I was excited about the new 2.2 patch and some of the changes that were supposed to be on offer, so when it dropped I picked up the new patch and MegaCorp together. Not because I wanted to play the Corps but because I love all the flavor and fun that the new expansions and everything adds to the game.
Do you smell that "But..." coming? Because it's coming.
There's some things that are absolutely killing me right now.
--Backstory--
The very first race I spun up in Stellaris was the Tebrid Homologs and I loved them. They were adorable little tentacly Borg Race things and it was an absolute delight to marched my way from end-to-end of the galaxy and absorb literally everyone and everything. Huge Galaxy, 1,000 stars, and it was entirely One. It wasn't the first run either, it had taken several times through to try and get everything right, but it was a great learning experience for all the mechanics of the game and how to fiddle. It also showed that size, shape, and spawn location in a galaxy can really make a huge difference in how things are played out.
--2.2 Complaints, Grievances, Frustrations and Suggestions--
I don't want to the be just That Guy on The Internet (TM) and do nothing but complain about the game. I want to identify some of the pain points that I've been experiencing in the game and just talk about them, because just looking through this forum for a short time definitely highlights that the way I've been playing would be considered "sub-optimal" at the best of circumstances and "LOL U DO WUT MATE??" so I acknowledge readily that I could be fucking up royally. Because... I'm playing basically in a vacuum.
Sectors -
I'm currently spreading throughout the eastern half of a brand new Double-Armed, Huge Galaxy (I like to play big and slow) with a new species: The Saathid Swarm. An adorable Hive-Mind of murderous Moths because why not at that point? As of this point in my expansion I feel that Sectors have become the biggest tear in my wing right now. I used sectors extensively during my run with the Homolog and had several (large) sectors that were set up and devoted to very specific roles. But after a while, my attention was simply too focused on the day-to-day absorbtion of all sentient life in the universe to bother dealing with sectors in a micro-managed way.
As of this point, with the Saathid Swarm I have something like 86 planets under my control and 44ish sectors. All of these sectors are constantly demanding my attention, and I'm a busy hive-mind! I have things to do, invasions to plan, ships and technologies to research, and I just don't have the time or energy to deal with trying to ensure that all of my sectors are micro-managed correctly. But the trouble is that during my expansions I will have to deal with filling those new governing Units. That's almost 5,000 energy per governor. Then each sector will need to be filled up with Minerals and Energy by itself so that the governor can make the... modifications... to the planet that need to be handled. This is incredibly tedious work. It seems that the sector limitations is based on Jump Distance and that's fine... if there was a way to increase that Jump Distance to cut down on the sheer number of sectors I'm having to fiddle with at all times.
Deviance, Joblessness, Overpopulation, and Migration -
As a Hive-mind I don't have to worry about Happiness, and frankly it's one of the reasons why I play the Gestalt Consciousnesses I do: I just don't want to hear the noise of individuality. It's too much bother. However, Joblessness is a huge problem for me and an enormous frustration because I have dozens of planets spread across thousdands of light years all with plenty of housing and jobs that need to be filled. However, for some as-yet-unexplained reason my Drones simply refuse to migrate to their new positions. I have policies set to ensure that they are free to move around as necessary to keep population and employment and instead they stare at the wall, scratching at nothing, confused andn lost. So, I'm forced to move through all of my planets (80 and more) that have this issue and forcefully move the idle drones to a new world with enough housing and employment to keep them occupied and to silence the Deviant Thoughts that arise when they aren't doing anything.
The deviance is another pain point for me, because the alerts that one planet or another is suffering from deviant behavior are practically never-ending. They are idle, so they are experiencing deviant behavior, so I have to swing back through and make the manual modifications to every single planet and either build brand new structures manually or move the drones off somewhere else. However, this takes me back to my problem with the Sectors because this is exactly why I have the governors in the first place: So that I don't have to be building these structures manually at all times, the Swarm is simply too large and my attention is elsewhere.
System Performance Issues -
I have seen that this is a consistent problem for many people, so it's worth mentioning at least for swing through, but before 2.2 and MegaCorp my system laughed at even the largest and busiest of galaxies and right now it's struggling to process my possession of even a single half of one galaxy. I'm sure it's something that is being addressed, but it's still a source of frustration.
AI and odd construction choices -
For some reason, during my expansion I've found that the AI has been dramatically favoring Anchorages with their starbases. Like, with this latest growth period of The Swarm I found an entire species that had every starbase they build filled with exclusively Anchorages. Citadels with nothing but anchorages. And yet, with all of these anchorages they had a max fleet strenght of 30k combined across three or four laughable fleets. I'm not entirely certain what's going on here, but something seems to be strange with their construction code.
--The Suggestions--
A large portion of my problems have to do with the amount of micromanagement I need to do with Sectors and I think that some of this could be solved if it was easier to either add new governors to the new, smaller sectors, instead of trying to find the ones that are missing a governor-drone.
Another problem with the new sectors has to do with adding minerals and energy to the indiviudal sectors because they need both. At least, from what I've seen, they need both. It's the only way to encourage drones to leave planets where there isn't enough work, or too few hives and go to ones where they are needed. But when you add resources to a sector it no-longer tells you individual numbers, only a total number of materials in their stock pile which is... essentially useless. Not knowing if the sector needs Minerals, or energy and how much is currently stored makes the system nearly useless. So I have to flood the sectors with what I "think" they might need and then just hope that it's correct. Then, if for some reason, I'm incorrect, that stockpile can never be taken back. It's lost, I might as well have thrown the materials into a black hole because I've got 30k of "I Don't Know What" stored in a sector and that number hasn't gone down in a hundred years, so what the hell is Autnomous Drone 9572q1 doing with it?
Just some quality of life improvements can make little changes go a long way. I'm a busy Govrerning Sentience and I have a galaxy of Others to exterminate, I cannot be constantly called back to one sector or another to handle some deviancy or a Drone that won't work, or a Governor that doesn't know how to build.
--That's it?--
I've seen a lot of problems with people that are running as Hive-minds of some sort, and they seem to have trouble with Energy production and after a very short time I had managed to get that mostly under control. Since my food production is soo much higher than I have any need for (Processing of Others is a tremendous boost to my food production) I can readily supplement my energy production during Expansion Periods when the Energy production drops down. During the early game, when attempting to manage the young Swarm it was a matter of ensuring that there was an Energy Nexus on every planet and at least a handful of Generator Districts in use. At this point, even with all of the deviance and the issues I already have more than 1k Energy Per Month. Same with my Minerals and even my Alloys are producing strongly. And thanks to the contribution of The Others to my food production I'm at almost 3k per month food.
I'm not going to freak out or anything and say that I'm going to stop playing the game or anything absurd like that. I have every intention of continuing to play, but I feel that I may need to put the Swarm to the back for now and explore other races and mind-structures because of how this game has been playing out so far.
Any suggestions or tips will be welcome. I'll try and check back later.
Do you smell that "But..." coming? Because it's coming.
There's some things that are absolutely killing me right now.
--Backstory--
The very first race I spun up in Stellaris was the Tebrid Homologs and I loved them. They were adorable little tentacly Borg Race things and it was an absolute delight to marched my way from end-to-end of the galaxy and absorb literally everyone and everything. Huge Galaxy, 1,000 stars, and it was entirely One. It wasn't the first run either, it had taken several times through to try and get everything right, but it was a great learning experience for all the mechanics of the game and how to fiddle. It also showed that size, shape, and spawn location in a galaxy can really make a huge difference in how things are played out.
--2.2 Complaints, Grievances, Frustrations and Suggestions--
I don't want to the be just That Guy on The Internet (TM) and do nothing but complain about the game. I want to identify some of the pain points that I've been experiencing in the game and just talk about them, because just looking through this forum for a short time definitely highlights that the way I've been playing would be considered "sub-optimal" at the best of circumstances and "LOL U DO WUT MATE??" so I acknowledge readily that I could be fucking up royally. Because... I'm playing basically in a vacuum.
Sectors -
I'm currently spreading throughout the eastern half of a brand new Double-Armed, Huge Galaxy (I like to play big and slow) with a new species: The Saathid Swarm. An adorable Hive-Mind of murderous Moths because why not at that point? As of this point in my expansion I feel that Sectors have become the biggest tear in my wing right now. I used sectors extensively during my run with the Homolog and had several (large) sectors that were set up and devoted to very specific roles. But after a while, my attention was simply too focused on the day-to-day absorbtion of all sentient life in the universe to bother dealing with sectors in a micro-managed way.
As of this point, with the Saathid Swarm I have something like 86 planets under my control and 44ish sectors. All of these sectors are constantly demanding my attention, and I'm a busy hive-mind! I have things to do, invasions to plan, ships and technologies to research, and I just don't have the time or energy to deal with trying to ensure that all of my sectors are micro-managed correctly. But the trouble is that during my expansions I will have to deal with filling those new governing Units. That's almost 5,000 energy per governor. Then each sector will need to be filled up with Minerals and Energy by itself so that the governor can make the... modifications... to the planet that need to be handled. This is incredibly tedious work. It seems that the sector limitations is based on Jump Distance and that's fine... if there was a way to increase that Jump Distance to cut down on the sheer number of sectors I'm having to fiddle with at all times.
Deviance, Joblessness, Overpopulation, and Migration -
As a Hive-mind I don't have to worry about Happiness, and frankly it's one of the reasons why I play the Gestalt Consciousnesses I do: I just don't want to hear the noise of individuality. It's too much bother. However, Joblessness is a huge problem for me and an enormous frustration because I have dozens of planets spread across thousdands of light years all with plenty of housing and jobs that need to be filled. However, for some as-yet-unexplained reason my Drones simply refuse to migrate to their new positions. I have policies set to ensure that they are free to move around as necessary to keep population and employment and instead they stare at the wall, scratching at nothing, confused andn lost. So, I'm forced to move through all of my planets (80 and more) that have this issue and forcefully move the idle drones to a new world with enough housing and employment to keep them occupied and to silence the Deviant Thoughts that arise when they aren't doing anything.
The deviance is another pain point for me, because the alerts that one planet or another is suffering from deviant behavior are practically never-ending. They are idle, so they are experiencing deviant behavior, so I have to swing back through and make the manual modifications to every single planet and either build brand new structures manually or move the drones off somewhere else. However, this takes me back to my problem with the Sectors because this is exactly why I have the governors in the first place: So that I don't have to be building these structures manually at all times, the Swarm is simply too large and my attention is elsewhere.
System Performance Issues -
I have seen that this is a consistent problem for many people, so it's worth mentioning at least for swing through, but before 2.2 and MegaCorp my system laughed at even the largest and busiest of galaxies and right now it's struggling to process my possession of even a single half of one galaxy. I'm sure it's something that is being addressed, but it's still a source of frustration.
AI and odd construction choices -
For some reason, during my expansion I've found that the AI has been dramatically favoring Anchorages with their starbases. Like, with this latest growth period of The Swarm I found an entire species that had every starbase they build filled with exclusively Anchorages. Citadels with nothing but anchorages. And yet, with all of these anchorages they had a max fleet strenght of 30k combined across three or four laughable fleets. I'm not entirely certain what's going on here, but something seems to be strange with their construction code.
--The Suggestions--
A large portion of my problems have to do with the amount of micromanagement I need to do with Sectors and I think that some of this could be solved if it was easier to either add new governors to the new, smaller sectors, instead of trying to find the ones that are missing a governor-drone.
Another problem with the new sectors has to do with adding minerals and energy to the indiviudal sectors because they need both. At least, from what I've seen, they need both. It's the only way to encourage drones to leave planets where there isn't enough work, or too few hives and go to ones where they are needed. But when you add resources to a sector it no-longer tells you individual numbers, only a total number of materials in their stock pile which is... essentially useless. Not knowing if the sector needs Minerals, or energy and how much is currently stored makes the system nearly useless. So I have to flood the sectors with what I "think" they might need and then just hope that it's correct. Then, if for some reason, I'm incorrect, that stockpile can never be taken back. It's lost, I might as well have thrown the materials into a black hole because I've got 30k of "I Don't Know What" stored in a sector and that number hasn't gone down in a hundred years, so what the hell is Autnomous Drone 9572q1 doing with it?
Just some quality of life improvements can make little changes go a long way. I'm a busy Govrerning Sentience and I have a galaxy of Others to exterminate, I cannot be constantly called back to one sector or another to handle some deviancy or a Drone that won't work, or a Governor that doesn't know how to build.
--That's it?--
I've seen a lot of problems with people that are running as Hive-minds of some sort, and they seem to have trouble with Energy production and after a very short time I had managed to get that mostly under control. Since my food production is soo much higher than I have any need for (Processing of Others is a tremendous boost to my food production) I can readily supplement my energy production during Expansion Periods when the Energy production drops down. During the early game, when attempting to manage the young Swarm it was a matter of ensuring that there was an Energy Nexus on every planet and at least a handful of Generator Districts in use. At this point, even with all of the deviance and the issues I already have more than 1k Energy Per Month. Same with my Minerals and even my Alloys are producing strongly. And thanks to the contribution of The Others to my food production I'm at almost 3k per month food.
I'm not going to freak out or anything and say that I'm going to stop playing the game or anything absurd like that. I have every intention of continuing to play, but I feel that I may need to put the Swarm to the back for now and explore other races and mind-structures because of how this game has been playing out so far.
Any suggestions or tips will be welcome. I'll try and check back later.
