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

[mial42]

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.

Turn off the new pop mechanics in defines (I've done that and just slowed down growth/assembly in general + added an event to make new colonies grow faster so as to not take forever to get off the ground, and it works reasonably well).

 

[maxirage]

Industrial sectors are annoying because they group alloy and consumer good production together, meaning if you only need one of those it adds more micro to prevent pop going unemployed from demotion.

By the way, why is demotion time still a thing? It's one of the worst mechanics I've ever seen in a video game.

 

[mial42]

Industrial sectors are annoying because they group alloy and consumer good production together, meaning if you only need one of those it adds more micro to prevent pop going unemployed from demotion.

Agreed, and I said as much when they first announced them.

By the way, why is demotion time still a thing? It's one of the worst mechanics I've ever seen in a video game.

The only reason I can think of is to prevent bureaucrat micro. It's the sort of thing that sounds good in the abstract, but really just doesn't work (piracy is another thing in that category). And the thing is, the devs know this, since they reduced the time in the update, they just... didn't get rid of it for some reason.

 

[Jarolleon]

IMO just scrap it and replace it with a decrease to base growth rate. This way you'll still have fewer pops in the endgame, carrying capacity will matter more, and you won't have to cheese around this counterintuitive nonsense

 

[Bankipriel]

IMO just scrap it and replace it with a decrease to base growth rate. This way you'll still have fewer pops in the endgame, carrying capacity will matter more, and you won't have to cheese around this counterintuitive nonsense

Yeah ... the fact that my habitats/planets have to be kept sort-of-empty to maximize growth is an annoying mechanic *because* it feels like a penalty.

Just looking at carrying capacity as it is now, it would be really nice if there was a strategic way to utilize planet/habitat "space" that didn't involve pops, e.g. nature preserves, or something. Then we could at least make some kind of strategic & advantageous decision about how to *not* use a planet for population & jobs.

 

[tremor3258]

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

I'm not much of a modder and haven't published one before, so this may not play well with other mods since it affects the base predefined file.

It seems to be working so far but the other AIs feel way behind, like they just invented the cruiser while I have titans. I just molded out the empire pop growth total modifiers but it feels it revealed something.


I think it is keeping a level playing field growth wise between player and AI, lot of robot assembly factories on worlds I integrated and good number of robots but also energy nexus on worlds with no generator districts, etc.

Just to note around 3k pops and it feels like unemployment is moving around, but not a ton of it. I haven't dug into long populated worlds but newly populated worlds are showing a very limited growth until some housing.

This wasn't a game from start so the total pop would be further ahead normally with these values, but that boost should affect everyone. After I took the empire limiter out, I started to hit migration treaties and habitability tech that opened up a lot more worlds but I was leading before, so a lot more afterwards.

 

[Less2]

Industrial sectors are annoying because they group alloy and consumer good production together, meaning if you only need one of those it adds more micro to prevent pop going unemployed from demotion.

All you need to do is change planetary designation to flip from 1/1 alloy/cg to 2/0 or 0/2. It honestly makes balancing them far too easy. There's no penalty at all to overbuilding one at the expense of the other, you can just flip your whole economy overnight.

(unfortunately this doesn't work for your capital planet, so it's better to quickly load pops into your first colony and make that your foundry).

 

[RaptorCommander]

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).

There is an idea in there. Instead of pops being slowed just transfer the mulus to tech.