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It is my third game and I think that this version is fine ... the problem I see is that there are many Mods that are already useless with respect to Pops growth, in fact I stopped using 3 of these Mods and there are several others that no longer make sense with this version.
I played one game on 3.02 as Spiritualist, Authoritarian Necrophages and I am now playing a game on the 3.03 Open Beta as Fanatic Xenophile, Egalitarian United Nations.
The 3.02 game was played on Captain difficulty, while for the Beta I am playing on Ensign.
I'm around the year 2280 so far so here are some thoughts on the early to early-mid game growth and a comparison.
1. Growth feels quick enough in the early and mid game. I feel like I have to keep an eye on my planets a lot to make sure there isn't unemployment. That said, I feel I actually am growing slower via peaceful settlement, natural growth, robots, migration treaties than I did as the Necrophages in 3.02. Conquering and slaving seem much more powerful as engines for growth
2. Jobs in 3.03 early game feel either scarce or very abundant almost entirely by whether I had unlocked the technology for the respective job multiplying buildings. Edit: played a bit longer to 2320, and job scarcity is pretty much completely whether I have buildings that giver per district extra job. If I have those, I have tons of open jobs. Before then, job market was a little tight.
3. The resource I am finding the most scarce in the early game are minerals, I feel like I am constantly using the exchange to buy more so that I can afford districts and buildings. That might partly be that I am overproducing alloys. In 3.02, my slaving Necrophages were producing so many resources that I reached the resource limit on almost every resource by the mid game. Also, the Utopian Abundance policy is something I'd like to use for RP reasons, but the cost and benefit are so out of whack that I can't justify doing it.
4. I haven't gotten to using Ecumenopoli or Ring Worlds in 3.03 yet; I'll update this post when I get there. In 3.02, I felt that filling up the relic world with slaves for my Necrophages was very good, but not so good that I would have wanted to intentionally build an Ecumenopolis. I had a Ring World section I filled a little, but I never even considered whether rebuilding the other sections was worthwhile, even with me floating 40k+ alloys
My biggest takeaway so far, is that the empire build I picked was way more important than the growth changes for difference in game feel. Getting growth in pops, resources, and territory was all bigger for me in 3.02 than in 3.03 because of how beneficial conquering and slavery are compared to trying to coexist with other empires. Now, I am not demanding by any means that these be made the same in terms of economic growth, but I do think it points to the game needing better tradeoffs between the approaches of being diplomatic vs being a conqueror. For example, I had no allies at any point as a Necrophage and basically never felt threatened. In my UN playthrough, I want to make friends and build a strong Federation, but around 2240 neighboring empires go from a threat to a joke; their fleets stagnate (I think in some cases, they might even shrink) and the AI empires are suffering from Ethics revolts and popping out 1 planet rebels. In some ways, the playstyles could be brought into better parity if making friends and allies and Federations was more beneficial. In both cases, making the AI better at managing its own empire would make cooperation stronger and provide a risk to nations that go it alone.
What i can say ?
In 2.8 was a lot pops and they made late game unplayable.
A bit better was with GTO edict, but it was hard to getting it.
In 3.0 PDX cutted pop grow and by this cutted late game pops number.
But gave more output to pops.
And added auto resettle to unemployed pops.
This made late game as fast as starter 2200 years.
That is good, you can say. But not good as it could be.
Because with new pop grow formula late game pop grow is literally dead.
No, really, at late-game you can wait decades before you get one new pop.
To fully fill one size_25 Ecumenopolis you need conquer more than half galaxy. Arcology project AP becomes useless.
For example, at 2.8 i had 80-90 planets. And one Ecumenopolis for each 10-12 planets. Totally it was 8-9 Ecus.
Most of them was fully built.
Now its dreams that won't come true.
I know what another problem with large pops number was what game every month was checking pops jobs. But why cant make this "checking" less often ?
For example, you can connect "checking" to Capital building's level.
Look - if planet just colonized - calculate pops every month.
After upgrading to Planetary Administration - once in 2 years.
After upgrading to Planetary Capital - once in 4 years.
System Capital-Complex - once per 6 years.
Or you can connect this calculating to your new feature - planet capacity.
Before 10% capacity - every month.
40% capacity - once in 2 year
And other staff like this.
About reducing pop grow from filling planet capacity - i think its one of worst idea.
I can understand reducing grow from low amenities, from low housing. Its logical and playable.
But not from capacity. Or I understood pop grow formula wrong ?
Anyway my suggestion - pop grow must be reduced only from low housing/amenities.
After planet fully filled - new pops will be just moved to new planet and not problem with this.
Another feature i want to suggest to improve - auto-resettle.
I want buttons on planet to set - more incoming pops or less.
Like car's gear shift - D / N / R. So, there will be buttons - Incoming pops is welcome / Neutral to migration / Do not move unemployed pops to this planet
Or more improved variant with slaves - moving slaves or not..
As i said before - you need to add policy - to let auto resettle or not resettle unemployed slaves.
Or you can realize this feature with decision.
System could scale tho. You do not need to track all the pop individually but rather track them as a groups of job.
What do I mean about it:
NOT 1 pop thinks about job placement, it has 2/3rd will choose scientist, 1/6th farmer, 1/6th miner, 1/6th clerk. Then juggling of pops starts and grows exponentially with the amount of those. This supposedly supposed to simulate individual pops choosing roles that will increase their happiness, ignoring the common reality that if menial work pays better than being sociologists then a lot of people end up as coal miners after getting masters degree in sociology.
DO there are 5 metallurgist jobs on the planet and I want to have the best pops for the job, fill them. There are 4 farmers job, want to have the best pops for the job, pick them. Because pops are always placed optimally, the only recalculation will happen if either new pop shows up or a new job is added to the filled group. The player could even set priorities of jobs to fill if he liked in a form of a ladder. Because given pop is always best for the role unless a modified or new species shows up, it would be as simple calculations as assigning counters to a couple of brackets.
It even works with promotion and demotion to a higher stratum. If you sign migration treaty with species that is much better scientist, they will replace local population actively demoting them (`they are stealing our jobs` and stuff). The current system due to weights and individual pop management is doing a lot of busy work for no good gameplay reason.
Vassalizing your empire's peripheral sectors is the key to pop growth in 3.0, since the new vassal empire(s) will grow with almost no penalty early on, and can later be reintegrated with much higher population than they would have otherwise. I found the "Shared Destiny" ascension perk finally useful for that purpose.
Well this is basically workaround for a design problem, and keep in mind not all empires can have vassals and at the same time, you could just run a federation for the same purpose.
But ending up with planets that are 50% empty housing and having to carefully curate the number of jobs to be at a point so you're staying at that 6 growth is just weird. I feel like I'm building ghost towns everywhere. Plus with so little in-game explanation of how the curve works exactly it feels overall less intuitive than before.
Logistic growth does not flatline at about 50% of capacity held, it increases (exponentially to some degree) till there are no more resources to consume. A good case study was mice infestation in Australia this year, it was not that suddenly at 50% of capacity growth of mice slowed down, quite contrary, they were multiplying till there was nothing for them to eat so they ate their pups, the population crashed and stabilized now on the level where there are just enough resources to come by. Intelligent species take more factors into account than 'right now we have food to eat' but the general rule is similar. Just wanted to clarify that it's not logistic growth, it's Stellaris's design how to simulate it is awkward and unclear.
I've played games in the release version and in the 3.0.3 beta. Settings 0.25 habitability, 0 guaranteed planets, 400 star galaxy. 8 AI factions. (Keeping things small to see if the game reaches endgame in ideal conditions).
Bit of a rant to follow. I do apologise in advance for the wall of text.
In Short: I was... Confused. Annoyed. Frustrated. Disappointed... and worst of all... bored playing 3.0.3.
Even when things should have been quite exciting like an early war vs a hostile and unknown strength neighbouring advanced start empire (due to the bug with lost colony overriding advanced start settings taking me by surprise) or a strong extremely early crisis (also taking me by surprise due to not knowing when to set the crisis and leaving it on very early dates and high strength and being quickly overrun by an overpowered unbidden spawning and quickly destroying all my worlds - the crisis didn't get stuck that game, just melted my planets in seconds and instantly converted all my outposts. Should have been very scary and exciting but my enthusiasm had already been crushed by pop growth)... there's just something... unwholesome about 3.0. If the pop growth system had a one word descriptive trait, I'd say that dealing with the new growth system feels a little... repugnant.
My thoughts on Population Growth:
Unintuitive with Poor/non-existent UI
Undermines a lot of existing systems (Housing, Immigration and Emigration, Housing Usage, Livestock/Chattel/Domestic Servant Slavery, Peaceful Expansion, Population assembly... while massively boosting Raiding, Conquest and other exploits like vassal integration shenanigans).
Housing is broken because you never reach it. It no longer serves any function for the vast majority of situations.
Housing Use is broken because it isn't included in carrying capacity. This at least could be easily fixed for organics by granting +/- carrying capacity from all housing use modifiers, so it makes a difference if you have 25 communal slaves or servitude robots with adaptability tradition vs 25 slaves vs 25 normal pops vs 25 solitary pops.
Immigration and Emigration (the old mechanic) is broken because you get 100% of growth converted to migration automatically if you just have 0 free jobs. You never get to use the flat +50 planet emigration push from low housing, which itself would give you a tiny fraction of the drastically reduced growth from being at carrying capacity.
(Even the old system the emigration push numbers were far too low, and arrived far too late to be useful, 100% of 0 growth is still 0 emigration. Sorry but the planet decisions to stop growth never worked properly. The system should have just been +100 emigration push and x0 emigration pull from 0 free jobs (people migrate if they can, if there is nowhere else to go then they stay on the planet and become unemployed).
Instead of fixing migration we now have this convoluted mess with 4 different migration systems - free and automatic for some unemployed pops, broken automatic siphoning of pop growth for some organic (but only if you're playing badly), manual relocation with an influence cost for some free pops, and manual without an influence cost for some other types of pops).
Default Slavery is broken because you need more specialist and ruler jobs in the new system, the housing use reduction of slaves no longer does anything and slavery types like livestock reduce the growth speed of actual functioning pops while having a pathetically tiny output and causing stability problems lowering all outputs even more.
Purging is broken because it's not competitive vs assimilation/slavery, resulting in you having worse population growth than a pacifist (they at least don't suffer the growth penalty from having all those purging pops clogging up their empire).
(Also it's wrong that the AI care more about purging than assimilation or slavery despite those being the true game-winning expansionist strategies. Those should be more Threatening strategies, rather than almost ignored diplomatically. The AI shouldn't care as much about a Fanatical purifier purging primitives, but should care far more about the Borg turning a planet of primitives into armies of mindless drones manning their huge fleets. That is unless purging is made more lucrative to fit the new system, e.g. reducing the growth target per pop purged so purifiers/exterminators/devouring swarms can grow much faster in the years after clearing planets.
Peaceful expansion is broken because it hits a limit where stuff stops happening... long before the game is over you have lots of resources, but nothing to spend it all on. You have lots of planets, but no growth, no need to build new buildings and are punished if you have more than the minimum number of pops needed on each planet to maximize growth. The same empire switching over to war at this point could rapidly double its pops instead of hitting a soft cap of pops/year, but without any significant penalties to that strategy sadly.
Population Assembly is broken because the total costs and time scales with empire population. The bigger the population of your empire the worse the return on investment is for these buildings and jobs. The longer the game goes on the worse each assembly building gets, with no clear indication when you pass the point when you really should have dismantled them decades ago.
It wouldn't be so bad if all sources of assembly came from buildings (none from jobs) and if the upkeep cost scaled with growth required - so if you were to get +5 assembly from the capital+Machine Assembly Plants costing 5 alloys/month with a 100 growth target, 2.5 alloys/month at 200 growth required, 1 alloy/month at 500 growth required making the total cost per pop constant. In that situation you wouldn't have to worry or balance jobs growing steadily less efficient over time because the efficiency would be constant.
How are Growth rates on your settings?
Fine in the early game.
Decent mid game.
Annoying and confusing by the late game.
Question: A planet has 6 open jobs. How long will it take to fill those 6 open jobs?
Answer: Not a clue... could be 2 months (pops grow this month and migrate next month), could be 60 years (local growth only), or those jobs may never fill (local growth plus conquest and growth elsewhere raising growth targets faster than growth/month)... and there's no way to know without checking other planets.
It's certainly not the x months suggested on the growth panel as that only measures local growth, completely ignoring the feeder worlds that are the actual source of new pops, and each new pop grown will increase the growth target locally. (and the growth shown may drop dramatically when the population increases a little as you get closer to capacity, but you can't see what the growth will be in future in the UI).
So if I want to know when I'll actually fill those 6 jobs I would have to manually check how many of my other worlds are sources of migration... automatic migration I mean, the old Migration and Emigration mechanics shown in the UI no longer serves its function.
If I have no open jobs on other planets and lets say 6 feeder worlds I'd get the 6 jobs filled in one growth cycle + a few months for automatic migration (roughly).
If I have open jobs on one other planet it will take 2x as long to fill those 6 jobs.
If I have open jobs on 3 planets total it will take 1-3x as long (roughly, completely random which ones fill first or at all).
The UI has no way to quickly see how many planets are going to be migration sinks and how many are feeding pops to other planets... although it did have that before in the old migration system it's just been trampled on and no longer functions.
If you have enough other planets with open jobs aka no feeder planets, so that you rely entirely on local growth then if the growth elsewhere is high enough, or you are also waging war and gaining pops from other sources, then the planet may never actually produce a new pop before the game ends as the growth target increases faster than the pops are growing.
This is all funny, in a deeply tragic way that makes you want to cry instead of laugh, because there's an entire (now completely non-functional) part of the UI about migration and emigration pressures (that annoyingly covers up those growth numbers and months required to grow as if it's vitally important) and it lists all the planets that are sending growth and receiving growth... but that doesn't apply now, actually sometimes it's incorrect and applies in reverse - planets that have no jobs are technically migration sinks in the UI because of having high amenities and housing from the luxury residences with no sources of emigration push, despite them being breeder planets and actually being sources of automatic migration once the pop grows, becomes unemployed and decides to resettle.
It's a mess. You can't have 4 different migration mechanics all at the same time and expect things to work smoothly. Adding new systems without factoring in what you already have means more work, more bugs and less mechanical consistency.
Do Growth rates make sense?
No.
Not even a little bit.
Growth is quite weird at all stages of the game. I can't tell without looking up fan-made graphs what is going to happen when I build a building or district (no indication of these mechanics in-game). Though I did learn it all fast enough through trial and error, it's very poorly explained ingame.
UI changes can fix this by showing Carrying Capacity prominently, with exact numbers on districts, buildings and all other sources and penalties. There could also be indications for the optimal population ranges on a planet that will still benefit from max growth. The district under construction can also count as an unbuilt district to avoid temporary drops in growth. Lots of tiny improvements are possible, but it will never make sense... for a lot of reasons... which I will try to explain if anyone is interested in my reasoning:
The new system seems to be trying to copy real life mathematically... but fails. The result is more confusing then my old lectures on Carrying Capacity, Michaelis–Menten kinetics, Allosteric regulation and all the other processes and feedback loops found in nature. At least back then the biology maths problems were tricky for young me but it was at least based on real practical things that can be measured and working through the maths results in those nice textbook growth curves...
But Stellaris instead is applying a strange handmade growth curve that doesn't match anything in nature with bits manually chopped-off at the top and bottom so it's easier to micromanage on a planet-by-planet basis, completely ignoring variables like migration that should apply to those graphs. The results are sometimes ugly and confusing (have a looks at the flat top on high-capacity planet growth-curves, or the bizzare habitat growth-curves, or any planet with a very small carrying capacity, it sometimes isn't even a continuous line - there really should not be a discontinuity here and it only happens because of the odd manipulations to the mathematical formula).
Designing by imitating the results rather than the causes means you end up with something that makes no logical sense because there literally is no connection between cause and effect. It cannot ever make sense. It is a mess when instead those graphs should be emergent features after you put in a few variables.
To phrase it better. If the variables you are using for growth are working then you should be able to test you've got the correct numbers for growth and decline (and haven't accidentally put x10 instead of x1.0) by plotting growth you get in an actual game and getting something that looks like the nice S-shaped graph. If you get a graph that is oddly shaped, with discontinuities, flat bits and planetary populations that stop at half the expected carrying capacity then you've done something really... terribly wrong (or lots of little things wrong).
(Aside: I had a summer job once transcribing tables from old books to computer systems (and calculating the blanks when the books had missing bits), then graphing the results to double-check the variables all worked and matched the original graphs. If the graph matched the book it was fine, if the graph was wonky I'd done something wrong... that didn't actually happen but it could have... if I'd seen a graph that should have been S-shaped turn out to be flat and discontinuous I'd have been... most perplexed).
So in Stellaris say the population on a planet grows by 1 and you want to know what will happen? No idea (without digging into the numbers and checking several graphs not included in the game), it depends what the developers thought would be fun or simple, or what works best from a performance perspective, or what wouldn't be frustrating, or what balances empires using machines and robots, or what stops the old migration system from needing to apply (early growth on colonies).
Organic Population growth on the planet may suddenly drop by 50% (habitat with low carrying capacity after getting the first few pops), or it may increase a random step towards +100% growth, or it may stagnate because you've reached the cap of +100% growth so the extra pop is wasted here and should be moved elsewhere until every planet has max growth (despite perfect conditions and lots of room and jobs here), or it may decrease growth because you're over 50% carrying capacity (despite again having lots of housing, jobs and 100% habitability as carrying capacity doesn't care you have an excess of everything), and whatever happens organic growth will also decrease on all the other planets in your empire because of the robot you just built here.
Real populations have things they need (food, housing, mates, temperature) that cause growth over time... here pops also have needs (food, housing, mates/other pops, habitability) but those don't factor in to the calculations (at least not intuitively). Real populations have things that cause negative growth, also known as death (age, predation, accidents, natural disasters, starvation, pollution etc.), here species also have variables tracking life expectancy (but only for leaders, oddly), there are natural environmental conditions (habitability, planet modifiers, earthquakes and storms, planet temperature and availability of water) but that doesn't change or modify carrying capacity. There can also be starvation (but pops still grow while starving, growing without being fed is rather magical). So almost all the variables you could want exist in the game in some form... they just aren't being used in any intuitive ways.
Pops have an age, and can decline (die), they have requirements like food and housing... but Carrying capacity lowers growth without causing decline, with no delays to anything so there can never be the boom and bust cycles seen in nature. Pops never age, they never die, they have no life-cycle, they just slowly grow. That wouldn't be a problem in itself but it's in stark contrast to a mechanic that tries to emulate nature.
All these numbers have been applied to individual planets ignoring the fact that pops can move freely between planets (requiring different equations - ones with migration and emigration, something you already had coded in... kinda... as mentioned it needed fixing not completely supplanting). The growth system doesn't properly include food, habitability, jobs, housing, housing usage and all the things that should matter.
I've suggested before, a long time ago, that the game could have simulated populations entirely if you wanted it to: Children, Elderly, non-government civilian pops etc. In that sort of situation seeing complex growth graphs would make sense, it would be a thematic simulation even if the performance costs may be excessive and the added fun rather minimal. You would have a delay between cause and effect, there would be generational cycles as periods of rapid growth in the past with lots of children lead to periods with a temporary decline in the working population as that generation all ages upwards and needs looking after or simply dies and so on. You could model reproductive strategies based on pop traits, family sizes, age, life-expectancy, you could have more non-functioning injured pops after wars and planetary devastation (depending on the life expectancy of pops), gene-clinics would be able to increase population life expectancy and be useful... if you wanted S-shaped curves all you need to have are a few simple variables (growth and death, carrying capacity, age etc.) and then put in the equations and the results should be emergent. Instead this is a lot of work to force pops to obey a pattern with poor results. (None of my games would have growth that looks like an S-shaped curve no matter what the marketing of these changes has been, my population graph would jump all over the place).
I do understand that the empire growth requirements are purely a technical limitation. It's not going to make perfect logical sense as it's applied to solve a technical problem, it's not intended to be a robust simulation, but I suspect the empire growth target growing steadily larger would FEEL completely different if it also provided a benefit instead of being a pure negative. Even a small bonus may make a difference. e.g. every pop grown adds a tiny global % pop output modifier, while total pops that exist cause the penalty. So if you conquer pops rather than grow them you lose out on the global modifier (they don't follow your traditions that have streamlined production) but you still have the growth target penalty.
I would have suggested this as a throughput modifier, but first I'd want the efficiency techs that were supposed to be throughput modifiers to actually increase efficiency rather than decreasing efficiency of resource conversion. This is something that most people don't notice currently because resources are in such abundance you don't need to care about efficiency, just that the alloy and research number gets bigger... which it does... just not very efficiently. If you actually were struggling to cover your mineral, energy, food and consumer goods costs you'd actually feel the pain as the new techs make upgraded worlds produce less output per unit of input.
Anyway, so what happens in 3.0.3?
Lets say you have a genetically modified slave species of well-fed (excess food), long-lived (lots of +5 life expectancy techs), rapid-breeders. Super-Rabbits who are fertile and robust with limited regeneration or Social Pheromones, cybernetic implants, perfectly happy and barely take up any space, benefiting from a series of advanced life-extending technologies, enjoying perfect habitability, a choice of jobs and luxury housing, living on a planet custom-made to be perfect for them with millions of times the surface area of a normal planet. But in this perfect situation they have a negative rate of change of growth, with growth rate slowing, stopping and eventually their growth rate decreasing empire-wide due to having too many pops elsewhere. (Slowing but never declining).
...While an endangered species of solitary, non-adaptive, short-lived, starving Tortoise pops in the empire next door has its pop growth increasing over time... Because those pops haven't reached the carrying capacity of the planet yet (so each new pop is increasing the total growth rate rather than decreasing it) and the empire is small enough that they aren't suffering from the same massive empire-wide malady of the first empire.
The result is that if the technologically advanced long-lived race with sexy/fertile-rabbit slaves want to fill their new Ringworld they don't actually breed new rabbit pops but instead have to regularly raid the endangered race of short-lived repugnant slow-breeding/syphilitic tortoises next door to steal them to work jobs... that's just bonkers game design that makes the young biology student in my heart cry because the maths is just so ugly.
How abundant are Jobs?
Too many jobs in general.
Too many Workers, Specialists... I was never in a position in the past few games where I felt limited by jobs. I could always easily build more sources of jobs, pops were the only real limiting factor.
Having more than 0 Clerks was too many Clerks (so I turned them all off).
Cheap Buildings and districts.
I'm hitting the mineral cap every game and selling 100+ minerals a month on the market, even more in direct empire trades, so the mineral costs in general are trivial past the first couple of years where I am actually buying minerals to cover the very first few buildings and mining stations. The price of buildings and districts only ever decreases as the game goes on with civics, traditions, planet designations and even technologies. Perhaps the technologies that increase the output of jobs should also increase the cost of buildings and districts to compensate? So with +100% job output you also have +100% building and district build costs. Not sure if it would work but it is logical at least that those advanced techs aren't completely free (and it makes building cost reduction more important).
New Buildings are extraordinarily productive.
1 building easily giving 13+ jobs if it adds a job to all the existing districts. That's too many new jobs when pop growth is now much lower by the time you get those advanced buildings.
I like that the buildings are more powerful, but it undermines the district limits and doesn't work well with lower populations per planet.
Many buildings and districts are completely unlimited now.
You can build all the alloy and researcher jobs you want on ANY planet in your empire. There is no limit at all. This is actually a problem as there is no reason to build filler jobs, no hard choices or sacrifices. It's boring. The very best jobs with the most essential output are completely unlimited in number the entire game. If those are the superhero jobs, why would I ever feel the need to build a clerk instead?
Habitats can produce industry no matter what empty spot they orbit (instead of needing mineral deposits for example giving the player a tough choice) so resourceless sites are strangely very productive (even if you have to do spreadsheets to work out how you're supposed to fill them without crippling growth).
The fact that industry and research buildings both have no limits or requirements is just as strange considering that everything else is much more constrained. Alloy/consumer goods/energy/mineral/foods buildings modify their respective districts, which are often limited in number or even availability, while habitat districts requiring a research deposit to build aren't even remotely liked to the research buildings. And industry doesn't need anything anywhere. For mechanical consistency research buildings should modify research districts, and industrial districts need some limiting factor or cap, even if it's a limiting factor that you directly control that acts as a soft-cap instead of the usual hard-cap (e.g. -5% Habitability per district, so with technologies the first few districts can be built without lowering habitability for your main race, or you can shove all your industry on a hell-planet knowing it will never get above 0% habitability no matter what you do so you can go all-in on polluting industry).
Expensive Upkeep.
The advanced buildings and districts (specifically upgraded Labs and Ringworld districts) have upkeep costs that aren't proportional with their reduced value as a source of jobs. It's better to not use them as long as you can avoid it, sadly. Plus you don't actually ever want to have planets filled, or even more than half-full in the new system, so you neither want or need those advanced buildings and the jobs they provide. (I still build them, but only on huge planets with good modifiers when I have lots of excess rare resources from starbases and deposits currently sitting idle, or I literally run out of slots to build jobs elsewhere... and then I get annoyed because the empire isn't growing as fast thanks to over-filling a couple of key worlds instead of spreading those pops around for max growth bonuses. Also putting all my eggs in one basket ended me as a machine empire when I had the crisis spawn right on top of my most productive sector that I had funnelled all the pops back to fill while my fleets were years and years away conquering pathetic AI empires).
I've suggested before having increased quality jobs provided by advanced buildings (2 Researcher vs 2 Research Directors), or more automation (Food Processing Centers upgrading to be more like Nourishment Centers rather than less like them), anything more logical than having a building that makes tractors with 20 seats so you can employ lots more farmers on the same plot of land, or a lab that now needs a horde of 100 technicians now the machines have been upgraded to require more hands to operate.
Production Levels?
Too much of almost everything, only a very small number of things are more limited now. Excess Housing
Built in excess for the carrying capacity, building slots and amenities... not because you actually need housing as an independent statistic.
Excess Amenities
Smaller population sizes have lower amenity use, amenities from rulers covers more of total amenity needs. Also the excess amenities from luxury housing is relevant now those are good. Lastly entertainers are dirt cheap and cover all needs if something did ever go wrong.
Excess Energy
Modified worker output edicts are now extremely powerful so I always run the energy edict. Also the modified Energy Nexus buildings giving lots of extra jobs means you are never limited by energy districts in the empire (forcing you to use clerks instead). Cheaper espionage in the update actually makes this worse as the one new big energy sink has gone. I was gambling away energy with traders and gifting it away when I had nothing I wanted to buy.
Excess Food
Starbase buildings now much more productive. Fewer pops meaning expenses are reduced. Job output is immense and buildings add to district job numbers... there's almost no possible way to starve or run out of farming districts in the new system.
Excess Minerals
Planet-based jobs are terrible now relative to every other job... so you'd think you'd be struggling for minerals, but that isn't the case. You can buy minerals in the early game, then gain a huge amount of extra mineral and gas income from starbase Nebula Refinery buildings and space deposits making planet-based mining and mineral-sinks like refining feel like a waste (why spend 10 minerals and a job when you could gain 10 minerals and some gas without a job?).
Excess Rare Resources
You still have space deposits, but planet deposits are now much easier to build now that you aren't limited on building slots and buildings with few jobs are good rather than bad. Extra rares now come from starbases. And there's less incentives to spend rare resources in general - worse advanced buildings, fewer advanced buildings needed thanks to fewer pops, trivial amounts needed for ship modules and for edicts so huge excess at almost all points of the game.)
Excess Consumer Goods
You can build industry anywhere you want since you aren't limited by district availability - you aren't forced to build lots of farming, mining and energy districts with the buffs to those so you have lots of room for industry everywhere and anywhere you want. Each job is more productive thanks to additional bonuses from new techs and high stability from high amenities. And since you have excess minerals you aren't limited on input either.
Excess Alloys
As above. With even fewer alloy sinks now that habitats are cheaper and crisis empires can build ships with minerals instead. Alloys are always the limiting factor to expansion, but it feels like they're easier to get now.
Excess Research
As above, but with increased output per job, increased output from anomalies (it's great anomaly rewards are relevant... mostly, some still aren't balanced like the rewards from battle debris and things), and the techs gained/pinned from stealing technology espionage actions make research more directed and fast - equivalent to +1 research alternatives each time you steal a tech so you can easily research only the techs you want in record time.
Excess Unity
There's no new unity sinks and you can still stay under admin capacity so you will, as always, get every tradition... Getting every single tradition is not a good thing. It means all races converge on one identical description - barring those with tradition swaps, those at least are more distinct because of their special traditions.
Excess Admin Cap
Bureaucrats still let you remain under the cap the entire game, gaining the cheaper research, unity and other costs. It's also a bit odd that you don't get any penalties to admin production from low habitability/CG shortages/food/energy shortages depending on the admin job upkeep for organics vs gestalts.
Excess Naval Capacity
Soldier jobs are much, much worse with the new system having fewer pops... so you'd think this would be the one resource not in excess. But you don't have to use soldier jobs at all. You can still easily increase naval capacity with techs (that come much faster now), starbases (that you have more incentives to build and increase the capacity of or even go over capacity with) and it's even cheaper to go over both starbase and naval capacity with the excess energy and alloy production (or minerals for menacing ships).
Excess Influence
My influence reserves are higher than ever thanks to: Spending less on favours (not that I ever did this before). Spending almost no upkeep on edicts - no upkeep and costs to start and stop means I'll spend a couple of hundred influence the entire game on edicts and never change them over, a smaller and smaller portion of total empire production the longer the game lasts. I can now see just how bad those technology and commercial agreements would be for me (I'd give 15 technologies in each category to gain 2/0/4 technologies) so I don't sign those as often now either. The player always has an advantage with first contact so I get a ton of free influence in the early game from those. I have cheaper habitats in games where I use habitats so can afford far more of them than I ever could (building 3 at a time my last game). I can still reach the +5 from Will to Power making influence costs almost irrelevant at that point.
Excess Codebreaking/Encryption
I've easily hit the cap in "relative codebreaking" making all other sources of codebreaking redundant. This shouldn't happen. It's frustrating to research a technology that does nothing at all but seems like it should be doing something. If I'm already at +4 relative codebreaking that tech, civic or edict doesn't make my infiltration go any faster, it doesn't raise the cap or change the difficulty. It shouldn't be as easy to hit the hard cap of relative codebreaking (I've only had it matter against some gestalts, rarely).
Limited Infiltration speed
I'm sat twiddling my thumbs watching infiltration creep up painfully slowly before I'm allowed to do anything fun or even to passively get intel. I want to be able to sink thousands of energy credits into espionage to speed it up. Or to benefit from the fact that I have far more codebreaking than the enemy has encryption and a million assets sitting idle. I want missions that cost 0 infiltration but raise infiltration speed while triggering events to pump even more resources into my infiltration (energy, influence etc). Also I want ways to reduce the infiltration lost on completing each mission... it feels odd to have no intel on an empire because you are constantly infiltrating their research and gaining assets... which technically increases your intel cap but you never reach that because doing lots of missions quickly because they're so easy to do drops infiltration down to near 0... where it stays... for years... slowly climbing back to reasonable levels only if you don't actually do any missions. I'd rather only have failed/discovered missions lower infiltration.
Also I'd suggest only capping the max infiltration but not capping the infiltration speed from relative encryption so that extra codebreaking does something. I'd also suggest a few things that increase the Base/Minimum infiltration (like assets) as well as espionage actions that can increase infiltration per month but with a cost... also tiny bug, so pathetically small I can't be bothered to take screenshots and fight the bug reporting forum to convince the QA that the issues are real... but the time to next infiltration level is actually the points to next level... it needs to be divided by the points per day to be the actual days. e.g. shows 100 days to next level when you need 100 points, even if you are actually gaining 1.4 points per day or 0.6 points per day. It's tiny but mildly annoying, more a sign that headline features weren't sufficiently tested than an actual issue itself.
Limited Trade Value
My trade value has been pathetically small in all games so far. No clerks employed at any stage because they are so horrifically bad. Fewer merchants at all points of the game now that planets don't get the extra jobs from the prosperity finisher effect (even if merchants are better when you do get some).
All the other bonus jobs haven't been adjusted to fit the lowered pop numbers. This also applies to: Portal Research Area, Cave Shroom Veins, Subterranean Contact Zone, Spore Vents etc. all of which still assume you'll have lots of pops on each planet not barely enough to get 1 extra job. The result of all that means I only have passive trade value generation and barely any active trade generation... even as a Megacorp. I actually decided to make a research federation instead of a trade federation last game... which was just... sad.
TL; DR: It's bad.
I can reach the endgame with improved performance and low habitability settings... that should be great.
But it's boring to reach the endgame, nothing is balanced and all the population growth mechanics weirdness make me sad... that's bad.
TL; DR: It's bad.
I can reach the endgame with improved performance and low habitability settings... that should be great.
But it's boring to reach the endgame, nothing is balanced and all the population growth mechanics weirdness make me sad... that's bad.
I wish I could give your post 1000 likes because everything in it is true. Devs, please, if you only read a single post in this feedback thread, this is the one you should be reading. These are the real problems that need to be addressed in the Stellaris economy explained in detail. Twiddling some numbers on the empire growth cap is not going to fix anything.
Designing by imitating the results rather than the causes means you end up with something that makes no logical sense because there literally is no connection between cause and effect. It cannot ever make sense. It is a mess when instead those graphs should be emergent features after you put in a few variables.
Glad to see a fellow Biology-bro notice this problem. This was the reason why the reaction to the S-curve was positive despite several posts explaining why it's fundamentally bad. Everyone thought the curve was going to be the final result (like it is in real life) instead of the cause (which is nonsensical). By making it the cause you create an absurd universe in which China's empty ghost cities should have worked to double their fertility rate. I can only assume feng shui is a real mystical force in the Stellaris universe that makes houses transmit mind-altering magic waves that cause people to have more babies.
I think this update helps with pop growth and espionage, to be sure. I don't know if it is perfect yet but it's certainly an improvement.
Habitats
I think one big thing that would help is to slow down the AI's habitat spam. By midgame I look through my neighbor's systems and they've all got two to three habitats floating around each. This is all well and good but its causing problems with population growth and makes later game wars a complete slog.
Solution
Make AI less likely to develop habitats
Population
Please do not listen to the nay-sayers who are giving one word "bad" replies to the population system. The foundation here is good it just needs to be clarified for the player and tweaked so it is a bit more balanced.
Again, I feel that this patch is an improvement upon the old system; it's MUCH harder to hit higher populations like in 2.0, which is good. My only suggestion would be to make it so the civilization population cap number (the one which starts at 100) is increased so you don't get the population growth slowdown until a bit longer.
Also, is the planetary "feed people" edict supposed to be disabled? It used to work but since 2.0 it looks like it is disabled. This would help improve growth and make it so food matters a bit more. Bring that back, please!
Espionage
Espionage is a fantastic addition but it still needs some work. I feel that some of us still don't know what some of the espionage actions do and we just need more meaningful variety. Also, Gather Intelligence should be more powerful or, at least, have a more powerful version of it you can do lategame. In fact, I would suggest doing that with each operation: have a mid-lategame version of each operation which is more expensive but more impactful.
It sucks to be stuck at 10-30 infiltration on a neighbor where I cannot do anything. We need some sort of an Agent we can actively deploy to help spy on and improve intel and operations... they could be overseen by the Envoy.
I'd like to see corruption of governors, rebellious scientists, promoting criminal organizations and rebellions on planets (this is a big one), and assassinating leaders as options. Look at what Galactic Civilizations 3 and Civilization IV did with their espionage systems for some inspiration.
Lastly, make it so Envoys (or agents) level up and gain traits. I swear I've even seen events for envoys which gave them traits but they're not there. Make it so!
I posted earlier already but I was going through slowly and trying to maximize my population growth.
After 4 years of doing nothing with districts or buildings (I've only just managed to explore my immediate neighbourhood with 3 science vessels), my "growth progress" has already increased by 10%.
My monthly population growth on my capital was 4.65 and so I tried to increase this with the "A New Life" tradition but the 10% increase in population growth resulted in my population growth DECREASING to 4.40
After consulting the equations presented on the wiki (not clear how reliable these are?); I decided to try increasing the housing available. Going from 12 to 16 INCREASED my population growth again to 5.16.
I researched "Genome Mapping" for another 10% boost and again got a pop growth DECREASE to 4.84
I'm not clear how the 10% boosts reduced my growth in each case or why increasing my housing was the only thing which was effective.
As I mentioned in my previous post, a simple growth modifier based on empire-wide food availability and planet-local housing would fix the population mechanics far more effectively than putting a hard cap on population which hampers game play from the start of the game. Would the Developers be able to share the equation and implementation they used for the population growth? As a biological systems modeller, I'd love to help implement a better solution which is more logical and natural.
Though I realise that many players on this forum enjoy the new population mechanics, I personally can't see how its playable. I would love to discuss this with other players to see how I can change my play-style if these mechanics aren't changed.
First, please remove the empire wide pop growth malus.
Second, make so that the only time a calculation for a pop is done is when it first comes into the game. Pop grows > Is there a ruler job? > Yes/fill a ruler job randomly, No/continue > Is there a Specialist Job? > Yes/fill a specialist job randomly, No/continue > Is there a worker job? > Yes/fill a worker job randomly, No/continue > Is there an open job anywhere in your empire? > Yes/migrate and fill a random job, No/Become Unemployed. You could either have the pop sit unemployed forever until the player intervenes, or make it so only unemployed pops have interval calculations done to them.
Then, make the job menu on each planet a little more user friendly and have the player have the option to make optimizations after the fact. Even if players choose not to, its not the end of the world, jobs are still getting filled. This is a Paradox game, your primary fanbase is here for complicated, sky is the limit, open choice gameplay. There doesn't need to be complete balance, people don't only play Ottomans or France in EU4, there can be less optimal builds for people looking to have different flavor/challenge. This isn't eSports.
You could even have a minor quality of life optimization for the player to select a migration focus for migrating pops to try to migrate to a target world first.
Not directly related to pop growth but the AI (including one's own) still seems to be pretty bad at allocating Maintenance Drone jobs as a robot gestalt consciousness. Especially on planets with a large number of city districts (built for building slots) and therefore lots of Maintenance jobs. They are either completely prioritised over other basic jobs (e.g. Tech drones), leading to a large excess of Amenities on the planet (50+), even if there is for example an empire wide energy deficit and energy generating jobs would be available or they are completely ignored in favor of higher tier jobs (e.g. research), leading to a defgicit of Amenities. While I can see how situation #2 might be somehow working as designed (higher jobs having more appeal and being prioritized), both situations lead to a gameplay where one must very carefully prioritize jobs per hand (restricting maintenance jobs and manually increasing them later on) or restrict the number of city districts quite a lot, leading to less building slots. Neither is very efficient nor is it any fun, just tedious.
Secondary to this would be the automatic job allocation of low tier jobs (e.g. Mining drones and Tech drones) on planets. Those should ideally take into account a) empire wide production and net profits/losses (automatically allocating more pops to whatever ressource is needed most, b) planet designations (Generator worlds should prefer Tech drones and vice versa for mining) and c) planet buildings (planets with Mineral hubs should have more weight for Mining jobs, planets with Energy Nexus' should prefer Tech drones). As it is, building mixed planets is certainly viable but as manual management is still better than automatic, building planets with just one type of basic job seems easier to maintain and organize.
1. End the empire-wide growth curve. Limit them to individual colonies and their capacities. It feels ironic enough that POPs are attracted to migrating to new colonies, but then constrained by empire-wide curve in mid and late game at the same time. It's very discouraging to continue expanding the empire internally, with plenty of worlds ripe for colonization within the borders. The order of colonization and timing becomes more important, if one doesn't want a particular planet they want to fully utilize to turn into a barren and rural backwater until the inevitable late game lag hinders everything. Nightmare. But honestly there shouldn't be a need for that.
2. Lower the number of jobs the buildings provide and adjust outputs accordingly. Districts are fine. With the slow breeder version of the game, it's a constant battle to decide whether to hold off on specialist jobs or not at this point. Honestly, with the economy system the way it is, the traditional 4x single pop growth is not only frustrating but feels unfit. A single pop feels undervalued, while putting inflated value on them with restrictive growth system at the same time.
3. Do not penalize authoritarian faction when assimilating with transcendence living condition. Not a big deal, but I think this should be changed.
The choice is simple. It's either delaying the inevitable late game lag (which is futile) or delaying the actual game's pace. The late game has improved, not gonna lie. But by another 100 years or so. But this feels very much forced, rather than mechanic-oriented. If the pops are the cause of the problem with the game's performance, I think it's necessary to root it out and rebuild, rather than creating inconvenient blockages and changing the pacing of the game just to put a band aid over the severity.
My main concern is the empire-wide growth curve. Please don't let the final frontier - on a galactic scale no less - feel like a piece of continent.
Just pop mechanic theory-crafting; not a serious suggestion...
Have pops grow on jobs, immediately giving off 0.2 minerals with 0.1 energy upkeep while growing on a miner job, as an example. The output and upkeep increases as they grow. As growth speed becomes faster, have a spillover, causing another pop to grow on another job in parallel. While spillover is happening, the growing pop with the highest growth speed from which the spillover happened, should be soft capped at a certain growth speed. And this growth speed and soft cap should be affected by the colony's growth curve as well. If the growing pop doesn't hit the soft cap of the growth speed, the spillover doesn't happen. The spillover pop doesn't have to be of the species it offshoot from. It could be any species that are capable of internally migrating.
The spilled over pop would have a growth speed of the excess amount from the capped one. Then if the main growing pop finishes growing, the speed is carried over to the spillover pop plus the excess it's been receiving. And its own excess creates a spillover again, this time growing faster than the previous spillover. Until the soft cap gradually increases due to the curve and pop growths slow down and spillovers don't happen. So on and so forth. The colony shouldn't necessarily have to reach the peak of the curve for the growth speed of a pop to hit the cap and cause a spillover. But a brand new colony or highly populated colony, for example, definitely shouldn't have such an effect.
Following that, have immigration separated. Immigration from xeno empire shouldn't directly boost the growth speed of the local growing pop. Instead, have one whole separate migrant pop to start growing on a job. Migration speed should be determined by the usual modifiers of the colony and how much emigration is happening from the colonies they are coming from. But incur penalties from the overflowing admin cap usage, and be applied empire-wide. Migrating pop growth should also be prone to spilling over, separated from the local pop growth. Regarding this, the xenophobes who aren't likely to go for migration treaties should be buffed to have lower growth speed soft cap threshold to better utilize parallel growth of their dominant species or slaves.
If somehow there's a point of the growth curve where spillover halts, the partially grown pop should still be around with stunted growth until the main growing pop finishes growing and the growth speed carries over to it. Same goes for immigrating pops. Internally migrating pops should directly affect the growth bonus of locally growing pops as usual.
If a partially grown pop gets stolen through a raid bombardment, the value of that pop remains the same in the raider's colony.
Partially grown or not, they should be considered to exist, and should appear in the species templates as soon as one starts growing.
A fully grown pop takes precedence on a job over a growing pop, if there are no other jobs or if a job is prioritized by the empire. If no job to grow on, they should grow as unemployed, with the happiness impact or partial unity production depending on living standard.
Partially grown pops would have less political power, and less amenities and food upkeep than the fully grown ones. These also increase as they grow. Unemployed growing pops would have possibility to create a growing criminal pop spillover.
Colony capital building should provide more planetary capacity every time it upgrades once. With the pop growth curve, it should be harder to achieve system capital complex anyway despite the fact, if disregarding this beta. As a trade off, don't restrict any colony buildings to the level of the capital buildings. Except for disassembled colony ship.
Also judging by what another commenter said reloading pre-patch endgame saves with the new patch show considerable performance improvements, so the pop changes aren't the sole cause. I never had performance issues so I can't test this either way.
Also judging by what another commenter said reloading pre-patch endgame saves with the new patch show considerable performance improvements, so the pop changes aren't the sole cause. I never had performance issues so I can't test this either way.
Yeah it's not just pops. Becoming galactic imperium and having considerable amount of base intel on every empires meant that I could see everyone and their fleet movements without the sentry array. This also enabled the late game lag for me. But I was able to reach the year 2500s before the lag kicked in. I have also seen some improvements with the beta. However, what I find strange is that 3.0.1 performance was much better than 3.0.2. I was able to reach 2600s with ease in a single game, in 3.0.1. Same map size, same amount of empires, similar style of gameplay etc.
In my opinion based on how I understand the system, the biggest issue with pop growth appears to be the empire wide slowdown in growth. New planets do not gain pops nearly quickly enough and thus it feels like the game stalls. As I understand it the pop growth rate on any particular planet is effected by a wide arrange of different factors including available capacity, available amenities, housing/districts, emigration push/pull and most tellingly overall empire population.
I believe it is the mix between local factors (housing/amenities/carrying capacity) and global factors (total pops in empire) that is causing the disconnect.
So in my view what needs to happen is that growth needs to be better distributed across the entire empire. Sort of like water flowing to spread out evenly, it will fill in any depressions in that surface while moving ever closer to a uniform height.
To state it another way, the overall pop growth-rate of an empire can and should slow down as total population increases, but the distribution of where that growth is occurring needs to be weighted more towards the lower population planets.
(I'm now going to make up some numbers to try to demonstrate what I'm talking about, but I'm not trying to actually mathematically define the system... so bear with me)
Lets say you have 5 planets with 50, 30, 20, 10, 2 population. (total population 112) and each with a carrying capacity of 60 (total 300 capacity).
If the total pop ratio is 112/300 lets suppose that = 20pts of growth per month allocated somehow to those planets.
(1 - 50/60) = 17% | 17% * 20 = 3.4
(1- 30/60) = 50% | 50% * 20 = 10
(1 - 20/60) = 67% | 67% * 20 = 13.4
(1 - 10/60) = 83% | 83% * 20 = 16.6
(1 - 2/60) = 97% | 97% * 20 = 19.4
Re-normalize to 20 total growth (dividing by the sum of 62.8)
50pop = +1.08 monthly (5.4% of global 20)
30pop = +3.18 monthly (15.9% of global 20)
20pop = +4.26 monthly (21.3% of global 20)
10pop = +5.28 monthly (26.4% of global 20)
2pop = +6.18 monthly (30.9% of global 20)
So while the small planet wouldn't grow much on its local population growth, emigration from elsewhere in the empire should juice the growth rate significantly.
Since low pop planets grow faster, the distribution of population in an empire tends to equal out overtime. Thus in a sprawling well developed empire, if a new colony suddenly comes online, its population will start to rapidly increase as growth from other planets is redirected there.
These numbers should make sense if the following is true:
1) the points needed for pop growth increases based on empire population on all planets the way it does currently.
2) The growth rate is not capped on individual planets.
What I mean is, its fine if it requires 500pts to grow a new pop, if that planet is growing at +50pts per month. (local growth + emigration)
The weights of how much global pop growth is allocated to each planet could be influenced by other factors like how much free housing there is, and how much amenities, or special bonuses for ringworlds/dysons and Ecumenopolis or high habitability. But those would NOT actually increase the global growth rate, only the percentage that each individual planet receives from the global pool.
Hopefully with a change like this the population growth of each individual empire would asymptotically trend towards a given soft-cap but the growth rate on each individual world in that empire would vary wildly depending on its "desirability" for pop growth.
NOTE: I made no attempt to fix other potential issues like raiding/slavery/conquest/integration or resource over-abundance.
I've played games in the release version and in the 3.0.3 beta. Settings 0.25 habitability, 0 guaranteed planets, 400 star galaxy. 8 AI factions. (Keeping things small to see if the game reaches endgame in ideal conditions).
Bit of a rant to follow. I do apologise in advance for the wall of text.
In Short: I was... Confused. Annoyed. Frustrated. Disappointed... and worst of all... bored playing 3.0.3.
Even when things should have been quite exciting like an early war vs a hostile and unknown strength neighbouring advanced start empire (due to the bug with lost colony overriding advanced start settings taking me by surprise) or a strong extremely early crisis (also taking me by surprise due to not knowing when to set the crisis and leaving it on very early dates and high strength and being quickly overrun by an overpowered unbidden spawning and quickly destroying all my worlds - the crisis didn't get stuck that game, just melted my planets in seconds and instantly converted all my outposts. Should have been very scary and exciting but my enthusiasm had already been crushed by pop growth)... there's just something... unwholesome about 3.0. If the pop growth system had a one word descriptive trait, I'd say that dealing with the new growth system feels a little... repugnant.
My thoughts on Population Growth:
Unintuitive with Poor/non-existent UI
Undermines a lot of existing systems (Housing, Immigration and Emigration, Housing Usage, Livestock/Chattel/Domestic Servant Slavery, Peaceful Expansion, Population assembly... while massively boosting Raiding, Conquest and other exploits like vassal integration shenanigans).
Housing is broken because you never reach it. It no longer serves any function for the vast majority of situations.
Housing Use is broken because it isn't included in carrying capacity. This at least could be easily fixed for organics by granting +/- carrying capacity from all housing use modifiers, so it makes a difference if you have 25 communal slaves or servitude robots with adaptability tradition vs 25 slaves vs 25 normal pops vs 25 solitary pops.
Immigration and Emigration (the old mechanic) is broken because you get 100% of growth converted to migration automatically if you just have 0 free jobs. You never get to use the flat +50 planet emigration push from low housing, which itself would give you a tiny fraction of the drastically reduced growth from being at carrying capacity.
(Even the old system the emigration push numbers were far too low, and arrived far too late to be useful, 100% of 0 growth is still 0 emigration. Sorry but the planet decisions to stop growth never worked properly. The system should have just been +100 emigration push and x0 emigration pull from 0 free jobs (people migrate if they can, if there is nowhere else to go then they stay on the planet and become unemployed).
Instead of fixing migration we now have this convoluted mess with 4 different migration systems - free and automatic for some unemployed pops, broken automatic siphoning of pop growth for some organic (but only if you're playing badly), manual relocation with an influence cost for some free pops, and manual without an influence cost for some other types of pops).
Default Slavery is broken because you need more specialist and ruler jobs in the new system, the housing use reduction of slaves no longer does anything and slavery types like livestock reduce the growth speed of actual functioning pops while having a pathetically tiny output and causing stability problems lowering all outputs even more.
Purging is broken because it's not competitive vs assimilation/slavery, resulting in you having worse population growth than a pacifist (they at least don't suffer the growth penalty from having all those purging pops clogging up their empire).
(Also it's wrong that the AI care more about purging than assimilation or slavery despite those being the true game-winning expansionist strategies. Those should be more Threatening strategies, rather than almost ignored diplomatically. The AI shouldn't care as much about a Fanatical purifier purging primitives, but should care far more about the Borg turning a planet of primitives into armies of mindless drones manning their huge fleets. That is unless purging is made more lucrative to fit the new system, e.g. reducing the growth target per pop purged so purifiers/exterminators/devouring swarms can grow much faster in the years after clearing planets.
Peaceful expansion is broken because it hits a limit where stuff stops happening... long before the game is over you have lots of resources, but nothing to spend it all on. You have lots of planets, but no growth, no need to build new buildings and are punished if you have more than the minimum number of pops needed on each planet to maximize growth. The same empire switching over to war at this point could rapidly double its pops instead of hitting a soft cap of pops/year, but without any significant penalties to that strategy sadly.
Population Assembly is broken because the total costs and time scales with empire population. The bigger the population of your empire the worse the return on investment is for these buildings and jobs. The longer the game goes on the worse each assembly building gets, with no clear indication when you pass the point when you really should have dismantled them decades ago.
It wouldn't be so bad if all sources of assembly came from buildings (none from jobs) and if the upkeep cost scaled with growth required - so if you were to get +5 assembly from the capital+Machine Assembly Plants costing 5 alloys/month with a 100 growth target, 2.5 alloys/month at 200 growth required, 1 alloy/month at 500 growth required making the total cost per pop constant. In that situation you wouldn't have to worry or balance jobs growing steadily less efficient over time because the efficiency would be constant.
How are Growth rates on your settings?
Fine in the early game.
Decent mid game.
Annoying and confusing by the late game.
Question: A planet has 6 open jobs. How long will it take to fill those 6 open jobs?
Answer: Not a clue... could be 2 months (pops grow this month and migrate next month), could be 60 years (local growth only), or those jobs may never fill (local growth plus conquest and growth elsewhere raising growth targets faster than growth/month)... and there's no way to know without checking other planets.
It's certainly not the x months suggested on the growth panel as that only measures local growth, completely ignoring the feeder worlds that are the actual source of new pops, and each new pop grown will increase the growth target locally. (and the growth shown may drop dramatically when the population increases a little as you get closer to capacity, but you can't see what the growth will be in future in the UI).
So if I want to know when I'll actually fill those 6 jobs I would have to manually check how many of my other worlds are sources of migration... automatic migration I mean, the old Migration and Emigration mechanics shown in the UI no longer serves its function.
If I have no open jobs on other planets and lets say 6 feeder worlds I'd get the 6 jobs filled in one growth cycle + a few months for automatic migration (roughly).
If I have open jobs on one other planet it will take 2x as long to fill those 6 jobs.
If I have open jobs on 3 planets total it will take 1-3x as long (roughly, completely random which ones fill first or at all).
The UI has no way to quickly see how many planets are going to be migration sinks and how many are feeding pops to other planets... although it did have that before in the old migration system it's just been trampled on and no longer functions.
If you have enough other planets with open jobs aka no feeder planets, so that you rely entirely on local growth then if the growth elsewhere is high enough, or you are also waging war and gaining pops from other sources, then the planet may never actually produce a new pop before the game ends as the growth target increases faster than the pops are growing.
This is all funny, in a deeply tragic way that makes you want to cry instead of laugh, because there's an entire (now completely non-functional) part of the UI about migration and emigration pressures (that annoyingly covers up those growth numbers and months required to grow as if it's vitally important) and it lists all the planets that are sending growth and receiving growth... but that doesn't apply now, actually sometimes it's incorrect and applies in reverse - planets that have no jobs are technically migration sinks in the UI because of having high amenities and housing from the luxury residences with no sources of emigration push, despite them being breeder planets and actually being sources of automatic migration once the pop grows, becomes unemployed and decides to resettle.
It's a mess. You can't have 4 different migration mechanics all at the same time and expect things to work smoothly. Adding new systems without factoring in what you already have means more work, more bugs and less mechanical consistency.
Do Growth rates make sense?
No.
Not even a little bit.
Growth is quite weird at all stages of the game. I can't tell without looking up fan-made graphs what is going to happen when I build a building or district (no indication of these mechanics in-game). Though I did learn it all fast enough through trial and error, it's very poorly explained ingame.
UI changes can fix this by showing Carrying Capacity prominently, with exact numbers on districts, buildings and all other sources and penalties. There could also be indications for the optimal population ranges on a planet that will still benefit from max growth. The district under construction can also count as an unbuilt district to avoid temporary drops in growth. Lots of tiny improvements are possible, but it will never make sense... for a lot of reasons... which I will try to explain if anyone is interested in my reasoning:
The new system seems to be trying to copy real life mathematically... but fails. The result is more confusing then my old lectures on Carrying Capacity, Michaelis–Menten kinetics, Allosteric regulation and all the other processes and feedback loops found in nature. At least back then the biology maths problems were tricky for young me but it was at least based on real practical things that can be measured and working through the maths results in those nice textbook growth curves...
But Stellaris instead is applying a strange handmade growth curve that doesn't match anything in nature with bits manually chopped-off at the top and bottom so it's easier to micromanage on a planet-by-planet basis, completely ignoring variables like migration that should apply to those graphs. The results are sometimes ugly and confusing (have a looks at the flat top on high-capacity planet growth-curves, or the bizzare habitat growth-curves, or any planet with a very small carrying capacity, it sometimes isn't even a continuous line - there really should not be a discontinuity here and it only happens because of the odd manipulations to the mathematical formula).
Designing by imitating the results rather than the causes means you end up with something that makes no logical sense because there literally is no connection between cause and effect. It cannot ever make sense. It is a mess when instead those graphs should be emergent features after you put in a few variables.
To phrase it better. If the variables you are using for growth are working then you should be able to test you've got the correct numbers for growth and decline (and haven't accidentally put x10 instead of x1.0) by plotting growth you get in an actual game and getting something that looks like the nice S-shaped graph. If you get a graph that is oddly shaped, with discontinuities, flat bits and planetary populations that stop at half the expected carrying capacity then you've done something really... terribly wrong (or lots of little things wrong).
(Aside: I had a summer job once transcribing tables from old books to computer systems (and calculating the blanks when the books had missing bits), then graphing the results to double-check the variables all worked and matched the original graphs. If the graph matched the book it was fine, if the graph was wonky I'd done something wrong... that didn't actually happen but it could have... if I'd seen a graph that should have been S-shaped turn out to be flat and discontinuous I'd have been... most perplexed).
So in Stellaris say the population on a planet grows by 1 and you want to know what will happen? No idea (without digging into the numbers and checking several graphs not included in the game), it depends what the developers thought would be fun or simple, or what works best from a performance perspective, or what wouldn't be frustrating, or what balances empires using machines and robots, or what stops the old migration system from needing to apply (early growth on colonies).
Organic Population growth on the planet may suddenly drop by 50% (habitat with low carrying capacity after getting the first few pops), or it may increase a random step towards +100% growth, or it may stagnate because you've reached the cap of +100% growth so the extra pop is wasted here and should be moved elsewhere until every planet has max growth (despite perfect conditions and lots of room and jobs here), or it may decrease growth because you're over 50% carrying capacity (despite again having lots of housing, jobs and 100% habitability as carrying capacity doesn't care you have an excess of everything), and whatever happens organic growth will also decrease on all the other planets in your empire because of the robot you just built here.
Real populations have things they need (food, housing, mates, temperature) that cause growth over time... here pops also have needs (food, housing, mates/other pops, habitability) but those don't factor in to the calculations (at least not intuitively). Real populations have things that cause negative growth, also known as death (age, predation, accidents, natural disasters, starvation, pollution etc.), here species also have variables tracking life expectancy (but only for leaders, oddly), there are natural environmental conditions (habitability, planet modifiers, earthquakes and storms, planet temperature and availability of water) but that doesn't change or modify carrying capacity. There can also be starvation (but pops still grow while starving, growing without being fed is rather magical). So almost all the variables you could want exist in the game in some form... they just aren't being used in any intuitive ways.
Pops have an age, and can decline (die), they have requirements like food and housing... but Carrying capacity lowers growth without causing decline, with no delays to anything so there can never be the boom and bust cycles seen in nature. Pops never age, they never die, they have no life-cycle, they just slowly grow. That wouldn't be a problem in itself but it's in stark contrast to a mechanic that tries to emulate nature.
All these numbers have been applied to individual planets ignoring the fact that pops can move freely between planets (requiring different equations - ones with migration and emigration, something you already had coded in... kinda... as mentioned it needed fixing not completely supplanting). The growth system doesn't properly include food, habitability, jobs, housing, housing usage and all the things that should matter.
I've suggested before, a long time ago, that the game could have simulated populations entirely if you wanted it to: Children, Elderly, non-government civilian pops etc. In that sort of situation seeing complex growth graphs would make sense, it would be a thematic simulation even if the performance costs may be excessive and the added fun rather minimal. You would have a delay between cause and effect, there would be generational cycles as periods of rapid growth in the past with lots of children lead to periods with a temporary decline in the working population as that generation all ages upwards and needs looking after or simply dies and so on. You could model reproductive strategies based on pop traits, family sizes, age, life-expectancy, you could have more non-functioning injured pops after wars and planetary devastation (depending on the life expectancy of pops), gene-clinics would be able to increase population life expectancy and be useful... if you wanted S-shaped curves all you need to have are a few simple variables (growth and death, carrying capacity, age etc.) and then put in the equations and the results should be emergent. Instead this is a lot of work to force pops to obey a pattern with poor results. (None of my games would have growth that looks like an S-shaped curve no matter what the marketing of these changes has been, my population graph would jump all over the place).
I do understand that the empire growth requirements are purely a technical limitation. It's not going to make perfect logical sense as it's applied to solve a technical problem, it's not intended to be a robust simulation, but I suspect the empire growth target growing steadily larger would FEEL completely different if it also provided a benefit instead of being a pure negative. Even a small bonus may make a difference. e.g. every pop grown adds a tiny global % pop output modifier, while total pops that exist cause the penalty. So if you conquer pops rather than grow them you lose out on the global modifier (they don't follow your traditions that have streamlined production) but you still have the growth target penalty.
I would have suggested this as a throughput modifier, but first I'd want the efficiency techs that were supposed to be throughput modifiers to actually increase efficiency rather than decreasing efficiency of resource conversion. This is something that most people don't notice currently because resources are in such abundance you don't need to care about efficiency, just that the alloy and research number gets bigger... which it does... just not very efficiently. If you actually were struggling to cover your mineral, energy, food and consumer goods costs you'd actually feel the pain as the new techs make upgraded worlds produce less output per unit of input.
Anyway, so what happens in 3.0.3?
Lets say you have a genetically modified slave species of well-fed (excess food), long-lived (lots of +5 life expectancy techs), rapid-breeders. Super-Rabbits who are fertile and robust with limited regeneration or Social Pheromones, cybernetic implants, perfectly happy and barely take up any space, benefiting from a series of advanced life-extending technologies, enjoying perfect habitability, a choice of jobs and luxury housing, living on a planet custom-made to be perfect for them with millions of times the surface area of a normal planet. But in this perfect situation they have a negative rate of change of growth, with growth rate slowing, stopping and eventually their growth rate decreasing empire-wide due to having too many pops elsewhere. (Slowing but never declining).
...While an endangered species of solitary, non-adaptive, short-lived, starving Tortoise pops in the empire next door has its pop growth increasing over time... Because those pops haven't reached the carrying capacity of the planet yet (so each new pop is increasing the total growth rate rather than decreasing it) and the empire is small enough that they aren't suffering from the same massive empire-wide malady of the first empire.
The result is that if the technologically advanced long-lived race with sexy/fertile-rabbit slaves want to fill their new Ringworld they don't actually breed new rabbit pops but instead have to regularly raid the endangered race of short-lived repugnant slow-breeding/syphilitic tortoises next door to steal them to work jobs... that's just bonkers game design that makes the young biology student in my heart cry because the maths is just so ugly.
How abundant are Jobs?
Too many jobs in general.
Too many Workers, Specialists... I was never in a position in the past few games where I felt limited by jobs. I could always easily build more sources of jobs, pops were the only real limiting factor.
Having more than 0 Clerks was too many Clerks (so I turned them all off).
Cheap Buildings and districts.
I'm hitting the mineral cap every game and selling 100+ minerals a month on the market, even more in direct empire trades, so the mineral costs in general are trivial past the first couple of years where I am actually buying minerals to cover the very first few buildings and mining stations. The price of buildings and districts only ever decreases as the game goes on with civics, traditions, planet designations and even technologies. Perhaps the technologies that increase the output of jobs should also increase the cost of buildings and districts to compensate? So with +100% job output you also have +100% building and district build costs. Not sure if it would work but it is logical at least that those advanced techs aren't completely free (and it makes building cost reduction more important).
New Buildings are extraordinarily productive.
1 building easily giving 13+ jobs if it adds a job to all the existing districts. That's too many new jobs when pop growth is now much lower by the time you get those advanced buildings.
I like that the buildings are more powerful, but it undermines the district limits and doesn't work well with lower populations per planet.
Many buildings and districts are completely unlimited now.
You can build all the alloy and researcher jobs you want on ANY planet in your empire. There is no limit at all. This is actually a problem as there is no reason to build filler jobs, no hard choices or sacrifices. It's boring. The very best jobs with the most essential output are completely unlimited in number the entire game. If those are the superhero jobs, why would I ever feel the need to build a clerk instead?
Habitats can produce industry no matter what empty spot they orbit (instead of needing mineral deposits for example giving the player a tough choice) so resourceless sites are strangely very productive (even if you have to do spreadsheets to work out how you're supposed to fill them without crippling growth).
The fact that industry and research buildings both have no limits or requirements is just as strange considering that everything else is much more constrained. Alloy/consumer goods/energy/mineral/foods buildings modify their respective districts, which are often limited in number or even availability, while habitat districts requiring a research deposit to build aren't even remotely liked to the research buildings. And industry doesn't need anything anywhere. For mechanical consistency research buildings should modify research districts, and industrial districts need some limiting factor or cap, even if it's a limiting factor that you directly control that acts as a soft-cap instead of the usual hard-cap (e.g. -5% Habitability per district, so with technologies the first few districts can be built without lowering habitability for your main race, or you can shove all your industry on a hell-planet knowing it will never get above 0% habitability no matter what you do so you can go all-in on polluting industry).
Expensive Upkeep.
The advanced buildings and districts (specifically upgraded Labs and Ringworld districts) have upkeep costs that aren't proportional with their reduced value as a source of jobs. It's better to not use them as long as you can avoid it, sadly. Plus you don't actually ever want to have planets filled, or even more than half-full in the new system, so you neither want or need those advanced buildings and the jobs they provide. (I still build them, but only on huge planets with good modifiers when I have lots of excess rare resources from starbases and deposits currently sitting idle, or I literally run out of slots to build jobs elsewhere... and then I get annoyed because the empire isn't growing as fast thanks to over-filling a couple of key worlds instead of spreading those pops around for max growth bonuses. Also putting all my eggs in one basket ended me as a machine empire when I had the crisis spawn right on top of my most productive sector that I had funnelled all the pops back to fill while my fleets were years and years away conquering pathetic AI empires).
I've suggested before having increased quality jobs provided by advanced buildings (2 Researcher vs 2 Research Directors), or more automation (Food Processing Centers upgrading to be more like Nourishment Centers rather than less like them), anything more logical than having a building that makes tractors with 20 seats so you can employ lots more farmers on the same plot of land, or a lab that now needs a horde of 100 technicians now the machines have been upgraded to require more hands to operate.
Production Levels?
Too much of almost everything, only a very small number of things are more limited now. Excess Housing
Built in excess for the carrying capacity, building slots and amenities... not because you actually need housing as an independent statistic.
Excess Amenities
Smaller population sizes have lower amenity use, amenities from rulers covers more of total amenity needs. Also the excess amenities from luxury housing is relevant now those are good. Lastly entertainers are dirt cheap and cover all needs if something did ever go wrong.
Excess Energy
Modified worker output edicts are now extremely powerful so I always run the energy edict. Also the modified Energy Nexus buildings giving lots of extra jobs means you are never limited by energy districts in the empire (forcing you to use clerks instead). Cheaper espionage in the update actually makes this worse as the one new big energy sink has gone. I was gambling away energy with traders and gifting it away when I had nothing I wanted to buy.
Excess Food
Starbase buildings now much more productive. Fewer pops meaning expenses are reduced. Job output is immense and buildings add to district job numbers... there's almost no possible way to starve or run out of farming districts in the new system.
Excess Minerals
Planet-based jobs are terrible now relative to every other job... so you'd think you'd be struggling for minerals, but that isn't the case. You can buy minerals in the early game, then gain a huge amount of extra mineral and gas income from starbase Nebula Refinery buildings and space deposits making planet-based mining and mineral-sinks like refining feel like a waste (why spend 10 minerals and a job when you could gain 10 minerals and some gas without a job?).
Excess Rare Resources
You still have space deposits, but planet deposits are now much easier to build now that you aren't limited on building slots and buildings with few jobs are good rather than bad. Extra rares now come from starbases. And there's less incentives to spend rare resources in general - worse advanced buildings, fewer advanced buildings needed thanks to fewer pops, trivial amounts needed for ship modules and for edicts so huge excess at almost all points of the game.)
Excess Consumer Goods
You can build industry anywhere you want since you aren't limited by district availability - you aren't forced to build lots of farming, mining and energy districts with the buffs to those so you have lots of room for industry everywhere and anywhere you want. Each job is more productive thanks to additional bonuses from new techs and high stability from high amenities. And since you have excess minerals you aren't limited on input either.
Excess Alloys
As above. With even fewer alloy sinks now that habitats are cheaper and crisis empires can build ships with minerals instead. Alloys are always the limiting factor to expansion, but it feels like they're easier to get now.
Excess Research
As above, but with increased output per job, increased output from anomalies (it's great anomaly rewards are relevant... mostly, some still aren't balanced like the rewards from battle debris and things), and the techs gained/pinned from stealing technology espionage actions make research more directed and fast - equivalent to +1 research alternatives each time you steal a tech so you can easily research only the techs you want in record time.
Excess Unity
There's no new unity sinks and you can still stay under admin capacity so you will, as always, get every tradition... Getting every single tradition is not a good thing. It means all races converge on one identical description - barring those with tradition swaps, those at least are more distinct because of their special traditions.
Excess Admin Cap
Bureaucrats still let you remain under the cap the entire game, gaining the cheaper research, unity and other costs. It's also a bit odd that you don't get any penalties to admin production from low habitability/CG shortages/food/energy shortages depending on the admin job upkeep for organics vs gestalts.
Excess Naval Capacity
Soldier jobs are much, much worse with the new system having fewer pops... so you'd think this would be the one resource not in excess. But you don't have to use soldier jobs at all. You can still easily increase naval capacity with techs (that come much faster now), starbases (that you have more incentives to build and increase the capacity of or even go over capacity with) and it's even cheaper to go over both starbase and naval capacity with the excess energy and alloy production (or minerals for menacing ships).
Excess Influence
My influence reserves are higher than ever thanks to: Spending less on favours (not that I ever did this before). Spending almost no upkeep on edicts - no upkeep and costs to start and stop means I'll spend a couple of hundred influence the entire game on edicts and never change them over, a smaller and smaller portion of total empire production the longer the game lasts. I can now see just how bad those technology and commercial agreements would be for me (I'd give 15 technologies in each category to gain 2/0/4 technologies) so I don't sign those as often now either. The player always has an advantage with first contact so I get a ton of free influence in the early game from those. I have cheaper habitats in games where I use habitats so can afford far more of them than I ever could (building 3 at a time my last game). I can still reach the +5 from Will to Power making influence costs almost irrelevant at that point.
Excess Codebreaking/Encryption
I've easily hit the cap in "relative codebreaking" making all other sources of codebreaking redundant. This shouldn't happen. It's frustrating to research a technology that does nothing at all but seems like it should be doing something. If I'm already at +4 relative codebreaking that tech, civic or edict doesn't make my infiltration go any faster, it doesn't raise the cap or change the difficulty. It shouldn't be as easy to hit the hard cap of relative codebreaking (I've only had it matter against some gestalts, rarely).
Limited Infiltration speed
I'm sat twiddling my thumbs watching infiltration creep up painfully slowly before I'm allowed to do anything fun or even to passively get intel. I want to be able to sink thousands of energy credits into espionage to speed it up. Or to benefit from the fact that I have far more codebreaking than the enemy has encryption and a million assets sitting idle. I want missions that cost 0 infiltration but raise infiltration speed while triggering events to pump even more resources into my infiltration (energy, influence etc). Also I want ways to reduce the infiltration lost on completing each mission... it feels odd to have no intel on an empire because you are constantly infiltrating their research and gaining assets... which technically increases your intel cap but you never reach that because doing lots of missions quickly because they're so easy to do drops infiltration down to near 0... where it stays... for years... slowly climbing back to reasonable levels only if you don't actually do any missions. I'd rather only have failed/discovered missions lower infiltration.
Also I'd suggest only capping the max infiltration but not capping the infiltration speed from relative encryption so that extra codebreaking does something. I'd also suggest a few things that increase the Base/Minimum infiltration (like assets) as well as espionage actions that can increase infiltration per month but with a cost... also tiny bug, so pathetically small I can't be bothered to take screenshots and fight the bug reporting forum to convince the QA that the issues are real... but the time to next infiltration level is actually the points to next level... it needs to be divided by the points per day to be the actual days. e.g. shows 100 days to next level when you need 100 points, even if you are actually gaining 1.4 points per day or 0.6 points per day. It's tiny but mildly annoying, more a sign that headline features weren't sufficiently tested than an actual issue itself.
Limited Trade Value
My trade value has been pathetically small in all games so far. No clerks employed at any stage because they are so horrifically bad. Fewer merchants at all points of the game now that planets don't get the extra jobs from the prosperity finisher effect (even if merchants are better when you do get some).
All the other bonus jobs haven't been adjusted to fit the lowered pop numbers. This also applies to: Portal Research Area, Cave Shroom Veins, Subterranean Contact Zone, Spore Vents etc. all of which still assume you'll have lots of pops on each planet not barely enough to get 1 extra job. The result of all that means I only have passive trade value generation and barely any active trade generation... even as a Megacorp. I actually decided to make a research federation instead of a trade federation last game... which was just... sad.
TL; DR: It's bad.
I can reach the endgame with improved performance and low habitability settings... that should be great.
But it's boring to reach the endgame, nothing is balanced and all the population growth mechanics weirdness make me sad... that's bad.
Devs, please study this entire post, especially the in-depth writeups in the spoiler buttons. It's extremely informative and enlightening. With this thread getting longer I assume devs won't read everything, especially since a lot of the feedback is rather throwaway and uninformed. So let's help curate the thread by highlighting the best and most well-researched feedback. And this is it.
I encountered some technical problems in the 3.0.3 beta. In a multiplayer match around midgame start the game crashes unexpectedly (sent multiple crash reports). I can't find the reason for that. It happens at different times and if i load the last savefile, it crashed again but always some years later. Even if the save is loaded in singleplayer i get this crash actually. I switched back to 3.0.2. Loaded the same save and no crashes happen.
