300+ Hour Player, Megacorps makes this game unplayable.

[Eled the Worm Tamer]

this right here. everytime i get to the crisis now everybody is pathetic to me. except the crisis. and if it is the scourge its broken. so i win the game. but if its unbidden or AI its basically me vs the crisis because every other ai is so worthless.

the AI really doesnt totaly conquer people like fanatic purifiers used to. the ai really doesnt hate you when you get to strong. it really is a economy game with a war aspect as a perk, a secondary game if you will.

Is the AI not keeping up, not really more of an AI issue than an econ issue?

And as for it being reduced to a resorcebalancing game? What do you think reall life politics comes down to? Balancing resorces to manage growth in ways desirable to those making the calls. Trade.

 

[Flyinghotpocket]

Is the AI not keeping up, not really more of an AI issue than an econ issue?

And as for it being reduced to a resorcebalancing game? What do you think reall life politics comes down to? Balancing resorces to manage growth in ways desirable to those making the calls. Trade.

Well. we already know for a fact the ai wont upgrade their buildings. so they keep pace in the early game. but then they quickly fall behind when you start upgrading. The ai straight up doesnt war and devour other ai's like they used to. their aggressive-ness isnt the same.

I literally didnt buy this game to represent real life politices clearly. its a space game. i bought it because the music was stellar, the game play was fun, the science prevented B-lining, the ai were always doing something dumb. waring with each other, devouring each other.

 

[Eled the Worm Tamer]

I hate to say this but unless you bought the DLC, in which case you should have done your reserch... You can just revert to the last version and the game you liked wont have gone away right?

Meanwhile, the simulation is so much deeper now we have gameplay beyond war scope to be clever and have it rewarded, actuall choices! I kind of hate to say 'get good'... but if you cant manage your economy you dontdeserve to go to war and win.

 

[Serenity84]

Is the AI not keeping up, not really more of an AI issue than an econ issue?

Yes. It's not an issue with the economic system itself. On a more basic level the AI is able to develop a planet in a reasonable manner. Specialization is another issue maybe. Like not exploiting a mineral world properly. It also mines and synthesizes strategic resources. But then it runs into issues like not upgrading its factories. Or not clearing tile blockers which prevents further development.

 

[fourworlds]

Wait you can deprioritize? Where do i do this?

In the job screen for every planet, there are the plus and minus buttons on each row for each job. Minus will deprioritze the job and force a pop to find another job. Just make sure when you need that job again you prioritize it because I believe pops will go unemployed rather than take a depritoritzed job.

This helped me as when I was starting, I built in anticipation of a growing population, so my planets always had tons of jobs, but the right jobs I wanted filled weren’t being filled, so my economy was always unbalanced. Once I learned this, it helped me run it much smoother. So even though you can’t assign a specific pop to a specific job, you can make sure that the jobs you want to have filled are filled.

I would recommend that if players are struggling, they come to the forum with posts that are closer to “I don’t seem to be getting this, can someone help me figure out what’s not working for me?” and less like “This game is unplayable”. People don’t have a problem explaining the new system to people, it’s a little rough to get your head around and easy to miss little details like being able to peioritize jobs, but once you do, the game makes a lot more sense. And It doesn’t matter how many hours you have in the game either, it’s a radically different game now in this aspect so we’re all having to learn it regardless of the hours we’ve put in. And if you get it and still don’t like it, then that’s fine too, but you can express that in a way that’s constructive instead of “it’s unplayable” which will convince no one that your point of view is valid and the community will just get annoyed and nothing will be accomplished except more frustration.

 

[Matoro_TBS]

But... isn't the fact that you CAN crash your economy a good thing? I mean, that makes economical choices matter. Back in 2.1 it was just "build a matching building to the right resource tile", now there's actual gameplay in economy. Sure, it can be a little cryptic and hard to control before you get the hang of it, but it makes the game harder and that is definitely good thing. Saying it's bad design that you lack resources is like saying wars are bad design when you lose them.

 

[Xephos Demonslayer]

Hey, loved the game prior to this current expansion; the game is currently unplayable for me now until the resource problems are fixed. I actually made an account just to give feedback on this.

The game has turned for the worse into a resource bouncing game, and is your primary concern always. The biggest threat to you is no longer other empires, it's the internal management of resources that you have to walk a tightrope on or immediately lose the game.

1. I can't control where a citizen goes: They pop into whatever building or district they please, and I can do nothing about it save turning off the building and waiting 5 years for them to get off space welfare and off to the farm. At first I thought I could force them by only having one district type open at a time, but then your planet overcrowds because you don't have housing, at which point you have to either build a crappy apartment building in your limited building slots, or continue building more districts....I hope you have an open district slot of the same type open, or you're now dealing with random distribution of pops. This could be fixed by allowing me to move workers within a strata, or by increasing resources gained by said structures.

2. You are constantly out of something critical: Every game I have played so far has been an exercise in delaying the inevitable. Eventually, your lack of resources cascades until one of several things happens that ends the game:

--A. Your energy starts to deplete, either because of all the other crap you're forced to build to give you resources, or the ships / army you have to get to stave off invasion. If you are invaded, this exacerbates your energy depletion as your systems are taken to the point where you get -75% damage to all your ships, ending the game as your crap fleet is eradicated; my favorite part is when it happens between jumps when I'm about to attack a fleet. You are unable to build more, because alloy makers take energy which you don't have any of.

--B. You lose consumer goods, either because you don't have minerals or you're trying to stave off the much more critical energy depletion by shutting down your citizen manufacturing centers. Suddenly your entire population flips out and starts invading your own planets. I hope you've been putting 10+ armies on that planet, because otherwise its gone. While I like this gameplay element in theory, combined with all the other ridiculous resource restrictions it's excessive.

--C. You can't afford alloys, which require both a crapload of energy upkeep, plus a crapload of mineral intakes, and a ton of citizens to unlock the building slots in order to actually make the damn things. The amount of alloys you need for ships, colonies, system expansion, etc is obscene compared to slow sluglike pace you generate them at. Attempting to speed up this resource generation will result in one of the other cascading economic effects that result in you getting wrecked by another civ.

3. The above problems might be fixable, except for the fact that the pops grow at a snails pace, and the first pop you grow is a useless ruling administrator who does nothing. I also love that I have 3 useless clerk slots in my capital that also do nothing. I don't want their crappy luxury goods or whatever useless crap they generate, I want to send their asses into the mines to get me some shiny rocks, or the local nuclear plant because I'm -5000 energy trying to make alloys.

It would be great if Paradox could address these issues. There's promise in a lot of the new gameplay, but right now the amount of micromanage-y crap that I have to deal with now (which still results in cascading economic game loses) is ridiculous.

I have 1000+ hours and have had the game since Asimov (pre Leviathans, when there was still 3 type of FTL and you could steal an FE's broken RW through border protrusion abuse), but I'm not gonna say "git gud lol", like I want to, so please give me the courtesy of actually reading my advice and trying it out before flaming me that I'm a dumbxss and that it doesn't work.

1: Multiple threads about this already, I agree that we should be able to manually shuffle pops within strata (if only because its less clicking), and that gestalts and some authoritarians (especially corvee system) should be able to move around pops however they feel like in general.

2: Every game I've played so far has never had this problem: I use the internal, and then galactic market to hold off any resource deficits until I patch them up.

A-- As a regular organic empire, I don't even build energy districts, my clerks make EC at a 1:1 value from trade, allowing me to spam everything else much more easily, selling whatever I have in excess atm, and buying whatever I need atm. I literally make all planet-bound energy off of trade, no technicians whatsoever, especially once I get the tradition that doubles clerk jobs per district. I don't know how you're loosing to the AI atm, it's fxcking braindead rn, and by 100 years in, with a paltry 10k fleetpower I'm always, uncontested, the strongest nation in the galaxy until the Khan busts in (who has been disabled by me until building sizable fleets can work again) I barely produce alloys myself, I just make everything else and buy them off the market until I have the motes to run 3-6 lv 2 alloy plants (depending on mineral availability), and then stay on that until my HW is made into and Ecumenopolis.

B-- This is usually the things I have in surplus that I sell, I legitimately can't understand how you consistently bankrupt them, as I've yet to go under 500 unless I've sold below that amount on a 50+ monthly surplus...

C-- Alloys. As I've said, I don't make more, I just buy them until I have motes. Then I run on 3-6 lv 2 alloy buildings until I get my 1st ecumenopolis, whereupon I replace them with the metallurgist districts and demolish the buildings so I can sell the surplus motes to buy more alloys. They are trying to address it, and the beta has made returns less terrible, but I admit it still needs work.

3. I'm pretty sure base pop growth is 2x faster than pre 2.2, it just feels slower because you need more pops for everything. Since you haven't mentioned a starvation problem, I'd recommend running the encourage growth edict on your Homeworld at all times until your first colony, then as much as you possibly can on your HW and any colonies where the capital is still lv 1. Also take rapid breeders, because growth speed is the new meta atm. Though machine pop growth atm is literally unplayable, but that's another thread ( here ) Those clerk slots are arguably better than your technicians, because they make amenities to keep your pops happy, and make trade value that becomes energy at a 1:1 ratio on the default policy, or 1:0.5 and 1:0.25 Consumer Goods and Unity (respectively) on other policies available from game start, which would help you with both 2-A and 2-B.

My recommendation is that your HW is primarily spent investing into city districts to make EC from trade, mineral districts, and farm districts. The 1st world you colonize should be the one with the most mining districts available with at least 60% habitability, build 1-2 city districts for housing and then try to max out mining D's on the planet to make it a mining world for the extra 5% boost. Next planet is a farming world, same setup, so you can have enough food to constantly run growth decision on as many worlds as possible, and you can sell extra food in a pinch. Always try to have enough civ buildings to be making 10+ CG, and sell surplus whenever you are above 600, but try to keep a constant stockpile of 500. Use the EC from all your trade to buy alloys as needed, you don't need more than 100-300 at any moment unless you plan on going to war and are stockpiling for replacements. I generally grab worlds for food or mining, depending on which resource I need the most. Eventually you''l be shifting the resource districts on your HW to city districts to house more pops for more special buildings, and if you plan on using Ecumenopli, that's where your first will go. Planets give bonuses depending on what the most numerous job is. Try to concentrate a specific type of industry on each world for small, but beneficial bonuses. Building all civ buildings on one world will make an industrial world, which will give 5% bonus to a world that already makes a ton of CG. Same for a mining world, agri world, tech world, etc.
Lastly, try switching to the beta, they're constantly working to fix all the broken shxt, so you'll have a better time there.

Hope this helps, and sorry for the wall of text.

 

[Andragon Lea]

That sounds more like a player issue and less like an econ issue.

First off: Yes, the new economy system allows you to screw yourself over if you're not careful. While some see that as a failure, I see it as the more realistic system. If you people your empire with only scientists and have no farms, no consumer goods and no energy generation, sooner or later your scientists will be angry, smelly, hungry and annoyed at the constant brown-outs crashing their shoe-string experiments. This is a bad thing and it SHOULD be a bad thing. You SHOULD be in trouble if you mess up your empire.

That said, the main problem I've seen streamers and youtubers have with the new system is that they didn't switch their behaviours from pre 2.2. They constantly build districts on planets that have nowhere NEAR the population, housing or amenities to actually fill and supply the jobs they're creating. As a result, anytime a pop gets born they play Russian roulette. Will that pop become a miner and give me minerals, will that pop decide to be a farmer and solve my food deficit or maybe it'll become an artisan and further exacerbate my mineral shortage while doing nothing for my starvation problem.
Now, this could be solved with job priorities (which many of them don't seem to know exists or don't want to deal with if they do), but the easiest solution and the one that wastes the least of your resources is to only build new districts or buildings when you are approaching the time you have pops to fill it.

This solves several problems at once: it removes the need to pay upkeep for districts and buildings (or incur penalties for districts above the administrative cap). It stops you from putting minerals into something that's gonna do nothing for you for the next couple of years until a pop grows that actually needs or wants to occupy said districts and building job positions. It also gives you the flexibility to quickly change what you produce more of and prevents you from making the problem worse by creating jobs that take away resources you have a shortage of in exchange for producing something you don't currently need.
Say you have a planet that's nearing full occupation of all jobs. If you're doing well in all basic resources, you may want to use this opportunity to build a laboratory complex for an influx in research, but if pop growth has outstripped your food production you can instead turn on a dime and decide to build an agriculture district. As the planet was almost fully occupied with workers, you'll start filling more farmer jobs in the very near future, filling this need and allowing you to forego spending credits on buying food to instead spend it on other things.

The new system was a lot harder to get into, given that it went from a very simplistic economy (invest minerals = get more minerals, more energy credits or research in return = little to no risk or thought involved beyond "build what you want more off") to a very inter-connected one. You need amenities, consumer goods and food to keep your people happy, but also need consumer goods to produce research to improve your tech and minerals to produce alloys. Going too far in one direction or not paying attention or care when building your planets up (or indeed colonizing them) is now a major deal, when before it was almost entirely a no-brainer. Colonize anything about 15, specialize in food/minerals/energy/science with the obligatory 1 per planet special buildings for pop growth and unity, move on to the next planet.
Losing planets meant next to nothing. Sure, you lost some income, but it almost never really crippled you and was more of an annoyance than anything.

In my last game I jumped in for another player who was playing a Megacorp during a multiplayer session. He had lost one of his planets to rebels and failed to take it back, losing another 3 systems because an opportunist player next to him had backed the rebels. His empire was WRECKED. The planet he lost was where he produced all his consumer goods, which meant he had no consumer goods in storage and sat on -59 a month in production. His pops were angry, crime was rising, his fleet was destroyed by the other player and due to some change or bug (no idea which) he could not reach his rebelling planet after the other player status quo'd and therefore had no way to get it back, so he bailed.

Getting that empire back to being a profitable and dangerous entity in galactic politics was actually a challenge.

All in all I have to say that once you know what you're doing you actually have much less micro-managment in Stellaris now than you had pre 2.2. You still build things and you still fill jobs, but once you get into the flow you only have to make administrative actions on a planet once every year or two, allowing you to spend time looking for angles of attack, advantages, scouting out systems, eyeing neighbours and generally being a thorn in the side of your enemies.
While it's a more dangerous system, I feel that it is ultimately much more complex, engaging and rewarding once you adjust to it, all while being less work overall and less simplistic.

The new DLC has problems, but I'd say the econ isn't one of them, barring a few balance issues.



(edit and disclaimer: I'm saying this as someone who play organic empires, sometimes inwards perfection, sometimes megacorp - I haven't tried the genocidal types or robot empires yet so those might be out of whack and I wouldn't know about it^^)

 

[Xephos Demonslayer]

(edit and disclaimer: I'm saying this as someone who play organic empires, sometimes inwards perfection, sometimes megacorp - I haven't tried the genocidal types or robot empires yet so those might be out of whack and I wouldn't know about it^^)

Don't try robot empires RN. The beta has unbroken synth ascension in the sense that it's now no longer better to remain as cyborgs (but it still needs work), but with the somewhat exception of driven assimilators, robot civs are outright broken atm. The pop growth is terrible, and the economic balancing will be on a knife's edge until you can start making machine worlds in the midgame. Even after they nerfed the bio-reactor, it's still more profitable to make food as robots and convert it into energy than to build energy districts, and because of exploits that occurred in the dev clash by one Kaiser--- Comrade Johan (which was worth it imo), the growth speed for them was nerfed, and robots, who don't need things like "growing up" or "education", grow slower than the organics who do. Rouge Servitors (who were my second favorite after assimilators) got hit the worst, as they also need to produce CG for their bio-trophies, and no longer get empire bonuses for bio trophies, making it genuinely more cost effective to just get rid of them and play as a normal robot empire, meaning it's basically a waste of a civic slot RN. The thread for that is here, if you're interested.

 

[Zenopath]

Hey, loved the game prior to this current expansion; the game is currently unplayable for me now until the resource problems are fixed. I actually made an account just to give feedback on this.

The game has turned for the worse into a resource bouncing game, and is your primary concern always. The biggest threat to you is no longer other empires, it's the internal management of resources that you have to walk a tightrope on or immediately lose the game.

1. I can't control where a citizen goes: They pop into whatever building or district they please, and I can do nothing about it save turning off the building and waiting 5 years for them to get off space welfare and off to the farm. At first I thought I could force them by only having one district type open at a time, but then your planet overcrowds because you don't have housing, at which point you have to either build a crappy apartment building in your limited building slots, or continue building more districts....I hope you have an open district slot of the same type open, or you're now dealing with random distribution of pops. This could be fixed by allowing me to move workers within a strata, or by increasing resources gained by said structures.

I agree with this complaint. There is now only 3 job management tools that work: slavery, population controls and relocation. Giving equal rights to other races is a huge mess that can really only be fixed by gene editing them all to be decent at every job and to fit your species planet type. If you do conquer aliens, or they migrate on to your worlds, you will cry at the consumer goods and food they consume working as specialists or rulers on 20% habitability worlds. Also pop growth formula is seriously broken, why are all these aliens spawning on worlds that don't suit them and none of my own race?

Easiest solution is to put population controls (in species rights) on all alien species that do not share your planet preference or gene editing them to be pretty much same as your own species. Or constantly be resettling aliens to worlds they like. You can also manually select what race you want to spawn on a planet in the population tab of that planet, but gives -20% growth penalty, which you can easily overcome.

I do wish they wouldn't spawn on worlds they aren't suited for, preventing pop growth on worlds they do not currently inhabit (like before) would make game so much easier.

2. You are constantly out of something critical: Every game I have played so far has been an exercise in delaying the inevitable. Eventually, your lack of resources cascades until one of several things happens that ends the game:

--A. Your energy starts to deplete, either because of all the other crap you're forced to build to give you resources, or the ships / army you have to get to stave off invasion. If you are invaded, this exacerbates your energy depletion as your systems are taken to the point where you get -75% damage to all your ships, ending the game as your crap fleet is eradicated; my favorite part is when it happens between jumps when I'm about to attack a fleet. You are unable to build more, because alloy makers take energy which you don't have any of.

--B. You lose consumer goods, either because you don't have minerals or you're trying to stave off the much more critical energy depletion by shutting down your citizen manufacturing centers. Suddenly your entire population flips out and starts invading your own planets. I hope you've been putting 10+ armies on that planet, because otherwise its gone. While I like this gameplay element in theory, combined with all the other ridiculous resource restrictions it's excessive.

This i don't agree with. You will probably not like my answer, but neither of those things are a problem if you know what you are doing.

Tips:
1) Focus on trade. Use consumer benefits policy to produce some of your consumer goods, and build commerce centers, overall, 5 clerks with consumer benefits are worth more than 2 technicians and 2 artisans and an entertainer. Use the trade map to see if your trade is being interupted by pirates.

2) Reduce your consumer good consumption
a) Stratified economy, from taking authoritarian.
b) Byzantine Bureaucracy combined with Conservationist racial trait, can be stacked with stratified economy.
c) Slaves.
d) Dont build too many jobs that consume consumer resources, aka, priests, entertainers, culture workers, or scientists. Live within your limits.

--C. You can't afford alloys, which require both a crapload of energy upkeep, plus a crapload of mineral intakes, and a ton of citizens to unlock the building slots in order to actually make the damn things. The amount of alloys you need for ships, colonies, system expansion, etc is obscene compared to slow sluglike pace you generate them at. Attempting to speed up this resource generation will result in one of the other cascading economic effects that result in you getting wrecked by another civ.

I have generally not found this to be the case. But you should focus your alloy production to a small number of forge worlds, where you have 3 alloy plants in one place, this gives you a bonus to production (remember that you can still have resource districts on your forge and tech worlds, but only up to 5 of each type and still get forge world bonus).

3. The above problems might be fixable, except for the fact that the pops grow at a snails pace, and the first pop you grow is a useless ruling administrator who does nothing. I also love that I have 3 useless clerk slots in my capital that also do nothing. I don't want their crappy luxury goods or whatever useless crap they generate, I want to send their asses into the mines to get me some shiny rocks, or the local nuclear plant because I'm -5000 energy trying to make alloys.

1) Clerks aren't useless, they generate trade, each clerk can produce a base of .5 consumer goods with consumer benefits policy, at no material costs. Also amenities increase stability which gives overall bonus to all jobs. You could have too many of them, worrying about a few isn't a problem though.
2) Population growth can be increased in so many ways, you can stack bonuses and get upwards of 1 pop per year if you work at it. Best overall deal is the cloning vats from engineered evolution ascension perk, but theres a policy, a decision, and tons of tech. You can also buy slaves, steal pops from other races and make them slaves.
3) Also remember that until you upgrade your colony to a planetary admin building, which takes pop 10, they grow at half speed and steal growth from other planets. I recommend that when you land a colony, you start building 4 resource districts asap, resettle people to get to 10 population, then upgrade them. It helps so much if you do that.

It would be great if Paradox could address these issues. There's promise in a lot of the new gameplay, but right now the amount of micromanage-y crap that I have to deal with now (which still results in cascading economic game loses) is ridiculous.

I agree there is a lot issues and promise, but maybe too much micro. But you can work around a lot of the problems you mentioned if you use some of the tips i outlined.

 

[Urza1234]

I'm going to commit the sin of bumping this crappy thread to comment on the OP thinking 300 hours is a lot for Stellaris. LOL.

"I played for a whole 300 hours guys my opinion is so huge"

Im sorry, but LOL.

 

[calen]

I'm going to commit the sin of bumping this crappy thread to comment on the OP thinking 300 hours is a lot for Stellaris. LOL.

"I played for a whole 300 hours guys my opinion is so huge"

Im sorry, but LOL.

So at what hour does your opinion suddenly became valid? Is there there some gauge that slowly fills that to let you know when you are allowed to speak? I have upwards of 1000 hours in this game, yet this guy's opinion is still just as valid as mind. Now stop your gatekeeping BS.

 

[Urza1234]

So at what hour does your opinion suddenly became valid? Is there there some gauge that slowly fills that to let you know when you are allowed to speak? I have upwards of 1000 hours in this game, yet this guy's opinion is still just as valid as mind. Now stop your gatekeeping BS.

Right, sure, but do go around quoting your hours played as a qualification to your statements?
I suppose not, its a behavior exhibited when people want to make a point, but have no better argument. "I didnt like X and since I cant make a coherent argument because my opinion is either wrong or stupid I'll quote my hours played"
Generally we all ignore such behavior, because as you point out its pretty much valueless.

I just thought it was reeeeeally funny to see someone trying it with 300 hours.

Just LOL.