Why not use Imperator: Rome / Victoria 2 hybrid pop system?

[苏白@夢璃花]

We had a lot changes to the pop system, and 3.0 probably is the biggest one. Although it was meant to eliminate performance issue, it made many people unhappy about it, so the devs made a makeshift bandage solution to the problem, a linear slider to make people shut up. From what I observed last post, some people are fine with this change, some are not, but generally speaking, it will be great to have the problem addressed.

In the current system, every month, the AI checks, for every single pop in the game, for every single trait and modifier, every single job and its candidate pops. This and trade routes are mostly the major factor caused late game lag, forced Paradox to introduce the population control in the 3.0 update. So why not move away from the current individual pop system we have right now, and use Imperator: Rome / Victoria 2 hybrid pop system instead. Sort the pop by stratum like we have right now, but instead show each individual pop, they are grouped with same race, traits, ethos and jobs. And you won't have individual pop work on the job, rather they provide modifier. Somewhat like the Production Revolution mod. Now, district will be kind like the factory in vic and building is sitll the same. This solved the boring micromanagement that you have to shuffle the pops around if you want to have a good economy, and maybe will help the AI. Also lore wise, you are a emperor of a galactica empire, not a planetary governor, you do not and should not to manage every single pop on a plant, but give a general board direction for them to develop. Yes, I know it's possilbe by automation, but who ever trust AI? This also partially fixs the admin problem, since you don't have direct control over jobs, you can't do the trick anymore. You could also introduce a economic policy, free market which you don't have any conntrol over the jobs, but gives buff to trade value and automatic resettlement chance. The opposite, state owned gives you the option to prioritize jobs.

Factions
A pop system without internal political is shallow, I think we should have differennt factions with same ethic like Xenophobe. And most importantly, we should have factions based on stratum or job types, a ruler and a slave won't have same political needs, even if they have same ethic. This is more close to vic's dominant issues. And unhappy pops should have more dire consequences, distant sectors could have separatist movements, slaves could connect to each other and rebel, people leave jobs and go on protest, so you can’t just ignore them in the current meta.

 

[Ussnorway]

Paradox makes a random change, then patches it once before moving on to the next Dlc

 

[Bezborg]

There's been a growing consensus in the Stellaris community that the Imperator/Victoria pop system would better serve the game than individual entity slot-pops that fill slot-jobs.

There is absolute consensus that the current Stellaris pop system is the source of all evil in the context of performance issues, and various others.

Paradox resorts to increasingly bizzare and convoluted solutions to this fundamental problem, such as the growth curve, all in the gigantic effort of postponing an actual solution - changing the pop system into something more feasible.


I hope someone in charge finally gets the willpower to initiate a comprehensive change to this eternal wound in the game's development and evolution.

 

[Empire of Terra Nova]

less variables (vic2/i:r haven't got such an extensive origin/trait system like stellaris) means less calculation, so before asking for an overhaul of a core system i would like to know if the performance gains will justify the workload

if not i'd prefer more content and flavour

 

[Bezborg]

less variables (vic2/i:r haven't got such an extensive origin/trait system like stellaris) means less calculation, so before asking for an overhaul of a core system i would like to know if the performance gains will justify the workload

if not i'd prefer more content and flavour

Extensive origin and trait system, lol.

Have you played Victoria? Was that pop system not infinitely more complex?

 

[Empire of Terra Nova]

Extensive origin and trait system, lol.

Have you played Victoria? Was that pop system not infinitely more complex?

12 hardcoded pops with tax adjustments vs origins*traits*ethics*modifiers and whatever

yeah, pretty much lol

 

[exi123]

I havent played Victoria or Imperator Rome, but i never got why so many processing power is used for individual pops. Many calculations could work on a pure planetary level, like ethics. We have an absolut useless cake diagram for different races in the planetary UI, this could show a local parliament or faction attraction on this local planet...

Do we really need so much Details for every single pop? I dont think so. I could even live with way more abstract system as it is now, like when nine out of ten pops fill a stratum, the whole stratum gets 90% production value. There is no need to calculate every single job if you ask me, just add numbers, apply boni from different sources like triats, go next.

 

[qer]

less variables (vic2/i:r haven't got such an extensive origin/trait system like stellaris) means less calculation, so before asking for an overhaul of a core system i would like to know if the performance gains will justify the workload

if not i'd prefer more content and flavour

If a Vic 2 model is adopted yes. Vic 2 pops are actually much less calculation intensive than individual representation of the pops as in stellaris. Take into account that in Victoria 2 there could be polish catholic farmers or protestant german farmers and they would be treated as a separate pop unit.

Of course it would not be enough to change just pops as all the economic model would need to be reworked. It would probably not be feasible for stellaris, but maybe yes for an hypothetical Stellaris 2.

 

[Empire of Terra Nova]

If a Vic 2 model is adopted yes. Vic 2 pops are actually much less calculation intensive than individual representation of the pops as in stellaris. Take into account that in Victoria 2 there could be polish catholic farmers or protestant german farmers and they would be treated as a separate pop unit.

honestly, i don't recall vic2's pop system to be that extensive, or even in any way as near as interactive like the system in stellaris

all the optimisation that i'm doing right now on the pop level i did in vic2 on the factory/production chain level, the pops were just another less relevant and less influential aspect of the game

i would even go so far as to say that they were too enigmatic, just as the sliders for taxes and tariffs, and even more so the resource market

in vic2 i'll just end up adjusting sliders and see how it affects the tax revenues, which is not a strategic component but the classical simulation, the actual strategy, the country and province specific setup, the planning in advance, i've done by setting up production lines preferably as planned or at least interventionist economy

in stellaris i at the species creation have to know which traits they and in what ethics/civics i'm going to reform the government mid-game after finishing exploration and expansion and researching galactic administration

since i tend to play tall i tend to customise all of my pops, from founding pops, robots, even to immigrated or conquered xenos as it is the only way that enables to stack the modifiers (and also influence the appearance/portraits) as i like or in the very specific way i want to roleplay in that campaign

so adopting vicy's system would be a massive abandonment of customisation for the uncertain sake of performance enhancement, so unless this is going to turn the game into a speed monster i would simply suggest for the people experiencing unbearable performance problems to get new hardware

i myself used to play stellaris on a macbook pro before running it on the new imac, and from my perspective the performance increase is amazing. medium galaxy works quite fine, still significantly slowing down late-game but nothing that i find unbearably disturbing

then i had a campaign on my brother's computer when i last time visited my family (some kind of murder gamer machine customised for his oculus gaming needs) and the game was even faster than on my brand new imac, the difference between early-game and late-game speed 5 was still somewhat noticeable, but absolutely marginal

Of course it would not be enough to change just pops as all the economic model would need to be reworked. It would probably not be feasible for stellaris, but maybe yes for an hypothetical Stellaris 2.

tl;dr if the change meant less customisation options i would tend to reject it

 

[Ramiel]

Would a Victoria-lke POP system be better for the game, both for gameplay and performance? Absolutely. But the current POP system is so fundamental to the game's design I'd be very surprised if it wasn't hard-baked into the code so thoroughly that changing it in such a drastic manner would require rewriting half the game's code. Stellaris already had two massive overhauls that required significantly remaking large parts of the game and code - 2.0 and 2.2 (3.0 was major as well, but I believe it was more additions rather than rewriting existing systems). Doing another such overhaul, especially one that's significantly larger than the previous two (and essentially undoes one of them) isn't going to happen at this point. Stellaris is coming up on six years old, and while I don't expect development to stop for several more years I do expect we will see mainly additions and refinements, especially in areas where the game is seriously lacking (Internal politics and factions anyone?). Not more massive code rewrites of half the game.
Stellaris 2 is inevitable, probably sometime in the second half of this decade, and then I'll be surprised if the game *doesn't* have Victoria-like POP mechanics. With all the lessons learned from making Stellaris - what works, what doesn't work, etc - I'm excited to think what could be possible with a new game being built from the ground up. But the Stellaris we have now is overall pretty great too, and until then I'm going to enjoy it to the fullest.

The mod you're talking about looks pretty interesting, and I may go check it out later, see what it's like. If I'm understanding it correctly though, seems to me it kinda conflicts heavily with the ability to have multiple different species on a planet. Also can't find the FAQ page you mention explaining the mod in detail anywhere.

 

[Bezborg]

Would a Victoria-lke POP system be better for the game, both for gameplay and performance? Absolutely. But the current POP system is so fundamental to the game's design I'd be very surprised if it wasn't hard-baked into the code so thoroughly that changing it in such a drastic manner would require rewriting half the game's code.

This supposition is based on what?

The fact that the game “houses” a clumsy monstrosity of a system, so bloated and ill-conceived that it’s making the engine struggle…doesn’t necessarily mean it’s THE basic building block of the game, in a way that the game can’t function without it.

Not at all

 

[Willy Waggler]

But the current POP system is so fundamental to the game's design I'd be very surprised if it wasn't hard-baked into the code

They had generic tile/pop straight from galciv system prior to v2 so no.

 

[Saviour of Galaxy]

There's been a growing consensus in the Stellaris community that the Imperator/Victoria pop system would better serve the game than individual entity slot-pops that fill slot-jobs.

there is no consensus and to show you that you also got my respectfull disagreement.

 

[Ramiel]

This supposition is based on what?

The fact that the game “houses” a clumsy monstrosity of a system, so bloated and ill-conceived that it’s making the engine struggle…doesn’t necessarily mean it’s THE basic building block of the game, in a way that the game can’t function without it.

Not at all

They had generic tile/pop straight from galciv system prior to v2 so no.

POPs, as the discrete unit entities we have in Stellaris, were designed and made for the old tile-based system. They're one of the game's fundamental design aspects from when it was originally programmed. And under that system they're not a bloated, ill-conceived mess that cause the game to struggle. But the tile system itself was pretty flawed in a lot of ways, so it was replaced - yet while planets were redone, POPs are still essentially the same entities we had before, just put into a new system. If anything you can view the new system as an extended, abstracted tile system - jobs are the tiles of the old system, just now more detailed and made dynamic in number. Fundamentally the design isn't a *huge* stretch from the original system. And doing it was a huge undertaking which took nearly a year and still released as a buggy, broken mess that took another year to fix up. What's being considered here would require fundamentally remaking what POPs *are*, essentially remaking both the entire POP and planet system (again) almost from scratch. Remaking whole chunks of an existing program is not a small task, with difficulty and resources required increasing exponentially with scope.
In a perfect world, with unlimited time and resources, could Stellaris function without the current POP system? Absolutely, and done well it'd be a better game for it. But the time and and effort required to remake it is so great it'd probably be easier to just make a new game from scratch - one that improves not just the POP system but countless other aspects of the game with lessons learned over the years. AKA Stellaris 2. Meanwhile the POP system as it is works well enough, and using existing resources to improve on other, more lacking areas of the game is a far better investment for everyone.

 

[Bezborg]

POPs, as the discrete unit entities we have in Stellaris, were designed and made for the old tile-based system. They're one of the game's fundamental design aspects from when it was originally programmed. And under that system they're not a bloated, ill-conceived mess that cause the game to struggle. But the tile system itself was pretty flawed in a lot of ways, so it was replaced - yet while planets were redone, POPs are still essentially the same entities we had before, just put into a new system. If anything you can view the new system as an extended, abstracted tile system - jobs are the tiles of the old system, just now more detailed and made dynamic in number. Fundamentally the design isn't a *huge* stretch from the original system. And doing it was a huge undertaking which took nearly a year and still released as a buggy, broken mess that took another year to fix up. What's being considered here would require fundamentally remaking what POPs *are*, essentially remaking both the entire POP and planet system (again) almost from scratch. Remaking whole chunks of an existing program is not a small task, with difficulty and resources required increasing exponentially with scope.
In a perfect world, with unlimited time and resources, could Stellaris function without the current POP system? Absolutely, and done well it'd be a better game for it. But the time and and effort required to remake it is so great it'd probably be easier to just make a new game from scratch - one that improves not just the POP system but countless other aspects of the game with lessons learned over the years. AKA Stellaris 2. Meanwhile the POP system as it is works well enough, and using existing resources to improve on other, more lacking areas of the game is a far better investment for everyone.

I fully agree with you that the old tile system was simply re-skinned and multiplied by orders of magnitude...but is essentially still the same, or at least very similar in its function. Where we had 25 tiles max before, now we have hundreds and thousands. We simply got the ability to make tiles ourselves, via jobs. I agree, and I said it many times on these forums as well.

What I don't agree with is simply that it's an inextricable part of the game. Just as an example for purposes of discussion (not as a serious suggestion for the game): if they made planetary population to be simple a numerical segment of the planetary UI, it could work already. Let's take this idea to the extreme: just scrap the whole pop system, and add a "population" spreadsheet to planets. Species, numbers, growth, immigration, everything in that spreadsheet. Just an example.

I think the game would work just fine. So yeah, I don't think the single-entity pops as we have them now are a law of physics for Stellaris.

 

[Ramiel]

I think we're having a slight disconnect in what we're talking about. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you're talking primarily about the game's design, right? In that case I completely agree - there's nothing fundamental in the design of the game where POPs couldn't be replaced by such a system. What I'm talking about is the actual code of the game's program. The current POP system is so baked into the actual code that extracting and remaking it would be a herculean effort. Obviously a bit of an assumption, but based on the game's current state and history I'd say a very reasonable one. The game's already seen several massive (code) overhauls, and this one would likely be far bigger than all of those. I believe, and I think most players would agree, that the time and manpower required for such a change would be much better spent improving everything else in the game.

 

[DebbieElla]

Thread cleaned up, stay on topic and be kind.

 

[Willy Waggler]

I think we're having a slight disconnect in what we're talking about. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you're talking primarily about the game's design, right? In that case I completely agree - there's nothing fundamental in the design of the game where POPs couldn't be replaced by such a system. What I'm talking about is the actual code of the game's program. The current POP system is so baked into the actual code that extracting and remaking it would be a herculean effort. Obviously a bit of an assumption, but based on the game's current state and history I'd say a very reasonable one. The game's already seen several massive (code) overhauls, and this one would likely be far bigger than all of those. I believe, and I think most players would agree, that the time and manpower required for such a change would be much better spent improving everything else in the game.

You're saying this is an extremely hard effort consuming and daunting task.
Yet i see single random chinese modder doing just that. And it works and is popular.
For experiencing program it would take less than a week to release it in unpolished and buggy state.
But being unpolished and being buggy is the actual default state of stellaris so...

 

[TheHuntedOne]

I think the argument over whether it can happen or not is kinda moot, given there's a mod which overhauls jobs to create the exact situation people seem to want, a Vic2 pop system in Stellaris, called Production Revolution.

 

[GnoSIS]

We've been through this hundeds of times in the past years:
The pop system suggested here would be too much work for them to re-code, for little benefit - and by benefit here, I mean their bottom line business profits. We can only hope for fixes, optimizations, and simplifications. Besides, once you have a full competent AI empire filled galaxy by the mid game, the game has other other performance issues.

A mod I've had fun with that considerably changess the pop semantics and workload to be in line with what is suggested here is the production revolution mod, which I expect to be even faster once 3.2 hits us and is updated.

I highly recommend you give it a spin!

Steam Workshop::! Production Revolution [rebuilding...]

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