2.2 SUSTEMATIC micromanagement problem (attention, please)

[SpectralShade]

the problem right now, is that you are better off just bombing a planet to 100% devastation and calling it a day rather than conquiering it.

Conquering means you take a heavy hit after the war. Bombing it means your opponent takes a heavy hit.

Tell me again who is supposed to be the winner of a "won" war.

 

[sillyrobot]

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?

You can shut a factory? How?

The planets had almost no districts developed so they weren't self-sufficient even if I had a working population.

Factories take about a year? to come online. All my planets were still growing population and I had issued orders for further growth as unemployment developed. I kept doing that when the numbers first dipped negative because I hadn't yet realized things were going to get worse.

 

[PirateJack]

Ideally we just need 3 things:

1. Sectors to cover more area. I've proposed increasing the sector generation range to 4, with a monthly check to see if it needs to be expanded or not as well as one on colony starting to see if a new sector needs to be created. This would cover both your starting colonies and a substantial area around, which will make sectors quite formidable once we get the internal politics rework to make them distinct entities that may rebel.
2. Automated resource allocation to the sector (or allow it to use its own resources up to a set cap, after which the overflow goes to the player)
3. Get the AI to a state where we can trust it to not tank its own economy without human assistance.

We'll be able to meddle with sectors easily enough if we need to specialise (and human placed buildings should be blacklisted for being replaced), but otherwise that would make things much easier on us once our empires get to a larger size. I'm the kind of guy who loves keeping plates in the air and even I'm struggling to do it once I reach ~12 planets.

 

[AlanC9]

Select a building and you'll see buttons for Replace, Demolish, Disable, and Repair. Hit Disable and the workers become unemployed and building maintenance stops being paid.

 

[Cymsdale]

I think a big part of the problem should be solved by better notifications. In previous versions you wanted to build a new building when the old one finished, so the “building completed” notification was useful. Now the main time you want to build on a planet is when there is unemployment or overcrowding, so these should have notifications. That way you wouldn’t need to scroll through the outliner all the time checking up on your planets.

The general terribleness of notifications in Stellaris has always bothered me, especially since the notifications in all the other Paradox games are so helpful.

 

[sillyrobot]

Select a building and you'll see buttons for Replace, Demolish, Disable, and Repair. Hit Disable and the workers become unemployed and building maintenance stops being paid.

Thanks, I think that'd have gone a fair distance in controlling my haemorrhaging.

 

[TehJumpingJawa]

Thanks, I think that'd have gone a fair distance in controlling my haemorrhaging.

Which begs the question... Why is maintenance charged on idle buildings?!

It's almost like the designers think more button clicks = better.

 

[~Robbie]

Which begs the question... Why is maintenance charged on idle buildings?!

It's almost like the designers think more button clicks = better.

I really do believe that a lot of design decisions are born out of creating busy work for players to pad out downtime.

 

[maxp779]

Yep, you do have to revisit planets far too often in 2.2; planet babysitting.

It becomes progressively more tedious the larger your empire becomes, and the one tool we had to mitigate this (sectors) is hopelessly broken.

The 'construction competed' notification is practically useless too; tell me what's been completed fgs!

Couldn't agree more.

Give me working sectors please Paradox, im approaching mid game as a standard ME and im pretty fed up with planet babysitting.

 

[KingAlamar]

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.

Here I think we can agree. There's a healthy balance between making [even a lot] of reasonable, meaningful decisions vs. needless micro that seems like it can punish you if you let it go too long.

As for job balancing I build my buildings & districts "just in time" so for workers + worker buildings / districts it's no problem other than the "just in time" overhead. I would like priorities so that once I build specialist and/or ruler buildings that I could influence which workers leave their jobs to take promotions.

Summary: Adding quality-of-life things along with updating "inter-related" systems so that they work more organically with the recent changes.

 

[Delthor]

I would like priorities so that once I build specialist and/or ruler buildings that I could influence which workers leave their jobs to take promotions.

This is pretty reasonable. My personal preference would be some kind of sliders to dictate relative weight of jobs within a statum. Being able to do an absolute priority would be fine, too, but sometimes I want to keep two worker jobs roughly even rather than always prioritize one over the other.

 

[KingAlamar]

This is pretty reasonable. My personal preference would be some kind of sliders to dictate relative weight of jobs within a statum. Being able to do an absolute priority would be fine, too, but sometimes I want to keep two worker jobs roughly even rather than always prioritize one over the other.

I'm sure there's room for UI improvements. The actual details of the implementation don't matter much as long as it brings the quality-of-life bonus we were discussing earlier without taking away anything [useful] from the decision-making process.

 

[Blurb]

I'm sure there's room for UI improvements. The actual details of the implementation don't matter much as long as it brings the quality-of-life bonus we were discussing earlier without taking away anything [useful] from the decision-making process.

Room? It's strictly necessary; trying to play Stellaris in its current state is frustrating.
The current UI is hopelessly useless when it comes to managing large numbers of planets effectively - the only way to avoid this is to artificially restrict how many planets you control.

Imagine the ridiculousness of the situation: The player represents some supreme authority of a nation spanning dozens of planets and hundreds of star systems.
Yet the authority is never provided with information in a convenient way. Sure, it can access each planet individually and scan for the needed information, but that is a task far below the level of this entity.
Do you want me to believe that this unusually powerful entity does not have an assistant who can fetch a list of planets with untapped deposits of strategic resources?

 

[Etrutian]

What went from a mobile farmville type engagement to actual specialization of worlds. While 'districts' are a very hard-to-grasp concept in the way of providing meaningful interaction, they do at least allow interesting economic choices in the game. As well, building order has never been more important for the early stages of a colony.

 

[KingAlamar]

Room? It's strictly necessary;

I was trying to be "charitable".

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trying to play Stellaris in its current state is frustrating.
The current UI is hopelessly useless when it comes to managing large numbers of planets effectively - the only way to avoid this is to artificially restrict how many planets you control.

I won't disagree here. I, for RP reasons, deliberately kept my system count low. By 2450 I only have 12 or so planets [counting Ring worlds] and 55 systems. Probably could have taken out every single "regular" empire 100 years ago & the FEs 50 years ago but chose not to bother.

The constant "planet-scan-analyse-build as needed" cycle really made me mad. I would use other words but I'd rather not get banned At least we tested things for the DEVs so they should be aware of some relatively easy to implement automations that would help.

Note: I don't disagree that we should have to make a lot of the decisions to be optimal. It's not getting help carrying out our "vision" that needs work.

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Imagine the ridiculousness of the situation: The player represents some supreme authority of a nation spanning dozens of planets and hundreds of star systems.
Yet the authority is never provided with information in a convenient way. Sure, it can access each planet individually and scan for the needed information, but that is a task far below the level of this entity.
Do you want me to believe that this unusually powerful entity does not have an assistant who can fetch a list of planets with untapped deposits of strategic resources?

Well at least we have common problems with the UI. Why should I be manually scanning planets to see if "Encourage Growth" or some other decision has timed out?? While I understand that deciding what to build & when is important [and should generally be kept] why aren't there more tools to help automate the decisions that I've already made / want to make.

 

[PirateJack]

Room? It's strictly necessary; trying to play Stellaris in its current state is frustrating.
The current UI is hopelessly useless when it comes to managing large numbers of planets effectively - the only way to avoid this is to artificially restrict how many planets you control.

Imagine the ridiculousness of the situation: The player represents some supreme authority of a nation spanning dozens of planets and hundreds of star systems.
Yet the authority is never provided with information in a convenient way. Sure, it can access each planet individually and scan for the needed information, but that is a task far below the level of this entity.
Do you want me to believe that this unusually powerful entity does not have an assistant who can fetch a list of planets with untapped deposits of strategic resources?

If you click F4 and open up the relevant sector it'll tell you how many of each district you have/total districts available per planet. The font for the numbers could do with being white text with a black outline, though, because just white text melds into the background.

 

[Blurb]

If you click F4 and open up the relevant sector it'll tell you how many of each district you have/total districts available per planet. The font for the numbers could do with being white text with a black outline, though, because just white text melds into the background.

I want you to try using that panel for managing an empire larger than just a few sectors.
Just looking at this picture, can you tell me if any of the planets can support has a rare planetary feature for motes/gas/crystals?
Can you tell me if the planet has workers to spare, needs amenities or is about to stop pop growth from housing shortage?

 

[PirateJack]

I want you to try using that panel for managing an empire larger than just a few sectors.
Just looking at this picture, can you tell me if any of the planets can support has a rare planetary feature for motes/gas/crystals?
Can you tell me if the planet has workers to spare, needs amenities or is about to stop pop growth from housing shortage?

Agreed. It does need some work to make it more useful. As it is this screen only shows the current production, not the total possible for each. I'd stick a post in the suggestions forum asking for this to be updated so it becomes more of an Empire Management screen.