Peak empire efficiency

[Maginor]

With the current administrative capacity mechanics, the rule of thumb is that by growing a large empire, you can usually offset any maluses by just expanding production. In the early game, expanding your empire too fast may be dangerous, but when you are able to fill entire planets with level 3 science buildings or culture producing buildings, this no longer becomes a problem.

There is however one problem I can think of with this. I recently had a game on a large galaxy where I played as pacifists. By some weird randomness, it happened to spawn all fallen empires and a marauder in my quadrant of the galaxy. Since every empire always has quite a bit of space around it and since these ones never expand (at least not before much later), I got about 1/5 of the entire galaxy to myself and ended up with 82 planets without ever conquering one (also got the L-cluster and a lot of terraform candidates after the other anomalies ran out).

The limiting factor once you get that large is that you can only build one megastructure at a time even if you could afford more. Megastructures are supposed to give you a huge boost, but if you are very large, they don't amount to that much relative to the rest of your economy. Since each one takes 20-30 years to finish, you will barely feel their impact.

Most megastructures cost on average about 100 alloys per month during their build time (if you spread out their cost), and so it seems like the peak efficiency of a late game empire is if you are large enough to have a 100 alloy surplus each month atop of what you need for your fleet. This allows you to build as many megastructures as you can in the time given. In that case a science nexus may still give you a big relative speedup to your technology rate.

The admin cap increasing repeatable techs in the late game are also worthless if you are too big, but could be worth it if you are smaller.

I also felt like a much larger proportion of the rare resources I used in this game had to be manufactured, but I'm not entirely sure about that one, because your access to rare resource deposits should in theory scale with the amount of planets and space you have. I guess you could decide to settle planets less often unless they have rare deposits, but I have not done the math on how much more efficient it is to extract them compared to producing them from minerals or buying them from the market.


The counterpoint to this is of course that all that really matters is the size of your fleet, and so you can live with slightly slower research rates if your fleet can beat everything else anyway.

Any other thoughts about this?

 

[Blurb]

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make or what kind of discussion you want to start.
Firstly, you need to define what this "peak efficiency" is with respect to.

The limiting factor once you get that large is that you can only build one megastructure at a time even if you could afford more.

The limiting factor to what, exactly? Aside from your empire's ability to build megastructures, that is.

and so it seems like the peak efficiency of a late game empire is if you are large enough to have a 100 alloy surplus each month atop of what you need for your fleet.

So in general terms, an empire should only make as many alloys as it needs? A bit bland, but sure.

 

[AlanC9]

He's maybe talking about economic growth rates?

 

[Maginor]

The point is that megastructures increase your economy without increasing empire sprawl (apart from ringworlds). The "efficiency" is how large of an economy you can get relative to how much you lose to increased costs from sprawl. Megastructures increase this efficiency, but the relative increase you get from megastructures gets smaller the larger your empire gets.

This efficiency measure is mostly relevant for tech speed and tradition gain.

And past a certain point, your rate of building megastructures will not grow, hence your efficiency is no longer as high. The threshold point is when you are able afford to continually build megastructures. Atop of that, how large a fleet you "need" is of course highly variable.

 

[Defiler99]

Another detail is that several megastructures now offer a percentage bonus on top of their flat output.
For example, the Science Nexus gives you +15% research speed. 15% is 15% no matter what size you are.

 

[AGenericAccount]

82 planets?????

That outliner must have packed up and gone home...

 

[FIBBIDEH]

82 planets

And here I thought the micro in my game was bad.

 

[mergele]

82 planets?????

That outliner must have packed up and gone home...

There is a minimalize outliner entires mod which works very well and actually makes about 80 planets viable.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1610578060
Shamlessly plugging because it's such a revelation once you try it and I don't want anyone to suffer not knowing of it.

 

[Roddo]

Happened to myself, being locked away with 1/4 of the galaxy for my empire alone. With pacifist you just grow and grow.
The problem is not the growth per-se, the problem is that there's no drawback to growing.

I think (and mind me, I mostly play egalitarian/pacifist, so it might be a slanted view):

If you manage your economy and "politics" well, there will be no internal upheaval. NONE. AT ALL.
This is specially notable for egalitarians and pacifists, the benefits of running a happiness focused empire greatly outstrips any other benefits the other ethos get.

Egalitarian/Pacifists are the kings of stability -> stability is king of growth -> growth is king of stellaris.

My last game I'm playing Commonwealth, never played them... I'm used to make my own empires.
So 20 years in, I colonize my first planet. 2 years later (with only 3 pops and a 4th growing) I get an event out of nowhere stating that there's deviants on the colony.
And I wonder, why? +50 stability and only one pop jobless and this happens? And to top it all, the event said I'd get 3 deviants or only one and a happiness malus... I naturally went for the happiness malus and my pops are still militarist/xenophobes (bug?)

It seems as though some ethos have it harder to grow.

 

[Blurb]

The point is that megastructures increase your economy without increasing empire sprawl (apart from ringworlds). The "efficiency" is how large of an economy you can get relative to how much you lose to increased costs from sprawl. Megastructures increase this efficiency, but the relative increase you get from megastructures gets smaller the larger your empire gets.
This efficiency measure is mostly relevant for tech speed and tradition gain.

Throughout the history of Stellaris, it has been a rule that large empires gain technology and traditions faster than their smaller equivalents,.
There have been a few exceptions (such as unity from artists buildings or science from science nexus), but as a thumb rule bigger is better (this conveniently also applies to weapons and ships). Similarly, the strength of an economy is not measured by the ratio of income vs. upkeep, but by the sole net surplus, which again increases as the empire grows larger in size. This also applies to megastructures like the dyson sphere or the matter lifter - they add a fixed income of minerals or energy, completely regardless of your empire's size.

If your concept of efficiency is maximizing the ratio of income vs. upkeep, then your goal is backwards; roleplaying at best.
Note also that the rate at which you build megastructures would have no impact on efficiency, if that is your definition.

And past a certain point, your rate of building megastructures will not grow, hence your efficiency is no longer as high. The threshold point is when you are able afford to continually build megastructures. Atop of that, how large a fleet you "need" is of course highly variable.

What exactly is wasted when you can build megastructures faster than the limit allows?

Happened to myself, being locked away with 1/4 of the galaxy for my empire alone. With pacifist you just grow and grow.

Any nation will grow rampantly if unchecked, I fail to see how this is a merit of pacifism, noting that a genocidal empire will be able to claim space at a far higher rate, owing to their massively reduced starbase influence cost.

Egalitarian/Pacifists are the kings of stability -> stability is king of growth -> growth is king of stellaris.

By what rationale is stability the king of growth?
As I see it, fleet power and number of pops are the two most important indicators of an empire's immediate military and economic power, respectively, meaning those are the numbers you want to increase.
Stability doesn't increase your fleet power directly, and it doesn't increase your number of pops either. At best, it's a +25% output bonus on pops.
It doesn't help you grow (pop growth speed does), but it does make your existing growth more valuable, by simple extension of making existing pops more valuable.
Sure, extra stability is nice, but I would not call it the king.

 

[Maginor]

What exactly is wasted when you can build megastructures faster than the limit allows?

The science nexus will not increase your technology rate by as much when you are large because it generates a fixed number of points, but this is what you touched on in your opening. Similarly, how many extra researcher jobs, and consumer goods production and so on to support them, you can create with the minerals from the matter extractor is fixed, but with a large empire size, this no longer amounts to a that much higher research speed.

Similarly, the strength of an economy is not measured by the ratio of income vs. upkeep, but by the sole net surplus

The net gain in resources and tech points is not what matters for your research speed, (or similarly unity for speed of getting traditions), what matters is the net gain after you modify by the sprawl costs. The sprawl costs are correlated to the size of your regular economy (minus megastructures) because the size of your economy is again correlated to your sprawl. Hence the ratio. It is not a very precise measure, and was not meant as such, it was just a talking point about whether or not it is a good idea to expand past a certain point, whatever that point may be determined to be.

It may be true what you say that the research rate you can afford always increases with the size of your empire, but why would this be the case past a certain size? Is there any generally accepted analysis of this? I can understand why a 40 planet empire could more easily specialize than a 10 planet one and thus get more out of each worker, but why would an 80 planet empire be better than a 40 planet one? Is it just because the sprawl costs are not large enough to offset what you gain from a new planet? And by how much is it better? Enough to offset the fact that you no longer gain as much from megastructures in terms of tech and culture rates?

 

[Blurb]

So it's just the same old "how do I tech fast?" question again. The simplest answer is STILL "more planets", as it has been since the launch of Stellaris.

It may be true what you say that the research rate you can afford always increases with the size of your empire, but why would this be the case past a certain size? Is there any generally accepted analysis of this? I can understand why a 40 planet empire could more easily specialize than a 10 planet one and thus get more out of each worker, but why would an 80 planet empire be better than a 40 planet one? Is it just because the sprawl costs are not large enough to offset what you gain from a new planet? And by how much is it better? Enough to offset the fact that you no longer gain as much from megastructures in terms of tech and culture rates?

The time it takes to research a given technology is (Base Cost * Tech Cost Modifier) / (Research Output * Research Speed) or (BC*TCM)/(RO*RS). Now, we don't care about base cost or research speed, as they're independent of how large an empire is, leaving us with TCM/RO. The rate at which an empire researches technology is then RO/TCM, where a larger number means faster research.

Assume all planets are identical (simplicity), and then define parameters for what an average planet is: number of researchers, any output modifiers, number of systems without planets and so on. Once that's done, you have an RO and TCM for each planet. The empire's RO/TCM is then the sum of RO contributions (remember empire base RO) over the sum of TCM contributions (again, remember the base contribution). You'll then have an equation something like (RObase + x*RO)/(TCMbase + x*TCM), where x is the number of planets, an equation which can readily be plugged into a spreadsheet or graph plotter. The same procedure can be applied to traditions, and you will find that many of the conclusions regarding science also apply to traditions.

As for the 40 planets vs. 80 planets: If adding a planet to your empire increases its RO/TCM, then the planet's innate RO/TCM is larger than the empire's RO/TCM before the addition. However, the empire's new RO/TCM is still less than the newly added planet's, if we still assume all planets are identical, then it means the next planet will similarly increase the empire's RO/TCM, while still keeping the empire's new RO/TCM smaller than the planet's (asymptotic growth). Therefore, if adding one planet to your harem improves your research rate, then adding one more provide further improvement (although the relative change will be less), extending into infinity.