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

[Tim_Ward]

I will never not support improving the UI, but the planet interface right now is... okay? Could use some work, but it's ok. Not a major source of frustration.

I think my first port of call were I in a UI improving mood would be stations and the management of them.

 

[Greenslade]

Hello everyone!

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.

Something we feel is important is making sure that city districts do not look so significantly different from the other districts. We will be making the Max Districts show as boxes as well, so it's more consistent and visually appealing. You can visualize it as picking a box from “Max Districts”, and putting it into one of the districts. We’re also consolidating some of the UI elements so that they appear in more consistent locations across the tabs. The list of resources should also be more structured, with better tooltips for each item.

Hey guys. Thanks for all your work on this.

Can I ask if it's possible, while you're already working on this, to have a look at a good way of having more than 4 district types per planet or planet analogue?

I know at the moment the game is designed around a max of 4, but since that isn't a hard limit in code it would also be great to see if those kinds of things could be reflected in the UI.

 

[Tsudico]

Given the UI image of the Pops, couldn't priority be arranged by dragging the Jobs to a certain order? For example highest priority to the left on the condensed view or top on the expanded view. This way I can see at a glance the priority of jobs on a planet and adjust them as needed without manually adjusting each job. Currently when I adjust the job "priority" I am adjusting how many pops can work it, so the next pop that grows ends up unemployed until I adjust the "priority" again.

I think the star should be used to prioritize a certain class of jobs above others. Make it so I can prioritize workers over specialists on a planet.

 

[Harle]

I just want to say, I've been playing since the beta, and while I felt like Stellaris had a way to go at the start, I stuck it out and kept picking up DLC and expansions, because every new major update has left me more excited for the future than the last. You guys are doing great with this game, from patches to new content, and I look forward to keep supporting its development. <3

 

[Peter34]

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 also want to be able to assign low priority to Jobs.

Specifically to Clerks, which aren't very useful in the early game compared to other Workers. I constantly find myself closing Clerk Job slots, sometimes all of them, during the first many years of play, but that's not something I'm comfortable doing, because I loathe having to have to remember to go in and manually open those Job slots again later.

Also, while I've toyed with the thought of asking for Clerks to just be generally treated as trash priority by the game's algorithm, I've realized that no, I wouldn't actually want that. In my current game, I'm trying to score the role of host for the Galactic Market, and so I've taken steps to drastically increase the number of Clerk slots on my capital, to generate more Trade Value. So an algorithm change to assign Clerks lowest priority among Workers for all games (or at least all non-Corporate polities) would not be a good thing.

 

[Lord Milutin]

Daniel, please let us create sectors like before, and make us see what they're building/using resources on.
PLEASE. <3

 

[James_K]

Ont he topic of UX, something that I think would really help is a set of notifications to let us know when a planet needs our attention (unemployment, overcrowding, negative amenities), as that way we won't have to keep scrolling through our planet list to find ones that need new buildings. I put up a suggestion forum post on the topic:

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...-about-unemployment-and-overcrowding.1140554/

 

[BlackUmbrellas]

Daniel, please let us create sectors like before, and make us see what they're building/using resources on.
PLEASE. <3

Unlikely - autodefined sectors provide a better foundation for internal empire politics and supply chains.

 

[NemoRow]

As I have seen other people mentioning it here and I wrote some time ago in the 'Suggestions' sections - I believe that AI is one of the major concerns n the game. It seems like each expansion adds to the technological debt and erases some good bits of AI.

What I mean is - on simpler previous versions of Stellaris, AI had handled well role-play, technology and economics. Strategical expansion. With subsequent new versions some of those things had dropped down in quality and the longer the game takes the more 'dump' challenges in them become. So instead of 'intelligent' they feel more like 'power' - a strong fleet to beat or to wait out or to fool.

What I had suggested before is to use the interface of the Observer mode to allow AI learn from players - with players allowing it with a special flag of course. This solution would still be influenced by inertia (entering the new expansion would require some old-style teaching), but can automate the fixing process afterwards, what given the total amount of stabilization time required after each expansion - is not that bad thing.

Personally for me the game slowly starts to loose it's role-play simulation atmosphere, with only hive-minds and robots playing more-or-less accordingly to their simple destruction vision, while the rest of the cultures mixing in the very similar strategies and relations. Mid-game is a starting point when all of the simple civilizations become too dumb to be of a challenge.

 

[akeean]

Can we get the jobs within a caste redraggable to set allocation priorities? Like so:

So the leftmost (or rightmost) would be filled first, then the adjacent one to that and so on till all job slots are filled. User could drag&reshuffle the job boxes left and right.

 

[NemoRow]

Would love to see changes to the criminal rate though! It gives more depth into it all and allows to feel it better. I believe that
* going lower than some threshold like 5% should be very difficult and be rather exceptional (and can have yellow color)
* most of the planet having moderate criminal rates: 5-15% influencing trade value losses but otherwise not that much trouble
* culture and ethics influencing criminal rate more than enforces (there are many cases when police only stops criminals from making too much damage, but not really lowering the criminal rate itself in real life)
* advanced criminal rates 15-30% can cause more loses on the trade value side, and property damage or resources being lost from time to time
* higher criminal rates can cause all of the events mentioned

I think that enforces should match or be higher than the criminal rate to prevent negative effects, but some deeper society changes would need to occur to lower the criminal rate itself. However it would involve too big mechanism changes, so I'm afraid might not be seen in the foreseeable future

 

[Tufy]

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.

Just a hint: remember last setting. Because some of us will prefer to see pops by default.

 

[LayZboy]

It would be nice if you could add an option for something equivalent to the "Tiny UI" stuff on the steam workshop. Tiny outliner & co is so much more useful than the standard one.

 

[faljen_isus]

any indication on slaver guilds fix?

 

[Uncle_Joe]

Since you guys are talking about bringing in more realism into game - how about the time need to actually physically move pop during the resettlement from one world to another? It should take time - while now it is instantaneous. Same for moving scientist or other leaders around. I would guess it could be a new techno - teleportation or portals allowing this.

Realistically, I agree it should take time but that just adds yet another layer of micro for almost zero payoff. Now you'll have to remember to wait until the people you transfer arrive before providing a job (since you don't want to 'pre-create' the jobs lest the people already on the planet move).

 

[TheDarkMaster]

This is a much improved UI over the old one. Things seem to be in places you're more likely to expect them. Maybe this is because it's more similar to the old UI?

One thought for growing, assembling, and declining. You should be able to click on these and open up a more detailed breakdown of the factors contributing to growth or decline rates, as well as potentially saying which species is likely to grow next or which species want to migrate to the planet. Also, if there's only one of the three active on the planet, it should automatically be opened up with either no close button or no way to back out to the three item view.

 

[Theory]

I also want to be able to assign low priority to Jobs.

It looks like this is possible in the new system. I can see one job (robot manufacturing?) that has a gold star attached, which should be the 'highest priority' job, and then there is another one (Consumer goods) which has a red arrow attached which I interpret as being the 'lowest priority' job, and only 3 of the six openings are filled. But that's just my interpretation, and I'm sure it's a work in progress, so only time will tell for sure.

 

[Princess Stabbity]

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

View attachment 444486

Speaking of which, in the current version, when there's a lot of pops doing the same job, they get segregated into stacks based on species and ethics. Which is also how they're organised in the resettlement window.

However, this does not account for pops that have individually applied modifiers and I feel like that is a significant enough difference over regular pops to justify separating pops with modifiers from stacks (and stacking pops that have identical modifiers together if needed) both in planet view and the resettlement window.

Alternatively, I would like to be able to click on a stack of pops and see all individual pops that comprise it, with pops that have modifiers preferably sorted first and separately interactible in the resettlement window.

 

[Aizer3115]

Is the game still laggy?

Us who live on the poor deserts of the south can't afford better computers

 

[TheBromgrev]

shameless plug for my suggestion to make the species list collapsible, like the current sector and pop jobs UIs.

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/species-tab-collapsable-ui.1145413/