Sector Discussion/Quarantine Thread

[TrickyToX]

Sector coding in general is very questionable and weak on common sense.

Let's start with simple rules of the thumb:
Rule 1 - If we put sector priority on some resource, with "Respect tiles on", we actually mean - "Respect the sector tiles, and build this resource on all empty tiles left"
Rule 2 - If we put sector priority on some resource, with "Respect tiles off", we actually mean - "Don't respect the sector tiles, and build this resource on all empty tiles left"
Rule 3 - We tend to respect science tiles to maximize yields, that means with "Respect tiles on" we always build and upgrade science lab according to science resource present on tile
Rule 4 - If we disrespect tiles, labs on empty spots and labs overriding anything else are upgraded to bring the most lacking science type up to speed.
Rule 5 - Food should never be overproduced unless specifically put as sector priority. First to be replaced are 1-food tiles, then 2-food tiles. In general, 3-4 food tiles are too good to pass up the opportunity to farm those up.
Rule 6 - Spaceports should build just enough upgrades to fit economy upgrades. Those are, in order of priority: solar panel, hydroponic farms, observatory
Rule 7 - It is *always* more profitable to build level 1 building under every pop present, than keep upgrading something. So, if sector has any pops on empty ground, these should have the priority to get resource production under their feet a.s.a.p.
Rule 8 - For double resource tiles things get a bit more complicated but still doable. First, we check sector focus - if sector wants to focus one of the resources, we suggest we can build it. Next, we check if we have double-producing buildings (like Slave processing hub or Farm as Agrarian Iddyl), and make sure we build that instead.
Rule 9 - When all Ascention perks are completed, and we no longer need Unity, we don't build Unity pure buildings, and replace existing ones.
Rule 10 - If we have access to Pop growth speed %% buildings, we prioritize working it with pop right after the Colony base. As example, I had sector Gene clinic ready, but it refused to work it until all other tiles were covered.

I understand that initially when you pass a planet to sector, AI starts with clearing all tiles to understand what to do with the planet. As a human, I can see what resources I got under the obstacles, and can plan tile cleanup ahead of pop growth, clearing 1-2 tiles ahead. Not having this behaviour coded in is just lazy. There is no excuse for this.

I'm not sure how sector AI behaves with specific builds/finetuning, like inward perfectionists + agrarian addyl for example.

I hope Stellaris team finally sits down at some point and try to make a really good efficient sector AI, which i entirely possible, but obviously needs time investment, which they seem to focus on useless DLC (Human Empires, anyone).

Yes. YES. The sector AI is dumb, this is acknowledged, but the worst it's that it's not even doing what you ask it to do. If there is an energy deficit, then let ME deal with it, unless I asked you to ("Balanced resource production" for instance).

And about optimization, we're not asking the AI to check all possible configurations of the position of the main building to maximize input of the wanted resource or to simulate production for the next year to know which building it should upgrade first, we want it to do common sense things. Like, you know, not waiting the planet to be completely full to put a POPs on a Gene Center, or prioritizing building level 1 buildings (+2 production, fast, cheap) on tiles with inactive POPs rather than upgrading (+1 production, slow, more expensive) already existent buildings of the same type.

The game has been released almost two years ago and this kind of issues is still there. I come back every patch hoping the sector AI has been "fixed". I usually do a couple games and then quit because of frustration. I have to admit it's still better than 1.0, but come on, how long it's gonna take to get this feature to work properly?

 

[Aldernut]

For what it's worth, here's my opinion:

I'd like sectors be purely UI based. You could create subgroups to the planet list, and name the headline. These could be opened and minimized, cleaning up the UI clutter. The graphical representations could be retained in the galaxy map, and you could choose colours for them. The headline would be the sector name.

This would make the game feel more personal, and you feel more like a ruler. It would help UI clutter and make the galaxy map more informative.

 

[mianmar]

For what it's worth, here's my opinion:

I'd like sectors be purely UI based. You could create subgroups to the planet list, and name the headline. These could be opened and minimized, cleaning up the UI clutter. The graphical representations could be retained in the galaxy map, and you could choose colours for them. The headline would be the sector name.

This would make the game feel more personal, and you feel more like a ruler. It would help UI clutter and make the galaxy map more informative.

Instead of sectors this game needs a tool to sort your planets according to various economic and non economic factors.
for example if you want to figure out 5 planets running highest energy/minerals or by amount of armies etc. then you need to take a piece of paper a pencil and visit each planet and note info down and then you have an overview of your empire on a piece of paper. how sad.

 

[Elryos]

Instead of sectors this game needs a tool to sort your planets according to various economic and non economic factors.
for example if you want to figure out 5 planets running highest energy/minerals or by amount of armies etc. then you need to take a piece of paper a pencil and visit each planet and note info down and then you have an overview of your empire on a piece of paper. how sad.

Oh yes, please!
And give Sectors their own menu. I don't want to scroll through 12 planets, 8 ring world parts and 7 habitats to get to my sectors.

 

[Aldernut]

Instead of sectors this game needs a tool to sort your planets according to various economic and non economic factors.
for example if you want to figure out 5 planets running highest energy/minerals or by amount of armies etc. then you need to take a piece of paper a pencil and visit each planet and note info down and then you have an overview of your empire on a piece of paper. how sad.

Some basic sorting functionality is definitely needed as well.

The way sectors are now feels more like a stick, rather than a carrot. They're something you're forced to do, instead of something you want to do. The only benefit they provide is reducing the UI clutter, and that could be done in a much more intuitive way.

Control feels nice. Rather than forcibly take control away, allow players ways to sort and customize.

 

[Anschau]

I agree if sectors formed around some sort of economic ties to other nearby planets, where one became a hub/sector capitol as other nearby planets fed it trade or society point or whatever that would be much more organic. Players would actively try to prune and tend to their planets and space to encourage sector development, especially if there was some specialization bonus or something you could assign once these organic sectors formed.

 

[Aldernut]

I agree if sectors formed around some sort of economic ties to other nearby planets, where one became a hub/sector capitol as other nearby planets fed it trade or society point or whatever that would be much more organic. Players would actively try to prune and tend to their planets and space to encourage sector development, especially if there was some specialization bonus or something you could assign once these organic sectors formed.

Good idea. Distant Worlds, for example, has "regional capitals" which reduce governmental inefficiency in the surrounding area. Sector hubs could work in a similar manner, plus allow special sector hub buildings. There could be mining distribution centers, energy collection nexuses, research institutions, slave labour hubs, "Vatican" style temple complexes, you name it.

 

[Acheron]

Is there even a way to quickly click through planets? I mean, you have one planet selected, hit a button and are with the next planet, ideally in the same menu. When rebuilding my fleet, I would like to spread out ship production around my empire, so the fleet is rebuild faster, this is essential when fighting an AE and your strategy is to drown them in repeated suicide waves.

 

[Asuzu]

This is getting hilarious in 1.9.1

So I settled a planet and passed it into sector right away.
The sector has been uploaded with 2,000 energy and 2,000 minerals
The sector has -3 energy deficit and 10 mineral income
I put the sector on "Industrial" focus with "Respect tiles ON"
What I expect is - "Build everything according to tile resources, and build mines on empty tiles"
Sounds simple, right?

So, first thing sector is doing - it puts a pop on 1 mineral tile, then starts building POWER PLANT over it.
There no energy tiles on the planet, but there are some free empty tiles around - but hell no, it wants to actually build it on top of the mineral.
I cancel this construction.
Next tick sector again starts building the power plant OVER the mineral tile. Even though it is supposed to 1 - respect the resource 2 - focus on minerals, as told

So at the very least, there is a core issue where sector puts a pop on tile, then starts construction for this pop, ignoring whatever sector orders were given.

This is just an example of anemic programming, where the sector logic code is probably so bloated and so bad, nobody even wants to touch it.
It is much easier to make some eye candy with design team and sell it as 20$ DLC, but fixing sector AI? Hell no.

 

[Vortex79]

Am I the only one who likes the sectors and think they work well pretty much all the time...?

I love sectors. I use them as secondary banks. My rant on the back end programming would be eternal, so I'll just say it needs work.

 

[Asuzu]

Getting very frustrated when I look what AI is doing in my sector. I should probably stop looking.

Dear devs can we at least agree on 1 thing sector-wise - RESPECT RESOURCE means exactly that, the AI must respect tile resource.
There must be no way in hell an AI is allowed to build minerals on top of energy tiles, and engineering labs on top of physics tile (this triggers me the most).

Even following the respecting setting will improve yields of sectors (and AI opponents) immensely, as right now it's clown fiesta going on down there.
Thank you.

 

[Lord_Tao]

Dear devs,

I have been playing and LOVE Stellairs, but after over 500 hours of playing, there are two game mechanics that ultimately undermine the game: Emergency FTL (and long range guns) and Sectors which I will address here.


I see that people love sectors for management, but I cannot fathom why, as I constantly have to go back and wipe their buts for them, since they are terrible at building. They don't save me any time as I have to go and build each building myself (usually by replacing terrible choices that the AI put down).

The main problem with sectors is the extreme bog down of the game starting in mid game, and 'fastest' being slower than 'normal' speed late game. I have a 6800k and a 1080ti, so it is definitely not my PC. And yes I have read that breaking up sectors into smaller ones helps fix this, but an empire doesn't have nearly enough leader cap to keep 10+ governors.

Also, like I said, the management of sectors by AI is atrocious. They will build useless defensive armies (for added upkeep), clear ALL tile blockers (including ones that have valuable adjacency affects), and plain old not build important structures. Have spare empty titles with no resources on large planets for cultural buildings? Well prepare to have 100s of surplus food produced, unless you go in MANUALLY to replace farms with the important buildings that should have been built in the first place. Even if you have a huge food surplus, the AI will still give preference to farms over mines/power stations if there is a food and a mineral/energy on the same tile. This is with turning off all options other than 'respect tile resources', which even that they don't do all the time.


I am honestly sick and tired of pausing the game, and having to spend half an hour going through dozens of planets, and fixing the mess the Ai has made: Deleting hydro farms, adding important buildings, and upgrading buildings that the AI just seems to not want to do. Even with a massive resource pool they sometimes won't upgrade the buildings on some planets (and yes there are no projects currently being done on that planet, it is just sitting there with a dozen buildings needing to be upgraded).


In short, I see what sectors were meant to do, but in reality they only cause frustrations with the game and hinder gameplay. I recommend that sectors be removed from being mandatory, and perhaps the more planets you have in the core sector, the more their resource contribution approaches 75% of their production. At least this way it might be possible to finish end game cleanup at FULL speed, rather than at 'normal' speed when the game is set to 'fastest'. Leave them as optional for the players who like them, but remove them from being mandatory for players who actually want to finish a game without playing hours and hours at what is normal speed.

 

[Asuzu]

Dear devs,

I have been playing and LOVE Stellairs, but after over 500 hours of playing, there are two game mechanics that ultimately undermine the game: Emergency FTL (and long range guns) and Sectors which I will address here.


I see that people love sectors for management, but I cannon fathom why, as I constantly have to go back and wipe their buts for them, since they are terrible at building. They don't save me any time as I have to go and build each building myself (usually by replacing terrible choices that the AI put down).

The main problem with sectors is the extreme bog down of the game starting in mid game, and 'fastest' being slower than 'normal' speed late game. I have a 6800k and a 1080ti, so it is definitely not my PC. And yes I have read that breaking up sectors into smaller ones helps fix this, but an empire doesn't have nearly enough leader cap to keep 10+ governors.

Also, like I said, the management of sectors by AI is atrocious. They will build useless defensive armies (for added upkeep), clear ALL tile blockers (including ones that have valuable adjacency affects), and plain old not build important structures. Have spare empty titles with no resources on large planets for cultural buildings? Well prepare to have 100s of surplus food produced, unless you go in MANUALLY to replace farms with the important buildings that should have been built in the first place. Even if you have a huge food surplus, the AI will still give preference to farms over mines/power stations if there is a food and a mineral/energy on the same tile. This is with turning off all options other than 'respect tile resources', which even that they don't do all the time.


I am honestly sick and tired of pausing the game, and having to spend half an hour going through dozens of planets, and fixing the mess the Ai has made: Deleting hydro farms, adding important buildings, and upgrading buildings that the AI just seems to not want to do. Even with a massive resource pool they sometimes won't upgrade the buildings on some planets (and yes there are no projects currently being done on that planet, it is just sitting there with a dozen buildings needing to be upgraded).


In short, I see what sectors were meant to do, but in reality they only cause frustrations with the game and hinder gameplay. I recommend that sectors be removed from being mandatory, and perhaps the more planets you have in the core sector, the more their resource contribution approaches 75% of their production. At least this way it might be possible to finish end game cleanup at FULL speed, rather than at 'normal' speed when the game is set to 'fastest'. Leave them as optional for the players who like them, but remove them from being mandatory for players who actually want to finish a game without playing hours and hours at what is normal speed.

+1
Yeah, right there with you.
I find myself sitting 10 minutes every 20 minutes , fixing the sector mess.
Which brings the question - how exactly is this helping me not to get drowned in micromanagement, which was the original idea behind having sectors?

Like, at best sector builds 5 defensive armies each planet. Why? If you do build them, you either stock full, or you don't build them at all. Especially if I have "Military production" disabled i sector, it means I do not want neither defensive stations, nor armies being built.
And so on and on.

 

[FurorGermanicus]

Is something planned to make the AI actually less overpowered and more alert in attacking/helping?

 

[Razzlie]

Is something planned to make the AI actually less overpowered and more alert in attacking/helping?

Dunno about overpowered, but the AI should have better behaviour in warfare in 2.0, due to the simplified FTL that's much easier for it to parse and work with. It should also help with some odd behaviour loop bugs that seem to happen because of how warp/wormhole worked and how it was causing the AI to get locked up in a repeating cycle endlessly.

 

[Vortex79]

Dunno about overpowered, but the AI should have better behaviour in warfare in 2.0, due to the simplified FTL that's much easier for it to parse and work with. It should also help with some odd behaviour loop bugs that seem to happen because of how warp/wormhole worked and how it was causing the AI to get locked up in a repeating cycle endlessly.

So it was crap programming that causes the late game lag and makes Multi-FTL types unviable. *Tsks* Can't interrupt a basic logical loop.

 

[Lord_Tao]

So it was crap programming that causes the late game lag and makes Multi-FTL types unviable. *Tsks* Can't interrupt a basic logical loop.

From what I understand it is sectors that cause late game lag. Try disbanding all of your sectors and hitting unpause. The game should run as if you just started a new game.

 

[rexx]

alright. Guys.. i get it. Sector ai is fucked, but lets cool it on the "designers not doing their jobs" and "coders are crappy" talk. Legit, IF you are game devs, youre not devs id want to work with because youre short sighted an lacking an understanding of those two distinct roles.

Most of the sector ai was likely written by a designer. Its ai stuff. Bunch of if then loops. Maybe a few switches. So complaining about the programming is missing the part where an actual programmer likely didnt do the programming. An then theres the design complaints from you lot. AI design is THE HARDEST DESIGN WORK A DESIGNER CAN DO!! the amount of corner cases an bullshit that get in the way of very very specific rules of behaviour is unimaginable. An IF this was coded by an actual programmer, note that it is even harder for them to design something like this to work because they generally think about design completely different. Not counting if it was done by more than one person. Holy fuck the communication issues that would happen just on if one person thinks "respect tile resources means dont build new buildings over old ones" while someone else actually knows its "dont build bullshit minerals on energy" etc etc.

Just, cool it on the grrr blame stuff. At least the sector ai doesnt cause the game to crash. Because it damn well could. You complain of lag. Consider the fact that atm every empire is probably running multiple ai. Not, a single ai for all the sectors, but instead a bunch of functions are running for each seperate sector. On top of that is the functions running for each actual empire thats not a player. Thats.. alot. Its also bad sure, but its not like they arent trying. On release sectors were garbage fires. An they almost certainly had to be rushed out the door by some producer who, like you, thought ai design was real easy an you could just throw a bunch of stuff together to do.

P.S to those of you that think "well i can design the ai right here in the forum an thatll work" none of you have actually managed to get the decision net right so far. Theyre all missing basic shit, because the way you think is different to the way computers think an you arent breaking any of the decision net down to its most simple parts. One of you came pretty close, but still missed a big ole step in there. Im not quoting, Who am i to judge, ai design is HARD.

 

[lederbuchsn]

@rexx
What do you want to tell us with your contribution?
Are you glad that the AI does not crash the game?
The same thing when a used car dealer say ,hey is stalling every
crossover, BUT I'm glad that he's NOT EXPLODING.
I would like to respectfully point out that this post is the BIGGEST humbug in this thread.

 

[rexx]

My point is instead of bitching about how lazy the devs are, just stick to telling them what the sector ai is doing wrong an maybe why u think it's doing that. The rest is just self righteous bitching an back biting because u think it makes u sound clever...