Planet management isn't the "grand" part of grand strategy, so may switch around with your settings.
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The problem with Empire Growth penalty: Your habitability setting
- Thread starter monkeypunch87
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Having a handful of empires, with no more than 5 or 6 planets, each, isn't in anyway "Grand"
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But is the same for every empire in that galaxy, so it is "grand" on that scale. And, you could maybe increase you empire count with lesser planets.
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and that was the beauty of the game. You could adjust the settings to make it work for you.
Me I usually played on medium size galaxy with 0.5 habitability, and even then I'd come up with crazy pop numbers by late game (3000 on a recent playthrough with only maybe 1/5th of the galaxy controlled).
There's no doubt that they needed to lower pop growth and overall numbers, but the new settings remove way too many options for way too many people. Medium and large-sized galaxies are a waste now because even with 0.25 habitability there's still plenty of room to get to 1000 pops no problem and after that you just sort of sit there stalled with your thumb in your butt. After that you have to start getting really gamey to go any further.
Also, as I've said before, there are tons of different empire-types, civics and traits that are literally neutered into uselessness by the update. They just don't work anymore. If that fits in with the house rules/settings you like to play, that's great for you.
For everyone else? It's awful.
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You know, I propose a band aid solution for 3.01 here. If you don't want it, fine with me, but it is the state of the game in this version. And to keep Empire growth penalty per POP, I would suggest to connect it to habitability, since I'm sure, the devs would like it to stay.
It feels fine on 0.25 is all I'm saying, but adjustments are needed for higher settings.
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Usually max Hyperlanes, but I haven't done this in a while and not with 3.01.
Edit: Oh, and no guaranteed worlds nearby. Like never.
So, your galaxy is boring before you even hit the start button?
If you are statistically stuck on one planet for a serious part of the game, and don't wage war, you are not playing a grand strategy game or a 4X game.
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It's not a very helpful suggestion.
0.25 habitability and smaller galaxies solved the performance problems already. The problem that the pop growth malus aims to "fix" never really existed on those settings, so I don't really understand why you think it's helpful to suggest that playing on those settings makes it feel better. That's a no-brainer.
The folks that are upset with the changes enjoyed playing with larger parameters. They can't really have that now - not without a lot of awkward cheesing or unless they want to play a really stale and boring diplomacy game. Now they have to manage their Empires as if they were in small galaxies with low habitability, even when they're in larger galaxies with more available planets. You end up with a lot of useless, near-empty planets you can't make use of unless you're cheesing as mentioned before.
TLDR they didn't give players like you anything that you couldn't have before, but they took a huge swathe of options off the table for everyone else.
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I would disagree, usually, I have 5-8 planets, the first one is still often close by, but not guaranteed, and after that I expand usually as a president of a federation through new members or with vassals.
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Well, it is just not true. My planets still grow with the S-curve and stop to grow after they hit a ceiling. Just new places don't have such a penalty since there aren't that many POPs around anyway.
And my games play even faster than before. Also, I never said, I play with smaller galaxies, default medium.
And I even acknowledged the problem with higher settings and proposed a fix.
So, what do you want to hear? You just don't like it and it is not constructive.
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The ceiling is barely relevant on your settings. You have hardly any habitable planets. Didn't you say earlier that you've never even reached 1000 pops before? If I'm wrong about that I'm sorry.
Bottom line is that the changes barely affect you because of the way you choose to play. That's wonderful for you, especially if you're seeing performance improvements.
For the rest of us? Your suggestions aren't helpful. They're just stating the obvious. I'm not sure what you're referring to for proposed fixes either. I've not really seen much other than "roll back your patch" or "they should tweak the malus settings on higher settings".
The point is that any malus that leads to marginal growth reaching near-zero past a certain point sucks. The idea that you can't get any benefit from settling another planet because your empire is "full" is moronic. Full stop. There's not much else to say about it.
Bottom line is that the changes barely affect you because of the way you choose to play. That's wonderful for you, especially if you're seeing performance improvements.
For the rest of us? Your suggestions aren't helpful. They're just stating the obvious. I'm not sure what you're referring to for proposed fixes either. I've not really seen much other than "roll back your patch" or "they should tweak the malus settings on higher settings".
The point is that any malus that leads to marginal growth reaching near-zero past a certain point sucks. The idea that you can't get any benefit from settling another planet because your empire is "full" is moronic. Full stop. There's not much else to say about it.
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Yeah, I never said that. Don't know why you think that.
And yeah, my proposed fix in this thread is a lower penalty if you have a higher habitability setting so you don't end up with empty planets all over the place and to enable the great experience I have on my settings on your higher settings.
And I'm just sure that the penalty stays, regardless the forum hate. It will be tweaked, yes, but the devs won't delete it. For that, the performance boost is too high. So what is wrong with my fix, if you consider it under this assumption?
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I played Rogue Servitors with .75x habitables on a small galaxy. I hit the wall around the early 2300s and it is agonizing to see entire decades pass with maybe 1 thing happening.
This update for those who don't know basically broke most Machine Empires, especially Rogue Servitors. The pop penalty on assembly is more crippling than on growth because assembly doesn't get the bonuses growth does. Rogue Servitors also get such low bio-trophy growth that the idea of building a second organic sanctuary anywhere is just silly.
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Oh yeah, RS were completely slimed by the changes, no argument. Bio-trophies counting against pop limit was mean.
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Your fix doesn't work because it ends up in the same place. It's a linearly stacking debuff, so on higher habitability settings you're just setting the end point on diminishing returns from 1000 pop to say...1500 pop. It would mean you get to the same place in a reasonably similar time frame...just at higher number. You'll still have your Empire growth just stall out and you'll still be faced with a situation where you can't colonize new planets beyond that point because the game said your Empire is full. You'll still not be able to exterminate pops from other worlds and take over their planets. You'll still not be able to build and inhabit ring worlds. You just stall and then muck around with obtuse game mechanics for growth beyond that point.
Your certainty on the penalty staying is amusing though. I mean, we'll have to wait and see, but as people play this mess out and see how many setups are just non-functional, and how shitty it feels to have to finagle the system to eek a tiny bit of extra growth out, we'll see the pop numbers plummet. Paradox will be walking this change as it's going to remain deeply unpopular for most of the people who actually understand its implications.
Nobody cares about the performance improvements if the game isn't fun anymore, your personal enjoyment notwithstanding.
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I think what's really mean is applying the added growth amount requirements to assembly itself. The problem the devs were trying to solve was too much growth for no investment, and they made organic pop assembly a thing with high investment, but then for some reason they felt the need to say "sorry but if you already have 2000 people, it now takes a whole battleship worth of alloys to build a discrete robotic workforce" and similar for organic pops.
Assembly is basically pointless past a certain point for organic/synth-ascended empires, and Machine Empires other than Driven Assimilators are just screwed as they lose out to those empires.
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I can sort-of see why. My typical game will have 100+ colonies with robot assembly and organic growth. If you only nuke organic growth, I'd still have 100+ robot assemblies with speed modifiers from synth ascension.
Once they made the (poor) decision to build the linear growth control, they have to apply it to pretty much all forms of pop growth or suddenly only one ascension makes any amount for sense for organics and hive minds might as well be turned off entirely.
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Stellaris badly needed something to stop pop growth bonuses and colonization spam from being so utterly dominant and this does the trick. I do agree that it makes no logical sense that having more pops slows growth, but overall it's an improvement and I can now finally start playing medium galaxies with 1x habitable planets instead of small galaxies with 0.25x habitable planets and actually start playing the diplomacy game.
An actual viable tall play style actually exists now for perhaps the first time in the game's history, at least in early and midgame. You will still want to start incorporating other empire's pops into your own empire in the late game, but it's refreshing that you don't need to do so in the early and midgame. And it's now more useful to vassalize your neighbors instead of murdering them too, so that their planets can grow and you can integrate them in the late game.
Also, more planets still gives you more growth so it'll always be worth colonizing more. The scaling now just has diminishing returns. But even 2 pops are still enough to make a new colony productive. Build an Industrial District, set it to Forge World, and favor the Metallurgist job. You're now getting 6+ Alloys (value 6x4=24) for the cost of 3 Energy, 2 Food, 1 CG, and 6 Minerals (value 3+2+1x2+6=13), which is a net profit of 9. Production bonuses and upkeep reduction increases that too, but let's go with 10 value. The colony ship costs 1400 worth of resources and together with the 500 minerals for the district that's 1900. The colony will pay for itself in 190 months or 17 years. You do get 7 sprawl before reductions and let's say 6 after reductions. So every 4th colony would have to be an administrative center which costs about as much as the Industrial District. That gives you 30 value to pay for a 7600 investment, which pays back its cost in about 25 years. So you can really keep colonizing up until say 50 years before endgame and still profit from it.
Finally, this is quite trivial to mod. I timed myself and it took me less than 4 minutes to make a mod that removes the slowdown, though it took me another 10 minutes to make a thumbnail and upload it to the Steam workshop. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2462494797
An actual viable tall play style actually exists now for perhaps the first time in the game's history, at least in early and midgame. You will still want to start incorporating other empire's pops into your own empire in the late game, but it's refreshing that you don't need to do so in the early and midgame. And it's now more useful to vassalize your neighbors instead of murdering them too, so that their planets can grow and you can integrate them in the late game.
Also, more planets still gives you more growth so it'll always be worth colonizing more. The scaling now just has diminishing returns. But even 2 pops are still enough to make a new colony productive. Build an Industrial District, set it to Forge World, and favor the Metallurgist job. You're now getting 6+ Alloys (value 6x4=24) for the cost of 3 Energy, 2 Food, 1 CG, and 6 Minerals (value 3+2+1x2+6=13), which is a net profit of 9. Production bonuses and upkeep reduction increases that too, but let's go with 10 value. The colony ship costs 1400 worth of resources and together with the 500 minerals for the district that's 1900. The colony will pay for itself in 190 months or 17 years. You do get 7 sprawl before reductions and let's say 6 after reductions. So every 4th colony would have to be an administrative center which costs about as much as the Industrial District. That gives you 30 value to pay for a 7600 investment, which pays back its cost in about 25 years. So you can really keep colonizing up until say 50 years before endgame and still profit from it.
Finally, this is quite trivial to mod. I timed myself and it took me less than 4 minutes to make a mod that removes the slowdown, though it took me another 10 minutes to make a thumbnail and upload it to the Steam workshop. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2462494797
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Of course it does, only later. I never claimed otherwise. But it is good enough to play trough a game.
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