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

[Mythox]

ahhh what a good fresh news =) thank you

 

[Vund]

Thank you for the update, I hope we will also see performance improvements as well.

 

[mysticdueler]

@grekulf Thanks for the DD and all the work to improve the current version. Quick question: would it be possible to improve the window regarding the list of your planets ? Currently, the planets are all hidden under their sectors so we need to click on each sector name to expand the list. If i want to sort out by production or else, it will not work since they are stuck on each of their sector.

The idea would be to have the full list of your owned planets and just add the sector name in the description. Maybe adding a drop down list on the very top of the window to chose a particular sector if i want to focus on it.

Hope you see what I mean.

About the best that you can do right now is open the outliner preferences and choose the ‘planets’ option instead of ‘sectors’. It will list just the planets in order of distance from your capital, basically how it was before 2.2. The downside here is that it’s just a planet list, with no other way of sorting it. The Planets/Sectors Tab is also a little awkward to use at times, and could probably use a UI pass as well.

 

[roman566]

I don't like the new population screen. While it shows employment, information about who is working where is sorely lacking. I will have to open a worker tab every time I want to check how many free pops I have on the planet. The window is tiny so it will mean tons of pointless scrolling. Can you just make it BIGGER? It would have space for another line of the information displaying pop race working in each stratum and show more than four jobs at the same time.

 

[Vilain Nabo]

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.

Can we imagine a checkbox or a dropdown list on dock yards (when there are multiples in a station ) to allow or not its usage for upgrades? This way we could eventually imagine a scenario where I have one keep building new stuff while the other is performing the upgrades

 

[NilsFabian]

What also needs to be overhauled is the sector mechanic.
The old one wasn‘t great but now. It is a mess. Technically I am not using sectors. Using sectors is the same micromanagment as managing the plantes itself. When my empire reaches the size the sectors would be useful it is easier just to ignore the planets unless there is a crisis with ressources , too much crime or unenployment. Them I deal with that plamet and thats it.

 

[AlanC9]

I don't like the new population screen. While it shows employment, information about who is working where is sorely lacking. I will have to open a worker tab every time I want to check how many free pops I have on the planet.

Won' that still show under the Summary tab, the way it does now? Of course, that probably still won't show which stratum the unemployed are in, which is a big downside.

 

[Calvax]

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.

Are there any plans to make upgrade time dependent on shipyard number? It doesn’t feel right that currently a starbase with 6 ship yards doesn’t upgrade any faster than one with 1.

 

[roman566]

Won' that still show under the Summary tab, the way it does now? Of course, that probably still won't show which stratum the unemployed are in, which is a big downside.

I don't care about unemployment. I want to know how many pops belonging to my main race are working as workers so I know if I can move them somewhere else or add a new building so they promote to specialists.

 

[Bearjuden]

We will be adjusting how pops are chosen for growth, and try to avoid having pops move to, or being chosen for growth, on planets where they have a very low habitability.

Why don't you split up pop growth from being a single pop growing and the game has to pick into every different type of pop grows at rates determined by their current population and habitability? It would be far more accurate to split it up rather than having the game "choose" (since in order to maintain realistic demographic growth while also only growing one pop at a time then you would have to cache the current demographics at periodic intervals to know what to grow), so I'm not sure what your reasoning is on having it combined.

this process should make use of multiple shipyards in the same starbase

<3 you guys, thanks, since I assume this will entail a fractional time reduction based on how many shipyards are used to upgrade.

Will you be taking a closer look at sectors as well and how they can be retooled to be more effective?

 

[Annihilat0r]

Please give us an overview in the planets & sector screen similar to the expansion planer. I need to know which of my planets have which kind of districts. Ideally, give us the option to build new districs directly from that screen.

 

[dostillevi]

Are there any plans to make upgrade time dependent on shipyard number? It doesn’t feel right that currently a starbase with 6 ship yards doesn’t upgrade any faster than one with 1.

It sounds like ships will upgrade 1 at a time, using all available shipyards. This should speed up the upgrade time.

 

[Kain2K]

Why don't you split up pop growth from being a single pop growing and the game has to pick into every different type of pop grows at rates determined by their current population and habitability? It would be far more accurate to split it up rather than having the game "choose" (since in order to maintain realistic demographic growth while also only growing one pop at a time then you would have to cache the current demographics at periodic intervals to know what to grow), so I'm not sure what your reasoning is on having it combined.

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.

 

[FinestSeven]

I've got one small UI change to propose: allow players to open other empires' planet views from the strategic galaxy map. Currently you're only able to do this on the planets that you personally own, but not for planets that others own.

It would make inspecting foreign planets significantly less clunky and for example make playing a megacorp less tedious when you're trying to find good places for your branch offices.

 

[Pancakelord]

I hope we get an army editor or some UI adjustments for (long) pop lists in very diverse empires - for example:

1) hitting the "build army" button on a planet with a bajillion half-breed pops is brings up a long list which is ... not effective. Especially when/if I'm looking for a specific genemodded alien.

2) The other issue this appears in is when resettling (usually unemployed) pops between planets - if there are a metric crap-ton of pops they should not appear in one long list.
They need to be categorised/filtered and tallied e.g. by stratum, race, employment/unemployment, traits, ethics etc (see character filters in ck2's search function for some idea of what I mean)

That said - to the dev team - in spite of the bugs, AI indecisiveness and performance issues, I'm still playing and enjoying 2.2.x a lot. The update was an objective improvement to Stellaris 2.1 and that's what really counts.

 

[Andrzej I]

That would bring problems for planets with a less diverse species count. Growing several POPs at once would just be impossible to balance.

Well, the thing is - if I'm understanding @Bearjuden correctly - the pop growth would also be based upon the number of pops already extant on the planet - so a planet of 30 Humans would grow as many pops as a planet with 15 Humans and 15 Blorg (assuming no modifiers to make that differently), it's just that planet A would grow 10 Human pops while planet B might grow 5 Human and 5 Blorg pops. Again, I could be misunderstanding, though.

The other problem you mention is valid, though! Suddenly growing several pops at once could be difficult to manage.

 

[Bearjuden]

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.

Ah, I had the same issue when I first thought of this a few days ago, but you can weight it. So if you have five total planetary growth, and two species, then you can divide the five growth weighted amongst their demographic distribution. If Species A is 60% of the population and Species B is 40%, then A has growth of 3 and B has a growth of 2.

To then prevent that from being underpowered by making pops grow too slow in cases where you have lower growth and many species to divide it by, you can then have partially grown pops have jobs, which are operated at an efficiency determined by their growth. A 50% completed pop has 50% upkeep and 50% output, 60% completed has 60% upkeep and output, and so forth. I don't think this would be unbalanced at all, but it would allow for way more realistic growth. (this could be true for all societies, of course, not just multi-ethnic ones. It may also be too complicated, but the low population societies it would affect also tend to have high immigration, so if you cut that last bit maybe growth would stay reasonable courtesy of the migration bonus).

 

[Metztli]

Can you please give us some QoL changes for playing "wide" ? Like it's a complete nightmare to scroll through all of your planets to activate a certain decision (encourage growth for example).
Take a look into the automatic migration as well, encourage the jobless/homeless pops to migrate faster (instead of being forced to use a mod) and to the appropriate worlds with high habitability for them.
Please check the defense platforms as well. There are major problems with them currently which are : slow to build, being too expensive and you need to build them again after they get destroyed.
And even though it was mentioned at the bottom of the thread don't forget that the main concerns with the game still are the PERFORMANCE LATE GAME and CAPABILITY OF THE AI of being competitive with the player.

 

[Crowarior]

Will pop growth be affected by current population on the planet? For example, as your population grows pop growth becomes bigger and bigger.

 

[Minchandre]

If you're adjusting the UX, I'd really appreciate a blank space set aside for custom districts that do not replace a pre existing type; maybe horizontally, sharing some space with the trade amount. Such a feature would help a wide variety of mods. I tried doing this myself but it ended up being very tricky.