Two major things that need a fix: Crisis and Pop Growth

[Liggi]

These are the main two things that are stopping me from starting a new game at the moment, and I do slightly worry that the next patch is going to be all "easier" changes like new systems and new resolutions, but I think there are two fundamental mechanics that are still in dire need of rework:

1) The Crisis - at the moment, it's barely functional. It needs to be much more threatening, and actually spread. At the moment, it seems to atrophy and stop expanding. I'm not exactly sure why... I also noticed that the purging is still incredibly slow, so it could be related to that? I also wonder if it's related to AI decisions about ship movement, as I have noticed (and many others have pointed out), that constructor ships often travel across the entirety of the crisis' space rather than expanding in the direction they are already going, and likewise, combat fleets often flit about between systems for no reason.

2) Pop Growth - as mentioned elsewhere, this really needs a rework, as it really doesn't make much sense at the moment. I know that it's been mentioned before that this is on the list to rework, but I'd definitely suggest a push to make it as high priority as possible. Species should grow based on the size of the species, and not just on a per planet basis. And the whole "one random pop is picked to grow" thing just makes no sense and ruins immersion for Xenophile empires. You end up in situations where single refugee pops grow to encompass a significant proportion of your population over time, and during the time those POPs are growing, your primary species inexplicably stops growing on that planet?

Does anyone have anything else they'd flag as a high priority for you, or things that are currently blocking you from starting a new game?

 

[tobias.mb]

2) Pop Growth - as mentioned elsewhere, this really needs a rework, as it really doesn't make much sense at the moment. I know that it's been mentioned before that this is on the list to rework, but I'd definitely suggest a push to make it as high priority as possible. Species should grow based on the size of the species, and not just on a per planet basis. And the whole "one random pop is picked to grow" thing just makes no sense and ruins immersion for Xenophile empires. You end up in situations where single refugee pops grow to encompass a significant proportion of your population over time, and during the time those POPs are growing, your primary species inexplicably stops growing on that planet?

Growing multiple pops in parallel instead of ("randomly") choosing one is something we had in the past and it was generally considered a disadvantage. Assume it takes 30 month to grow a pop, Empire A has only one species, Empire B has two species.
Empire A will have 1 pop after 30 month and 2 pops after 60 month.
Empire B will split the growth between 2 pops who grow simultaneously, so they will have 2 pops after 60 month.
That means Empire A has a pop more to work a job for 30 month. And it only gets worse the more species there are to split the growth between.

If parallel growth makes a comeback, there also needs to be an incentive instead of it being strictly worse. And that's not even considering the problem of the current UI not supporting parallel growth.
But I'm all for adjusting the weights of choosing which pop to grow. Because you're right that this is annoying:

You end up in situations where single refugee pops grow to encompass a significant proportion of your population over time, and during the time those POPs are growing, your primary species inexplicably stops growing on that planet?

In theory I also agree with this idea:

Species should grow based on the size of the species, and not just on a per planet basis.

Some rural backwater planet, with a few million people, having the same growth as your capital ecumenopolis with several hundred billion people makes no sense whatsoever.
However, pure exponential growth would mean pop numbers completely explode during the mid game. So from a purely game mechanics point, this is simply not feasible.

 

[Liggi]

That's a really good point about population density affecting the rate of growth, that should definitely be the case. I wonder if there's another way to solve the issue of minor species growing meaning that your primary species essentially entirely stops growing for that time? Even adjusting the weights, I'm not sure the current system makes much sense.

 

[Rhaegar83]

Yeah the pop growth thing is really stupid. It wasn't as bad when it was 25 tiles max and you could visually check it easy enough to reshuffle, but it was still dumb the way it would randomly pick which species to grow. Each species should grow at a rate based on the total number in your empire, and when it grows a pop of that species it should just place it in one of your planets based on job availability.

Main reason I mostly play slaver empires right now is to just turn on pop controls for most of the species by default...


Now that there can be hundreds of pops on a planet and with the new job system, the UI is absolutely atrocious too. We need a proper demographics section where we can see the species breakdown per planet, and relate that to jobs properly. Right now I have to look in like 4 places for all that info (species tab, resettle tab, planet jobs tab). No one place tells me all the info I need and I'm constantly shifting between windows trying to figure out where my pops are and where they need to be. The pie chart is useless and even if it wasn't the colors are different for every planet I have instead of always making my main species the same color.

I think it would help a lot of the planet overview showed not just free jobs, but free worker/specialist jobs. Then the species on the planet should clearly indicate the number of citizens/slaves and both of those numbers should also show on the resettle interface so that you could easily give each planet exactly the number of worker/slave pops it needs, for example.

 

[InvisibleBison]

Does anyone have anything else they'd flag as a high priority for you, or things that are currently blocking you from starting a new game?

I'd say the AI's handling of its fleets in peacetime needs another look. I was switching between all the AI empires in one of my games to compile some statistics, and I noticed that with one exception the AIs all had a few sizeable fleets, and then ten to twenty tiny fleets of no more than half a dozen ships, all of which were wandering around their territory. I'm pretty sure that it has something to do with piracy suppression, as the one exception I mentioned was a hive mind, who had their entire navy concentrated in five substantial fleets parked at a starbase.

 

[Rhaegar83]

Growing multiple pops in parallel instead of ("randomly") choosing one is something we had in the past and it was generally considered a disadvantage. Assume it takes 30 month to grow a pop, Empire A has only one species, Empire B has two species.
Empire A will have 1 pop after 30 month and 2 pops after 60 month.
Empire B will split the growth between 2 pops who grow simultaneously, so they will have 2 pops after 60 month.
That means Empire A has a pop more to work a job for 30 month. And it only gets worse the more species there are to split the growth between.

If parallel growth makes a comeback, there also needs to be an incentive instead of it being strictly worse. And that's not even considering the problem of the current UI not supporting parallel growth.
But I'm all for adjusting the weights of choosing which pop to grow. Because you're right that this is annoying:


In theory I also agree with this idea:

Some rural backwater planet, with a few million people, having the same growth as your capital ecumenopolis with several hundred billion people makes no sense whatsoever.
However, pure exponential growth would mean pop numbers completely explode during the mid game. So from a purely game mechanics point, this is simply not feasible.

Then what you could do is slow the growth on a planet once its population starts reaching a certain density based on planet size. This would encourage having less dense colonies for growth, but you would have to tune the incentives properly so that it doesn't create some new form of cheese strategy.


Parallel growth was bad because it was based on the planet tiles and they made each species grow half as fast to balance it. I think what OP is suggesting is a system where you would have empire wide growth that still gives you a pop every X months, but distributes those based on the species you have. So if you have 90% main species and 10% other you would get main species 9/10 times and other species 1/10, but the total growth rate would be the same (aside from species specific growth bonuses, which in this case maybe just up that ratio slightly in their favor)

 

[Tech Noir Synth]

Agree pop growth needs an urgent rework. Same with Crisis. We've been telling Paradox that the Crisis doesn't expand properly. And obviously x25 crisis strength doesn't change that. The Crisis remains a broken functionality. The game doesn't offer what it promises: A threat to the entire galaxy. Instead its merebly a blob on the map which occupies maybe 50 systems.

 

[Liggi]

I'm not sure why parallel growth wouldn't work, actually. The level of growth could have a baseline based on the number of POPs of that species on the current planet. So, say on Planet A you have:

5 Human POP
1 Mammalian POP
2 Reptilian POP

And another, xenophobic empire decides to just have Planet B with 8 Human POPs.

All of them are growing simultaneously at a rate in line with the number of existing POPs (obviously affected by various modifiers on the planet / empire / species level).

You need 300 "growth points" to get a new POP, so on Planet A you've got three growing POPs:

A human POP, growing at a base rate of 5
A mammalian POP, growing at a base rate of 1
A reptillian POP, growing at a base rate of 2

On Planet B, you just have a human POP growing at a base rate of 8.

So after 3 years, Planet B has a progress of 288/300 towards growing another human POP.
And Planet A has 180/300 towards a human POP, 72/300 towards a reptillian POP, and 36/300 towards the mammalian POP.

Nothing there seems unreasonable to me? And it means that minority species will never suddenly take up a huge proportion of your population?

 

[tobias.mb]

So if you have 90% main species and 10% other you would get main species 9/10 times and other species 1/10

That's how the current System should work. The weights are just totally off, so minority species get chosen too often.

 

[Zentay]

Agreed the pop growth is a bit problematic. For the main issues are:

Parallel growth is too powerful (ie. having organic pops growing and robots assembling at the same time).

Having a lot of planets/habitats is the best way to grow population.

Planets that are fully developed and populated continue to grow well beyond what would be desirable which puts a micromanagement burden on the player to constantly fix it.

Encourage growth should be a toggle.

Clinics are too weak. There should be a point in the game or a situation where a clinic is actually a good choice, but if you do the math and consider the costs, it never seems like a good choice.

Colony ships can generate pops out of nothing.


What I think should be done:

Parallel growth needs to be balanced a little better.

There should be ways to focus on growing tall that are an alternative to growing wide.

The growth rate should be more complex than it currently is and depend on the existing population, available jobs and housing and things like that. A small population should grow slowly, a large population should grow quickly, and planets with a scarcity of housing/jobs/happiness should grow little or not at all and mainly generate migration.

 

[Delthor]

I don't see why either of these systems need a total rework. The crisis not expanding is just one or several bugs that need fixing. No massive rework needed; just a bug fix that seems like it's been extremely elusive for them.

Underrepresented pops being chosen too often seems on a similar scale. I can somewhat understand the desire to move away from the pop growth per planet model, but I don't think the alternatives make for a better experience. An exponential system based on number of pops on a planet wouldn't be very fun, since it's either painfully slow early on or totally unwieldy once a planet gets going. Something more complicated with carrying capacity and such gets very difficult to understand very fast. I also don't think an empire wide growth system feels right, since it assumes free movement throughout your empire, which is not a given. Growth should stay attached to planets, and movement around the empire should be modeled through immigration.

I could see a change to how pops are picked. I'd envision something like a split growth under the covers, which chooses which pop grows. You have each pop that could grow on the planet growing proportionally with a hidden value. When picking which pop gets grown next, whichever is in the lead gets picked and you subtract an amount from that value. This way, the lower population species do eventually overtake the more populous species enough to spawn a pop, but then it'll be a while before they get picked again. This also allows species coming in from immigration to be scaled to however much growth you get from immigration instead of overwhelming the pop growth on the planet.

I think the system that most desperately needs attention is population control decisions and resettling. Resettling should be a rare enough event that it can be moved back to an influence cost. The only reason it was moved to energy was because the new system requires constant resettling to manage your pops. That shouldn't be necessary. Controlling where your pops move when you no longer want growth on a planet should be achieved by decisions regulating immigration and emigration. Machines also need a system that works the same as immigration and emigration, where growth can be distributed via decisions rather than resettling.

I'd also really like the ability to create a template for the automation system to use when automating colonies. If I could tell it which buildings I want and what ratio of districts I want on a colony based on the designation I've set, I'd be much more willing to automate things. This is especially true of resource planets. I almost always build the exact same districts and buildings on planets based on their designation once I get past early game. They mentioned this possibility back when first discussing the planet automation system, and I think it would greatly alleviate the complaints about the automation. It also seems like it would be a huge improvement to the experience for how much work is needed compared to improving the automation AI.

 

[Pale Blue]

I think one of the reasons pop growth should be changed to be less planet dependant. It would reduce the luck factor in how many planets you get. Even the worst planet is better than none. Either colonize, resettle,recolonize or colonize and resettle all grown pops to your homeworld. Even slow pop growth on a low habitability planet is an increase in pop growth. If you don't keep the pops on that planet you also can ignore the increased upkeep for the pops.

 

[YagabodooN]

Exact same issues here, last game unbidden took about 20 systems then just stopped and waited for me to blast them.

Immigration allowed? your species is now a minority in your own empire....oops looks like your traits/strategy synergy is ruined, have fun genemodding 100 variants to have the traits you want.

 

[STABBY5]

However, pure exponential growth would mean pop numbers completely explode during the mid game. So from a purely game mechanics point, this is simply not feasible.

Which is why we should be glad that in real developed economies, population flattens off. It should be like this in the game. We should not have to deal with mass housing problems as if we were managing space Mexico City. The game's a pain to play because instead of advanced space empires, we are running glorified 3rd world countries with space ships.

 

[DrNukeLear]

1) The crises have improved with 2.6, but it could be better with regards to managing construction ships and with the usual incremental improvements to AI. I think it’s a case of give it time, I think the devs are on the right track this time.

2) I have Lobbied for Pop Growth to be done on a pop by pop basis for some time now.

If each pop has a pop size variable which grows/shrinks by a birth rate (modified by traits, habitability, spare housing and jobs) minus a death rate (modified by leader age traits slightly, health care facilities/jobs, purging, overcrowding and the like) you can multiply that pop’s work by it’s size (not all pops are equal). You can than kill the pop if size less then zero, split the pop if size > 1.5. At this point you have a more accurate pop growth mechanic.

Yes this leads to exponential growth, but it’s the only way to deal with pop growth and have it believable. To scale for performance you could actually abandon pops as discrete units and deal with blocks of the population of differing sizes. For instance if I have 200 pops working the artisan job on an ecumenopolis 5% could be Race A and 57% Race B and 48% Race C. The other information tracked on a pop by pop basis is neither here nor there. Who cares if 7 of the 10 Race A artisans belong to faction D. It’s more important to track that’s 70% of the total population of Race A on the colony has a whole supports the faction.

The pop system as is gives a lot of granular information Pop by Pop, but it’s unnecessary, unhelpful and artificial. If you have 2 pops on the planet, they don’t represent 2 people, they should be able to represent a broader spectrum of ethics than 1 per pop. If you have 20 or 200 pops on a planet the individual pops cease to matter (and are all automatically assigned jobs). At the end of the day the demographics matter, not the pops themselves.q

 

[Methone]

The crisis not expanding is just one or several bugs that need fixing. No massive rework needed; just a bug fix that seems like it's been extremely elusive for them.

Doesn't seem like a bug to me. What bug are you thinking about?

 

[Evangeline]

The extreme minority pop preference that 2.0 introduced has actually been fixed quite a while ago. They now grow pretty realistically according to various factors (e.g. suitability for the climate of a world). That is now a really old bug, it's been taken care of and at least I'm satisfied with the solution. Are you sure you're playing the latest version?

They've also just introduced crisis strength x25, which I haven't tried yet. Should give quite a lot of challenge! And they've patched something about crisis behavior in 2.6.3, so if you haven't tried that version yet, maybe give it a spin. I agree that the crisis sometimes was weirdly passive in the older versions (I haven't tried 2.6.3 endgame yet).

 

[Shadowstrike]

The parallel pop growth issue has a really simply solution. Have each species grow independently, and create a new pop when the fractions of all the growing pops add up to 1 full pop. Then subtract 1 full pop from the growth counter of that species (i.e. so the counter is a negative fraction), such that one of the pops is virtually representing a mixed pop. Here's an example:

Humans: 0.6 pops grown, +0.1 pops/month
Blorg: 0.3 pops grown, +0.1 pops/month

When the next month timer hits, the sum of the growing pops reaches 1.1, which creates a new Human pop. Now, the pop growth becomes:

Human: -0.3 pops grown, +0.1 pops/month
Blorg: 0.4 pops grown, +0.1 pops/month

Effectively, the "new" human pop is representing part of the growth of both species. This way, pop growth keeps up on multispecies worlds just as they do on single-species worlds.

 

[Delthor]

Doesn't seem like a bug to me. What bug are you thinking about?

You know. That thing that's unintended behavior that only happens some of the time? And when it doesn't happen things work fine? I'm not sure how that's anything other than a bug. Do you think anyone at Paradox intentionally made the crises randomly stop expanding?

Reworks are for when things have some fundamental problem even when they do work as intended.

 

[Methone]

You know. That thing that's unintended behavior that only happens some of the time? And when it doesn't happen things work fine?

I know what a bug is. I'm asking what particular bug you're talking about.

Because even without the 'randomly shuts down' bug, crises DO need a fundamental rework, in regards to their reliance on construction ships, the fact that they don't get more of them as they expand, and that as they expand, the construction ships have no sense of travel time and keep trekking back and forth across their territory.

This has been a problem since 2.0. The crisis does, indeed, need a rework, not just a bugfix.