If overpopulation is actually a problem, there is a button for that. Declare population controls.
Micro management is astronomical now
- Thread starter pkco2
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The micromanagement itself isn't that bad. It just feels bad because of the terrible UI.
Separating the population window from the buildings window was an unfortunate decision. It's made worse by all the scrolling that you have to do in the resettle, build and planet decisions windows. The fact that the decisions window closes itself every time you switch to another planet is another pain in the rear. Same for the jobs window, where a stratum not only doesn't stay open when you switch to another planet, but it even closes when the last unemployed pop goes into a job that you just made available.
Separating the population window from the buildings window was an unfortunate decision. It's made worse by all the scrolling that you have to do in the resettle, build and planet decisions windows. The fact that the decisions window closes itself every time you switch to another planet is another pain in the rear. Same for the jobs window, where a stratum not only doesn't stay open when you switch to another planet, but it even closes when the last unemployed pop goes into a job that you just made available.
Except that hits you with a stab malus and costs you a population growth slot. Population being an important resource. A much better way would have been real automigration. Either because the pop is free and allowed to do so on their own, which would of course require them to be smart enough to know what place and job is good for them. And they aren't. Or via some setting that more simplistically just sends excess pop somewhere automatically. Also not available.
Lack of foresight and testing in the mid-late by the development team.
There is just an enormous amount of things to balance on a planet and your economy at large. It doesn't seem so bad in the early game when you might only have 3 or 4 planets. However, once you get beyond that things start to become unwieldy. You start spending all your time tinkering with planets and the rest of the game's content have to take a backseat.
There is a ton of stuff that could be streamlined or automated without dumbing down the game or decreasing depth. For example, instead of individually building every district, it would have been much less micro if players simply needed to selected the district mix they wanted on that planet. Then it would just fill out automatically. Players would then be free to mostly focus on the special buildings that go in the slots.
I also think they overdid it with the sheer number of resources players have to juggle. Energy, Minerals, Food, Consumer Goods, Alloy, Influence, Unity, Science, and then 6 rare resources! Then you go to planets and you have amenities, housing, stability, and crime to juggle. I liked the alloy addition, but It needed to be paired down a lot.
@ Alastor: Wait... how are you simultaneously overpopulated and underpopulated? And the stab malus is trivial, as you well know. (Honestly, I'm not sure that the whole stability mechanic doesn't need a rethink -- when we ran the math entertainers looked like they were never worth it.)
How is looking to the right of your screen and looking at the icons there that much of micro management? you only have to click on a specific planet if you see that there's a lack of housing or if some is unemployed. Otherwise you just have to look at your income and check the right planets if you're lacking in certain things such as Consumer Goods and Minerals etc. That's when you start clicking through your planets to see if there's one which you can focus on to increase your production of said mineral.
Take my own FP play. I've claimed Fen Habbanis. I almost only produce Alloys there. So to keep ahead of the vast amount of minerals needed for that I colonise a few mineral rich planets of smaller size that I've ignored before. Build up mining districts so you reach 10 jobs and then only look at them again if you drop too low in mineral productions. that's when you maybe should resettle a few clerks there so that you can reach 10 pops to upgrade your colony to avoid the minus in population growth. At the same time you do so you build just the bare minimum of buildings needed to keep your pops happy and growing. For Bio ascendants that would the clone vats. All of this doesn't take that many clicks and I can ignore them until they really demand my attention such as if my increasing alloy production stats to overtake my growing mining production.
The one thing I have a huge problem with is how much empire sprawl fucks over your Unity production. I currently have +338% due to sprawl and it much harder to compensate by building compared to science. But I do own almost a quarter of the largest size galaxy.
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I'm not sure I understand the question. Clarify? As for entertainers they provide amenities not stability directly. I believe only nobles provide stability directly. And that edict costs you one noble. Which is not exactly that trivial no. I'm not saying it will break you but it is still punishing you for wanting to avoid some of the microhell.
Sweet Lord, this looks like a mess. People can't even agree on how actually the system works. I had shelved the game for six months thinking they were going to fix it while religiously buying every expansion because well, it's Paradox. But this is ridiculous. See you next year, I guess.
Well, what I meant was that losing a pop growth slot can't be a problem if you're already at the point where using the stop population growth edict looks like a sensible move. Either I want to stop pop growth or I want more pops; I can't want both at once. (I can be at a point where I'm more-or-less indifferent as to whether pop growth is happening or not; late-game Egalitarian running UA, for instance.)
As for being punished for not doing micromanagement, I don't see how it's conceptually possible to avoid that unless the game is designed so micromanagement is outright impossible, either because you don't have the controls to do it or because it's automated perfectly anyway and there's nothing for you to do. Stellaris lets you wring a percent or two more production if you want to put in the time. I have trouble seeing that as bad.
The problem seems to be that paradox needs to make money, and they've found out that the only way to do it is by adding new things.
For one, I like this whole dev philosophy and I wish every other dev company had it. On the other hand, they are clearly unprepared to tackle this kind of work.
Every other new expansion just breaks the game in a different way, and fix patches are just not cutting it. And don't even get me started with balance issues.... megastructures that don't feel "mega" at all... broken ass ecumenopolies, lame gaia worlds.. if you just keep adding overpowered things over and over you'll never see the end of the balancing shenaningans.
Someone has to stop development, sit down and go... OK. We need to make the picture clear and rewrite all rules/mechanics/features over again from scratch.
For one, I like this whole dev philosophy and I wish every other dev company had it. On the other hand, they are clearly unprepared to tackle this kind of work.
Every other new expansion just breaks the game in a different way, and fix patches are just not cutting it. And don't even get me started with balance issues.... megastructures that don't feel "mega" at all... broken ass ecumenopolies, lame gaia worlds.. if you just keep adding overpowered things over and over you'll never see the end of the balancing shenaningans.
Someone has to stop development, sit down and go... OK. We need to make the picture clear and rewrite all rules/mechanics/features over again from scratch.
Yes you can. You can have an overpopulated planet and an underpopulated one. An overpopulated planet that loses it's growth spot means less pops you can migrate to your underpopulated ones.
But if I want to do that then I wouldn't be thinking about using the stop population growth edict in the first place, right? The edict's for the times when I don't want to bother with migrating pops around.
To all the people saying to just look for the icons in the outliner: yes you are correct, that is indeed the way to go and helps alot. Except now you are busy 24/7 scrolling up and down that huge list until your finger hurts and are constantly watching that display.
No you don't. one quick scroll or two, see nothing of interest, back to whatever else you were doing. I do that with 30+ planets without much effort, takes a second or two to scroll through that list. Sounds like you're obsessively looking to minutely control every single little detail which is just a waste of time unless you've made a really sub-optimal empire that is bleeding all the time. It does not hurt to leave your nation with a few homeless and unemployed for a few months or even a year as long as your finances are in order. There's been times in wars I've not checked back on my worlds for years. Takes a bit more focus once I did because of all the stuff that's been piling up but it's not the end of the world if your empire is planned from the start. You only really have to watch your incomes, that's the one thing that needs a constant eye every monthly update.
Yeah, pretty much. For everyone complaining about how much micro you have to do, there's a poster asking why you're even bothering to do that micro, let alone feeling that you have to. (Example right above this post.)
Part of the problem is that we haven't really defined the economy rules-of-thumb yet. We've got a lot of freaking out over seeing red stuff on the screen, but nobody's done the math to show when it's rational to freak out over red stuff, and when it isn't.
I still feel that most of this could be resolved with bigger, preferably manually created, sectors with at least semi competent AI. Then add in a bigger modifier for migration on overpopulated worlds to slow that down and most of my micro issues would be gone. I went back to 2.1 and had fun as I was looking forward to expanding instead of being apprehensive of adding more micro.
Most of my planets are never really "done." They go through multiple development cycles.
Early game, I run "on demand" construction. Whatever the empire needs, that's what I build. I don't care about planet specialization or anything else. We need minerals? Put a mine down. We need more food? Put a farm down.
One reason for this is that I discovered the hard way that RNG can really screw you. You never know what districts will be available on newly discovered worlds, and you never know what kinds of system resources you discover. Trying to plan 10 planets in terms of 200 years of development from the moment you discover them is a waste of time and resources. You have to be flexible.
Later, I start to specialize (once I feel secure and have enough minerals to burn). I'll swap a bunch of buildings and districts to different kinds to specialize planets to take advantage of bonuses. I start getting forge worlds and the like.
But even then, development doesn't cease. As I grab certain techs or perks, some planets go through a third development cycle. Really urban planets either get turned into ecumenpolis or I start swapping from resource districts to city districts as population continues to climb and I get the advanced alloy and research and commerce buildings.
Then some planets go through a tertiary development cycle if I grab resort, thrall, or penal colony techs.
Then there's things like swapping Psi Corps for Precinct Houses on planets when you grab the perk. Or deciding to build wonders to generate minerals or energy. Suddenly, you need to retool 25% of the economy, because you now have another 1200 minerals in income from that fancy matter decompressor, so it's time to swap from mines to energy or time to swap some buildings over to alloy production to soak up the minerals.
If I felt that the migration-POP growth interaction worked better, I wouldn't spend so much time moving POPs around via resettlement. I'd just let the POP growth stuff do its job.
But having idle POPs sitting around that could immediately take up an open job somewhere else (while the planet they are on is not going to have an opening due to being full on buildings) is a damn nuisance. Those idle POPs could open a building slot on a less developed world. Which brings us to POP promotion.
The irony is that I really like the auto-promotion to higher strata. When I want more alloys, I want them now. When I want more research, I want it now. So, when POPs promote, that's a good thing. But it does mean that worker jobs go empty some times.... which is why POP growth and resettlement ends up being important. I can move labor around to cover those worker jobs as POPs promote. I don't want to wait on migration to "solve" my problem when I have a planet with 10 unused worker jobs (due to some recent promotions from building factories) when I have 10 idle POPs laying around the empire doing nothing.
Nah. I rarely have to re-build to cover increased amenities or crime unless a criminal mega-corp carpet bombs me with criminal branch offices. Even then, once I figured out how to oppress people (or make them happy via other means), it's not that hard to police planets. I just don't focus on amenities that much.
not to mention you also have to start making a mental list about which planets you need to ignore which icons on, as eventually you will have planets with housing and/or unemployed icons that you just can't do anything about. I especially 'love' when one of my administrators for some random reason gets unemployed and his job gets taken by a lower strata right away and then I suddenly have an unemployed administrator out of the blue for no discernible reason, and with no way to deal with him except just ignore the unemplyed icon on the planet.
