Thoughts regarding Pop Micro

[ZomgK3tchup]

Tbf, the pop system itself isn’t bad.

It makes sense that a game about alien empires has a way to track who lives where and how they contribute to society.

The sticking point is how much attention the player has to give to this system.

I’d rather my attention be on other “grander” things than the monotony of which pop is working which job. Stellaris would be much better if I could just tell it that I want a planet specialized in a certain way and the game makes that happen while I focus on making more important decisions.

Right now Stellaris feels like a pop game in space whereas it should be a space game with a pop system.

But on the other hand, this really high-level game-changing stuff probably isn’t the purpose of this thread, so it might not be worth venturing further into this.

 

[Millbot]

Honestly reforming your empire's government in a way that switches out a job is a great argument for ditching pop demotion. For whatever reason, the game just breaks and you have to manually fiddle with the new jobs to get all you unemployed pops back to work. The best argument is to just become the galactic emperor. Seriously, why did all my current ruler pops quit and now won't take the new jobs when I fire all the other rulers?

I have a screenshot that just shows you how bad that mess is. Only way it could be worse, is if I was at a point in the game where I didn't have tons of stability and happiness modifiers stacked up or worse, had something that was slamming stability and/or pop happiness down. Unemployed ruler and specialist pops can really drag things down and often, the player doesn't have control over it, it's just the game being really dumb.

 

[Zentay]

Oh yes, I hate the bugs in pop promotiong and job switching that create unemployed rulers/specialists when a building finishes or ruler job types change.

 

[HFY]

The resettlement UI is a pain.

The biggest pain is that there’s no way to sort. It’d be way easier to use if you could sort by planet name, open jobs, and unemployment.

Also habitability, sector, job stratum, and designation.

E.g.: I don't want to send citizens to a Thrall World even if there are open jobs there; I don't want to send Serviles to a Research Habitat but if I have a specific Researcher species then I do want to be able to find a Research Habitat job for that species.

 

[Millbot]

A valid question would be, assuming that pops are going to stay in some form. How much of their current role needs to be kept? As in how much further could we abstract things, so that there is less management of pops and less issues of pop calculations bringing performance down, while also still being able to account for things like species traits, habitability, faction approval and pop happiness?

I'd agree that there probably are some factors that we really could abstract down into something that is both less pop micro and less calculation intensive.

 

[Orange1861]

I also think pop demotion has a bad performance impact.

 

[MatHack]

I would love to get an option to make a job low priority, so it will be filled last, just to be clear: I want high priority to keep existing. I usually have more than 1 jobtype in a tier (e.g. technicians & miners) and I want one of the jobs to be filled last (e.g. technicians or clerks last on a mining world).

Another thing that triggers me is when my robots with the Power Drills and Efficient Processors traits don't get assigned to mining jobs, they usually end up on other (specialist) jobs...

 

[HFY]

Another thing that triggers me is when my robots with the Power Drills and Efficient Processors traits don't get assigned to mining jobs, they usually end up on other (specialist) jobs...

IMHO the problem here is that there are traits which are no-brainers and have no impact outside "did you put this pop in the matching job?"

That's bad game design.

Better traits would impact multiple strata and many would have some leader effect, too.

 

[rylasasin]

- Remove enforcer job that you get for free from the capital building, this is usually just disabled anyway

I'm kind of split on this. I see the point, as 95% of the time it gets disabled anyway... but it's that 5% when it's actually necessary (when you have a planet that has a crime modifier, when a criminal syndicate sets up shop, or when you get over 50 pops) makes me disagree with this.

Maybe disable it for the smaller ones (or have it disabled by default), but keep it for the larger capital buildings?

Some form of army manager

On the topic, The topic of embarking armies on ships has been thrown around a lot. Here's my take on it:

1. Embarking of armies should only be available on cruisers on up. Destroyers, Frigates, and Corvettes are just too small to allow for this. This means early game you still have to rely on the 'inefficient' method of transports
2. The ability to dock soldiers on a ship should come with a cost. This cost being its stern section. Cruisers, battleships, and titans should have a 'troop quarter' stern section that removes all of the weapons, but gives you extra utility and aux slots in exchange, and also lets you put on a troop unit on that ship. Cruisers can have 1, battleships can have 5, titans can have 10. Juggernauts are the exception in that they not only get 30, they get them without the need to sacrifice weapons.
3. Embarked soldiers on a ship like this reduces their upkeep, much like how the crew quarters of a starbase reduces upkeep for docked ships.
4. Soldiers can be unembarked manually, but can also be set to unembark automatically during bombardment or when the defensive army is weak enough.
5. Ships or the army/fleet manager can have a 'reinforce army' option to encourage loose armies to embark on them.
6. Certain ground army types (titanic beasts, mega warforms, psionic entities, etc) are too big/problematic to allow for embarking on most ships. Only Titans and Juggernauts are big enough to properly handle them (and even then they take up more slots than normal).

- Build All button for defense platforms on starbase

Honestly, I'm of the mindset that Defense Platforms should be nixed entirely, in favor of the following features:

1. Editable Starbase: The ability to edit your starbase and adjust its loadout, without having to put a starbase item in your ship designer (maybe have it open a standalone ship designer just for that particular starbase). That's kind of what defense plaforms were meant to get around, but since defense platforms are basically little more than anti-corvette rush glass cannons anyway, I say just cut the fat and have us be able to edit the starbase itself.
2. More starbase items: For the above, we'd need more types of starbase items. Now I'll only go over military ones here as it relates to the topic at hand, but I could forsee some more economic ones too to give starbases more function besides the tired Shipyard-Tradehub/Solar panel-Anchorage-Chokepoint quadrad we have now. Basically, Small batteries that add 4 small slots, PD that adds 4 PD slots, Large Battery that adds 1 large weapon slot (but can only be put on starholds or higher), Spinal slot that adds 1 XL Slot (but can only be put on star fortress or larger and can only have 1), and for the bottom, an ion canon (replacing the ion canon platform, but can only be put on citadels).
3. Scaling starbase items: So if you've played Starbases Expanded (or NSC) you'll probably guess I'm getting the ideas from there. Which is accurate. But what I hate about that mod is that they expand the starbase slots themselves, making it so your starbase item choice doesn't really matter since you can just stuff all sorts of everything on them. Instead of doing that, what I propose are scaling starbase items. In other words: the buildings become stronger/more effective with each starbase upgrade. In this case, the items give more slots to use. IE: The small battery gives you 4 small items. Then when you upgrade them to starhold, it gives you 2 more for 6 in total. Star fortress gives you 8, and citadel gives you 12. Same with the others, the number of slots each weapon gives you goes up by 1.5x rounding up.
4. Mine Fields: These could either be a starbase addon or a kilostructure. These are the final replacement for defense platforms. This spreads out an array of mines throughout the system that ships must waste time destroying or they ram into ships, blowing up and doing damage. Each one of them does 2x the damage of a devastator torpedo and has the similar ship scaling effect. However, there should be some downsides. Namely that it also slows down your own ships (they have to avoid the mines themselves). Also, mined systems are cut off from trade, and colony production in system is reduced by 50-75% due to shipping difficulties. They could also have some techs/policies associated with them:
   • Smart Mines: Mines now have a built in IFF trigger. Minefields no longer have negative effects and stations can be built in minefields.
   • Cloaked Mines: (very late game tech) Mines now have a built in cloaking device that hide them from visual.
   • Magnetized Mines: Mines now have magnetic propulsion. When enemy ships come within a range of 60, they will automatically home in on them. They will also prioritize bigger ships over smaller ones.

Some automation ideas:

1. Amenities. Give players an option to choose between automation building holo-theatres or luxury residences.

You could almost get rid of luxury residences entirely. There is no real reason to build those over holo-theaters as they provide far less amenities than holo theaters, and especially since housing is such a complete non-issue 99% of the time since housing is attached to city districts which you'll be building anyway to unlock building slots. The only time I ever see them used efficiently at all is on habitats where that doesn't apply.

 

[Abdulijubjub]

You could almost get rid of luxury residences entirely. There is no real reason to build those over holo-theaters as they provide far less amenities than holo theaters, and especially since housing is such a complete non-issue 99% of the time since housing is attached to city districts which you'll be building anyway to unlock building slots. The only time I ever see them used efficiently at all is on habitats where that doesn't apply.

Luxury residences are great. They're 900 minerals for .55 pops, 500 of which is the city district and which you can recover if you want to make the planet more dense anyway.

The housing is mostly useless except on habitats, agreed. But there's a good reason to use them over entertainers: they require zero pops.

 

[stargazersatnight]

Hello, just wanted to gather some ideas regarding ways to reduce pop micro. Not promising to fix anything but it feels like everyone agrees it's a big problem but how to fix it becomes a bit harder.

My initial ideas to start the conversation:
- Remove enforcer job that you get for free from the capital building, this is usually just disabled anyway
- Remove clerk jobs from housing districts, rather only provide them from commercial zones and then overall buff them somehow to make them worthwhile (let's not get into clerk details though as it will derail the whole thread)
- Make pops that already have jobs also be able to auto-resettle, for example, two pops can switch planets with each other if they would both get an increase in habitability, making manual resettlement of multi-species empires much less painful
- Remove requirements on buildings for slaves and robots to be able to auto resettle, combined with the point above this would make robots automatically switch places with other pops who are living on low habitability worlds
- Greatly increase chances for auto resettlement

I would love to hear your ideas in the thread below.


Edit: List of some common brought up topics:
- Colonist job -> Turn it into worker strata
- Species modding is a major pain
- Ability to disable all jobs in the empire and set default forbidden yes/no on jobs
- Disable auto migration away from a planet either with a checkbox or if there is ongoing construction to stop the upgrade capital construction from being canceled
- Clerks should be able to auto migrate away from a planet into any other job if there is no trade value designation or boosting building
- Pops that are demoting will not auto migrate away if there are free worker strata jobs
- Add more modules to planet automation like being able to automatically forbid clerks or similar

Armies/Ships:
- Some form of army manager
- Ability to "Invade all planets" by right clicking from galaxy map
- Ctrl/shift click to queue 5 or more items at a time
- Build All button for defense platforms on starbase
- Duplicate ship template button in fleet manager

Misc:
- Scroll speed settings


Other smart ideas:
- When playing with the tutorial add a warning if you are overbuilding jobs as new players are likely doing it by mistake rather than on purpose

So the way the game automatically promotes worker pops annoys me. I should be able to change this, I can be bleeding minerals and my new pops won't take miner jobs because there are specialists jobs available. This needs a rework, you could say only build specialist buildings once the worker jobs are filled but when you have 50 planets this is just way too much micro.

 

[stargazersatnight]

Luxury residences are great. They're 900 minerals for .55 pops, 500 of which is the city district and which you can recover if you want to make the planet more dense anyway.

The housing is mostly useless except on habitats, agreed. But there's a good reason to use them over entertainers: they require zero pops.

And using entertainers in the early game will murder your consumer goods supply.

 

[stargazersatnight]

I figured it would be a bit larger than you intended now but also figured it was worth mentioning.

Disabling enforcers and clerks is fine and all but it’s easy to ignore that minmax and still play a good game. The micro hell of pop modding on the other hand pushes players away from a basic mechanic of the game.

We should be able to make templates.
Worker: nerve stapled, strong etc.
specialist:erudite and whatever traits you want
and we set a species to this and they get turned into it via assimilation instead of a 1 by one research project.

 

[stargazersatnight]

Added a list of some common complaints in the original post. It seems like 50%~ of the pain is related to species modding which I guess is it's own topic altogether.

Any other suggestions for reduced overall pain of micro? My #1 wish list would be to be able to queue up a housing district and then also queue some building that would go into that building slot even though it isn't constructed yet

Also the way pops grow is annoying especially playing a slave empire, I conquer territory and get all the slaves I need but have no specialist because my founder species never gets grown unless I force it, which hits me with a growth penalty. I should be able to preferentially grow my founder species for no penalty

 

[Millbot]

Honestly, at this point, my biggest issues with the game boil down to just how flawed the pop system is.

-Performance, is mostly an issue of pops and all the calculation associated with.

-The species modification feature is probably the least fun part of the game. I like the idea behind all the ascension paths and it would be really nice if psionic didn't end up being the most appealing for the simply fact that it let's you avoid having to touch species modification. This is also an area where game performance takes a hit because the AI loves to create subspecies, which on it's face isn't bad because pop specialization let's you get more resources to do better. The problem is that you get the performance hit when each AI and player empire is creating multiple tablets. Then through in how pop growth ensures all the defunct species templates stick around as well and you get a few other oddball things that can keep or reintroduce a defunct template.

I know this is going to come across as heresy for some, but I think I'd rather have a setup where we couldn't do subspecies and that when you do a special project to modify a species in your empire. That project is for all of them and any new ones of that species you get will be converted to the template you pick. Sure it might not be optimal from a min/max angle, but it might just be a better quality of life for gameplay and again probably cuts down on game lag, since the game will be spending far less time trying to figure out what species to grow or assembly. Sure it's a buff to multispecies empires and sure it makes terraforming a bit more important for empires that lack a means to have a species for each planet type and honestly, I don't see an issue with either.

-It makes anything that can increase pop growth too dominant in the game. There are very few scenarios where a player that is familiar with the game mechanics feels liek they are making a rewarding decision, when they opt for something that isn't optimal decision for maximizing pop growth. You always want to get more worlds to colonize. You always want to grab techs that increase pop growth and assembly. You always want to select a trait for your species that gives them the optimal pop growth and while there are some real issues with the design of species trait, mind you there are other issues with the species trait system (namely, there are only a handful that feel right to take, with most being there for subpar roleplaying, I'd like roleplay options to be good options, even if they aren't optimal). You almost always want to build habitats, but there is a point where sprawl does catch up and make them less appealing. If you can't snag psionics before a certain point, the other paths start to become much better options and it's mostly because of their pop growth potential.

-Pops are creating tedious micromanagment.