History of Traits & Productivity

[HFY]

Back in 1.x when tiles walked the planets' surfaces, productivity traits were never purely effective.

If a tile gave 3food, 2minerals, 1 energy, moving a pop with a +% food trait to work that tile would boost only part of that tile's output.

This meant traits were originally always a trade-off, and you never got a situation where every output had a perfect trait match which boosted it at zero opportunity cost. You were always making a choice with no perfect solution.


2.2 broke this when tiles with mixed productivity were replaced by jobs with more simplistic productivity.

Along with pop scaling breaking the late game, jobs broke the previous productivity trade-off and replaced it with UX frustration -- there now is a perfect trait for every job, but you can't get them there because of user interface limitations.


Would it be better to allow you to just plop or genemod (or robomod) a perfect trait package for every job? It would end one frustration, but would it make the game better?

Would having a single obvious answer make the game's choices more interesting?

I think that can't be the correct answer, because to me having a single obvious answer means not really having a choice.


But something should be changed. The current setup where only UX is used to "balance" traits isn't a good feeling.

Here are a few ideas:


Laborer Jobs

- All three basic resource Districts now create +2 Laborer jobs, which produce a mix of resources (+2 food / +2 minerals / +2 energy). Each district also adds +0.1 of its specific resource to the output of each Laborer.
- Planet modifiers can change the initial allocation, for example a Dry world might produce -1 food / +1 energy (good for Lithoids); a Wet world might produce +0.5 food / -0.5 minerals (good for Catalytics). Something like Bleak might reduce the base by -2 food.
- Buildings like Hydroponics Tanks might provide a Laborer job and also provide flat resource output (+5 food), or might just provide the resource with no pops -- making them more pop-efficient if you can spare the slots.


Complex Traits

- Instead of having cheap traits which are only relevant to a single job, create more interesting traits which each provide trade-offs.
- Someone would need to design these complex traits.


Endgame General Traits

- With ascension or endgame techs, provide cheaper Traits which make specific traits obsolete and are incompatible with the starter traits, like +10% Worker production instead of +15% food production.
- Maybe Assimilation always removes the starter traits and provides access to new, better traits.


Endgame Unified Jobs

- Alpha Centauri had something like this for specialists: you start out with jobs like Technician & Doctor, but by the endgame every specialist is a Transcend which gives a better bonus than either of the starter jobs.
- One way to do this might be to transform starter planets into a new kind of Ecu for basic resources, with new jobs (like the Laborer) which provide all 3 basic resources.
- Seems a bit like the first idea with extra steps, so I'm not sure it's worthwhile.


Other ideas?

Thoughts?

 

[ZomgK3tchup]

Endgame Unified Jobs

- Alpha Centauri had something like this for specialists: you start out with jobs like Technician & Doctor, but by the endgame every specialist is a Transcend which gives a better bonus than either of the starter jobs.
- One way to do this might be to transform starter planets into a new kind of Ecu for basic resources, with new jobs (like the Laborer) which provide all 3 basic resources.
- Seems a bit like the first idea with extra steps, so I'm not sure it's worthwhile.

This one is the most interesting.

One of the many things Alpha Centauri did right is that your empire is a fundamentally different place than it was when you started the game.

While Stellaris does have ascension perks that can shake things up, your empire at the end of the game is usually just a larger version of your empire at the beginning of the game.

Having “advanced jobs” would be an interesting way to address this and provide a sense of progression that’s missing from the game right now.

 

[Ryika]

If a tile gave 3food, 2minerals, 1 energy, moving a pop with a +% food trait to work that tile would boost only part of that tile's output.

This meant traits were originally always a trade-off, and you never got a situation where every output had a perfect trait match which boosted it at zero opportunity cost. You were always making a choice with no perfect solution.

I think you're misremembering how the system worked. The situation where you have a tile with 2 minerals and 1 food essentially never occurred past the early game, because the moment you placed a building on it, the "incorrect" yield would be overridden. So a tile with 2 minerals and 1 food with a mine would turn into 4 minerals 0 food.

 

[DamnedLackOfTropicalFruit]

Laborer Jobs

- All three basic resource Districts now create +2 Laborer jobs, which produce a mix of resources (+2 food / +2 minerals / +2 energy). Each district also adds +0.1 of its specific resource to the output of each Laborer.
- Planet modifiers can change the initial allocation, for example a Dry world might produce -1 food / +1 energy (good for Lithoids); a Wet world might produce +0.5 food / -0.5 minerals (good for Catalytics). Something like Bleak might reduce the base by -2 food.
- Buildings like Hydroponics Tanks might provide a Laborer job and also provide flat resource output (+5 food), or might just provide the resource with no pops -- making them more pop-efficient if you can spare the slots.

I think this would put too much emphasis on empire design - your early resource distribution would be dictated by your planet class and trait choices, and it would be extremely difficult to meaningfully adapt your economy to your position.

Different playstyles need different raw materials in different amounts, and early Labourers would be extremely inflexible once you've locked in your empire design. If an AI empire is trying to be aggressive but has Ocean habitability and doesn't have Industrious, it's going to be massively crippled because for every 1.5 minerals it produces for its foundries, it has to produce 2.5 food, which is wasted because there's nothing to spend the excess food on.
This inflexibility is two-fold, because in order to overcome the Wet penalty, you'd need to build lots of extra mining districts. This is extremely costly in terms of minerals, taking many years for the investment to pay for itself, and also not really possible on an Ocean world anyway, because they have half as many mining districts on average compared to a Cold world.

While different empires should be good at different things, I don't think this is a good kind of specialistaion - it forces specific combinations of traits/civics/planet classes, which AI empires won't pick, and stops you from adjusting your strategy if the circumstances demand it. A Catalytic empire isn't just better if it picks a Wet homeworld, it's actively crippled if it picks Dry. If you find yourself surrounded by aggressive empires and need to ramp up your alloy production, you can't just employ more miners, you needed to pick Tundra in the empire creation screen.

 

[Pancakelord]

Spoiler: Me initially rambling... and im too lazy to edit it - just skip.

Just so I am understanding this right - and its not me acting as a pedant - the issue we are trying to solve here is:

"there now is a perfect trait for every job, but you can't get them there because of user interface limitations."

Strip away everything and think about this for a second.
Pretend there are only 3 jobs in the game, farmer, miner, technician. and there are 6 pops - 2 on each.
You can have either

1. +10% "worker output" - and this is insta-applied to all 6. (A strata trait)
2. +10% farmer output, +10% miner output, +10% technician output. With 2/6 pops getting each of these traits, depending on their job. (A job trait)

These two scenarios are identical. The difference is, #1 was a single trait dumbly applied to all 6 pops, #2 was 3 distinct traits applied via logic to each pair of the 6 pops. Adding "job output" traits, would potentially harm RP-ness/species identity (natural farmer? natural refiner? I'm sure there would be ways to make it work, flavour wise, but it might be a bit awkward) and would be functionally identical to a "strata output" modifier - but with extra (processing/logic/ui) steps. The strata modifier would harm rpness, and be harder to justify even more ("natural worker" etc) I think. Logically, going the other way, traits set per specific resource really would benefit RP more, and would be easier to work with -- the current system. But that's also just me assuming that you would suggest that pop job traits are all positive and synergetic (see final points for more).

Spoiler: Me rambling about how the game's changes have hampered species traits

To me, species traits really do 2 things well in my opinion:

1. Flavour /RP-hooks
   • You can look at a pop and you can tell what it is, you get a shiny tactile widget with a name, image and some lore, and a little stat modifier.
   • You can use its traits to build up, basically, stereotypes and the like.
2. Tile-scale interactions.
   • You would interact with traits via tile ui, the species screen (when gene editing) and the empire creation screen (when making your species).
   • You could genemod with a lot of precision on the tile system, stacking up slavery and purging statuses - and other per-pop modifiers (that later got offloaded in to the country or planet scope for performance) - concurrently.
   • Pop-counts were low enough and the planet-tile mechanics were created (by design, or accident) in such a way that you could "solve" a tile (pick the right building, pick the right pop[traits, slave/free etc] and lock-in everything for maximum output. With 25 tiles/pops, and fewer country modifiers, each one often could have a material effect on the overall planet.

But looking at that, and how the game has changed, if im honest I just dont think species traits make a lot of sense with the current scale of the game.

1. Country modifiers galore have built up an immense - hidden - presence in Stellaris.
   • Take a fresh game, do the research_all_technologies 1 command and see what your output jumps to for each pop, each ship etc, without you doing much in the way of manual upgrades (yes youre clicking on techs and waiting). Its a lot, and it goes unnoticed by a lot of players I think.
   • This is going to errode the value of a tiny little +X% modifier from a species trait and is one of the biggest contributors to species traits - with few exceptions, like anti-sprawl ones - basically being meh after 20 years. (this also applies to some other areas of the game, like the +100 hull for ships - a random example but one imo that should be something built in to ship components in some capacity)
2. Pops - pops everywhere.
   • This overlaps with UI and pop growth/inflation/ the value of "one more pop" being less relevant, but when you have so many pops, I think it becomes difficult to create impactful traits that do not feel totally pathetic or ridiculously OP at both the start and "end" of the game, when pop-ulations are so small/big, relatively speaking.
   • One can get around this to a degree, with things like overtuned, or otherwise designing late-game only / gated traits (e.g. ones that cost minor artefacts to put on your pops) to justify/time-lock their OP-ness to a stage in the game when they'll feel "about right" - relative to all the other country and planet modifiers a pop must contend with.
3. UI - as you mentioned.
   • But thinking on it more, i really only assign or look at traits in the empire screen and forget about them after that (e.g. when playing as xphobe or xphile) unless playing specific empire types (e.g. gestalts, slaver empires or ones that otherwise impose job restrictions) - whilst going for bio ascension.
   • This is because, for me, the pops are "out of sight and mind" as they are found on 1) a second tab of the planet screen 2) nested within a strata layer 3) nested within a job-fly-out button 4) only revealed after clicking on a pop itself. and 9/10 times i'm doing economy managment on mental autopilot, so dont really care for it anymore -- this is obviously not the case for everyone, and is anecdotal, but i'd be suprised if i'm alone in this approach. Oh and there's the species screen, but that's really for setting species rights early-on, for slavery and for gene-editing, for the most part, its largely useless otherwise.

They really need to be able to scale up - literally. Or otherwise, we need gated traits that are much more powerful, but you can only get them from midgame engineering and onwards.

Complex Traits

- Instead of having cheap traits which are only relevant to a single job, create more interesting traits which each provide trade-offs.
- Someone would need to design these complex traits.


Endgame General Traits

- With ascension or endgame techs, provide cheaper Traits which make specific traits obsolete and are incompatible with the starter traits, like +10% Worker production instead of +15% food production.
- Maybe Assimilation always removes the starter traits and provides access to new, better traits.

I think the solution lies somewhere between these two points.

I think Country modifiers should be partially loaded into pop traits - where appropriate. For example.

• Some tech that gives +10% country food output, should maybe instead give +5% country food output and [triggered] +5% agrarian-trait [or agri-bot] food output. So if you want to maximise the modifiers youre retrieving from techs, you need to actually make use of the traits that accompany them, too.
• This would help with the country modifiers drowning out everything - and help traits scale into late game. variants of this could be done for Biological traits, machine traits, and even the psychic/cyborg traits.

I think pop traits should be split into 3 categories, with them capped in total amount, and scaling up.

1. 0/0 Phenotype traits (lithoid, machine, Mammalian, etc - costs nothing)
   • Rare soc techs [physics for machine/cyborg-class pops] could boost specific phenotype output "globally" or carry other planet effects (e.g. "Plantoid soothing" - all pops consume less amenities on a planet, if plantoids are working an entertainer job, with variations of this for all phenotypes, and it being a weighted draw with what you get. As in, if you get Plantoid soothe, youre less likely to get Plantoid mine, but might get Arthropoid miners - or whatever)
2. 3/3 evolved [pre-designed if MI] traits-- these would be your game start traits. These things would be bundles of different positive and negative modifiers built around a theme
   • (e.g. Creative: bonus to energy, research production, minus output to administrative tasks, increased pop sprawl, leaders can spawn with the "creative" trait*)
   • These can be scaled up and down (see below) via policies, planet designations, governor traits.
3. 1/1 or 1/2 Engineered/Robomodded traits(1 allowed, 2 if bio-ascended/robo/cybo-ascended -- this is where job traits would go)
   • Whilst these could be unlocked early on, you'd go through rounds of techs scaling them up (e.g. you unlock agri-bot in 2220 with robomodding I, but robomodding II will double the effects of agribot)

Then, lastly, I think a round of empire policies (maybe governor traits or buildings) could be used to scale up/down the positive/negative effects of evolved and engineered traits further.

1. e.g. population upkeep policy - higher food consumption might boost the positive effects of evolved traits, or minimise their negative effects, with good diets.
2. e.g. planet designations could also boosts the positive effects of robomodded traits on the world -either universally, or only ones that synergise with the planet's designation (e.g. "industrial refiner bots" are boosted on refinery worlds, by machine shops, whilst agri-bots are not). Governor traits, buildings, planet ascensions or traditions could further boost this pop-trait boost.
3. Governors with certain traits (former roboticist? former geneticist? social policy champion? idk) could also negate negative effects of evolved/pre-designed pop traits. Or boost engineered/robomodded ones.

The reason / idea for this all is, you start with a mixed bag of pops, and are forced to make choices about how to minimise their shortcomings - and never fully remove them - whilst maximising their benefits.

It's only in the mid-game that you get access to "straight buff" job-traits [Synaptic Researcher / Research-bot -- for science etc] (Via gene/robomodding - and are rewarded more for picking that path -- psi-pops would be more generic overall in their buffs), and as such these can be more powerful at-base (as they're gated through various means, and arent gotten in 2200) - and they continue to scale up with techs, as they take in some of what would otherwise be country modifiers.

Lastly, to bring back a degree of active management back, having pop traits scale with synergetic planet designations (and further scale if other buildings are around) would eventually put you in a position where pops are outputting *a lot* off their traits effects -- but only if you play to them. In theory (this is the big bit) this should be done by working around the pop, not by having to deal with the (current) poop pop UI implementation.


* I am of the opinion that basically all species traits should have a way of impacting leaders - somehow. As leader traits get more "UI" presence. in this example, the creative leader trait could do nothing on its own, but might double the positive effects of other leader traits.

 

[BrokenSky]

I would prefer it if more jobs just produces more different things - both innately (e.g. reducing science from researchers to 4 physics, 1 society and 1 engineering, then giving healthcare workers +2 society research, artisans +1 engineering, priests -1 unity and +1 society research etc.) and from civics making jobs do more things (e.g. miner's guilds giving -1 minerals but +4 trade value to miners, and making them affected by trickle up economics).

 

[Dragatus]

I think Country modifiers should be partially loaded into pop traits - where appropriate. For example.

• Some tech that gives +10% country food output, should maybe instead give +5% country food output and [triggered] +5% agrarian-trait [or agri-bot] food output. So if you want to maximise the modifiers youre retrieving from techs, you need to actually make use of the traits that accompany them, too.
• This would help with the country modifiers drowning out everything - and help traits scale into late game. variants of this could be done for Biological traits, machine traits, and even the psychic/cyborg traits.

The simplest method of implementing the general idea behind the suggestion would be to give species traits an additive effect. So instead of Agrarian giving +15% Food from Farmers it could give +1 Food from farmers (raising base production from 6 to 7). The +1 would then benefit from all the percentile modifiers you get from technologies, planet specializations and so forth.

 

[XCodes]

I understand you don't want to micromanage your pops but frankly the pops are mostly micromanaged for you. Traits that boost a pop's resource output will also cause the pop to be significantly more likely to get picked to fill that job when the jobs open up. Further, since most planets only feature a relatively small number of jobs in any significant quantity, you will often be able to utilize other tools to separate the pops such as Slavery or the various Prole traits.

 

[CocoCincinnati]

The traits were originally designed with the tile system in mind, meaning a player could move different pops to a job that matched their trait. There were fewer "jobs" back then and immigration was a bit slower (more realistic) so you could have a few different pops on planets that really added flavor if, for example, they were great at mining, you could move them to those jobs and it was great. As it stands now, the system is really convoluted and inefficient. I had a recent game where my primary species was thrifty...I had an ag planet that was roughly half my main species and half an agrarian species that immigrated in. There were two types of worker jobs available, farmers and clerks, and guess what, the pops were split about half and half between them, with about half of the farmer jobs worked by thrifty pops and half of the clerk jobs worked by agrarian pops.....and absolutely no way for me to change them. Add the crazy immigration system on top of that and if I didn't closely monitor and control pop growth, I would end up with 2 dozen different species on that planet instead of two meaning that pretty much none of the jobs are being worked by the best pop available.

For these reasons, I would like to see traits become empire or planet specific instead of pop specific....some of them already are so it's not that much of stretch. If you create a species that is thrifty then whatever trade is produced on a planet, regardless of which pop is working as clerks, you get 25% bonus added on to the total. This would mean less calculations need to be done behind the scenes, improving performance......AND it would make an empires traits matter and feel like it was actually part of that culture....even late game when they have a hundred different modified pops spread across the galaxy, their talent in trade would still be a defining trait of that empire.