Hey all,
Pops have been a cause of performance issues and mechanic perplexity for a long time now, and a solution was certainly needed, but I feel this isn't it.
In this thread I would like to have a discussion about the design philosophy of pops in general and their role in the game.
In the earlier versions of Stellaris and the tile-based planetary building, pops were a pretty direct and intuitive mechanic: you dragged and arranged them in such a way that yielded the best results based on pop traits and resource production.
I think it was quite gamey, not particularly exciting but it excelled at what it meant to achieve: giving the players direct and intuitive control over their empire pop and production.
As the amount of content grew with Utopia, Synthetic Dawn, Apocalypse - the pop micro started to feel stale and the production a bit oversimplified, and so LeGuin/Megacorp were developed.
Most of the control over pops was given to automation; now rather than playing tile-tetris, you would develop the economy based on abstractions like housing, jobs, and districts, while pops shuffled to their preferred jobs automatically.
Granted it wasn't implemented flawlessly, but purely as a concept, the new system was designed as a medium to tie the now abstract economy mechanics to the still concrete pop entities - with their traits and strata and ethics and habitability and the corresponding calculations.
As we know, the result was an explosion in pop numbers and a severe hit on performance.
A fix here and a fix there, we get to the present day and the current system. The pop number is reduced by an empire cap and the production adjusted to try to achieve a smoother game.
Again, it's not implemented flawlessly. It makes the mid/late game expansions slow down to a slog, it encourages gamey managament of planetary mechanics, or silly vassal release/integration cycles. I'm sure however that the team will be able to patch this in the coming weeks.
But this brought me to the leading question: what is the purpose of pops?
The more I try to consider the pop mechanic from a zoomed-out perspective the more I feel that it's a living fossil from old Stellaris, hindering the more 'grand-strategy'/less 'tile-builder' direction the game has since evolved towards. A sort of bump in an otherwise smooth shape, that feels weird no matter how many times you paint it over.
I find myself thinking: is it necessary that every single pop has an happiness value? A strata? An ethic? An upkeep?
What if population underwent an abstraction process, similar to what happened to production in 2.2? Job, stratum, political affiliation, traits and all the jazz could be represented by pie-charts, graphs, and statistics, or anything really.
I honestly can't come up with many reasons why pops are a necessary or even desirable mechanic in modern Stellaris, but I would like to hear as many opinions as possible.
What do you think? How do pops contribute to the experience you seek from Stellaris?
Pops have been a cause of performance issues and mechanic perplexity for a long time now, and a solution was certainly needed, but I feel this isn't it.
In this thread I would like to have a discussion about the design philosophy of pops in general and their role in the game.
In the earlier versions of Stellaris and the tile-based planetary building, pops were a pretty direct and intuitive mechanic: you dragged and arranged them in such a way that yielded the best results based on pop traits and resource production.
I think it was quite gamey, not particularly exciting but it excelled at what it meant to achieve: giving the players direct and intuitive control over their empire pop and production.
As the amount of content grew with Utopia, Synthetic Dawn, Apocalypse - the pop micro started to feel stale and the production a bit oversimplified, and so LeGuin/Megacorp were developed.
Most of the control over pops was given to automation; now rather than playing tile-tetris, you would develop the economy based on abstractions like housing, jobs, and districts, while pops shuffled to their preferred jobs automatically.
Granted it wasn't implemented flawlessly, but purely as a concept, the new system was designed as a medium to tie the now abstract economy mechanics to the still concrete pop entities - with their traits and strata and ethics and habitability and the corresponding calculations.
As we know, the result was an explosion in pop numbers and a severe hit on performance.
A fix here and a fix there, we get to the present day and the current system. The pop number is reduced by an empire cap and the production adjusted to try to achieve a smoother game.
Again, it's not implemented flawlessly. It makes the mid/late game expansions slow down to a slog, it encourages gamey managament of planetary mechanics, or silly vassal release/integration cycles. I'm sure however that the team will be able to patch this in the coming weeks.
But this brought me to the leading question: what is the purpose of pops?
The more I try to consider the pop mechanic from a zoomed-out perspective the more I feel that it's a living fossil from old Stellaris, hindering the more 'grand-strategy'/less 'tile-builder' direction the game has since evolved towards. A sort of bump in an otherwise smooth shape, that feels weird no matter how many times you paint it over.
I find myself thinking: is it necessary that every single pop has an happiness value? A strata? An ethic? An upkeep?
What if population underwent an abstraction process, similar to what happened to production in 2.2? Job, stratum, political affiliation, traits and all the jazz could be represented by pie-charts, graphs, and statistics, or anything really.
I honestly can't come up with many reasons why pops are a necessary or even desirable mechanic in modern Stellaris, but I would like to hear as many opinions as possible.
What do you think? How do pops contribute to the experience you seek from Stellaris?
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