This economy ruins all the fun and active part of the game

[AlanC9]

Well if suddenly your mechanic put square wheels on your car and you cannot move it, does it mean that you are "incompetent" driver?
If you try to keep stone face and accept every changes, no matter if they are failure, because you fear that your friends will call you noob, it is not good for developers and their game in perspective. And for you too, because at some point you just become tired of overtaking bad mechanics and drop it.

That is a terrible, silly analogy. Cars with square wheels wouldn't work for anyone, right? But that's not the situation we have here. You and I have the same car now, but I'm zipping along the highway just fine; my main problem is that the AIs can't drive, so I'm thrashing them without trying. You, meanwhile, keep driving straight into trees.

How about "replaced the steering wheel with an XBox controller?"

 

[Col. W. T. Philmore]

That is a terrible, silly analogy. Cars with square wheels wouldn't work for anyone, right? But that's not the situation we have here. You and I have the same car now, but I'm zipping along the highway just fine; my main problem is that the AIs can't drive, so I'm thrashing them without trying. You, meanwhile, keep driving straight into trees.

How about "replaced the steering wheel with an XBox controller?"

Car with sqare wheels work if you wanna lift it on your back and run along the highway yeling "Look at me! Im so strong! Square wheels are no problem for me!" And it is good if you if you so strong that you can move car with any wheels or with no wheels at all, but for those who like good driving your car and your method to operate it will look quite weird and require some improvement.

 

[AlanC9]

You're not making your argument look any better.

Look, I get that you're feeling defensive because I called you incompetent. But you didn't learn how the system works, and it sounds like you didn't even bother to try; you just kept doing stupid stuff and getting crushed for it. That's not bad in itself; if you don't like the new system, there's no reason that you should learn it. My point was only that you shouldn't talk about not knowing what you're doing. It makes you look stupid, and stupid is easy to dismiss.

 

[KingAlamar]

I think the economy in its current state ruins a lot of the fun. It needs a lot more optional automation like we had in all the previous patches aka sectors. They essentially don't work anymore as of 2.2.

I 100% believe that being able to give "hints / nudges" to the AI ; automation ; etc. would improve the quality-of-life while playing the game a TON!!

For example:

• You create a species template for "Robo-Miners" for example. They are awesome at mining and perhaps not much else. Being able to set job priorities inside of the template itself would be great so the AI knows which robots to assign to which jobs.
• Giving you the option during "robo modding" to only mod workers performing a specific job. I.E. You could robo mod all of your current "miners" to be good at mining ; your researchers good at research ; etc.
• IF we have timers when you move from one job to another maybe instead of it just being a largely unexplained timer MAYBE it's because it takes that time to re-mod that worker for the job that they are demoting to? ... or even promoting to if needed??
• Changing some decisions [like Promote Growth] from having a fixed duration [with no notifications of expiration!!!] to something that is ongoing. Maybe it costs 10 influence per planet to start and then there is just a monthly food "upkeep" for the decision. The decision stays in place until you cancel it.
• The ability to assign each of your anti-piracy fleets their own sector / region and have them auto-patrol the region to minimize piracy loss. Even if their patrol routes aren't perfectly optimal it still keeps someone from having to do the "piracy scan" periodically. The player still makes all of the high level decisions [where, how many, etc.] but the AI does all of the busy work of making sure that the pathing works. If pathing decisions are event driven [instead of on every tick] then there shouldn't be too much computational load.

TL/DR: The base ideas are decent however we don't have as many infrastructure pieces / tools / automations / etc. to allow the player to still make ALL of the decisions but have the AI automate some of the "needless micro".

 

[Col. W. T. Philmore]

You even dont know what i did or what i learned and just wanted to look more clever than me. But it doesnt work that way.
As I said, If you prefer to ignore game desigh failures, or use em to show your problem solving skills it doesnt mean that failures are not failures, and there is nothing to do to make em better. That was the point of analogy.

 

[Namfuak]

The new economy is much more interesting than the old economy, people are free to not like it because it adds some depth but I like that it makes taking an enemy planet something that you have to think about and deal with rather than something you do and forget. With that said, what it needs is a better system to allow for automation of planets, but there are plenty of people talking about how that might happen in ways that don't throw out the baby with the bath water.

 

[Kinkness]

I disagree with your reasons why this is a problem and how you have presented it, but the new economy has certainly done little to meet the promises it was meant to fulfill. This economy ruins the game because the AI has no clue how to run it, and the old method of throwing production bonuses at the difficulty levels actually just helps them build a deeper hole to fall in once the initial territory grab is over.

I also agree that the early game exploration is one of the best things Stellaris has going for it and 2.2.x has nerfed a lot of anomaly awards while the new economy makes space based resources very noncompetitive until you research 5x +10% techs, and even then a single additional planet will provide almost as much as your 50 systems do. The market is also a huge crutch that nullifies any difficulty the new system brought.

I'm with you on the feeling that conquest gives very little incentive where either I amalgamate an additional 500 pops and work through trying to get them all where they are best suited from an egalitarian perspective or dealing with 10planets being purged for 10 years and having to manually remove all buildings and districts to reduce the upkeep and sprawl. Unless there is a leviathan or really nice planet in their borders, I find I am very disinclined to mess with my neighbours. I remember a long time ago with one of the many reiterations of strategic resources that Paradox said they wanted to make them worth going to war over, and yet here we are with version 22 of these resources being broken and rebuilt from the ground up, that only 3 of them actually matter and the really rare ones give a single edict with a single use(if you even go for megastructures or late game tech). The trader enclaves, a paid feature, are now just a fixed cost version of the market that you have to go out of your way to find the right one depending on your needs.

By making planets the be-all end-all of both basic, advanced, and strategic resource production there is no real reason to be anything but isolationist and turtle on a few worlds. No reason to step outside your borders until the very end game when you are looking for FEs to steal from or leviathans to kill. You just get one mineral world, one farm world, an ecumenopolis/forge world, a research world, and wait for megastructures. Anything more will just be overkill. All the other empires are speedbumps on the way to a late game that barely runs and has 2/3 of the crises not functioning at all in the current release, and with how they use the current economy in vanilla they aren't even that if you don't gimp yourself with an RP built empire.

Maybe a balance patch will solve some of these issues but 2.2.x has added so many problems and broken a lot of things that worked in the old system there are bound to be a lot of things that slip through the next few patches unaddressed. I like what the new system could be, but that's how I felt at 1.0 launch and here we are with a new load of potentially good features that only time will tell if they fulfill it before being axed in favour of more potentially nice things.

My heart cries at the accuracy of this post.

 

[AlanC9]

You even dont know what i did or what i learned and just wanted to look more clever than me. But it doesnt work that way.
As I said, If you prefer to ignore game desigh failures, or use em to show your problem solving skills it doesnt mean that failures are not failures, and there is nothing to do to make em better. That was the point of analogy.

Don't be silly. We all know that you played badly, because you told us that you played badly. If you had played well, you wouldn't have crashed your economy a dozen times.

I recently started a dozen of games and failed every one of them, because something dropped in deep minus - food, or energy, or civilian goods...

When your economy crashes a dozen times, the thing that's failing is you.

 

[Secret Master]

I recently started a dozen of games and failed every one of them, because something dropped in deep minus - food, or energy, or civilian goods... Not minerals or alloys, there are always plenty of them. Who said that it is hard to build fleets and stations?

Given that free POPs will promote to fill jobs that produce alloys and consumer goods, it is relatively easy to get alloys.... the hard part is doing so without crashing the rest of your economy.

So, yeah, if you have plenty of alloys and not enough food or energy, it means you are overdeveloping your worlds.

 

[LWE]

Even I, a noob, managed to manage the economy OK in my first real playthough (that is now my Stellaris AAR). Maybe familiarity with Victoria helped things, even though Stellaris economy is not much like rather hands-off Victoria.

It's true, however, that "two-tier" economies, where you don't merely produce stuff by things you harvest, you have to transform the things you harvest first into semi-fabricates, and only then produce things with it, can be confusing to beginners. That's probably why games that strive to be accessible to newcomers avoid it (Civ5, in fact, got rid of raw commerce, a similar resource in all preceding Civs, and was more popular than these, even if "true civvers" criticized Civ5 for simplification).

 

[Dëzaël]

The only time I have to complaint about micro is being wardec while already running a negative income. Then I run everywhere to salvage the thing and it's tedious. That's OK in peace time, although I find the CG costs a bit high overall. Got them in red more often than not.

That said, I play with an AI mod that makes it quite able to do stuff. Conquest aftermath less tedious, better pop sorting for jobs. Resettling, well, is not that tedious. Maybe the economic system is less a problem than the AI not being taught to play it in the first place. Or the fact there is no official user manual, especially after such drastic changes.

We've all being noobs again on Dec 6th, I still struggle to find the right development pace, but I've progressed enough to feel I just don't master colonizing and building order and timing enough yet. I don't think the economic model is at fault, however without modding I would've waited for the game to be patched the hell out.

 

[KingAlamar]

Maybe a little more constructive criticism and less "newb shaming" would be called for?

Either way I do believe that vanilla Stellaris could use SIGNIFICANT work on AI, quality-of-life, [for some] performance, etc. While I would have disagreed two months ago I'd love to see the devs take a step back and make the next TWO [or more] patches address these items. One AI + Performance and one quality-of-life patch would be awesome. Once we have those issues [mostly] addressed THEN I'd welcome [paid] diplomacy or other updates.

While some people may never like the new system I think the initial impression of the new system is driving most of the perceived problems because of the AI / performance / lack of updates to go with the new systems / etc.

TL/DR: The problem isn't the idea necessarily -- it's the execution of the idea that's the problem.

 

[Namfuak]

Maybe a little more constructive criticism and less "newb shaming" would be called for?

The thread didn't start with a constructive post, so it's not surprising that posts responding to it haven't been fully constructive either.

 

[evilcat]

Something is ruining the game, but it is not mid economy crisis. It is something else. If you want to run good economy you can do it. If you are stuggling, AI is struggling just as much. Probably more, since it do not have player plan in mind.

Some tips:

• Technology, Unity, Pop growth, Robots are all investments. Investmen is good if you have spare resources and peace time. If you are at hard war do not invest but focus on winning war.
  
• You adapt your policies to have more saving economy: Use lower food policy. Use consumer goods trade policy. Use Lower living standards or even stratified economy or some slaves.
  
• Entertainers are interesting mix of Unity and Happiness. Monuments are more meh.
  
• If your civic goods/alloys production is larger than 2:1 it is worth to use civic/militarized economy.
  
• There are civics: Mining Guilds, Functional Architercture, Environmentalist. Which can save you some resources. In more complex way so does Police State and Aristocrati Nobles (by stability). There are traits as conversationist (consumer goods discout)
• You can conquere one of enemy empires as tributari, and enjoy that extra minerals withotu empire sprawl. Conquering enemy capital is generally good, but conquering bunch of colonies in making is less good.
  
• Forts give fleet cap with pop and minerals. Which could be cheaper than building 300 alloys of starbase with anchors.
  
• Sometimes you just need to set your alliances, and wait. If you collect all tech and traditions giving bonuses to production things will get better.
  
• 2nd tier starbase full of guns modules could chope point enemy fleet mid game. Unfortunetly defesnvie platforms without special tech i kinda pointless.
  
• Federation fleets are still maintained with energy of the Void. Not for you for suere. And having that 20k fleet never hurts.
  
• Good managin edicts both influence and energy could help you. For that reason Authoritarian, Executive vigor are good.
  
• Generally Authoritarian are strong due to Influence, stratified economy, and abillity to move pops around Unfortunetly workers output has lower impact over time.
  
• Having some spare energy is good, buing constantly consumer goods from market is ok (they are often cheap). If you have Leviathans you can constantly buy 5 rare resources from traders.
  
• Stick to your plan and go for it. If you plan to war, run war economy, do not try at the same achieve technological supremacy when you need fleets.
  
• Do not take crappy systems if you do not have to. It could be better to run edicts instead. That 20% production could have bigger impact that some extra systems,
• If you are in deep crisis just swiching off temporary all your research labs may be an option.
  
• You may control colony planet type by building 3 districts of the type, or 1 of each + building of choice.

If you want to you can run good economy. It is a bit harder if you want technological empire, harder to balance.

Unfortunetly there are things which hard to work with:

• 1 planet sectors
• no planetary AI set (only sectors)
• pop growth out of control, main spiece sometimes never grows
• fleets are slowly moving and it never changes
• pirates everywhere, not enought option to have passive protection (no technoogy) wack o pirate mini game is boring
• no diplomatic option to influence other empires to like us more, or to like each other more so diplomacy is random
  
• Scientist could become metalurgist anytime, but going to clerks is to low (strate reduction 10y timer is deadly)

So there is still a lot to do. A lot to complain about, just not economy is hard.

 

[Col. W. T. Philmore]

Don't be silly. We all know that you played badly, because you told us that you played badly. If you had played well, you wouldn't have crashed your economy a dozen times.
When your economy crashes a dozen times, the thing that's failing is you.

No you dont know how I play because I never told you how. I told you how much games I dropped because economy ruined fun. And I created topic about that, and explained why. There is no word that game is "hard", or I need help, or concept of economy itself must be set on fire. But u see what u want to see. And your words have no more sense, than boasting of a school boy. May be your friends in Fortnite appreciate that, but why bring it here i dunno.

Given that free POPs will promote to fill jobs that produce alloys and consumer goods, it is relatively easy to get alloys.... the hard part is doing so without crashing the rest of your economy.

So, yeah, if you have plenty of alloys and not enough food or energy, it means you are overdeveloping your worlds.

Yeah. I wanted to get rid of insane micro in the first place. First thing I tried is to colonise and pre-build maximum planets, to pay minimum attention to it later. But in this case energy upkeep goes to hell. Especially when you are robot. Especially if you try to use ships in the meantime (when they simple patrol against pirates they eat upkeep like combat fleet, which is a failure too). Also, population growth is a complete mess, and you can easily find your alloy factories populated, and your power plants not. Or planet dedicated to be science world full of useless rebelling slaves. And you must manually sort it all.

Okay, then I tried to max out population growth, in order to later build a buildings for them. But in this case food, happiness and all the rest goes to hell, leading to doom spiral. So only way to be effective in this economy is to constantly monitor any new pop and any new building which require resources, to immediately get rid of any shortage. Manually renew edicts, manually resettle pops, manually buy from market what you suddenly and urgently need. Maybe its interesting with 1 or 2 planets, but with 10 of them it's clicking hell. Also you must never use multi-species, slaves, robots, gene modding, and never capture enemy planets to get things worse.

Im very glad that someone is strong enough to push this ugly cadaver to glorious victory, but in terms of fun and quality of life it's a disaster.

 

[Secret Master]

. But in this case food, happiness and all the rest goes to hell, leading to doom spiral.

I don't see that happening unless I am getting too greedy with things like nutritional plentitude and food decisions too early.

I know the Distribute Luxuries decision for planets is popular, but I don't use it too much in the early game. I'd rather stockpile consumer goods for downturns.

Now, if you had said, "Sometimes the player is screwed by the starting planets and resources," I could get behind that. There was one game where I was really hurting for resources due to the allocation of resources in space and districts on initial planets. But it was crappy planets, not the mechanics, that was shafting me.

 

[KingAlamar]

I don't see that happening unless I am getting too greedy with things like nutritional plentitude and food decisions too early.

I know the Distribute Luxuries decision for planets is popular, but I don't use it too much in the early game. I'd rather stockpile consumer goods for downturns.

Now, if you had said, "Sometimes the player is screwed by the starting planets and resources," I could get behind that. There was one game where I was really hurting for resources due to the allocation of resources in space and districts on initial planets. But it was crappy planets, not the mechanics, that was shafting me.

My first 2.2.x game had my one of my two "guaranteed habitable planets" 14 hyperspace hops away from me. There were two other empires that were CLOSER to my guaranteed planet than I was

The more I think about it I like random maps BUT it would be nice to have a "strategic balance" option to lessen some of the local randomization. I.E. making sure you get similar local planets, resources, etc. would all be quite handy esp. for those interested in MP.

 

[Col. W. T. Philmore]

I don't see that happening unless I am getting too greedy with things like nutritional plentitude and food decisions too early.

Well i was focused on reducing micro so I tried not to touch over populated planets as long as possible.
And I always play with 0 guaranteed planets so often it is required to colonize some crap.

I would accept playstyle with 1-2 planets and some micro related to them, the problem is, that AI thinks in different way and try to eat as much as possible, and then it will simply zerg you with infinite stacks.
And if not, crisis will do it, after easily eating all galaxy, not controlled by player.

 

[makaramus]

if you think you got planets enought and dont need them then go war for systems? or simply conquer planets and send pops to your other planets to populate them

 

[Masoz]

I really, really do not want to devolve back into the pre-2.2 economy of +0 energy, +0 food, +99999 minerals.