[Dev Team] 3.0.3 Beta Patch Released (checksum 927c)

[Mealya]

Seems to be. When I updated to check out the privateers fix I didn't notice anything wacky really. I was able to upgrade capital buildings and all that. It was pretty much at the end of the game though. Used that save game for the achievement.

Arm privateers works, but late seems kind of useless. Could be ok early I guess, not sure. At 2450 it spawned a 4k fleet.

4k at 2450 ?... So useless :/ At this time it should be something like 50~120k...

 

[PedroLuiz]

. Except they do on the planets, where they have high habitability (90+)... I have to spend ~260 influence to resettle those 3 bastards. Could you put higher value on migration, -1000 instead of -100?

Pops resettle away from planets without jobs, so just turn them off

 

[RobInconformista]

I have a suggestion - remove all kinetics weapons. Why do we need them anyway? Energy weapons have null void beam that destroy shields, penetrating weapons that makes any defence irrelevant, and now T weapons that are extremally strong, and what kinetics have? Erm... lot of other engi tech so you cant improve them as much as energy in end-game? yeah... great...
...
2. The fact is that energy weapons have everything, and kinetcs have only hard time of upgrading them via repetables, and that penetrating weapon is both - op, and energy.

Edit: its funny, because You are disagreing with facts xD You may not like it, but its a fact xD

This was bad communication and arrogantly rude. Those who use hull penetration weapons know the dps is lower, but also the damage varies from 1..N where the kinetic/laser/plasma tech guarantee more and a max of about 3N/2.

Whether anti-hull weapons are the best choice depends on ratio of shields+armour : hull points, so against FE/AE and many crises forces they are a good choice, but against empire ships with most points hull, the cons of a lack of good L slot range option (except if you pair cloud lightening with Fed DLC juggernaut with the +40% range module). The big kinetic have shorter cooldown, so their damage chews at shields opening the target for a big energy hit. Note that massive 1000 pt kill shot may be totally wasted on a 400 pt ship, which ought to be considered before being snide to the developers.

That is a good balance, only carefully designed fleets can be more effective than long range kinetic plus laser/plasma.

Consider Flak, if you need high tracking it's kinetic, plenty of late game fleets use strike craft/missile combos in addition to the battle cruisers and titans.

Frankly I was surprised that the ion beams were not in the energy category, probably a simple oversight.

Last point is you can control which repeatable tech is researched with the automatic repeatables mod, so you have a way to pick which engineering techs to ignore to optimise research points.

 

[PedroLuiz]

It seems to me right now from playing 3.0.3 that the S curve is missing the mark, because the slow growth right as colonies start up hurts them for too long (not great in early colonization), and with the lower building slots now, more established planets just tend not to have the jobs to end up near their capacity (so midgame things go crazy as the core planets become breeders that also pile on robots).

agreed, they need to dramatically decrease the number of jobs

imagine a planet with very little spare housing, no unused district slots, but jabs galore, vs. a planet with tons of district slots, but nothing built and crippling unemployment; the current system says the former planet should have low growth as it's near capacity, while the latter planet should have high growth as it's around half its carrying capacity.

and the system is realistic, cost of living is what truly matters to industrial societies' population growth, furthermore, IRL places with too many jobs only keep growing by attracting people from regions with higher population growth

Seeing as both extremes are wrong, it's reasonable to conclude that the middle is wrong too, and that's what I'm seeing in games, as my "core" planets are pumping out pops where there's no opportunities, while my colonies twiddle their thumbs despite having abundant opportunity (and a decent few extra pops moved in to promote growth).

if colonization in the real world is a model to Stellaris it's reasonable that colonies grow slowly at first and then explode as the population has plenty of room to grow

To think about "realism", logistic growth theories are premised on carrying capacity being bound by available food, as population inherently wants to be exponential, but having too little food individually increases chances of having trouble reproducing and outright dying, putting a clamp on things.

tell that to Europe, they have plenty of food and yet are struggling to grow their population

That guarantees access to food and other important things to live, like medical care, is generally having some kind of income to spend, and thus having a job.

we are talking about post-demographic transition populations here, having food and medical care hardly matters to the population growth (unless you are a literal slave but that's besides the point)

 

[Archael90]

This was bad communication and arrogantly rude. Those who use hull penetration weapons know the dps is lower, but also the damage varies from 1..N where the kinetic/laser/plasma tech guarantee more and a max of about 3N/2.

Whether anti-hull weapons are the best choice depends on ratio of shields+armour : hull points, so against FE/AE and many crises forces they are a good choice, but against empire ships with most points hull, the cons of a lack of good L slot range option (except if you pair cloud lightening with Fed DLC juggernaut with the +40% range module). The big kinetic have shorter cooldown, so their damage chews at shields opening the target for a big energy hit. Note that massive 1000 pt kill shot may be totally wasted on a 400 pt ship, which ought to be considered before being snide to the developers.

That is a good balance, only carefully designed fleets can be more effective than long range kinetic plus laser/plasma.

Consider Flak, if you need high tracking it's kinetic, plenty of late game fleets use strike craft/missile combos in addition to the battle cruisers and titans.

Frankly I was surprised that the ion beams were not in the energy category, probably a simple oversight.

Last point is you can control which repeatable tech is researched with the automatic repeatables mod, so you have a way to pick which engineering techs to ignore to optimise research points.

Yeah, i can agree that everything You have said would be great, and i believe devs wanted this to be that way. Unfortunately they have failed. Yeah, without cl You should not go pen weapons. But im talking of energy weapons domination. Especially past mid-game where engineering weapons starting to became no more than addition to energy ones. And after repetables, where no weapons can be upgraded as fast as energy. Penetrating weapons are the cherry on top, those are op bastards, because there is no defence against them. Empire that is heavily investing energy dmg and atk speed will be far ahead against empire with mixed weapons (kinetic, energy, carriers) especially if those would spend some research on armor or shields. Only thing they can do is to go full energy for T weapons and NL with energy repetables, and try to take of some penetrating ships before they do, because armor was only thing they were improving... So... Energy weapons are end-game focus, and nothing else.

 

[shrgamer]

5 things
1. Imperial capital usually provides 6 ruler jobs but with merchant guilds only provides 4 (2 administrators and 2 merchants). Is this intended?
2. Rouge Servitors habitat industrial districts provide 1 fabricator job and 1 artisan drone job. However the foundry habitat designation only removes an artisan drone job if a level 2 or 3 factory has been built and habitat, regular, and machine world foundry designation add an alloy drone job instead of a fabricator job. Similarly the habitat, regular, and machine world factory designations remove an alloy drone job instead of a fabricator job.
3. Forge subsidies does not give foundry jobs energy maintenance for regular empires in spite of its tooltip.
4. Gestalts still can't research edict duration repeating tech. Is this intended?
5. loosing a bunch of artisan jobs on completing an archology is real annoying.

 

[AlknicTeos]

I do normally one vanilla game with each great version change ... and one thing is, that there is a tech outcommented in the repeatable engineering vanilla file that increase hull by 5% each, that I always re-incommented 'cause of the penetrating weapons.
even it is nice, that some more weapons scale now with the repeatables - does it change anything in your playstyle ? do you experience a "new game" then.
However, I won't play a single game with vanilla settings for pops growth.... regardless which new dlc,etc.

 

[Ludaire]

Every variable for the logistic growth system (and the growth-per-pop, for that matter) are very intentionally in defines for ease of modding.

I think they were hoping for more access than tweaking the numbers of the existing system. For example, I couldn't add planetary carrying capacity for organic sanctuaries with a mod (though I'm thrilled you added it yourselves). I still can't make it so pops who require less/more housing count more/less for logistical growth. The only thing I could find outside changing the constants in the equation was changing the amount of carrying capacity undeveloped districts provide on different planet types.

The same is true of the empire wide growth penalty. I can change the numbers or turn it off, but I can't change how pops are counted based on traits or some other context.

I would love to be corrected and pointed at the thing I'm missing. Pops being different depending on traits is one of the things that makes Stellaris so great, and it's a bit sad when new systems are introduced that don't interact with all of the awesome species and empire customization you've created.

It was mostly flavor, but does encourage you to actually feed them and provide consumer goods.

It is certainly good to encourage rogue servitors to cloth and feed their bio trophies.

Not yet, but expect that to get fixed at some point, it is considered a bug that they're not affected by it.

Woo! Thank you.

(Though if you wanted to declare it a feature, I'd happily start resettling my original bio trophies to non-gaia worlds to grow, instead of not abusing the bug!)

 

[Kayden_II]

What's about this silly thing that basically the same robots count as "different" species ? Still a thing ?

 

[Wizard of Cozz]

I'm not trying to be one of those people who think they have the best answer, but maybe instead of having the Population Growth be affected by your total population count, perhaps it would be better to have it be affected by the Population count of the planet instead?

 

[Olterin]

I'm not trying to be one of those people who think they have the best answer, but maybe instead of having the Population Growth be affected by your total population count, perhaps it would be better to have it be affected by the Population count of the planet instead?

This is literally what the s-curve of logistic growth represents. There's a reason the bonus growth from that is called "+N.N from pops" in the tooltip (... or if you ever get to a very high populaion, it goes into negatives).

Edit: with that said, what is currently ingame is a very ... significantly modified version thereof.

 

[grommile]

I'm not trying to be one of those people who think they have the best answer, but maybe instead of having the Population Growth be affected by your total population count, perhaps it would be better to have it be affected by the Population count of the planet instead?

There are two systems.

We have an empire-wide linear cost increase for how many Pop Growth Points it takes to make a new pop.

We have something resembling a (mutilated) logistic curve, based on the number of pops on the planet and the Carrying Capacity of the planet, for how many Pop Growth Points a planet generates each month.

 

[mial42]

I'm not trying to be one of those people who think they have the best answer, but maybe instead of having the Population Growth be affected by your total population count, perhaps it would be better to have it be affected by the Population count of the planet instead?

This is in the game already, and the main reason (among a few others) why it doesn't work is simple: resettlement exists. If the number of pops in a planet affect the growth, then encourages bizarre and counterintuitive gameplay to make sure that every planet has the perfect number of pops for optimal growth.

 

[Nox Eterna]

"Ion Cannons, Perdition Beams, and Titan Lasers are now considered energy weapons and benefit from repeatable technologies." Been asking for this for like 3 years or something xD

 

[cman960]

I played a little bit of the void dweller origin, I got into about 50 years give or take. It was okay, but I was doing a weird strategy where I wanted to impose my ideologies as a shared burdens empire. My pop growth was around 70-80 before I closed it. I changed the origin to life seeded, and my UI broke upon loading the galaxy. Image for reference. EDIT: Sorry I'm tired, I posted this in the wrong thread.

 

[ulver]

Beta patch still ironman achievements compatibles? What if I update an existing game?

 

[YokoZar]

That bug which indirectly causes slaves with Energy Credits-boosting traits to instead actively avoid Technician jobs, has that been fixed? I heard it has been in the game for years. Copied from a Reddit post:

"This is an old old bug specifically related to slaves and the Technician job. Normally slaves have big boosts to their job weights for Farmer and Miner, trying to make it so slaves take those jobs whenever possible. The Technician job is supposed to have a clause that gives slaves with traits that make them good at energy production high weights for the job, but instead it does the opposite: it gives those weights to only slaves who don't have the traits, and the slaves who do get the normal low weight. Therefore it's very hard to get slaves who would be good at Technician jobs to actually take those jobs."

This bug is indeed still live. I have now posted it to the Bug Reports forum, where it might actually get looked at, complete with test case, screenshots, and a fix:

Stellaris - [3.3 beta, first reported 3.0.3] Technician slave weight is backwards if slave has +energy traits

Description [3.0.3][1d63] Technician slave weight is backwards if slave has +energy traits Game Version 3.0.3 What version do you use? Steam What expansions do you have installed? Synthetic Dawn, Utopia, Leviathans Story Pack, Apocalypse...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

 

[YokoZar]

Yeah. Don't do that. Keep it in the bug forums, hounding us with issues will get old real fast.

In the last few patches PDX has been very good at reading reports, marking them confirmed, replying with thanks, etc. This wasn't always the case (there was basically no feedback that bug reports were even being read during the 2.6 cycle), and I'd like to once again thank you for the positive change.

Post good bug reports people! It's not that hard

 

[Tirion1987]

Thank you for fixing the aggressive stance armies!

 

[Toybasher]

Why was the effect of Criminals on trade lowered to -5?

It originally was -1, then last update IIRC changed it to -10, and this changes it again to -5.

The issue where criminal syndicates got unfairly dinged for crime on the target planet was fixed.

I'm bringing it up because I thought the "harsher" penalties for having high crime gave criminals some real teeth so the crime lord deal wasn't such a no-brainer.

I'm not sure if the energy penalty for deviancy (Machine/Empire version of crime) is the same, on a side note.