processors trait. Planets with no farming jobs free - or no farming jobs at all! - are building farming specialist robots. When I try to fix it manually the pop growth is halved.
-Sector AI doesn't seem to learn or take account of preferences. If I overrule a building's construction, or replace it with something better suited, the AI just restarts construction or rebuilds it. It also builds up unsuitable infrastructure, not taking account of potential planet-type bonuses. 8 generator district slots on a world, but only 3 mining? You better believe it will build only mining districts on that world, whilst building generators on others in the sector.

These are things that should have been checked and ironed out first, before 2.2 was even released. Balance can be fine tuned; but in order to know how to tune it the actual mechanics have to be working.

The UI and user experience, meanwhile, shouldn't have even made it past the design stage.
-Wonky AI could be worked around if you could properly assign pops to jobs. What on earth was the thinking behind the convoluted priorities system?
-You can't assign useless bots to be decomissioned - "purging" is now locked behind a bizarre rigmarole that affects an entire demographic, not a pop-by-pop basis - you have to hope that there are planets with suitable jobs to reclocate superfluous pops (and in some scenarios these are citizens - only a fanatical authoritarian should find themselves in a situation where they regard citizens as superfluous!).
-And what's with an arbitrary 50% growth rate malus when you prioritise pop growth (where that's available)? I can maybe see that making sense for organics, but robots?
-As said above, knowing which buildings are on a planet, and which are staffed, are needlessly separated. The entire planet view is fragmented and poorly laid out.
-One-planet sectors make no sense. How was this not picked up in early playtesting? Maybe the solution is to let players fix it manually; or maybe you just insert a check at galaxy generation that finds such potential sectors and recombines them into larger groupings; but the way it works presently is glaringly awkward and an obvious pain in the arse.

 

[EvilKnievel82]

The most annoying thing to me is actually that you can't activate the planetary edicts in a centralized manner. Having to click through 30 worlds to renew the growth edict is just as annoying as the old tile system. Just give a central edict for all planets that scales in cost with the number of colonies (i.e. 30k food for 30 planets).

 

[MNOne]

The most annoying thing to me is actually that you can't activate the planetary edicts in a centralized manner. Having to click through 30 worlds to renew the growth edict is just as annoying as the old tile system. Just give a central edict for all planets that scales in cost with the number of colonies (i.e. 30k food for 30 planets).

I don't think you always want those decisions to apply to all planets, but you make a good point - add something to the Planets and Sectors screen when you can put a check next to each planet (and a "check all/clear all" option) and then activate a particular decision/planetary edict for each. Not dissimilar from how you apply species templates.

 

[Pyoro]

For it feels like mostly the wrong micro.

Managing piracy patrol fleets? Tedious and boring. Don't want to. Would be nice if that were simpler.
On the other hand, "designing" my Empire with certain POPs in certain jobs, adjusting where people live and work etc. - I'd enjoy doing that, but I'm not actually allowed to do much here.

So the stuff I would want to bother with I can't do, and the stuff I don't want to do I have to do. ^^;

 

[Mortmal]

Since 2.2 stellaris is finally shaping into a great game, its closer to victoria 2 now with the new economic system and has much more depth. Most of my complaints have been adressed, you can play tall now and have small specialized high tech fleets or wide with a large fleet of rusty unupgraded ships and it works. Station defenses finally works too now due to alloys rarity they are much more cost efficient and cant stand versus a fleet.
Still there's a few glitches and it could use some quality of life improvements like mentioned before, for exemple, when i am trying to sell slaves, you can filter by race only, i'd like more filter options to be able to send unemployed people on the market with no regard of species.

 

[Ezumiyr]

There are a lot more things that could be shown on the galaxy map, and I hope the devs understand it at some point.
Each system with a colonized planet could have various icons. It would make the map (which is the vast majority of what you have on the screen by default) something else than a pretty picture that is only useful during wars. Currently most useful informations about management are concentrated within the tiny outliner on the right.

Either they'll need to expand the outliner, or they'll have to increase the informations available on the map.

There are also things that are (and have always been!) badly designed. Decrees and edicts should have an auto-renew button. Planets should have customizable alerts (like "tell me if the next growing pop will create unemployement/housing shortage", just like we already have an alert for blockers). We are also in dire need of economic and demographic charts, in order to understand the tendancies within our empire and on the galactic scene. We shouldn't have to open the diplomacy screen to know the empire ethics of other empires - it should either be in a tooltip when hovering the mouse, a map indication, or a map filter. Playing a Megacorp, we should be able to select foreign planets by a single click on the map, rather than needing to open the system view, click the planet in order to open the firm panel.

And more than anything else, Paradox: please stop making such tiny windows for planet management. Every other space 4x game has a big, almost full screen window dedicated to planet management, that also shows a really nice artwork/picture of the planet, and most of the management decisions on the same screen. Just look at the buildings categories on the Stellaris planet management window...