Suggestion: Streamline planetary management

[KingAlamar]

While many people would agree that players should be faced with interesting decisions I don't know if I'd prefer to go wholly in your direction. At first I'd prefer quality-of-life fixes and updates such as:

• Give me a notification when a planetary decision has expired. Don't force me to manually scan my planets just to keep "Encourage Growth" up. Maybe make the decision "permanent" [with monthly food upkeep] until we have a decision to disable "Encouraging Growth" --- not necessarily to confuse this with Discourage Growth
• Let us be able to set "Job Priorities" in the population tab of planets. This way we have better control over what jobs get filled first, what jobs are "looted" when we promote from lower tiers, etc.
• Let us set preferred job type(s) in the species tab empire wide ... This will help the AI decide who to assign to what jobs
• Let us set species growth priority to help the AI figure out which species we prefer growth in.
• Tie the growth mechanic [at least a little bit] to available jobs & priorities of those jobs.
• Help automate piracy patrolling. For example either give a piracy patrol fleet a multi-system radius that they could suppress piracy OR have the AI decide on what the patrol route should be given the patrol radius of the fleet in question.
• Make it more clear [from the trade map view] of how large of a patrol fleet [or even stationary fleet] we'd need to keep "effective piracy" at zero.
• Allow the player to choose a planetary focus ... this is more of a nudge so that sector AI can be taught to help develop planets under our guidance.
• Allow us to set up build-templates for the sector AI so we can tell the AI what we want built ahead of time -- the AI's job is just to handle the "just in time" nature of those builds

Other things that I'd want to look at first would be:

• AI overhaul ... see Glavius
• Changing from blind recalculation daily to [perhaps] event driven triggers for when to recalculate things AND/OR monthly recalculation. The idea is to lower the CPU load.
• Bug Fixes
• Finish every #TODO

 

[MeowBeep]

I guess it comes down to whether players want to spend their time making strategic decisions or attending to management. Personally, I signed up for a grand strategy game.

In the current system, your decisions on setting up your first few planets are strategic, because they greatly impact the relative ratio of production. However, by your 20th planet those same decisions have become managerial, because they no longer have much impact on that ratio.

With districts, the strategic aspect is the ratio of the different types. Players generally form plans around either specializing their planets, meaning they maximize the ratio of one thing and minimize the rest, they they go for balance in which the ratios are about equal.

So, consider how many control points are actually necessary for this strategic level thinking about the relative ratio of production? I am simply arguing that 25 control points are far more than is necessary, and that about 5 would be sufficient. Players are faced with essentially identical strategic choices whether it is 5, 25, or 100, but the managerial work required to execute the decisions varies significantly.

 

[Adolf - Finite War]

It doesn't really make sense to have to order district by district, city by city when you're managing an interstellar empire. When I colonize a planet I expect the administration to fully exploit all the minerals, maximize energy production and farming and build the necessary housing for the population living there. If there are conflicts like having to strip mine such a large area that it would affect food global production i'd rather have an event about it.

Meaningful choices in terms of changing a planets ressource ratios might also be placed in terraforming like Tropical/Continental worlds to increase food production, Dessert/Arid ones that allow higher energy production and make mineral exploitation easier than say on an Arctic or Tundra worlds. Ocean/Gaia worlds would be ideal Ressort places.

 

[FlyingPhoenix]

I agree with the premise of the OP but disagree with the implementation.

I dont think reduction of districts or buildings adds any value.

I think a player should be able to decide on planetary development once and execute it once, or even communicate that plan to an AI agent which then does the actual month to month planetary management according to the plan.

The problem with the current system is the developers (and some of the players) fall into this trap of thinking that execution of decisions is the same thing as making those same decisions.

The ideal system would be automatic with human input.

 

[Frostyant]

Setting up some kind of template at the beginning of a planet's colonisation (ie when x pops build this district/building) is a good solution.
A simple solution would be a planetary decision saying : when pop unemployed build district xyz. Alternatively allow us to "build" buildings before the slot is available, eating up the resources, but it only activates after the pop grows + construction time.

Improving sectors so that you can leave 20+ planets if its too much for you is also a good solution.

Removing districts is not.

Again keep in mind that for small empires you should still be able to do interesting management. I love 2.2 precisely because of how you can fine-tune planets and how those planets now organically change when you make major economic decision (more applicable to smaller empires where you don't just fix your problems by colonising a new world and giving it a specific job but by changing one your current ones). This may become tedious when you have a lot of planets (although personally my tolerance is slightly higher), but if you just strip the system down altogether it makes having less planets uninteresting.

 

[Hyomoto]

I'll bite: no, managing a hundred planets sucks and its why I play on no guaranteed worlds with 0.25x habitable planets. But even if it was simpler, easier, less tedious and in a phrase less interesting I would still play with fewer planets.

Look, you may not enjoy my playstyle but the micro is effectively nil because at most I'm managing a dozen planets. Point being how much of this micro are you inflicting on yourself by deliberately maximizing your potential for micro? Making planets simple-minded because you want to have 200 fire and forget experiences doesn't make the game better for everyone, it just caters to your specific playstyle. You are asking for less micro but why? So you can have more planets and add more micro?

At some point you have to factor yourself into your problem. I don't have that issue because I play in sparsely generated galaxies. You have that issue because you want as many planets as you can put in your borders. Try tributaries and vassals if you want to reduce micro. I'm not anti making things better, but I am very much anti your entire argument.

 

[Greenslade]

I'll bite: no, managing a hundred planets sucks and its why I play on no guaranteed worlds with 0.25x habitable planets. But even if it was simpler, easier, less tedious and in a phrase less interesting I would still play with fewer planets.

Look, you may not enjoy my playstyle but the micro is effectively nil because at most I'm managing a dozen planets. Point being how much of this micro are you inflicting on yourself by deliberately maximizing your potential for micro? Making planets simple-minded because you want to have 200 fire and forget experiences doesn't make the game better for everyone, it just caters to your specific playstyle. You are asking for less micro but why? So you can have more planets and add more micro?

At some point you have to factor yourself into your problem. I don't have that issue because I play in sparsely generated galaxies. You have that issue because you want as many planets as you can put in your borders. Try tributaries and vassals if you want to reduce micro. I'm not anti making things better, but I am very much anti your entire argument.

But, honestly, this kind of cuts out swathes of ways that Stellaris can be played.

I think the issue is more one of UI than of mechanics, to be honest, but even so, I think saying "turn all the settings down" isn't really a very good answer.

 

[Kain2K]

I think the issue is more one of UI than of mechanics, to be honest, but even so, I think saying "turn all the settings down" isn't really a very good answer.

I think it is both.
Having a real automation mechanic (like the "fire and forget"-automation we had 'till 2.1) would solve many of the issues most people who are not fond of the heavily increased micromanagement have.
The ill-designed UI, mostly the outliner, plays a big part with the issues that then would remain. But that could be solved by expanding the funcionality of the menus, and by adding new menus where necessary. The problem with the outliner is, that it is the only source of information for the most important things, and it is heavily overloaded, because it shows nearly everythig you can build. So you have to constantly scroll to find the one thing you are looking for. By showing only the most important things in the outliner (like your fleets), and giving the possibility to favorit colonies, sectors and so on, and then show only those, would most propably help in solving that issue. In short: Stellaris really needs an UI-specialist, who cleans up that mess we call "User Interface".

 

[Greenslade]

My ongoing suggestion is to conceive of the whole thing under a "tree" schema and constantly surface important information to the most visible top level element

• Empire overview - here are things that need attention 1 2 3
  • Sector - issues 1 2
    • System
    • System
    • System - issue 1
      • planet - issue 1
    • System
    • System - Issue 2
      • Planet
      • Planet - Issue 2
  • Sector - Issue 3
    • System
    • System - Issue 3
      • Planet - Issue 3

 

[Frostyant]

But, honestly, this kind of cuts out swathes of ways that Stellaris can be played.

I think the issue is more one of UI than of mechanics, to be honest, but even so, I think saying "turn all the settings down" isn't really a very good answer.

The UI is serviceable but really doesn't help. An "issues" tab (which just contains all planets with current unemployment/not enough housing/low stability/invasion) would be nice. Though at the end of the day you still have to do those decisions.

But his point on NOT having 200 "fire and forget" planets holds. As the OP pointed out, even he agrees that when you have fewer planets each individual development decision matters a lot more. While I think that a pure fire and forget would be disastrous there is a case for less individual decision later on. Provided they DONT invalid an entire play-style and render the early econ game boring for everyone.

Again a solution is sector AI. But then you have the problem of either making it obligatory (pissing off a lot of players since you remove agency) or not (pissing off a lot of OTHER players because now they have to micromanage in MP / to get the best empire). Plus some automation here and there (let us build buildings in advance).
Alternatively you could have it so that empires just run differently altogether once they are to large (ie rather than having a "planet tab" you get a "sector tab") but this is unlikely since at this point the devs have to create a whole new econ game for wide empires.

 

[myrsl0ken]

I just want sequential and conditional queueing and autobuilding.

Let me define a queue of buildings and districts which will be build when their housing and/or jobs are required. I should be able to design planets individually and also define a couple of standard templates to select from. There would have to be an "empire manager" window to track past (and preferably also future) expanses and some basic way to prioritize between planets if there's a resource shortage. This would solve most of the boring micro while keeping all important decisions.