Fixing the Problems With Empire-Wide Declining Pop Growth While Keeping the Benefits

[exi123]

I'd move the empire-wide modifier to a galaxy-wide modifier. That directly attacks the problem of late-game performance regardless of galaxy settings (number of empires) and player cheese tactics while substantially reducing the impact of the modifier on early game.

*edit* Reducing the number of pops expected on a completed colony back towards 25 would also go a *long* way to fixing the problem.

I am not really sure about galaxy wide effects for pop growth, but i never got why a district needs to add 3 jobs. Isnt one enough? One district, One job, One pop. How much these produce is a balancing issue, but this would reduce the pop count to one third or LESS what we had in 2.8.x.

In the current system one building adds 1-2-3 jobs for labs and foundries and replicators. The least two grant production bonuses to the other regular jobs. The energy nexus, mineral plant, science control thing and ministry of production dont even need a job at all (10% more raw resources ending in 10-20% more production sounds good). Ecumenopolises could stil grant 2 jobs per district.

Or should we get another district type for city districts? Which grant science jobs and/or merchants and/or entertainers and remove housing at all? Squeeze every job into districts and use buidlings just to boost up these districts. In this case a 20 sized planet ends up with... 20 pops. Like industrial districts benefit from a foundries or replicators, city districts are controlled by a lab, entertainment building or stock exchange.

Everything around is balanceable: How fast pops grow, what upgrades from buildings grant what bonus. Just thinking, if i had the time o would mod it just to try it.

 

[sillyrobot]

I am not really sure about galaxy wide effects for pop growth, but i never got why a district needs to add 3 jobs. Isnt one enough? One district, One job, One pop. How much these produce is a balancing issue, but this would reduce the pop count to one third or LESS what we had in 2.8.x.

In the current system one building adds 1-2-3 jobs for labs and foundries and replicators. The least two grant production bonuses to the other regular jobs. The energy nexus, mineral plant, science control thing and ministry of production dont even need a job at all (10% more raw resources ending in 10-20% more production sounds good). Ecumenopolises could stil grant 2 jobs per district.

Or should we get another district type for city districts? Which grant science jobs and/or merchants and/or entertainers and remove housing at all? Squeeze every job into districts and use buidlings just to boost up these districts. In this case a 20 sized planet ends up with... 20 pops. Like industrial districts benefit from a foundries or replicators, city districts are controlled by a lab, entertainment building or stock exchange.

Everything around is balanceable: How fast pops grow, what upgrades from buildings grant what bonus. Just thinking, if i had the time o would mod it just to try it.

Yeah, in my ideal world, all pop would live in districts and buildings would provide modifiers to those districts or the colony as a whole (like a planetary shield). In other words, MOO2.

 

[Baron Jukaga]

there are mods getting rid of the population growth debuffs already:

Steam Workshop::Lifting pop restrictions X

steamcommunity.com

 

[mial42]

there are mods getting rid of the population growth debuffs already:

Steam Workshop::Lifting pop restrictions X

steamcommunity.com

I know that. I don't want to do that, however, since I do like most of the effects of the change. I'd rather solve the (very real) problems it does have instead.

 

[Baron Jukaga]

I know that. I don't want to do that, however, since I do like most of the effects of the change. I'd rather solve the (very real) problems it does have instead.

How are you going to solve the problems without a mod? The devs won't change to suit your fancy. And what can you possibly like about this change?

 

[mial42]

How are you going to solve the problems without a mod? The devs won't change to suit your fancy. And what can you possibly like about this change?

If you read the OP, I listed 11 things I like about the change. Regardless, I'm making my own mods to solve some of the issues I do have; this post was just a suggestion to try and get the ones it'd be difficult to mod in in the base game.

 

[DrNukeLear]

Rather than creating or trying to fix this complex system, just returning to the 2.8 pop growth system and turning the base pop growth down would do wonders .

Reduce the ease of adding housing so that overcrowding becomes unavoidable, thereby reducing pop growth. Have a fraction of crime reduce pop growth to account for the crime related deaths increasing

 

[arkangyl88]

It's awful, remove it.

Nothing it accomplishes that is desirable can't be accomplished by much cleaner, more sensible, fun ways.

The way to fix snowballing is to go back to a tech system where large empires reached a soft cap on teching rather than being able to research repeatables in 3 months because you have 5000 pops and its impossible not to be research leader with 5000 pops. The problem with snowballing is that large empires are both advantaged in quantity (due to production) and quality (due to teching rate scaling linearly with pops so long as you stay under sprawl). Fix it so that large empires tech at roughly the same rate as small empires (or slightly slower than heavily optimized small empires), and its fine again. This is an explicit REGRESSION from previous stellaris versions that should have been fixed long ago the right way, not "fixed" by this awful mechanic.

There is no anti-lag mechanism because pops still grow just as quickly as before with lots of small empires and players are encouraged to make vassals to grow faster. AI empires still never expand much and by the time the AI starts expanding much the planets it conquers will have grown. All this mechanic does is punish players who can expand much faster than an AI, and a player is then left the choice of either suffering with few pops or abusing many of a litany of strategies to work around it and therefore negate the lower # of pops. A player who built 100 habitats before and wants to build 100 habitats now will still do that and lag their game to hell, the only change is they now need to do workarounds to get the growth.

There is no anti-micro effects because this update in fact encourages even more micro than before. Where before you could just build what you want when you want, now you need to dynamically monitor your planets and expand/contract housing and jobs and handle migration AHEAD OF TIME in order to keep growing well rather than simply clicking the planet when a red icon showed and building something. There was a simple suggestion to fix micro pre-3.0: LET PLAYERS BUILD BUILDINGS AHEAD OF TIME! Was this implemented? Still no! Instead you still unlock buildings over time and still can't pre-build them, they are just unlocked by slightly different things (city districts and some tech/civics/etc rather than every 5 pops).

Everything about this, yes.

 

[maxirage]

You could solve the micro problem by using a one-sided logisitic curve (growth slows down as a planet fills up, and that's it). I have no idea how the playtesters didn't see the problem with this system. It's so bad.

 

[Bezborg]

Remove the change and back to the drawing board.

Yes, performance and micro is an issue, but this game is bogged down enough by the endless war with Megacorp’s broken legacy that ruined the game (no matter how many individual positives we can find).

Thank you devs for trying but we’ll tackle the performance issues some other way, some other time, it’s ok. Since you made Stellaris into a pop micro manager type of game...ok, it is what it is...but now, making it even more unpleasant, and turning it evem more into a waiting game that has to rely on gamey micro... no, take a step back, we’ll figure something else out.

 

[currylambchop]

The way to fix snowballing is to go back to a tech system where large empires reached a soft cap on teching rather than being able to research repeatables in 3 months because you have 5000 pops and its impossible not to be research leader with 5000 pops. The problem with snowballing is that large empires are both advantaged in quantity (due to production) and quality (due to teching rate scaling linearly with pops so long as you stay under sprawl). Fix it so that large empires tech at roughly the same rate as small empires (or slightly slower than heavily optimized small empires), and its fine again. This is an explicit REGRESSION from previous stellaris versions that should have been fixed long ago the right way, not "fixed" by this awful mechanic.

A soft cap on research is as stupid as the soft cap on pops.

 

[Tristiss]

I misphrased I realized - I removed the empire wide boost, didn't change the other population modifiers, so planetary growth effects and any global pop caps are in effect.

Did you test this? I thought about this solution, but I'm not a modder myself. Would you publish this on steam?

 

[mial42]

You could solve the micro problem by using a one-sided logisitic curve (growth slows down as a planet fills up, and that's it). I have no idea how the playtesters didn't see the problem with this system. It's so bad.

That doesn't solve the micro problem, it makes it worse, since now you have an incentive to leave every planet half full (albeit not quite as bad as it is currently). Maybe if you did this, but instead of lowering growth you turned into emigration (speaking of underused systems...), that would work. But that doesn't solve the lag problem at all, since that requires reducing the total # of pops, not just how they're distributed.

 

[Tristiss]

That doesn't solve the micro problem, it makes it worse, since now you have an incentive to leave every planet half full (albeit not quite as bad as it is currently). Maybe if you did this, but instead of lowering growth you turned into emigration (speaking of underused systems...), that would work. But that doesn't solve the lag problem at all, since that requires reducing the total # of pops, not just how they're distributed.

Obviously I'm no expert at all, but my thought process was that it would reduce the total number of pop since now you wouldn't have 200 pop planets at least... Every planet could be filled but no one would be "overfilled" right? Also there's already an automatic migration system isn't it? I wouldn't mind if it were changed a bit like if pops would migrate if their planet is full but there's a new one opening and there are free jobs and homes?

I really don't know if that sufficient to reduce lag though, I'm just throwing that there
Also I'm really just throwing ideas, I'm really not an expert

 

[mial42]

Obviously I'm no expert at all, but my thought process was that it would reduce the total number of pop since now you wouldn't have 200 pop planets at least... Every planet could be filled but no one would be "overfilled" right? Also there's already an automatic migration system isn't it? I wouldn't mind if it were changed a bit like if pops would migrate if their planet is full but there's a new one opening and there are free jobs and homes?

I really don't know if that sufficient to reduce lag though, I'm just throwing that there
Also I'm really just throwing ideas, I'm really not an expert

It wouldn't reduce the total number of pops until well after every planet in the galaxy is more then half full. This is because, provided you leave every planet about half full (or even significantly less, per testing), you get DOUBLED pop growth on every planet, and with auto migration this is very easy (just don't build extra jobs). Thus you'd have more pops at just about every stage of the game, except maybe extreme lategame (but by building ringworlds, habitats, and ecus, quite possibly indefinitely).

My provisional solution (which feels pretty good) is to just double the amount of required growth and turn off both new systems (increasing required growth based on population and planetary logistic growth), while adding a modifier to new colonies that makes them grow much faster for the first couple of decades. Combined with a stronger "recently conquered pops" modifier to rein in snowballing, and it works pretty well. Not perfectly, but IMO better then both the old or new systems.

 

[rubert]

The problem seems to be expotential growth you can get when fully grown pops move (resettlement and immigration) when you have 10+ planets filling up couple new planets. As a wild idea I wonder if removing resettlement and immigration of fully grown pops and replacing them with some other mechanics for the new colonies and the "full" planets to handle pop growth and overcrowding.

Eg. new colonies could get a big boost to pop growth at the start and then it would slow as the population grows. Rationale behind this could be that when the colony only has one million people moving 100k immigrants would be easy and it would give a huge bonus to the colony but when the colony has one billion people 100k immigrants wouldn't be that big increase.

Full planets could have some sort of permanent underclass of unemployed, criminals, people doing odd-jobs etc. which would give penalties, bonus production and consume some resources depending on your empire type. Once full the planet should have basically zero growth. Player could use different policies to either reduce the underclass or otherwise negate the problems caused by it. Maybe there could dynamically changing number of jobs for a clerk-style workers. They would not be very effective but it would move the pops from the underclass.

Let the underclass grow too big and you might get bigger trouble with criminals etc. Each empire should have different way of handling them. Eg. Egalitarian empire might give Utopian Abundance and get bigger bonus from the underclass while Authoritarian empire might have work camps, surveillance etc.

"Overcrowded planet" is fairly typical trope in scifi as well and currently Stellaris doesn't really have anything like it.

 

[Meneye]

The absolute simplest solution is to keep the empire-wide growth cap, but to make it so it only slows down pop growth by a much smaller amount. I'd be sorta fine with keeping a hard cap like we have now, but having it take 25 years to grow a single pop is way too much. 10 years should be the absolute maximum, if even that, because right now megastructures like ringworlds are an absolute pain to fill if you don't start them early enough.

Maybe another solution would be to move the empire-wide debuff to the total amount of planets you and your vassals have instead. It could encourage tall play by making it so they could have fewer but much more developed planets. Wide players would still be stronger because they can exploit much more space and planets in general, but they would do so at the cost of perhaps never being able to have highly populated planets (which is fitting for an actually wide playstyle).

 

[Bankipriel]

Interesting points, OP.

It's super frustrating that the devs keep making changes that cause optimal play to be a giant pain in the a**.

I foolishly thought 3.x might actually reduce micro, and instead it has just taken planet micro to a whole new level.

The carrying capacity systems seems just *incredibly*, poorly thought out. Now Corvee is a mandatory civic & vassal farming is too good to ignore if I'm actually trying to play to the best of my strategic ability. Ugh, vassal farming, what a pain in the a**. It took me about 5 hours of play to realize what I needed to do, and then I saw my assumptions confirmed here on all the pop threads. Yet *nobody* at PDX could look at their systems and see this obvious, terrible optimal play being created by these growth changes?

Well, I suppose it added some spice to AP choices. Shared Destiny might actually be a strong choice for every game. I plan to aim for at least five single system habitat vassal pop-farms. I'll have to keep track of the influence cost over the game and see how much Shared Destiny would have saved me.

I just pray they learn their lesson and get rid of pops in Stellaris 2.

 

[orc4hire]

Based on my limited experience so far, the problems this new pop growth mechanic fixes aren't problems I had, so all I get is the negatives.

I'm only 50 years into this game, but so far I haven't seen anything at all in this update that makes the game more fun for me.

 

[Bankipriel]

Based on my limited experience so far, the problems this new pop growth mechanic fixes aren't problems I had, so all I get is the negatives.

I'm only 50 years into this game, but so far I haven't seen anything at all in this update that makes the game more fun for me.

If I could roll back to 2.8 and *keep* the new crisis and galactic imperium additions, that's what I would be doing.

Oh, and the industrial sectors. I actually really like that change.