Let's Talk Pop Growth and Research

[arosenberger14]

Let’s talk about two systems I think are in desperate need of major changes for the next big update: pop growth and research.

If you don't want to read this monster of a post, I've provided a TLDR at the bottom.

The Problems:

The fundamental problem is that the number of pops is by far the most significant determinant of an empire’s strength. Yes more populous empires should be stronger, but as of now the relationship is so strong that it dominates all other strategic considerations and interacts poorly with other mechanisms in the game. Consider:

• All advanced resource production scales linearly with pop number. Alloys, consumer goods, unity, and research are all determined by how many pops are working their jobs. Research rate and unlocking traditions are now very strongly tied to population size since bureaucrats prevent tech and tradition costs from increasing with sprawl. Consequently, it is now easy for the player to have researched all technologies by 2300, and be very deep into the repeatables by the default endgame. Additionally it counteracts diplomatic attempts to counter large empires as one large empire will research technologies faster than a research federation of several small ones with an equal total number of pops.
• The main factor determining how quickly you grow new pops is how many planets you have. Since base population growth is per-planet, the main way to increase your pop count is by colonizing as many planets as possible regardless of habitability. This overshadows traits such as fast/slow breeders and severely gimps empires that are unlucky with nearby habitable planets.
• Robots are the second most critical factor to boosting growth as adding a robotics plant effectively increases your pop growth speed by 50% or more. This is a very large boost to anyone that researches robotics and also makes them overshadow biological pop growth factors.
• Conquest enables you to substantially boost your pop numbers, especially in early game where you can double your strength by conquering a neighbor’s capital. There are no significant repercussions or inefficiencies to absorbing a bunch of hostile xenos. This is also a substantial nerf to exterminators, hive minds, and gestalts as they cannot grow immediately from conquest.

Essentially this combination of factors makes it is very easy for the player (or theoretically a large AI that could manage its economy) to snowball exponentially. On the other hand, if an empire is small and weak the only possible way to keep up (let alone pull ahead) is to try and find a way to grow faster (which the AI is pretty bad at). This tends to lead to a rather deterministic game progression where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, where the AI cannot recover from setbacks, and once you get ahead as a player you will always be ahead of everyone else by a wider and wider margin. Additionally, it unbalances high difficulty settings by making it hard to survive in early game, but extremely easy once you hit mid to late game. These factors strongly promote situations where the player finishes the tech tree and is eons ahead of every other AI in technology by mid to late game and all that remains to do is to wait for the crises to show up.

There are also significant detriments to gameplay from the current system of pop growth:

• Because each planet is steadily churning out new pops, building slots are pop-locked, and automation options are extremely poor, the player has to micromanage each planet to build new buildings and districts and/or resettle pops as they grow in. This works OK when you’re small, but at large empire sizes becomes extremely tedious.
• The “encourage growth” and “distribute luxuries” decisions are micromanagement nightmares.
• Minority races grow unrealistically quickly. While this is better than before they are still substantially over represented in pop growth. This makes your starting race choice matter less; once you get some pops with a different habitability preference via diplomacy or conquest you will easily be able to colonize almost all planets within your borders. Furthermore, I find it rather annoying when you let one pop with the right planet preference into your empire and suddenly all your planets are growing that species.

The Solutions:

There are three broad changes I’d like to propose to fix these issues. I think there’s a lot that more that could be done to improve the economy and research system, but to keep the proposed changes realistic I’m trying to avoid ideas that’d require a complete rework of the entire economic system (again!). Also I’m going to avoid discussing ethics and internal politics; while those absolutely need improvement too that’s another topic for discussion.

First: Change pop growth to be species based instead of planet based. Instead of each planet in an empire growing pops, have each species in an empire grow at a base monthly rate of 0.1*(Number of Pops of that Species), with a minimum of 2/month. Starting with 40 pops, you’d have a base empire growth rate of 4/month giving a new pop in a bit over two years. Once a new pop is grown, it will have a chance to spawn on any world weighted to ones with high habitability, open job spots, and open housing. Every pop will contribute to growth, but pops on low habitability planets will still cost more upkeep and produce less.

This would have several benefits to gameplay. Since pop growth would be detached from the number of planets there would be less incentive to immediately seize and settle every scrap of land. Geographically small empires would still have fewer resources and building slots, but would fall behind less dramatically before other options for expansion such as habitats or terraforming became available. Signing a migration treaty or "acquiring" some xeno pops would not instantly solve all your habitability problems as it would take time for the xeno pops to grow and fill out low habitability worlds. Best of all, instead of constructing buildings and districts to react to pop growth, the player (and AI) can construct them to direct pop growth. If you want to develop a world build districts and buildings on it and the pops will grow there; if you want it to stay the same just leave it alone and once the open jobs and housing go away so will pop growth on that planet.

There’s several additional details I envision to more fully flesh out this system:

• If empire-wide total housing is negative, a negative modifier is applied to pop growth to prevent overcrowding from becoming too severe
• Internal immigration would be changed to a monthly chance for a pop to resettle from a world with negative amenities/jobs/housing to one with open slots acting as a sort of “automatic resettling” mechanism
• Migration treaties would now give a chance for an empire’s pops to spawn in each other’s worlds from natural growth or immigration and can be one way or two way.
• Change nutritional standards to a species right so that xenophobic authoritarians can make the alien proles eat cake.
• Change the “encourage growth” decision to boost the chance of pops spawning on a world. Only allow it on one world. Add a notification when it expires. Remove “distribute luxuries”
• Change gene clinics to increase local planet habitability instead of pop growth.
• Give slavery empires a building and/or edict that boosts slave growth rate
• Synthetics and robots are tricky, but I think their growth should come solely from roboticist jobs. Remove the one per world limit to robot assembly plants and make them cost alloys to prevent too much spam. This will take some balancing, but the idea is that robot production will require more inputs than natural biological pop growth and be hard capped by the number of building spots you have empire-wide. Dedicate enough of your industry to building robots and you can build then faster than biological pops, but at substantial opportunity cost. We could also have planets dedicated to robot manufacturing!
• Make clone vats operate like robot assembly plants and “assemble” sterile biological pops to give the bio-boys something to balance the robots. Maybe make bio-ascension give the ability to produce biological pops.
  
• Change the requirements for making an ecumenopolis to having >80 pops and no basic resource districts. While ecumenopoli and ringworlds won’t have increase overall pop growth, their large number of jobs and housing will make them very attractive targets for pops to spawn in and they’ll still be more resource/sprawl efficient than normal worlds.

Second: Make wars more likely to kill pops. Currently it's relatively easy to capture planets with armies, but takes forever to bombard them into submission. So to change this, defensive armies should spawn based on planet population, and damage to pops from orbital bombardment and ground warfare should be significantly increased. These changes will keep underpopulated colonies easy to capture, but highly populated home worlds would be much more difficult. Ideally you would still be able to capture an enemy home planet in the early game, but kill half for more of the populace in the process. Technologies that increase army strength can be buffed to make it easier to overcome default defensive armies and capture un-fortified planets intact in the mid and late game. We also need an option to surrender to orbital bombardment or invasion if the defender wants to avoid mass casualties.

Overall, these changes will reduce the population gained by conquest and add several interesting facets to warfare. The ability to surrender to an invasion will give you the choice to try and hold out to the end to drive up war exhaustion or bring in reinforcements, or to trade a planet’s occupation for preserving your pops and infrastructure at risk of giving your enemy a short-term advantage. Increasing the overall destructiveness of wars would make tactics such as raiding more impactful, and lead to situations where once-strong empires are devastated by a Pyrrhic victory.

Third: Increase high-tier tech costs and add technology diffusion. The quickest fix to combat tech snowballing would be to make tech costs scale with sprawl again. However, this would make bureaucrats useless. Instead, I propose to rebalance the cost of higher tier technologies (I’ve made a mod that does this already) to make tech progression more in line with earlier versions of the game where you’d be getting into the repeatables near 2400.

However, this won’t combat the issues of larger empires teching up much faster than small ones. To do this, I would add a mechanism for technology to diffuse to neighbors. The base cost of a non-rare technology should be reduced if one or more neighboring empires has researched it 10 or more years ago, proportional to the time since it was researched up to a maximum of, say, 95% at 50 years. Diplomatic relationships such as commercial, migration, defensive pacts, or being in a federation will increase the diffusion, while empires with xenophobic ethics or the enigmatic engineering ascension perk will provide less of a tech cost reduction to their neighbors. Also change research agreements to provide a 25% tech cost reduction instead of rate increase. The galactic community could also have a set of laws that increase or reduce tech diffusion.

With this system, large research focused empires will still be able to stay substantially ahead of the curve, but the AI will be less likely to fall too far behind. It'd be more analogous to EU4 in terms of the distribution of technology. Alternate strategies like focusing on diplomacy or military and relying on technology diffusion for research will be possible. Xenophobic empires could get policies that let them choose between trying to steal the xeno’s tech at risk of divergent ethics spreading or their own tech leaking out, or trying to cut off technological exchange in both directions. Xenophiles with a strong diplomatic focus could try and increase tech diffusion so that their allies are all advanced.

The main benefit from this are that AI empires and diplomacy should matter more near endgame. Even if the player is still the leader in tech, ideally the AI should only be a few generations behind and still able to do something when the fallen empires awaken or the crisis hits or be able to band together and provide (on paper) a counterbalance for a player on a conquering spree. On a meta level it would nicely tie diplomacy into research much more impactfully than it is now.


Conclusions:

Taken together these three ideas should have several beneficial effects on both singleplayer and multiplayer games. To rattle off a list:

• An empire's growth will depend less strongly on the number of planets that spawn near their homeworld.
  
• Empire technological advantage will depend less strongly on number of pops. Larger empires will not be penalized for growth, while small or less tech-focused empires will be able to stay within spitting distance more easily.
• AI empires will be more relevant in the endgame.
• Migration treaties and diplomacy with other AI’s will matter more and be more of a long-term investment.
• Alternate playstyles such as intensively developing a few worlds or concentrating on things other than tech will become more practical.
• Planets will feel more unique and players will have more agency in shaping their development by being able to focus pop growth on certain planets by building infrastructure there. For instance, it’d be possible to build a mining planet with rare resource production plants without having to go back and continuously re-develop it or migrate pops off it later once the population starts to exceed the number of jobs and housing.
• Your founding species and mid game technologies such as terraforming or habitability modification will matter more.
• Warfare will not provide as strong short-term benefits to the victor and raids or invasions can do significant damage even if the territory is not held/kept.
• Lategame micromanagement will be significantly reduced.

TLDR:

• Have pops grow by species proportional to their number empire wide and spawn preferentially on planets with high habitability, unfilled jobs and housing.
• Make wars kill more pops.
• Add tech diffusion to promote non-tech focused playstyles and help smaller or less tech focused empires (i.e. the AI) remain relevant into the endgame.

 

[HugsAndSnuggles]

This is also a substantial nerf to exterminators, hive minds, and gestalts as they cannot grow immediately from conquest.

It's more about 'conquer same type of empire' than anything else.

 

[Pale Blue]

I think there still needs to be a empire based pop growth cap, otherwise xenophile multispecies empire would grow a lot faster, if pops grow for each species independently. Something like 100 pop growth per month that is distributed among your species and their pop count.

 

[arosenberger14]

I think there still needs to be a empire based pop growth cap, otherwise xenophile multispecies empire would grow a lot faster, if pops grow for each species independently. Something like 100 pop growth per month that is distributed among your species and their pop count.

Actually the growth rate would depend only on the number of pops you have, not the number of species. If you have two species of 50 pops each they'd each grow at a rate of 5/month or 10/month total. If you had one species of 100 pops it would also grow at a rate of 10/month total.

Now I do propose a base minimum growth rate of 2/month, but this will only would only matter for up to 20 pops of a species taking a base of 80 years to reach, and be half your founding species' growth rate, which is fairly insignificant mid and late game. The primary benefits to xenophiles would be the ability to settle wrong type planets more easily and obtain more pops without warfare or the slave market.

Housing would act as a soft cap to growth by reducing growth at negative housing, or maybe you could add some other modifier to slow growth once you've reached a high population density based on the total size of your planets. I don't think a hard cap is necessary in conjunction with the warfare and technology diffusion changes and the upcoming vanilla habitat changes though, empires should be able to stay closer in pop number to each other than they are now and if one empire breaks too far ahead in technology it'll pull the others up with him.

 

[EccentricJoe]

I'm all for these. 10/10 someone mod this pls

 

[Spaceception]

These are interesting changes
Edit, you added this in the comments

And the fortress building + planetary shield would be stronger choices to invest in. I also like the new options during a war. If armies automatically spawn, would fortresses add naval cap based on the number of armies?

 

[1602 AD]

Late game economy micro has been my biggest gripe with Stelly for a while now. So just to clarify, when you say that this approach will mitigate micro, do you mean that by massively nerfing/diffusing pop growth there will just be less of it?

 

[majikero]

Good lord I can feel my computer die from this. So you want to constantly calculate each species on each empire based on their population. Then you get into the fun of sub-species and migrations. Then each pop grown gets to calculate where they get dumped for each empire. This is a shit ton of redundant calculations that just grows exponentially.

 

[mrt1212]

Let’s talk about two systems I think are in desperate need of major changes for the next big update: pop growth and research.

The Problems:

The fundamental problem is that the number of pops is by far the most significant determinant of an empire’s strength. Yes more populous empires should be stronger, but as of now the relationship is so strong that it dominates all other strategic considerations and interacts poorly with other mechanisms in the game. Consider:

• All advanced resource production scales linearly with pop number. Alloys, consumer goods, unity, and research are all determined by how many pops are working their jobs. Research rate and unlocking traditions are now very strongly tied to population size since bureaucrats prevent tech and tradition costs from increasing with sprawl. Consequently, it is now easy for the player to have researched all technologies by 2300, and be very deep into the repeatables by the default endgame. Additionally it counteracts diplomatic attempts to counter large empires as one large empire will research technologies faster than a research federation of several small ones with an equal total number of pops.
• The main factor determining how quickly you grow new pops is how many planets you have. Since base population growth is per-planet, the main way to increase your pop count is by colonizing as many planets as possible regardless of habitability. This overshadows traits such as fast/slow breeders and severely gimps empires that are unlucky with nearby habitable planets.
• Robots are the second most critical factor to boosting growth as adding a robotics plant effectively increases your pop growth speed by 50% or more. This is a very large boost to anyone that researches robotics and also makes them overshadow biological pop growth factors.
• Conquest enables you to substantially boost your pop numbers, especially in early game where you can double your strength by conquering a neighbor’s capital. There are no significant repercussions or inefficiencies to absorbing a bunch of hostile xenos. This is also a substantial nerf to exterminators, hive minds, and gestalts as they cannot grow immediately from conquest.

Essentially this combination of factors makes it is very easy for the player (or theoretically a large AI that could manage its economy) to snowball exponentially. On the other hand, if an empire is small and weak the only possible way to keep up is to try and find a way to grow faster (which the AI is pretty bad at). This tends to lead to a rather deterministic game progression where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, where the AI cannot recover from setbacks, and once you get ahead as a player you will always be ahead of everyone else by a wider and wider margin. Additionally, it unbalances high difficulty settings by making it hard to survive in early game, but extremely easy once you hit mid to late game. These factors strongly promote situations where the player finishes the tech tree and is eons ahead of every other AI in technology by mid to late game and all that remains to do is to wait for the crises to show up.

I'll play Devil's Advocate for some of this because I agree with a lot of identifying these issues down the level you have but...

On the whole, is the 'Rich get Richer and Poor get Poorer until..." just how most systems work? Like until there is a shock to the systems a natural and somewhat deterministic entropy is in play towards success and power breeding more success and power. Philosphical to games themselves, how much do you just admit some types are harder than others and that's the way it is and deal with it?

Should there be more risk and internal disharmony for being so large that they haven't already created and then provided an escape hatch for? Maybe one of the fundamental issues with Stellaris as a game system is they keep building onto a ramshackle foundation with facades. The whole Admin Cap thing seems to have been the 'solution' to getting to an unimpeachable position early. But it wasn't a very hard yoke because it really didn't matter when setting the table for Early/Mid-Game dominance if on the back end you couldn't be stopped and you could eventually overcome the penalties with raw output of Unity and Research. And then they provided an escape hatch for Admin Cap in the latest DLC...and now we're back to there being not yoke on getting big other than HOW to do it best.

There are also significant detriments to gameplay from the current system of pop growth:

• Because each planet is steadily churning out new pops, building slots are pop-locked, and automation options are extremely poor, the player has to micromanage each planet to build new buildings and districts and/or resettle pops as they grow in. This works OK when you’re small, but at large empire sizes becomes extremely tedious.
• The “encourage growth” and “distribute luxuries” decisions are micromanagement nightmares.
• Minority races grow unrealistically quickly. While this is better than before they are still substantially over represented in pop growth. This makes your starting race choice matter less; once you get some pops with a different habitability preference via diplomacy or conquest you will easily be able to colonize almost all planets within your borders. Furthermore, I find it rather annoying when you let one pop with the right planet preference into your empire and suddenly all your planets are growing that species.

Yes. The game becomes a task the longer it goes on. I am a Xenophile to my core and I love the Genetic game but it is a huge time sink pausing the game to make things 'just so'. Setting species rights to disallow immigration helps but if you aren't the Empire type that can just do that, and if you don't have resettlement either, for whatever reason...I would hate playing as an Egal Xenophile. You'd be powerless to stop all sorts of things. And Authoritarian Xenophile with Indentured Servitude is already a ton of micro but at least the bad things can be managed.

I also agree with the starting race mattering less and less the more you grow BUT it matters a TON if you leverage it with your playstyle and specs. There is some really goofy stuff you can get up to speccing out MinMax Syncretic Evolution. Foundationally, you are still going to rely on your initial preferred biome planets the most for certain tasks based on how you spec out your founder species. This is true whether your colony profile is 1/3rd founder species preferred or 4/5ths. It just doesn't matter as much the larger you grow.

The entire immigration system is kind of wonky which is why I avoid it as much as possible in play preference. When you assign default species rights on 1.1.2200 as one does, always restrict migration if you can and revisit on a case by case basis.

But to go up a level, simply getting pops to colonize non prefered biomes is as trivial as meeting 3 other empires. You will run into a Desert and Arctic type eventually and screw the hab penalties for not being Arid or Alpine or vice versa. Doesn't matter. If you're peaceful you'll likely Migration Treaty them open and if you're unpeaceful you'll likely Conquest them. Or you'e buying them on the Slave Market.

Terraforming is a mug's game. Who the hell is actually terraforming as their first option in this game at this point when it becomes available? Maybe that's the point for a few fringe cases but I can't remember the last time I terraformed a non-pref to pref biome.

The Solutions:

There are three broad changes I’d like to propose to fix these issues. I think there’s a lot that more that could be done to improve the economy and research system, but to keep the proposed changes realistic I’m trying to avoid ideas that’d require a complete rework of the entire economic system (again!). Also I’m going to avoid discussing ethics and internal politics; while those absolutely need improvement too that’s another topic for discussion.

First: Change pop growth to be species based instead of planet based. Instead of each planet in an empire growing pops, have each species in an empire grow at a base monthly rate of 0.1*(Number of Pops), with a minimum of 2/month. Starting with 40 pops, you’d have a base empire growth rate of 4/month giving a new pop in a bit over two years. Once a new pop is grown, it will have a chance to spawn on any world weighted to ones with high habitability, open job spots, and open housing. Every pop will contribute to growth, but pops on low habitability planets will still cost more upkeep and produce less.

This would have several benefits to gameplay. Since pop growth would be detached from the number of planets there would be less incentive to immediately seize and settle every scrap of land. Geographically small empires would still have fewer resources and building slots, but would fall behind less dramatically before other options for expansion such as habitats or terraforming became available. Signing a migration treaty or "acquiring" some xeno pops would not instantly solve all your habitability problems as it would take time for the xeno pops to grow and fill out low habitability worlds. Best of all, instead of constructing buildings and districts to react to pop growth, the player (and AI) can construct them to direct pop growth. If you want to develop a world build districts and buildings on it and the pops will grow there; if you want it to stay the same just leave it alone and once the open jobs and housing go away so will pop growth on that planet.

So if I'm reading this correctly, if you had 100 species, all 100 would be growing pop points. Once they hit the threshold to spawn, they are sent to their best fit based on Hab and Ethics Faction? This seems like a Xenophile with Xeno-Compatibility fever dream! The incentive would be to collect as many Xenos as possible (which I already do, naturally). This might not be an issue when you really only have 3-4 species early in contact but later...

How would pop growth buidings work? A higher chance to be the landing destination for a spawned pop? What would the point be in spamming pop growth buildings then? Hmmmmmmm.

There’s several additional details I envision to more fully flesh out this system:

• If empire-wide total housing is negative, a negative modifier is applied to pop growth to prevent overcrowding from becoming too severe
• Internal immigration would be changed to a monthly chance for a pop to resettle from a world with negative amenities/jobs/housing to one with open slots acting as a sort of “automatic resettling” mechanism
• Migration treaties would now give a chance for an empire’s pops to spawn in each other’s worlds from natural growth or immigration and can be one way or two way.
• Change nutritional standards to a species right so that xenophobic authoritarians can make the alien proles eat cake.
• Change the “encourage growth” decision to boost the chance of pops spawning on a world. Only allow it on one world. Add a notification when it expires. Remove “distribute luxuries”
• Change gene clinics to increase local planet habitability instead of pop growth.
• Give slavery empires a building and/or edict that boosts slave growth rate
• Synthetics and robots are tricky, but I think their growth should come solely from roboticist jobs. Remove the one per world limit to robot assembly plants and make them cost alloys to prevent too much spam. This will take some balancing, but the idea is that robot production will require more inputs than natural biological pop growth and be hard capped by the number of building spots you have empire-wide. Dedicate enough of your industry to building robots and you can build then faster than biological pops, but at substantial opportunity cost. We could also have planets dedicated to robot manufacturing!
• Make clone vats operate like robot assembly plants and “assemble” sterile biological pops to give the bio-boys something to balance the robots. Maybe make bio-ascension give the ability to produce biological pops.
  
• Change the requirements for making an ecumenopolis to having >80 pops and no basic resource districts. While ecumenopoli and ringworlds won’t have increase overall pop growth, their large number of jobs and housing will make them very attractive targets for pops to spawn in and they’ll still be more resource/sprawl efficient than normal worlds.

I like all of these for testing out, TBH

Second: Make wars more likely to kill pops. Currently it's relatively easy to capture planets with armies, but takes forever to bombard them into submission. So to change this, defensive armies should spawn based on planet population, and damage to pops from orbital bombardment and ground warfare should be significantly increased. These changes will keep underpopulated colonies easy to capture, but highly populated home worlds would be much more difficult. Ideally you would still be able to capture an enemy home planet in the early game, but kill half for more of the populace in the process. Technologies that increase army strength can be buffed to make it easier to overcome default defensive armies and capture un-fortified planets intact in the mid and late game. We also need an option to surrender to orbital bombardment or invasion if the defender wants to avoid mass casualties.

Overall, these changes will reduce the population gained by conquest and add several interesting facets to warfare. The ability to surrender to an invasion will give you the choice to try and hold out to the end to drive up war exhaustion or bring in reinforcements, or to trade a planet’s occupation for preserving your pops and infrastructure at risk of giving your enemy a short-term advantage. Increasing the overall destructiveness of wars would make tactics such as raiding more impactful, and lead to situations where once-strong empires are devastated by a Pyrrhic victory.

Oh Nuffle, YES.

But this has the potential to simply expose weaker participants in a game earlier. If, in an early war, just some Animosity CB cause you have it and they're one over from where you just conquered...you simply just killed enough pops to put them back 20-25 years, that's basically a death sentence right there. I wholly agree with War needing to have devestating consequences but my worry is the moral hazard of War then for Empires that depend on it to actually have a puncher's chance and it also simply blowing a hole in the sides of Empires because you capriciously raided them. This is a reciprocity issue with the AI in a large way - if you work your angles as the Human you can mostly avoid that fate simply by working relationships or using the blunt object first.

Third: Increase high-tier tech costs and add technology diffusion. The quickest fix to combat tech snowballing would be to make tech costs scale with sprawl again. However, this would make bureaucrats useless. Instead, I propose to rebalance the cost of higher tier technologies (I’ve made a mod that does this already) to make tech progression more in line with earlier versions of the game where you’d be getting into the repeatables near 2400.

However, this won’t combat the issues of larger empires teching up much faster than small ones. To do this, I would add a mechanism for technology to diffuse to neighbors. The base cost of a non-rare technology should be reduced if one or more neighboring empires has researched it 10 or more years ago, proportional to the time since it was researched up to a maximum of, say, 95% at 50 years. Diplomatic relationships such as commercial, migration, defensive pacts, or being in a federation will increase the diffusion, while empires with xenophobic ethics or the enigmatic engineering ascension perk will provide less of a tech cost reduction to their neighbors. Also change research agreements to provide a 25% tech cost reduction instead of rate increase. The galactic community could also have a set of laws that increase or reduce tech diffusion.

With this system, large research focused empires will still be able to stay substantially ahead of the curve, but the AI will be less likely to fall too far behind. It'd be more analogous to EU4 in terms of the distribution of technology. Alternate strategies like focusing on diplomacy or military and relying on technology diffusion for research will be possible. Xenophobic empires could get policies that let them choose between trying to steal the xeno’s tech at risk of divergent ethics spreading or their own tech leaking out, or trying to cut off technological exchange in both directions. Xenophiles with a strong diplomatic focus could try and increase tech diffusion so that their allies are all advanced.

The main benefit from this are that AI empires and diplomacy should matter more near endgame. Even if the player is still the leader in tech, ideally the AI should only be a few generations behind and still able to do something when the fallen empires awaken or the crisis hits or be able to band together and provide (on paper) a counterbalance for a player on a conquering spree. On a meta level it would nicely tie diplomacy into research much more impactfully than it is now.

The tech cost inputs to fulfill with research outputs scale in a way that basically flattens the curve of research quickly with some amount of work on growing pops. While I understand wanting to use an internal factor reference to affect tech cost, this is what Sprawl was already supposed to do but doesn't really because again, research outputs matter most and Sprawl can be flattened out with the Bureaucratic escape hatch.

I like diffusion for the lowest possible tech researched passively accumulating points based on a bunch of factors and actions you can influence.

One of the wonky things about Research Agreements is they boost Research Outputs rather than reduce Tech Cost Inputs. This is a better deal for Empires with no Sprawl than Empires with some Sprawl in a situation where for whatever reason, all that Sprawl wasn't increasing Research Outputs, which I find doubtful but I'm not going to do some 3rd variable comparisons between 2000 Tech Cost, 100 Research per Month, +25% Research Agreement and 150% Tech Costs because of Sprawl and then change Sprawl to a factor of 125% and Research Outputs to 125. Not up for making a spreadsheet.

If they worked by reducing Tech Cost which under your notion, Diffusion would also do, Empires under Sprawl wouldnt enjoy as much benefit but still be much better off than those over Sprawl keeping Research Outputs the same. Just something to keep in mind.

Conclusions:

Taken together these three ideas should have several beneficial effects on both singleplayer and multiplayer games. To rattle off a list:

• An empire's growth will depend less strongly on the number of planets that spawn near their homeworld.
  
• Empire technological advantage will depend less strongly on number of pops. Larger empires will not be penalized for growth, while small or less tech-focused empires will be able to stay within spitting distance more easily.
• AI empires will be more relevant in the endgame.
• Migration treaties and diplomacy with other AI’s will matter more and be more of a long-term investment.
• Alternate playstyles such as intensively developing a few worlds or concentrating on things other than tech will become more practical.
• Planets will feel more unique and players will have more agency in shaping their development by being able to focus pop growth on certain planets by building infrastructure there. For instance, it’d be possible to build a mining planet with rare resource production plants without having to go back and continuously re-develop it or migrate pops off it later once the population starts to exceed the number of jobs and housing.
• Your founding species and mid game technologies such as terraforming or habitability modification will matter more.
• Warfare will not provide as strong short-term benefits to the victor and raids or invasions can do significant damage even if the territory is not held/kept.
• Lategame micromanagement will be significantly reduced.

I like a lot of it but I am curious about how this plays out for Empires that don't have some of these options to play in the sandbox. I have to report I have really enjoyed a game with 5x Tradition and Tech speeds and starting with 15-30 Advanced Empires because I have been behind so long and weak and not able to steam roll the same way. I am still buttering my bread but it's not like taking candy from a baby as much. More like a 1st grader.

 

[mrt1212]

One thing that bugs me is that Naval Cap doesn't consume some amount of bodies from planets and your whole military apparatus is actually a hugely insignifcant labor drain in itself to your Empire and is at most, crudely expressed through Alloy production which sometimes doesn't even rely on Jobs. I don't know how this figures into research and pops but this is one of those stray thoughts I had while reading this.

Maybe that's how it works with interstellar war where empires of hundreds of billions of folks fight wars with .01% of their population.

 

[majikero]

One thing that bugs me is that Naval Cap doesn't consume some amount of bodies from planets and your whole military apparatus is actually a hugely insignifcant labor drain in itself to your Empire and is at most, crudely expressed through Alloy production which sometimes doesn't even rely on Jobs. I don't know how this figures into research and pops but this is one of those stray thoughts I had while reading this.

Maybe that's how it works with interstellar war where empires of hundreds of billions of folks fight wars with .01% of their population.

Why should it? Ships would top out at thousands at the larger end. This is a drop in the bucket in a billion population planet let alone a multi-planet empire. Ground units cap out based on how much pops you have.

 

[arosenberger14]

These are interesting changes
Edit, you added this in the comments

And the fortress building + planetary shield would be stronger choices to invest in. I also like the new options during a war. If armies automatically spawn, would fortresses add naval cap based on the number of armies?

I haven't thought about chainging naval cap or fortresses much. My vision for defensive armies is that you'd get "militia" units from pops in addition to garrison units from buildings that are ok early game, but become less significant compared to army or fortress units by mid and late game. Basically an early buff to make it harder to snipe someone's home planet in the early portion of the game that don't affect late game too badly.

Late game economy micro has been my biggest gripe with Stelly for a while now. So just to clarify, when you say that this approach will mitigate micro, do you mean that by massively nerfing/diffusing pop growth there will just be less of it?

Not really, my intention isn't to dramatically slow pop growth; the numbers I spitballed with a 0.1 growth per pop would lead to ~1000 pops by natural growth by 2400. Overall pop growth should be similar to what it is now, just less dependent on how many planets you have. The reduction in micro is that instead of growing on every planet continuously, pops will spawn preferentially on planets on your empire with open job spots and housing. Say you have a late-game empire with ~1000 pops total. You'll be growing ~2 pops a month with modifiers, so ~24 yearly. You can influence where these pops spawn by constructing excess buildings/districts on one or two planets. If you have an ecumenopolis, just build three districts on it and that'll suck up all your pop growth for a year. So instead of having to constantly monitor every planet, once you have enough resources to not really care about efficiency you can just queue up a bunch of empty buildings and districts on one or two planets and pops will spawn there while all your other planets remain constant.

Good lord I can feel my computer die from this. So you want to constantly calculate each species on each empire based on their population. Then you get into the fun of sub-species and migrations. Then each pop grown gets to calculate where they get dumped for each empire. This is a shit ton of redundant calculations that just grows exponentially.

Actually I think it's pretty favorable to the current system where each planet calculates which pop to grow, a monthly growth rate, and immigration/emigration pressures. The number and species of each pop is already monitored in the empire status. All the numbers are things the game already keeps track of, and the number of calculations is based on the sum of the number of species in each empire, which should be comparable to the total number of colonizable planets.

You're right that subspecies sprawl could be a mess, that's already an issue with base game. One way to deal with it could be to just have the game count all the pops in a subspecies as one and spawn a pop with proper habitability preference for the target planet or just randomly pick one.

I'll play Devil's Advocate for some of this because I agree with a lot of identifying these issues down the level you have but...

On the whole, is the 'Rich get Richer and Poor get Poorer until..." just how most systems work? Like until there is a shock to the systems a natural and somewhat deterministic entropy is in play towards success and power breeding more success and power. Philosphical to games themselves, how much do you just admit some types are harder than others and that's the way it is and deal with it?

Should there be more risk and internal disharmony for being so large that they haven't already created and then provided an escape hatch for? Maybe one of the fundamental issues with Stellaris as a game system is they keep building onto a ramshackle foundation with facades. The whole Admin Cap thing seems to have been the 'solution' to getting to an unimpeachable position early. But it wasn't a very hard yoke because it really didn't matter when setting the table for Early/Mid-Game dominance if on the back end you couldn't be stopped and you could eventually overcome the penalties with raw output of Unity and Research. And then they provided an escape hatch for Admin Cap in the latest DLC...and now we're back to there being not yoke on getting big other than HOW to do it best.

I think you've came to the same conclusion as me there; yes there should be benefits to being big but they shouldn't be too strong. And it's too easy and too beneficial to snowball right now. The first fifty or hundred years are fun, but eventually you reach critical mass and nobody can touch you ever again. I think instead of dragging the rich down, it's better to have them pull everyone else up with them, hence tech diffusion.

Yes. The game becomes a task the longer it goes on. I am a Xenophile to my core and I love the Genetic game but it is a huge time sink pausing the game to make things 'just so'. Setting species rights to disallow immigration helps but if you aren't the Empire type that can just do that, and if you don't have resettlement either, for whatever reason...I would hate playing as an Egal Xenophile. You'd be powerless to stop all sorts of things. And Authoritarian Xenophile with Indentured Servitude is already a ton of micro but at least the bad things can be managed.

I also agree with the starting race mattering less and less the more you grow BUT it matters a TON if you leverage it with your playstyle and specs. There is some really goofy stuff you can get up to speccing out MinMax Syncretic Evolution. Foundationally, you are still going to rely on your initial preferred biome planets the most for certain tasks based on how you spec out your founder species. This is true whether your colony profile is 1/3rd founder species preferred or 4/5ths. It just doesn't matter as much the larger you grow.

The entire immigration system is kind of wonky which is why I avoid it as much as possible in play preference. When you assign default species rights on 1.1.2200 as one does, always restrict migration if you can and revisit on a case by case basis.

But to go up a level, simply getting pops to colonize non prefered biomes is as trivial as meeting 3 other empires. You will run into a Desert and Arctic type eventually and screw the hab penalties for not being Arid or Alpine or vice versa. Doesn't matter. If you're peaceful you'll likely Migration Treaty them open and if you're unpeaceful you'll likely Conquest them. Or you'e buying them on the Slave Market.

Terraforming is a mug's game. Who the hell is actually terraforming as their first option in this game at this point when it becomes available? Maybe that's the point for a few fringe cases but I can't remember the last time I terraformed a non-pref to pref biome.

True there's some fun min/max stuff you can do with your starting race, but it feels like it's way too easy for them to become irrelevant unless you're playing a purger. Xenophiles should have to work more to bring in alien races in significant numbers.

Terraforming is pretty niche unless you can't get friendly xeno's and get the abandoned terraforming equipment event early on and have enough energy for it. Make it slower to grow xeno pops and less beneficial to immediatly settle every world and there'll be more use for it later.

So if I'm reading this correctly, if you had 100 species, all 100 would be growing pop points. Once they hit the threshold to spawn, they are sent to their best fit based on Hab and Ethics Faction? This seems like a Xenophile with Xeno-Compatibility fever dream! The incentive would be to collect as many Xenos as possible (which I already do, naturally). This might not be an issue when you really only have 3-4 species early in contact but later...

How would pop growth buidings work? A higher chance to be the landing destination for a spawned pop? What would the point be in spamming pop growth buildings then? Hmmmmmmm.

I like all of these for testing out, TBH

So yes all 100 species would be growing pop points, but at a rate proportional to the number of pops each species has. So if there are N pops in your empire the total growth rate is the same no matter how many species you have (with a slight boost to species with <20 pops).

I would change the gene clinics to increase planet habitability. Pop growth would be boosted only by techs, pop traits, and living standards. It could be decreased by negative total housing in the empire.

Oh Nuffle, YES.

But this has the potential to simply expose weaker participants in a game earlier. If, in an early war, just some Animosity CB cause you have it and they're one over from where you just conquered...you simply just killed enough pops to put them back 20-25 years, that's basically a death sentence right there. I wholly agree with War needing to have devestating consequences but my worry is the moral hazard of War then for Empires that depend on it to actually have a puncher's chance and it also simply blowing a hole in the sides of Empires because you capriciously raided them. This is a reciprocity issue with the AI in a large way - if you work your angles as the Human you can mostly avoid that fate simply by working relationships or using the blunt object first.

Yeah, there may be balance issues with making war kill pops faster. That's why I think it's critical to be able to surrender to orbital bombardment or invasion before it kills half your pops. Say you're in an enforce ideology war or something where you'd rather loose than get gutted. I think if a weaker empire's in such a poor position that it's homeworld is able to be invaded it's on the way out regardless and these changes are needed to make it harder for the victors to grow off their conquests.

The tech cost inputs to fulfill with research outputs scale in a way that basically flattens the curve of research quickly with some amount of work on growing pops. While I understand wanting to use an internal factor reference to affect tech cost, this is what Sprawl was already supposed to do but doesn't really because again, research outputs matter most and Sprawl can be flattened out with the Bureaucratic escape hatch.

I like diffusion for the lowest possible tech researched passively accumulating points based on a bunch of factors and actions you can influence.

One of the wonky things about Research Agreements is they boost Research Outputs rather than reduce Tech Cost Inputs. This is a better deal for Empires with no Sprawl than Empires with some Sprawl in a situation where for whatever reason, all that Sprawl wasn't increasing Research Outputs, which I find doubtful but I'm not going to do some 3rd variable comparisons between 2000 Tech Cost, 100 Research per Month, +25% Research Agreement and 150% Tech Costs because of Sprawl and then change Sprawl to a factor of 125% and Research Outputs to 125. Not up for making a spreadsheet.

If they worked by reducing Tech Cost which under your notion, Diffusion would also do, Empires under Sprawl wouldnt enjoy as much benefit but still be much better off than those over Sprawl keeping Research Outputs the same. Just something to keep in mind.

Yeah research is real wonky currently. The exponential growth of tech costs is just too slow, early game techs take a few years, late game you can crank them out in a few months. There's no time to sit around in the middle techs, and once you really get your economy going everyone else just falls further and further behind.

I like a lot of it but I am curious about how this plays out for Empires that don't have some of these options to play in the sandbox. I have to report I have really enjoyed a game with 5x Tradition and Tech speeds and starting with 15-30 Advanced Empires because I have been behind so long and weak and not able to steam roll the same way. I am still buttering my bread but it's not like taking candy from a baby as much. More like a 1st grader.

Heh, yeah there could be some nasty scaling issues at slower game speeds. Maybe you'd need an option to reduce base pop growth rate in the game settings so that it doesn't become too uncoupled from tech speeds. I've played a few games at x5 tech too, but what always gets me is that the early game is excruciatingly slow, but once you grow enough it's the same old snowball. Empire growth is exponential, and tech costs are only scaled by a constant factor so late game is still the same.

 

[Derp]

Should there be more risk and internal disharmony for being so large that they haven't already created and then provided an escape hatch for? Maybe one of the fundamental issues with Stellaris as a game system is they keep building onto a ramshackle foundation with facades.

this is a consequence of their new business model and the limitations it places on design

 

[asveron]

I really do hope population management gets better.
We all know the about the annoying late-game migration management.
But If you play a bio ascension, the game becomes an even bigger headache.

-I get the frozen alien event and defrost a bunch of artic slimes. They all end up migrating to my artisan gaia world without me noticing. My gaia suddenly has no artisans because they hog up the population.

-Battle Thralls look like an interesting niche slave type. It'll be cool to bio-engineer a charismatic and strong species to work as duelist/soldiers. Since it's niche I'd only like a few but they always over populate.

-To have specialised species, the only way to influence migration is with habitability preferences and becomes a headache. Like ice-world for scientists, dessert for miners etc.

 

[OxfordNik]

The problems you identify are 100% correct. I've never got to a late-game crisis (and only made it to the mid-game point a handful of times) because it's either too easy to steamroll everyone and everything - since I'm miles ahead in tech, population, etc - or, in a few cases, it's obvious an AI empire (often the over-powered Prikkiki-Ti) has won the "grab everything in sight and expand your population" game and I'm going to be lagging behind, with no way to catch up.

I'm not sure I'm entirely on board with the "per species growth cap" as a solution - particularly as I don't think it would be easy to implement it in the current build of the game (or mod); I'd guess it would need at least a new "population growth" interface of some description. If we got that, I could well get on board with this suggestion - preferably, this would be tied in with a rework of the existing species screen (unlike the Galactic Community interface, which was completely un-linked to the pre-existing Contacts screen on release of Federations, for instance - with the latter still using, by the looks of it, outdated calculations to compare empire strengths [but I digress...]).

What this screen could have is a list of all your biological species, with growth progress and a way to specify - if you wanted to/your policies allowed (otherwise for you to simply know) - which planet you can expect that pop to grow on - and a way to "click through" to that planet to make sure that there are jobs etc for the pop to go to.

What has always felt "off" to me is the whole growth/migration interaction, ever since the POPs rework that came with 2.0 removed the actual moving of pops aspect of migration.

So, since we're talking pop growth, in addition to your suggestions, I would suggest the following:

1. make migration meaningful again - make it actually involve the moving of an existing pop to a different planet. There could be a migration timer, as was the case pre-2.0, allowing you to take action to address the 'ouflow' of pops (if you could/cared to), or - perhaps - an actual "setting up" of migration routes, or ways to nudge the migration flows etc. I would even go so far as to suggest removing the "move pop" interaction in favour of this mechanism, so that you couldn't "insta-teleport" whole populations at the click of a few buttons, but I guess that may not be popular with everyone.

In any event, I would definitely decouple the link between the "pull/push" factors to migration (available jobs & housing + any incentives you'd put in place - e.g. that "Distribute luxuries" decision - that I personally would keep - plus anything else like migration treaties - but see below) from factors affecting pop growth (habitability, food policy, any particular buildings and/or decisions).

For what it's worth. I'd make stability affect migration push/pull (pops moving from less stable planets to more stable ones) whereas amenities should affect pop growth, IMO (I wouldn't personally remove the pop growth from gene clinics/cryolabs but if they do lose that bonus, definitely keep the amenities bonus and make amenities have more of an effect on pop growth).

To counteract the possible loss of buildings from emigration, leading to a possible 'downward spiral' (no jobs->emigration->reduction of planet population below the size for the latest building -> loss of more available jobs), I would propose:
a) have a "tolerance margin" for buildings - so e.g. if you wanted to build a building on a newly colonised planet, in order to attract pops there, you could; and once the population reached the next size threshold, you could build a further one (assuming you had housing etc to spare). Conversely, falling one below the threshold for a building wouldn't immediately ruin it but would put it "at risk", with it only becoming ruined if the population continued to decline; AND
b) have a way to prioritise buildings on the planet, so that your most-recently-updated Cryogenics lab or Alloy nano-plant (say) isn't the first thing to be ruined if pops move away (or are killed/sold/etc).


2. rework migration treaties - for a start, by requiring a pop of a different species to have actually grown on one of your planets before you can then build a colony ship with them (see 3 below), OR if not, by "siphoning off" the population growth of that species from the original empire's population growth, should the below suggestion not be implemented - and consequently extending the construction time of the colony ship, if required.

This could also be done as a per-species thing - either as species rights (ideally) or in the process of concluding the actual migration treaty (so e.g. if you wanted to specify which of your pops could and could not be "taken away" through external emigration, you could - equally, you could also negotiate that you'd "liberate" some of another empire's slaves, say, in exchange for them getting your highly intellectual specialists), or at least as a “per-tier” thing, perhaps as a way to “progress” the migration treaty after a certain amount of trust etc are built up (so slave migration would be one tier, worker migration another, and specialist migration another thing again).

The way it could be particularly cool to see this happen - that occurs to me - is to have a type of 'civilian vessels' that you could send to another empire to "collect" a pop from them, and bring back to one of your planets (it would be quick and cheap but couldn't act as a colony ship); these 'civilian vessels' could perhaps be re-usable and you might have a soft limit on the number you had, or they'd just be expensive to maintain; they could also be used for migration routes within your own empire, perhaps, in line with my suggestion at 1 above...


3. require an actual pop to "move" to a colony ship (or population growth to be siphoned to the construction of the colony ship). This would further help to deal with the "expanding to guaranteed habitable worlds and/or planets with reasonable habitability is a sure-fire way to boost population growth exponentially" issue.

The Expansion tradition giving a guaranteed 2nd pop can, instead, be used to unlock the "tolerance margin for buildings" feature which I suggest at 1a above - while the Adaptability tradition giving the extra building slot could "double up" the effect, so the "margin" (either way) would effectively increase from 5 to 10.


4. rework Xeno-compatibility (further; the change announced for the beta/May patch - preventing cross-breeding between variants of the same species - is welcome but should IMO have been there from the moment the ascension perk was introduced); I'd personally make it require Fanatic Xenophile and/or - ideally - allow only cross-breeding of species of the same type (e.g. humanoids with humanoids, lithoids with lithoids, molluscoids with molluscoids. etc).


5. Separate out robotic and biological pops - There are several things to address here:

a) I would have bots/droids/synths in a different "species" list to biological pops (e.g. as an extra tab at the bottom of the "species" screen, as happens with relics and traditions), which could also allow for the modding of a robot design before one is built (e.g. I often don't finish building any robots before I finish researching the "Robo-modding" technology, meaning that my newly-built robots have to be upgraded immediately on being built if I want to use their full potential - which seems fairly counter-intuitive).

b) I’d like to see a separate "Bot Market" alongside the Slave Market (separate tab again at the bottom of the market screen, perhaps) - with galactic resolutions affecting the availability of the Slave Market (and slavery rights generally) being separate to ones affecting the Bot Market (and vice versa) - with 'AI rights'-type resolutions generally being separated out and fleshed out a bit more; hopefully the devs have watched Star Trek: Picard and got some interesting ideas from that!

c) I would use the separate screen at a) above to record things about the different robot "designs" (e.g where/when first manufactured, rate of production, etc) and maybe vary the names a bit more - with e.g. the original empire that came up with a particular design being reflected in the name (currently it just says "Robot", AFAIK, for any AI-designed bots of any type?).

d) I would also allow different bot types (basic bots/droids/synths) to be progressively upgraded from one to another, but with the option to prevent this happening automatically, if you chose to do so,

e) I’d have separate notifications about “vacant trait points” for biological and robot pops, which - if clicked - would take you to the relevant tab (as at a above)

f) finally, I’d like to see robots conquered after a war being required to be "adapted" in order to be usable by the new empire (giving you the option to specify which design you want them to use, etc).

Treating bots separately from normal pops could also help deal with problems with trying to shoehorn bots into the "slavery/servitude" system (see e.g. the bug reports about colonisation rights and generally broken robot rights).



Completely agree with nutritional rights needing to be species-based, BTW. Could also help address the issue with lithoid pops spawning everywhere. In a game I'm currently playing, it's 2332 and a servile Lithoid species, from a Syncretic Evolution nation (who were generous enough to conclude a couple of migration treaties early in the game), is now at 21% of the entire population of the Medium-sized galaxy (no other species, even if you include any sub-variants, is even in double digits percentage-wise!).

Really like the idea of tech diffusion, too, and what you're suggesting there (though of course there will need to be a way to prevent this affecting Fallen Empires' tech).

Likewise with the suggesion of "impact of war" on population (and, to balance out my suggestion of "building population tolerance margins", I guess the likelihood that a building could be ruined during bombardment/invasion could be increased, too, but for e.g. raiding for pops to have less of an effect).


If these don't make it into the official game, I'd love to hear from any modder who makes something like this into a mod (or if anyone can point to a mod that does something similar, I'd be very grateful!)

 

[majikero]

-To have specialised species, the only way to influence migration is with habitability preferences and becomes a headache. Like ice-world for scientists, dessert for miners etc.

Or cut out migration all together. The entire point of specialized species is to control where they go what they can do. Or just stop caring about it and just toss them all in the ecumonopolis. Early game it really matters since every little bit helps but late game, a factory worker is a factory worker.

 

[Hansatron]

Something like 100 pop growth per month that is distributed among your species and their pop count

I think this is the only "competitively balanced" long term solution. By aggregating "growth points" at the empire level, and then when the bucket fills placing pops based on some criteria - probably "is growth encouraged here" (we can convert the decision into a target marker) and "does this planet have free housing/jobs" - you can combine what is effectively auto pop migration with some semblance of balance on growth rate.
To make things nice and gamey, you could convert the system to something easily digestible like - 10 pops on a planet gives you 1 point, colony phase gives 0 points and grows via "immigration" aka high priority for new pop placement. Robot assembly plants can still assemble, but the Medical Clinic could be a source of +1 bio growth, and the cloning vat likewise. Growth contribution from a planet can still be modified by habitability etc.

Throw in some base empire points to naturally level out starting expansion variation, and you have basically everything in place. Robots would still require replicator/roboticist jobs rather than population levels. Roboticists could be balanced by saying they reduce bio growth by 1, and add 2 assembly. Empire level effectswould still work. Fast/Slow breeders could adjust the bucket size needed to grow that pop.

The downside is that unless you grow pops in batches you'll have a nearly continuous addition of pops late game, which could be annoying if players have to play whack-a-mole unemployment. Fortunately, there's no reason the bucket has to only be 1 pop for 100 points. It could be 2 pops for 200, other something, so you can get a nice demographic representation of xenos in there.

3. require an actual pop to "move" to a colony ship (or population growth to be siphoned to the construction of the colony ship). This would further help to deal with the "expanding to guaranteed habitable worlds and/or planets with reasonable habitability is a sure-fire way to boost population growth exponentially" issue.

This isn't a bad idea at all, it might be finnicky to have it clear which pop is getting loaded onto the spaceship, though.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
RE tech, one option is to essentially implement a tech cost function that has three stages: if you're near the middle of the pack, you have normal costs. If you are ahead of the pack, new technologies get increasingly more expensive the more ahead you are. If you are behind, they get increasingly cheaper. This would make a sort of Arc-Tangent style curve on tech rate, which is handy because you can easy set asymptotic limits.
But the upside of using this is that your tech rate remains monotonic with science output; more science means faster tech rate, and an empire that produces more science will always be ahead of one that produces less. It just won't allow the leader to explode ahead of everyone. The design here is to roughly nudge the galaxy to be in a band of tech level; adjust the scaling cost adjustments (perhaps measured as how many tiers ahead of the average is this tech) to tighten or widen the band.

Right now +10% tech rate modifier means more than +10%, because tech begets more tech. This sort of scheme can actually keep +10% to about +10%.

 

[BlackUmbrellas]

Wars definitely need to kill more POPs, I agree there. It feels like death from bombardment is still balanced for when planets had 25 POPs, max.

Purging being fixed to no longer happen one at a time would help, too.

 

[asveron]

Or cut out migration all together. The entire point of specialized species is to control where they go what they can do. Or just stop caring about it and just toss them all in the ecumonopolis. Early game it really matters since every little bit helps but late game, a factory worker is a factory worker.

Yeah it's not that big of a factor late game, honestly since you are either snowballed or you didn't. It's rarely that you're still minmaxing to go from 2nd place to 1st. But honestly the game UI still keeps trying to make you think things are important.

Like unemployed people still show up as red for maxed colonies and still give you alerts. It is important for developing colonies so you instinctively think you should care.

There's other things that are also deceiving in the UI. Like going 1 point over sprawl capacity doesn't actually do anything. It turning red makes new players think you should stay under.
51/50 should be lime.
75/50 should be yellow.
100/50 should be orange.
200/50 should finally be red.

Sigh.. I'm starting to rant off topic again.

 

[Delthor]

The quickest fix to combat tech snowballing would be to make tech costs scale with sprawl again. However, this would make bureaucrats useless.

Why not both? The existing penalty for going over admin cap is fine, and adds a decent empire wide economic concept to juggle. However, I'd like to see an additional modifier, which slowly increases technology costs as you accumulate sprawl that you cannot change. I don't think it's needed for traditions, as those already increase exponentially throughout the game, keeping things from feeling too snowbally.

This way, you have both an interactive limit on snowballing, where a portion of your economy has to be dedicated to bureaucrats, but you also have a set in stone modifier that increases over time, too. That second one would just increase at a much slower rate. It shouldn't even be listed as a penalty under the admin cap stuff. Just have it as a modifier on the tech cost tooltips. You have the base, plus increases based on sprawl, plus increases based on administrative penalties. One is a penalty; one isn't. The biggest problem with the back and forth over sprawl and cap is people expecting to stay under it. Before they moved underlying modifiers to big angry red/yellow numbers with words like "cap," people just accepted that bigger empires had to expand their research capabilities to stay competitive with tech, and it wasn't a big deal. Sure, some people tried to maximize tech output given their size, but that's fine; we didn't have the neuroses some players have for staying under the various caps. If you just don't communicate this separate modifier as a penalty, it would simply a white-colored modifier people know you aren't meant to keep low. Bigger is always better, but twice as big isn't twice as good, at least with regard to researching technologies.

I actually tried to do this in a mod, but there doesn't seem to be a way to connect tech costs to sprawl alone. It looks like it's hard coded to cap - sprawl, and you can only change the number it multiplies that difference by. Strangely, you can change the costs of all kinds of ridiculous things based on empire size, but not technology costs. The strategic resource-based edicts already work this way, though the tooltip is poor, since both the sprawl modifiers and the cap - sprawl modifiers are listed as simply "Empire Sprawl: +900%" rather than clearly communicating the two different kinds of modifiers. I'd absolutely love it if they split those two different penalties more clearly in the UI and gave us the ability to fully mod technology costs.

Edit: Oh, and one more thing. Could we please change the admin cap penalties back to a relative value instead of an absolute value? Having 50 sprawl over your cap penalize you the exact same amount whether you're at 30 cap or 1000 is ludicrous.