Graphical Comparison of 3.01 vs 2.9 Pop Growth

[EmperorOfSerbia]

If NASA opened up a portal to a Virgin Earth and the US settled 5% of their population on it with the same laws, society, economy, and living standards we have here, you wouldn't expect the birth rate in the country to double overnight.

This is not as obvious as it sounds at first.

The key word here is the same living standard. But the living standard on the virgin Earth would be inherently different than from the original Earth. Two main differences are housing and job availability.

In the modern US, there are areas significantly lacking in jobs, for example rural Nebraska. On the other hand, the major population centers have a labor shortage. An important property of the large population centers is that housing is extremely expensive, mostly due do high population density and the need to optimize the limited land into high population capacity.

On a virgin world, land would be basically free. You could build spacious one-story houses with yards everywhere. Housing on a virgin world would inherently be cheaper with a good-enough industrial base, and thus the standard of living on a colony would increase in that regard.

On the other hand, jobs are inherently present on a virgin world. The world is virgin, it needs to be tamed. Every single capable person would be employed, leading to a combination of both job and housing availability. Thus, with the same level of technology, one might even expect that the colonists would have a better standard of living than the people staying on the homeworld.

But the primary difference is that in our society, children are basically an economic burden. They need to be fed, given shelter, kept healthy, educated... Parents get no economic returns, they have kids for emotional / biological reasons. But on a virgin world in development which is starving for new workers, people are wealth. Thus having more kids to help work on your farm, shop, whatever, is actually economically beneficial for the parents. Based on this, my assumption is that the population on the virgin world would grow higher than on the homeworld, per capita.

 

[ChiefBigFeather]

This is not as obvious as it sounds at first.

The key word here is the same living standard. But the living standard on the virgin Earth would be inherently different than from the original Earth. Two main differences are housing and job availability.

In the modern US, there are areas significantly lacking in jobs, for example rural Nebraska. On the other hand, the major population centers have a labor shortage. An important property of the large population centers is that housing is extremely expensive, mostly due do high population density and the need to optimize the limited land into high population capacity.

On a virgin world, land would be basically free. You could build spacious one-story houses with yards everywhere. Housing on a virgin world would inherently be cheaper with a good-enough industrial base, and thus the standard of living on a colony would increase in that regard.

On the other hand, jobs are inherently present on a virgin world. The world is virgin, it needs to be tamed. Every single capable person would be employed, leading to a combination of both job and housing availability. Thus, with the same level of technology, one might even expect that the colonists would have a better standard of living than the people staying on the homeworld.

But the primary difference is that in our society, children are basically an economic burden. They need to be fed, given shelter, kept healthy, educated... Parents get no economic returns, they have kids for emotional / biological reasons. But on a virgin world in development which is starving for new workers, people are wealth. Thus having more kids to help work on your farm, shop, whatever, is actually economically beneficial for the parents. Based on this, my assumption is that the population on the virgin world would grow higher than on the homeworld, per capita.

There are some assumptions here that are not true. Parents with children get various forms of help from the government in different states. You also have the benefit of (hopefully) having someone to care for you when getting old.
Living standards would not necessarily be higher on a new world, that depends entirely on the old world and how social welfare works. Infrastructure plays an important role in living standards too.

[edit]
But this is ultimately besides the point. You can very well add a (diminishing) per planet growth bonus to empire wide growth. The way it was handled in 2.x was terrible because it made the game scale too aggressively with number of planets. Having 2 more good, habitable planets in your starting area with some good leader traits like "a new generation" made me want to turn the difficulty up a step. Having really poor starting planets made me loose. The power of your empire was way too dependent on what planets you got because pop growth is so incredibly powerful.
Stellaris is not a "realistic" game anyway, so the question of game mechanics is way more important then any speculation about "realism".

 

[EmperorOfSerbia]

There are some assumptions here that are not true. Parents with children get various forms of help from the government in different states. You also have the benefit of (hopefully) having someone to care for you when getting old.
Living standards would not necessarily be higher on a new world, that depends entirely on the old world and how social welfare works. Infrastructure plays an important role in living standards too.

But this is ultimately besides the point. You can very well add a (diminishing) per planet growth bonus to empire wide growth. The way it was handled in 2.x was terrible because it made the game scale too aggressively. Having 2 more good, habitable planets in your starting area with some good leader traits like "a new generation" made me want to turn the difficulty up a step. Having really poor starting planets made me loose. The power of your empire was way too dependent on what planets you got because pop growth is so incredibly powerful.

Yes, I am not stating this as fact, I am just saying that the issue is much more complicated that what it seems at the first glance.

 

[Abberon]

If you haven't guessed by now, I kinda sit in the middle of the fence on judging these new changes. One the one hand I can see what the devs are trying to do and agree with a lot of their high-level intentions, but I also think they've done a pretty poor job executing their ideas. I don't pretend to have all the answers to fixing the current mess, but I can say that truly fixing it will take a more substantial effort than just tweaking a few growth modifiers. If the devs really want to shift the game progression so that you have only a few highly developed worlds supported by multiple underdeveloped ones, there's a ton of better, more intuitive, and more fun ways to do so. Maybe revamp the colonization and building system so that you'll get a few basic resource pops quickly on a new planet no matter what your empire size, but full developing it will take much longer. Perhaps go back and re-work the trade system so that you have trade networks of rural worlds supporting urban cores with raw resources and growth. Instead of having this fantastically complex and obtuse system of individual planet growth with tons of local modifiers tied into an auto-resettlement system, maybe just make pop growth empire wide instead to cut down the complexity and promote the mindset of "I don't have enough pops to fill all my planets" instead of "my planets aren't growing enough pops."

At some point, the devs are either going to have to knuckle down and take the time to just scrap some of the game mechanics and re-build them from the ground up. I get that they want to do things with the least amount of time and effort (and programming changes), but the game is far past the point where layering more changes on top of everything is just making everything worse with unintended consequences, and people are getting pissed.

Also, each dev should HAVE to play a singleplayer campaign on default settings to the end-date each patch cycle. That alone would help fix some of the more obvious issues with balance that seem to come around every patch cycle.

This was a great post, and I hope some of the people who didn't understand the implications actually read through it so they can speak with at least a basic understanding of what's happening now.

I've been saying in this forum that I was PUMPED for the Nemesis update and it wasn't really because of the Imperium or Nemesis or espionage mechanics. I knew espionage was going to end up being a big nothing (it always is in these games) and I never enjoyed the Galactic Senate in the first place. Becoming the crisis appealed to me but that was already sort of an option.

What I was really excited about was a substantial effort to reduce population and improve late-game performance. I remember reading the dev diaries and being so excited about what they were aiming to achieve.

Never in a million years did I realize that what they were talking about was anything like what we actually got. The stacking pop growth malus was probably one of the laziest, most intrusive and most game-breaking solution they could have come up with. Not only is it unintuitive, as you say, but it's an absolute sledgehammer that obliterates so many options and playstyles that I find it almost impossible to understand they didn't see how poorly it would be received.

Where you and I differ, I guess, is that I'm not on the fence at all on this change. I'm firmly on the other side and have absolutely no desire to play the game whatsoever after this change and I suspect we'll see player numbers plummet to new depths in the coming weeks/months. It may take some of the more easy-going and less math-inclined folk to play enough to actually experience the implications, but most of them will get there. Sometimes you have to see it to believe it. The mathematical "theory" isn't enough.

 

[117Killer]

I offer the elegance of a simple solution.

Halve the old pop growth, halve the jobs, double their output.

Half the pops, half the jobs, half the computer resources taken up, no changes to gameplay and a boost to performance. everyone wins.

 

[RoverStorm]

I offer the elegance of a simple solution.

Halve the old pop growth, halve the jobs, double their output.

Half the pops, half the jobs, half the computer resources taken up, no changes to gameplay and a boost to performance. everyone wins.

Yeah this is a club that is growing. Another one is essentially a return to the hard cap of Planet Size = pop limit, and balance around that.

I've been curious about how certain things work and may try creating some interesting economic overhaul mods to see if they reduce lag.

 

[ompy]

Why not just keep the growth model from 2.9, but cut the scale of it and compensate by making pops produce proportionally more resources?
For example, have rural and manufacturing districts only hold 1 pop instead of 2, but make each pop job produce twice as much stuff. Do the same for every other job, and halve the overall growth rate. Then you'd have half as many pops as you did in 2.9, but the game wouldn't feel any different, (except for edge cases like events where one pop dies which would be twice as impactful)

 

[monkeypunch87]

Why not just keep the growth model from 2.9

2.8 and, hopefully, never again.

 

[sotmh]

I am absolutely on board with making populations hard to come by as planets get more crowded, or having rural planets that funnel growth to ecumenopolis worlds or making growth management an important part of the game. I just don't think the current system does this very well and any system has to have a transparent operation so that newer players and the AI don't get crushed by it.

 

[RoverStorm]

I am absolutely on board with making populations hard to come by as planets get more crowded

I'd rather they rework jobs and maybe ethics so that having millions of pops has nearly no impact on lag, so it can open up the ability for some empires to be based on huge populations of crappy quality while others can be based on what we are currently shooting for (high quality low quantity pop count).

 

[Nakkivene]

Just remove pops, they add nothing to the game anyway.

 

[Pellaken]

Also, each dev should HAVE to play a singleplayer campaign on default settings to the end-date each patch cycle. That alone would help fix some of the more obvious issues with balance that seem to come around every patch cycle.

hold on a second... do the devs really not play single player?

 

[Less2]

hold on a second... do the devs really not play single player?

Have you seen the state of the game?

 

[arosenberger14]

hold on a second... do the devs really not play single player?

They say they do. I am somewhat uncertain if they actually play all the way to the endgame dates.

 

[Ozonosfera]

Or something like Star Ruler 2 where you have developed planets supported by a network of more rural ones.

The fundamental problem here is that they've made a planetary management system that's fun to play with when you have up to a dozen planets, but becomes clunkier the more you have. And the game lets you go all the way to hundreds of 'em. They've never really tackled that disconnect well; the early game works great, but once you start getting to mid game the economic gameplay mechanics start to scale worse and worse.

Nice to see someone remember Star Ruler 2. I liked it's planetary management and diplomacy. Each race had unique gameplay.

Funily enough I discovered Stellaris and Paradox thanks to someone mentioning it in a Star Ruler 2 review.

 

[RoverStorm]

hold on a second... do the devs really not play single player?

At the very least they do have QA (Quality Assurance) test out all aspects of the game. I'm not quite sure if the developers themselves do, but the developer streams I feel are usually multiplayer. The lowest player count I can recall was 2 players; previous lead developer Wiz versus youtuber cKnoor from a REALLY long time ago, 2017 if I recall and was a preview of the Utopia DLC. Though I don't frequently follow their streams.

 

[Brael]

Why not just keep the growth model from 2.9, but cut the scale of it and compensate by making pops produce proportionally more resources?
For example, have rural and manufacturing districts only hold 1 pop instead of 2, but make each pop job produce twice as much stuff. Do the same for every other job, and halve the overall growth rate. Then you'd have half as many pops as you did in 2.9, but the game wouldn't feel any different, (except for edge cases like events where one pop dies which would be twice as impactful)

This is basically what they did. Except it's a lot more tricky than simply cutting everything in half because not everything is proportional like that, and it doesn't actually fix the issue. If you do this without a curve to slow growth, you have the Thanos problem where a snap to eliminate 50% of the population doesn't set everything back all that much. With exponential growth, and it was exponential previously due to the fact that you could build more habitats and so on to increase it as you snowball, halving pops doesn't reduce end game pops by half. It only reduces them by 15% or 20%. They wanted to go for a much, much, bigger cut for various reasons, and that means you need a growth curve, not just starting growth from a smaller point, as exponential growth doesn't care much about where you start, and they also have to account for different game settings like playing past 2500 for various reasons, or larger maps, and so on.

Changing this requires a really in depth change to all sorts of scaling across the game.

 

[Bezborg]

Just remove pops, they add nothing to the game anyway.

It’s true. Individual micro pops in a galactic empire macromanager? Ambitious but it’s not working, not in this game. Maybe the next one

 

[Tom D.]

So, please correct me if I understood it wrong, but does this mean that it's actually good to play "tall" and confine yourself to like 5 planets max? Or even just your homeworld?

 

[MK1980]

So, please correct me if I understood it wrong, but does this mean that it's actually good to play "tall" and confine yourself to like 5 planets max? Or even just your homeworld?

no it's never good to play tall. the positive effect of playing tall with the new mechanics is that your total pop count may be small enough to not get into the "snails pace" part of the growth curve.

a civ with more planets will still have much more total growth, a lot higher total pop count and thus more... everything really. staying small to avoid the penalty for growing is not a winning strategy in a game where size is basically the equivalent of success