My Automatic Pop Migration mod may help remove the tedium of moving pops around. Link to all of my mods in my signature if interested.
Wide play style and tedium
- Thread starter Dustman
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My Automatic Pop Migration mod may help remove the tedium of moving pops around. Link to all of my mods in my signature if interested.
This is what I don't get. Why are you feeling the need to resettle so many pops? Once a planet fills up and there's just a bit of unemployment/overcrowding pop growth and pop decline start to balance out, leading to population equilibrium. So long as the planet is otherwise stable that little bit of unemployment/overcrowding shouldn't make a difference. Only time I've ever resettled pops in 2.2 is if I want to jump-start a really good new planet; I've never done so to relieve overcrowding.
This +1. If one plays as a Egalitarian empire there's even the option of switching to utopian abundence living standards for a + research/unity bonus for your unemployed pops.
Even without massive conquest, there is room for expansion, like habitats, L-cluster, FE. Massive growth is a great boon turning into management nightmare. Not that I try to min-max or optimize everything, but having 7+ unemployed pops per celestial body just in few years hurt my eyes and give uncomfortable itching: why the hell I spend these hours getting here and would ignore most important resource in the game, namely pops?
Then you may not be thinking about it from a design perspective.
In general you have turn-based strategy games like Civ, that have been deep(excluding recent installments) but have been extremely unsupported and underemployed from a Multiplayer perspective.
On the other hand you've had RTS games like the Blizzard-crafts, that were designed more for multiplayer, and have received much more multiplayer popularity and support, one even being watchable enough to be called an "esport", but are shallow to a fault.
Maybe some strategy nerds will bring up an exception or two, but the paradigm has mostly been Turn-based Vs RTS, Deep vs Shallow, Singleplayer Vs Multiplayer
When Stellaris was released in 2016 I saw it as an attempt to bridge that gap, and to tap into the Twitch market. It was a grand-strategy game that attempted the depth of Civ in Space, but was almost completely designed around its somewhat unique queueing system, all the way down to little mechanics like Tech Overflow, and the monthly pseudo-turns, that made it much more popular and appropriate for multi-player and streaming.
Is that Brilliant game design, trying to make a game with the best of both worlds? I'd call it at least astute, in theory anyway.
There have obviously been a lot of bumps, and bugs, along the way. Perhaps the developers would have stuck to their original vision if their game-stutter and other issues hadnt killed off so much of their multiplayer community.
Honestly, from a lot of the design choices I've seen Stellaris may as well be completely re-released as a turn-based game.
Why is there no Growth Overflow for instance? Growth is now no longer pop-distinct, its treated as a resource like everything else, so why does growth have breakpoints rather than overflow?
Why did they implement a system like job-strata, which has seemingly no purpose other than to fill a developer's economic fantasies, and to punish both the player and the AI with bug-riddled inefficiencies, or mind-killing micro.
Why have sectors, which were always better in theory than in execution, been reduced even further in scope?
Then there's the example of migration no longer actually existing as anything more than a function of growth, the example of buildings no longer being economic to queue...
I could probably think of more examples, but the point is that the game no longer functions in real-time, even in theory. If thats the case, then all its real-time elements are no more than vestigial, serving no purpose.
Considering that pops are the most valuable resource in Stellaris 2.2, it should be self-explanatory why you would want to resettle them rather than have them go into decline and disappear. Basic optimization means you need to use every world as a pop factory and either resettle them or create useful jobs they can fill.
Decline and disappear? What are you talking about? Overcrowding leads to an emigration push, but the total pops are still growing.
Oh, I'm thinking about it from a design perspective. Just not yours. Where you see a twitch game, I see a boring game.
Of course, that could just mean that I'm so insensitive to the concerns Paradox was trying to address that I can't see the greatness. If you're trying to bridge a gap to a genre I'm bored by, the bridge isn't going to do anything useful for me.
Note that Stellaris, in any version, doesn't strike me as being any more or less turn-based than any of its cousins, like EU and HoI. Time in all these games works the same. You're using turn-based as shorthand in a way which isn't really legitimate, although I can't think of an alternative term for you at the moment. If you want to say that Stellaris is turning into HoI in space, though, feel free.
But this is an empirical proposition about game development. Are there any dev statements concerning what the devs were attempting to do?
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While I find that when having many planets mid-game forward can cause micromanagement tediousness, I welcome the challenge as I see Stellaris as just that. A strategic management game. If you want a quick simple game, shorten the years and make a small galaxy. Otherwise you want to play big and long. It comes with the territory and that's what a game with Strategic longevity is meant for.
Micro tedium is why I generally play tall. I like to get my initial little territory efficient enough so that it can support everything else I conquer later on even if I ignore my conquests. If I'm not playing a gestalt I generally just vassalize everything I don't want to directly manage so that I don't need to babysit the sector screen constantly. For wide to ever be fun for me I'd need the sector AI to just take what it needs automatically and not crash the economy. It doesn't need to be great, it just needs to be able to keep planets from spiraling into unstable messes I have to deal with.
You can get similar results by going xenophile egalitarian and absorbing everybody into your federation.
I really like the new system and I've been getting a handle on it. I just wrapped up a game where I had over 50 planets at one point. The only problem I had was clicking through the list of worlds with unemployment to see if there were enough unemployed pops to justify building a new district or building. All I would like is to have a counter in the outliner to show me how many unemployed pops are present on each planet so I don't have to click on them.
I agree with the OP. Micromanagement gets ridiculous even on a small Galaxy once you get around 40-60 planets. I tried an experiment where I played without pausing and something like 95% of my time was spent scrolling through the planet list fixing problems. With the other 5% picking new techs, spending influence on claims, and continuing megastructure builds.
It is even worst with synthetic Ascension because your pops can't migrate and you have to tab in and turn off the roboticist jobs. Which doesn't stop randos from migrating in and being assimilated.
The old sector system was much better. I could decide what was in my sectors, pre-build everything, then hand the planet off to be upgraded by the sector ai. The only thing it was missing was the ability to automatically divide resource overflow amongst the sectors. Even without pre-building, the AI generally did a decent job at building towards the sector focus.
The new sector system is so horrible in comparison. No choice about what is in each sector. No pre-building. AI can't into economy even with massive bonuses to production. I mean it is so bad that I think building selection completely at random would be superior (which is totally true with the AI fleet design as well, they seem to like mixing plasma and disrupters).
It is even worst with synthetic Ascension because your pops can't migrate and you have to tab in and turn off the roboticist jobs. Which doesn't stop randos from migrating in and being assimilated.
The old sector system was much better. I could decide what was in my sectors, pre-build everything, then hand the planet off to be upgraded by the sector ai. The only thing it was missing was the ability to automatically divide resource overflow amongst the sectors. Even without pre-building, the AI generally did a decent job at building towards the sector focus.
The new sector system is so horrible in comparison. No choice about what is in each sector. No pre-building. AI can't into economy even with massive bonuses to production. I mean it is so bad that I think building selection completely at random would be superior (which is totally true with the AI fleet design as well, they seem to like mixing plasma and disrupters).
I set my planet count to 10%, medium galaxy with a moderate amount of empires. It results in dealing with 4-6 planets usually, but enough space to have interesting stuff and solid mining station income.
A bunch of planets is just too much to deal with when you cant pre build them, or set a build order, or automate pop transfers or something.
A bunch of planets is just too much to deal with when you cant pre build them, or set a build order, or automate pop transfers or something.
Well, of course the size of the galaxy in itself has nothing much to do with this.
But how do you end up with that many planets in a small galaxy without getting to the point where it doesn't really matter how you run them? Are you cranking the number of planets up?
I get the impression that the current system is optimized around a galaxy setting and playstyle where by the time you've passed something like 30-40 planets you've run away with the game.
It wasn't like this before the update. You could take planets you had mostly built the way you wanted them, and add them to automated sectors without limits. There was a 25% tax on what they made but it didn't matter much to a wide empire. In the new system there is no tax but small sector auto generation combined with the need to manually send them resources to build with makes it nearly useless as a feature to combat out of control micromanagement in the late game. It's almost amusing how everything aligned just right to make this new system as annoying as possible to deal with for wide play. Like they did it intentionally. Though really I know it's because they were just focused on beta testing megacorps.
I should have said celestial bodies instead of planets. I had maybe 1/4th of the Galaxy, but both AI empires that attacked me built a bunch of habitats. So like 10 or so were not planets. It was default settings, other than Galaxy set to small.
The micro issues crop up earlier than that, I would say at around 7-8 planets. But somewhere past 40 is where it starts getting obscene.
The old system had issues as well when scaling up the sector count. Once is it more than 7-8 sectors I'd much rather be able to add another layer. Like sub-sectors owned by sectors owned by me.
Maybe something similar to how CK2 does it would be good.
I never play anything bigger than small, with default planet count, since my laptop simply can't handle it well past first century. Even with Small game is painfully slow by the end of the second. And very often I'd get 10+ planets mostly from colonization by 2230 in presumably peaceful reactive game, where aggression is just to break boredom. Add Horizon Signal ending, and Gray Tempest, and count is around 40 w/o much expansion. Put on habitats and you're in 60s by year 150. Add just a bit of conquest and you can easily get close to 80. Start as a dedicated conqueror/genocidal and you'd get at least 3-4 homeworlds by 2230, with assortment of smaller worlds if desired.
When you're sitting #2 just beside FE there's no point going forward, unless you want to fight aforementioned FE and end crisis. And you can easily get to this position with just a handful of planets, depending on difficulty.