New player to the game - here's my impressions

[-Marauder-]

How do you get this convo so drawn out. The thing is that 1.91 had a system where any new world or habitat later in the game would fill up quickly with pops migrating from your full worlds. In modern stellaris this is absolutely not the case as you need to mash the resettle button a million times every minute.

But, resettling is fun! No?

Thing is, there's a solution in-game and the devs simply refuse to give it to people. Hell, the game outright sabotages it to the best of its ability. For example, it enslaves unemployed pops even when you have Indentured Servitude/Chattel Slavery, freeing gainfully employed pops. Thus preventing them from being resettled via GTO.

 

[DrFranknfurter]

What im saying is that pre 2.2 migration was tweak to fill new version, and is not entirely new system, and pre 2.2 migration was not resettlement in current one.

There are lots of mechanics that move pop growth around, it's hard to keep track of them sometimes...

In 1.9.1 we had migration as I've mentioned (pops moving on their own for free). Greater than ourselves does something very similar but instantly instead of slowly, late-game instead of always, with an influence cost instead of free, with no pop modifier instead of the happiness boost (very similar but different).

In 1.9.1 we had manual resettlement. Similar to how it is today, but with a better UI - you could see the two planets side-by-side and the empty jobs clearly (rather than trying to remember names and planet roles, with bugged free job numbers - thanks to certain jobs messing up the UI) and you could view all the tiles worked on both planets and drag & drop between them so the pop would work the intended job instantly. Only the costs were different, influence rather than energy - so very expensive, discouraging you from doing it too often (maybe you'd never do it, relying instead on automatic migration), but the mechanic was there to allow certain players to perform a little bit of optimization - for example gene-modding a planet to be better at mining then spreading those pops to mineral tiles on other worlds.

Excess food converted to growth
In 1.9.1 excess pop growth was transferred between planets via a different mechanism entirely - food. Excess food contributed to growth, with the scaling bonus growth bonus divided by the number of growing pops - so once a planet was full the food would speed-up pop growth elsewhere. This may seem similar mechanically to the current migration, but thematically it's very, very different:
1.9.1: Cockroaches are growing by 10 points a month instead of 5 because of the excess food dumped on the tomb world, food grown by foxes on a gaia world
2.7.2: Cockroaches are growing by 10 points a month instead of 5 because of the... migration of gaia world preference foxes to the tomb world, where they turn into growing cockroaches. (I really hope you can see why this is so much worse than what we once had... I honestly can't explain it any better).

So the migration systems in the current game replaced systems that made sense before. The changes are bugged, inferior versions of the old systems that make less sense.
The changes also made food worthless when before food was an interesting and rather elegant mechanic - you would overproduce food early for excess growth then slowly convert farms to other purposes as your planets stopped needing the excess growth and each individual farm was more productive, eventually getting into a situation similar to the First League as many planets stopped being self-sustaining:

Food had to be imported from other member worlds to support the untold billions living in this enormous metropolis.

When the League collapsed, these food shipments ceased virtually overnight. Those with the means departed for other worlds, but most of the population remained behind. Mass starvation and anarchy followed

So the migration changes didn't just kill migration with bugs and annoy any player who wants to play into the late game (when planets are full and you need to resettle to ecumenopolis and ringworlds), it also killed emergent storytelling in the late game and the fun parallels with precursor civilizations (now you can just buy the food instantly at any time and will never, ever suffer starvation).

 

[Flying Scorpion]

If managing 1000 planets takes 1000 more clicks and work than 1, the game is unplayable.

You hit the nail on the head. For example, with construction drones there is no option to build both research and mining stations with a single button press. This is just one example of an opportunity to reduce micromanagement and improve quality of life for the players.

Learn to enjoy the space accounting simulator.

I took your advice and attempted to "embrace the micro". Here were the results of my pacifist empire expansion:

I was in the process of integrating the cyan colored empire during this screenshot. (70 years to integrate! O_O )

I set the game to very slow or slow for the majority of that playtime, which reduced the stress and annoyance of micromanagement, and made the game more enjoyable; however there were still problems. Specifically 2:

1. The game became unplayable due to lag (next playthrough I'll avoid building habitats and use Collosus to clean things up and reduce CPU burden)
2. The Rising Unemployment->Crime Wave->Order Restored popups became very annoying. Here's a picture of 3 popups coming up simultaneously:

This was so annoying. I'd be trying to record video footage of fleet battles and this pop up ruined so many fleet battles

Social welfare living standard makes unemployed pops not loosing happiness and wont trigger unemployment events (as long as you are not assimilating pops).
With this strategy you will have 90 stability, average 90% happiness, and no crime. Stability can drop few points because of overcrowding, but that's all.
Its one from viable strategies, but showing that you dont HAVE TO micro managing pops

Would this stop that popup from happening?

People aren't only talking about resettlement, but mostly refer to the fact that you cannot queue up buildings, instead having to wait until another pop has grown, and then also have to manually upgrade each building, then try to make the right pops (those that are actually good at it) work the jobs they're good at instead of the jobs their species sucks at. And you have to re-check each planet each year, countless times, because the game utterly mishandles planets on auto AND doesn't allow you to plan ahead, design building templates for "new planets", "science planets" etc. that you just have to select once and then forget about. Which also means the game punishes you for winning: the more planets you conquer or settle, the more planets you'll have to check and recheck and recheck again and again to give another little micro command. That's why so many players stop at midgame and restart: the beginning/exploration part is great, but then it just becomes more and more repetitive busywork.

Templates would help a lot with reducing micro burden. I think for many of us, having options to reduce the number of clicks necessary to play the game would be desirable. I don't even care if it's less optimal than micromanaging - I think it's totally fair for the micro-intensive playstyle to be more powerful than sitting back and putting the game on cruise control.

 

[Archael90]

Would this stop that popup from happening?

Some living standards (social welfere, and utopian abundance im aware of, but dont know how about academic privilages, chemical bliss, or shared burdens) and some traits like nerve stemple are not triggering this events, so no popups happening. But be carefull about trascending species because they are put into assimilation and then trigger unemployment events.

 

[Flying Scorpion]

Some living standards (social welfere, and utopian abundance im aware of, but dont know how about academic privilages, chemical bliss, or shared burdens) and some traits like nerve stemple are not triggering this events, so no popups happening. But be carefull about trascending species because they are put into assimilation and then trigger unemployment events.

I was using utopian abundance. Perhaps the problem was that I was xenophile, open borders, migration treaties, etc. I only went into the species window a couple of times to give everyone utopian abundance, but after awhile more species emerged in the late game and I forgot to back into the window to change their living standards. That might have been the problem for me. I just didn't think the utopian abundance thing was working like I expected it to. Is there a way to set it to automatically give new species added to the empire that living standard as....a standard option?

*edit* for how helpful utopian abundance is for reducing micromanagement burden, I'm surprised how few players have actually used it.

 

[FlyingPhoenix]

Dont forget people play with mods and not in ironman

 

[Archael90]

I was using utopian abundance. Perhaps the problem was that I was xenophile, open borders, migration treaties, etc. I only went into the species window a couple of times to give everyone utopian abundance, but after awhile more species emerged in the late game and I forgot to back into the window to change their living standards. That might have been the problem for me. I just didn't think the utopian abundance thing was working like I expected it to. Is there a way to set it to automatically give new species added to the empire that living standard as....a standard option?

*edit* for how helpful utopian abundance is for reducing micromanagement burden, I'm surprised how few players have actually used it.

View attachment 644538

Only pops under those standards are not triggering unemployed event.
Yes, at the top of the species tab, there is a button called "set species default rights" or something like this. But there is a bug that i cannot reproduce that makes some templates to not take this as default... and i dont know why ;/
And its not only utopian abundance, social welfare is available to almost all empire types and this also helps with unemploy events.

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

Dont forget people play with mods and not in ironman

I have about 1500 hours of Stellaris and zero achievements.. pretty much as I have in ANY other game that I play as I always play with mods of some kind.

I think most players that play games such as Stellaris use mods of some sorts. I also never understood the point of Ironman but some people probably does?!?

 

[Incompetent]

So the migration systems in the current game replaced systems that made sense before. The changes are bugged, inferior versions of the old systems that make less sense.
The changes also made food worthless when before food was an interesting and rather elegant mechanic - you would overproduce food early for excess growth then slowly convert farms to other purposes as your planets stopped needing the excess growth and each individual farm was more productive, eventually getting into a situation similar to the First League as many planets stopped being self-sustaining:

"Food had to be imported from other member worlds to support the untold billions living in this enormous metropolis.

When the League collapsed, these food shipments ceased virtually overnight. Those with the means departed for other worlds, but most of the population remained behind. Mass starvation and anarchy followed."

Weirdly, even a fully-populated Ecumenopolis can be self-sufficient in food now, once you have enough Livestock pops; I guess the First League were just noobs for picking Xenophile, meaning this option wasn't available to them. (But on an Ecumenopolis/Habitat, what do the Livestock eat?)

It's a small thing, given how easy food is to get in general, but I find the whole concept of Livestock as currently implemented is a bit nonsensical in terms of how it gives slaver empires much more food potential than non-slaver empires. I would rather have it something like this instead:
- With bio ascension, instead of "Delicious" trait, have a "Photosynthetic" trait that means pops have zero food/minerals consumption and are immune to the growth penalty from food/mineral shortages. Now, instead of a trait that only matters for biological slaves, you have a trait that is available/useful for all organic pops, whether free or slave, and they can be biological or lithoid. We could also make the Plantoid species pack more interesting by having Plantoids be inherently Photosynthetic, balanced out with some downside (maybe higher CG consumption?).
- Livestock slavery as currently implemented is still available, but only for Photosynthetic pops. For other species, you can use the "processing" purge, like a Devouring Swarm. (Of course, purges are another cheese the devs really need to fix: the basic rule with purges I think should be that you only get resources from purges when a pop actually dies, so you aren't rewarded for keeping those pops alive.)