Stellaris 2.2, Thomas Malthus and Thanos

[Agamemnic]

This forum has got strict about external links and so I am not comfortable linking it in case the mods delete the post. It is easily found through Google, as are similar articles.

Reproduction is energetically and nutritionally expensive. It makes sense from an evolutionary perspective not to waste energy or nutrients reproducing when the environment won't support the new population.


If you take history into account then that
It is not, however, a Malthusian catastrophe, and that is what regulation looks like. Yes the anthropomorphism or attribution of intent is probably misplaced.

Those social contraceptives have existed throughout our history however.


People aren't claiming overpopulation is a myth, but that population growth which outstrips resource availability until a critical point where the population collapses, referred to as a Malthusian Catastrophe, is a myth.

Put it better that I ever could.

It seems clear that what people really want is a computational model of evolutionary dynamics that takes into account the latest scientific findings and fits real world population data.

Lol. Not quite. I just prefer a less autocratic way of having to manage population. I opened my post with some economics out of fun really. The core gameplay issue is that the pop management system is tedious...and too slow.

 

[SirAlexius]

The core gameplay issue is that the pop management system is tedious...and too slow.

I agree 100% with that

 

[Sarius1997]

History shows that populations self-regulate their growth over time as they develop.

History shows that populations self-regulate their growth under a very specific set of cultural and societal values as they develop.

 

[Agamemnic]

History shows that populations self-regulate their growth under a very specific set of cultural and societal values as they develop.

We're going off-tangent but - for recent history, the data says otherwise. World pop growth has been consistently declining since 1971 (bar ~3 years). Even countries with high growth rates now are below their historic peak (most of them anyway).

edit: ok I can't link but the world bank has a good data portal for this

 

[Thinkamancer]

I would disagree - Stellaris deals with interstellar empires, not primitive animals or medieval humans. Thus I'd say sociology/psychology would be a greater factor....

My opinion on the matter is that Stellaris can in no way lean so heavily on human psychology, methods and customs if it wants to model truly alien societies. Going by natural precedent is the best data we have.

It seems clear that what people really want is a computational model of evolutionary dynamics that takes into account the latest scientific findings and fits real world population data.

I'm sorry I can only upvote you once

This forum has got strict about external links and so I am not comfortable linking it in case the mods delete the post. It is easily found through Google, as are similar articles.

Reproduction is energetically and nutritionally expensive. It makes sense from an evolutionary perspective not to waste energy or nutrients reproducing when the environment won't support the new population.


If you take history into account then that
It is not, however, a Malthusian catastrophe, and that is what regulation looks like. Yes the anthropomorphism or attribution of intent is probably misplaced.

Those social contraceptives have existed throughout our history however.


People aren't claiming overpopulation is a myth, but that population growth which outstrips resource availability until a critical point where the population collapses, referred to as a Malthusian Catastrophe, is a myth.

Fair enough, on the link.

That's not how evolution works.

You either know a lot more, or a lot less history than me, because my image of human history doesn't fit your statement at all.

 

[SirAlexius]

I'm sorry I can only upvote you once

Seriously though how cool would it be to have an actual scientificly valid model that we can plug hypothetical alien races into and observe their population as they spread throughout the galaxy?

 

[buglepong]

Micromanaging pops; their growth, disposition, job assignment, happiness, criminality, productivity, etc is tediously repetitive because the problems faced during the development of one planet are much the same as every other planet.

Stellaris' management aspects should be about macroeconomics, not microeconomics.

The problem is buildings. There is a minimum pop unlock (because???), and essential micro like amenities are buildings.

 

[Thinkamancer]

Seriously though how cool would it be to have an actual scientificly valid model that we can plug hypothetical alien races into and observe their population as they spread throughout the galaxy?

Stellaris III, maybe. Including entire biospheres for planets.

 

[TheTam]

Srsly
I built a Ring World and migrating pops is such busywork
Where is my button to resettle per strata or species, not by planet? I dont care where those unemployed come from lol
I cant imagine playing as egalitarian in this patch. This is quite the downside of the new emigration system, since useless pops dont resettle themselves. I guess its quite realistic, not every unemployed person moves for a new job irl.
But for everyone else there needs to be some QOL improvements for this

 

[AmpsterMan]

So this conversation got sidetracked quickly...

Population growth stops at 1.5 times housing.

I.e. if you have 20 housing pop growth stops at 30 population.

 

[Antediluvian Monster]

This forum has got strict about external links and so I am not comfortable linking it in case the mods delete the post. It is easily found through Google, as are similar articles.

It mostly applies to external forums. You can definitely link to Nature (where that study was published) and similar journal and research sites here, and at least to mainstream news sites.

 

[Tisifoni12]

I tried re-setting the pop growth constant in 'defines' to 2 rather than 3. I found that rather than all the problems that come with your population breeding uncontrollably I was having to be careful about how I deployed the population I had.

Then today Steam made me run a file integrity check and one file was updated; pop growth re-set from 2 to 3 !

Ampster man's comment above is very helpful ! Perhaps one can discourage over-population by limiting housing . . .

 

[Thinkamancer]

So this conversation got sidetracked quickly...

Population growth stops at 1.5 times housing.

I.e. if you have 20 housing pop growth stops at 30 population.

Several factors were probably at work, but in my previous campaign my very well developed capital had exactly as much housing as jobs and as soon as as I had one homeless unemployed the worst habitability pops were declining almost exactly as fast as the good habitability pops were growing. With growth rounding, exactly as fast.

 

[AlanC9]

I cant imagine playing as egalitarian in this patch. This is quite the downside of the new emigration system, since useless pops dont resettle themselves. I guess its quite realistic, not every unemployed person moves for a new job irl.

Egalitarians don't care about unemployment. Turn on Utopian Abundance and it doesn't much matter if pops have jobs or not.

 

[Dëzaël]

To me expecting planets to have halted growth rate without becoming unemployment, homelessness and criminality hellholes is unrealistic. Population don't regulate themselves. Environment does for the most part, via attrition. And it's ugly way before getting a 1:1 birth/death ratio.

OP maybe didn't know this :

Population growth stops at 1.5 times housing.

I.e. if you have 20 housing pop growth stops at 30 population.

As a player you can stop growth at the expense of productivity, find new lands either colonizing or by war, otherwise the enforcer building can keep that crime in check, there's ways to increase stability directly depending on ethos, and finally it's maybe time for Utopian Abondance or at least Social Welfare for overcrowding not being a problem.

This is all part of the management of your empire. As long as stability is good enough unemployment should only be a source of manpower, either via migration push or ressettlement.
Balance may not be perfect for sure, but the mechanic in itself seems sound to me.

 

[eagletrekkie]

I think the 1.5 placement of the pop growth stoppage is a little high, especially at higher levels of pops because it means you can wind up with 1/3 of your pops on a planet homeless and possibly jobless if you're doing the logical thing and building enough housing to meet the needs of the jobs you have/anticipate having total. This model seems to encourage underbuilding of housing so you don't wind up with tons of homeless pops.
What might be better is a scaling stoppage point, so at lower levels of housing, on a newer colony it might be at 1.5 or 2.0 times housing so that growth doesn't stutter to a halt while you're building up a world (30 pops & 20 housing is a very new world), but then just doesn't go on endlessly when you've got, say, 100 housing and pop growth won't stop until you've got 150 pops - maybe scale it down to 1.2x housing at that point. You would still have pops without housing but it wouldn't be nearly as many

 

[Cry_Havok]

I think the 1.5 placement of the pop growth stoppage is a little high, especially at higher levels of pops because it means you can wind up with 1/3 of your pops on a planet homeless and possibly jobless if you're doing the logical thing and building enough housing to meet the needs of the jobs you have/anticipate having total. This model seems to encourage underbuilding of housing so you don't wind up with tons of homeless pops.
What might be better is a scaling stoppage point, so at lower levels of housing, on a newer colony it might be at 1.5 or 2.0 times housing so that growth doesn't stutter to a halt while you're building up a world (30 pops & 20 housing is a very new world), but then just doesn't go on endlessly when you've got, say, 100 housing and pop growth won't stop until you've got 150 pops - maybe scale it down to 1.2x housing at that point. You would still have pops without housing but it wouldn't be nearly as many

This. Because I often end up over-building city districts, late stage planets unless you are going full on rural worlds tend to have way more open housing than anything else, can have quite a bit of excess housing. Particularly on refinery worlds, which end up just starving for jobs (and if you want to build most effective planets, every super planet basically needs its own refinery world). I would rather something like growth stopping when pop decline would start to kick in, which would also solve weird things like some of the auto-extinction issues.

 

[Vanhal]

You currently don't actually micro pops though... With the exception of people trying to. Having a background system like we have now is great. What we need to change regarding micromanagement, is not a fundamental change. It is smaller changes to growth and emigration so pops don't overcrowd and overpopulate the jobs you have created so much, and better if still optional sector mechanics. I really don't see why we are not allowed to set a monthly fund to sectors.

Somehow every single time i see people complaining about new pop system is that they TRY to do it like before. They try to micromanage every single pop, try to design pops for mining, pops for farming, pops for everything and manually put them in desired place. No wonder they feel overwhelmend by micro. not to mention auto allocation system is already here and it work (not very good though, but i imagine it will be tweaked in the future).
I just leave it completely out, and do what a empire ruler would do, try to make the people to work themselves. It work perfectly and the amount of micro is not only way less than in previous versions, but it's more interesting, as oppposed to million clicks to build and upgrade buildings (not to mention bloody adjacency bonuses are gone entirely, i hate that crap in passion in every 4x game). Well, sure, i would probably lose your typical zerg mentality multigame, but those are over in few decades anyway so what's the point.

Seriously though how cool would it be to have an actual scientificly valid model that we can plug hypothetical alien races into and observe their population as they spread throughout the galaxy?

I think we would have to have any notion about any actual intelligent extraterestial species first. As long as we don't have it, we could only have somewhat scientifically (and i hope you aren't one of the types that would try to make social sciences into pure math) model where we could plug hypothetical human projections of hypothetical alien races. Not to mention there is also many different guesses on how alien exactly would aliens be, from rubber foreheads up to the point we wouldn't even recognize them looking at them.

 

[Cry_Havok]

Somehow every single time i see people complaining about new pop system is that they TRY to do it like before. They try to micromanage every single pop, try to design pops for mining, pops for farming, pops for everything and manually put them in desired place. No wonder they feel overwhelmend by micro. not to mention auto allocation system is already here and it work (not very good though, but i imagine it will be tweaked in the future).
I just leave it completely out, and do what a empire ruler would do, try to make the people to work themselves. It work perfectly and the amount of micro is not only way less than in previous versions, but it's more interesting, as oppposed to million clicks to build and upgrade buildings (not to mention bloody adjacency bonuses are gone entirely, i hate that crap in passion in every 4x game). Well, sure, i would probably lose your typical zerg mentality multigame, but those are over in few decades anyway so what's the point.

Pops require very careful micro to not implode your economy. You CAN'T prebuild, or all your pops shoot into upper strata jobs, and then starve themselves to death rather than stay farmers and miners. New planets will spend decades useless if you don't move pops over, particularly if you are reliant on robots. It's not even about microing pops by species, but a large amount of babysitting is required on every planer to monitor building slots, districts, what's unemployment doing, amenities, housing. Even if you have UA or Shared Burdens if unemployment gets to high either stability crashes or consumer goods use skyrockets. Miss a control pop growth timing and suddenly entire species are killing themselves off. Right now the entire game can be spent barely staving off a malthusian nightmare, and as soon as you take your eyes off your pops to deal with a war, you end up with overcrowded planets everywhere with massive unemployment.

 

[SirAlexius]

(and i hope you aren't one of the types that would try to make social sciences into pure math)

I think social science should be studied using rigorous experimental designs, but from what I understand modern evolutionary biology makes use of computational models and game theory. I would not say that biology is a social science though.