Wide play style and tedium

[Dustman]

When number of colonies go above 10, it turns into micromanagement hell. You need to ensure jobs for everyone, move pops around, etc. Default job allocation sucks since it looks like empire's resource flow is simply ignored. Sure, it's much more important to get extra 4 amenities instead of 6 food...

Getting to pop limits pose additional challenge of unemployed pops spamming nice crime/deviancy events, so doing batch jobs once every few years is out of question, you must react asap.

I've played a single game for 200 years this year and can't really stand damn micro... Get yourself as no. 1 on the scoreboard and game's over for me.

 

[Kryndude]

It helps if you use tiny outliner mod and low jobs/housing alert mod.

 

[Dustman]

You can't have build-queues since slots are bound to pop count. Few unemployed pops, and that's really just 2-4 out of 100 pops on planet, cause bad events. It is visible in the window to the right to start with, problem is you need to react all the time, mostly in uniform way, to the same events, mainly to unemployment/new buildings/housing shortages. In my latest Hive game I had uniform growth of 10+ on usual planets. 2-3 pops every second year. And dozens of planets.

Frankly, I thought about getting to end-game crisis for a change, but tedium will kill me earlier. Could've vassalize/kill all other empires long time ago otherwise...

So far the only nice part of the game is early start, especially if you get couple of empires with opposite ethics who bang on you. If one of them is advanced start, things can even get hot. But once you get couple of fleets and stable resource flow, all is left is tedium. Wars are mostly predictable total occupation vs. waiting game just to get few claims. Nothing sporty in SP, and MP requires too much time in one go.

 

[Ramiel]

You're probably not going to find this helpful at all, but to me it just sounds like you haven't learned to play the game very well in 2.2. Granted I rarely ever play super-wide, and maybe having a hundred worlds would turn into micromanagement hell, but I do usually end up with a good 1~2 dozen worlds and have never felt any of the issues you mention. If you're constantly fighting against unemployment and making jobs for things as you need them then something is terribly wrong. You should be looking ahead to what you will need in the near future and getting jobs ready ahead of time. Whether that +4 amenities or +6 food comes first simply shouldn't matter, so long as they both get filled eventually. I always keep my planets with about 2~5 jobs above the current population, and only in very special circumstances do I ever feel the need to manipulate job priorities or shuffle pops around. And when the planet does get full you just have to tweak it a bit to have a nice stable population, usually with just a tad bit of unemployment and/or overcrowding. That little bit should have no meaningful effect on a stable, developed planet.
So yeah. To me it sounds like you're creating micro where there doesn't need to be any. Like many, many other people who've said the same things.

 

[Dustman]

@Ramiel You're bit wrong. In mid game when early resource shortages are gone, I build almost all districts right after colonization. It's not really admin efficient, but I have jobs for ages. Buildings can't be built from day one though. You need some pops. With IP/genocidal/Gestalt problem is slightly alleviated by extra build slot from Adaptability. And it's not as bad with Authoritarians either, since you can resettle. For Egalitarians it's quite different and natural growth is the only way to get pops, beside raiding and slave market.

When you get your planets to their natural pop limit, things get nasty. You can stop growth as gestalts, but it's waste of resources, namely pops. Slavers can resettle. Fine, but look at original post: having 50+ planets with ~40-50 pops in nead of resettlement every year, just to avoid trouble, and you can't do it automatically, like 'click a button to resettle unemployed pops from other planets up to the job limit'. No, you need to open resettlement tab for every single planet, scroll and choose a planet to resettle from, scroll down to unemployed pops and click them several times, while counting, just not to get to many extra pops on your target planet, since your amenities/housing can be low. Think of colonization of L-cluster, with 10+ plus planets at once.

If economy is solid and the build is optimized for influence generation, Habitats can be created almost overnight, or at least every second year. Even if you play tall, number of colonized celestial bodies grow very fast.

Take egalitarians and things are getting nasty. You need basic mineral income and in many cases food from your planets, so they are best to be used with plenty of resource districts. In such case housing is again a problem at some point. Unemployed homeless pops even at Utopian abundance cause trouble, both crime and stability issues. You can slow down growth, but it costs influence for decisions and cause unhappiness.

Prior to 2.2 unemployed as well as employed pops would migrate ad libitum, filling in your new territories. Now it's just a number, and quite few unemployed pops will be staying till things get too bad for natural pop decline.

All things built, planets at 80+ pop limit is when this game turns into micromanagement hell. Strategy? Which strategy when you simply do tedious tasks again and again, plus game turn into crawl itself. Very, very enjoyable.

 

[Subcomandante]

I have 68 planets and 4300 pops. It is one great puzzle to solve, and it only gets ever larger. I am considering the abolition of slavery, because I want more skilled workers, and slaves really don't cut it anymore in my super advanced authoritarian economy. Don't hesitate to give out unemployment benefits.

It is micromanagement heaven.

Ye gods of 4x, when do we get c#?

 

[methegrate]

I have 68 planets and 4300 pops. It is one great puzzle to solve, and it only gets ever larger. I am considering the abolition of slavery, because I want more skilled workers, and slaves really don't cut it anymore in my super advanced authoritarian economy. Don't hesitate to give out unemployment benefits.

It is micromanagement heaven.

Ye gods of 4x, when do we get c#?

Agreed. I like the new economic system.

The only thing I feel like it's missing is competing end goals. Right now you only build toward two things: research and alloys. And let's be honest, research isn't competitive with alloys. So you really just build toward alloys. Everything else is just a means towards that end.

So at this point, I'd only really make two big changes to the economy.

First, I'd expand on end goals. There should be at least one more resource that you build towards, and both it and research should be equally competitive with alloys in terms of strategy and play style. Basically something so that if I min/max toward X , I'm missing out on Y and Z and will actually feel that loss.

Or, to put it another way, if there's research, alloys and X, I can focus on X and it's an equally viable strategy as focusing on research which is an equally viable strategy as focusing on alloys.

Second, I would make strategic resources more rare. I love the addition of gas, crystals and motes, but they're too common. I plunk down a couple of refineries for each and never think about them again. They should be something that you, as the player, are always short of. Finding, building or securing those resources should drive a lot of my middle game.

At the moment though? Not so much. Refinery buildings produce too many resources. I always end up with huge stockpiles.

Otherwise, personally I think the new economy is great.

 

[trojan1234]

When number of colonies go above 10, it turns into micromanagement hell. You need to ensure jobs for everyone, move pops around, etc. Default job allocation sucks since it looks like empire's resource flow is simply ignored. Sure, it's much more important to get extra 4 amenities instead of 6 food...

Getting to pop limits pose additional challenge of unemployed pops spamming nice crime/deviancy events, so doing batch jobs once every few years is out of question, you must react asap.

I've played a single game for 200 years this year and can't really stand damn micro... Get yourself as no. 1 on the scoreboard and game's over for me.

Once you reach mid-game such as 400 -600 pops, you can ignore 1-2 unemployment on a planet. This can be better dealt with synchronized pop growth - having pop growth rate same over all planets. You only need to look at planet once a year.

 

[AlanC9]

Take egalitarians and things are getting nasty. You need basic mineral income and in many cases food from your planets, so they are best to be used with plenty of resource districts. In such case housing is again a problem at some point. Unemployed homeless pops even at Utopian abundance cause trouble, both crime and stability issues. You can slow down growth, but it costs influence for decisions and cause unhappiness..

I play egalitarians all the time, since I prefer to test new patch releases with the stock UNE. I have no idea what you're talking about here. I haven't had any problems with population management, unemployment or even planetary management. It's certainly never occurred to me to shut down growth, except in the sense that I start blowing off using the Encourage Population Growth decision after 2400 or so. Honestly, I'm usually sitting around waiting for some unemployment or a building slot so I can build more stuff.

Note that my rig can't handle more than a medium galaxy (never could, even in previous versions), and I don't generally go on huge conquest sprees, so my total number of planets doesn't get higher than the 30-40 range until late enough in the game for economic efficiency to not really be worth my time anyway.

 

[DonKeeOT]

I agree about the micro, even playing tall. I enjoy optimising in the early - mid game, then after around 2300 my game starts to slow down because of performance and having to keep up with pop growth. By 2350 it is agonising. I don’t know what the solution is but next game I,m moving the crisis to hit much earlier.

 

[Badesumofu]

May I suggest Shard Burdens? Unemployment doesn’t matter, you can allow a few pops to be unemployed without serious problems. Pops will demote in 6 months as well which is lovely. It’s also a pretty powerful civic to boot. I like to combine it with Mechanist to fill as many worker jobs with robots as possible which avoids the biggest downside of SB. It also feels thematically appropriate ie utopian socialism based on automation (robots do this shit work, people work only if they wish to).

 

[beckermt]

May I suggest giving the sectors instructions, resources, and leaving them to their own devices?

 

[Dustman]

May I suggest giving the sectors instructions, resources, and leaving them to their own devices?

Does sector AI work? My main problem is inter-sector resettlement and early building/district setup. I doubt AI's ability to be frank.

 

[beckermt]

Does sector AI work? My main problem is inter-sector resettlement and early building/district setup. I doubt AI's ability to be frank.

The answer to that question depends a lot on what you define as working. The AI won't absolutely destroy your planets, but it will fail to engage in any sort of large-scale specialization plans.

The sector AI is identical to the empire AI, so at the very least you will have a functional economy. If it builds robots and is being a weirdo about things (building ag districts when you have livestock slaves aplenty) well... that all just kind of comes with the territory.

If micromanagement is making the game unplayable for you, then I would posit that any loss of efficiency is worth being able to continue playing the game.

 

[Cocco81]

Does sector AI work? My main problem is inter-sector resettlement and early building/district setup. I doubt AI's ability to be frank.

To my experience, it fails when building need advanced upgrades, because you can give sectors energy and minerals only, so as soon as rare resources are needed, the development is stuck.

 

[Magdaki]

It helps if you use tiny outliner mod and low jobs/housing alert mod.

I could not agree more with this.

Personally, I like the current economy gameplay. I find that it has a pretty good decision tempo. It might be a touch on the micromanagement side especially in the early game when it is very inefficient to simply mass build districts/buildings in advance. It would be helpful if districts/buildings that are not used did not have upkeep, at least imo.

 

[Urza1234]

It would be helpful if districts/buildings that are not used did not have upkeep, at least imo.

Absolutely.
Honestly, part of the original brilliance of Stellaris as a real-time empire management game, was that with the 1.0 version of the product just about everything could be queued. You could keep those plates spinning by playing months or even years ahead of your actual needs

A lot of that is gone now, the game is much more reactive. I dont think thats a good thing for the real-time or mutliplayer aspects of the game's design.

 

[beckermt]

To my experience, it fails when building need advanced upgrades, because you can give sectors energy and minerals only, so as soon as rare resources are needed, the development is stuck.

They don't get stuck due to lacking the special resources, as they'll just pull from the empire pool. It's just that motivating the AI to actually build advanced buildings is somewhat difficult.

 

[PanzerMan7]

The problem is I can't automate my bloody sectors! I'm considering just federating my empire (release sectors as independents then invite to federation). Then at least those sectors get AI difficulty bonuses

Whelp, time to pine for the diplomacy dlc

 

[KingAlamar]

I tend to think that the IMPLEMENTATION of the current ideas aren't particularly good given what I want out of the game.

Things that I do want in the game:

• I want an empire based strategy game. 4x with grand strategy elements or vice-versa would be OK
• I do want to make the high level decisions, I want the ability to make low level decisions, and want to be able to hand a template to the AI to follow implement my decisions

So what does this mean? Basically:

• If I hear sector 42 has a piracy problem I want to make the decision of what fleet, how big, etc. to send to sector 42 to protect my trade or other factors. I don't ALSO want to have to micromanage exact anti-piracy routes, re-evaluate new routes for every new starbase, colony, or even trade value bump. I certainly don't want to scan every system looking for piracy ... that's something I should be "pinged" so I can make a decision.
• I like the idea of "encouraging growth" on some [all] planets. I don't want to also have to manually scan those planets to see if the decision expired without being informed / asked to renew.
• I like the idea of "just in time" building management for colonies. It's likely similar to how I would think things "should" be actually done. I don't want to drill down this low to make that decision in stellaris though. I'm cool with "what to build". Maybe even "where to build". The scan constantly to perfect "WHEN to build" is too much.
• I like the idea of amenities just fine. I don't like having the President / Emperor deciding that we could use another theater on planet 73 of the empire.

Changes that I'd like to see:

• Have Edicts / Decisions / Campaings / etc. last "forever" but have upkeep costs of some nature OR once they expire I'd like to be asked if I want to renew. Change techs / APs / etc. that lengthen duration to lowering up front & upkeep costs.
• I'd like to set minimum amenity levels for a planet and if it dips below that I want a governor to build a holo theater [or something]
• I'd like to be able to tell governors "hey when you're at 2 unemployment upgrade the research building" to keep me from having to scan for that
• I'd like to assign piracy control fleets to a sector and let the sector AI handle all anti-piracy activities
• I'd like to assign numeric priority to jobs ... perhaps empire wide, perhaps planet wide so I don't feel the need to go in and shuffle who is in what jobs
• I'd like to assign job hints to each species template ... basically to set priority there to nudge the AI in the direction I'd like it to go. Maybe even set a "growth priority" to help fix the current system(s).