• We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.

Stellaris Dev Diary #192 : Perfectly Balanced, As All Things Should Be...

Hello!

This week we’re going to look at some more changes we're planning, as well as a review of how some of the experiments mentioned in the last few dev diaries have evolved.

Thank you for the massive amount of feedback in those threads.

Reduction in Pops

Due to the effects on performance and a desire to reduce the micromanagement burden in the mid to late game, some of the things we’ve been deeply looking into are different ways of dramatically reducing the number of pops in the galaxy.

These experiments have generally revolved around modifying the growth (or assembly required) for pops as an empire’s population grows, with some variants trying a logistic pop growth (where growth follows an S-shaped curve as planets develop, based on a carrying capacity of a planet). These experiments have reduced the end date pop count to somewhere around one half of the old numbers with the expected performance improvements.

Organic pops will follow a curve where they begin at standard population growth, increase growth as the approach a midpoint between population and the planetary carrying capacity, then slow down to zero as they reach the top of the curve. Pop Assembly, on the other hand, is generally slow but consistent. The biggest change is that producing a new pop no longer costs a static amount of pop growth - it increases as the empire population does.

A significant reduction in pops has a cascade of major implications for the overall economy, production, and other gameplay effects. As such, these also require a pass on buildings, technologies, and even seemingly minor ripple effects like what the value should be for the trade value generated by pops.

There will be a lot of patch notes.

Most buildings have been standardized to now give 2 jobs per tier rather than the old 2/5/8 progression.

1605711331057.png

Just one example of many.

We’ve also changed a few buildings to have new or additional features, such as the Spawning Pool and Clone Vats, which have had their Pop Growth modifiers replaced with the new Organic Pop Assembly. This fills the same slot on the planet as Robotic Pop Assembly, so generally you’ll want to pick one or the other. (Clone Vats also picked up a food upkeep cost to represent simple materials to break down.)

1605711370874.png
1605711378849.png

Pops is Soylent Green!

A few other jobs got minor perks added to them, like the Medical Workers from Gene Clinics making it a little easier to live on less hospitable worlds.

1605711434441.png

Doesn't normally produce exotic gas, this one happens to be a lithoid.

And a few new techs have been added to help compensate for lost productivity. One tech line increases both the job production of a planet as well as job upkeep - those fewer pops are still capable of producing the work of more on a developed planet.

Ring Worlds

As part of the balance pass, Ring Worlds have been bumped up to 10 segments from 5, and the jobs per segment have been adjusted.

1605711480292.png
1605711496833.png
1605711511728.png
1605711521188.png
1605711530973.png

The Shattered Ring origin now possesses a warning that it may be a Challenging Origin for Lithoids due to a scarcity of minerals, and now also applies the Ring World Habitability Preference to your pops. We’re considering adding a similar warning for Hives selecting the origin, since the habitability preference change puts a serious crimp in their expansion.

1605711541929.png

Put a ring on it?

Their starting blockers have also been adjusted to give a more balanced spread of jobs.

Ecumenopoleis

Like the Ring Worlds, these start with all building slots open. As mentioned before, you can now use the Arcology Project decision on a planet that has a mix of City and Industrial Districts.

Note: Empire has all technologies but no traditions active.
1605711566787.png
1605711585016.png
1605711593479.png
1605711601512.png

The ecumenopolis has a unique distinction of being able to have both the Factory and Foundry building lines on the same planet.

Habitats

The changes to Habitat modules are much smaller in scope, but here’s the list of their districts.

1605711621995.png
1605711632042.png
1605711641350.png
1605711651091.png
1605711658034.png

Void Dwellers have gotten a bit of attention as well with some tradition swaps for those that had minimal or no beneficial effects for them.

1605711683433.png

1605711691774.png


Replacing Public Works Division:
1605711706121.png


And for Void Dwellers with the Adaptability tree:
1605711724002.png


Interstellar Franchising and Imperious Architecture now also function for Habitats.

Updates to Dev Diary 190

Some of these updates may not be new to people following the forum threads, but it's easy to miss things so I figured we should go over them.

Many people requested the ability to fully specialize their foundry and factory worlds. We've modified the Forge and Industrial World planet designations to shift one pop on each Industrial District to the appropriate job if possible.

1605711738324.png
1605711745816.png


We've also upgraded the Food Processing Center, Mineral Purification Hub, and Energy Nexus to provide an extra job to each of their associated resource production districts. (The Food Processing Center will also improve Hydroponics Farms.)

1605711771358.png
1605711779670.png
1605711789149.png


One of the suggestions made in the thread was to add a civic that increases unlocked Building Slots. Sounded like a great addition to Functional Architecture.

1605711797879.png

Functionality increased!

Updates to Dev Diary 191

We’ve explored some additional options regarding the resettlement system we outlined in Dev Diary 191, and after trying a few things, and have settled on some extensive modifications to the system.

All planets with free sapient unemployed pops that are not locked down by migration controls will have a small chance every month of moving one to another planet within their empire that has jobs that they are willing and able to work, housing, and habitability of 40% or higher. This chance is increased if there are multiple unemployed pops that meet the criteria.

The system now prefers to move higher strata pops first, so rulers and specialists will move before workers, and this system also functions for gestalt empires. It will not relocate non-sapient robots or slaves. It will generally prefer to move pops to the planets with the most free jobs.

After some experimentation we’ve chosen to keep the Transit Hubs as Starbase Buildings that provide a system wide buff to the chance of auto-resettlement occurring. (Rather than being essential to have it occur in the first place.)

1605711834820.png

Doubles the chance the pops choose to resettle themselves.

Greater Than Ourselves has been rewritten to also massively increase this chance when the edict is active, with a +200% bonus.

We initially had these pops considering destinations available through Migration Pacts as well, but decided against keeping that since it introduced a new Migration Controls micromanagement element that we didn’t find desirable.

We’ve also done a minor update to the Authority bonuses that seemed a little bit weak.

1605711874350.png

1605711882524.png


Democracies now have a bonus encouraging their pops to seek their dreams, and Dictatorships have a bit of an easier time holding things together when they’re a bit overstretched.

Closing Thoughts

One other little quality of life improvement that was just added is this filter on the colonization interface.

Colonisation QoL.gif


That’s probably long enough for today. We’re looking forward to your feedback on these as well.

Next week w̷e̵'̸l̸l̴ ̴b̸e̴t̵̮̄ǎ̸͈l̷̠̈k̴͔͂i̴̞͒n̷̪͊g̸̳͗ ̸͚̎a̵͉̐b̵̤̿ȯ̴̲ṵ̵̀t̸͇͂ ҈҂▒©╛⅜

1605711927580.png
 
  • 209Like
  • 111Love
  • 24
  • 13
  • 7
  • 2Haha
Reactions:
Huh. I was considering making a thread asking whats with gaia world origin giving you gaia world habitability, but ring world end relic world origins not giving you ring world or relic world modifiers while those do exist in the game xD(with post apocalyptic I assume its because tomb world habitability is super good) Like I was wondering if it was balance thing or if ring world and relic world were just intended to be stronger than normal origins.

Also interesting to see loop starting over again. I mean I remember back the old days when clinics increased habitability of planets ;D

But yeah, these changes sound cool and all, but I'm not going to be super hyped until I hear about ai flavor being added :3 Besides being interested in more personality, I'd like the already existing personalities actually do things they should be doing(they seem to vote sometimes bit randomly in galactic community and apparently they don't edit their policies at all so robots never get citizen rights?)

Anyway, seems like next diary is about espionage related dealios? Huh.
 
As someone who has played with the Carrying Capacity mod in the past ... yeah, tying the carrying capacity purely to housing is a bad idea™. But you'll never avoid the gamey tactic of half-filling your worlds with pops and jobs and making sure everything above that migrates to a "better" planet or gets moved there by force. As long as manual resettlement and active pop migration (self-resettlement) exist, there will be a way to do this.

Tie the capacity to housing, player builds housing. Tie it to planet size and player will cry silently about having to waste half a planet everywhere to maximize pop growth (and thus economy growth) ... or spam out pop-growth-"worlds" (be this a habitat or an ecu) to fuel the rest. With that having been said, the mod did not have a brake like the one you're proposing, in that pops will take longer to grow the more total pops you have - I'm unsure how that will play out, especially without actual numbers and formulas. In theory, this is how you can get an overall S-curve for your entire empire, but the player has little agency over the curve parameters - and what's worse, there's no indicator of the total "capacity" of your empire for pops (other than the sum of planetary capacities).

Another question I have is: if a planet is forced over it's carrying capacity, will the population go into decline (e.g. through emigration) or not? There needs to be some downside to having an overpopulated world.

Regarding (biological) pop assembly - will bio ascension get a more comprehensive overhaul, or is it just the cloning vats change? (If it's just the cloning vats change, bio ascension will be functionally equivalent to a stage-1 (of 2) synth ascension). Will we get extra traits for clones? (Shorter lifespan but faster xp gain would be a flavorful option, for example)

And another question - how much of the population growth system is going to be exposed to modding? Can we modify the curve parameters? Can we add modifiers to biological pop assembly? Can we affect planetary carrying capacity directly, and/or add modifiers to it (via ingame buildings with said modifiers)?
 
  • 10
  • 1Like
Reactions:
1. Pop growth or total growth points is the same, once you normalize the values to one-another.

2. Housing districts add jobs. So not sure how close to the S curve you would be, and are you willing to not utilize a colony and leave it half (or less than half) capacity empty?

1) Not really since pop growth is per planet while total growth points is shared empire-wide, so to be a real deterrent the increase in growth points should be higher than the increase in pop growth from the additionnal pop growth lines. Of course this means that you have to set an "efficiency point" past which every planet decreases overall pop growth and that means establishing an arbitrary number of planets as "efficient" which of course creates additionnal problems...

2) you do know you can shut down jobs manually ? Anyway you're going with the idea that the breeding farm is a sacrifice of a planet, but that's not the case, a breeding farm is a planet that is not useful for anything else, if you can make use of the planet then it works as well.


The whole problem here is that more planets = more pop growth in every case (except if all planets are at full capacity, but that is not really a problem) and that it is thus a sub-optimal choice not to colonize planets since your empire pop growth is proportional to the amount of planets you have.
 
  • 2Like
  • 1
  • 1
Reactions:
As someone who has played with the Carrying Capacity mod in the past ... yeah, tying the carrying capacity purely to housing is a bad idea™. But you'll never avoid the gamey tactic of half-filling your worlds with pops and jobs and making sure everything above that migrates to a "better" planet or gets moved there by force. As long as manual resettlement and active pop migration (self-resettlement) exist, there will be a way to do this.
A good fix for that would be for worlds that are at max capacity to boost pop growth from immigration on other planets by the same total amount that they would produce if they weren't at max capacity.

That way the pops are still growing without any loss to pop growth, they're just growing on other planets.
 
  • 2
Reactions:
Organic pops will follow a curve where they begin at standard population growth, increase growth as the approach a midpoint between population and the planetary carrying capacity, then slow down to zero as they reach the top of the curve. Pop Assembly, on the other hand, is generally slow but consistent.

Small QoL request: Can we have a policy for pop assembly that would allow us to stop growth empire wide? Something like Banned (all assembly stopped), Regulated (stops if no free housing slots in empire), Unrestricted (like now). Something like this would be really good for machine, robot heavy or clone heavy empires in the late game. It would save having to turn off growth one planet at a time, or fiddling around with jobs, to prevent assembly continually giving rise to overpopulation.
 
  • 9Like
Reactions:
A good fix for that would be for worlds that are at max capacity to boost pop growth from immigration on other planets by the same total amount that they would produce if they weren't at max capacity.

That way the pops are still growing without any loss to pop growth, they're just growing on other planets.

This has the problem of re-introducing exponential pop growth, something this change intends to kill off. (Again, barring severe braking from the total empire population)
 
Well, you gain a job per district, so I think it works fine. 8 districts and a building should net 17 jobs for lvl 1, and 18 jobs for lvl 2.
Plus it's 15 and 25%, not 10%.

Before it was just 1/2 jobs, and the production bonus, but the same upkeep.
ah, haven't seen the extra job slots based per district. with 10% I meant the increase from lvl 1 to lvl 2, as I have written. Then it's the question, if you also get then 1 job per district with a lvl 1 building. If so, then you would still need about 25 pops in this job, to make lvl 2 meaningful for the one advanced ressource you need for upkeep. A lvl 1 job building doesnt need an advanced ressource atm.
 
  • 3
Reactions:
Interesting DD, I've tried lowering pop growth and assembly speed by 33% and while it did what it was supposed to do, waiting for new colonies to develop and/or for 5 pops to grow for the next building slot was an agony.
 
I think that's what the global increase in pop growth cost with empire population is supposed to achieve, but we can't really say how effective that'll be yet.

The problem is that as things stand it won't work, because since the cost is dependent on total amount of empire pops, a 10X10 planet empire and a 100x1 planet empire will have the same growth cost, but the 10 planet one will have an overall empire growth of 10x the one planet empire.

If you can't make pop growth empire dependent, than making it directly proportional to the amount of pops present would at least nullify the distinction between the two; So for example one pop = 1 growth/month and 100 pops = 100 growth/month (before modifiers).
This creates other problems of course but it is the only way to keep tall and wide evenly balanced while keeping planet based growth.
 
  • 2
Reactions:
As a spiritualist player it is quite fitting that they finally remade the pop growth system and it made spiritualists and psi ascension even weaker. Not only will we be massively outgrown by synthetic players but now genetic ascension as well. ALso so fitting that of all the incredibly weak bonuses identified already spiritualist was not buffed or even mentioned. Such is the fate of the spiritualist always weak and ignore das much as hive minds.

At least hive minds got a origin

I totally agree with you. I will however continue to play with psi ascension even if it means only play with mod that clearly balance the spiritualist way. Maybe something will come...
 
We’ve also changed a few buildings to have new or additional features, such as the Spawning Pool and Clone Vats, which have had their Pop Growth modifiers replaced with the new Organic Pop Assembly. This fills the same slot on the planet as Robotic Pop Assembly, so generally you’ll want to pick one or the other. (Clone Vats also picked up a food upkeep cost to represent simple materials to break down.)

1605711370874.png
1605711378849.png
Oh my god I love it and want it now. Does this mean I can finally make an origin where the species is completely infertile and relies on cloning to reproduce?

(Small nitpick, hopefully the description for Clone Vats isn't final, because it's lacking in a certain amount of flavor.)
 
  • 4
Reactions:
I'd also suggest taking a look at the Habitat Cap mod which gives a starbase-limit style limit to the number of habitats you can build - currently the ideal is to build a habitat around any body that can have them, which balloons the number of pops the galaxy can potentially support, as well as the number of "planets" the player has to manage.
Please, no. That's such an arbitrary restriction that will mean players are forced to do map-painting.
 
  • 2
  • 1
Reactions:
Organic Pop Assembly is great ! Now you can probably play Spiritualist without using robots at all ( Does Clones have a soul tho? )

I don't think so. Psionic Ascension will now be the only one without pop growth bonus. Yes there might be a random composer of strands contract, but it is rng and still has downsides. Without a better shroud I still don't see it in a similar power level.

Finally, Ring world habitation should have been on that origin since the start imho. Always seemed pretty naff that only the Void Dwellers got hit with the balance hammer.

On the point of balance. Is there a chance that Post-Apocalyptic and Remnants could get another pass too?

Post-Apocalyptic would do with a bit of tomb world habitability. Maybe even take after Necroids and have the guarenteed worlds spawn as Tomb Words?

As for Remnants, with the different building system could they get the void dweller treatment, by which I mean have no actual food districts but start off with the Hydroponic farms technology unlocked and have a Hydroponic farm building on site?
I would like for post apocalyptic to get true tomb world habitability, but start with significantly less pops, because most of them died in the Apokalypse.

This is one of the things that is still in balancing, but currently it's total housing but we include a bonus for undeveloped districts. People living off the land and such. Some planets, like Gaia worlds, get more carrying capacity for their undeveloped districts.

This may change to be a simpler formula largely based on planet size, since there are a couple of quirks I'm not totally happy with right now

So this carrying capacity thing is on a per planet basis not an empire wide thing? Doesn't that lead to a lot more micro, because you want your planets to be at the optimal growth spot. Therefore you are encouraged to constantly close and open jobs to get them to move and to get the optimal pop growth on all planets. This new system seems to me more like torture for the player than an improvement. Wouldn't it be better to base the S-shape on empire wide statistics?

Some great changes overall. One thing deeply worries me though:


I think this change tackles the problem of pop numbers but it drastically increases a different one: That settling a planet is always good because planets produce pops!
Now with this change you not only still want planets as pop generators, you added a nother micro-intense meta where you also want all your planets at the sweet spot in the S-curve to maximize overall pop growth.

Please reconsider this, we absolutely need to grow pops per empire and not per planet. There is also a similar effect with purging, as is, resettling to a purging planet makes sense as one planet only purges one pop at a time.

Yes empire wide growth would be so much better than a per planet one. It would get rid of all that resettlement micro to optimize carrying capacity and remove the need to settle undesirable planets or spam habitats just for the pop growth. Empire wide pop growth and pop assembly definitely should be a thing. The same for pop decline to get rid of purging world abuse.

I don’t see Thrall Worlds mentioned in the dev diary, have they been changed in regards to pop growth?



If I’m not mistaken Thrall World require you to destroy all mining and achriculture districts before you can turn it into a Thrall World, only to rebuild them afterwards. It would be nice if they would get the same treatment as Ecumenopoli.

God yes, having to destroy and then rebuild districts and building after enabling the designation is annoying.

Most buildings have been standardized to now give 2 jobs per tier rather than the old 2/5/8 progression.
So t2 labs are now useless? It gives the same amount of jobs like just building two T1, but has more upkeep. If I built a building for the rare resources I can instantly upgrade to t3. That's two building slots for 6 researchers. Unfortunately even T3 isn't worth it anymore if you aren't restrained by building slots.

I want to add that gases are now significantly more important than all other rare resources, because labs are probably the only building you still want to spam.

A significant reduction in pops has a cascade of major implications for the overall economy, production, and other gameplay effects. As such, these also require a pass on buildings, technologies, and even seemingly minor ripple effects like what the value should be for the trade value generated by pops.

Please take a look at event/anomaly/archeology rewards. They are mostly x months of resource production, but simultaneously capped at a ridiculously small max amount. Even in the early game the max amount is often just a fraction of one month's production.
 
  • 6Like
  • 4
  • 3
  • 1
Reactions:
Next week w̷e̵'̸l̸l̴ ̴b̸e̴t̵̮̄ǎ̸͈l̷̠̈k̴͔͂i̴̞͒n̷̪͊g̸̳͗ ̸͚̎a̵͉̐b̵̤̿ȯ̴̲ṵ̵̀t̸͇͂ ҈҂▒©╛⅜

1605711927580.png

Espionage will be amazing! I am really looking forward to it. I think the next DD will be the most important one!
 
  • 4Like
  • 1
Reactions: