Stellaris 3.0.3 Open Beta Announcement

[MrFreake_PDX]

Hello Stellaris Community!

We’ve seen a number of your reports regarding the pop growth mechanics included in the 3.0 Update. We’ve been reviewing this feedback, and including it in our post-launch support for 3.0.

Either this week, or early next week, we will be publishing an open beta to Steam that includes a revision of some of the population growth changes. The objective behind the changes introduced in the 3.0.3 Open Beta is to address some of the concerns raised by the community regarding mid and late-game population growth.

When the open beta branch goes live, you can opt-in to the beta by right-clicking Stellaris, click Properties, Beta tab, and choose “Stellaris_test” from the drop-down.

We will do a further post when this branch becomes available. We are committed to gathering additional feedback and will consider incorporating this feedback into our development moving forward.

We hope you’re enjoying Nemesis, and thank you for your patience while we further refine pop growth.

EDIT: Refined our time estimate slightly

 

[Liggi]

Beautiful, thanks all! Looking forward to trying this out.

 

[monkeypunch87]

Great. I was hoping for something today or tomorrow.

I hope, you don't get rid of the penalty completly, but make it more fun for larger galaxies and more planets. It doesn't have to be the same penalty, but a way to stop the endless growth to a lagging game experience and the constant need to increase your housing and habitable places to handle all these pops.

 

[Everstill]

But the problem is not just the Pop-growth itself. It's how the pop growth penalties make your Empire full of useless jobs that will never be worked.

If you guys think that Pops are the major cause of Lag in the game, you need to rebalance jobs, cutting most of them and improving the production so the ratio of Pop/Jobs is the same.

The player wants his planets filled with pops working on all jobs. They don't want to feel bad for working on Clerk jobs or other bad jobs. So please, if you guys want to cut Pops, cut the amount of jobs too and rebalance the economy.

EDIT: just to make sure people understand: i'm talking about LITERALLY USELESS JOBS, because there will never be enough pops to work them. A Ring World will be full of useless jobs because you will NEVER grow enough pops to work all of them.

 

[Teodosio7]

Will this patch include the posibility for slaves to relocate by themselves? I am waiting for that before starting a campaign.

 

[John MacWhat]

Is population growth the only major change in the Beta, or is there anything else to keep an eye on like AI empire performance, slave processing facility resettlement, etc?

 

[Morbus Bubbonicus]

So no AI changes?

 

[KNakamura]

But the problem is not just the Pop-growth itself. It's how the pop growth penalties make your Empire full of useless jobs that will never be worked.

If you guys think that Pops are the major cause of Lag in the game, you need to rebalance jobs, cutting most of them and improving the production so the ratio of Pop/Jobs is the same.

The player wants his planets filled with pops working on all jobs. They don't want to feel bad for working on Clerk jobs or other bad jobs. So please, if you guys want to cut Pops, cut the amount of jobs too and rebalance the economy.

*you* might, aside from my OCD, I don't really care if my pops are working on "suboptimal" jobs. As long as they're working and I don't need to micro every three years to build housing, shuffle pops, etc, which means I find 3.0 a very relaxing change where I'm not micro'ing 20 planets every year.

ETA: Okay, I do admit I would not mind seeing the pop growth rebalanced, though. It is.. someting when I don't even bother to fill up the ring-worlds I get from the Cybrex chain because the growth is.. slow.

 

[Thoughtful Gaming LP]

Hello Stellaris Community!

We’ve seen a number of your reports regarding the pop growth mechanics included in the 3.0 Update. We’ve been reviewing this feedback, and including it in our post-launch support for 3.0.

This week (date to be confirmed) we will be publishing an open beta to Steam that includes a revision of some of the population growth changes. The objective behind the changes introduced in the 3.0.3 Open Beta is to address some of the concerns raised by the community regarding mid and late-game population growth.

When the open beta branch goes live, you can opt-in to the beta by right-clicking Stellaris, click Properties, Beta tab, and choose “Stellaris_test” from the drop-down.

We will do a further post when this branch becomes available. We are committed to gathering additional feedback and will consider incorporating this feedback into our development moving forward.

We hope you’re enjoying Nemesis, and thank you for your patience while we further refine pop growth.

Very cool to be so quick and straightforward with this. Scrum ftw

 

[pmchem]

ya'll know I'm gonna test the AI if anything related to AI is mentioned in the notes.

Is the AI worse now?

I have played 3 games now on 3.0 and in my opinion, the AI falls off a cliff harder and faster now than ever before. Does anyone else notice this?

forum.paradoxplaza.com

So please, PDX, just beat me to it and have the devs confirm wholesale fixes to AI before it goes live. I'd rather spend my recreational time on other things!

 

[Panzerslothen]

Sounds promising,

Hello Stellaris Community!

We’ve seen a number of your reports regarding the pop growth mechanics included in the 3.0 Update. We’ve been reviewing this feedback, and including it in our post-launch support for 3.0.

This week (date to be confirmed) we will be publishing an open beta to Steam that includes a revision of some of the population growth changes. The objective behind the changes introduced in the 3.0.3 Open Beta is to address some of the concerns raised by the community regarding mid and late-game population growth.

When the open beta branch goes live, you can opt-in to the beta by right-clicking Stellaris, click Properties, Beta tab, and choose “Stellaris_test” from the drop-down.

We will do a further post when this branch becomes available. We are committed to gathering additional feedback and will consider incorporating this feedback into our development moving forward.

We hope you’re enjoying Nemesis, and thank you for your patience while we further refine pop growth.

Sounds promising, PDX! I, and I'm sure many others, will be hugely looking forward to it.

But the problem is not just the Pop-growth itself. It's how the pop growth penalties make your Empire full of useless jobs that will never be worked.

If you guys think that Pops are the major cause of Lag in the game, you need to rebalance jobs, cutting most of them and improving the production so the ratio of Pop/Jobs is the same.

The player wants his planets filled with pops working on all jobs. They don't want to feel bad for working on Clerk jobs or other bad jobs. So please, if you guys want to cut Pops, cut the amount of jobs too and rebalance the economy.

Why is this even a complaint? Just turn off particular jobs on a per-planet basis. Simples.

 

[King Harkinian]

But the problem is not just the Pop-growth itself. It's how the pop growth penalties make your Empire full of useless jobs that will never be worked.

If you guys think that Pops are the major cause of Lag in the game, you need to rebalance jobs, cutting most of them and improving the production so the ratio of Pop/Jobs is the same.

The player wants his planets filled with pops working on all jobs. They don't want to feel bad for working on Clerk jobs or other bad jobs. So please, if you guys want to cut Pops, cut the amount of jobs too and rebalance the economy.

This. Just increasing the pop growth again won't solve anything. The lower growth is fine, just reduce the number of districts and jobs on planets so that the planets can fill up with fewer pops. This would solve the issue with stuff like Clerks too, by making it so you don't always have better options. It would also solve the issue where upgrading buildings is pointless compared to just making more buildings, AND make Ecumenopoleis/Ringworlds useful again.

 

[Cymsdale]

Why is this even a complaint? Just turn off particular jobs on a per-planet basis. Simples.

It adds micro, it's not intuitive, and the AI doesn't do it so they play worse.

 

[MK1980]

sounds like a good idea. might give it a shot over the weekend if you manage to put up the beta version by that time.

 

[brantodb01]

can we get a sneak peak at how you've changed the numbers?

 

[LystAP]

What other changes will be going into Beta? Will you fix the Crime Lord Deal? Where people intentionally temporarily turn their worlds into crime hovels just to get Stability.

 

[Enfield_PDX]

ya'll know I'm gonna test the AI if anything related to AI is mentioned in the notes.

Is the AI worse now?

I have played 3 games now on 3.0 and in my opinion, the AI falls off a cliff harder and faster now than ever before. Does anyone else notice this?

forum.paradoxplaza.com

So please, PDX, just beat me to it and have the devs confirm wholesale fixes to AI before it goes live. I'd rather spend my recreational time on other things!

This initial offering is primarily focused on pop growth. But once that's in hand adding AI tweaks for example is not off the table.. I know that's frustratingly vague but I can't make any firm promises just yet.

But I spent a significant chunk of today looking into our AI situation


As for various other fixes, this is a version of the upcoming 3.0.3 build, so there will be some but not all. We will be working on 3.0.3 for a little while longer yet, so that we can keep fixing things and make additional tweaks as needed.

 

[sillyrobot]

So... an announcement that there will be an announcement of an open beta. OK, better than what we had I suppose.

 

[grommile]

So... an announcement that there will be an announcement of an open beta.

more precisely:

an announcement that there will be an open beta starting in the next 2-7 days (depending how you read "this week"), but not exactly when.

 

[orc4hire]

Fixing the broken pop productivity would be nice, but how about the broken intelligence system?