New economy is too much for me... advice?

[Sanguis Aevum]

I love Stellaris,

I have sunk a LOT of hours into the game so far.

But I am REALLY struggling to play after the update. Its making me unhappy that I can't really enjoy one of my favourite strategy games anymore.

I simply cant cope with the way the new economy works, i find it confusing and far too complicated / multi layered.
I have tried 6 or 7 full games so far and still cant get my head around what i should be building, what resources / districts / building i should prioritise.

I desperately want to enjoy this game again,

can anyone offer advice / tips?

 

[Apophenia]

My building checklist (in order):

If there are no unemployed people then don't build anything. (Over building can cause big economical problems)
If there are unemployed people..
... and you are running a deficit (or near a deficit) build that type of district (Mining, Agriculture, or Generator district). If you are running a Consumer Goods deficit at this point instead disable Research Labs.
... and you have low amenities build either Commercial Zones or Holo-Theatres (the latter only if you have excess consumer goods)
... and you have low housing (<=1) build a City District.
... and you have excess consumer goods (10+ per month) build Research Labs, Autochthon Monument or the like.
... and you have excess mineral production (20+ per month) then build Alloy Foundries or Civilian Industries (alloys + consumer goods)
... otherwise build Mining districts.

 

[Matoro_TBS]

I guess it depends on the situation. There's many ways you can build planets now, and specializing planets is a real thing. Basically to keep your economy growing you'll want to provide your pops with jobs, housing and amenities. Just build few basic resource districts on new colonies, depending on what you need. If there's a lot of some particular deposit (like 14 mining district slots). then you could specialize that planets as a mining world.
After some time you'll have open building slots. Build with the same principle as with resource districts: if you lack something, prioritize it. If you think you'll lack something soon (like consumer goods being low but your population is growing), build that. If you don't have that sort of problems, build whatever you want to advance your economy - usually it's either alloy foundries or research labs.
You can restructure your planets. For example you can convert some civilian buildings to fortresses and foundries during war. If you need more city districts for population but you have already built your planet full, you can replace a resource district with a city one. You can switch stuff around how everything functions.

Btw, use the market. If you notice yourself producing too much food, it might be profitable to just set a monthly trade to sell it away, and when you need more food production, just cancel the trade. It's also pretty useful to buy large bulks of minerals/alloys you need for building projects, and sell surplus stories of stuff like consumer goods.

 

[Zenopath]

1) Take authoritarian 1 pt. in ethics, this gives you stratified economy which dramatically lowers your consumer good requirements.
2) Switch to consumer benefits trade policy, which provides bonus consumer goods production as soon as you start consuming more CG than your starting civilian infrastructure can provide.
3) if your world is close to 0 or has negative amenities, make a commerce zone, do not rely on entertainers or holo theaters. Clerks will do the job and give you bonus trade.
4) check your trade, the 2 arrow icon on the map bottom right corner will show you how you are doing on protecting and collecting trade. Red skulls means you need a station with gun batteries or hangers if you have them, to reduce piracy, if you have silver rings with white numbers being displayed you need a trade hub nearby to collect the trade.
5) don´t build more research labs than you can maintain, you want to watch your consumer goods production to be sure it doesnt go too far negative.
6) avoid upgrading your buildings if you don´t have the special resources needed. Every upgraded building takes a special resouce, having a shortage of one of them is a big pain in the ass, as they are very expensive to buy off market.
7) thrifty is a good race pick if you plan to have lots of clerks for amenities and consumer good production
8) your population grows faster on worlds with upgraded colony to planetary admin, you should resettle people onto your colonies to get them to population 10 soon as possible. Too many colonies under pop 10 will freeze growth on homeworld, as everyone will emigrate away, possibly leading to a situation where you can´t build anything new for a long time until colonies grow up.
9) plan your planets growth in 5 population chunks, i.e. what building and districts will i need to get my planet to unlock another building slot? pair up resource districts/city districts with research labs/alloy factories to get enough jobs and housing to reach next building slot. Never have more than 5 open job slots on a planet.

 

[Razor Feather]

If you’re playing an empire that has trade, it would probably be helpful to go to policies and switch the trade policy to “consumer benifits” if you have not yet done so. It makes managing consumer goods needs much easier and .25 consumer goods can often be sold for more than .5 energy credits on the market even if the consuner goods aren’t needed.

If you arent sure what’s most important on a new colony, its probably the robot assembly building and the unity building.

If your problem is just not knowing what your “end product” your trying to make is, that would be alloys and reaserch/unity. All the other resources are essentially there to help you grow and maintain your empire, so that it can eventually make more ships and research more techs.

If you need help beyond that, some more detailed descriptions of what your specific problems are and what your playstyle is would be very helpful.

 

[permeakra]

tl;dr : it's simple really, you just have to read the tooltips.

can anyone offer advice / tips?

Take a breath, relax and start a new game. Default Unated Nations would do.

Once started do NOT unpause. Instead, open the planet screen and than look at tooltips for districts and buildings you see. You'll see many notions of jobs a get a first idea how jobs are connected to buildings and districts.

Than go to population tab. It isn't that helpful, you'll have to unfold each group of pops, but it isn't hard. Once done, you'll see what pops work what jobs and what they do.

Return on the main tab. See tooltips for numeric values. Than return to population tab and see which jobs interact with those values.

Now you are familiar with economic model except for trade. The rule of thumb is to cover your empire with trade hub stations (starbases with trade hub buildings). Each have collection radius equal to the number of trade hubs. Than you should cover the trade routes (visible if you push relevant button in starbase main tab) with protection. Protection is represented by starbases, preferably with hangar bays (2 jump radius per hub)


But you can completely ignore traid if you decide to not run clerks.

 

[strayth]

One thing that helped me immensely was the "Job Descriptions (Achievement OK)" Mod on Steam. It provides clear, definitive information about what you're doing when you seek to build in settlements. I had a botch game going just after 2.2 and once I put that mod in, I decided correcting my game would take more time than to simply start over again, so I did.

Now it's just a simple, informed balancing act, rather than just fumbling around with guesswork.

Edit: Also, I learned to just write off criminal growths as they occur. They cost you a little, but if you're keeping things pretty in your Empire then it's mostly just a matter of "Would you prefer to lose some credits / production resources, or would you prefer to lose consumer goods?"

 

[Siu-King**]

If I may, I'll drop this here.

You essentially starts from "basic raw materials" from districts, turning them to "industrial" consumer goods and alloys, then to "end tier" like science points.
it's not easy to balance the production of all of them, which is why you have the market if you can cough up the energy credits.

 

[Maethendias]

My building checklist (in order):

If there are no unemployed people then don't build anything. (Over building can cause big economical problems)
If there are unemployed people...

this does not apply to machine empires (or other empires that dont have a strata for unemployed pops, since those are a pure negative), however, creating more than 2-3 jobs over your population might still be a bad idea, depending on the circumstances

 

[Snoipah]

The new economy is too much for the AI too, I'm playing on Grand Admiral and the year is 2430 and everyone is inferior or pathetic to me in economy, technology, and fleet power.

I almost wish Paradox would fly me to their studio for a few days to show them how to optimize an empire's economy and just code the AI to always build in a specific order.

Though I suppose for people who's economy crashes as soon as they upgrade their first building would be unable to win outside of cadet difficulty.

As a pro tip: Rush matter decompressor asap if you can, if you don't have a black hole, rush dyson sphere.
Technological ascendancy>voidborne>master builders>galactic wonders, gets you stuff asap.

 

[mcolder]

Might I suggest playing a Hive Mind until you get more comfortable with the rest of the game? Mind you, hive minds have their own set of issues but there is no Consumer Goods and no Trade Value and that’s two less things to have to juggle. On top of that Minerals are kind of a non issue with them (in fact I recommend disabling most mining jobs until you absolutely need them). It just might be easier to get comfortable with how stuff works with fewer moving parts.

 

[Copperwire]

Ignore Admin Cap. If it is actually hurting you, you are winning.

Don't worry about specialization. Once you get the basics, it is a way to get a bit more efficient. It is not necessary, ever. Your capital gets +3% to everything, so when in doubt, build it there.

If you think you can colonize something green, you probably should. If it is yellow, do it, but don't grow it; resettle them to your capital until that is clearly a bad idea.

Planets should have either 1 pop, 5 pop, or 10+ pop. All other numbers are bad juju and should only be allowed temporarily, and if you have people you don't need in your capital, feel free to resettle them to fix it.

If you need stuff, buy it. If you are broke, sell food. If you are not sure what to do, make more food. If your selling so much food the market is not recovering, make minerals. Don't sell minerals if you can avoid it; make them into CG or Alloys (50 / 50 is fine for a long time) before you sell them. Only sell those if you have to. If you have too many CG, build labs. If you have too many Alloys, make ships.

If your not sure how many ships you should have, take the game years since you started and divide it by 3 and add 3. That is about right until you turn up the difficulty a lot and even then it is often much cheaper to give your neighbors food then worry about ships.

Ignore space mines/labs that aren't energy or at least a 3 until you have done everything else you can think to do and have minerals sitting around in piles. They are a trap. Except the alloy ones/special resources. Get those.

If you ignore "trade", it will mostly ignore you, and that is ok. You don't need it. Figure it out when your wondering if you should raise the difficulty level.

If your wondering about Traits, take Agrarian. You can't go wrong with it. It is like jeans; it goes with everything.

Don't fret over Ethics. They are all pretty equal and there mostly for flavor. Unless you are sure, don't go fanatic anything. It is often annoying. Choosing based on RP is as about as good as anything.

Civics, be a little more careful, but don't stress it. If it starts with "A", it is a good pick. If you ethics don't let you take any civics that start with "A", consider changing your ethics.

Unless it really floats your boat for RP reasons, don't play Democratic until you are at the point where getting a little free unity seems like it might be worth extra micro and annoyance.

If you feel like the micro gets silly as you get bigger, your not alone. That is normal and it is ok. Just make sure your Empire is too big to fail by the point you can't take it any more and ignore any level of micro that makes you not enjoy the game.

 

[Longprao]

Very short advice: rush military at the very early game, and make tributaries. Then you'll have the resources to do whatever you want. A fun game, no longer confusing.

 

[Kahldris]

Theres a lot of great advice so I will just way one thing, think ahead. Its a lot easier now to have large swings in your economy, the only way to combat that is to look ahead. Think to yourself okay I am taking these 2 planets and building up 2k more fleet strengths how will this affect my economy. If you decide you need energy and you take a mineral heavy district planet that may not be so good. Try to look ahead as best you can. I haven't played hive mind yet but maybe trying them would be easier?

Also as someone already said only building building you need is very important, ya have to make sure all your workers don't suddenly move to specialist jobs and your suddenly out of pops working worker jobs.

 

[Alspego]

To give (non-optimal) suggestion:
Longterm goal: Maximize research (and unity) and alloy output, avoid resources shortages.
The strength of your nation is defined by your fleet and your technology level. Because of that, research and alloys are the two resources which are always useful and are your end products of your production chain. Longterm, the excess of consumer goods should be around 0, the excess of food should be around 8 per planet (to be able to run the decision "Encourage Planetary Growth" at all time), the excess of mineral should be between 50-100 (to be able to build new buildings etc.), and the excess of energy should be around 100 (for interactions with curators). Additional, you should make a slight excess of strategic resources for ships etc.

 

[AlanC9]

While those are good rules of thumb, resources are fungible via the market, and farm districts are more productive than other base resource districts. It's viable to overbuild farms and not build many generators. (You want all the mines you can get since minerals are converted to both alloys and rare resources, so your total amount of minerals determines your total production.)

 

[AlanC9]

If you think you can colonize something green, you probably should. If it is yellow, do it, but don't grow it; resettle them to your capital until that is clearly a bad idea.

Planets should have either 1 pop, 5 pop, or 10+ pop. All other numbers are bad juju and should only be allowed temporarily, and if you have people you don't need in your capital, feel free to resettle them to fix it.

Doesn't this cost a lot of energy?

 

[Aneegrae]

I can't add anymore than is already stated above. Bottom line? Build only when you have too.

 

[Razor Feather]

Doesn't this cost a lot of energy?

Its like 150 a pop or something along those lines, so its not terribly costly past the very early game. The main problem is it is hella micro intensive, and I dont think it's nearly as important as people like to say it is.

 

[Copperwire]

Its like 150 a pop or something along those lines, so its not terribly costly past the very early game. The main problem is it is hella micro intensive, and I dont think it's nearly as important as people like to say it is.

Depending on what type of worker you move and traits, it varies. It is usually 100.

Have you ever looked at what you are paying for each colonist by colonizing and just letting it grow? How about how much the two specialists in a new colony are producing/costing per turn?

Down that road, when you are making those comparisons, is when it becomes clear why microing pop is actually pretty important, specifically in the early game.