The pop mechanism is quite terrible in 3.0

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If the cheese is to just release sectors and reintegrate them, then it should be population maintenance costs which grow quadratically so that in the long run, you can't maintain all these newly integrated subjects. Or, have no empire-wide malus of growth or maintenance, but use the shiny, new espionage feature and make larger empires quadratically more fragile than smaller ones so that giant blobs can be beat in another way than through sheer military-economic power (Xploitation.. the neglected middle X)
 
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Somebody has almost certainly already made this point deeper in this thread, but what I don't understand is why they decided an arbitrary cap on growth was the best way to increase performance.

I'm not developer so I don't know, maybe reducing the overall amount of pops is the only way to increase performance out of Stellaris at this point. But couldn't they have more simply just halved the growth rates of pops? You'd still have less pops (and obviously to compensate you could make pops more individually productive), but you wouldn't have any of this nonsense where your pops decide to just stop breeding once your empire reaches a certain size. Because the way they've chosen isn't fun, it destroys a lot of different play-styles, and it doesn't feel realistic.

Although perhaps I'm wrong on the last point, maybe the Vatican City is pumping out little pope-men at a rate vastly superior to India.
 
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Somebody has almost certainly already made this point deeper in this thread, but what I don't understand is why they decided an arbitrary cap on growth was the best way to increase performance.

I'm not developer so I don't know, maybe reducing the overall amount of pops is the only way to increase performance out of Stellaris at this point. But couldn't they have more simply just halved the growth rates of pops? You'd still have less pops (and obviously to compensate you could make pops more individually productive), but you wouldn't have any of this nonsense where your pops decide to just stop breeding once your empire reaches a certain size. Because the way they've chosen isn't fun, it destroys a lot of different play-styles, and it doesn't feel realistic.

Although perhaps I'm wrong on the last point, maybe the Vatican City is pumping out little pope-men at a rate vastly superior to India.
Check this mod: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2461091125 which uses that solution with a few other changes to balance it, and see if it works for you.
 
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This is a ridiculous half way house. Pops have been reduced but not the need for them, or for that matter the space to put them. It's playable but the best ways to grow pops without cheese look ridiculous and are even gamier than friggin board games. Conquest and raiding have gone through the roof, vassal cheese is quite frankly just plain ugly... I'd go into more detail but I really don't feel like repeating the arguments already made in this very thread.

With vassals still being set to ensign and the military AI being about as coordinated as a high school cheerleading team in a Richter 8 earthquake, Stellaris is basically a competitive multiplayer game as it stands, the 30 player tournament Stefan's currently hosting has been great fun to watch, but the AI is weaker than ever and the undisputed king of playstyles is war. Why, I ask you, do we even have such a wide choice of ethics if the main factor to think about is "does this let me raid and conquer better for more pops?" or "does this maximise pop efficiency?" And before anyone says anything about not playing to win: Why shouldn't I think about playing to win? It's the way to play the game that just got buffed through the roof, after all!

So I guess this brings me to my point:
Either revert it, or go all the way. Reduce the amount of pops needed to get a good economy going. The efficiency helps but you still needs tons more planets than you did in 2.8 and alloy and research have been nerfed, as all those tier 2 and 3 buildings won't really get filled. Because in what universe is it okay for an ecu to be deliberately unfilled? Why did you even urbanize the planet if it's only going to be half full? This empire cap has done more harm than good and either needs to go or needs to be adjusted, simple as that.
 
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This is the worst change Paradox has made to Stellaris since they broke the AI with the megacorp update. I was looking forward to this update but I am utterly disappointed with it. This was the laziest, least elegant and most ham-fisted way they could have possibly come up with.

I've already refunded Nemesis on Steam. Congratulations Paradox. This is the third item I've ever refunded on Steam.
 
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Somebody has almost certainly already made this point deeper in this thread, but what I don't understand is why they decided an arbitrary cap on growth was the best way to increase performance.

I'm not developer so I don't know, maybe reducing the overall amount of pops is the only way to increase performance out of Stellaris at this point. But couldn't they have more simply just halved the growth rates of pops? You'd still have less pops (and obviously to compensate you could make pops more individually productive), but you wouldn't have any of this nonsense where your pops decide to just stop breeding once your empire reaches a certain size. Because the way they've chosen isn't fun, it destroys a lot of different play-styles, and it doesn't feel realistic.

Although perhaps I'm wrong on the last point, maybe the Vatican City is pumping out little pope-men at a rate vastly superior to India.
I suspect they tried that first, but then someone from sales came in and said "Now the early game is too slow, new players will refund the game in the first two hours", so they switched to this ramp-up system.
 
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This is the worst change Paradox has made to Stellaris since they broke the AI with the megacorp update. I was looking forward to this update but I am utterly disappointed with it. This was the laziest, least elegant and most ham-fisted way they could have possibly come up with.

I've already refunded Nemesis on Steam. Congratulations Paradox. This is the third item I've ever refunded on Steam.

Do yourself a favour and never ever buy games right after release or preorder anything. I tested this patch and after 2h right after release i knew i will skip it, even if i really looked forward to it. They killed the game with the pop growth mechanic, i will now wait for mods or patch to fix it. They will get no further money until good solutions will adress the main problems. 3.0 was a real chance and they failed.

They fixed the micro hassle with auto migrating pops (needs fixes for slaves and robots).
They improved planetary building.
AI also seems to play a little bit better.

They killed everything above with the growth system. Wth are they doing with this game?
 
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With vassals still being set to ensign and the military AI being about as coordinated as a high school cheerleading team in a Richter 8 earthquake, Stellaris is basically a competitive multiplayer game as it stands, the 30 player tournament Stefan's currently hosting has been great fun to watch, but the AI is weaker than ever and the undisputed king of playstyles is war. Why, I ask you, do we even have such a wide choice of ethics if the main factor to think about is "does this let me raid and conquer better for more pops?" or "does this maximise pop efficiency?" And before anyone says anything about not playing to win: Why shouldn't I think about playing to win? It's the way to play the game that just got buffed through the roof, after all!
If your playstyle isn't fun for you, is it a good playstyle?
 
Check this mod: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2461091125 which uses that solution with a few other changes to balance it, and see if it works for you.
I love your mod thats 10 time better that what we have now and it feel more 'natural' the last thing i wish you could add is another mod for reducing the spam of habitat just for making farm pop ( so a rework of habitat and void born origine) and this would be a most better stellaris that i played since 2.0.
 
Do yourself a favour and never ever buy games right after release or preorder anything. I tested this patch and after 2h right after release i knew i will skip it, even if i really looked forward to it. They killed the game with the pop growth mechanic, i will now wait for mods or patch to fix it. They will get no further money until good solutions will adress the main problems. 3.0 was a real chance and they failed.

They fixed the micro hassle with auto migrating pops (needs fixes for slaves and robots).
They improved planetary building.
AI also seems to play a little bit better.

They killed everything above with the growth system. Wth are they doing with this game?
Maybe the meme that Paradox games are balanced for dev clashes really is true. In a 30 player dev clash you'd hardly notice the pop growth slowdown until you've basically won.
 
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I suspect they tried that first, but then someone from sales came in and said "Now the early game is too slow, new players will refund the game in the first two hours", so they switched to this ramp-up system.
If you just want to cut the pop half, that is very easy to change some data to fit the modle now.
With half growth of all pop, just improve all of the jobs ouput, 6 energy to 12 energy, 4 mine to 8 mines, 4 tech point to 8 tech point.
Then the buildings and districts provide half of the jobs, the 2 job buildings and districts cut down to 1 job, the level 2 building provide 2 jobs and level 3 provide 4 jobs.
Just so easy . Paradox developers are just too lazy to change so much data.
 
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Well that would just be way too easy and make way too much sense, wouldn't it?

I keep hearing the counter argument being that "if you slow it 50% the galaxy will still overcrowd and lag games to death".

Well yea....but half as quickly. Who in the world wants to play to year 2600 anyways?
 
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Total empire pops affecting planetary pop growth is insane. Since when does the overpopulation of New York City cause people in other States to stop having kids? However, this explains why my empire of 1500 pops now requires 858 points of growth per planet before creating a new pop. The only planets in my empire that can make pops in any reasonable amount of time are ecumenopolis planets. Every other planet takes a decade or two to create just one pop.
 
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So, I finally went and tried out a new empire with the changes. And no, not some bog-standard one, but one that I expected to be utterly crushed under the new mechanics (Rogue Servitor). It actually went fine up until around 2300, when I ran out of planets from being mostly peaceful (no conquering enemy planets, I don't want my perfect fox guys polluted with xeno trash) and so made a habitat...
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the current state of Rogue Servitors:
Stellaris_BothrianRun_HabitatPopGrowth.png

Yeah, I'm never filling out my organic sanctuaries without using Nihilistic Acquisition (which I did pick up this run in part because I realized without conquering planets I wasn't getting alternate habitability types).
 
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I was pretty on board with the pop limitations on paper, but having tried it out with a hive mind I'm pretty unhappy with them. It just feels bad. Like expanding into unclaimed territory and terraforming uncolonized worlds into hive worlds and settling on them feels like it should work, but it doesn't. The discrepancy between player expectations (expanding into unclaimed territory should result in economic gain) and the reality of the game (it doesn't once you hit the mid-game) leads to a very dissatisfying experience. Perhaps there is a way to achieve a similar end without that discordant experience.
 
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A new POP should not increase the growth cost by 0.5, it should be less, somewhere between 0.1-0.3. This would be viable solution for the growth curve for a normal span of a game without sacrificing the late game performance.
 
I was pretty on board with the pop limitations on paper, but having tried it out with a hive mind I'm pretty unhappy with them. It just feels bad. Like expanding into unclaimed territory and terraforming uncolonized worlds into hive worlds and settling on them feels like it should work, but it doesn't. The discrepancy between player expectations (expanding into unclaimed territory should result in economic gain) and the reality of the game (it doesn't once you hit the mid-game) leads to a very dissatisfying experience. Perhaps there is a way to achieve a similar end without that discordant experience.
Yeah, that's the biggest problem here: Expansion into new worlds gets progressively worse.
If it were just using some cheese ability to make worlds BIGGERER, then it would probably seem normal that at a certain point, pops just don't want to fill the ever-higher skyscrapers of your double mega ecumenopoli...but instead what's going on is that having a ton of people over in those built-up planets means nobody wants to have babies in the vast empty frontier either.
A new POP should not increase the growth cost by 0.5, it should be less, somewhere between 0.1-0.3. This would be viable solution for the growth curve for a normal span of a game without sacrificing the late game performance.
In a word: no. This would result in still the exact problem stated above, it would just take 1.66-5x longer to be at the same level where a new planet basically never grows.
It's entirely possible things would be fine if there was just a minimum population amount on every planet before empire-wide per-pop penalties kick in...but then that's basically what carrying capacity already does.
It's worth realizing that there can exist game mechanics where their very existence is a negative on gameplay, no matter what you tweak the number to (aside of the number where it's the same as not existing; in this case that's 0).
 
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In a word: no. This would result in still the exact problem stated above, it would just take 1.66-5x longer to be at the same level where a new planet basically never grows.
It's entirely possible things would be fine if there was just a minimum population amount (perhaps the carrying capacity itself?) on every planet before empire-wide per-pop penalties kick in.
I know, but I don't have a problem with 0.5 right now, I just want to show a viable compromise so the peanalty kicks in some time later.