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Hi all!

As mentioned last week, our plan for today is to go over some changes to automated colony management and pop resettlement. As a reminder, these are still under development, and as such may undergo significant changes and won't be going live for quite some time.

Major goals here were to reduce the micromanagement burden in the mid to late game when individual decisions are less oppressive, and to significantly decrease the need to manually move pops at all. As with the economic changes we were discussing before, a lot of this is still a work in progress to varying degrees.

Automated Colony Management

Some sector management improvements have already been made in the 2.8.1 test branch (you can experiment and leave feedback on it by following the instructions in this thread), but here we’ll be focusing on planetary designations and individual planet automation.

A major pass has been done on automated colony management to improve its effectiveness. After manually setting a colony designation and turning on automated colony management, our intent is for the colony to develop into something you would reasonably expect if you were building it on your own. It should build districts, clear deposits as necessary, and upgrade buildings when there is a need for it.

Planet automation will upgrade capital buildings whenever possible (gotta unlock those building slots!), and will otherwise generally try to build or upgrade from its list if there are less than 3 open jobs. We’ve erred a bit on the side of caution, so it is currently extremely opposed to running deficits. It may require manual intervention if, for example, your energy credits per month are negative, but we figured it was better to leave those sorts of risky economic decisions in the player’s hands.

Code:
automate_foundry_hive_planet = {
    available = {
        has_designation = col_foundry
        owner = { has_authority = auth_hive_mind }
        free_jobs < 3
        has_building_construction = no
    }

    prio_districts = {
        district_industrial
    }

    buildings = {
        1 = {
            building = building_hive_capital
        }

        2 = {
            building = building_spawning_pool
        }

        3 = {
            building = building_clone_vats
        }

        4 = {
            building = building_hive_node
            available = {
                owner = {
                    hive_node_upkeep_affordable = yes
                }
                num_buildings = { type = building_hive_node value = 0 }
            }
        }

        5 = {
            building = building_foundry_1
            available = {
                owner = {
                    foundry_1_upkeep_affordable = yes
                }
            }
        }

        6 = {
            building = building_galactic_memorial_1
            available = {
                owner = {
                    has_valid_civic = civic_hive_memorialist
                }
                NOR = {
                    has_building = building_galactic_memorial_1
                    has_building = building_galactic_memorial_2
                    has_building = building_galactic_memorial_3
                }
            }
        }

        7 = {
            building = building_betharian_power_plant
        }

        8 = {
            building = building_mote_harvesters
        }

        9 = {
            building = building_crystal_mines
        }

        10 = {
            building = building_gas_extractors
        }

        11 = {
            building = building_chemical_plant
            available = {
                num_buildings = { type = building_chemical_plant value = 0 }
            }
        }

        12 = {
            building = building_hive_node
            available = {
                owner = {
                    hive_node_upkeep_affordable = yes
                }
                num_buildings = { type = building_hive_node value < 2 }
            }
        }

    }
}

This script will attempt to build a forge world for a hive empire. If there are less than 3 free jobs and there is nothing currently in the build queue, it will check to see if there is anything that it can build. Planetary automation has a tendency to favor districts over buildings, but will construct buildings if there are 1.5 times as many districts already built than there are buildings. (This ratio is able to be set in 00_defines.txt as COLONY_AUTOMATION_DISTRICT_PREFERENCE.) When selecting a building, it will move down the list until it finds something that it is capable of building and meets the scripted restrictions. The building’s upkeep is always taken into consideration. The scripted “_affordable” checks are to estimate whether you can afford the jobs it creates as well.

Blockers are fairly low priority for planetary automation, and will only be cleared if they are blocking a district slot that it actively wants to construct, or if there are no free district slots remaining. (Thus it will eventually clear all those random blockers once the rest of the planet is finished.) You can, of course, intervene and clear those Sprawling Slums or sleepy Lithoids earlier.

Buildings (other than the capital) will be upgraded if there are no other things that it wants to build right now, it can upgrade without causing resource deficits, and there are pops available that would want to work there. (Either because they’re unemployed or they prefer it to their current jobs.)

The scripts will attempt to handle various issues that may crop up on a planet such as low amenities, high crime, or failure to build buildings dedicated to extra-dimensional beings that love you and just want to be loved in return. These are tucked away in 00_crisis_exceptions.txt.

Code:
automate_amenity_management = {
    available = {
        free_amenities <= -5
        owner = {
            NOR = {
                has_authority = auth_machine_intelligence
                has_authority = auth_hive_mind
            }
        }
        OR = {
            NOT = { uses_district_set = city_world }
            free_district_slots = 0
            has_resource = { type = exotic_gases amount < 75 }
        }
    }

    crisis = yes

    buildings = {
        holo = {
            building = building_holo_theatres
            available = {
                owner = {
                    is_spiritualist = no
                    is_megacorp = no
                }
            }
        }

        temple = {
            building = building_temple
            available = {
                owner = {
                    is_spiritualist = yes
                    is_megacorp = no
                }
            }
        }

        commerce = {
            building = building_commercial_zone
            available = {
                owner = {
                    is_megacorp = yes
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

This "exception" will intervene if a planet’s amenities are -5 or below, and it’s either not an ecumenopolis or if it is an ecumenopolis, it’s either totally full or you’re running low on exotic gases. Based on your ethics and authority, it’ll pick one of the amenity buildings to add to the queue.

A few jobs, buildings, and planet designations have gotten a bit of a touch-up during this pass. Notable examples of designations include the Urban World, which now has a Trade Value bonus, and the Colony, which is now intended to satisfy the needs of a newly colonized world rather than provide pop growth bonuses.

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1605094456491.png

Urban and Colony Designations

The old Colony bonus was changed because it was a bit problematic - growth bonuses made it somewhat stronger than many other more specialized bonuses. We’d greatly prefer if you could flag that newly settled Mining World as such right away and immediately turn on automation, rather than it being optimal to manually develop the world until it reached 5 pops and no longer qualified for Colony.

Due to its inherent terror of deficits, the automation scripts tend to be a little bit more conservative than players may be, but I’ve personally enjoyed the dramatically reduced mental burden my mid to late game colonies require. It’s also convenient that several designations (such as Forge, Factory, Tech, and Urban) will build out colonies that qualify for the Arcology Project decision. In our dev multiplayer games, I've been making a point of using colony automation as much as possible in order to give everyone else a chance get a feel for what it's doing. (Except my capital. I'll admit that I do manually build that so I can take care of sudden shifts in priority.)

If you're using planetary automation but it doesn't seem to be doing anything, the three most common things to check are:
  • Is the colony in a Sector?
    • Colonies have to be in a (non-Frontier) Sector in order to use either sector or planetary automation.
  • Am I running an energy deficit?
    • Most districts and buildings have energy upkeep. While it's possible for the district or building to theoretically produce enough energy to overcome that and help work off the current deficit, the automation scripts are as light as possible and without deeper analysis can't assume that pops moving into those jobs wouldn't worsen the shortage. Manual intervention is necessary to dig out of an energy crunch.
  • Do I have resources in the automation pool for it to use?
    • There's a notification for this, but if the pool is running low it might not be able to afford whatever it is it wants to build. Remember, you can hold Ctrl to change the units moved from hundreds to thousands.
      1605096055953.png

      Save mouse-clicks, use Ctrl.

Resettlement

Manual resettlement and the mitigation of unemployment is a huge burden in mid to late game Stellaris. It is generally our belief that manual resettlement should be an extremely rare occurrence, not something done expected to be done as part of the core game loop. When you must, it should be a simple process, but it should be an unusual act.

One quality of life change we’ve made is to filter Unemployed pops up to the top, and highlighted them. The pops underneath are then sorted from lowest stratum to highest.

1605096681033.png

You're unlikely to see this specific scenario unless you intentionally create unemployment problems by turning off jobs in every pop strata.

We've also adjusted resettlement costs, and added an Influence cost to many pop types. These influence costs are nominal for worker tier pops, but get fairly expensive when you're forcing Rulers to move.

1605097705361.png
1605096840037.png

Slave Resettlement and Worker/Drone/Bio-Trophy Resettlement

1605097458581.png
1605097513050.png

Specialist Resettlement and Ruler Resettlement


Slaves and unintelligent robots can still be moved without expending Influence, and certain civics permit you to waive these Influence costs.

1605096949504.png
1605097021942.png
1605097088504.png

Hey wait, what's that about colony abandonment?

Despite their best efforts the Servitors still haven't found a good way to get their Bio-Trophies to shift their consciousness to a different planet using OTA updates, so you still have to pay for them.

Manually resettling the last pop off a colony you own carries an additional influence surcharge in our dev builds. There will very likely be an exception made for Doomed planets and Holy Worlds that are risking initiating a war with a Fallen Empire. A planetary decision to abandon a recently conquered planet is under consideration, though it'll likely use displacement purging to do so. (With the diplomatic penalties associated with it.)

1605097811856.png

But we just finished building it!

With Federations, we introduced a galactic resolution in the Greater Good line that provided limited automated resettlement called Greater Than Ourselves. As noted by some, that was partially intended as a means to allow Egalitarian leaning empires a way of handling resettlement without forcing it on their pops. There have been many requests to make that core game functionality, but we’ve been somewhat wary of doing so without some restrictions.

We've come up with a way for every empire to have easier access to a similar effect. The following new Starbase Building will handle it, unlocked by the Hyperlane Breach Points tech. (The Hyperlane Registrar has moved to Interstellar Economics.)

1605098298007.png

They like to move it.

1605098342337.png

The tooltip effect is a bit of a mouthful.

The Transit Hub will operate as a limited variant of Greater Than Ourselves, moving unemployed low strata pops between planets that are in systems with Transit Hubs. (This will allow movement within a system as well, for example if you have a bunch of habitats in a single system.) We're investigating ways to expand the scope of pops it's willing to move - the original Worker limitation was put into place because while a Worker could promote themselves to fill any free job, a Slave or Specialist might find themselves restricted from the free job on the new planet. We're currently experimenting with a more robust variant - if it works out without performance concerns, the Transit Hub will prioritize high strata unemployment and then move down the ranks.

Building out the Transit network does function best when you have a developed starbase above most of your colonies since it will only move pops between nodes on the network.

Tangentially related, we've also cut demotion time in half across the board, and made some changes to give each Authority type a unique bonus.

1605098685353.png

Yes, Shared Burdens pops demote pretty much instantly.

We have some other experimental changes going on that have significant effects on the number of unemployed pops in the late game, but we're not ready to talk about them quite yet.

The empire type that perhaps faced the most obnoxious burden of frequent manual resettlement were Terravores, the Lithoid Devouring Swarms. When devouring planets, they occasionally created pops on the consumption world. As a quality of life improvement, when they’ve finished the planet off we now resettle them back to the capital. (Since gestalts can also use the Transit Hub, I highly recommend that Terravores build one in their main system to send those drones someplace where they can be of use.)

Oh, and we also clear that pesky red habitability planet marker from completely consumed planets that was unnecessarily cluttering your map.

1605094492379.png

HP/MP restored! ...But you're still hungry.

As a reminder, we have an ongoing feedback thread related to AI improvements we have in beta on the stellaris_test branch. We'd love to get more people on it and telling us what they think about them. (Please note that 2.8.1 is an optional beta patch. You have to manually opt in to access it. Go to your Steam library, right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> betas tab -> select "stellaris_test" branch.)

Next week we plan on going through some more of the remaining economic balance changes. See you then!
 
I disagree with Empire-wide pop growth. It would make expansion and being proactive much, much, much worse, and heavily favour those who turtle or idle. Also, I disagree with your rationale that most people would default towards the core worlds. The American frontier and how it was settled as well as many other examples in human history show this isn't really how things go.


I'm not going to lie, this sounds terrible. It sounds like it would grind the game to a complete halt. Making pop growth even slower than it already is.
I hope you don't mind me theorycrafting Empire-Wide growth to see if it's quite as bad as you fear.

It's going to be difficult to balance settling 10 planets vs settling 1 and obviously settling 10 should be the far stronger position. But here's how I could see empire-wide growth working in a way that doesn't feel as punishing as you imagine:
Total growth = Base growth + Growth from excess food
Local growth = Total growth spread between planets, starting with highest immigration pull, with planets trying to take a minimum of 0.1, then 3 growth.

1. Own two identical planets, have base +5 pop growth.
2. Less room for agricultural districts (some converted to industry, less food deposits available)
3. Have +20 excess food with 40 consumed, that's converted to +20/40, or +50% extra from food, or +2.5 growth
4. Total growth is 7.5, or 3.75 growth/world

1. Own 10 identical planets, have +5 pop growth
2. More agricultural districts available (5x more though you wont be using all of them, instead the benefit will be from agricultural planet designations on planets with modifiers like titanic beasts to take advantage of, or captured livestock to eat)
3. Have +80 excess food, that's converted to +80/40, or +200%, or +10 extra growth
4. Total growth is 15, or 1.5/world, split into 3/3/3/3/2.5/0.1/0.1/0.1/0.1/0.1

My vision for global growth isn't so much to nerf wide empires, but instead to make food a critical resource again, and to give players the ability to push pop growth in a way that is much less dependent on the absolute number of settled worlds or require mass resettling all the time.
(With diminishing returns for excess food, a soft cap where each additional +% growth step requires more food than the last.
If you have 50 pops the first 50 food gives +100% growth, the next +100% growth step requires 100 food, then 200, then 400. So you could have +750 food giving +400% growth or +20 pop growth).

Mechanical pop growth could use the same mechanic, but growth would be allocated in reverse order - the planets with lower organic growth first. For a planet to receive any robot growth could require a Robot Assembly Plant, but each plant could give diminishing returns (1 job = 4 growth, 3 jobs = 8 growth, 7 jobs = 12 growth, 15 jobs = 16 growth, 31 jobs = 20 growth).

The Advantages:
Less need to manually Resettle pops
Pop growth is still a valid strategy
Food is useful again
Pop growth slows with extremely high pop count rather than increasing with it (performance benefit)
Buff to barbaric despoilers / nihilistic acquisition (farming empires for pops would be powerful)
Nerf to wide empires

Disadvantages:
Shifts the optimal growth from spamming planets to spamming empires. 10 x 1 planet vassals would grow 10x faster than 1 empire with 10 planets (illogical and encourages liberation/integration shenanigans)
Pop growth slows with extremely high pop count rather than increasing with it (not logical)
Buff to barbaric despoilers / nihilistic acquisition (farming empires for pops would be powerful)
Buff to federations / small empires / Turtling empires
Nerf to wide empires

I'm not sure if half the changes are advantage, disadvantages or just different. As I said before, I'm not completely sold on the merits of any particular growth system. I like the idea of the system being simple, clear and straightforward, not to encourage mindless expansion and for food to play a role. But beyond that I don't really mind.

I really need to try the carrying capacity mod... oddly the one thing that put me off was reading this:
"Free district slots count as 10 potential housing (2 more than you could get from a max tech city district), meaning that as you develop a planet its capacity will decrease, especially if you build non-city districts."
I didn't like that building housing would counter-intuitively reduce the effective housing... it seemed to massively buff growth on new worlds that are full of horrible nasty tile blockers. Although that does mean that clearing Dangerous Animals and other blockers does exactly what I want and increases growth... so that's probably a positive and not quite as negative as I assumed at first glance.

I think part of my problem is how easy it is to ignore tile blockers in the current game for all those worlds you can settle. The AI build order will only ever clear them when it prevents it from being able to build a building or district. That feels wrong to me... it's odd how low-priority dealing with Dangerous Wildlife and Radioactive Wastlands is in the game. If the American frontier involved settling down in a post-apocalyptic hellscape (like Fallout 4) with lethal radiation and roaming Radscorpions... I honestly think it should have significantly less growth than a safe spot with no natural hazards.

Well, if it scaled with Galaxy Size, it would need to be 20 for Huge maps or 0.8 for tiny maps. Still not certain I would pick it. Tying starbases to pops/economy seems like a more sensible fix. That way planets would unlock their own starbase.
One way to scale it would be for Grasp the Void to change from "+5 Starbase Cap" to:
Starbases no longer count against Capacity in populated systems
 
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It's still very much in flux. Some of our experiments have included things like adjusting the amount of growth required to build pops, to applying S-shaped logistic growth curves (the wonderful Carrying Capacity mod on the workshop implements something very similar to one of the experiments), but pretty much all of them significantly reduce the number of pops that exist in the galaxy in the late game. (With major economic effects arising from that as well.)
Frankly speaking, that would probably be the best news we've gotten in literal years.




The changes proposed in the DD are neat and all, but ultimately only treat symptoms. What needs changing is the fundamental power creep loop.

More colonies is more pops.
More pops is more power.
More power is more colonies.
More colonies is more pops.

And yet:

More colonies is more micro.
More pops is more micro.
More colonies is worse performance.
More pops is worse performance.


This leads to the bizarre situation that the better a player plays the game, the less enjoyable the game is to play.
 
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The current system of pop growth is very good. Just look at Distant Worlds, where population grows realistically. The result is that until the end of the game no other planet but the homeworld matters economically. And if you resettle billions off world, you'd have not even that.
 
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My vision for global growth isn't so much to nerf wide empires, but instead to make food a critical resource again, and to give players the ability to push pop growth in a way that is much less dependent on the absolute number of settled worlds or require mass resettling all the time.
This.
Nerf to wide empires
And this are in direct contradiction towards one another.

As for the rest. It's a horribly convoluted way to pretty much "nerf" wide Empires for absolutely no good reason beyond wanting "tall" to be better than it currently is. Disregarding the state of the game, how painfully slow pop growth already is, how planets and pops only really take off in the mid-game, how crucial a resource they are, and how lowering growth even further would have ripple effects throughout the entire game and its balance.

Also, a direct buff to Fan Mat/Synths btw. Because they can still massively increase their pop growth via assembly plants.

Mechanical pop growth could use the same mechanic, but growth would be allocated in reverse order - the planets with lower organic growth first. For a planet to receive any robot growth could require a Robot Assembly Plant, but each plant could give diminishing returns (1 job = 4 growth, 3 jobs = 8 growth, 7 jobs = 12 growth, 15 jobs = 16 growth, 31 jobs = 20 growth).
This, makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. At this point, you throw out logic, internal consistency, RP, and everything else to try and somewhat reign in the advantages your new system would give to Fan Mat/synths. With a change, nobody could reasonably explain as to why it would work that game beyond "something, something, game balance".

One way to scale it would be for Grasp the Void to change from "+5 Starbase Cap" to:
Starbases no longer count against Capacity in populated systems
That could actually work.
 
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That's exactly the reason why it got added, but it kills any Playstyle that wants to abandon colonies for legitimate reasons.


which is a massive shame, cause thats one of the few things that gives actual "play" to playing machine empires
 
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The new relocation system is unfortunate, the system I developed with the Necroid Empire type is now obsolete.
 
Out of curiosity, with the discussion around pops and pop growth, something I’ve been thinking about for a bit is how Stellaris compares to other games in the 4X genre when it comes to the growth of your cities/planets/etc. Most other games require the growth to be related directly to local food supply (especially excess food), whereas Stellaris growth is always a flat number (with boosts mostly from tech).

Would it make any sense to switch Stellaris over to the other system of pop growth? You wouldn’t be able to specialize as thoroughly since each planet/habitat would need some source of local food. But this would make it much easier to control population (if you don’t want more pops produce less food).

I’m not sold on it by any means, just thinking out loud.
 
Out of curiosity, with the discussion around pops and pop growth, something I’ve been thinking about for a bit is how Stellaris compares to other games in the 4X genre when it comes to the growth of your cities/planets/etc. Most other games require the growth to be related directly to local food supply (especially excess food), whereas Stellaris growth is always a flat number (with boosts mostly from tech).

Would it make any sense to switch Stellaris over to the other system of pop growth? You wouldn’t be able to specialize as thoroughly since each planet/habitat would need some source of local food. But this would make it much easier to control population (if you don’t want more pops produce less food).

I’m not sold on it by any means, just thinking out loud.

Well I think it was the point of food planetary decision but it was a lot of micromanagement, for nothing.

I just thought about that but having food be located and needing like some "civilian ships" to move food around in your Empire (related to trade routes for exemple) would be SO COOL. But it would need a system thought to be with few micromanagement or it would just be painful
Also, in war you could destroy those ships to create famines on different worlds, etc...
 
This leads to the bizarre situation that the better a player plays the game, the less enjoyable the game is to play.
Past a certain skill threshold, this tends to be broadly true for all growth-type strategy games played against the computer.
 
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View attachment 651651View attachment 651643
Slave Resettlement and Worker/Drone/Bio-Trophy Resettlement

View attachment 651649View attachment 651650
Specialist Resettlement and Ruler Resettlement


Slaves and unintelligent robots can still be moved without expending Influence, and certain civics permit you to waive these Influence costs.

View attachment 651644View attachment 651645View attachment 651646
Don't forget to modify Evacuation Protocols, otherwise Doomsday Origin is going to be a REALLY challenging origin ;)
 
Suggestion: make the Transport Hub a module instead of a building, with collection ranges for each and subject to the same rules as trade routes. That way wide empires aren't guaranteed to run into starbase limit for colonizing every habitable planet, let alone habitats, in their empire (and you know, daring to have dedicated bastions, shipyards and even trade hubs and anchorages. It would also allow us to plop down a Gateway in each inhabited system in late game and allow pop movement that way. Expensive to be sure, but better than the currently proposed design that needs a starbase with the building in every system that is to give or receive pops.
 
Past a certain skill threshold, this tends to be broadly true for all growth-type strategy games played against the computer.
True enough, but usually that tends to be due to the player turning into an unstoppable blob rather than due to the game falling apart under the weight of its own mechanics.
 
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Suggestion: make the Transport Hub a module instead of a building, with collection ranges for each and subject to the same rules as trade routes. That way wide empires aren't guaranteed to run into starbase limit for colonizing every habitable planet, let alone habitats, in their empire (and you know, daring to have dedicated bastions, shipyards and even trade hubs and anchorages. It would also allow us to plop down a Gateway in each inhabited system in late game and allow pop movement that way. Expensive to be sure, but better than the currently proposed design that needs a starbase with the building in every system that is to give or receive pops.

Having it check multiple systems is apparently resource intensive, while just using an "only in this system" method is comparably much lighter. They mention it in one of the dev replies.
 
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On sidenote, while i agree that filling choke points with bastions will be harder if you want to compete putting starbases on systems with planets(well unless you generate galaxy with very few planets), isn't it technically good thing to have more incentive to put starbases in same systems? It would make that tradition that increases amount of starbases more useful if there were more competition between where you want to put them.

That said, thread has been doing pretty good job at convincing me that we should probably have just some sort of "orbital building" thing for planets so that all those planet specific starbase updates would be more useful. Would definitely be way more quality of life thing than having to choose between effectiveness and ease.
I'd love this mainly for the reason that I hate the abstractness of planetary buildings. They just become meaningless icons when there's so many of them. Even if it's just implemented as a building that creates a model in orbit, that would be pretty nice.
 
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Having it check multiple systems is apparently resource intensive, while just using an "only in this system" method is comparably much lighter. They mention it in one of the dev replies.

It's a bit sad but I understand

But maybe you could just regularly "mark" systems in range like every year, and swap pop around in the marked systems ( equivalently as having the Starbase module in every of those systems ) so you don't have to calculate for every pop but only once a year

It sounds very faisable but it is maybe impossible with Stellaris engine
 
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Suggestion: make the Transport Hub a module instead of a building, with collection ranges for each and subject to the same rules as trade routes. That way wide empires aren't guaranteed to run into starbase limit for colonizing every habitable planet, let alone habitats, in their empire (and you know, daring to have dedicated bastions, shipyards and even trade hubs and anchorages. It would also allow us to plop down a Gateway in each inhabited system in late game and allow pop movement that way. Expensive to be sure, but better than the currently proposed design that needs a starbase with the building in every system that is to give or receive pops.

If you do this, dropping a single transit starbase at a gateway will typically cover a whole empire and negate the whole point.
 
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You could borrow something from IR and have pops only auto-migrate within a sector, once the sector capital builds the transit hub. The transit hub could require the 40-pop capital building. Once the capital building reaches 80, you could upgrade the transit hub to allow transfers between capital worlds.
 
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On the starbase front, what if we retooled the concept behind starbases. Currently, a base that specializes as a trade hub uses the same capacity as one specialized to be a shipyard, another specialized to be an anchorage and another that is intended to be a naval stronghold in a choke point. What if starbase capacity only applied to what would be considered militarized starbases. A starbase built to be militarized would be one that focuses on damage/anti-piracy rather than increasing naval capacity, building ships, facilitating trade or the rare research/unity station. These would have a cap on how many we could have before they incur a stiff upkeep malus , can be build anywhere and would be the only starbases that serious damage output.

Then you create for lack of better terms inhabited system starbases. These can only be build in a system with a colony present. Unless the player selects a decision to make the starbase militarized, these starbases cannot build any of the starbase buildings or modules geared towards combat. So the play can gear them primarily towards trade, naval capacity, ship building, while grabbign the few buildings that help with planet output or deal with an enclave. As far as firepower goes, they have the same fire power as an outpost and the same limits on defense platforms. They can upgrade all the way up to a stronghold. Since they aren't militarized, taking them won't impact war score. A player would have the option to upgrade them into a militarized starbase should they want to.

This seems like it would address concerns players have about the starbase cap. As long as you have a colony in a system, be it planet or habitat, you can further develop an outpost into a starbase that can access stuff to better boost colony production. At the same time, it keeps in place the goal the devs probably had in mind, where they didn't want the 100 system empire to be able to build a fully militarized star fortress in each of their systems without having a massive economy to support it, I haven't done the math, so don't know if it's even possible. The player would still have to be strategic about where they put those military starbases and this change could allow for the malus to be over one's cap to be higher. It would also have the advantage of making piracy a tiny bit less annoying. Open up the option to make starbases a more interesting component within the game, since now there is an excuse to add in more starbase buildings that are geared towards no military things and gestalts could really use that.
 
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If I play a Fanatic Purifier and I want disperse conquered aliens across my empire in order to efficiently dispose of them while keeping unrest down, and I can't use the conquered planet (low habitability) so I plan to abandon it; how will this affect me? If I have to pay 200 influence to abandon a useless world that's going to be pretty annoying. Honestly, resettling hundreds of pops in order to evenly distribute them for extermination is the reason I use resettlement more than on account of unemployment.
 
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