Thank you for 2.2!

[ChiefBigFeather]

Dear Stellaris team,

I want to sincerely thank you for 2.2. The changes to the eco add a lot of realistic feel to the game, I think they are overall great. Concerns of corporate interest often interfere with creativity in successful titles. In this context: Ripping out the economy system of Stellaris and replacing it like this is not an easy feat. Special thanks to however had the courage to go through with it!

There are some suggestions I would like to make:
The release is a little rough around the edges, but I'm confident you will improve those with some patches. Since the payoff of your efforts is probably in part brand loyalty, I think you really could profit from an early access or open beta model. That could quiet some "where is quality control?" voices and turn them into "it's getting there!" hype.

Speaking of hype, maybe you could turn to friendly competition to improve the AI. If you get positive response, you could start small events around it. Compare and evaluate different AIs, implement the best features, make requests for back end support to allow new best features, repeat. Since AI is such a buzzword at the moment, I'm fairly sure such a thing could attract a large crowd.

 

[Mikhail_Mengsk]

WHen performance and AI will be addressed, 2.2 will be fantastic.

 

[LWE]

Despite some howlers the team made, I am grateful to Paradox for the opportunity to play Stellaris 2.2 these months.

 

[Belhedler]

WHen performance and AI will be addressed, 2.2 will be fantastic.

Add basic functional automation and proper sector to the list and I give you my vote (figure of speach)

 

[Tech Noir Synth]

We do need a proper way to micromanage our pops in 2.2. The job system may look nice, but it turned out to be micromanagement hell. If you are playing a Robotic empire, you will create several different robot types specialized on ressource output. However we can no longer assign them to jobs manually, or queue up how many to grow.

In the past, I would look at a new planet or habitat. Fill all slots with queued up buildings. Queue up the specialized Robot type for each building and never have to look at it ever again. It was simple and effective.

In Le Guin, I am constantly annoyed by having to build new buildings once another slot unlocks. I can no longer pre-plan my planets and queue up all buildings I want to have. I have to do 3 clicks to assign a new Robot type to assemble based on jobs on the planet. I have to keep checking after some time and switch out the Robot model manually since you removed our ability to queue up Robots.

Robots do not migrate, yet they only unlock their biggest strength of extra Roboticists jobs at 80 pop Planet Capital. At this point, the planet is starting to fill up quicker and to take advantage of great pop growth, you have to manually resettle your pops because of some reason Synth Ascended Humans do no longer migrate. This makes no sense and once you end up with 30+ fully developed planet the game becomes "resettlement simulator". Every pop has to be resettled manually to new colonies when it could be simple and automatic.

I'm going to copy paste my thoughts from my thread which I created 18th of December already:

Suggestions to improve the pop system to surpass the tile system

One of the core problems right now is the huge micromanagement it requires to organize pops specifically so the pops with the best traits end up in the correct job positions. Lets take Synthetic Ascension as an example:

I want to use 4 different types of Robots for energy, minerals, science and unity. I can no longer queue up building these different pop types. Instead I have to check how many jobs need to be filled and I have to switch around which pops are being assembled manually. However each time I lose 50% on current assembly progress on the next pop, so I have to switch right after a new pop is added to not waste precious time.

Why did paradox design the system in such a way that it requires such a huge increase in micromanagement to allocate your pops properly? All the traits for extra ressource output are still in the game - it does not seem like the goal was to simply kill off any min/maxing yet this is effectively what happened.

I like the current system and see its potential. I think it would only require a couple tweaks to come out ahead of the old system.

Give us the option to queue up different Robot pops to assemble, so that we no longer have to check every planet, habitat etc in intervals. Make the AI smarter when it comes to assigning pops to jobs OR allow us to assign them manually (atleast for Robots). By doing this, you effectively remove the tedious upgrading of buildings and the insane micromanagement we are forced to do currently and you end up with a superiour, more immersive and beautiful management screen.


It may seem redundand, but I believe only if we keep asking for these quality of life changes will the developers listen and implement it. Otherwise a modder will allow us to do this and when everyone starts using mods just to make the system bearable, the developers should change it.

 

[SectorsAreOkay]

The pops are supposed to go where they are best suited. So robomodded pops that have, say, a mineral production bonus should be miners. Unfortunately it looks like this system doesn't consistently work, requiring micromanagement. I know Glavius has done some work in his (her?) mod and hopefully Paradox will address this. I would suggest posting in the bug forum. They need the right feedback about it.

As for not being able to queue up a whole planet from the start, I say good. It's immersion breaking and makes the game thoughtless. The fact that the game is forcing you to interact with...the game is an improvement. In practice, it's not that much work. In fact, you shouldn't even be building buildings every time a slot opens up. I think that's a mistake people make and then they also end up with wild swings in their economy and then come to the forum to complain about a "broken" system.

 

[Belhedler]

We do need a proper way to micromanage our pops in 2.2. The job system may look nice, but it turned out to be micromanagement hell.

That's apparently the easiest to fix. There are mods that have started doing it. It comes done to one thing: the current allocation rules are full of holes and bad priorities. I mean, out of 8 identical jobs to populate with 2 different species available, the system seems to find it fun to allocate some pops from the species without the trait augmenting the effect of the job I'm trying to populate using the +/- buttons by sheer what annoyance? That alone means there's a problem with the allocation engine. And fixing that will already be a huge change in the 'automation' of the colony. Fuck it even attempted to push a -25% amenities pop on a clerk job while I had plenty of +25% amenties one...

 

[SectorsAreOkay]

You can also fix this by just not overbuilding. A little overbuilding won'tcause problems. But I suspect a lot of you complaining about job priorities and wild swings are way overbuilding and suffering because of it.

 

[Tech Noir Synth]

As for not being able to queue up a whole planet from the start, I say good. It's immersion breaking and makes the game thoughtless. The fact that the game is forcing you to interact with...the game is an improvement. In practice, it's not that much work. In fact, you shouldn't even be building buildings every time a slot opens up. I think that's a mistake people make and then they also end up with wild swings in their economy and then come to the forum to complain about a "broken" system.

I disagree. Its not "thoughtless and immersion breaking". You always had the chance to not queue up everying and only build buildings as the pops were build/grown. In fact queuing up buildings and pops often times led to innefficiency but it was a way to ensure things end up perfect.

By design, everyone has the option to play the game "thoughtless and immersion breaking" by using sector AI to build stuff for them. If you were lazy you could focus only on your core sector and have the AI do busy work on the rest of your empire. Obviously not perfect, but the option was there. In theory this option still exists - but as well all know by now - the sector system is a total mess.

You call it "thoughtless and immersion breaking" I call it convenient and efficient. Again, having the option to queue up stuff doesn't mean you cannot check regularly on your planets, in fact it was better to do so because of pops on no building tiles etc. The purpose of the sector system is to make the game playable for people who don't want to focus on planet management a lot and this is perfectly fine.

The problem remains, the current system, both sectors and job system do not function properly and lack much needed features. Regardless of if you want to make use of them or not.

 

[Tech Noir Synth]

You can also fix this by just not overbuilding. A little overbuilding won'tcause problems. But I suspect a lot of you complaining about job priorities and wild swings are way overbuilding and suffering because of it.

You are mistaken. This is not one of the usual complain threads because people do not manage their planets properly. I know full well to hold off on building new planet buildings to not lose out on worker jobs for basic ressource production. This is about the job system not allocating my pops based on their traits properly and the added micromanagement of doing so compared to the old system. Up until now I am solely focusing on robot pops. For organics this is even worse. You either sacrifice 20% pop growth or you hope the growth and job roulette manage to allocate atleast some of your pops into the correct job position.

I get that this update is focused around making planet management more interesting. As I have written in my post from 18th december I am not against this. In fact, I like it and see its potential. The only problem is the system does not work properly yet and this is why I keep bringing those problems up, so they get fixed and we can all enjoy a better game.

 

[SectorsAreOkay]

I disagree. Its not "thoughtless and immersion breaking". You always had the chance to not queue up everying and only build buildings as the pops were build/grown. In fact queuing up buildings and pops often times led to innefficiency but it was a way to ensure things end up perfect.

By design, everyone has the option to play the game "thoughtless and immersion breaking" by using sector AI to build stuff for them. If you were lazy you could focus only on your core sector and have the AI do busy work on the rest of your empire. Obviously not perfect, but the option was there. In theory this option still exists - but as well all know by now - the sector system is a total mess.

You call it "thoughtless and immersion breaking" I call it convenient and efficient. Again, having the option to queue up stuff doesn't mean you cannot check regularly on your planets, in fact it was better to do so because of pops on no building tiles etc. The purpose of the sector system is to make the game playable for people who don't want to focus on planet management a lot and this is perfectly fine.

The problem remains, the current system, both sectors and job system do not function properly and lack much needed features. Regardless of if you want to make use of them or not.

If the new sector system worked, I think this would solve your problem. It absolutely needs to be fixed. Also, I really think focus and governors should be on the planet level, not the sector level. You specialize planets, not random groups of planets. I think if they did that and made it actually work, a lot of the micro concerns would go away. I 100% support automation through those means.

However, I still strongly disagree that people should be able to micromanage exactly where their pops are and what they are working on. It's a constraint of the game that you can't always get 100% efficiency, just like in the real world where we don't get to control what every single person is working on. An improvement in the way it distributes pops to jobs would certainly be welcome. But perfection in that, it in giving you control over it, would be a big mistake in my opinion. The game is about running empires, not managing a 12 person company. You just shouldn't have that level of control on the empire level.

 

[TurtleShroom]

This is what I, and Apsec (the only layman I trust for cutting-edge "Stellaris" analysis), have said all along.

I myself will never go back to Planet Tiles. The economic system is literally that good. It makes the game more fun, gives more flavor and abilities to make Mods, and gives more depth to the game. I actually feel like there are more than twenty five creatures on my planet!

All it needs now is more optimization, so men who use toasters powered by Repurposed Hardware can properly run a late game adventure.

 

[Sinister2202]

If they are working on diplomacy rework next, they should have little choice but to improve the AI as well. Otherwise, what is the point of better diplomacy system?

 

[ChiefBigFeather]

Please stop whining about the flaws of the patch. The system is more complex then the old one, good automation (at acceptable performance) could take even longer. There are plenty of threads discussing the weak areas of the game in detail, but this thread is about the strategy at paradox.

The move to a new economy system is still exceptionally brave, especially if considered from a publishers point of view. It shows that both the devs and paradox as a company are willing to innovate. This is something the game industry as a whole lacks and it is very important for the smaller 4x community. They should get more positive feedback for the move. But I suppose most people just can‘t take the minute and think about that, their horizon is just limited to „omg feature x is broken, the game is totally unplayable“.

More important then what‘s flawed in the patch is the question of how the devs can improve the game faster. Especially something as complex as an AI requires resources game development studios simply do not have. Even in titles with acceptable AI, it took the devs plenty of patches and expansions to get there. Challenging skilled modders and AI programmers to a kind of contest could save resources, create hype and improve the experience all at the same time.

 

[Sigma 582]

friendly competition to improve the AI

Would be fun to see an AI tournament where each AI modder is represented by 1 empire managed by his version of AI. Best performing AIs would make their way into the base game and their authors would get prizes.

 

[kaboomz]

WHen performance and AI will be addressed, 2.2 will be fantastic.

PATCH HYPE