Stellaris Dev Diary #210: A post-Nemesis Address

[DC E1G]

@Eldarin

Have you considered reducing the amount of jobs per planet (via fewer districts and/or fewer jobs per building) so that planets don't struggle to ever actually fill up? Because a lot of the frustration with the lower pop numbers in late game comes from the perpetually half-filled planets rather than the actual pop numbers.

I really like the suggestions I saw that involved making larger planets more rare and I agree that a lot of frustration is more about feeling that planets can't be completed, rather than the absolute number of pops.

I do like the idea that not every planet will be super developed, but I think they've missed the mark quite a bit with the current balancing. I'm interested to see how the changes would work.

 

[Olterin]

2.8 had exactly one option for success: colonize fast, boost pop growth, spam habitats. If you didn't do that, you'd get stuck against the player who did.
Now we at least have the option to catch up. A system where every empire is limited to idk 600 pops surely has its fair share of problems, but at least at that point, your specific specializations through ethics, civics, etc. come into play, because you can't just dominate every single metric through more pops.

Except ... that's ... still kinda the case? Everyone gets slowed down in terms of peaceful development, but the empire with more pure planets that grow pops (not even breeder planets, just so we can concentrate pops in an efficient manner to get every last bit of throughput efficiency out of them) will still be ahead in terms of economic growth over time. This isn't even going into pop farming cheese (of all varieties). (This is not helped at all by the fact that the bottom end of the logistic growth curve also got teeth pulled out to not have any bite - fresh colonies should grow from pops migrating there to get jobs before it gets much natural growth, not start out with 3 base growth... ugh - this would instantly make 1-pop habitats as pop farms far less viable if implemented)

The thing is, the system doesn't limit everyone to a set number of pops - hell, there might be slightly less outcry over an actual legit population cap than what we have right now. The system merely kneecaps natural growth within a single empire - doesn't take long to figure out how to circumvent that.

 

[Agathors]

Fanatical Pacifist is an intended gameplay mode.

So are "Skynet" and "robot hivemind on a mission of enforced pampering", neither of whom can exploit conquered meatpops as productive labour.

Not anymore...

 

[V01ds33r]

There are still bugs and improvements that we want to make and the current plan is to fix bugs and make improvements for a couple of weeks more

I appretiate the changes in general, but is there any possibility that some of the most easiest changes will came out sooner then the others? Like this one:

The growth on highly developed worlds also felt a little low, so we've increased the floor of how low logistic growth penalties can drop planetary growth, to make sure that these planets still produce a low but noticeable amount of growth

This step alone maybe will not solve the problem, but could make the game more comfortable until the release of 3.0.3.

 

[sillyrobot]

I was playing Commonwealth of Man standard empire, and when I first noticed robots not migrating I thought it might be because they were in servitude, so I switched them to full citizenship. No change, they kept piling up on feeder colonies without being migrated away, except now I had to pay influence to fix it myself. Switched it back after ten years and gave up on the idea of synth ascending.

Huh. OK. As I wrote, I never managed to get that far before tossing the game because there's no reason to babysit a stagnant empire. I specially asked and got answered by a dev that sentient robots would migrate. Synths are sentient, so either the dev was wrong or its a bug.

Stellaris Dev Diary #208: Nemesis patch notes

Hello there! We're just about a week away from releasing Nemesis, our next big Expansion for Stellaris. So big in fact, that we're naming it after one of the most renowned Science-Fiction authors, Philip K. Dick, and calling it 3.0! This has...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

 

[-Marauder-]

OK, I will take a bullet for asking, but here it is.

You say "We do recognize that putting limitations on the previously endless growth can feel bad, and that the large number of sudden changes can be shocking. Internally, we’ve been playing with the system for months, and know that while it will take a transition period to get used to some of the changes, we believe that these changes are better for improving the long-term playing experience."

Could you elaborate what is the ultimate end goal in terms of the "long-term playing experience" please? All I see is another cap preventing you from using the game mechanic players already learned/enjoy (?) while trying to fix the lag problem at the expense of the very same playing experience.

Because at the end of the day, that's what this is. This is their change of the planets causing issues with the engine. So now they are changing it back, but only in part. Not only taking away player agency, but also enjoyment, capping growth, and harmstringing them.

 

[dooomninja]

any love for Agrarian Idyll? i've been finding myself rather cramped with the lack of building slots unless i go against it and build cities (and thats despite Functional Architecture). not to mention the Prosperity tree being less than helpful for Agrarian Idyll too.

 

[arl]

Can you give us a bug report with a save attached for this please?

I've the same problem, so I reported it in https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...ltip-when-upgrading-defence-platform.1469096/
it seems it's only the tooltip showing wrong value, by the way

 

[-Marauder-]

I think you're misreading the intent of their statement there.

No matter how many months they spend testing it, they have a relatively small team, and thus a small number of testers. If they have 10,000 players playing Stellaris 3.0 now [us, to clarify - and using made up numbers - I don't know the exact numbers], for example, then all the hours we have spent playing in the last week combined utterly dwarfs the amount of testing they would EVER be able to do (even if they hypothetically had more people who were testing it 24-7, to use an unrealistic example) from our sheer numbers alone.

EDIT: This doesn't mean that they shouldn't test things more - but it does mean that we put it through a far larger variety of conditions in a faster time collectively than they do, so we'll find things that aren't working far more readily.

No, he's pretty spot on. What the dev diary is doing here is to open with a conciliatory tone. Before taking a rapid swerve into the condescending. By talking about how "stuff might feel bad for now" but "they think it's for the better" and once we have accepted the new status quo which is enforced helplessness, less growth, less advancement, less ability to play the game well and draw ahead of other players and the Ai. Then this will totally for the best.

The current system is even more flawed than the one it replaced. All it does is address some lag issues, which come down to the limitations of their clunky and fairly old engine which won't even properly use most CPUs.

 

[grommile]

Not anymore...

I'm being nice, and allowing Paradox some meagre benefit of Hanlon's Razor regarding the impact of this patch on genocidals, pamperbots, and fanpacs.

 

[Kaoru Sen'nin]

PDX should really consider releasing these pop changes early to a beta branch as MANY people are impacted negatively by the limits. Despite what these tightly controlled forums show, the discontent is FAR greater than what appears here (go take a look at Steam comments to the

For the starters I would suggest to put int those sliders in (for both empire-wide malus and S-curve).

This would make game to be enjoyable for all while also solving issue with people playing on potatoes (I myself have 7 year old machine, but with 20Gb RAM so I never actually encountered this lag with too many pops, thou I did encouter it when I built sensor array so I now avoid building sensor array in all my games).

Then you can slowly, with help of community, work on economic rebalance. It's not shame to admit: OK, this doesn't work. It's also not shame to ask for help regarding balancing. We are all humans and we all make mistakes (well at least I hope you are not some xeno spies from neigbouring fanatical xenophobe empire )

building upgrades could be solved by various means. Like research lab could provide 2 research job at start. at lvl 2 it could provide 3 jobs but base research from job be boosted by 33% (so it would be same as with 4 researchers). lvl 3 could provide a science director job and so on.

Oh and if you really gonna put resettlement on slave processing plants, don't forget to flag toilers as unemployed or smth, since slaves from thrall worlds would never resettle.

Also I would rather advice to rethink of bonuses of democracy and dictartorship. I know, it was just changed, but 15% resettlement compared to 10% from democracy (not to mention you actualy need a pop that is capable and willing to resettle) is such a pale boost compared to influence boost from oligarchy. Likewise dictatorship reduces only empire sprawl PENALTY. If you don't go over sprawl then dictatorship has no effect at all. Consider changing it to empire sprawl itself, it would be much better.

Seriously, on WHAT setup do people that have lag play ?
PC from nearly 10 years ago can run the game.

 

[Kaoru Sen'nin]

2.8 had exactly one option for success: colonize fast, boost pop growth, spam habitats. If you didn't do that, you'd get stuck against the player who did.
Now we at least have the option to catch up. A system where every empire is limited to idk 600 pops surely has its fair share of problems, but at least at that point, your specific specializations through ethics, civics, etc. come into play, because you can't just dominate every single metric through more pops.

You will never catch up.
If someone has 300 pop more than you (by conquest or otherwise) and you are already at 500 pops, the game will have endend, the sun will have burned and you still won't have catch up because you are on a snail race. Your "snail" is faster than the other snail, but it will still take it so much time to close the gap that it's not even worth mentionning.

 

[Cymsdale]

This step alone maybe will not solve the problem, but could make the game more comfortable until the release of 3.0.3.

I'm not really sure what that step does. Are people really running into an issue where they are facing a steep penalty of the S-curve. The issue that seems to be going around is that growth feels too slow even if you have all your planets sitting in the +3 zone. It still would mean that going past the +3 is generally the 'incorrect' play.

 

[HighKings_Ruin]

No, he's pretty spot on. What the dev diary is doing here is to open with a conciliatory tone. Before taking a rapid swerve into the condescending. By talking about how "stuff might feel bad for now" but "they think it's for the better" and once we have accepted the new status quo which is enforced helplessness, less growth, less advancement, less ability to play the game well and draw ahead of other players and the Ai. Then this will totally for the best.

The current system is even more flawed than the one it replaced. All it does is address some lag issues, which come down to the limitations of their clunky and fairly old engine which won't even properly use most CPUs.

I felt bad for the Devs prior to this post, I really did and even defended them, but what has happened in this post has crossed a line I will never accept.

It's actually made me think they need to stop ignoring the toxicity and start coming to terms that they're choices are not good ones, and if they don't wake up soon this game will eventually be run into the ground.

 

[Fallenangel85]

It would be nice if my machine race could automatically migrate between worlds. I don't really understand why they're prohibited from doing so (if anything shipping them should be easier!), but I'd appreciate a policy toggle so I could allow them to migrate.

That's weird, my machine Empire pops automatically resettle.
Just normal robots I made as a bio Empire didn't do that, until I ascended.

 

[Tharundil]

I've been playing a psionically ascended lithoid inward perfectionist empire in an internal MP. Checking the save, in 2370 my empire population is 508 lithoid pops, 168 robots (and I deliberately never researched droids). Roughly 1,600 Physics and Society, 1,400 Engineering research per month. Total fleet strength around about 250k. I've literally never declared a single war in the game. I'm doing fine.

Inward perfectionist is a seriously terrible measure of a normal player's "tall" empire

 

[Kaoru Sen'nin]

It's quite outstanding that among the change of pop-growth they decided in this thread to revert the only change that we were all welcoming : full planet not growing.

That somehow speed up the pop growth so I guess it's a "win" considering we have now the fertility of a stone passed 600 pop.

 

[Fallenangel85]

I want to report a bug when you build a Ringworld.
All habitats in the system got destroyed and there was no warning for that happening, all pops were gone as well.

Maybe the solution to bring tall back is to make it so that the Empire malus is affected by the amount of colonies you have. Maybe even reduce the Empire penalty to below 100 if you for example only have one planet, but the average in the galaxy is 10+ planets.
On top of that, all pops gained through conquest/slave market/raiding should could double for the Empire Penalty, so it's less effective.

 

[BlockBadger]

Really loving the patch, I prefer the new pop growth system myself. I really wished people would not say the community hate it. Just because I don't engage here about everything I don't like does not stop me being part of the community.

 

[Kaoru Sen'nin]

I want to report a bug when you build a Ringworld.
All habitats in the system got destroyed and there was no warning for that happening, all pops were gone as well.

Maybe the solution to bring tall back is to make it so that the Empire malus is affected by the amount of colonies you have. Maybe even reduce the Empire penalty to below 100 if you for example only have one planet, but the average in the galaxy is 10+ planets.
On top of that, all pops gained through conquest/slave market/raiding should could double for the Empire Penalty, so it's less effective.

Makes no sense whatsoever in a Roleplay perspective, which is something that a huge amount of players consider.

Not all of them indeed but Stellaris heavily sold itself by "Make your own story" and that attracted people commited to roleplay.