The problem is that mods like this will break compatibility and fundamental mechanics like that should be a default state and not fan responsibility.
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Why not use Imperator: Rome / Victoria 2 hybrid pop system?
- Thread starter 苏白@夢璃花
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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...]
steamcommunity.com
I tried it, is it possible to play it without the UI mods?
I mentioned this mod in the main post and my augment is if some modder could do it, it won’t be unthinkable if they pushed last two big changes that failed and do it one more time.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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I think this change would be positive but it will never be implemented because after the last 2 pop reworks people kept complaining that they had to "re-learn" the game and how all their mods were broken and how Paradox is a trash company. It is people like that who make the devs scared to make major changes.
Of course, there is the sheer amount of coding and reworking almost every single part of Stellaris that would have to be done with an update of that scale as well.
Of course, there is the sheer amount of coding and reworking almost every single part of Stellaris that would have to be done with an update of that scale as well.
Stellaris engine/coding is just bad. Its easier make Stellaris 2 then patch this mess.
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This is intriguing, to say the least. It seems like a massive, fundamental rework of the game to me, more apt for a sequel than a patch, but then again, I know little about programming, so I don't know how well it could be done with the current engine or how much performance improvement it would bring.
As for the mechanic itself, from what I understand it is the following:
- There are no pops anymore. They all get pooled into the planet's "manpower" stat
- No more individual pop calculations for jobs searching, joining factions, etc. Everything is done on a planetary level
- Jobs, racial traits, and the likes get applied as modifiers for the planet's total output in relation to its manpower
It could work. The only problem that I see is that it is very abstracted and that it might lose a bit of granularity, so to speak. But if an interesting faction / internal politic is added, it could make up for that. Still, it will need to modify lots of other game areas in order to make it work, but it is indeed an interesting approach towards a more "big picture" type of game.
As for the mechanic itself, from what I understand it is the following:
- There are no pops anymore. They all get pooled into the planet's "manpower" stat
- No more individual pop calculations for jobs searching, joining factions, etc. Everything is done on a planetary level
- Jobs, racial traits, and the likes get applied as modifiers for the planet's total output in relation to its manpower
It could work. The only problem that I see is that it is very abstracted and that it might lose a bit of granularity, so to speak. But if an interesting faction / internal politic is added, it could make up for that. Still, it will need to modify lots of other game areas in order to make it work, but it is indeed an interesting approach towards a more "big picture" type of game.
Interesting to say this after the dev diary from yesterday. They are working active on this task and only the few things they showed are so simple, it really seems the only thing they have done the last years is stapling code. There are stil so many things going on, many of this stuff doesnt really matter if you play the game.
We just need a Stellaris 2 at this point. There's so many re-works of the core systems that its too convoluted and too imperfect to properly iron out. Its a gordion knot of technical debt that can be cut through with just re-launching the game with the more up to date vision that Wiz and Moregard have pushed the game toward.
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I really liked the way Wiz promoted Stellaris, i liked the way he communicated, but his last release, Megacorp with the planetary rework, was a desaster, plain and simple. Much of the technical debt the game is struggeling with until today was added when he was the game director. He is not to blame for everything, much things were the results of to tight dev-cycles i guess...
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How would Stellaris 2 be better than what we have now? Do you think there would be anywhere near as much content? Youd get new mechanics that many would likely not enjoy as much. I think Paradox will continue to refine what we have, and I think that is the best solution for the devs and gamers.
Im not even sure I have a problem with the way pops work. I like the challange of the micro, although better feedback on worker productivity and climate requiements are needed.
I think its all fixable. I think dumping this game to start again is cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Im not even sure I have a problem with the way pops work. I like the challange of the micro, although better feedback on worker productivity and climate requiements are needed.
I think its all fixable. I think dumping this game to start again is cutting off your nose to spite your face.
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It's less the mechanics than it is the coding behind the game that people are pointing to needing a relaunch. The constant flow of new DLCs and expansions has limited the team's ability to address issues that have been building up, or their "technical debt". The issues with pops is one example of that - the pop rework in 3.0 didn't actually address the fundamental issues that caused pop lag, it merely prevented that being an issue by restricting the number of pops. The last 3.2 journal by contrast shows them addressing an aspect of the debt by pruning various unneeded checks.
A complete rework of the pop system, rather than just a rework of the growth numbers, would bring about yet more technical debt and would be a major challenge as it would directly impact pretty much every other system in the game.
While the Custodian team can help with the technical debt, there is a significant amount of catching up they'll have to do, and the main development team will continue to add to that burden with new content moving forward. At some point the question becomes when are they going to spend more money trying to correct the built-up issues to maintain the game's quality than it would take to start working on a sequel.
A complete rework of the pop system, rather than just a rework of the growth numbers, would bring about yet more technical debt and would be a major challenge as it would directly impact pretty much every other system in the game.
While the Custodian team can help with the technical debt, there is a significant amount of catching up they'll have to do, and the main development team will continue to add to that burden with new content moving forward. At some point the question becomes when are they going to spend more money trying to correct the built-up issues to maintain the game's quality than it would take to start working on a sequel.
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I would love to agree that time and manpower be spent on improving QoL and other features in the game, but alas, despite having a beast of a PC, this game runs so poorly for me, even on low settings, after the first hundred years, that I and others like me, barely get to see the fruits of such labours in-game. I refuse to pay out for content I can't enjoy, because performance issues prevent me from reaching it.
I hate to be one of those people, but the game I originally bought, no longer exists, that's okay, to some degree, I got alot of play time out of the game I did buy. Sadly, it only ever felt like a taste of a game, ala Early Access. I now regard many PDX games as "moving targets" I might be buying CK3, grand strategy title, but what I might end up with is "Crusader Sims: The life and times of Baron Spudface" Which, again, is okay, but as a customer, I'm less inclined to buy into an evolving product, when the process of evolution, seems dictated by poor planning on the coding side and money motive on the business side. It leads to situations in which, bad coding and design choices, are deeply baked into the system, such that, fixing them isn't an option. That is something I don't want to lay money down for.
That is something that I'd like to see PDX address in a meaningful manner. But I suspect their business model is too engrained to change.
I agree with those few voices that have pointed out, that if the task is so monumental, requiring so herculean an effort, how is it, that a group of modders in their spare time, have done, what a mutinational, multititle developement studio and production house, could not?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...]
And your right, this issue has been, very visibly debated for years and in all those years, rather than address the issue directly, honestly and openly, PDX has instead engaged in a very different, protectionist approach, that has led, not to a solution in those early days when it might have mattered, but to the compounding of the issue into the future, to, in my opinion, the detriment of their product and their reputation.
Culture at PDX could do with a refresh. Less corpo, more focused dev, would be a nice filter.
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Alright, so since quite a few people have made comments that 'if a modder can do it, why can't the studio?' - I have to ask, have they? Don't get me wrong, the Production Revolution mod looks like a very well-done mod, and it's crazy they've been able to make such a system given what modding abilities the game has, but that mod is nowhere near an actual functioning Vicky2-style system. It's hard to tell exactly how the mod is working as documentation is slightly lacking on details, but it seems to reduce POPs to a single manpower number with no distinction for species or other variations. It seems like the mod tries to keep representative POPs around for different species, ethics, etc, but it's very difficult to tell what, if anything, is being done to maintain relative numbers of differing POPs, or how differing POPS (traits, species, ethics, etc) are being taken into effect with job output, faction support, etc. Maybe there's more details than I can see on the surface, but it looks like large parts of the game involving population differences have been so streamlined they're effectively cut out of the game. And if you've played Vicky2, you know that's a *huge* part of the POP system. Then there's the fact the mod has numerous issues and incompatibilities with various civics, origins and playstyles (vanilla ones, not mod-added). It's a fantastic piece of work, and major props to the modders who made it, but it's a far, far cry from a proper functioning Vicky2 POP system.
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"The current software is too buggy" is NEVER a rational reason to throw out everything you've worked on and start fresh. It is ALWAYS easier to fix the existing code base, whether through bug-fixing or refactoring.
The time will be right for Stellaris 2 when the existing game gets to the point that the devs can no longer add the features they want to it. I again use the example of CK3. The old game of CK2 was left in a pretty solid state when they moved on to CK3. The devs even stated that they did this because they wanted to try out new things that would not fit with the existing structure of CK2.
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That is interesting. I have what is probably described as "mid range" bought exactly a year ago, and I have yet to experience any slowdown, despite increasing growth and number of planets, and increasing the end date by another 100 years. I probably only play with a maximum of 20 ai, but still, making an adjustment I would not expect to see a slowdown After 100 years of game time.
For reference I have an AMD Ryzen 5 5600X (6core 3.7ghz), 16GB DDR 4 3000mhz ram, 6GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 1660 and 2TB barracudea ssd 560/540. I also bought my son the same system, about 2 weeks before, although I bought him a "generic" SSD 520/460... and load times are noticably a lot longer on his system. But still no slowdown.
Last tme he stayed over he didnt bring his pc, so I cracked out my 6 year old pc that I had "refurbished". That has a i5-4690K (3.5GHz), DDR3 2133MHz and a samsung ssd 1050MB/s. And even though we were playing multiplayer, there was no lag or slowdown 350 years in.
May I ask what system you are running the game on and the settings you use?
A further point is that mods like this typically cater to a specific crowd of players and not the overall player base. This mod, on the surface at least, appears to gut the whole premise of the pop system, which was to model an empire as it if were filled with actual beings that have differing traits and ethics, and thus make it feel more alive. So while it may achieve what it sets out to do (I have no idea it if does, since none of the screenshots are in English, and I'm not willing to install it just for this post) it's at the cost of the original premise. It is little wonder then why the devs would NOT include something like this in the base game regardless of the performance boost. In other words, it's not that they CAN'T do it, but CHOOSE not to because it conflicts with the original vision of the game.
I honestly think we all need to take a step back from this topic until the next patch comes out. The Custodian team has already identified some critical performance issues with pop calculations that they believe they can fix. Let's see how that pans out before we start calling for some mass overhaul of the game.
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No, it is mechanics. Pop/job/buildings micromanagement stops being fun or even possible once you have several hundreds inhabited astral bodies.
Maybe you by coding you mean working automatization? I doubt it's more feasible than proper pop rework.
Unfortunately all signs point that game direction is to pander to quick intensive RTS-like competition on tiny galaxies and few planets, where pop micromanagement is the core gameplay like starcraft unit micro. And people who enjoy this don't care that game can't into scale.
So we get pop cap to further scale it down.
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1. Modders did not fix the problem, they just duct tape a new system on top an old one, that adresses some issues that we do care alot, while creating other issues, that we don't care about. The end result is a frankenstein monster, that would never be considered commercial grade gaming software.
2. Now what they should focus on, is fixing all of that potato code they have. If you read the recent diary, that code is far from correct, let alone performant. That, along with perhaps some threading improvements like more load balancing, and better handling of fleets would be tons of help. Beyond that, I also place my bets on DDR5 maturing in 2 years and thus boosting the baseline further. That would require a new PC, of course.
3. Let's not forget that with each expansion they are also adding more stuff. These do take their toll on top of everything - more or less, so if they don't solve the pop performance issue, they will get stuck and drag the product down the drain.
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i mean, the whole problem is about the pops being the bane of performance right? Why not just get them to make stellaris use more of a PC's resources. Stellaris never uses more than 15-20% of my PC's CPU, and almost negligible ram use (although i have a boatload of Ram to be fair) and my GPU, which is a few years from being top of the line at this point, laughs while playing stellaris. Just open up stellaris to using everything the computer has and we should be all good right?
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