Stellaris 3.0.3 Open Beta Announcement

[adil3tr]

Can we please get a toggle to disable criminal syndicates like we can with caravaneers? They're incredibly annoying and they break the diplomacy system. They show up in your planets, you have to declare war on them but they could be a vassal or even your vassal, even if you do go to war you basically need to win and as soon as the truce is up they just do it again.

 

[TSBasilisk]

So...don't build districts or buildings until you have the pops to fill them? You're just ending up paying district/building maintenance on unproductive buildings. And if you don't build jobs unless you have enough pops, you won't have the issue of jobs that will never be worked, either. I typically will build my next building/district when I have zero free jobs on the planet, and it works great. The only thing you ever need to pre-build are city districts, because increasing planet capacity speeds up your growth. And the thing about city districts is that once you turn off your first clerk job, further city districts won't add more jobs because they will already be auto-disabled.

Read the entire post - he's referring to Ring Worlds and Ecumenopoli, which are created solely to have LOTS of jobs and which can now never be filled as a result. Even Shattered Ring origin can't fill their starting Ring World.

 

[TrotBot]

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.

Thank you, looking forward to it. Any hints at what some of this will look like? Even a teaser? I'm super enjoying the DLC and patch and happy at how actively this game is being given love! Can't wait to see what the refined pop mechanics look like.

 

[Everstill]

I don't know if you have noticed, but with the addition of amenities production, clerks are not the complete waste of POPs they used to be. I have actually built for some in my latest game as an amenities/energy/consumer goods (through trade) top-up at minimal investment.

I did. But not a single planet is filled with Pops. So my Pops are working on more importante jobs while the Clerks and other jobs are literally useless because there is no sufficient pops to work all of them.

It's not that I don't want Clerks being worked, it's that there is no enough pops to work all jobs avaliable on my vacant planets.

 

[GeorgieBest]

I haven't played into late game yet so I can't comment on the late-game growth problems people have been talking about. Enjoying all the economic and quality of life changes. Haven't become the crisis yet but I've become custodian and it was good fun. The espionage system is also interesting, although some of the operations feel a bit lacklustre, like sabotaging a star base.

On a more general note - I really appreciate the level of the team's interaction with the community over the last 12-18 months. It's great to see how open you guys are to design changes based on community feedback, and also the speed with which you've implemented them. Looking forward to seeing the tweaks when the beta goes live.

 

[Kelarys]

Its nice to see that Dick keeps growing!
Dick keeps getting bigger!

PS> Posting this now because I cant get banned

 

[HFY]

Its nice to see that Dick keeps growing!
Dick keeps getting bigger!

PS> Posting this now because I cant get banned

Plus, the pop changes increase game speed, and the first contact events are more complex, which means Dick is also faster and deeper.

If they fix the AI to play competently, Dick may finally be hard enough to really enjoy.

I can't imagine any reason you'd be banned for noticing.

 

[Revshawn]

Listen developers. All I want is for this dumb pop growth shit to go away. Ticking down the population growth slightly toggle like the sliders on EU3 isn't suddenly gonna pull some force mind trick on me and suddenly make me want to play the game again.

It's so simple. Just get rid of it.

 

[Nebbie Zebbie]

Listen developers. All I want is ...

It's so simple. Just get rid of it.

It's not that simple, and there's no reason to be so rude. They put something in to help with performance, and just removing it without something else to help in that regard would just make more people mad as a result.
Basically, they need to put in better fixes as they pull out the per-pop empire pop cost penalty. I've been posting my thoughts here mainly in the hope they take some ideas to improve what goes in when the beta comes.

 

[StellarisFan1]

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

what doesn't work in the intelligence system?

 

[StellarisFan1]

It's a shame that the developers removed the killing of the leader and sabotaging the megastructures.
Initially, these operations were conceived, but during the development of the game they were removed!

 

[permeakra]

that sheds some light on something else potentially not playing ball, because the game should be buttery smooth with 2000 ish pops surely.

Could you please try destroying all gateways and wormholes? AFAIK, at some devdiary thread it was mentioned that pathfinding is a common problem a lot of code in the game needs, and they cannot really cache the results because it is purpose- and empire- specific. Increasing amount of connections between systems considerably complicates pathfinding.

 

[orc4hire]

what doesn't work in the intelligence system?

Off the top of my head, I get spammed with messages telling me that empires I know nothing about have changed their ethics, but can never see any information about enemy ships, even after having an intelligence network in that empire for a couple of centuries and reverse engineering their ship technology. That sort of thing.

EDIT: All things that are true, no matter how many people disagree. I'm speaking of the game without the Nemesis DLC, although no one has shown anyplace where the DLC changes the above.

 

[monkeypunch87]

Off the top of my head, I get spammed with messages telling me that empires I know nothing about have changed their ethics, but can never see any information about enemy ships, even after having an intelligence network in that empire for a couple of centuries and reverse engineering their ship technology. That sort of thing.

Hm, the notice about the ethic shift is old, really old, but true, they could incorporate it. But just passive espionage and building the network aren't enough on your side. You need to acquire assets to increase the possible infiltration and intel level and at 90 (?) you can also see the ship information. It is not broken.

 

[McTrevor79]

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

So will we get weekly standups with all players?

 

[permanently_afk]

So will we get weekly standups with all players?

No, there will be bi-weekly reviews with the entire playerbase and we will get to witness @grekulf and @MrFreake_PDX trying to keep calm when faced with inane questions by the stakeholders which should have been in the spec anyway :-D

 

[Olterin]

Hm, the notice about the ethic shift is old, really old, but true, they could incorporate it. But just passive espionage and building the network aren't enough on your side. You need to acquire assets to increase the possible infiltration and intel level and at 90 (?) you can also see the ship information. It is not broken.

The problem with that is that without the DLC you can't really get assets (reliably anyway) and are thus stuck at much lower levels of intel short of getting your hands on a Sentry Array (... or going Psi Ascension...). Not ideal, wouldn't you say?

 

[monkeypunch87]

The problem with that is that without the DLC you can't really get assets (reliably anyway) and are thus stuck at much lower levels of intel short of getting your hands on a Sentry Array (... or going Psi Ascension...). Not ideal, wouldn't you say?

Ok, I didn't know that you can't "Acquire Assets" without Nemesis. The operation should be in the base game, then.

 

[RobInconformista]

But the problem is not just the Pop-growth itself. It's how the pop growth penalties make your Empire full of useless jobs

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.

Open jobs are NOT an issue, you mean clerk jobs created by housing I think.

Your suggestions would destroy commerce basec play styles.

In 2.6-2.8 trade were OP, Megacorps could dominate by power of money ridiculously easily, because they generated cgs without minerals and unity without specialists, neither needing building slots. That meant alloys could be bought and forged, to build fleets/megastructures rapidly.

The clerk jobs are not useless, they provide labour flexibility, prior to 3.0 they attracted pops to unlock slots. The frustration in game with pop growth is caused by labour shortage, planets make specialists but there's no one to mine/farm/tech.
If you allow housing to create a labour pool, you can have the best researcher or entertainer selected. You shouldn't pre-build forge/industry you don't need due to upkeep and reducing capacity.

Production by specialists and basic/strategic resources is one way to measure economic power, but you ignore the diplo benefits of trade, which avoids costly wars and boosts the economy co-operatively. Most min-maxers analysis is flawed as it ignores these secondary effects.

By not filling them and restricting them to some balanced level, you create the conditions for auto resettlement to work for you, filling colonies with migrants.

I think despite clerk jobs taking a lower proportion of economies, trade/diplo/soft power still works, perhaps 10 clerks need to spawn a merchant to help trade, as if they were in commercial megaplexes. Perhaps that ought to be a mid game building, working as a multiplier for clerks (like energy grud/nexus).

 

[RobInconformista]

I'd rather see the mechanic tweaked so abuse isn't rewarding -- so you get full growth from pops easier, and you don't suffer a penalty until you're actually tight on housing.

One thing the original Carrying Capacity mod did was to count unbuilt districts as 10 capacity, not 3-4 capacity as Dick does. That alone probably helped a bunch.

The +4 is reasonable, it gives a reason to build housing and create some open jobs which may go unfilled.

The empire count is in effect an admin cap, the real solution is to beef up governors autonomy and have an empire region, agree a long term trade deal and paying tax, in return for empire fleet protection and rights to build local defence.

That would extend naturally to Megacorps, who are unable to integrate subsidiaries and do not want competing corps, but trade/production focused subordinates whose surplus output the corps trades to other clients.

In the short term, formula tweaks could work, perhaps with a galaxy wide capacity that adds breeding and assembly costs as its pop density rises above a threshold.

Points = 100 * (max( empire pops - 300, 100)/100) * (max( galaxy pops/planets, 10)/10)

That would brake large empires less, but add galaxy wide anti-lag cost.