A Paradox Employee Contacted Me Regarding Current Backlash on Forum

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Really like the answers i see in this thread. I would add that outside of war we still doesn't have choices. The game need economic, diplomacy, intrigue and internal politics enhancement quickly but...that's another subject.
All fair points. People underestimate the power of a loud and vocal minority if we band together the devs will be pressured into admitting these flaws and maybe even start working towards them
 
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If anyone has the skill or dedication to compile most major issues into a single document or form of media I would gladly share it with the current protest server and help it permeate into social media or other avenues of communication with the devs. Including the community ambassador working with us to compile said gripes.
 
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My system isn't anywhere near as good as most of you guys, I'm still rocking a 4th gen i5 but I don't really get much problems with performance. Perhaps due to I play 0.25 habitability and I don't like playing normal empires (always gestalt).

So for me personally, the military AI is the and the micromanagement is the main factors. Anything that is a "chore" in a game is a bad thing and that is what the level of micromanagement has become. I get two options in my games, disable growth and not bother any longer (expanding is one of the main points of the game, right?) or spend what feels like forever constantly moving pops around and wishing that could be automated.

Military AI is just broken, which breaks the entire war part of the game. There are entire threads that go very heavily in to what it does so the devs can just simple read any of those and see. Which is the shocking part that they either haven't or are not bothered enough to look in to it and fix it after this insane length of time - which in part makes me lose faith in the future of the game and further products from this studio.

Screw DLCs when I can't enjoy the game and when bugs remain unfixed and in most cases - not even acknowledged.
 
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Or, you know, read the pages and pages of posts about it already. To imply that the issues haven't been communicated to the development team seems surprising to me.
I agree, the concerns should be pretty obvious at this stage. I just dislike how this community ambassador has appeared out of nowhere to join a community discord of disgruntled forum users (totally not for the purposes of damage control) and asked for concerns to be repeated in that discord when it's clear as day what the issues are (hint: read your own forums Paradox, it would really help).

This from a community ambassador (I didn't even know Stellaris had one), which I've never seen before and judging from posts on here asking whether it's legit or not, I'm not alone in that. I would have thought being visible to the community was part of the job description? MrFreake still hasn't made any of this official on the forums. It's been left to a community member to do so, which as sillyrobot mentioned above isn't great PR and doesn't really suggest they're serious about this.

90% being happy with Necroids outside of the forum also totally misses the point. Again Paradox, reading your own forums would seriously help.
 
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Could it be as simple that the current backlash on the forums is because the devs have stopped engaging on the forums? Even the community ambassador doesn't have an active presence here.
 
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It's great that they are willing to collecting feedback, even if it's a strange way to do so. Anyway, I think that my suggestions are the same as other people who already posted here, but for the sake of being constructive I'll also try to provide my suggestions as possible solutions to them, where I can:

  • Performances. This is definitely one of the mayor concerns. I understand that the bottleneck here is the population. Namely that each individual is evaluated in terms of jobs, growth, etc.. If this is the case, maybe it would be worth to pass from a discrete analytical system to a (quasi-)continuous probabilistic one. In this new case the population on each planet is just a number (in billions), and the job/factions changes are all in terms of probability distributions. For instance, you can define the distribution amongst the different working classes (e.g. specialists, workers, but also criminals) of a certain species, and use it to directly compute the planet's output according their population size. It is also possible to simply draw samples from those distributions every month in order to simulate a bit of fluidity in the jobs allocation. A similar approach can be used for the different political factions. Jobs/factions shifts can be executed manipulating the relative distributions directly. Each species population size for each planet can then be efficiently computed with the logistic equation p(m+1)=r p(m)(1-p(m)) for each month m (p(m) in this case is the population density in the planet/habitat at a month m and r is the growth rate, also based on the traits). Some fringe cases where we are forced to use the unitary population system (e.g. slave market, resettlement) can be converted in either a fixed amount of individuals (in the former case) or a % of the origin's planet population (in the latter). Maybe there are cases or specificities that make this approach not viable, but if this is not the case it would solve the late game performances problems, make the system more realistic, and also streamline some operations. With a bit of tuning the game dynamics and balance won't even be much affected (just the performances). I was thinking (a while back) of creating a mod based on this idea, but unfortunately I lack the required time for that.
  • AI. This is the closest second worst offender. Stellaris has huge potential and a lot of deep mechanics, but these mean very little if the AI fails to use them properly. I understand that the AI is script-based. Maybe the game would benefit of some machine learning techniques, like some specific applications of reinforcement learning. This approach could also be tuned in order to provide specific personalities according the ethos. This can be interesting but more complex than the scripting approach. Even without this, the scripting approach we have now can still be used to improve the AI dramatically. Either way, I believe that allocating a considerable amount of dev time in improving the AI would benefit the game in the long run. It's kinda pointless to build up new, deeper, mechanics if the human player is the sole to effectively use them (in SP at least).
  • Micromanagement. Again, this is a problem that is particularly manifest in the late game. We definitely need a way to automatise most of the planets management. Having sector's governors that are actually effective may be a solution in the short term (see AI problems above).
  • All you need is war. Another problem is that in thinking about what to do with your empire in the short-mid term, war is all you need. War itself must be a core aspect of the game, I'm not denying that. But the point is that the stellaris framework (and theme) can potentially be much more. What I'm asking here is (as many other people suggested) a revamped internal politic, that is (i) very meaningful in their effects (not just % boosts) and (ii) a reflection of your empire ethos. In my opinion, this is exactly what would make the mid game engaging, instead of just a series of downtimes from a war to the other.
  • Crisis fixed/improved. Ok this is not exactly something that I've experienced a lot myself, but I've read a lot of criticism on that regards and I feel it justified. I believe they require a pass of bugfix and adding some unique mechanics to them.
  • Fleet template. Ok this instead is a pet peeve of mine. When I think about a template I think about an ideal situation that is applied to several concrete instances. What we have here is the opposite. Now in creating a ship (concrete instance) you are actually creating a new template. I would rather have a system where I can have "free" fleets (as before the templates patch) but with the added possibility of assigning a premade template to a certain fleet. Those templates can be created and modified using the current interface, but when a ship is created "by hand" from shipyards is not assigned to any template by default. Each fleet with a template assigned can have only the type of ships defined in the template, up to the number specified there. Fleets with a template can be reinforced, and necessary ships can be gathered from "free" fleets around or built from nearby shipyards, whichever is faster to arrive. This would simplify the fleet management and also remove the extra "orphan" templates that now proliferate in the UI (seriously those things seem to breed when I'm not looking). Again, nobody but me here is complaining about this point, so feel free to ignore it. I've just mentioned it because is something I find mildly annoying and also yet another thing to micromanage.
Uhm, should I bring up these points of mine also on discrod or the CM read this post as well?
 
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Are you telling me the devs themselves cannot see what is wrong with the game and need a forum compilation? Then either they don't play the game or their standards for a working and fun game are scaringly low.
 
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I understand that the bottleneck here is the population. Namely that each individual is evaluated in terms of jobs, growth, etc..
In retrospect one of the biggest design flaws is that pops can different traits. That was the case even with the tile system. Now suddenly certain pops are better at some jobs than others.

They are probably not going to remove that now, but doing it all over again all pops of a species should be the same. Species may still have traits, but it would cut down a lot on the calculations when you just have to do "5 miners * 4 minerals" without having to worry about 2 miners maybe being strong.
You could even get rid of species traits entirely and use country modifiers instead. But then you'd lose some gameplay around immigrants, slaves and subject species. Those would still complicate the calculation in multi-species realms, but at least you wouldn't have to examine the traits of individual pops after deciding which species is better at a job.
 
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Are you telling me the devs themselves cannot see what is wrong with the game and need a forum compilation? Then either they don't play the game or their standards for a working and fun game are scaringly low.
or maybe don't believe everything you hear
 
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The problem is that Paradox can't solve 2 years worth of greed and neglect with a community statement. They can't promise anything because they've lied so often that their promises are meaningless.
 
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or maybe don't believe everything you hear

I know, I am also skeptical. But fact is, the game has been in a rough state since release and in a deplorable one since Megacorp (almost 2 years ago!). The fact that the have done little to nothing in this time makes the statement "Then either they don't play the game or their standards for a working and fun game are scaringly low." valid either way.
 
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I know, I am also skeptical. But fact is, the game has been in a rough state since release and in a deplorable one since Megacorp (almost 2 years ago!). The fact that the have done little to nothing in this time makes the statement "Then either they don't play the game or their standards for a working and fun game are scaringly low." valid either way.
i have a huge issue with people who say 'they've done little to nothing' based on nothing except impatience. bear in mind, i'm not saying 'be patient', i'm saying 'get real.'

of course performance is a concern for them. of course AI is a concern for them. the company's actually very good at communication overall but there's absolutely no need for them to respond to daily whining and any response would create a snowball of more whining.

people might not like my use of the word 'whining' but i think most people would recognise that any dev response in a thread like this would just cause the thread to explode in a totally unconstructive and unnecessary way.
 
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i have a huge issue with people who say 'they've done little to nothing' based on nothing except impatience. bear in mind, i'm not saying 'be patient', i'm saying 'get real.'

22 months have passed since Megacorp. I don't care what they say or don't say, I care about what they do with the broken product they sold me. And the impression I got over the last years is that they only keep milking people with hollow promises, asking for time, asking for forgivenes that the needed fixes didn't make it in time, but maybe next patch... In those 22 months no substantial changes have been made to the game that make it any less broken.

I think I have been patient enough. And if by "get real" you mean "just accept that corporate greed is going to screw you": no, thanks.
 
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people might not like my use of the word 'whining' but i think most people would recognise that any dev response in a thread like this would just cause the thread to explode in a totally unconstructive and unnecessary way.
Well, a dev responded in a DD thread and I wouldn't say it exploded. Especially considering the fact that what people were talking about was essentially the same.
 
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Hmm... so "community ambassadors" only read twitter comments nowadays? completely disregarding their own official forums? :D
Remove the "Greater than ourselves" edict from the game, tie the code which lets workers swap jobs directly to the "migration allowed" policy for species (which does bugger all right now, as far as I know). There is zero reason to gate automatic pop migration behind the GC.
I don't get why people are so fixated on this. If pop control/migration system was working in the first place (marking planet as "done" to have it contribute its entire growth to migration pool instead), there'd be no need for crunches like resettlement.
 
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My issues with Stellaris have been growing longer and longer since 2018 when it was quite possibly my most played game of all time. I'm afraid AI, performance and neutered crisis factions are merely the tip of the iceberg for me. I think I'll leave this, the text of my review on steam:
Update: I wrote a glowing review on version 1.9.1 of the game. I was excited by the changes back in 2017 as until that point every update had added new features without breaking anything. After that point each update has removed features that I liked and poorly implemented new additions, adding bugs that haven't been fixed in years now. I excused it at first and now I'm just sad, gloomily playing the old version of the game while missing out on all the DLC I have bought since then or playing the newest version and lamenting the host of butchered content that makes the game an inferior imitation only with more shiny stuff.

The developers have cut the following content since 1.9.1:
Performance
The ability to play the game to conclusion. I used to play the game on an old laptop and the fan didn't even run hot, while tabbing out to listen to music and browse the internet. Despite the faster computer I use now, the game runs slower and slower as the years tick by until eventually grinding to a painful laggy state. I haven't completed a full game in 2 years, when before I'd often see a game till the end.

AI
The AI used to be able to play the game. Now they are quickly pathetic (in game terms).

FTL types.
There used to be 3, now only 1. The reason was difficulty in balancing and performance, warfare would be more strategic with chokepoints... warfare is worse now than before - the greatest military threat known as the "endgame crisis" was never updated to utilise the changed FTL methods and left with TODO code that has neutered them completely.

Starting technology
There used to be a choice between 3, now everyone gets all 3. This used to help differentiate races and push you into specialisation. Now everyone has every technology and will quickly research every possible technology.

Starting exploration
You used to survey your starting system, now it's already done. You used to survey enemy systems, now it's done. This shortens the time it takes to fully survey the entire galaxy by a massive amount, reducing the wonder and unknown and making everything feel smaller.

Expansion
You used to spread a bubble of influence that granted you control of space resources. Now you have to manually build stations above each star one at a time. This change increased the number of clicks but more importantly it removed non-military "culture bombs" or the ability to push your influence into enemy territory (because it wasn't very clear how far influence would spread they removed the feature rather than work on the UI). It also removed the ability to share systems, so removed 1-planet minor races/rebellions from the game. Now such things take entire systems, so 1 unhappy habitat or uplifted primitive race can steal 6 happy planets from you. Now empires control large continuous expanses that end at choke-points, before they could have small enclaves and exclaves, share control of territory and have messy and fluid borders that changed each year. Now the map is very fixed, static and simplified.

Resources
The following resources that have been removed from the game:
Gray actuators, gray crystals, gray dust, gray scales - from Distant Stars DLC
Muutagan crystals, Riggan spice, XuraGel - from Leviathans DLC
Engos vapor, Garanthium ore, Lythuric gas, Orillium ore, Teldar crystals, yurantic crystals, neutronium ore, pitharan dust, satramene gas, terraforming gasses and terraforming liquids.
Note: all ores, gasses and crystals were combined into 3. Ditto for the gray resources becoming nanites.
Deleting DLC features should really trigger a refund, what did I pay for? why is it gone?

Starbases
The 17 starbase modules related to creating or using those resources, not including the starbase modules related to specific ship sizes that have also been removed. This has made starbases empty shells of their former selves.
Starbases were once built directly above planets, now they float far away at the very middle of a system, the exact same location in every system with the glaring bright light of the star behind them making all battles they take part in painful to watch. There used to be defensive platforms that you could build anywhere including minefields where you would expect the enemy to arrive from, this functionality was also removed. Now it's luck if an enemy fleet will pass close enough to be drawn into combat or just skirt past the starbase. To counter this they added FTL inhibitors making the system stop fleet progress until deactivated, which completely broke all AI pathfinding and kills midgame crisis fleets and all wartime AI fleet behaviour.

Leader limits
These used to require influence (a limited resource) and have a hard cap, now unlimited and uses energy and are therefore effectively free. Small changes with unintended consequences, before your research was slower as you couldn't hire leaders with the matching +10%/+15% bonus speeds and you were more likely to specialise in tech categories rather than being good at everything because you couldn't afford to hire so many leaders, now you can.
Leaders traits like industry used to apply to all 3 categories of research, now it applies to 1 making you move them less often. They also used to die to failed anomalies (not that fun), now anomalies cannot fail (they didn't understand that instant death without a way to counter it was the unfun part... so that was re-added to some dig-sites).

Sensor ranges
Was once shown on the map as a dotted circle around fleets and planets, now hidden as it's changed from distance based to hyperlane based (and they can be different lengths so a circle wouldn't work) and they didn't bother to update the UI to account for the change.

Fog of War
Once existed, now survey data is shared automatically with every empire you meet. You even get a nice breakdown of the AI score, the diplomatic weight of an empire tells you if their fleet is larger than yours or not so you never have anything to fear, no unknowns and no surprises... isn't that fun?

Planetary building interface
This used to be a 2D tile system with adjacency bonuses, drag and drop capabilities and easy viewing of all relevant information - now it's split into a series of 1D lists, no adjacency bonuses anymore, no drag and drop functionality but +/- buttons instead, relevant information hidden behind 4 windows and several collapsing lists. It's hard to express how much worse this system is... and how easy it would have been to apply the new features onto the old system. (Adding more tiles to each planet would have probably been fine, the interface only took up a third of the screen so there was a lot of unused space. Stacking pops would have worked, as would condensing the number of buildings to free up some space for new buildings, or adding an extra layer for refined goods. Lots of options.

Balance between space resources and planetary resources.
The numbers all used to be very small and tightly balanced. With few percentage modifiers and instead more flat bonuses like +1 minerals to adjacent tiles. Now you can have 99% of your research from planets because space deposits and anomalies weren't updated to use the higher amounts and 100% of your minerals from space for decades because they added lots more space deposits to compensate for previously empty systems that you're now forced to expand into. There are other strange imbalances as numbers were inflated in one place but not in others, mostly the result is everything is dirt cheap as you produce about 10x as much of everything without the costs being much higher.

I could go on but I've run into the character limit and honestly it's depressing that not one single aspect of the original game hasn't been damaged during the updates since 1.9.1. It isn't that new features aren't good, or fun, they're often amazing and I hate to play without the cool new features. Instead it's that what was already fun was removed and the new features don't interact or fit with what came before
Since I can't help but throw out walls of text (I am sorry but it's hard to be concise when there's a vast amount to say) and there's a larger character limit here I'll rephrase some relevant issues here, including suggestions for how to improve each area to hopefully avoid being attacked by those on the forum who do not take critisim well, even if it's given with the best intentions.

A partial list of things that worked in v1.9.1 that don't work in 2.7.2, and how to fix them:

1. Performance
Despite having 3 FTL types performance was (relatively) smooth as butter. I used to play on a laptop that couldn't play the majority of the games I play now, Stellaris had the highest number of hours played because at the time it was one of the few good games made this century I could get to run. Now it runs far worse than it ever did on a computer that doesn't struggle with any other game in my library. Pop job calculations, gateways and inflated numbers in general seem to be the obvious causes of this abominable state, but there is probably a lot more goop gunking up the machine.

Performance Solution 1:
Reduce calculations - lower total pop numbers to 1.9.1 levels, i.e. soft-cap of ~25 pops a planet. Adjust job output and number to compensate for changes.
Lower ship numbers - either increase ship alloy/naval cap costs and increase HP/Armour/Shields proportionally e.g. corvettes cost x4 alloys x4 naval cap, have x4 HP/Armour/Shields, or conversely reduce production of Alloys/Naval capacity/Tech output/etc. globally by x1/2, x1/3, x1/4.
Lower habitable planets - habitats really need some limitation... current alloy costs are trivial and the influence costs equally so thanks to the botched edict rework and the +5 influence unity ambition. I love habitats thematically and in game and always have since they were first introduced (especially when they have some character in the form of modifiers and special features thanks to mods like the awesome "Guilli's Planet Modifiers 2.7" which adds "300+ Unique planet modifiers for planets, habitats, ringworlds, machine worlds, hive worlds, relic worlds, and so on!" I personally love that habitats over dig sites get special features, vanilla habitats are lifeless after seeing what they could have with a little love), but there are too many habitable worlds in the game and they aren't affected by the x0.25 habitable planets setting when that should have some effect on them (e.g. increasing cost or reducing their cap).

Performance Solution 2:
Have planets eventually 'Finish'. There used to be a state when there was no more room for construction, everything was planned and they were handed to the sector AI to manage, gradually upgrading the buildings and increasing output as minerals flowed in and tech advanced. We cannot do that anymore. The AI cannot be allowed to manage worlds thanks to poor weighting leading to easily preventable disasters... perhaps instead the world's output could be condensed, simplified and packed away until anything changes it.
e.g. A world with 12 jobs producing alloys when given to the sector AI uses a different system. It becomes 1 job with 12x output affected by stability. Events that would affect an individual pop on the world now generate a modifier that adjusts the entire planet. The planet can increase in pops/crime/unemployment and even buildings. The total output can change but the changes are simplified and the actual pops and buildings only generated when the sector is destroyed and the world is recreated to roughly match what it was producing (before modifiers). The world could even have a higher output when turned into a sector to encourage the use of this system e.g. 12 jobs now function as 15 jobs (+20% job number related to the planet designation). It's not a good solution, but it would be nice if there's a way to 'finish' a planet again in some form and also a way to reduce the overhead of so many calculations. Turning planets into a black box with the click of a button could help... but it's an awful risk.

2.1 Economic AI - It never learned how to deal with the new resources it's been given (housing, amenities, crime and job/strata/worker types like slaves/robots not merely CG and Alloys). I played a criminal megacorp game a few days ago (I love the concept) and the AI empires had 1/2 the population I had, I couldn't even unlock all my branch office buildings if I waited a thousand years as they never reached a high population on any planet. Mostly this was poor districts, buildings and no swapping to city districts to increase housing.
So the AI sees that it has no housing and does what it's programmed to do and turns off population growth at about 47 pops which hard-caps the output of a planet and simply deletes 1 planet's worth of planetary growth from their empire instead of transferring it to other growing worlds as I think was intended. Unfortunately someone didn't realise that anything that causes 0% growth (overcrowding or decisions) also deletes emmigration as any number x 0 = 0... except for mechanists who had their own version of hell with a million unemployed and strangely useless robots because they didn't know what to do with lots of pops that can only do 2 jobs (why can't they work in a forge? are we doing manufactoring by hand in the future?) since you only have a few farmers and miners in the new system rather than most of a planet being those jobs in the old system, robotics requires droids tech to be fully used... which is fine for the player but the AI reaches the tech a million years too late and never lives up to its full potential.

Economic AI Solution 1:
Remove the control population growth decision/cease robot assembly/expel excess population etc. as the AI cannot use them and the player should never use them for optimal play (instead it's to remove micromanagement hassles or very, very, very late game that never happens thanks to performance issues). Instead make sure the system works automatically without them existing. i.e. when overpopulated have growth numbers remain at 100% but immigration be 0 and emmigration be 100% of growth (remove the stupid cap of 5 units of immigration that currently exists and that gets pops killed in transit). If there are no growth targets available have population decline = growth with declined pops being removed based on policy (expelled if egalitarian, sold if authoritarian, sacrificed if death cult, placed in storage if machines etc.)

Economic AI Solution 2:
Turn on the greater than ourselves edict automatically for all empires, make it work with robots/machine empires (for when the above system breaks down, mainly assembled pops not being able to immigrate/emmigrate). This does require the following checks: "Do not move pops if doing so increases unemployment" from losing the jobs granted per 5/20/50 pops (unlocked buildings, dimension portal, merchant respectively... also feels a bit strange that these are the only sources of scaling numbers of pop jobs... I'd personally add a scaling 1 pop per X jobs to each planetary designation to make them interesting and add an influence cost or time delay to switching)

Economic AI Solution 3:
Lower pop numbers. 25 for a full planet was a nice amount that the game and importantly the player could handle. 250 pops on a planet is probably 10x more than the software can comfortably manage and far more people than I would like to delegate tasks for. Rebalance the numbers to handle fewer jobs - use the old numbers from 1.9.1. (Personally I'd have forges have 3/2/1 jobs, requiring fewer pops to work and produce the same or even greater total output the more efficient they become... as that makes sense... but I also thought the tile system could work with barely any modifications so take my advice with a pinch of salt).

Economic AI Solution 4:
Re-implement the (insert expletive) old Tile-system with all currently available new and shiny jobs, buildings, features, planetary classifications and mechanics. i.e. instead of having the tile blocker/planetary features (representing all the art, character and uniqueness of the world) shown on the first page hidden behind a button (bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard), the districts as colour-coded squares, buildings as an unsortable list with no ability to pre-build or arrange that's disconnected from pops who aren't shown working there so you can't tell that your lab is actually unstaffed, and pops themselves on yet another separate screen hidden behind 3 collapsible sub-menus...
(why is the interface so horrible?)
...so instead of the strange mess we have, perhaps look back to what we once had in 1.9.1 and have all those things on the (insert expletive) same page!

Have pop tokens on top of district icons like they're just normal buildings.
Use the old mineral, energy, food and housing buildings to represent the 4 districts
Have districts spread out in 2D like they once were but have the build interface for those spaces use the new district construction system to make it easier to build multiples.
Have current normal number of building slots/tiles alongside but have most of them blocked by tile blockers, some that require e.g. 10 pops/upgraded colony hub to remove and allow building upon (tile blockers can be fun and interesting too and don't have to only be relevant for districts, e.g. migrating forests providing an adjacency bonus until cleared giving a reason for not bulldozing the uniqueness out of every world like a determined Vogon fleet, or someone creating a vanilla machine world/hive world/ecumenopolis... I honestly feel pain when I look at the planetary features and it's just blank as though the world has nothing at all unique or interesting and no remnants of its past).
Planetary features like alien pets could even be on the same screen as everything else so you know which world is your betherian planet without having to rename the silly thing.
There could even be 4 (or more!) spaces there for branch offices and these could have adjacency effects too!! Ideally I'd have these at the corners of tiles and use a different shape, e.g. smaller diamonds that border 4 tiles without taking any extra space but with an output that is determined mostly by adjacency from neighboring tiles to naturally limit them by reducing their output when the neighboring tiles aren't occupied, i.e. you can build them whenever you want but they don't do anything until there's enough pops on the world... perhaps it's hard to imagine such an innovation I know but trust me I really think you could fit all that stuff, maybe even happiness of each pop (perhaps as a little bar under the popo) and it would all fit on one page. I know because it all did before and only took up 1/3 of my (insert expletive) screen. If you wanted to get really crazy you could have things like extra layers/tiles to the planet to represent orbital habitats, underground tunnels and other technological developments late-game or even stack multiple pops icons on one tile to represent overcrowding and have the extra pops modify the tile output... but ideally it should all fit cleanly on one page. (This is more for me than the AI, but we know it can handle the 2D tile interface without sneezing itself to death).

2.2 Military AI.
There's lots of issues here, the biggest, lowest hanging fruit in my eyes is that it can't handle FTL inhibitors, I refuse to research them if I want the AI to try to attack me at some point, otherwise it dithers or gets lost or stuck. This should not have gotten past QA testing, it certainly shouldn't be a problem years after introducing the features.

Military AI Solution 1:
Remove closed borders and FTL inhibition until you can get the AI to understand them. Work hard and fast on getting the AI to understand them so marauders don't spawn and sit waiting and wondering how to get to their target world, or get confused when a starbase upgrades, or for FTL inhibition to randomly break and turn off when a starbase upgrades letting enemy fleets waltz past them then get stuck inside your territory (all of which have happened to me, in the last few games).

Military AI Solution 2:
Show the player more information of AI intents. What enemy station is my AI friend intending to suicide against, give me a button to press to warn them it's suicide to send unescorted transports and reinforcing corvettes. Let me flag a system as my target, their target, or as a staging area before a war is declared (e.g. federation voting on a war, "(360) days till actual war declaration, All members proceed to staging area X, Y or Z").

2.3 Diplomatic AI
Federations have sadly never worked and I always avoided them like the plague, but now there's a strong incentive to use them, which has forced me to notice how bad the AI is. I really hoped after the signature Federations update I would be able to play with them without frustration but that has not been my experience.
The AI makes nonsensical decisions based on poorly balanced numbers (in all diplomacy not merely federations), often with little player interaction, ability to predict, ability to respond to, and little in the way of transparancy.
e.g.
Not federating with matching ethics because the 4 empires have decided to form 2 pairs instead
Perhaps cohesion is at 99 not 100 so you don't get the hidden bonus to all decisions
Distance penalty is at -262 quadrillion preventing any diplomatic agreements despite only being 3 or 4 hyperlanes between the edges of one federation/ally and the target empire.
Voting to declare war on every member of a target federation at the same time and it being pot luck which war goal against which primary target the AI federation members all collectively decide upon as the human player doesn't even get a chance to vote (when set to anything other than unanimous the votes are often instant and a complete surprise).
Repeating requests that cause tensions and permanently scar a federation - refusing a federation invite both lowering cohesion and creating mistrust between members.
No ability to see what an AI intends/wants to do so that you can interact with them.
No inter-federation interactions.
No federation-galactic council interactions.

Diplomatic AI Solution 1:
Diplomatic Distance penalties need to be severely toned down and never apply to commercial pacts/research agreements/etc which work at 100% effectiveness regardless of distance (although perhaps that doesn't make complete sense either but lets try not to tug on too many threads at once). Distance having an impact on Defensive pacts/subjugation makes sense as an empire too far away can't help or be threatened as easily, but the distance numbers make very little sense in the endgame - perhaps have them reduced when one empire researches advanced engine/FTL technology, eventually reducing to near 0 with jump drives/gateways researched.

Diplomatic AI Solution 2:
Federations need a "Goals" page that mirrors the Galactic Council resolutions. Examples could include:
"Vote Yes to [insert Galactic council resolution currently in session]"
"Convert X empire to Egalitarianism"
"Invite Y empire into the Federation"
"Be at Peace, currently (at war with X, 43% war exhaustion)"
"End ongoing food deficit in Z Empire, currently (-12)"
"Rebuild Federation/Z Empire Navy to (200) Naval cap, currently (12)"
"Fund Gateway construction at Empire Z capital world"
"Rescue (12) Enslaved Primary Species Pops in X empire"
The possibilities are huge, these could be mostly determined by empire ethics and current situation/priorities. It would allow each empire in a federation to present a goal (like a resolution) that if raised to the top via votes/diplomatic weight/rotation/current president wishes/challenge/etc. would indicate the collective feelings of the federation and be brought to a vote. e.g. war vote, ceasefire, or a collective donation to a struggling member of the federation with the highest donator getting influence and the federation getting a large chunk of XP+Cohesion bonus when the "federation resolution" passes, but presenting Goals would cost influence and failing goals would harm cohesion and damage relations (not helping an ally requesting assistance for example could cause them to leave and possibly join a rival federation).

This would offer transparency, a way to influence the members of a federation and could be used to set federation-wide voting for galactic council resolutions and other unified projects or features like setting slaver policies, the living standards for a specific species or even transferring relics or system ownership, there's no limit to what the system could do. It's also reusing the mechanics that already exist in new and exciting ways so requires less work than something completely new, with the ability to add to it in stages.

3. FTL Types
The idea that they were the cause of the performance issues has been shown to be... at best a misunderstanding of the true problems, at worst a lie to justify their deletion and simplify the testing and balancing of future changes. The AI could use them, the speed of movement and open fluid borders stopped the AI from being stuck and allowed it to attack a little too easily. Wars were all or nothing. Some of the following changes tried to stop the all-or-nothing wars and failed to do so:
Fleet capacity (this fails as there's no limit to the number of fleets you can stack on top of each other so there's absolutely no effect on doomstacking except annoyance as not all fleets are exactly the same speed/jump together so AI fleets arrive in dribs and drabs and are weaker for it).
Disengagement (This encourages the use of high damage alpha strikes, reducing weapon diversity as those don't trigger the disengage chance, the damaged fleets don't get to safety fast enough to be reinforced or even repaired as they don't return to dock at a friendly station just a friendly system, it also breaks the combat reports and war attrition system as losses do not show up properly)
FTL inhibitors (These are an interesting idea, but break the AI pathfinding completely and need reworking to slow enemy advances)

Fleet capacity and disengagement chances both feel like failed experiments that aren't excruciatingly painful but certainly aren't beneficial either. Both need additional work to achieve their goals. The amount of additional work and additional mechanics (fuel, supply, attrition, ship-crew, ship XP rework) to get them to function as intended does not seem justified. I can envisage how they could have a key part in curbing the all-or-nothing combats but doing so conclusively would require a full combat redesign. So something smaller.

FTL Inhibition Solution:
A simpler system would be FTL inhibitors shrinking the size of the local gravity well with respect to FTL to the starbases max range - i.e. ships have to be in range of the starbase to enter and exit the system. You can't skirt around the starbase but can path through the system normally. Ditto for closed borders - you can pass through any system but will be hostile while doing so and cause diplomatic penalties for fights you start.

4. Expansion
There used to be a lot more meat to the game in terms of expansion. Passive border spread, culture bombs, shared territory, 1-planet minor races... military destruction of frontier outposts to remove ownership of swathes of territory etc.
The outpost system is my enemy. I detest it with every fiber of my being... well maybe not, but the chosen implementation had several unintended consequences:
Systems became all-or-nothing, no shared ownership which meant rebellions couldn't be as common as they'd take all the planets and habitats in one swoop.
Wars are less interesting as you can't claim planets individually, no aliens owning Mars, or Venus.
Colony rush is much cheaper as it took away the influence costs while removing monthly influence costs and the high monthly energy costs of colony ships.
Space is more bland and homogeneous as all systems were given a minimum amount of resources as a peace offering for forcing you to take them.
Peaceful expansion is easily blocked as there's no passive border spread from constructions/population.
Combat takes place in the same location in every system, rather than in the skies above Coruscant for example.
Starbases/defenses are built far away from the colony rather than actually above them defending them (it's strange seeing an army orbiting a planet and unable to land because of the starbase that is 8 light mins away, far out of missile range but somehow still protecting them).

The Expansion solution:
Bring back the old system with modifications. The issues it had were mostly UI issues - it wasn't obvious which system you controlled, how to make the system yours and how to keep hold of it when a neighbour is encroaching. You'd see a +16 mineral system on the border with each side having a frontier outpost nearby and a few planets pushing and it was far from clear who would win... now we have hyperlanes only it seems it would be far easier to quantify. We also have a "claims" system with each system being given a number to show who gets it (in war). Perhaps it would make sense that any empire could build in a system they lay claim to, and planets and frontier starbases automatically grant (temporary, fragile) claims to nearby systems (i.e. full claim to local system, half claim to each adjacent system, tiny claim to all systems along the trade route back to capital planet, perhaps proportional to trade value carried by the route, slowly increasing your claim to regions of space including the contested systems on the way).

5. Resources
The following resources that have been removed from the game:
Gray actuators, gray crystals, gray dust, gray scales - from Distant Stars DLC
Muutagan crystals, Riggan spice, XuraGel - from Leviathans DLC
Engos vapor, Garanthium ore, Lythuric gas, Orillium ore, Teldar crystals, yurantic crystals, neutronium ore, pitharan dust, satramene gas, terraforming gasses and terraforming liquids.
Deleting DLC features should really trigger an automatic refund, what did I pay for? why is it gone? If all the portraits in a species pack were deleted there would be a riot and rightly so. Why did nobody care about the XuraGel? Perhaps because it wasn't that interesting, but I liked it.

I'm not sure why these were removed, possibly to make way for CG, Alloys, Crime, Housing, Amenities... so they were all condensed into a bland boring soup instead. The problem is they were the terrain of the galaxy, they were the landmarks in space, the machine oil to grease the wheels and the crude oil to wage war for generations to control and monopolise. The bonuses weren't monumental, but they felt special, unique even. A +10% here doesn't seem like much in the current game, but being able to focus on kinetics early and then being able to grant your allies offensive power or deny it to your enemies was an interesting strategic decision, especially when percentage modifiers were few and far between. I hate motes, gas, and crystals... they lost their names and identities, they are too generic and used for far too many things. There was nothing wrong with some resources being simply on or off, have or do not have, live or die. It could work again.

Resource Solution:
Restore the cut content. Let the galaxy have unique features that you want to control and preferably can't easily manufacture any other way. Make sure each resource actually has a use beyond its credit value (what am I supposed to do with a Zro deposit as a determined exterminator? or a dark matter deposit before hell freezes over?). Give a passive bonus for controlling them and another for the size of your stockpile. (One way to do it would be a wealth tax, or at full capacity for nanites 100% of nanite generation is converted into HP/Armour repair rate empire wide (like food was at one point converted into growth), nanites are also used for ship modules so you can have a smaller resource capacity and repair faster because you reach the cap faster, or a larger capacity and spend the nanites on ships and benefit less from the repair rate as it will take longer to accrue. Choices.

6. Starbases:
What have they done to you? My poor poor starbase... you used to be beautiful. You had pages upon pages of modules you could build, you stood proudly watching over worlds as a gleaming tower up on high. Now... you have one of 4 roles, you build 6 copies of the exact same thing to fulfill that role and then a handful of inconsequential percentage modifiers. Your defensive platforms are tethered to you and melt like a poodle made of butter, what happened to the massive independent fortifications, what about the minefields? and you yourself, my sad little starbase, will barely withstand any fleet by an equal empire past the first 10 years of game time. You used to proudly display your unique weaponry... now you all have a single, lonely missile to plink at the enemy and a motley assortment of medium guns and utility components seemingly randomly weighted due to some strange whim of the developers that starbases should never excel at any one thing (worse than a megashipyard at ship construction, worse than a habitat for producing naval cap or slowing an enemy fleet, worse than a gateway for collecting trade and worse than maybe what, 1 district for producing energy by late game?).

Starbase Solution:
Build around planets - the outposts can be removed, they don't add anything to the game other than tedium.
Defensive stations stronger, built anywhere - they need to live long enough to slow an invading enemy
Restore minefields (they did exist once, tell me I'm not going crazy here? I feel like Stellaris has been gaslighting me for years '...what do you mean 3 FTL types? there's only ever been 1', 'There are four lights') - they don't have to do massive damage though that was fun, they can also help slow the enemy down
Give them unique weaponry/loadouts rather than generic ones for all races (it used to be a starting choice between lasers/kinetics/missiles and that was reflected in starbase starting weaponry).

7.1 Sensors, Fog of War and Surveys:
Ships and planets used to show their sensor range, clearly, with a bright green dotted line. That was cut when sensor range was changed to based on number of jumps rather than Cartesian distances. I assume they couldn't afford to spend the time updating the UI to render shapes other than a circle... triangles were exhorbitantly expensive that day.

Sensor Solution:
Pay for some triangles. A way to indicate which in the UI which systems have full visibility. As clear as the green dotted ring once was.

7.2 Fog of War used to hide information on enemy planets.
Survey data wasn't instantly shared, so you had to go out and explore or trade with other races to find out what fancy minerals they knew about.

I believe these interconnected things were cut because of anomalies... if you surveyed a system you didn't own and that generated an anomaly then that anomaly could change their resources, perhaps deleting one or merely changing it. So they made it so you can't find anomalies in owned territory... by automagically sharing data. The solution should have been simple:

Fog of War/Survey Solution:
You cannot research anomalies in systems someone else owns 'if the anomaly changes system resources'. That would allow you to go to war over a system where you know a resource exists that they are unaware of. (e.g. you know there's living metal anomaly there and you can't research it so it would reveal some living metal, but can't do anything with it until it's inside your borders).

8. Balance
The game once used much smaller numbers and very few percentage modifiers, these numbers were easier to balance for tech costs, unity etc. Bonuses were often flat +1/+2 changes. These feel much better as the changes were obvious and often rather large, granular jumps... now people can't tell after being shown spreadsheets of data and a lecture by the resurrected corpse of your most beloved scientist if clerks are better than being punched in the face or if gene clinics could be useful if the galaxy was traveling at 50km/h south east and in the year 2600 a similar galaxy with a similar mass but +12 alloys/month production intersected it at an angle of 23 degrees and you want to calculate which one ate your soup last Tuesday... Being a convoluted mess that you can't follow because of small interconnected % modifiers, some additive and some multiplicative, with no clear distinction between them despite major differences in the effects when stacking bonuses as well as no way to preview changes - e.g. by changing trade policy, living standards, military/balanced/civilian production etc. will I be improving things or will I go bankrupt? Not being able to tell something that significant before you make a decision. That is, when taken together, a glaring design flaw.

Balance Solution:
Percentage modifiers are often ridiculous. Either they are amazing, or useless... and it's not obvious which it is. Any that can be converted into flat modifiers should be. Calculations that need a spreadsheet to optimize the players are not going to handle gracefully, or correctly for the vast majority of the player base. This includes all resource and research % modifiers... those used to be physical farm upgrades and lab upgrades... so they also had the benefit of requiring mineral investment, showing colony progression and growth as well as presenting a cheerful bounty of fancy artwork that's since been abandoned somewhere. I miss biolabs, habitat buildings and all the other deleted content. Bring that (insert expletive) back.

Space resources/planetary output/anomaly output must always be balanced at the same time. Never change one without seeing the knock-on effects on the utilization of the other sources of that resource. i.e. adding extra +2/+5 space mineral deposits killed planetary mining. Adding +1000/+1000/+1000 science from planets killed the +2 from space deposits and the +100 rewards from anomalies. If you change production, don't forget to change the costs too! (either decrease lab output or increase tech costs so we aren't swimming in a sea of repeatables before our first conflict, that sort of thing)

9. Admin Cap:
It once worked, not well, not clearly. But it did its job quietly in the background. It was less of a mechanic to work around (unless you were good at math) and more of a passive AI bonus for the majority of decent players and a buff to the players who were struggling. The bigger you got the faster the AI researched relative to you, the smaller and more pathetic you were the faster you researched relative to the giants in the playground. Now that's been torn up and thrown to the winds. The bigger you get the faster you get bigger.

The old system kinda worked. Not being able to mitigate the penalties was a feature not a bug. The system kept people playing smaller even if it was only through psychological trickery. This had the result of evening the playing field even more. Humans played the game with a handicap to expansion because we are terrible at doing the math for a series of percentage bonuses and were terrified of a red number... so the developers changed every calculation into a series of opaque percentage bonuses and plastered red numbers everywhere... I just... I just can't understand this one.

Admin Cap/Steamrolling Solution:
Admin cap as a feature in whatever form must achieve the same goal, reducing the gap between a steamrolling empire and the poor thing that's being flattened.
A wealth tax would achieve this goal, preferably as a scaling % of stockpile so that it's impossible to actually reach your resource cap (caps at 100% of production when stockpile is greater than or equal to the max capacity). This wealth could be redistributed to the pirates that live inside your borders, encouraging players to spend their resources and causing piracy problems for the rich and fat empires that are so well run that they're overflowing with resources in every category while giving those empires close to death a reprieve (from pirates, in this suggestion).

10. Strata:
Just why.
Strata Solution:
No.

Sorry for the essay... I apologize to anyone who feels I have wasted their time documenting what is, I'm very sorry to say, a small portion of the issues I have with the game currently. If you'd like to hear more (why, you crazy person) I have previously ranted about my issues with crime, piracy, trade routes, trade diplomacy, the galactic market, edicts, weapons and many other issues... I still feel strongly about all those things... I just don't like repeating myself when I've already written what feels like several novels. Feel free to take anything you wish from the above essays. (I probably will not reply, despite my ranting here I don't actually like confrontation or arguing... I find it deeply unpleasant and profoundly mentally exhausting. I just hope that some positive comes from highlighting flaws as well as potential solutions to them).

Also, I think it may not come across that well, but it's hard to feel this much anger unless you love what is underneath. Like finding your beloved gran covered in bruises after a mugging and nothing done about it... I feel upset at what has been done (to the original design of the game), the things that have been stolen (deleted content, some from different DLCs) and after several years without fixing the issues (2017-2020)... I no longer feel very charitable towards those responsible (whoever is in charge of the money at Paradox really). They have had their chance... they took the money, several times (I have all the DLC... even if I'm back to playing on 1.9.1 right now). I do hope they feel the repercussions.
 
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4. Expansion
There used to be a lot more meat to the game in terms of expansion. Passive border spread, culture bombs, shared territory, 1-planet minor races... military destruction of frontier outposts to remove ownership of swathes of territory etc.
The outpost system is my enemy. I detest it with every fiber of my being... well maybe not, but the chosen implementation had several unintended consequences:
Systems became all-or-nothing, no shared ownership which meant rebellions couldn't be as common as they'd take all the planets and habitats in one swoop.
Wars are less interesting as you can't claim planets individually, no aliens owning Mars, or Venus.
Colony rush is much cheaper as it took away the influence costs while removing monthly influence costs and the high monthly energy costs of colony ships.
Space is more bland and homogeneous as all systems were given a minimum amount of resources as a peace offering for forcing you to take them.
Peaceful expansion is easily blocked as there's no passive border spread from constructions/population.
Combat takes place in the same location in every system, rather than in the skies above Coruscant for example.
Starbases/defenses are built far away from the colony rather than actually above them defending them (it's strange seeing an army orbiting a planet and unable to land because of the starbase that is 8 light mins away, far out of missile range but somehow still protecting them).
Preach. I could get over some of these issues if I could mod back in old functionality. But literally everything in that list has been either;
  1. stripped out of the game's codebase / can't be called anymore (2.0 literally culled dozens of commands, even ones that didn't seemingly fall under the wider changes, rather than just not using them and leaving them for modders)
  2. Or was put directly into the encrypted executable (compiled code is faster than script... but do you really need to compile the checks for colonisation? for whether or not starbases can be built around stars vs planets? you can't just have the code reference the values exposed in script and stashed in RAM? honestly...)
    • They even exposed habitat & megastructure placement to scripts, so it's not like they couldn't expose way more than they already do.
    • They chose not to preserve features from pre 2.0, they didnt just cut them because they didnt make sense with the changes, they wanted them gone and they didnt want modders resurrecting them.
I'm apathetic about most of the changes in 2.0, most didn't really make it a better or worse game just... different for the sake of being different to what it was before. But the changes to the galaxy map really do piss me off.

The features you mentioned (and a few others) are all cut or have been watered down so far they'd make a homeopath blush, particularly when they could have persisted within a hyperlanes-only game, with border outposts, and been "fine" - with a few slight adjustments. (HL-only is how I played most games pre 2.0).
Far more than anything else the "map changes", have robbed the game of more character and uniqueness than anything which has since been put back in to it. I include origins, the GC & civics reworks in that. They're nice but the galaxy is the "star" of the show, and now it feels as dead and lifeless to explore as the Necrons Necroids coming in Halloween.​

Didnt include this in my OP as it's not a technical issue currently affecting 2.7+ so didn't want to dilute the point of the thread, but these changes in game direction really did damage the game's "core identity" and focus on "randomness"... and that really doesn't look like it'll ever be mended, IMO.
  • With 2.0 it seems they decided Stellaris was to become more like HOI4 or EU5 but with laser guns, more heavily pre-scripted stories (most of which still don't give players more choices, or responses taking their ethics/civics into account) and more rigidly defined galactic borders/homogenous galactic features, and not a light-scifi focussed on emergent stories, a healthy lump of player imagination and randomness, which are the key features of pre 2.0 stellaris IMO.
    • Far more things could happen in a game and your mind actively spun stories between the various events ... now the same things happen... repeatedly,
      • and, more often than not, things are so explicit, so well defined and so in your face, that it leaves little room for imagination or even RP - outside of whatever you cobble together with civics and origins - because the numbers tell you exactly what's going on.
An analogy for Pre 2.0 Stellaris vs Post 2.0 Stellaris is probably Old Lego vs New Lego.
  • Old Lego actively encouraged creativity and exploring different designs in a free-form way.
  • New Lego prioritises self-contained "kits" (often as franchise tie-ins). They still let you make interesting things - often more refined things than just building freeform with blocks - but the overall scope of the product is greatly diminished and now revolves around their new annual releases of kits.
  • This change is not unlike what happened to Stellaris with 2.0 and it feels about as good as stepping bare-foot on a Lego brick, too (though Lego never discontinued their old buckets of bricks when they moved to kits...).
 
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In retrospect one of the biggest design flaws is that pops can different traits. That was the case even with the tile system. Now suddenly certain pops are better at some jobs than others.

They are probably not going to remove that now, but doing it all over again all pops of a species should be the same. Species may still have traits, but it would cut down a lot on the calculations when you just have to do "5 miners * 4 minerals" without having to worry about 2 miners maybe being strong.
You could even get rid of species traits entirely and use country modifiers instead. But then you'd lose some gameplay around immigrants, slaves and subject species. Those would still complicate the calculation in multi-species realms, but at least you wouldn't have to examine the traits of individual pops after deciding which species is better at a job.

I generally hate to make suggestions -- not because I don't have opinions, but I have no capacity to judge which solutions merit further review because of limited information as to code base or foreseen side effects, nor any ability to actually implement a solution.

However, I will point out that many of the traits -- such as being good at a particular job could affect the job rather than the species. That would obviate the differences in pop job value and eradicate the optimization process of trying to fit the best pop to a job. Empires still would be diverse based upon what jobs the empire is good at and techs like gene modding would provide the capacity for an empire to become better (or potentially worse) at certain jobs.

The primary net effect would be a sudden reduction on pop surveillance which would improve large-pop (i.e. late game) performance. Essentially, the AI would simply need to make certain all available jobs are filled.
 
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i have a huge issue with people who say 'they've done little to nothing' based on nothing except impatience. bear in mind, i'm not saying 'be patient', i'm saying 'get real.'

of course performance is a concern for them. of course AI is a concern for them. the company's actually very good at communication overall but there's absolutely no need for them to respond to daily whining and any response would create a snowball of more whining.

people might not like my use of the word 'whining' but i think most people would recognise that any dev response in a thread like this would just cause the thread to explode in a totally unconstructive and unnecessary way.

If AI were a concern, it wouldn't be in the state it is today. Full stop. The AI used to be OK. Its performance was sacrificed to meet the company's actual concerns.
 
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I'm going to list these by impact factor (i.e. what affects every game)
  1. Biological pops will stop growing by themselves at 1.5x the housing limit, but there is no equivalent way of doing this for machines, you need to go to each world and suspend assembly, it's needlessly micro intensive, getting worse in large empires, particularly for gestalt machine empires.
    • Add a policy that lets assemblers stop building robots automatically if housing=0.
This would actually be really good. There are ZERO reasons whatsoever why a Machine Consciousness or even a Biological Empire should keep building new Robots when there are neither jobs nor housing. Now you could argue you they want to "ship" them out. That's reasonable. But only to an extent.

Machine Empires/Robots really need a way to set a point where assembly stops. Either if all the jobs, or all the housing is filled or simply when a certain specified number is reached. And to resume assembly if pops are moved out/move out on their own. Right now it's an absurd planet by planet micromanagement which even costs influence for no good reason.


i have a huge issue with people who say 'they've done little to nothing' based on nothing except impatience. bear in mind, i'm not saying 'be patient', i'm saying 'get real.'

of course performance is a concern for them. of course AI is a concern for them. the company's actually very good at communication overall but there's absolutely no need for them to respond to daily whining and any response would create a snowball of more whining.

people might not like my use of the word 'whining' but i think most people would recognise that any dev response in a thread like this would just cause the thread to explode in a totally unconstructive and unnecessary way.

"Impatience". Oh please. Crises and other things are broken for OVER A YEAR NOW. This isn't impatience. Especially given these things used to work before Paradox took the sledgehammer to this game and completely reworked large swathes of the game to cater to the new head devs vision. Then never bothered to properly make things work.

And no, the AI is obviously no concern. Otherwise, it wouldn't be broken beyond belief for over a year now. Same with advertised and prominent features such as AEs, Crises, etc. And while they used to be decent at communication, that has ceased almost entirely.

And going "valid criticism is just whining", would allow everyone here to use some unkind words in turn. I personally won't lower myself to that level. But this feels more like a personal and unhealthy investment in Paradox rather than a reasonable response from your end.
 
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