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

Hello everyone!

Today we’re back with a dev diary where I will outline some of the stuff I want us to prioritize in the near future. Note that this is not a complete list of the bugs or improvements, but rather a highlight of some of the bigger things that I feel are especially important. These are the current plans, which are prone to change, so I cannot promise that all these things will actually be deployed in the next patch. We’re planning to release a definitive 2.2.x version at the end of the post-launch support period, before all of us start working on The Next Cool Thing™.

Pop Growth
We’ve heard your concerns about how pop growth currently functions, and how it in some cases can create situations that feel wrong. 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. I feel like moving pops to those planets should be based more on player choice.

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.

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.

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.

upload_2019-1-24_12-36-49.png
Planet view work in progress, prone to change. In this picture we can see that it's now possible to see down-prioritized jobs and starred jobs.

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Those are just a few of the bigger points that I wanted to address, and that have been prioritized for the definitive 2.2.x version. Of course I need to repeat that it's not a complete list of all the issues we will be addressing. You can expect there to be more fixes to bugs, improvement to AI and performance, and other issues from the rest of the dev team. Your feedback is very important in helping us prioritize the most high-value changes we can make during this period, so we really appreciate it.

We have some really cool things planned for 2019, and I am really looking forward to being able to share those plans with you, but first we will focus on fixes and improvements for a while before moving on to the new content. Scheduled dev diaries will be on hiatus until we have something new to show, but we may post something during the post-launch support period if we feel like we have something worthwhile to share.

Thank you for your time, and I'm very much looking forwards to a great 2019!
 
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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).

Yeah, I would much rather something be done to streamline resettlement. Right now it is a nightmare having to constantly resettle pops, especially when you have a lot of planets.
 
Yes, I want these habitability-trait bugs fixed. Post-Apocalyptic should not change your original habitability trait, but rather supplement it.
I have to say this will only cause Post-Apocalyptic to drop from B tier to F tier. We have 40% habitability between normal tech and the rare tech, not to mention there are multiple races that work well on any planet (Nivlacs and Pre-Sapients uplifted from Tomb Worlds for two) Habitability only increases amenities and consumer good consumption. Furthermore, you can always terraform a planet.

Please, just remove the Survivor trait, don't remove the Tomb World Habitability.
 
The only thing I am sad about is that the annoying job system management is here to stay. Yes, job priorities are nice and everything, but they will still be based on job weight that will be putting pops the system wants to be placed there, not the player. Give me back drag&drop! I want to finally see those Domestic Servant entertainers, which never happens due to, guess what, a system giving free pops higher weight. I want to move just enough pops in Ecumenopolis to keep my consumer goods budget in green without having to click fifty times to close all slots then open them again, or visit every five minutes to open couple more slots as I move new pops from my empire. I want to finally have the best gene modded pop for the job to DO that job and not another one the system believes the pop is better suited for because someone forgot to factor in Proles trait into job weights.
 
Will you also be looking at robot assembly when addressing pop growth? It's kind of annoying that my planets are freely assembling standard synthetics over my highly modified ascended synths, for example.
 
I hope that performance is still a priority of the upcoming patch. For some reason the current beta made the stuttering worse as compared to 2.2.3 (as in playing huge galaxy with 5x habitable, which I understand isn't really common).

Anyways, I'm still amazed by the progress the dev team have made since the 2.2 release, and thank you for your work.
 
Is there any chance that the tweak to pop growth will include a change to overpopulation? Or at least pop growth as you approach overpopulation? It's kind of frustrating to deal with having your entire empire just keep growing without having to micromanage each full planet. Or constantly ship pops off each planet, which introduces a lot of clicks since you can't just ship all unemployed pops. Even though there are some situations where you don't want to, or simply don't have the option available.
 
Hey while you are at it fixing UI thins, how about finally changing the font into something more readable for people with no magnifiying glasses as eyes? Sharpen the edges and make it bigger? You have a big UI and it is almost unused. This is a constant problem with your games. For example Event windows take up, I don't know, about 1/10 th of the monitor with the text getting so tiny in resolutions about 1080p and above. Yeah, I know there is UI scaling, which btw still does not work correctly, with buttons beconing unusable and so on.
 
I have to say this will only cause Post-Apocalyptic to drop from B tier to F tier. We have 40% habitability between normal tech and the rare tech, not to mention there are multiple races that work well on any planet (Nivlacs and Pre-Sapients uplifted from Tomb Worlds for two) Habitability only increases amenities and consumer good consumption. Furthermore, you can always terraform a planet.

Please, just remove the Survivor trait, don't remove the Tomb World Habitability.
Nah.

Tomb World habitability is super overpowered, and there are already other ways to get it as the game goes along. Starting with it is way too much. "Post-Apocalyptic" was always more of a roleplay pick, anyhow.
 
"Post-Apocalyptic" was always more of a roleplay pick, anyhow.
You pay a point for this... One of two or three points... And you CANNOT remove it after the game starts. Furthermore you cannot convert to a MegaCorp if you pick this.

For a permanent, unremovable civic, this thing has every right to be "overpowered" because at no point can you change it outside of empire creation.
 
You pay a point for this... One of two or three points... And you CANNOT remove it after the game starts.

For a permanent, unremovable civic, this thing has every right to be "overpowered" because at no point can you change it outside of empire creation.
It increases lifespan, lets you settle Tomb Worlds in the early game, and synergizes well with both Fanatic Purifiers and Spiritualists. That's plenty.
 
This doesn't seem like a great solution. It allows me to solve one problem (need more food) but not multiple problems (need to reduce mining so that I can increase food and energy). Additionally, it doesn't sound like it will allow me to solve that problem intelligently (need to produce more food, but not necessarily max out farmers, since that would cripple my mineral and energy production). Can we please just get the ability to assign pops? Drag and drop within a strata?
Perhaps being Authoritarian should unlock the ability to directly assign pops.
 
This suggestion has come up a few times, but its worth reiterating. Are there any plans on allowing us to remove individual planets from the outliner? By late game the list becmes quite cluttered with "finished" planets so it would be nice to sort it somehow.
 
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.
I'm very in favor of this, but only once they get natural pop growth making more sense. If you're going to make realism trade off against gameplay - and Stellaris does this all over, with population mechanics being especially rich in unrealistic stuff for the sake of gameplay - then you need to balance where you make the tradeoffs. Making pop relocation realistic while pop growth stays unrealistic could cripple the game far worse than it is right now.

Pre-2.2, you could plausibly get through a whole game without opening up the resettlement interface, even when resettlement was permitted. In 2.2, I have to go and manually resettle pops around my worlds at least once a year, just to avoid unemployment on my "finished" worlds getting out of hand, and that's without considering the need to spike the movement of pops to newly-settled worlds so I can unlock their buildings or take advantage of their bonuses.

If I were seriously concerned about playing optimally, I'd be doing even more work than that; I'd be resettling pops that don't have good habitability, I'd be resettling pops that are specialized for the wrong jobs (why are there mining-specialized pops on my agri-worlds, and scientist-specialized pops on worlds without any labs?!?). That's way, way too much micro, though (especially since the resettlement view doesn't actually show you what the habitability of a given pop for a given world is, and makes in a pain to tell which jobs are open or have recently-promoted pops who would demote if somebody better showed up). No player has time for that, but that kind of algorithm-heavy detail work is literally what computers are best at, and it sucks that Stellaris makes the player do it (or suffer inefficiencies).
 
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Please change the Jobs number from "Jobs on this planet" to "Available Jobs", so if I have 110 jobs and 100 Pops, instead of saying 110 Jobs, it would say 10 Available Jobs.