Conquer a few planets, economy crashes-- 2.2 in a nutshell

[Zenopath]

First of all, merry xmas everyone,

Second, i may be a little drunk as i write this, but reading through the battle here, i am getting a feel for the complaints people have for the system.

Its the conquering of new worlds when you don't give full citizenship to the conquered race. i get you, i mean, even residence causes a ruler class vacuum to happen, and sucks out leaders from your world, annoying right? It seems like, maybe, there is a drawback to being a xenophobe and not being able to treat your conquered people like full citizens?

The problem is way worse if you go for making them slaves, because then you get a whole group of unemployed unhappy aliens who used to run the economy of the worlds you conquered. All those artisans and enforcers and scientist end up generating huge crime and you have to move in your own pop to fill in the enforcer jobs. And you then have to close down everything else and focus on pure enforcement because all the unhappy unemployed slaves give you super high crime and instability?

What is this i smell? Is it the spirit of realism?

Who knew that enslaving populations just so you dont have to spend consumer goods on them might not be as easy simply landing troops and calling it a day? Massive drain on your economy and workforce to forcibly occupy and enslave a whole world? What a twist!

So you disable the buildings you dont need at the minute, make police stations, and send specialists from your own worlds. Again its not that hard, if there are no other open specialist jobs they become enforcers. If you send regular workers from your worlds they have a tendency to be shy and not want to auto promote.

Send specialists instead, any will do, they will change jobs to enforcers.

On your worlds, the process of promoting workers to specialist jobs left vacant happens quickly, on worlds with low stability and crime it does not. You will grind your teeth as your workers start working the farms and putting more slaves unemployed. Dont worry about leaving empty specialists slots on your own worlds, they get filled within a few months by happy workers.

A good solution is also to resettle unemployed alien slaves back to your worlds to fill those empty worker slot jobs so there is enough farms. Check the population on your worlds, how many empty worker slots are there? Send alien slaves to work. Spreading alien slaves across your empire is actually super helpful, because it minimizes unhappiness from unemployment on conquered and fills the vacuum left by all the workers promoting to specialist jobs.

Yes they might suffer from high penalties from habitiability, but they are slaves, who cares. Go to species menu, set the species to subsistence diet to reduce food costs. Set their population controls to enabled so they dont breed on your worlds and you can keep on making your master race without filthy xenos pop growing on your worlds.

Alternatively, if you do want them to breed for extra workers on worlds they dont have low habitablity, you can set the population growth on your own worlds to specifically only grow your master race by clicking on the population growth icon of every world and selecting which race you want instead of "any", and it only costs you a 20% growth penalty which you can completely erase with a encourage growth decision. Problem solved! Once your new worlds get stable and there is room for more workers on them, send the aliens slaves back so you can make your own worlds pure again, then you can safely switch the population growth selection back to any once your world is ethnically pure again. The slaves stinking up your worlds are a temporary solution to the problem, you can let your own pop grow and when you see that unemployment icon, send a slave back home to its outhouse homeland like the foreign trash that they are!

Or colonize a new world of thier species type so you can send slaves there, its a slave colony, those are super effective! Use a colony ship of master race so you get rulers of the right kind.

If you plan to conquer an empire, and not turn them into full citizens, leave a few building slots empty! You will lose population, and that will cause blown up buildings. Or, right before clicking on accept surrender, premptively choose which buildings you dont need, demolish them so there is at least 1 empty slot per world. The game will automatically use unemployed main species population before it uses anything else for the process of creating rulers for newly conquered worlds. If you dont want to blow up building, leave em, you will get ruined building, but once you move some slaves back to the worlds to boost pop, you can fix ruined buildings faster and cheaper than making new ones.

And if the 5-20 or so clicks needed to move specialists via resettlement and disable buildings is too much work, luckly there are several easy solutions for you lazy xenophobes that dont want to deal with it. You can sell alien slaves on slave market, or purge them or eat them. You can abandon worlds completely if you want to, it happens if you reduce population to 0. Remember to move your own pop out first, before purging the now leaderless aliens.

Yes, recently conquered worlds are a bit of a pain to deal with, your own worlds grow organically over time and require little oversight, but when you conquer empires, you might need a little extra work to properly administrate them without flatlining your economy, who knew?

 

[SpectralShade]

Districts/Buildings still cost some energy upkeep regardless if the jobs are on or off.

I vehemently disagree.


I definitely don't try to micro every pop and job, I can't really directly direct where my species goes, and when I do go through my planets around mid-game (2300-2350 ish), I'm often up to 2-4 unemployed pops at many planets. Not sure how you play, but my micro increases as size (wideness) increases, not decreases. The amount of time I spend looking just at planets when I just have 1, 2 or 3 planets is far less than when I have 10, 20, or 30 planets, let alone nearing triple digits.

What's your "widest game" look like? My current game is a 1,000 sector map, I own ~70 planets or so in ~30 sectors around 2360, >2000 empire sprawl with probably about that many uncolonized-by-choice ones within my borders. I've never reached a point where I can basically neglect my colonies, in fact my empire size is so high I'm considering cutting governors from all but my largest sectors as leader upkeep has become a plurality of my energy expenditures.


Now I'm perplexed. What did your barest minimum look like? That experience doesn't match mine whatsoever.

2.1, I'd directly manage 3 planets (3 inhabited sectors under personal control was the old maximum) and put the rest under sector AI hands, maybe with some planet pre-building if I wanted stuff arranged a specific way, or a specific building (usually 1 Stronghold/Fortress for FTL inhibitor, Planet Shields, or special buildings). I'd sometimes spam some droids or synths on some tiles sometimes but otherwise I'd leave it be. Other than that, much of the time was spent managing the fleet and starbases. I'd only need to go through my core planets myself to upgrade stuff when I got a new research and there weren't so many of those lying around anyways (3 levels per resource building type, IIRC?). Sector AI got the rest, and they did, eh, acceptably (didn't crash my economy at least)

Now I have to personally check all my planets at least every 2-3 years at absolute minimum. What used to be a footnote on my right-side scrollbar is now half-full of just assorted planets by mid-game. If I wait too much longer than 2-3 years, I get negative events due to housing/unemployment/crime or whatever aggrevating the situation.

I thought I was being moderately micro-ey with those builds, but if your barest minimum with no resource optimization was managing >4-5 planets then I'm not sure what to call what I did.

Once again, I'm not going back to 2.1, I like the general idea of 2.2, but it's also brought a ton of management issues, most of which could be resolved or at least lessened with a UI overhaul and fiddling with certain mechanics.

I don't get the coments about more clicks pre le guin either. What I did was build up the base buildings. Then I could hand over the colony to a sector and tell the sector not to redevelop anything. That left it with upgrades as only option which it DID do. So all those clicks people are complaining about seem because they wanted to do what they could have gotten the sector govenor to do for them with the exact same end result as if they had done it themselves.

 

[Zenopath]

I don't get the coments about more clicks pre le guin either. What I did was build up the base buildings. Then I could hand over the colony to a sector and tell the sector not to redevelop anything. That left it with upgrades as only option which it DID do. So all those clicks people are complaining about seem because they wanted to do what they could have gotten the sector govenor to do for them with the exact same end result as if they had done it themselves.

Sure but did you set sectors to send 75% of resources back to core? If you didnt, then congrats you get lots of wasted resources stuck in sectors. If you didn't they wont have a ton of resources needed to upgrade everything as fast they could.

i made sectors as small as possible and told them to send 75% of their resources back to me, so I had to manually upgrade everything myself, because I left my sectors too poor to do it in a timely fashion.

 

[SpectralShade]

Many of us are defending it because it is much more interesting than the old system which excelled in blandness and in micro with little meaning. yes the new system has a lot of micro too, but I feel like it is micro that involves decisions instead of involving only a long series of no-brainer clicks.

the new system is arguably more boring to use.
It is not "harder" or "more interesting", it is just more tedious.
Work for the sake of work.
Artificial padding of required actions/clicks to make the appearance of content that isn't there.

I have no issue managing my economy under the new system. It is just that it is decidedly unfun because I am spending most of my time acting as a colony manager now instead of acting as controller of a galaxy spanning empire.

If I wanted up colony management, I'd load up a more interesting game for that aspect. So in effect we had what was one of the better 4x games and turned it into a boring sim-colony game with an UI that was never designed to deal with it.

 

[SpectralShade]

Sure but did you set sectors to send 75% of resources back to core? If you didnt, then congrats you get lots of wasted resources stuck in sectors. If you didn't they wont have a ton of resources needed to upgrade everything as fast they could.

i made sectors as small as possible and told them to send 75% of their resources back to me, so I had to manually upgrade everything myself, because I left my sectors too poor to do it in a timely fashion.

the sectors acted as deposits so you could store resources ABOVE your cap. This was very usefull during end game crisis or war in heaven, so you could draw on both the resources you had saved up in your 'normal' stockpile, but also the resources in your savings accounts. I often made sure to have several sectors in my games so I would have the option to make several withdrawals during a taxing war if I would need it.

 

[Zenopath]

the new system is arguably more boring to use.
It is not "harder" or "more interesting", it is just more tedious.
Work for the sake of work.
Artificial padding of required actions/clicks to make the appearance of content that isn't there.

I have no issue managing my economy under the new system. It is just that it is decidedly unfun because I am spending most of my time acting as a colony manager now instead of acting as controller of a galaxy spanning empire.

It only requires a lot of attention if you micro it. You can safely ignore your own worlds for long streches of time if you dont mind a little under performance via unemployed pops. Do a planet sweep every 2-5 years. I have a tendency to completely ignore my worlds while I am at war especially since I know i will need extra pop when i conquer worlds. leaving them to grow unemployed buffer workers and empty slots is actually helpful.

 

[Zenopath]

the sectors acted as deposits so you could store resources ABOVE your cap. This was very usefull during end game crisis or war in heaven, so you could draw on both the resources you had saved up in your 'normal' stockpile, but also the resources in your savings accounts. I often made sure to have several sectors in my games so I would have the option to make several withdrawals during a taxing war if I would need it.

Yeah, but it took influence and it didn't let me build up and maintain my fleet now. Reserves are nice, more income all the time is also nice. Its a gameplay question. The old system was actually pretty damn tedious if you let it be. just the process of picking base buildings on new worlds via the sector interface took a lot of time per world, especially since you also had to clear blockers and upgrade admin buildings before you can get the base buildings you wanted sometimes. you sometimes had to transfer energy to sectors before you could clear all the blockers.

 

[SpectralShade]

Yeah, but it took influence and it didn't let me build up and maintain my fleet now. Reserves are nice, more income all the time is also nice. Its a gameplay question. The old system was actually pretty damn tedious if you let it be. just the process of picking base buildings on new worlds via the sector interface took a lot of time per world, especially since you also had to clear blockers and upgrade admin buildings before you can get the base buildings you wanted sometimes. you sometimes had to transfer energy to sectors before you could clear all the blockers.

as opposed to now where you have to do the exact same things, but instead of being able to do it in one pass as before, you now have to keep going back all the time and do it a few steps at a time.

As I said earlier: artificial padding.

and influence shouldn't be an issue in endgame. I sometimes started using edcits solely to take some of my influence because I was about to hit the influence cap and then it would be better to get a minor buff than wasting influence from having it capped.

Being able to triple (or more) your resources while near the cap in a short amount of time if the brown stuff hit the fan was huge, though.

 

[AndyScull]

Why destroy the districts and buildings when you can simply go in and turn the jobs off on the higher tiers?

I agree, disabling buildings is a better option than destroying, I avoid it just because quite often I don't want to keep the planet since it isn't habitable for my main species, I conquer it only to destroy the enemy empire.
I play mostly mono-species xenophobe in 2.2 'cause dealing with multiple species is very frustrating for me in this version.

 

[Zenopath]

as opposed to now where you have to do the exact same things, but instead of being able to do it in one pass as before, you now have to keep going back all the time and do it a few steps at a time.

As I said earlier: artificial padding.

and influence shouldn't be an issue in endgame. I sometimes started using edcits solely to take some of my influence because I was about to hit the influence cap and then it would be better to get a minor buff than wasting influence from having it capped.

Being able to triple (or more) your resources while near the cap in a short amount of time if the brown stuff hit the fan was huge, though.

We sometimes call that artificial padding, gameplay... but i get it. If you let the sectors do the tedious stuff in 2.1 there was in fact less microing. Personally i was guilty of not letting the sectors do their thing, and found myself thinking that the sectors was basically a way to make the UI slightly less user friendly and trap some of your resources. I treated sector worlds much same way as my core worlds, so i found 2.1 tedious as hell and the sector system a barrier rather than an aid. I stopped playing stellaris in 2.1 mostly because i found it tedious and dull to manage my empire. It wasnt fun, it was just, a point and click game where you correctly identified what needed to go on which tile.

For fast paced gameplay with less microing, there were actually better games in my opinion. For example, the new masters of orion remake isnt bad and it uses the same tile system much less annoyingly because you only worry about buildings, pops will sort themselves out.

Endless Space's economy is even simpler still, no tiles, just system view with planets and you can move people from planet to planet at no cost, only real decision is what extra buildings you want per planet.

So, when I played stellaris i was really mostly only playing because I liked the macro, not the micro. You might feel same way, and i can respect that. But i don't really find new economy management that hard. It is very ignorable. Pops grow at like 1 every 3-4 years. It really doesnt take me that long to sort through it. It is only complicated when you add new worlds and need to manage them. This isnt as micro intensive as you make it out to be. There is just a clean up phase after you conquer worlds, and a tiny amount of maintence every once in a while.

The problem happens when you keep checking all your worlds to make sure you never get any unemployment. Its not really needed. A few unemployed pops or empty buildings slots wont break anything. The effect of not microing is actually a lot less pronounced in this system. In the old system, unemployed pops represented a huge waste of resources, in this game, they really dont, 1-2 unemployed pops or 1-2 homeless pops have minimal impact, and they will actually migrate away to emptier worlds with job slots if you leave them alone.

You only need to care about them on the macro level when one of your resource needs isnt being met and you need to adress the problem.

I honestly think you have same problem with this economy system that I had with the old one. You are spending more time on it than needed. Most microing happens because you are doing stuff and you dont have enough pops, if you wait for unemployed pops to appear, then do stuff, its actually less annoying to deal with.

 

[Eled the Worm Tamer]

So basically fuck the people who don't like what you like. Great logic. I'm done with you.

Isn't that exactly what you are saying when you demand the new systems we enjoy get trashed to suit you?

 

[SpectralShade]

We sometimes call that artificial padding, gameplay... but i get it. If you let the sectors do the tedious stuff in 2.1 there was in fact less microing. Personally i was guilty of not letting the sectors do their thing, and found myself thinking that the sectors was basically a way to make the UI slightly less user friendly and trap some of your resources. I treated sector worlds much same way as my core worlds, so i found 2.1 tedious as hell and the sector system a barrier rather than an aid. I stopped playing stellaris in 2.1 mostly because i found it tedious and dull to manage my empire. It wasnt fun, it was just, a point and click game where you correctly identified what needed to go on which tile.

For fast paced gameplay with less microing, there were actually better games in my opinion. For example, the new masters of orion remake isnt bad and it uses the same tile system much less annoyingly because you only worry about buildings, pops will sort themselves out.

Endless Space's economy is even simpler still, no tiles, just system view with planets and you can move people from planet to planet at no cost, only real decision is what extra buildings you want per planet.

So, when I played stellaris i was really mostly only playing because I liked the macro, not the micro. You might feel same way, and i can respect that. But i don't really find new economy management that hard. It is very ignorable. Pops grow at like 1 every 3-4 years. It really doesnt take me that long to sort through it. It is only complicated when you add new worlds and need to manage them. This isnt as micro intensive as you make it out to be. There is just a clean up phase after you conquer worlds, and a tiny amount of maintence every once in a while.

The problem happens when you keep checking all your worlds to make sure you never get any unemployment. Its not really needed. A few unemployed pops or empty buildings slots wont break anything. The effect of not microing is actually a lot less pronounced in this system. In the old system, unemployed pops represented a huge waste of resources, in this game, they really dont, 1-2 unemployed pops or 1-2 homeless pops have minimal impact, and they will actually migrate away to emptier worlds with job slots if you leave them alone.

You only need to care about them on the macro level when one of your resource needs isnt being met and you need to adress the problem.

I honestly think you have same problem with this economy system that I had with the old one. You are spending more time on it than needed. Most microing happens because you are doing stuff and you dont have enough pops, if you wait for unemployed pops to appear, then do stuff, its actually less annoying to deal with.

i agree that the old interface sucked if you wanted to micro planets inside sectors. I tried that once and didn't bother since.

interstingly, I found the remake of MoO almost too lightweigth and felt stellaris pre le guin was more interesting to play than the remake of MoO (which imo felt like a tablet game)

 

[Slynx]

I think the control is there, it just requires a bit of foresight.

ever tried assimilation in the new patch? (psi or cyber). it's literally unplayable without harmony tradition. you start assimilation(assimilated pop loose the job), then instantly worker promote to specialist\ruler (so you just lost worker job too) and worst of all when assimilated pop will finish the process he'll have to wait til he'll be able to demote to worker.

you can as a work around close the slots, but it's usually too micro intensive if you want to assimilate 10-100-++ pops at once

This is just letting players micro their way out of poor decision making. If you want to reduce the time spent managing your economy, that's the opposite of what you want. Shouldn't you want less clicks on your planets and pops, not more?

for example you want certain pop to work on scientist\enforcer\chemist job.
right now you can't put him there directly. so the only option is to close all slots of that strata except the needed one. then you can either open them again or wait til the new pop will grow and open 1.
easier solution would be drag and drop people asking for.

as for promotion and demotion...IMHO the timer is nice idea. but the time is too long. so I think it would've been better if the timer were fairly short, but applied to both promotion and demotion (just like resettlement before) - this pop is going to promote to specialist(while still working on a farm). you can see it and find a replacement. or deny him with migration controll. and authoritarians just move pops for energy.
but it's just imho

I think there are bigger issues (like sectors) that I'd rather see done first.

they still exist? I never played with them since...I guess 2.0
and in 2,2 I saw that they are now controlled by a player directly. so I assumed that they don't really matter. just a governor slot​

 

[Nighzmarquls]

I have a very similar challenge with my rogue servitor builds. I have to be very careful about acquiring new bio trophies and letting them reproduce out of control. Originally I would have loved to have as many as possible. But now I have to consider the economics of it. And honestly I can't even afford to colonize all my planets as fast as possible because of the economics of the situation.

Pretty much the name of the game in 2.2 is do not over-extend.

Granted, it is a lot harder to over extend when you are a bio-hive mind with population coming out of your eyeballs, but otherwise you have to be careful about over-extending, the windfall of new slave pops can totally cripple your economy if you are not built to absorb the impact.

 

[Slynx]

Pretty much the name of the game in 2.2 is do not over-extend.

funny. in my last game all I was doing were declaring war. claiming few planets and resettling ALL POPs (yup, planets were empty) to my worlds as slaves (myworlds were pre-built to roughly have enough housing and farmer jobs). then I waited 10 years for truce to expire and repeated the process (upgrading\reparing fleets, preparing new planets and fixing economy)

 

[Nighzmarquls]

funny. in my last game all I was doing were declaring war. claiming few planets and resettling ALL POPs (yup, planets were empty) to my worlds as slaves (myworlds were pre-built to roughly have enough housing and farmer jobs). then I waited 10 years for truce to expire and repeated the process (upgrading\reparing fleets, preparing new planets and fixing economy)

Setting up to have enough housing and farmer jobs is literally preparing your economy for the 'peace'.

Pretty much with stellaris you can win the war and LOSE the peace. Which is awesome I think.

 

[AndyScull]

Someone here in thread mentioned that you can turn off 'Land appropriation" policy so your own species do not immediately migrate to newly conquered worlds. Yesterday I started a new game (with recommended 0.25 habitable worlds which I recommend now too) and decided to try it out. It works wonders, I never had problems with resources after turning this policy off. I did get some negative income but it wasn't that drastic as before and usually could be fixed by relocating a few pops around and disabling some buildings on conquered planets