Unpopular opinion: Empire wide growth is a welcome change

[Oxo31000]

You wanna waste an enormous amount of time and influence on a tiny amount of planet population density? Be my guest.

Do I think the current game is perfect? No.

Do I think that 3.0.1 is a massive improvement on 2.8? YES

Do I think you're saying that because you can't optimize an empire properly? YES

 

[Vernichtere]

Fun part , this is realistic , for the human race .

At least the effect , not the origin of the effetc ;it should be based on economy power and not the total number of pops.

absolutly realistic for the human race. For this reason china and india have far less pops. They made the mistake to unite the region early. The same is for the USA. But on the other side? Probably France and Britain should stop to use cheese and just conquer their colonies in Africa back. The game is lagging.

 

[permeakra]

As far as I can tell, players are now meant to keep empires small and focus on playing diplomacy. Genocidal empires still can do it by releasing sectors as vassals. Many empires can ran hegemony. Megacorps with subsidiaries can be impressive thanks to their ability to set up branch offices and push their diplo weight this way through the roof wihtout their pops involved. Federations can work too, since AI isn't THAT terrible at wars.

I'm not sure I like it, but I probably could live with it. The way we are pushed towards this end, however, is terrible.

 

[monkeypunch87]

So, I played some more today and I'm starting to like it. My strategy after colonizing a planet involves to build enough city districts to to unlock all building slots and after that, I build jobs when they are needed. It works so far because of my increased housing at the start of my worlds to promote growth.

I also noticed that "Mastery of Nature" is now more powerful with its +2 districts.

 

[mergele]

Yeah the changes are a really good move. I like them a lot. I do also think they still need a bit of refinement, but they are still leagues better than anything we had since 2.2 killed the game. I just hope the devs don't go panicking into abandoning all progress they finally managed to achieve.

 

[arosenberger14]

Haven't played the new version yet, but the more I hear about the changes the more I like them. The old version had major issues with inflation. Since every planet grew at the same rate, once you got a bunch and they all started filling in every planet would urbanize and start ballooning your power around 50 to 100 years into the game. The results were the players blasting through the tech tree by 2300, having to micromanage full planets that kept spawning pops late game, and easily outgrowing the AI, FE's and Crisis, to such an extent they added the ludicrous x25 crisis strength settings.

The added growth from pops growing on each planet never made sense in terms of realism or balance, and it seems to me the empire wide penalty is meant to balance out the extra growth you get from each planet with increased growth costs as you grow new pops. More planets still gets you more pops faster, just not as fast, and you can't sit back and automatically grow every planet into a specialized fully developed powerhouse. Instead, we're pushed to use the new auto resettlement feature to concentrate pops from rural feeder worlds into a developed world. Which is good, as it differentiates planets more instead of every one becoming a maxed out factory or research or beauraucratic world. And now ringworlds and ecumenopoli are hard to fill, as they realistically should be.

Doubtless there are rough edges, and personally I think an empire wide pop growth system would have achieved similar results and been simpler to implement and understand. But I think it's good that the devs have finally put some brakes on the magic extra pop growth you get from sending a few colonists in a space pickup to some planet in the galactic boonies. Yes it makes it harder to develop your empire and for a slower game, but that too was badly needed, it was ludicrous how you could go from a single planet to massive galaxy spanning civilization in a single century in the old version. Overall, seems like a change for the better in my opinion.

 

[Vernichtere]

Haven't played the new version yet, but the more I hear about the changes the more I like them. The old version had major issues with inflation. Since every planet grew at the same rate, once you got a bunch and they all started filling in every planet would urbanize and start ballooning your power around 50 to 100 years into the game. The results were the players blasting through the tech tree by 2300, having to micromanage full planets that kept spawning pops late game, and easily outgrowing the AI, FE's and Crisis, to such an extent they added the ludicrous x25 crisis strength settings.

The added pop growth from pops growing on each planet never made sense in terms of realism or balance, and it seems to me the empire wide penalty is meant to balance out the extra growth you get from each planet with increased growth costs as you grow new pops. More planets still gets you more pops faster, just not as fast, and you can't sit back and automatically grow every planet into a specialized fully developed powerhouse. Instead, we're pushed to use the new auto resettlement feature to concentrate pops from rural feeder worlds into a developed world. Which is good, as it differentiates planets more instead of every one becoming a maxed out factory or research or beauraucratic world. And now ringworlds and ecumenopoli are hard to fill, as they realistically should be.

Doubtless there are rough edges, and personally I think an empire wide pop growth system would have been simpler to implement and understand. But I think it's good that the devs have finally put some brakes on the magic extra pop growth you get from sending a few colonists in a space pickup to some planet in the galactic boonies. Yes it makes it harder to develop your empire and for a slower game, but that too was badly needed, it was ludicrous how you could go from a single planet to massive galaxy spanning civilization in a single century in the old version. Overall, seems like a change for the better in my opinion.

You can like the new system beauce you like the balance. But please don't talk about realism. The structure of your society does not matter at some point. The situation on your planets also dont matter at some point. When you get enough pops together, your whole population going to be steril. And when yor release a sector as vassall: here we go with babyboom again. Very realistic system.

 

[The Founder]

You guys ever considered that perhaps it will take a few weeks to just get used to the new system?

Must be realy you people. Ah, the impatience of youth...

No, he's right. The first couple of weeks of complaints are often based around comparing what is to what was. Later, the complaints are around what doesn't work right. I try to jump to the second part straight off, but it can be hard when you have to unlearn previous techniques.

Every. Single. Time.
The that Atomic Clock in the game.

I just hope this "argument" does not go the way of the FTL argument.

I don’t mind the change conceptually, and I’d rather not see them rip it out entirely or whatever. But a lot of the systems within it aren’t at all intuitive and pursuing them, not even optimally, incentivizes strange behavior.

[...] It just seems like there have to be better ways to model these ideas that end up producing a similar outcome. I’m sure it’s hard as hell.

There are 3-ish problems to solve:
- the Planetary Growth Curve
- the Empire Growth Curve
- and at least one of them not ignoring Pop Assembly, ideally the Empire one

For example, it makes sense to people for pops to immigrate off of some backwater mining colony, but not because jobs are artificially being restricted and living space is constructed but never with the intent to be used. You’re currently incentivized to build out the infrastructure of a planet and then restrict people’s ability to use it so they’re forced move to the space city.

I think that could be relatively easily fixed.
Right now the "going down" part of the Planetary S-Curve is just growth going up in smoke. That is causing people to build more housing then jobs, so pop growth stays stable and the pops can move there after being out of work.

To fix it we need something that:
- transfers this lost growth into the migration pool
- but still substracts it, even if there is no (or not enough) Migration space left
Every single attempt failed on one of those fronts. The current one is failing on the former. Pure migraiton pressure fails on the later.

I made a suggestion to that effect:

Another empire growth bellcurve Idea

So I already made one suggestion on how to solve the empire bellcurve better then what we have now (increased cost). But I had another, not nesssearily mutually exclusive idea: The penalty from "High Population"/mostly used capacity should be...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

You're doing it wrong, concentrating pops makes them less efficient.

The problem with the new growth mechanic is that the optimal way to play is an infinite morass of 20-40 pop planets all constructed exactly the same way with no individuality.

Tech for +30% production at +30% work upkeep would beg to differ.
Keepin mind that Worker/Menial Drone jobs only need the minimal pop upkeep - whose production is also buffed.

Wasn't one of the main goals of going from a tile-based system to a jobs-based system to avoid the stagnant late-game? It was a while ago, so maybe I don't remember it right, but I think what people disliked about the tile system (apart from micormanagement) was that everything became static eventually unless you conquered new stuff.

The tile System had run it's course. It needed you to manage Adjacency bonuses to have any value (one of those things that need planning, so a hard thing for he AI).
While also limiting the kinds of planets they could add: a Ringworld would require dozens of segments for a management nightmare, Ecumenopolis would be impossible, and habitats were not that good either.

 

[Less2]

Tech for +30% production at +30% work upkeep would beg to differ.
Keepin mind that Worker/Menial Drone jobs only need the minimal pop upkeep - whose production is also buffed.

You don't need to keep pops on the planet after you've upgrade the capital. This is where abusing resettlement comes into play.

 

[arosenberger14]

You can like the new system beauce you like the balance. But please don't talk about realism. The structure of your society does not matter at some point. The situation on your planets also dont matter at some point. When you get enough pops together, your whole population going to be steril. And when yor release a sector as vassall: here we go with babyboom again. Very realistic system.

So was a planet with 10 pops growing at the same rate as a planet with 100. At least that's smoothed out in the long run now. Yeah it promotes gamey strategies with vassals, which is another reason I think empire wide pop growth would be better, but in the old version you could infinitely make pops by settling and abandoning planets. And growth never stops, it just slows down... which you counteract by getting more planets or habitats. There's now diminishing marginal returns to expansion, something the game badly needed.

 

[Dainty Owl]

Possibly.
There is something to be said about it being the lesser of [Predicted Housing] and [Predicted Jobs], where it currently only seems to be [Predicted Housing].

But it does allow some planets I have not yet fully maximized production on to provide people for the rest of my empire.


Where do you get that "Determined Exterminators no longer make sense"?
Have you been cheesing the playstyle by keeping the people around in Forced Labor or Matrix Purge for as long as possible?

For the rest: Megastructures were always for a tall playstyle. As conquerer you got very few Alloys to spare on such a extravagancy.

Well, DEs are basically all about snowballing and growing without limit. The same is true for DS. It doesn't mesh well with either.

As for Ringworlds the problem is quite simple: There's no point in building one if it takes forever to fill up. And this is a problem for tall as well. Granted we may have a different definition of tall. For me it's not about having less pops (that's just a losing proposition), but rather about having a lot of pops in a smaller number of systems. You can see how if you play this way you run into the same problem as a wide player: The ringworld you built is never going to reach its full potential.
This isn't just a problem for ringworld but for all mid and late game colonies. In addition to making them an even worse investment, it's just not satisfying gameplay.


I understand the need to adress snowballing but for anyone who enjoys watching their empire grow, developing their planets, and filling a ringworld at the end, this is just not fun, period. The way to adress snowballing is to make the AI act like a player. In MP people constantly swap sides to gang up on whoever is most powerful and everyone tries to maintain a balance ( at least with the people I mp with). Just add a coalition option EU4 style and make fleet power affect opinion. A victoria style great powers and crisis (vicky crises not stellaris crises) system could also help. Once the AI starts playing the Great Game this will become a lot less of a problem.

Also remove base growth entirely. An empire with one size 20 planet should grow at the exact same rate and reach the same capacity at the same time as an empire with two size 10 planets. This should also help smaller empires.
EDIT: I feel the need to stress this. THIS is how you fix the strange more planets = more growth + more room for growth situation. The devs havent gone far enough in regards to the logistics curve. It should be more planets = more room for growth only.

At the end of the day though this issue will NEVER be adressed properly until we have internal politics and it takes time and energy to keep your empire together, with difficulty scaling the bigger and more diverse it is.


Add all of the above and then remove the varying pop cost. That's my (rather long term) solution. As for performance just halve numbers again if you need to. It makes each individual pop more important anyway.

 

[Vernichtere]

So was a planet with 10 pops growing at the same rate as a planet with 100. At least that's smoothed out in the long run now. Yeah it promotes gamey strategies with vassals, which is another reason I think empire wide pop growth would be better, but in the old version you could infinitely make pops by settling and abandoning planets. And growth never stops, it just slows down... which you counteract by getting more planets or habitats. There's now diminishing marginal returns to expansion, something the game badly needed.

The growth stops more or less at some point. You can not cat up with building new colonies. The old system was more realistic than the current situation. You still have the issues between single planets. But now you are just have this very realitic antybaby pille for your whole empire when you conquer people. Worst possible solution to solve the problems with lags.

 

[mial42]

Personally, I agree with the idea I've seen other posters kicking around. If Paradox wants to reduce the number of pops to improve performance, just halve the numbers. Mining district with two housing/two jobs? Nah, that's one housing/one job. City with 6 housing 2 jobs? Nah, that's 3 housing 1 job. Double the cost to grow the pop, it's upkeep, and its output - you end up with the same net cost and production from a pop but it generates slower and you have half the number you would in 2.8. Half the number of pops means half the calculations required, reducing end-game load.

TBH you don't even need to double the pop upkeep/production; just halve the building/district upkeep instead. You'd have deflation, but deflation is fine considering how inflated the 2.8 economy was. Producing 1000 instead of 2000 or 50K instead of 100K research isn't the end of the world.

 

[The Founder]

The growth stops more or less at some point. You can not cat up with building new colonies. The old system was more realistic than the current situation.

Just a small reminder - the Logistics Curve was invented to match real life growth:
"The logistic function was introduced in a series of three papers by Pierre François Verhulst between 1838 and 1847, who devised it as a model of population growth by adjusting the exponential growth model, under the guidance of Adolphe Quetelet.[2] Verhulst first devised the function in the mid 1830s, publishing a brief note in 1838,[1] then presented an expanded analysis and named the function in 1844 (published 1845);[a][3] the third paper adjusted the correction term in his model of Belgian population growth.[4]

The initial stage of growth is approximately exponential (geometric); then, as saturation begins, the growth slows to linear (arithmetic), and at maturity, growth stops."

Logistic function - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

So anyone that claims a Logistics Curve does not match reality does know what the heck they are talking about!

 

[Pale Blue]

Just a small reminder - the Logistics Curve was invented to match real life growth:
"The logistic function was introduced in a series of three papers by Pierre François Verhulst between 1838 and 1847, who devised it as a model of population growth by adjusting the exponential growth model, under the guidance of Adolphe Quetelet.[2] Verhulst first devised the function in the mid 1830s, publishing a brief note in 1838,[1] then presented an expanded analysis and named the function in 1844 (published 1845);[a][3] the third paper adjusted the correction term in his model of Belgian population growth.[4]

The initial stage of growth is approximately exponential (geometric); then, as saturation begins, the growth slows to linear (arithmetic), and at maturity, growth stops."

Logistic function - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

So anyone that claims a Logistics Curve does not match reality does know what the heck they are talking about!

That would make more sense on an empire wide system. The habitat of a interstellar system isn’t just one planet. If a planet lacks resources they get shipped in or pops move to other planets. Growth should slow down because the empire lacks resources not some minor planet.

 

[EmperorOfSerbia]

Just a small reminder - the Logistics Curve was invented to match real life growth:
"The logistic function was introduced in a series of three papers by Pierre François Verhulst between 1838 and 1847, who devised it as a model of population growth by adjusting the exponential growth model, under the guidance of Adolphe Quetelet.[2] Verhulst first devised the function in the mid 1830s, publishing a brief note in 1838,[1] then presented an expanded analysis and named the function in 1844 (published 1845);[a][3] the third paper adjusted the correction term in his model of Belgian population growth.[4]

The initial stage of growth is approximately exponential (geometric); then, as saturation begins, the growth slows to linear (arithmetic), and at maturity, growth stops."

Logistic function - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

So anyone that claims a Logistics Curve does not match reality does know what the heck they are talking about!

Planet based logistic curve is realistic and barely anyone complains about it. That said, it is very questionable if building empty apartment buildings everywhere would increase growth in real life. However, the empire-wide malus has nothing to do with realism. The number of births per person in New York City and in Richmond did not explode during the Civil War just because the US split in two temporarily. The notion is ridiculous.

 

[arosenberger14]

The growth stops more or less at some point. You can not cat up with building new colonies. The old system was more realistic than the current situation. You still have the issues between single planets. But now you are just have this very realitic antybaby pille for your whole empire when you conquer people. Worst possible solution to solve the problems with lags.

You're just not thinking in terms of scale. Even if it takes a decade for a planet to grow a pop, if you have 10 feeder planets or habitats that's one pop a year. I'm not saying it's perfect, especially in terms of growth pacing, exploits, and balance against conquest, but there are advantages over the old system.

The big issue is that planetary growth is more like a blood and soil lebensraum "more land = more people" vision of how colonization works than how it really does. Land doesn't grow people, people grow people.

 

[Vernichtere]

Just a small reminder - the Logistics Curve was invented to match real life growth:
"The logistic function was introduced in a series of three papers by Pierre François Verhulst between 1838 and 1847, who devised it as a model of population growth by adjusting the exponential growth model, under the guidance of Adolphe Quetelet.[2] Verhulst first devised the function in the mid 1830s, publishing a brief note in 1838,[1] then presented an expanded analysis and named the function in 1844 (published 1845);[a][3] the third paper adjusted the correction term in his model of Belgian population growth.[4]

The initial stage of growth is approximately exponential (geometric); then, as saturation begins, the growth slows to linear (arithmetic), and at maturity, growth stops."

Logistic function - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

So anyone that claims a Logistics Curve does not match reality does know what the heck they are talking about!

This is nice. It has just nothing to do with the mechanic. All the conditions around the growth in a area can be the same. The difference between growth and no growth is the area part of the same country or many countries. And this is not like it works in reality. Otherwise, you would see more growth in the area of the former soviet union after the collapse. Just please stop to find logical explanations for the mechanic. We all know a game mechanic is always abstract. But it was not a good way to boost the feeling of immersion.

 

[EmperorOfSerbia]

Land doesn't grow people, people grow people.

And people decide if they will grow more people based on the land available

Having a child is very expensive, and requires larger housing space than for a single person. If housing is very expensive due to high demand and low supply, a significant number of people will decide not to have children. On the other hand, if housing is basically free, the same people might have kids instead.

 

[sillyrobot]

And people decide if they will grow more people based on the land available

Having a child is very expensive, and requires larger housing space than for a single person. If housing is very expensive due to high demand and low supply, a significant number of people will decide not to have children. On the other hand, if housing is basically free, the same people might have kids instead.

So why does your population rise faster if you get a few planets cracked?