The pop mechanism is quite terrible in 3.0

[Nebbie Zebbie]

I loaded up an old save earlier and it would take 681 months to make a robot on a newly-colonized ringworld, but only 131 months to grow a pop, and down to "only" like 70 months once I massively increased carrying capacity.
It's an utter joke; any decently-sized empire in a decently-sized galaxy basically can't grow into new colonies once it has most of its planets filled out. I don't want to even imagine the midgame struggles with this without resorting to the utter cheese it will inevitably force with vassalization or Nihilistic Acquisition.

You're joking. That's how the mechanic works?

It's not as bad as it sounds. Basically, unemployed people will want to move off the planet because there's no jobs for them, but the planet has a high carrying capacity, so people on it will keep making babies because there's tons of housing and such.

There was a similar hate for the FTL rework, and paradox stood by their choice. It is far from certain paradox will change this mechanic.

I'm still a little upset about the FTL rework, because I feel that warp travel could've been fixed with only a few mechanics (unlike the mess of wormhole stations), and hyperlanes are incredibly stifling.

 

[sillyrobot]

I wonder how much longer the outrage will continue before PDX makes an official announcement, the hate for this mechanism is to large and wide spread to ignore, or at least for them not to notice, it's impossible.

Probably at least 2 weeks. It takes about that long for humans to grow accustomed to a change. Until then, the complaints often centre around the differences to what was rather than what actually hurts.

Always collect the first two weeks of feedback from large user bases, but don't act -- barring obvious not working as intended. But pay real close attention to complaints that last more than 2 weeks because people now describe what actually hurts.

 

[Doomy]

My suggestion to fix this.

Stellaris: Suggestions

Your ideas can help improve the game!

forum.paradoxplaza.com

feedback welcomed.

 

[Cat_Fuzz]

If you physically cannot play the game with empire-scaled growth, I have a surefire solution. Turning it off.

Navigate to your local files (on Steam, there should be a button you can click, not sure where it installs if you are not on steam, someone else can help), and go to the "common" folder, and then go to the "defines" folder, and open 00_defines.txt in Notepad++ or maybe even normal notepad or whatever text editor you use.

Then scroll down or Ctrl+F and find this:

View attachment 705111

See where it says "REQUIRED_POP_GROWTH_SCALE = 0.5"? Yeah change that 0.5 to 0, and empire growth increase from pops is gone.

I'll make the simplest mod in existance changing it for steam users as well, since this seems to be highly requested.

EDIT: For those who read this a bit late, uh, you need to scroll down and also set THIS to zero as well:

View attachment 705168

Have you ever wondered is a minus number could go here? So for example, the bigger your empire, the less is needed to grow pops, but this would heavily slow down as capacity reaches its limit?

 

[Inane_Newt]

Tall, wide, does it matter, I am at year 2292 with a pop of 700 and I am bored, years go by without any pop growing and I have 5 dozen planets with under 5 population. These are not new colonies either, you take over another empire or 2 and everything just stops growing. I cant build buildings in all my free building slots because I cant afford to promote workers into specialist without risking undermining my economy. So I really can't do anything.

If I am not fighting a war, I am not doing anything, the economy is viable and competitive with other empires, it is just boring cause nothing is happening.

This is really sad too cause I love every other change I've seen

 

[Nebbie Zebbie]

Probably at least 2 weeks. It takes about that long for humans to grow accustomed to a change. Until then, the complaints often centre around the differences to what was rather than what actually hurts.

Always collect the first two weeks of feedback from large user bases, but don't act -- barring obvious not working as intended. But pay real close attention to complaints that last more than 2 weeks because people now describe what actually hurts.

I really doubt that they'll wait this long, because I don't think this works as intended:

1. Nihilistic Acquisition and Barbaric Despoilers are now probably just crazy better than normal play because they cheat the penalty by just stealing pops (and the lower-pop empires then repopulate fast).
2. You can release individual planets as vassals, then later reintegrate them, effectively cheating, and this is basically mandatory for peaceful play, but is super unfun.
3. Regardless of the above, bigger galaxy sizes mean bigger empire sizes mean more populations by midgame, and thus the penalty is higher. That is a direct imbalance from settings that are normally expected to all be relatively equally viable.

 

[Bezborg]

Tall, wide, does it matter, I am at year 2292 with a pop of 700 and I am bored, years go by without any pop growing and I have 5 dozen planets with under 5 population. These are not new colonies either, you take over another empire or 2 and everything just stops growing. I cant build buildings in all my free building slots because I cant afford to promote workers into specialist without risking undermining my economy. So I really can't do anything.

If I am not fighting a war, I am not doing anything, the economy is viable and competitive with other empires, it is just boring cause nothing is happening.

This is really sad too cause I love every other change I've seen

If this is not lack of pre-launch testing, what is?

 

[sillyrobot]

I don't think people really understand just how dire this is for planetary development once you've expanded.

View attachment 705315

EVERY planet looks something like this, because this is the only way to maximize growth which is still so painfully slow. I have dozens of these and they won't grow to become mid-size colonies unless I actually play to 2500. Because of this, there's no point in building anything but housing, because what else actually contributes to a colony without needing to be worked by a pop? The answer is almost nothing.

Alloy fabs/Civilian industries? Useless, just use the district and planet designations.
Robot Assembly? Barely adds any actual growth due to the issue of splitting pop growth and construction. Even if I did add it I'm looking at each single robot costing thousands of alloys. Also robots are just a micro horror because they don't migrate and so you actually have to check every planet every time a pop becomes unemployed.
Chemical/Gas/crystal plants? There's no point, since upgraded structures are worthless until you get to 60+ pop planets. Spoiler: I never will. No matter what there will always be other planets to migrate pops to every time unemployment hits.
Holo theaters? Why spend precious pops producing amenities when housing does it? It's not like I can really use these building slots anyway and I have to have build city districts to get enough housing to speed up my painfully slow growth.
Gene clinics? haha these were a joke even before 3.0

Aside from planets that are focused on Administrative Offices or Research Labs, which give effects impossible to replicate with districts, every planet looks like this. I think housing makes up over half the buildings in my empire. This is just a normal, average sized galaxy, 1x habitability, I've casually conquered about 1/5th through vassals and integration, and its 2294. And every single planetary decision is so *boring*, because its so simplistic.

Also unrelated but damn, the modifier stacking nowadays is starting to get pretty silly:
View attachment 705316

Careful! Too much housing halves your potential growth rate!

Colonies follow something like an S-curve. Low pop count compared to total capacity = modest growth. High pop count compared to capacity = almost no growth.

The best growth happens when pop count is half capacity. You get about double what you get at low pop counts. So get ready to micro housing to maintain growth!

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

People... people... you know there are ways to keep your population relatively small and still grow a large empire no do you?!?
You can release Vassals from your empire to keep the Empire Pop growth numbers down... your Vassals now cans start booming to as they have just been released from your enormous overhead. You also can tailor them into a productive member of your Empire by filling out their planets with buildings and districts. You can have their population migrate to yours too.

Take on tributaries/vassals instead of conquering enemy planets...

You don't need to own the entire galaxy to "win" the game.

You don't need to engineer every world into the perfect breeding pit either. Sometimes it is just more efficient to maximize their output instead, having perfect breeding pits is only economically sound in some places... small planet in particular are better of with a sub optimal growth later on and concentrate more on production instead.

This new mechanic also means that Federations and Xenophilic empires are more viable and that war and conquering is not the only way to play the game efficiently, just one of them.

You have to judge how useful it is to waste resources on growing more population... at some point it simply is not much meaning in wasting resources to do this. So now you have to figure out a way to split your empire up in smaller pieces. It obviously is a soft nerf to anyone who can't use vassals and allies... but being the largest empire in the galaxy still is a huge benefit as you can get so much more resources from space that you turn most of your population into high quality workers instead, the ratio of specialists versus workers can now increase. It means you utilize administrative resource way more efficient this way too...

The in game reasoning is that any suitably large empire will eventually either Ascend, become a Fallen Empire or the Crisis.... I think this fit rather well as every galaxy end up in a repeating cycle of rise and eventual fall.

It still is possible to conquer the entire galaxy, you just can't expect much pop growth at the end of the game and have to manage growth differently. You also have to accept that your economy at the later stage of such a game will be quite inefficient and make peace with that.

 

[-Marauder-]

It's funny, people have been clamoring for total empire pop count affecting growth for over a year. Now that it's here people are angry. LMAO this forum is a gift that keeps on giving

Oh don't you dare lie. Some people have been clamoring for it, others have been arguing against it for this exact damn reason. I can dig up some of my posts where I was arguing with folks, I've seen you in those threads though I can't pin down which side of the argument you were on without looking it up.

All I have to say on this topic is. Told you guys so. Some folks were against it, and were shouted down.

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

Oh don't you dare lie. Some people have been clamoring for it, others have been arguing against it for this exact damn reason. I can dig up some of my posts where I was arguing with folks, I've seen you in those threads though I can't pin down which side of the argument you were on without looking it up.

All I have to say on this topic is. Told you guys so. Some folks were against it, and were shouted down.

I think it is what type of person you are... if you like the awful snowball rolling down a steep hill or a gentle hill?!?

The mechanic works quite well in my opinion... you just have to be a bit more creative and there are multiple ways to solve the problem.

 

[-Marauder-]

I think it is what type of person you are... if you like the awful snowball rolling down a steep hill or a gentle hill?!?

The mechanic works quite well in my opinion... you just have to be a bit more creative and there are multiple ways to solve the problem.

The mechanic is absolutely and utterly broken. And your weird work around of abusing the ability to create vassals, which some empires like Machine Empires and Gestalt Consciousnesses don't have doesn't help with it, at all. It's merely enforcing a play style you personally enjoy and were advocating for long before this because it's broken and didn't take them into account.

Hey guess what? Nihilistic Acquisition does the same. You can keep a bunch of 1 planet empires around and farm them for pops regularly.

 

[sillyrobot]

I think it is what type of person you are... if you like the awful snowball rolling down a steep hill or a gentle hill?!?

The mechanic works quite well in my opinion... you just have to be a bit more creative and there are multiple ways to solve the problem.

There are a couple of ways to cheese around the problem, but no way to solve it.

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

That depend on what you mean by solving the problem?!?

What is the problem?!?

A hive mind just have to figure what is the best use of their population... at some point you are just better of abandoning planets (just like the precursors did) and concentrate on quality rather than quantity. You still get the resources from space from a vast empire.

You become the crises or you Ascend and start a new game.... or you end up a fallen empire.... or you just conquer the galaxy as a fanatic purifier and the retreat to your corner of space and once again become a fallen empire.

I really don't see the problem... there are multiple ways to play the game... I don't understand what the end goal of people in this thread really is. Producing more pop is not the end goal of the game is it... you still can grow your economy even if your population have stagnated.

I see way more role-play opportunities with the new mechanics as just growing exponentially are no longer a thing...

 

[sillyrobot]

I don't have enough experience to see how mid and late game are going to play out, but early game seriously flattens pop growth.

My current game hit year 34. I have a total of 6 colonies, none well-developed. My effective pop growth rate is 4x my original single colony start (6 growth centres, 150 points required for the next growth). So long as I can continue to add new colonies in a timely way, I should manage to keep that figure rising ever so slightly.

Once my easy access to colonies ends though as borders firm up and my growth will slide back towards the start of the game. My middling to large empire will be producing as many pops a year as my single world did. I struggle to conceive how I would ever use a single ecumenopolis or ringworld in less than a few hundred years of growth without using cheese.

 

[DC E1G]

i can understand they wanted to do this because they couldn'T resolve the lag because of pop late game and limite the snowballing, but that too extreme, they should take this to 0.2/pop or 0.3/pop and not 0.5/pop after 60 or 70 years you have nothing to do execpt war. Thats not fun for a 4x.

And i honestly don't think we can beats the crisis x25 at years 2350 like we were doing before, even a x5 seem like impossible, we have like, 3x or 4x less pop that what we were using to have.

I think something like this is the most likely change. There's probably a sweet spot where pop growth is reduced enough that it helps micromanagement and lag, without producing feels bad situations until late enough in the game that it doesn't matter for most players. They probably aren't going to throw out the new system and almost certainly aren't going to just remove pops, that's a job best saved for Stellaris 2.

 

[sillyrobot]

I think something like this is the most likely change. There's probably a sweet spot where pop growth is reduced enough that it helps micromanagement and lag, without producing feels bad situations until late enough in the game that it doesn't matter for most players. They probably aren't going to throw out thew new system and almost certainly aren't going to just remove pops, that's a job best saved for Stellaris 2.

I doubt it. Don't get me wrong, a lower penalty will help especially in the early to mid-game. But any linear growth modifier will end up with the large empire producing pops at the rate of the single colony at the beginning of the game eventually. It's the nature of fractions with ever-larger denominators.

To get control of end-game total population (which empire limits won't do by their less than global nature) requires a large enough modifier that it will seriously curtail growth to the point that those large high-population toys become almost impossible to use.

 

[DC E1G]

I doubt it. Don't get me wrong, a lower penalty will help especially in the early to mid-game. But any linear growth modifier will end up with the large empire producing pops at the rate of the single colony at the beginning of the game eventually. It's the nature of fractions with ever-larger denominators.

To get control of end-game total population (which empire limits won't do by their less than global nature) requires a large enough modifier that it will seriously curtail growth to the point that those large high-population toys become almost impossible to use.

Hopefully someone around here has enough time to model what a few different modifiers would look like. You might be right that any linear modifier would ultimately be so small as to be insignificant, or big enough that it wrecks late game, high population stuff.

I never used the planet carrying capacity mod, does anyone know if it reduced overall pop counts or just created a system where pops moved around more logically?

 

[PetStark]

I think to cap population is not a bad idea but they need to rebalance it and do it so much better. It makes that you always need help (diplomacy) or being the custodian to beat the crisis. Being the only one superpower at the galaxy is more difficult and you will need to colaborate with other empires. If you are an isolacionist and war power conquering others is the correct way to growth

Maybe it is a perfect time to make an internal DLC or expansion that can modify these population limits giving more population limits to pacifist empires and less to militarist ones.

 

[Xerberus]

new pop mechanic is braindead. who thought "hey, if you have a big crowded empire and find a new planet ... nobody is gonna go there and no new children for decades...cuz realism duh".

sounds like a refund for the dlc i guess...first time but this mechanic is the worst thing they've done in a while.

espionage also seems to need more punch...right now primarily only some fluff.