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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.

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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.)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.
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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.

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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.

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Replacing Public Works Division:
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And for Void Dwellers with the Adaptability tree:
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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.

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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.)

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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.

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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.)

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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.

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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.

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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

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On that front actually, it should be almost a requirement to resettle pops from homeworld. It's not that we will start colonizing Mars by sending Adam and Eve and letting them do their thing.
Well that is what the colony ship is supposed to represent. Forcing people to resettle aswell seems like it would be a bit too much micro.
 
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It's not that we will start colonizing Mars by sending Adam and Eve and letting them do their thing.

Considering the local environment, better to send the serpent, can uplift later :cool:.
 
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Have you guys considered giving agriculture districts to habitats around habitable worlds?
Oh wow, this would actually be the perfect implementation!

And then if the orbited planet is destroyed with a Collossus, the districts could be automatically converted to Mining (World-Cracking) or Research (Shielding).
 
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So why is the developed world experiencing a stabilization / shortfall in population count? It's not from lack of food. It's from the fact that children are expensive both in cost and in effect on lifestyle. The value of the asset is lower than its cost and improvements in accidental construction limit the number of unexpected creations.

You can't ignore the effect of birth control. Knowing kids will almost certainly surviva and having birth control are the biggest factors in decreased family size. There are countries that provide a lot of assistance in costs for raising kids, but the effect isn't very large.
 
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I understand using a logistic curve for planetary growth rate, that's dandy - what is the reasoning behind changing the amount of growth needed to produce a single pop based on the empire-wide population? That's the only aspect of the new system that doesn't quite "click" to me.

IMHO, logistic curve tackles with growth "vertically" on planet level, increased growth points tackles with growth "horizontally" on empire level. Both are necessary to tune the pace of growth and reduce the inflation in number of POPs into mid/late game.
 
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Have you guys considered giving agriculture districts to habitats around habitable worlds? Given how they extract their other resources through specific planetary deposits, I feel like that would fit. But could there be a reaon this isn't implemented?

The game has hydroponic farms, so I don't really know why they don't have agricultural districts already if you have that tech.
 
You can't ignore the effect of birth control. Knowing kids will almost certainly surviva and having birth control are the biggest factors in decreased family size. There are countries that provide a lot of assistance in costs for raising kids, but the effect isn't very large.

Nor did I: "improvements in accidental construction limit the number of unexpected creations " is birth control.
 
in my opinion habitats over planets don't need the agriculture districts on it, but if you could build an agriculture world with a habitat over it like pops living on the habitat and working on the agriculture districts of the planet without that malus your pops get if they live on a planet while you have the voiddweller trait... well but at least you also could use farm-bots or slaves to work on that agriculture planets, should be an option for thrall-worlds to be pure agricultural... (at least i think voiddweller-xenophobes/authoritairs are a strong combination)
My thinking was about gathering the biomatter and important resources that are found in soil from the planet as a major source of feedstock for your food. Plus it helps that farming habitats are a real concept. But the idea that your farmers would be worked harder on a farming habitat to provide food for the rest of the Empire is interesting.

Within the game though, I was thinking that because of the changes with building slots, hydroponic farms might be too restricted. Now, this might not be the case, since you have industrial and research districts being default or based on deposits, so that takes some of the pressure off. But it seems you'll usually be limited to about half a dozen building slots. How many of those will have to be farms? It does help that the processing center will add jobs, so that could be enough. I just think this is something that could be looked at, not necessarily implemented.
 
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There have been studies about utopian conditions where a species of rats get everything they could ever hope for.

Yeah. Familiar with those. Hilarious. Take away the imperative/need to strive for survival, and all the rats just became fat lazy slobs sitting on their couch waiting to die. No interest in procreation.

Reducing the speed of pop growth without changing its local nature provides the perverse incentive to go wider to develop even more centres of pop growth.

Yes. Exactly. A species that has stopped expanding, starts to stagnate. Hence fallen empires.

I understand using a logistic curve for planetary growth rate, that's dandy - what is the reasoning behind changing the amount of growth needed to produce a single pop based on the empire-wide population? That's the only aspect of the new system that doesn't quite "click" to me.

If you think of pops as a 'percentage' if the population (its representative rather than physical) then it takes more effort to significantly grow the population as a whole.

One way to think of it is that a significant fraction of humanities 20th century population explosion was due to increased access to medical care and improvements in medical technology. Basically, people lived longer, weren't dying like flies, but births were still high.

Now we are seemingly approaching a cap where increased life expectancy is flattening out, so the death rate is 'increasing' again, and the difference between rate of deaths and rate of births is approaching zero or even going into the negative. In other words, it's not just birth rates that have fluctuated, its death rates as well.

So while birth rates are stabilizing at somewhere around 1.9 to 2.1 per female, this is becoming only enough to stabilise the total population, not grow it.


Food surplus will always be the main defining factor for population increase.
Nah. Food is a limiting factor only for populations under threat of starvation. But when access to food is infinite, it ceases to be a factor. At some point the reasoning becomes 'do I want kids?' Rather than ' will I be able to feed them?'
 
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You can't ignore the effect of birth control. Knowing kids will almost certainly surviva and having birth control are the biggest factors in decreased family size. There are countries that provide a lot of assistance in costs for raising kids, but the effect isn't very large.
Economic conditions are definitely relevant to birth rates. See this chart tracking Irish birth rates from 1950 to 2020. While there is a clear downward secular trend, the birth rate in 1973 was higher than it was in 1950, and the birth rate in 2008 was higher than it was in 1994. The chart shows that periods of high unemployment like the 1950s, the 1980s, and the Great Recession, depress birth rates, and there appears to be a lag between improvement in employment rates and birth rate.


Edit: it may be of interest to note that the sale of contraceptives and the publication of information about the use of artificial contraceptives were only legalised in Ireland in 1979.
 
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The line of techs is currently:
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The higher bonuses are tied to higher tiers of capital buildings, so resource gathering backwaters are less likely to reach maximized production levels than your heavily populated core worlds.
I like the idea of increasing throughput (I'd like it as its own modifier if possible).

But have you considered making this upgrade:
+10/20/30% Base Output and Base Upkeep from Jobs?

So that the effect is multiplicative rather than additive. Otherwise it's considerably worse the more stacking modifiers you have which is probably not the intention. It may say +10% but your research output will only increase by a very tiny percentage once you factor in the +a bazillion% from all other sources, and if you were to have -90% upkeep before applying this modifier then the +10% would effectively be +100% current upkeep costs. So it hurts coming and going (smaller benefit than the player expects, harsher penalty than expected).

Also do these modifiers apply to other job outputs? It would be annoying if Naval capacity/amenities/trade value were mostly unaffected but Soldier/Entertainer/Merchant jobs still had increased upkeep.
 
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Economic conditions are definitely relevant to birth rates. See this chart tracking Irish birth rates from 1950 to 2020. While there is a clear downward secular trend, the birth rate in 1973 was higher than it was in 1950, and the birth rate in 2008 was higher than it was in 1994. The chart shows that periods of high unemployment like the 1950s, the 1980s, and the Great Recession, depress birth rates, and there appears to be a lag between improvement in employment rates and birth rate.


Yes, of course horrible economic conditions have a negative effect. But beyond a certain point, better economic conditions aren't going to increase the number of kids. It's even hard to maintain the population level without immigration.
 
Yes, of course horrible economic conditions have a negative effect. But beyond a certain point, better economic conditions aren't going to increase the number of kids. It's even hard to maintain the population level without immigration.
well, that is a problem of the pops prioritys, kids or career? A thing where a more cooperative kind of State will have better growth than a more competitive... if the personal career isn't much impacting the quality of life, its much more likely that the pops do theyr thing and grow kids than it is in our, capitalistic states atm...so maybe a megacorp should have less kids growing than a shared burden egalitarian... but that to implement is way too much if you want it that realistic
 
well, that is a problem of the pops prioritys, kids or career? A thing where a more cooperative kind of State will have better growth than a more competitive... if the personal career isn't much impacting the quality of life, its much more likely that the pops do theyr thing and grow kids than it is in our, capitalistic states atm...so maybe a megacorp should have less kids growing than a shared burden egalitarian... but that to implement is way too much if you want it that realistic
I've already pointed out that there are many countries that provide a lot of assistance. It doesn't change things that much.
 
That is the definition of a lazy mechanic: one that cannot be explained within the game's lore/logic and is so gamey that the optimal play is to grant your own planets independence so they grow faster and then reconquer/integrate them.
Then we have very different definitions of a lazy mechanic.
And what exactly is wrong with following a gamey tactic in a game?
 
A thought occurred to me currently synth and machine empires get additional districts from building energy grids and mineral purification plants. This number is then doubled when those buildings are upgraded. I've noticed it's not uncommon for megacorps and normal empires to run into an issue where a sizeable chunk of their worlds are district poor. The industrial districts will help here, since it seems clear that they'll work like city districts, you can max out all districts as those. Anyways, would it be possible to have it so that the first building for energy grids, mineral purification plants & food processing facilities gave +2 districts for what they produce for megacorps and normal empires. This would give them a bit more flexibility on specializing rural worlds and leave them a little less at the mercy of RNG. I'd be fine if the upgrades didn't net them additional districts, since I don't want to take away everything unique about synth and machine empires.

I'm leaving out hive minds because hive worlds solve the issue and they should be going for that perk.
 
Yeah. Familiar with those. Hilarious. Take away the imperative/need to strive for survival, and all the rats just became fat lazy slobs sitting on their couch waiting to die. No interest in procreation.
Literally Wall-e
 
The line of techs is currently:
View attachment 654316

The higher bonuses are tied to higher tiers of capital buildings, so resource gathering backwaters are less likely to reach maximized production levels than your heavily populated core worlds.

For people worried about this having already stacked tons of +job production or -job upkeep, I don't think this is an issue. What this is effectively is a flat bonus to your amount of pops which don't gain any bonuses or malus. And considering that every job is a net increase of resources this is always worth it.

What I'm actually concerned about is the fact that +resources from jobs doesn't effect every resource: trade value and amenities ignore it for some reason. Admittedly it is a very minor worry, as both clerks and merchants have no upkeep, and entertainers using a few extra CG is easily offset by the bonus they give, but still.
 
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To be honest, I think the resettlement of slaves should also cost Influence. Slaves have owners and moving their property from one system to another should have a political cost. Even if you imagine that the slaves are all owned by the state, they would still be effectively the property of different Departments, Governors, or whatever.

Sure thing, as long as:

- Slaves get to be automatically resettled the way free pops are.
- The algorithm is changed so unemployed pops aren't being enslaved unless you use domestic servitude, which frankly nobody should be doing. Basing the algorithm on the worst slavery type, in the process outright screwing everyone else over seems questionable to begin with. But now slaves won't be resettled and some people want to add an influence cost to them being resettled to boot.

IMHO, logistic curve tackles with growth "vertically" on planet level, increased growth points tackles with growth "horizontally" on empire level. Both are necessary to tune the pace of growth and reduce the inflation in number of POPs into mid/late game.
Sure thing, as long as they adjust the requirement and production output/costs. If they don't we might look at some really messy hotfixes. Let's remain hopeful.

Will gestalts - machines & hives and megacorps get the same love as regular empires?
I doubt it. Machine Gestalts still lack leader traits, both Machine and Hiveminds are locked out from a lot of events, Ecumenopoli, etc. :(


For people worried about this having already stacked tons of +job production or -job upkeep, I don't think this is an issue. What this is effectively is a flat bonus to your amount of pops which don't gain any bonuses or malus. And considering that every job is a net increase of resources this is always worth it.

What I'm actually concerned about is the fact that +resources from jobs doesn't effect every resource: trade value and amenities ignore it for some reason. Admittedly it is a very minor worry, as both clerks and merchants have no upkeep, and entertainers using a few extra CG is easily offset by the bonus they give, but still.

The problem is that every additional bonus becomes "less" of a bonus. Because they all act additive rather than multiplicative. Now having all of these multiplicative would lead to an absurd inflation in terms of resource generation. But the reverse also holds true. Species traits become less relevant and impactful as you gain additional bonuses. To the point that the advertised "15%" in effect is oftentimes closer to 5% or below as it does not scale with other bonuses.

One solution might be to make species traits exclusively multiplicative with other bonuses. As they actually have a "cost" in terms of very limited trait points to keep them relevant and desirable.

As for the new technologies. The issue some people seem to have is that the increase is worth much less than the game makes it seem. While the increase to upkeep is fairly static. Let's take minerals as an example.

100% Base Mineral Production.
60% from the mining chain.
25% from the Mineral Purification hub.

This is a 185% increase compared to the base production. If we add another 30% from the final new tech. It ends up being only an overall 21,5% increase to productivity but a 30% increase to upkeep. Now the value might lie in this technology increasing specialist output/science output(?) but the more modifiers you have active the less beneficial it becomes at large.

Further, these technologies scale negatively with themselves in terms of efficiency. Each of them making the subsequent one slightly worse. And for base resources i.e minerals/energy they get worse with every repeatable. They might still be worth it for end product output ala Science, Alloys, etc. But they, funnily enough, increase inefficiency.
 
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