Logistic Growth is Unredeemable

[Gobla]

The only times those sources mention the term "Smooth" was as a optional property.
The 2nd one only mentioned it for Exponential growth, making it very specifically not a Logistics Curve property.

Smooth is the result of it's properties. If you read them and what the resulting derivative functions are you'll conclude that these must be continuous and thus the original function is smooth.

The Stellaris curve does not have a continuous derivative, among many other ways in which it's different.

In simpler terms, just like a circle from which you cut the top half is no longer a circle. The Stellaris curve has both it's top and bottom mostly cut off and thus is no longer a logistic curve except in some very specific ranges which overall make up the minority of the curve for almost all carrying capacities.

 

[The Founder]

Smooth is the result of it's properties. If you read them and what the resulting derivative functions are you'll conclude that these must be continuous and thus the original function is smooth.

The Stellaris curve does not have a continuous derivative, among many other ways in which it's different.

In simpler terms, just like a circle from which you cut the top half is no longer a circle. The Stellaris curve has both it's top and bottom mostly cut off and thus is no longer a logistic curve except in some very specific ranges which overall make up the minority of the curve for almost all carrying capacities.

"Continuous". Yet another human evaluation that you use to try to argue "this is not how the science says it should be!".
Your own sources do not support the interpreration, that you try to apply to say "this is wrong".

You seem to asume that just because there is a very symetrical "ideal book case", they all need to have that property. This is not the case.

 

[Gobla]

"Continuous". Yet another human evaluation that you use to try to argue "this is not how the science says it should be!".
Your own sources do not support the interpreration, that you try to apply to say "this is wrong".

You seem to asume that just because there is a very symetrical "ideal book case", they all need to have that property. This is not the case.

You're either arguing in bad faith here or simply don't understand the subject matter.

I've provided several sources, which you don't seem to have read or understood, beyond scanning them for a few very specific words I mentioned.

Continuous is a very specific and meaningful mathematical term which again you either don't seem to understand or attempt to twist into something else so you can make a bad faith argument for your untenable position.

I wish you the best of luck with your convictions but I myself will draw my own conclusions from the arguments you've presented as well as the on probation badge next to your name and stop responding as it doesn't appear to be productive at all.

 

[Tisifoni12]

Aha !

With one of the two sliders completely to the left and the other completely to the right I seem to have reached believable population growth; have choices about how to best use population I have rather than reacting to social problems.
Otherwise game still 'samey' . . .

 

[Blackadder23]

• Real-world intelligent beings (aka Humans) do not breed to fill out environments. Rather, humans have children when they believe their children will be most successful. In the developed world, that's usually tomorrow, when the parents are just that little bit wealthier & mature than today. In the developing world, that's usually yesterday, since the uncertainty of the future is so high it's better to work with what you have and get through the tough part of raising children as early as possible. Our understanding of intelligent beings and how their populations grow is at odds with the concept of carrying capacity & logistic population growth, with no model having successfully & consistently predicted the changes in population growth across the globe during the 20th & 21st centuries. The populations of intelligent beings grow in ways which cannot be simply modelled and all we can say with confidence is that they don't breed like rabbits.

Eh? Human breeding has run absolutely amok, spread far beyond its original environment and any sustainable level, and left the planet in a smoking ruin.

I guess it's true that we don't "breed like rabbits", in the sense that rabbits aren't intelligent enough to create the tools that would allow them to do a fraction of the harm that we've done.

 

[Objulen]

Removing the growth curve bonus from planets with no jobs is an easy enough to fix the basic exploit of pop resettlement, but even then you'd still be able to get around the influence cost with Corvee System.

 

[Randy In A Hat]

You know, I played 2 games on 3.0 and I never noticed any ingame info explaining what you guys are calling "logistic" pop growth. yes, there was a slider but without any explanation what it really does (at game creation time), so somewhat useless. Then there is the mysterious "this planet is growing faster because of a balance between (something)" but the nature of the balance, the boundaries, etc . are nowhere to be found.

So I thought... ok, I will do it, even though I hate it, I will go to the wiki and learn, how hard can it be? ^^

So I go to https://stellaris.paradoxwikis.com/Population and oh boy...

There is a chart, but it's at a funny angle.
There is no pop 0, 1, 2, 5, or 8 on the chart, so I don't know anything about new colonies. Seriously? Game is all about expansion, and there is NOTHING about new colonies on the main chart for the game population? Oh man, this is gonna be tough.

OK, let's disable my "look at pictures mode". I've got masters in computer science, worked at Google, I can handle some maths!

So the text begins with references to total empire population. OK, I see how the more pops I have, the slower growth will be. That part is easy, but it's basically a no-control factor, so I can ignore it - can't optimize anything there

I kept reading somewhere that jobs affect growth, but how? I don't see any reference to it on the wiki. So what do jobs have to do with growth?

There's something about auto-resettlement, but nothing on the Population page on the wiki.
Is wiki not up to date?

So keep reading further... base growth (not bolded out - why not?) is from 0.3 to 4.5. OK that's a pretty big range.
What's base growth formula?
Oh man, it depends on planet capacity - unknown, not shown anywhere on that page what is a planet capacity for, say, capital. So an unkown....
Oh, it also depends on population squared divided by capacity, so it will trend up then down as any [N-N^2] function. OK, got it. What control do I have there? Oh well so I can probably manipulate this by resetlling... who cares...

So here's what I think:
- the blue-yellow chart is unclear, stupid, too small, and not representative of I care about as a player. hm.
- no examples. Hmm.
- planet capacity not explained. the https://stellaris.paradoxwikis.com/Celestial_body#Planet_capacity page doesnt' explain it either. So it's a random number assigned to a planet? is it 10? 20? 100? planet "size" x a constant? ...
- resettlement seems like still key min-maxing mechanic.
- resettlement now costs Influence. Good, because it's absurdly OP without it.
- then again, why isn't resettlmenet a slow process? would remove all game'y aspects of it. Mass resettlements (think Stalin) were long term processes. OK, not looking for game mechanic suggestions here...
- CONCLUSION: one more elaborate mechanic I'd best just ignore. I don't see what it adds. Some more complex function for growth - slow initially, faster later, slow again. Who cares? I play single player.

Too much confusion about something that doesn't matter in my view.

I'll give you the best bit - I bought Nemesis, played for 5 hours, couldn't find anything about spies. Game kept proposing that I sent envoys to build Spy Networks. So I send them. But then what? decades go by, I don't know what to do. Is there a place somewhere? Menu? No. Top m enu? no. Envoy menu? no. F1 with enemy list? no. What the hell?

Then 10 hours later I notice a small tab in on of the windows. That tab has some stuff in it - ohh here's the "network'.

I took me 5 more hours and some forum reading to realize:
- that you can do something to have more intel (it's not explicitly said anywhere)
- there are words "Intel" and "Infiltration level" which seem to sound like identical thing but it's unclear to what level do I raise them, how I raise them, what they got to do with each other, where I invest to get each, etc. Hmm.
- no matter how powerful my spy network, envoy count or age, technology, it'll take decades to know what a tiniest empire looks like (borders etc) even if I have a pact with them
- I can no longer sneak a ship through enemy territory before first contact is established because it vanished even if they have no ships or starbases in those systems. what the hell?
- that you can have more than 1 asset and that it's critical
- that without assets there's nothing you can do that's tough
- that I won't see the loadout of enemy ships that are IN MY SPACE until late game
- that there are no more early game pacts possible because everything is hidden for decades (can't make federations, friends, etc. because only negative stuff is possible now in diplomacy)
- I can no longer get Trust with anyone (previously possible at least through Guarantees)
- spies seem to be SEPARATE from pacts, diplomacy, etc. but spies can in no way benefit diplomacy

And once I have the all powerful huge intel on the enemy, I can .... steal (partial - not 100%) tech or sabotage a _building on starbase_....?

Not too fun tbh.

PS. OK I know the spy bit was a rant and not the right place, my thought was basically:" here's a much bigger set of features and they are both underexposed and supposedly more impactful than new population growth mechanics, and yet seem underwhelming again. Not sure what to make of it".

 

[Objulen]

Early game pacts are still possible. Sending envoys to improve relationships are still a thing. It's a bit meta, but you'll be able to figure out, generally, why someone doesn't like you. Typically, it comes down to:

1) Conflicting ethics
2) Machine vs. non-machine, except materialist
3) Gestalt vs. non-Gestalt
4) First contact conflicts

Espianage is relatively minor, with one major exception - if you get your infiltration level within an empire high enough (80 or 90, IIRC), you cane make them the target of a Crisis. I had a play through with an Inward Perfection empire that used this trick to get the Grey Tempest to absolutely wreck a Fanatic Purifier that was too close for comfort.

 

[Tetranet]

Eh? Human breeding has run absolutely amok, spread far beyond its original environment and any sustainable level, and left the planet in a smoking ruin.

I guess it's true that we don't "breed like rabbits", in the sense that rabbits aren't intelligent enough to create the tools that would allow them to do a fraction of the harm that we've done.

Sol III is not a Tomb World

 

[Objulen]

Sol III is not a Tomb World

But it can be! With giant roaches you can uplift into roach people.

 

[BakedPotato]

Absolutely agree. I was trying to explain this on discord with a bunch of stellaris players and I don't think they really understood what I was saying.

Stellaris is already collapsing under its ever-expanding complexity, and very few of those added layers have actually made the game better over the years. Maybe they thought that making planetary pop growth math more complicated would help because a lot of players wouldn't understand it.

I will say that the logarithmic curve on planetary growth makes sense to me in some manner. At a certain point you'd think that pop growth WOULD slow on an overcrowding planet, but then you always do have the option to emigrate to less crowded worlds.

Slowing population growth and lowering overall numbers is a worthy objective, but not like this. Obviously the malus is a mess, but then the planetary capacity curves are kind of awkward and gamey as well.

Personally, I think Paradox needs to accept the fact that Stellaris past a certain point just sort of breaks. Outside of a sweeping overhaul of the entire pop-based economy, we need to realize that the game isn't very playable much past year 2500 on anything bigger than small and 0.25 habitable.

Yes, they've changed things so the game can handle late-game loads better now, but it's more boring than ever and not very fun to play so what was the point?

Agreed. The individual pop system is probably the worst thing to ever happen to this game, and unfortunately it's a relic from when the game was much different. It reminds me of Diablo 3's auction house, which, even after being removed from the game, forever haunted the game and forced new devs to have to find ways to work around its permanent effects on mechanics and itemization. I think Paradox should've just phased Stellaris out back in 2018 or 2019 and began on Stellaris 2, with lessons learned.

 

[Objulen]

Agreed. The individual pop system is probably the worst thing to ever happen to this game, and unfortunately it's a relic from when the game was much different. It reminds me of Diablo 3's auction house, which, even after being removed from the game, forever persisted to influence the game and forced new devs to have to find ways to work around its permanent effects on mechanics and itemization. I think Paradox should've just phased Stellaris out back in 2018 or 2019 and began on Stellaris 2, with lessons learned.

Pops could be fine, but they'd need pop tiers and collapsing lower tier pops into higher tier pops when they move. Higher tier pops are more productive than lower tier pops, directly or indirectly.

 

[BakedPotato]

Yeah that's what we're looking at now. We've a gaping wound of basic design problems piling on to each other and we're trying to fix it by piling on a bunch of bandaid fixes.

Frankly I'd rather just go back to what we had before and manage pop bottlenecks and whatnot with game settings than have to play through the current snooze fest.

I guess there's one bonus to it, it makes pops even more valuable. Losing them to bombardment, free pops from events, or buying slaves is more important than ever.

 

[Tisifoni12]

Two factors determine population growth; reproduction rate and life expectancy.

It is likely that, similar to our own species, a technologically advanced species will go through a period of extension of life expectancy as medical science progresses and through improvements in education, hygiene, food standards, etc. Though it is conceivable that some species may retain some cultural practices like for example allowing weaker offspring to die, or socio-economic inequality might mean lower life expectancy for some of the population.

Changes in the reproduction rate will be influenced by a number of factors, not just the amount of space into which the population can expand; fertility, education, aspiration, social mores, and other factors will influence population growth. Pollution might effect fertility, education and aspiration might mean investing 'more' in fewer offspring, the aspirations of the state might mean promoting higher reproduction.

Biological factors also influence population. Not all technological species will necessarily reproduce like humans. Their patterns of fertility, whether the offspring develop in utero, in external pouches, in eggs, etc. may vary.

Stellaris must abstract a range of factors, but basing population growth on non-technological species like rabbits seems a little un-thought through without a number of potential modifiers. Yes there are some in place; slow breeders, fast breeders, etc., but are these still the right factors and are they given the correct weighting or range ?

 

[Aed]

While technically logistic models aren't used in human population modelling these days they are a decent approximation for the sake of a videogame.

Go look a the UN world population projections. Slow initial growth that ramps up until reaching some infection point where growth slows down again, with the total population history following a "s" shaped curve.

The implementation in Stellaris may be junk but the notion of a logistic-like growth curve is sound.

 

[Jaxck]

While technically logistic models aren't used in human population modelling these days they are a decent approximation for the sake of a videogame.

Go look a the UN world population projections. Slow initial growth that ramps up until reaching some infection point where growth slows down again, with the total population history following a "s" shaped curve.

The implementation in Stellaris may be junk but the notion of a logistic-like growth curve is sound.

It's really not. The point of modelling is to be predictive, yet no logistic model has accurately predicted the changes in population during the 20th & 21st centuries. People don't have kids because they can, they have kids for an enormous variety of generally specific social reasons. It's dehumanizing and extremely shaky to try to relate an arbitrary economic model, such as the concept of carrying capacity, to social behaviour of intelligent beings.

Also, carrying capacity is largely a debunked concept. Or to be more accurate, it's an incomplete description of how ecosystems actually work. All populations are relative to each other, meaning the "carrying capacity" of any given species cannot be described because to do so would require describing all other species, not to mention being limited temporarily. It's only a useful concept when looking at historical trends and holds little in the way of predictive value. For example, we know that historically the population of Blue Whales was over 100,000, but we don't know whether that is a description of the max population or just a very large but still growing population. Every prediction of human "carrying capacity" has been thoroughly trashed as our population has continued to grow regardless.

The current implementation in Stellaris is thus backwards of what is expected. The designers have designated an end state for every empire around which they have then applied a curve back in time to the beginning of the game. This feels really bad to go through since the balance is so nakedly prescriptive. Stellaris already has an issue of denying player agency to serve mechanics (indeed, so do all of Paradox's games. CK for example succeeds because the game is about working around variable agency). The population changes have smashed the illusion of meaningful player choice.