Stellaris 3.0.3 Open Beta Feedback Megathread

[Valanoir]

Final update for this game:


Galaxy Size: Large
Defining Civic: Ravenous Swarm
Civic Unlocked Via Tech: Subsumed Will (no influence cost for relocating pops)
Difficulty: Commodore
Current Pop: 3968 (3468 not counting undesirables)
Year: 2434
Ring sections: 4, total pop for ring world: 76/58/113/23, length of time ring world has been completed <50 years
Ecumenopolises: 1, total pop 35, length of time owned <30 years
Total Planets (minus planets conquered in <10 years) 94, all planets have more than 20 pop, spawning pools, clone vats, and are hive world, peak growth is 11.70 on most
Average pop gain per year is in the neighborhood of 20, more than doubled my pop in the last 100 years (since the last post)

Something worth note, once I reached about 2200 pops the game began to get unresponsive, the speed is fine but menus lag occasionally, certain pop up events can cause frame loss, going in and out of galaxy view can lag, etc. Before 3.03 never had any issues with lag on large size galaxies, did have lag on huge which is why I switched to large... would prefer to not have to go to medium as thats too small for my tastes.

 

[Spyre2k]

I think part of the reason the galaxy feels empty is because planets are too Large. I've seen some comments about if you don't like empty planets then they should lower the number of planets. This completely ignores the fact that there is a planet slider in the game for those who want more or less planets so telling people who want a lot of planets they need to reduce the number of planets isn't helpful.

As for why I think planets are too big it is because they are still scaled for the old system which means people are looking to fill them up like they did on the old system. A Size 15 planet can still get 15*8 Housing late game for 120 Pop Capacity. But jobs on buildings have also been lowered so even with 11*6 jobs for T3 R&D buildings that's 66 jobs. Now sure you can have other districts and their housing/job count is 2/3 with upgrade building which means you'll need some housing to offset it which also have building slots open for some extra jobs there. And this is a fairly small end planet as Size 20+ planets are really massive for Capacity.

Housing was so high in the old system because most late game buildings had 8 jobs in them. Also there were buildings like Clerk Center which gave even higher numbers of jobs per building because it was more about giving all those people jobs. But in the new system it's about getting more from less and lowering the number of people, yet we still have planets sized for that same number of people so of course people are going to be unhappy that they are not getting use out of all that empty space.

My solution to this is rather straight forward, lower the amount of housing that housing districts give. If instead of starting at 5 and going up to 8 they started at 2 and went to 5 it would greatly reduce the capacity on planets. I recommend 2 housing because housing gives you a building and it is effectively there to give housing to the 2 jobs that most buildings have starting out. As housing Tech increases so to does the number number of jobs in those buildings through upgrades. And while higher end buildings can give 6 jobs it's not all of them and most planets have more distracts then building slots so you should still be able to have enough housing.

As for the Clerk jobs that coming with housing which can conflict with this I say drop them. It seems clear most people turn off Clerk jobs because they don't like them so if someone wants a Clerk Build they can go with making a bunch of Commercial Zone buildings as they give a ton of clerk jobs as is.

Specialty planets like Ring Worlds, Ecco, and such I think can remain the same as they are suppose to be unique massive hub worlds with lots of population dwarfing other worlds. Plus they already got a bit of a nerf to try and bring them in line with the new lower pop economy.

But overall dropping the housing by 3 on housing districts effectively reduces the population capacity of a planet by 3*Size. So on a size 15 world that's 45 less pop the planet can support but it still can have those 66 R&D jobs with 75 Housing. And size 20+ planets will have 60 less capacity but still can reach 100+. With jobs counts being reduced in a lot of plances you are almost never gonna use all that housing and it only encourages the half empty meta for growth bonus.

 

[Cronos988]

I think part of the reason the galaxy feels empty is because planets are too Large

I think it would be fairly simple to reduce the size range of planets to, say 6-12, with rare size 15 taking the space of the current size 25 planets.

Could even keep ringworlds the same, as even with their super districts they're still way too small compared to other planets currently.

Together with housing, this should drastically reduce the number of pops in the universe without any empire growth cap.

It'd also keep one of the positive aspects that people keep mentioning, namely that planets feel "done" quicker and you don't eventually have to manage 50+ planets, almost all of which are growing and need attention.

 

[Rinin]

A couple of things about my experience with this patch.

Since in this patch it's super easy to build a lot of city districts and open a lot of space for the "cool stuff" I very often found myself looking at million starving poor and overall suffering specialists. That's because I built everything needed, but everyone decided to do the cool stuff and no one actually work the fields, power plants and all the rest uncool stuff. This update was partially aimed, if I recall correctly, to build up new colony from the get go and don't bother much with it later. In reality I found myself spending way more time keeping track of the colonies than before.


A couple of suggestions that could be incorporated to solve this and some other issues.

Add midgame production building with no population requirements. One unique main building with low ammount of worker and several buildings to improve the output of this one. For example mining facility + automatic mineshafts and it should be possible to build the mineshafts in a closed slots.
This would make rural planets more reasonable and implementing such approach would allow to transfer "uncool" jobs to automats and free up population for research and other tasks.

• It would feel natural progression from manual labor to automation.
• Players would have a means to free up the population for their ringworld regardless the pop cap.
• It will reduce the ammount of mindless clerc-drones instead of fighting the overall population, because specialists are not a problem.
• It would actually allow to prebuild small colonies from the get go in the midgame

Another suggestion in conjunction with this one - implement the pop cap differently. Not the grow reduction, but exponential coefficient on the crime or happiness. Productivity would still increase more or less linear so at the beginning it would be profitable to grow, but after the soft cap point it would be more profitable to reduce the grow and focus on efficiency/specialisation, since the crime would start to grow faster than productivity. But in this case it would be players decision and actual gameplay, not the imposed limit. Still usage of the exponent or the power function would make it the hard limit. It would also make the prison worlds and the recreation worlds necessary for the huge empires, what I would love to see in the game.

 

[YokoZar]

The AI is using the "Stop Robot/Droid Assembly" and "Discourage Growth" decisions when it is out of housing and finished building districts.

    ai_weight = {
        weight = 5
        modifier = { # don't enable if you have free housing and no city districts left to build
            factor = 0
            OR = {
                free_housing > 0
                num_free_districts = {
                    type = any
                    value > 0
                }
                has_building_construction = yes #Added since they're probably building housing
            }
        }
    }

These two decisions should be removed from the game, as they don't make any sense in the new pop growth system due to automatic resettlement.

 

[Jarolleon]

The empire wide pop growth modifier being reduced does make it less annoying than in 3.0, but the core issue isn't resolved. I think I know of a game with a pop growth mechanism that elegantly solves the tall vs. wide issue. The current system, despite the cap, still encourages you to settle every habitable planet as fast as possible because each planet you own grows pops at a roughly similar rate due to the base growth rate mechanic.

In Medieval II: Total War you get a percentage growth rate every turn which works like compound interest, influenced by things like the governor's chivalry, how populous the city is already, the level of trade in the region, the fertility of the farmland &c. &c. Even the Black Death is rolled into this system, slapping a huge negative to the percentage growth so that infected cities exponentially decline instead. If this were taken fully to Stellaris (a half-baked attempt was already made with logistic pop growth) you would of course have to change which factors affect the percentage due to the setting not being medieval, but it could work per-planet quite similarly if you swap "turn" with "month". This would reduce the need to colonise every planet as fast as possible because your overall growth rate is tied to the number of pops you have more than the territory you possess, but you'd still want to colonise to avoid the maluses from approaching carrying capacity (this is called "Squalor" in Medieval II) and to acquire more resources and building slots.Early stage colonies would be primarily driven by immigration rather than the mysterious "base growth rate" as it is now, but would soon benefit from the high percentages afforded by the land of opportunity. Paradox has done something similar with Victoria II, though without the squalor mechanics IIRC.

It may get slightly immersion-breaking if the growth selector picks a minority species, which somehow factors the sum of all species on the planet into its growth rate, but I wouldn't be hopeful enough to imagine per-species pop growth on every planet (it would be amazing if combined with this system).

 

[StoobH]

I played through with fanatic purifiers to see how things go when you can only grow your own pops.

First off, I love the logistic growth model. I love it.

Growth in early game is good, now that I know how to set up the starting planet as a colony feeder I get enough pops to grow at a very reasonable rate.

Making new high-growth planets is a fun game that lets you control how your growth rate is going for a long time, it doesn't feel like you suddenly hit the wall on growth, and even as a purifier I was able to get 4x the population of my neighbors during the midgame.

Midgame is great. Absolutely no problems filling the planets I wanted to fill. I also love how a planet you set up as a dinky outpost in the early days remains an outpost, it really lets you craft your little space empire (as opposed to before Dick when every planet would become overcrowded eventually).

I got my only ecumenopolis in midgame, by converting the first league's relic world and making it my new capitol. I had no problems filling it, it grew quickly on its own, there were always spare clerks lying around to be resettled, and if I ignored it for a while to go play space battles then unemployed people from outpost planets would just migrate over on their own.

I did hit a wall in end game.

By the time I was breaking into the L cluster and fighting the first nemesis (I was the second nemesis) I had a population of ~1000 (default settings map). ~100-150 years later after completely purifying the galaxy and just before hitting the big red button I had a population of ~1400. I colonized every planet in the L-cluster and got basically nothing out of them but the colonist jobs and a roboticist. They may have felt weak as a self fulfilling prophesy though because growing them was so hard and resettling people to them so time consuming that I mostly ignored them and they may have just been feeding their slow, slow growth to my bigger planets. Making new colonies in endgame definitely felt pointless.

Overall growth wise this felt like a huge upgrade relative to before the beta. In 3.0.2 I was having that problem in midgame and had to resort to workarounds to fill my planets like abusing the vassal system.

Having a population growth crash in end game is fine, I guess. I mean, in this game the fate of the universe was already very, very clear during the midgame, so population growth in end game was more of a "sim city" goal than a strategy goal. Like, one ecumenopolis and a dyson sphere is all you need to take on a fallen empire, and population becoming less important than wonders as you turn them into robots or transcend or what have you feels reasonable enough. Definitely tracks with how fallen empires go the way they are...

That said even after conquering the entire galaxy it would be nice to be able to have an end-end-game that lets you keep playing the empire building "sim city" you get to do at the start. Like, the game is over at that point so the stakes are pretty low, restricting growth any further just makes it like all that's left to do is wait for the game to end.

I think having a maximum growth cost or a growth cost that plateaus based on galaxy size (to a level that you only typically hit in end game) would be a good compromise for people looking to build a galaxy wide empire. Especially if later on we got some techs, buildings, or edicts that let you bring it down a little bit so you feel you have control over it.

 

[Kamis51]

I am more concern about districts specially housing ones was not adjusted properly to new pop grow ps empire wide in my opinion its wrong idea its penalty for new colony with no reason for me more sens have s curve logistic grow per individual planet cap

 

[lukamjedi]

I feel like there are other ways to balance pops other than slowing growth. I would be completely fine with the growth being slowed if there was a hard limit somewhere, but as it stands, the endgame/lategame just feels really bad. A lot of the fun for me comes out of watching planets fill up and generating an ever larger amount of resources, and that just doesn't happen anymore. Sure, it is possible, but it doesn't feel good, or fun. It's waiting for a number to tick up, and the only way for that to be fun is if the number ticks up faster and faster (which is how clicker games survive).

There has got to be a better way to do this. Maybe only update pops whenever something changes on the planet, or group them together to make calculations faster. While this wouldn't work with jobs, it would work with the pop's ethics and happiness. Instead of all pops updating all the time, they would only update when another pop grows on a planet, someone resettles, etc. which would save a lot of resources and make the game run faster. I remember a game pre patch where I kept on getting new factions that would disappear instantly because enough pops would follow the ideals of that faction, and then switch back. I don't know if they changed this, but the game was constantly calculating what disposition each pop should have, and factoring in the chance that they would change.

Maybe the game already does this. I don't know how to code, and I certainly don't know how to analyze code. I have a lot of trust built up for the devs because expansion after expansion has been good, and this is really the only problem I have with the game that is not nitpicking.
Maybe these changes would require a massive rewrite of existing code, and paradox is not willing to fund that. But I would not recommend the game in its current state to my friends. I trust the devs to come up with a good solution to this eventually, with a lot of thought and effort put into it.
Hell, i wouldn't mind reverting to the old system while they spend a lot of time finding a better solution which would be included in the next expansion (which I'd definitely buy)

But the game in its current state just isn't as fun to play, and that is a problem.

 

[Stardance]

A Tale of Two Conquests

Relevant settings: A large galaxy with 1.5 tech speed and 1.5 planets on Captain level. Standard number of empires. No mods.

I started as a militarist egalitarian xenophile. I was hoping for peaceful expansion, but prepared for war if a big bad happened to be close by. And there was - a driven assimilator started nearby. So I did a save and decided to see how well 3.0.3 handled a rush conquest by a comparatively inexperienced player (I am not a pro). Building up the fleet went fine, 30 ships and 6 transports did the job very nicely. I built an alloy plant building, and that gave me the alloy production edge I needed. I also built a stronghold for two soldier jobs to get the extra naval capacity (I didn't want to spend alloys on starbases since I wanted to get the war started ASAP).

Now while I was doing this, they had built up to I think 24 ships, but they were also settling a gold mine of colonies in their vicinity, 6 new planets plus their homeworld. None of them were very productive by the time I invaded. I basically made a bee-line for their capital.

This is where it gets interesting.

The first time, I didn't pay close attention to the colonies, and I took the rural colonies first. I blew past my admin cap in record time (unity and tech ground to a halt), and, weird for egalitarian, I had to turn on forced settlement so I could relocate pops to the planets. Automatic resettlement doesn't work fast enough when purging machines, when left to the AI. I literally lost a colony through purges that was compatible with my homeworld pops before I noticed, and enacted the policy to transfer a citizen to the others as I invaded.

Still, not bad. 5 new planets plus their homeworld. Oh that homeworld was a headache. There were 10 or so cybernetic pops on the homeworld, so I didn't have to resettle there and start from scratch, but (without tinkering) that homeworld literally crashed my economy. All 10 auto-promoted themselves to the empty specialist jobs, so I was saddled with suddenly high resource consumption and no resource production. Demoting took FOREVER, and if I unemployed them for demotion, they weren't producing goods I could sell on the market until they demoted. It took me ages to repair the damage, and I was pretty near broke by the end. I even started selling alloys, it was that bad. So. No tech. No unity. And no resources. Why did I conquer them again?

The second time, I reloaded to the start of the war. This time I didn't take the rural colonies first, I took the capital first. Then (through hard earned experience) I immediately set all the specialist jobs to 0 and turned off all the relevant buildings. This was before more than a day or two passed, certainly before the end of the month. And something unexpected happened. All those pops switched fairly quickly to workers! Faster than normal demotion time, maybe at the turn over of the month, I'm not sure, but fast. I had to keep the specialist jobs zeroed out, and I had to make sure I didn't take the rural colonies too quickly (replaced the stronghold with an admin building), but this time - it felt manageable and rewarding.

Now, as I've been developing for the past decade or so, there's some interesting patterns of development. I left the rural colonies rural. I had all this already built infrastructure on the conquered homeworld that needed to be filled, so I did zero development on the rural colonies and they migrated to the conquered homeworld. It is slow, but it works.

What is interesting is that conquered homeworld had HUGE emigration. I mean it ticks forward at 0.23 pop growth, despite having lots of housing and carrying capacity. It is because the game's built in migration system is pushing pops from it to the rural colonies, where ironically, the pops are being formed and migrating back to the homeworld where the actual jobs are. The two systems are fighting against each other.

I think it would be more logical if pop growth was tied to available jobs, maybe in addition to housing capacity, but definitely jobs. I'm desperately trying to fill this homeworld, and the two population growth systems (migration and capacity) are butting heads against each other.

I also think there should be something in place that helps keep a player from purging the last pop from a conquered planet before one of your pops can arrive, especially for egalitarians. If the resettlement policy had been locked in cooldown, I would have been screwed. As is, I may have to re-enact that policy again in the future when I go up against hive minds / other machine empires / etc.

Overall, enjoying the pacing.

Thank you for all of your hard work!

 

[Acenoid]

How about this:
The goal is to simulate less pops in the game to make numbers feasible. So we have to reduce jobs and planets to a bearable number.
1. During galaxy creation the game has to ensure that the sum of all habitable and terraformable worlds incl. techs will not exeed the foreseen max number. So the planet sizes will be distributed accordingly. This will eliminate the lag at the endgame for good and lead to smaller planets I assume. Don't forget FEs, named planets etc.

2. Allocate / Reduce the number of jobs / housing / bombing limitations (x pop protected etc) accordingly.

2b. I don't know if it would hit the performance again, but maybe it would be feasible that buildings provide jobs for a fraction of 1 pop. This also adds into interesting scenarios where you could always have a little unemployment and live with it. (maybe this suggestion is not really straight forward / intuitive but i like it at least). The player would get the feeling that 1 pop is still A lot! Also it will make jobs more precious again. Same for housing.

3. Allow for a bit faster / easier elimination of pops from the game, via purge etc. Maybe add a fleet command to blockade and reduce a colony to rubble on a system wide level, so you dont have to micromanage all those habitats in a system?

4. For tall empires that have reached their capacity, there could be some bonus for "non-growth". So X days w/o productivity = Y % bonus to production maxing out sometime. Could also add an ascension perk to optimize this further.

5. Suggested it previously, but I wanted to add it again, maybe reduce the number of calculations for the pops from daily to "whatever is feasible". Simulates that it takes time that events have an effect. Things like bombings / certain events could still trigger a manual re-calculation? All mechanics that are are demanding on a pop level and are happening frequently should be checked, to ensure all non critical stuff is just done less often. E.g. would it be really a problem if the faction / ethics of your pop recalculate only monthly / quartely or even less? Could be explained that your reports are basically the results from "last month"

 

[ded_yaga]

The main issue is still here - at some point you stop growing. Nihilistic acquisition has always been a good choice but now it's a must (or slave market).

Ravenous swarm that stopped growing is nonsense.

Early-to-mid feels even too fast in 3.0.3, booming. As terravore i was barely able to build new districts in time. It was quite lucky spawn with over 10 planets in reach but... booming lithoids?

Mid-to-end feels the same, nothing has changed principally. Useless ringworld and endless stagnation or endless wars just to abduct pops.

Endgame economy was fine in 3.0.2 but now even stronger.

 

[DC E1G]

I haven't gotten far enough in my 3.0.3 game to comment on the growth changes, but from my limited experience, the slower first contact process feels much better. I would really appreciate a different sound effect for the notifications though, it feels wrong to have it be the same one as for dig sites.

 

[Egodeus]

My 2 cents from playing the beta:
- The modifications to crisis menace point generation were welcome. I was looking at the long road of generating 5k more menace to get to level 5, but with the change I got there in no time.
- The espionage rebalancing seems to have gone well, I haven't really paid enough attention to see if the at least one insight fail or pass per roll bug was fixed though.
- Population growth is still a problem. Even though the penalties were lessened, my machine empire is just not growing, at all. Then again I'm not really paying it so much attention now as I have more than enough to do with eating stars and getting production from megastructures, but I could be producing a lot more if I could just get enough pops to my planets.

 

[der.mo]

It’d be just dandy if you guys made a whole new pop system that wasn’t horribly draining on performance instead of these huge pop growth changes for the sole purpose of late game performance that harms so much more than it benefits.

They could just massivly increase the output of the pops especially on lategame structures like Ring worlds or Ecumenopoli (and also haitats!) while reducing their number. This would make these Structures also feel more advanced since they would seem highly automated...

 

[Hellioning]

I don't know if it's a bug or not, but my pop growth keeps resetting completely. If that's intentional it seems like a really annoying way to do things.

 

[KopiG]

One game was plenty enough to try out this new system where more pop growth cap (Im at around 312 in my current game which I now abandoned) is needed for subsequent pops. This is an abomination. Might check back in 1-2 years again.

 

[Mewnine]

I've tested one game in 3.0.3 so far. This might be a bit excessive but I might as well tell a bit about the run:
Setup:
Ideology: Xenophobe, Fanatic materialist
Goverment: Oligarchic
Civics: Technocracy Meritocracy
Intelligent, Natural Engineers, Rapid Breeders, Unruly, Weak
Shattered Ring

Ruleset: Medium galaxy, Spiral (4 Arms). End-Game Start year 2350 instead of 2500. Commodore Scaling Difficulty. All other settings as default.

Reason for this setup: Strong science setup, but limited habitability, so I shouldn't have a ton of colonies. I wanted to leave my options for war open, but my original plan was to mostly remain passive and expand in my own space, only going to war when I would have been cut off too badly.

Early game:
The run itself started off with some luck. A Gaia planet inhabited by natives was only 5 systems away, so my first colony was a bit sooner than I expected. Naturally, gaia preference, so that didn't open up any other planets and I decided to prevent my 4 new friends from breeding any further (extremely adaptive on gaia preference and slow breeders is possibly the worst combination of species traits I've seen in a while) I got the grunur as my precursors, which meant I could now set up at least one world every 10 years. Which is a huge boost to my build. It looked like I would have about half of an outer arm of the galaxy for myself. As both fallen empires blocked other entrances into it. I went for robotic ascension. The holy guardians did spawn though, so early robot would have been a little too suicidal.

Mid game/Late game:
I set up my first ecumenopolis about 80 years in. It's great that we can use industrial districs instead of city districs for that, good stuff. It didn't get close to filling up though, so it felt a bit mediocre. I started repairing 2 ring world parts. But my homeworld ring wasn't even close to full. Around 120 years in, even with 2 small planets capping out and tossing some pops around to other worlds, the game started to slow down significantly. Megastructures allowed me to retool to an industrial district focus rather than basic energy and minerals on my existing plents. But any growth here was not from population, and planet management was dead at this point. For me It felt like it held out about 20 years longer. At this point I figured I'd rush to an end, the crisis wasn't coming for another 80 years at best. So I went for my first nemesis run. The khan woke up a few years after picking up the ascencion perk, and woke up next to a gateway. Destroying the khan alone got me to crisis level 4 due to all of the tiny ships. I spent the rest of the game fighting off the fallen empires and the galactic community. I did have fun ending the game this way. I don't think it'll be much fun the second time around, but that's fine. What is not fine, is that especially after conquering some Fallen empire worlds with their huge pop number, there was nothing more to do economy wise. Most of my time as the crisis, was just fleet management.



The experience:
This version is doing some good things to balance on overall. Which I'm glad to see.
Lowered pop numbers for capital buildings means we can get some properly specialized planets set up again.
Civic changes to involve some more additions to espionage are great, I've been spying a lot during the game, the reduced cost made me feel it was worth it most of the time now. Or at least fun enough to use. Even with an espionage focus, I don't think it impacted the actual game too much though.


For the specifically requested feedback:
Jobs:
Jobs aren't really an issue for me in this update. I do have to say that I just turn clerks off entirely, as they are much worse than they were before. I like the resettlement feature, and I did make use of that a few times over the course of the game. The earlier capital building unlocks made some jobs a bit more accesable, which is neat.

Production levels:
Production levels feel off, but not entirely in a bad way. Many of the changes in 3.0 gave other ways too obtain resources other than basic production. those changes were probably balanced over a smaller pop count, which means setting up an economy to create megastructures has become easier. However, I don't think that's such a bad thing.

Pop growth:
Early game pop growth feels fine, perhaps a little too quick but I don't think that's a bad thing.
Population used to become an issue for me in the midgame, this time around, it was alright, it was slowing down, but my first ecumenopolis still felt useful.

Late game:
For me, even with pops that can only live on Habitats/ecumenopoli/relic/gaia/ring worlds. The empire wide malus still brought the economic game to a crawl at a point in time where with default settings, there is still 125 years to casually pick my nose before the crisis can occur. One ecumenopolis is cool, but beyond the first they are barely useful. If you happen to find a single relic world, the ascension perk is probably not worth taking. Ring worlds still can't grow to a point where they feel useful, if you already created an empire that is able to build them.

In early and midgame, the population growth seems a bit too fast with the current adjustment from 0.5 to 0.25. But in the late game, it's excruciatingly slow and getting significantly worse with every pop, which is smothering my enjoyment there. Rather than a linear formula, I would much rather see something akin to this:

 

[Artificial Idea]

I'm not sure if this is related to changes made in the beta but I'm 125 years into a game and there isn't a single federation. There's obviously some randomness going on here but I've never seen this before.

 

[Snoipah]

Guess who's back, back again.

Wife has given me some free time to play stellaris again.

I have two things to advise:

1: Give us a habitat button. With the last pop to remove costing 200 influence, habitats are even more annoying to clear out. This alone will help the lag from pop growth, not the pop growth changes.

2: Turn off empire-wide pop growth debuff. This is just silly and everyone is just going to mod it out. In fact, turn off the debuff from planet pop-size, cause clone vats provide me 3 points to pop growth compared to the .6 I get normally.

Just, do something else besides messing with pop growth to fix lag.

Revert to pre-Nemesis and Cut planet size in half or something.