2.2 SUSTEMATIC micromanagement problem (attention, please)
- Thread starter HindrancUS
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When you start getting to that size your economy should be more than strong enough to take some inefficiency. For the early to mid game with 5-10 planets it’s definitely important to plan things carefully. Only build buildings when jobs are maxed out or there are unemployed, don’t suddenly over produce advanced resources etc. By the time you get to your 20th planet you should have a bunch of economic powerhouses as your core worlds. Then if you want you can afford to queue up a bunch of districts and leave the planet empty aside from 30+ jobs and a gene clinic.
A lot of the complaints about the new system seem to be that people haven’t yet adapted to how empire management works for small and large empires. They’re not the same.
That icon would be showing on most planets half the time. There's no point upgrading a building if you don't have pops to work the new jobs. Also, if you have open slots (which is the case for planets with many resource districts as they employ pops without using slots), it's better to build another basic building than upgrade existing one because of rare resources needed for upkeep.
Yes and no. I have 35 worlds in my current playthrough. Conquering 2 poorly developed worlds and assimilating their populations was enough to tank my entire empire's production and start a spiral failure. I shudder to imagine how much worse it would have been to pull out of the situation if I had allowed inefficiencies to develop.
Ideally it shouldn't.
Or at least there should be a difficulty on which it shouldn't.
I'm sick and tired of games where I can half ass things and win, or put in my all and quit half way because I got bored by it all suddenly presenting no challenge. Or even worse, quit because putting in my all, is too f-ing tedious to be any fun.
PDX seems dead-set on taking existing systems with little depth and replacing them with new systems that also have very little depth, but come with enough micromanagement to fool a significant portion of people into thinking they have depth. They did it with FTL travel, they did it with defenses, they did it with war, and now they've done it with planetary management, sectors, and the economy. And the AI, both sector and enemy, remains a persistent problem.
No part of the new system has any strategic depth or interesting decision making. It's all just additional clicks for the sake of clicks. Tons of babysitting your empire that wasn't necessary before to achieve the same result. And if you don't babysit, and try to play the game as it was before, you are harshly punished. I suspect the idea here is to pad out downtime with additional micromanagement, but the answer should be to pad it out with new and interesting content instead.
No game has disappointed me more than Stellaris has since it abandoned the original vision of the game and moved toward replacing its mechanics one by one. I had always held out hope that someday the ship would be righted, but this update has cemented in my mind that it will continue to move in this direction forever. Sad to see it happen like this.
No part of the new system has any strategic depth or interesting decision making. It's all just additional clicks for the sake of clicks. Tons of babysitting your empire that wasn't necessary before to achieve the same result. And if you don't babysit, and try to play the game as it was before, you are harshly punished. I suspect the idea here is to pad out downtime with additional micromanagement, but the answer should be to pad it out with new and interesting content instead.
No game has disappointed me more than Stellaris has since it abandoned the original vision of the game and moved toward replacing its mechanics one by one. I had always held out hope that someday the ship would be righted, but this update has cemented in my mind that it will continue to move in this direction forever. Sad to see it happen like this.
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I didn't agree with OP until I got to late game. What we need is the ability to 'plan out' our planets and have them automatically abide by that plan as they grow. Right now I'm constnatly going back to every planet once every 2 minutes to add the next stage of my plan.
So yeah, there is a lot more 'thoughtful' management in this version, but the fact that you space it out every 2-3 minutes across every planet is really frustrating.
So yeah, there is a lot more 'thoughtful' management in this version, but the fact that you space it out every 2-3 minutes across every planet is really frustrating.
Oh how about notifications when "Encourage Growth" is completed instead of having to scan manually OR to have it be an ongoing decision that could be cancelled later??
How about creating job priorities to help balance who is in what jobs at what time instead of doing that after buildings complete?
How about tweaking how ascension vs assimilation works in context of the new jobs systems?
It not the decisions themselves that are bad ... it's the lack of systems in place to help automate the nuisance-level tasks that are NOT decisions.
Until you realize that you need to do the same thing for the other 6 new planets you just conquered. The planets don't grow the same rate, your earlier planets won't need any management once it's filled, but your conquered worlds will need babysitting especially if you purged everyone. I like to play wide a lot so I'm constantly acquiring planets which means a ton more management.
Sure my economy can take inefficiencies, but the more planets you conquer these inefficiencies stack up and eventually becomes a problem.
I agree here but this is something the old system needed too. The big problems with the old system seem to be forgotten. With the new system it will be much easier to automate the ai.
Why does it add more checks when you only have to open the sector window, add some ressources and never look at the planets again?
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Overall I'm of the opinion that people need to learn that its OK to only check in on a planet every decade or so and queue up a bunch of buildings, letting it grow out to fill them over time. This is inefficient but larger empires come with inefficiencies, that's fine, that's how it's supposed to work.
But I have to admit that I do like the idea of planning out it advance, and I think I can come up with an easy way to do it. What we need is a way to set queued constructions to build only when there is unemployment - that is, the building queue pauses until there is an unemployed pop, waits until the new building/district is filled, then continues. This seems easy enough to do since its only a simple check, but it would allow you to lay out an entire planet's development at once and then come back much later to fix any big problems, but to otherwise leave it to grow slowly over time.
Could you show some math on that? Where were all your resources going?
The problem described with starbases still persists, and there's nothing meaningful about having to perform starbase upgrades in separate segments.
It should be possible to queue up a full complement of upgrades, modules and buildings, so that I can upgrade a starbase to its desired level in one pass.
Planets would benefit from same principle - I find that a lot of my planets share a basic set of buildings: unity, pop growth, stronghold.
Why can't I just queue up these buildings, so that they're constructed when the planet has sufficient pops?
What's worse is that this problem only increases as the game progresses and the outliner grows in size.
There's nothing fun or meaningful about clicking through 10 planets to check for unused strategic deposits, so why would it be fun at 50 planets?
Stellaris 2.2 suffers *badly* from what I call the "upscaled strategy" problem. Developers wanted to let players manage a vast empire, and have done so by letting players own dozens (if not hundreds of planets).
However, the player has been provided only with a minimum of tools to efficiently manage this vast empire, and so a lot of playtime boils down to sifting through what can only be called useless information.
Combined with the pathetic AI and the absolutely horrendous UI, Stellaris 2.2 become thoroughly unenjoyable before ingame year 2300.
I'm away from my game machine right now, but from memory, the two systems I took had a fair amount of population. One had a bunch of alloy factories and the other had a lot of clerk buildings. Neither had a lot of resource districts developed. My food output fell negative, consumer goods fell negative, my energy production was already under strain and it went negative too.
Just two planets out of 35 was enough to tank your economy? I've not encountered any conquest that was so disproportionate in size that had such a huge effect. I've gone into deficit for some resources that I don't make sure there's always a huge surplus of (like consumer goods) but my stockpile was always so big it was never a problem. The planets could be stabilized in time and there was always the market. What specifically happened? Were these planets hugely populated/crime ridden? Was your economy not particularly strong (i.e. very small surpluses)?
i mean they can be though. I don't have issue just checking my planets occasionally or looking for a place to fit in more food production etc. The issue i've seen, is sometimes i'll have forgotten a colony doesn't have maxed out districts for a while and os it's been under producing for decades. I wish the UI had a little num used/ num available on the outliner somewhere.
I tried taking a single planet from a hivemind. It hadn't built any food districts, but built several hydroponic farms. (???)
I resettled several pops from my capital world to take over the jobs, as all the 80-something hivepops that were getting auto-purged weren't doing anything good for me.
I just loaded up the game and took a screenshot from a save not too far after the conquest.
out of the 85 pops, 10 of them are my own that I resettled from earth. the rest are hive pops being purged.
When I look at this colony (that has an inherent bonus to mineral production, no less, from an asteroid field) I just shake my head. I can imagine that if I wasn't purging the pops that were there when I took over (and there were more of them when I initially took the planet) then my deficits from that planet alone would have been quite big.
I can't imagine how hoorible it would be to play a non-purging empire and take over several colonies at once in a war. I can easy imagine how it could tank your economy taking planets that the AI have mistreated.
It's still early in the game, probably about year 75, so my population isn't full. I was running moderate-high double digit on the primary resource surpluses generally, IIRC. Secondary resources were lower, but still positive. The conquered planets were reasonably populated -- the larger had over 40 pop -- and I made the mistake of not changing that species citizenship rights away from assimilation (actually I couldn't because there is a decade long lockout on changing rights and I had previously taken a frontier world -- I'd have had to wait several more years before invading). All the pop suddenly became unemployed and unhappy.
My food fell negative, my consumer goods fell negative, and eventually my energy fell negative. What made it worse was my main planets kept growing and a couple more alloy fabricators/research stations came online. I was able to pull out of the crash by selling minerals and alloys to buy food, consumer goods, and energy, until enough population had converted and extra districts on my main planets came online. It was very close, I essentially had no stockpiles of anything left. It took a few years to stabilize. Less than 10, because the original rulers were still unemployed.
Well, captured factories don't matter much since you can shut them down at will and eliminate the CG drain, and the clerks produce energy if you can collect the trade value. I take it the planets were heavily Devastated? Or were they just never self-sufficient in the first place?
Edit: oh, wait.... assimilation, right. Yeah, I'm not really clear how you're supposed to play that.
I'm a little confused -- your planets growing brought more alloy factories on line? Without you doing anything?
Edit: oh, wait.... assimilation, right. Yeah, I'm not really clear how you're supposed to play that.
I'm a little confused -- your planets growing brought more alloy factories on line? Without you doing anything?
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You mean conquering worlds without having the infrastructure to support them has negative consequences? The horror! They clearly need to fix this so that your military magically transforms each conquered planet into a beautiful magic fairy princess dream world! ...or you could plan for and respond to conquered planets and recognize that this extra challenge is part of the game.
I agree that the encourage growth and distribute luxuries should be toggle with an upkeep instead of having a duration and large up front cost. I expect their goal was to make these things more active and less passive, but once you're past early game, needing to remember to maintain a duration-based decision is just frustrating, not enjoyable. I also agree that assimilation could probably be improved, though this is based on others' descriptions since I haven't run into it myself.
As for job priorities, you can do this naturally through constructing districts and buildings in a disciplined manner. It would be convenient to be able to set a relative weight to each job within a stratum (especially workers), but if you keep empty jobs low, this happens naturally, and isn't much of an issue until late game.
mean they can be though. I don't have issue just checking my planets occasionally or looking for a place to fit in more food production etc. The issue i've seen, is sometimes i'll have forgotten a colony doesn't have maxed out districts for a while and os it's been under producing for decades. I wish the UI had a little num used/ num available on the outliner somewhere.
You don't actually need to max out districts on every planet. I will usually have a relatively small number of urban worlds, and for the rest, once I have all the rural districts I want (usually just mining), I'll stop growth so that all the growth on the planet is directed elsewhere where the growth is more valuable. Learning to declare a planet "done" is something that is a bit trickier in 2.2, but still important.