Stellaris Dev Diary #139 - 2.2.x post-launch patch

[FiddleSticks96]

Yes, I want these habitability-trait bugs fixed. Post-Apocalyptic should not change your original habitability trait, but rather supplement it.

Actually, I think the Post-Apocalyptic civic granting Tomb World preference, with all that entails, is a much better take on the civic than how it was before it "bugged." Habitability doesn't matter that much in 2.2 since there is no longer a minimum threshold and it no longer affects happiness. Amenities/consumer goods are also really easy to get. Considering that this civic cannot be added/removed post game start, it brings it up to par with other civics that cannot be added/removed after game start. Look at all the things that Inward Perfection or any of the purifier type civics give you and then compare it to Post-Apocalyptic only giving you +10 to leader life (even Enduring, which only costs 1 trait point, gives you +20 leader life) and a boost to habitability to one of the rarest planet classes in the game. Will you at least consider giving it a try internally?

 

[Kelhammer]

Prioritizing/staring jobs is nice and all, but what if I want to prioritize more than one job? Or what if I want 7/9 farming jobs always at priority #1, all technicians as priority #2, and then those remaining farmers as #3?

 

[FlyingPhoenix]

Planet View
One of the most important UIs in the game is getting a bit of an overhaul. We’ve been joined recently by our new UX/UI designer, Doyle, and he’s been very busy taking a look at the planet view.

It's so good to hear you have a dedicated UX/UI designer. Can I suggest he goes through the "shift-click" issue as well?

There are multiple places (Diplomacy, Fleet Manager, Market, Jobs) where you can click on a button to add 1 quantity, shift-click to add another, ctrl+shift click to add a third value. This is great.

Except it's a different rule in each UI - the Market has different quantities represented by different UI elements, Diplomacy uses one scheme, Jobs has another, and the fleet manager requires as many clicks as you are adding ships.

The Pops tab is also being cleaned up a little, and you’ll now be able to prioritize one job per strata, which should make it easier to make your workers prioritize farming without having to juggle the priorities of other jobs in the same strata. The ability to “star” a job was actually the original design, but it was changed into an on/off prioritization.

I'm not sure if it has been said in this thread or not, I'm pretty sure it has.
I would prefer a list system of priority where you have the ability to turn on or off the prioritization.

So for example, you turn off miners, and then prioritise clerks over generators over farmers within the worker strata.

 

[Elimdur]

So for example, you turn off miners, and then prioritise clerks over generators over farmers within the worker strata.

You would always want to prioritize farming atleast to the point of having a production of +-0 or above. Nobody wants to starve But for the rest I agree.

 

[FlyingPhoenix]

You would always want to prioritize farming atleast to the point of having a production of +-0 or above. Nobody wants to starve But for the rest I agree.

And why would you turn off miners? Honestly I basically just shuffled those four jobs in my head and picked them at random.

 

[Elimdur]

And why would you turn off miners? Honestly I basically just shuffled those four jobs in my head and picked them at random.

Would not turn them off, where did I say that? I just said that before any other priorities apply, the food supply has to be secured.

 

[Khunter]

General observation about performance issues, Xeno compatibility needs to get scrapped.

Playing a Fanatic Purifier race to test this, I exterminated the entire galaxy through occupation instead of bombardment. What I found was a list of Xeno hybrids so long the UI couldn't show them all, and it took nearly 100 years of extermination to bring the list down to fully visible size. During the peak of my campaign around the year 2400, when I had nearly 4000 pops to execute, the game stuttered and lagged like crazy. As I slogged through the process I noticed an uptick in performance as the list of xenos dwindled. By the time I was done and there was only one race left in the galaxy, the game was running like I had just started fresh.

Seriously check your algorithms for population growth, interspecies breeding and genetic manipulations. There's no reason there should be 10+ subspecies of every race and race mix in the game.

 

[Badesumofu]

General observation about performance issues, Xeno compatibility needs to get scrapped.

Interesting observation. I'm playing a medium galaxy game right now in 2334 and I have been thinking to myself that the performance so far is great. Just took a look and there are no half-anything species in the galaxy. I wonder if there is something happening with that perk that is causing issues.

 

[FlyingPhoenix]

We will be looking into why some players feel the need to automate more, and how that experience could be improved. I have nothing concrete that I can mention though.

I'll bite, because I am one of those players.

I don't want to automate away my decisions, I want to automate away the executions.

I don't want a better experience in that the process of executing a decision is "more engaging". I want to be able to get distracted on the wrong side of my empire by a large attack and find that the colony I colonised before war broke out is still getting along fine without needing to be babysat. The problem is that you make a decision and then you get inundated with a host of repetitive executions which are redundant.

And that's the problem. Somewhere at Paradox, someone has become confused by the distinction between making a decision and executing a decision, and the game experience is not that of a grand strategy, but rather one of those phone apps which were designed to be as addictive as possible to people.

 

[Tvarog]

You can fold out the strata to get a view of the portraits and details, like before

When i firs tried Megacorp i was thinking "this button on the right makes priority higher or lower, why is it grayed out?" I was really confused why if i press "-" that job dosn't go down in the list, was thinking it's a bug.
Can we have simple system like, uh, higher priority jobs are literally higher (like HOI 4 factories) and low priority jobs are lower?
Then fire/block job made by right clicking like in Tropico for example?

About sectors...
I have no idea how now sectors are made... if i want to make subsidiary i have to colonize planet for him first, then grant him independence, than claim all systems around him which i want for myself (because i have no control (OR knowledge) which systems are granted to him and which are not.
Does anybody know any other way to control it at all?

 

[Aleriez]

I had exactly the same idea, but after a bit of thought, it came to me that this would be far to powerfull. Imagine that there are 10 species on a planet, all those species would grow at exactly the same speed, so after the first batch hast grown up, you would have two new building slots available, possibly massive unemployment and so on. You could only balance that by increasing some numbers, but that would bring problems for planets with a less diverse species count. Growing several POPs at once would just be impossible to balance.

Actually you just need to use the growth value as a selector for the next pop to grow. The highest bidder wins and gets its growth value reset.

Similar to the system in Endless Space 2.

 

[Kain2K]

We will be looking into why some players feel the need to automate more, and how that experience could be improved. I have nothing concrete that I can mention though.

I think the problem has two sides.

1. Since 2.2 was released the game feels like the need to micromanage planets has not only increased significant, but it also is now mandatory to micromanage every planet. This is partially because the need to micromanage has increased, and partially because the automation function for sectors still needs regular attention because resources have to be assigned manually. So, even if you activate sector automation to decrease the need to micromanage (either because you don't like micromanagement at all, or because you want the AI to manage a few worlds) you still have to micromanage your automated colonies to a certain degree.
2. The second part is the outliner. At the moment, automation is just a means to an end, because it is the only way, to make the empire management via the outliner somewhat manageable. It was already overcrowded when was 2.0 released, but it was manageable. Reason is, that since 2.0 every upgraded outpost is also shown in the outliner. This makes it neccessary to constantly scroll through the whole thing, because at some point you end up with a whole bunch of starbases, more than the outliner can show without scrolling. Since 2.2 this has gotten much worse, because now there are also hundreds of planets shown. In short, the whole concept of the outliner has to be redone.
   • Most of the information that is today shown in the outliner should be moved into the corresponding menues, new menues should be created as neccessary. Reason for that is, that the outliner shows, all together, to much information, and that information is not viewable anywhere else. So you tend to never deactivate elements, because if you do, you will most likely lose valuable information that is available nowhere else. The Sectors and Planets menu should not only contain every needed information for every colony and sector, it should also allow to directly jump to a colony and to also manage it directly from the menu.
   • There should be a new menu for the starbase management, that basically does the same.
   • The outliner should only function as a way to quick acccess things we have to have quick access to.
   • There should be a function to favorite certain colonies, and starbases, and these should be shown in the outliner (for example: the outliner of CK2 doesn't show every vassal, and it doesn't show everyone who is at your court, it does only show people you favorited, because anything else would hardly be manageable).

Tl;dr:
The main reason to have automation, in my opinion, are:

1. Mandatory micromanagement since 2.2
   
2. Bad UI design regarding the outliner

 

[Cat_Fuzz]

I think the problem has two sides.

1. Since 2.2 was released the game feels like the need to micromanage planets has not only increased significant, but it also is now mandatory to micromanage every planet. This is partially because the need to micromanage has increased, and partially because the automation function for sectors still needs regular attention because resources have to be assigned manually. So, even if you activate sector automation to decrease the need to micromanage (either because you don't like micromanagement at all, or because you want the AI to manage a few worlds) you still have to micromanage your automated colonies to a certain degree.
2. The second part is the outliner. At the moment, automation is just a means to an end, because it is the only way, to make the empire management via the outliner somewhat manageable. It was already overcrowded when was 2.0 released, but it was manageable. Reason is, that since 2.0 every upgraded outpost is also shown in the outliner. This makes it neccessary to constantly scroll through the whole thing, because at some point you end up with a whole bunch of starbases, more than the outliner can show without scrolling. Since 2.2 this has gotten much worse, because now there are also hundreds of planets shown. In short, the whole concept of the outliner has to be redone.
   • Most of the information that is today shown in the outliner should be moved into the corresponding menues, new menues should be created as neccessary. Reason for that is, that the outliner shows, all together, to much information, and that information is not viewable anywhere else. So you tend to never deactivate elements, because if you do, you will most likely lose valuable information that is available nowhere else. The Sectors and Planets menu should not only contain every needed information for every colony and sector, it should also allow to directly jump to a colony and to also manage it directly from the menu.
   • There should be a new menu for the starbase management, that basically does the same.
   • The outliner should only function as a way to quick acccess things we have to have quick access to.
   • There should be a function to favorite certain colonies, and starbases, and these should be shown in the outliner (for example: the outliner of CK2 doesn't show every vassal, and it doesn't show everyone who is at your court, it does only show people you favorited, because anything else would hardly be manageable).

Tl;dr:
The main reason to have automation, in my opinion, are:

1. Mandatory micromanagement since 2.2
   
2. Bad UI design regarding the outliner

The outliner should only display things that need your attention regarding planets and stations. In other words, when a planet has a riot on its hands, is suffering unemployment or if it's a starbase, if there are modules or buildings that need to be built. If it doesn't need anything critical, it should be hidden from view, as it can still be accessed via the planet and sector view (which should include a tab for stations and be renamed 'empire view'. Maybe collapse the expansion planner in here too.)

 

[Magdaki]

This is the patch I need to get back into Stellaris, although I have no complaints from a value to dollar perspective for MegaCorp with over 200 hours played. I love it so much I want to play it some more. The pop growth issues, for me (and these things are subjective), just make too many playstyles frustrating.

 

[jusuff]

Ship Upgrade
I think the experience of upgrading ships could be better, as it feels a bit awkward that cancelling your upgrade at 99% doesn’t actually leave any ships upgraded. I want to address that by making each ship upgrade individually, one at a time, and that this process should make use of multiple shipyards in the same starbase. This should mean that if you cancel a fleet upgrade at 50%, roughly half of the ships will still be upgraded. We’ll also take a look at tweaking the upgrade costs and time.

Update cost seems ok right now (it shouldn't be cheap). But update times, specially with BBs and Titans, are nightmare. Sometimes it takes so long that it would be faster to rebuild fleet than to upgrade it (in terms of time)

 

[amirkhafan]

fix these to
1.pop with default slave right will migrate to empires with slavery policy and become slaves
2.pre-sapient become refugees

 

[Coconut_Cookie]

Update cost seems ok right now (it shouldn't be cheap). But update times, specially with BBs and Titans, are nightmare. Sometimes it takes so long that it would be faster to rebuild fleet than to upgrade it (in terms of time)

But doesn't this add to the strategy in terms of long term planning. I always liked it in HOI that you really need to plan ahead when deciding what kind of capital ships you are going to build, especially because not all parts can be upgraded. You really need to have a good idea of what you are going to be up against in the next couple of years. That being said maybe stellaris should offer some more adaptability in how you use your ships by making fleets act more like a group instead of ships individually, that way ship roles could vary a bit from what they are designed for. IRL warships in WWII were almost never used for the purpose they were originally intended for (battleships in escort roles, carriers far more important than their intended scouting role, etc.).

 

[jusuff]

You really need to have a good idea of what you are going to be up against in the next couple of years.

I agree. But upgrade that needs more than 1000 days (longest upgrade I remember was about 1700 days) is somehow to long I suppose.

 

[Coconut_Cookie]

I agree. But upgrade that needs more than 1000 days (longest upgrade I remember was about 1700 days) is somehow to long I suppose.

Well maybe this can be offset by having more maneuverability in how you utilize your ships, assign the older ones to escort roles, maybe ship them off to patrol duty before scrapping them (or add a section to the market were ships can be bought and sold). Maybe some modules shouldn't be upgradable for capital ships keeping upgrade times in check with smaller vessels (there could be a perk that your ship designs are build in a modular fashion making it possible to upgrade everything). Naval strategy is build strategy, but maybe the battles in stellaris are still to deadly to allow for such strategy. I just like to see a bit less abstractions in the game so you actually need to have short and long term plans for most things you need to do. A lot of things can be ignored without consequences, or are omitted completely like resources teleporting to were they need to be. I don't think it would be good if stellaris would be completely hard core but all paradox's other games that are called "grand strategy" have these kinds of elements.

 

[T4r4g0n]

Please buff robots, please fix admin cap, PLEASE unnerf servitors. But an honest thank you for fixing ship upgrading.