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

[klopkr]

An idea I would like to see added to the game at some point is a galactic history tab that shows all information for each war that occurs in the galaxy, as well as when new empires were founded, empires were destroyed, and when empires changed government types and names. It would greatly help people who like writing after-action reports.

I want this along with galactic news network scrollbar telling us interesting events across the galaxy.

This game needs chirpy!

 

[Bearjuden]

Do you mean the Force Disparity Combat Bonus, which is already implemented?

Ah, you're right. I forgot about that. I stand by my other two points though.

 

[Gundabadguy]

Maybe add Ascension Paths for Machine Empires.

 

[Mikhail_Mengsk]

I want this along with galactic news network scrollbar telling us interesting events across the galaxy.

This game needs chirpy!

Also statistics, ledgers, all the numbers that EU4 churns out i'd like to have in Stellaris.

 

[Zarrex]

I like the new UX/UI and good you can see the pop profile, how else would you be able to tell if Slaves were actually doing their jobs ;-)

 

[Bearjuden]

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.

Hey devs, one last thing. I wanted to offer my thoughts on this since idk how you are planning on solving it but I think there is a good way that addresses a number of concerns I have.

Concern 1: if you leave it as a single refit order, then cancel it, you have no way of controlling which ships got upgraded.

Concern 2: if you leave it as a single refit order, and are considering canceling it, you have no way of knowing how close you are to upgrading your next ship (if you are upgrading a fleet of battleships, you may wish you had just waited the 2 extra days, but didn't know that was all you needed to complete the refit).

Concern 3: if you expand it out from a single refit order so that each ship in the fleet gets a "Refit: Shipname" entry, it will become micro-ey as all hell to try and build new ships at the same time as upgrading old ones.

For these reasons, I think you should make two shipyard lists: one for refits and one for new ships. When you refit a ship, each ship gets a separate "refit" entry, allowing you to prioritize the refits of whatever ships you want. You will also easily be able to see on each entry how close it is to being refit successfully. And then if you let us "transfer" shipyards from one list to the other, then we can also determine easily how many new ships are being built alongside that, without having to calculate where in the massive list they would go; the only little note to add is that the shipyards would have to recognize when one list is empty or semi-empty and put unused shipyards to work on the other queue.

So for example, I am building 5 new destroyers, refitting 15 of the same, and have 4 shipyards. I allocate 2 shipyards to each. The game begins refitting the first two destroyers on the refit queue and starts building 2 destroyers on the new ship queue. It will continue doing this so long as both queues are filled. When the fifth destroyer is started, however, the second shipyard on the new ship queue is being wasted, so it automatically starts refitting the next ship in that queue until it sees that a new ship is being built. If you choose to start a new ship after that point, it leaves the refit queue with the ship it was working on partially redone (just as ships and buildings currently are if you have them in their respective queues) to work on a new ship. If you are building lots of new ships and refitting only a few, then once they are done refitting the "refit shipyards" should start working on new ships in the same way.

 

[Singularity Mechanics]

Thank you for continuing to improve and make innovations to the game, it's great having a game that's supported as well as this one is with frequent and active attention paid to it.

I have a request/suggestion in terms of pops and jobs: can it be designed so that you can focus a job for a specific species on a planet? E.g. I have a race that's great at mining, I want them to always fill mining slots first but only for that species, and another different race that's good at energy to always fill energy first? Like a "preferred race" for a job selection (like how you can select which pops to grow by force). Failing that, how about just an ability to pin a pop to a job so Pop X never leaves that job unless I manually move them? I think these make sense for non-egalitarian, non-democratic, xenophobic, or authoritative empires.

Thanks.

 

[Kuna_2]

About UI and modding. I`ve started moding UI, planet view, to be exact, and of course the announced changes make my ealier work useless. But it is not about it. The problem which I met moding planet view is that "active displaying elements" are linked to specific sections. If you try to use one in another tab, it is inactive, and just displays the text from the file, not value of a variable or string. But some elements like Ammenities are definied or globally or in more than one section and can be displayed correctly in different tabs. Moving an element to "higher" in the definition tree doesnt help. It seems like specific tabs have specific list of variables for the tab and nothing more. Can this be changed in order different elements can be moved freely between tabs in planet view window?

 

[magriboy0750]

Good afternoon,is there will be a DD today or not?
Thanks.
Cordially.

 

[sithalo]

@grekulf I know the devs have already been made aware of the district definition issue and subsequent problems for intermod compatibility. It is a huge pain having to deal with countless compatibility patches all the time, while an official solution would be rather simple.
TL/DR Add planet class attribute to check for district usage rather than planet class.

There is a work around but its a pain to do requiring events, and having enough districts to hide the normal vanilla districts.
But I hope that TLDR is added. It sounds much simpler.

 

[Agedone]

Robot growth needs some improvement as well. It is far too slow on new colonies

I agree. Robot build speed is far too slow to compete as a mechanical empire. I will add that I love what you Dev folks did with food for robot empires, converting to energy is a great development

 

[The_God_of_All]

The new sector system is a nightmare. All I do is micromanage my planets. I need to be able to define the amount of income per sector, what planets go into what sector. Otherwise after the mid game I am no longer having any fun. It feels more like work

 

[CrazyJ]

Devs I've found a real nasty glitch, when you conquer a planet of an empire with a different set of planetary capitols, ie a gestalt or primives, or if you are yourself a gestalt the planetary capitol doesnt update and you cannot upgrade the planet meaning if it is a colony or a primitive world you have an eternally unspecialized plane

 

[SnakeInATopHat]

well OK then

 

[The Founder]

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.

Any chance you could move those weights to scripts? That way mods could finetune those values. And we could start to understand how they (are supposed to) work.

 

[Yandersen]

View attachment 444482​

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.​

I think I have a suggestion about the more realistic and clear pop growth mechanic. Let ALL species presented on the planet breed a new pop of each kind simultaneously. The speed of each depends on the proportion ratio and other factors. To check the progress of each growing pop one should scroll over it's kind on the legend of the demographics diagram - it should give a popup hint reflecting the growth progress. And the "Growing" tab should just show the single pop that is closest to completion.

 

[The Founder]

I think I have a suggestion about the more realistic and clear pop growth mechanic. Let ALL species presented on the planet breed a new pop of each kind simultaneously. The speed of each depends on the proportion ratio and other factors. To check the progress of each growing pop one should scroll over it's kind on the legend of the demographics diagram - it should give a popup hint reflecting the growth progress. And the "Growing" tab should just show the single pop that is closest to completion.

So you want the old Growth model, with a compressed view.

The issues is that you can not unambigiously identify species without seeing their full traits. So this would not fit into a tooltip.
Indeed it would have to look like the current "select species for growth" mechanic, with a progress bar.

 

[Yandersen]

Just finished a day playing with the new patch. Indeed, the ratio of days-per-second ("DPS") did increased significantly in a lategame (at year 2400), the rendering lag decreased a lot - no more freezing at least. I can confirm that the game become playable with 2.2.5 (DPS at max speed is close to 1 at year 2400 on 600 stars), but still, not quite enjoyable (still too slow IMO). At least it is not frustrating any more. But if that speed is a maximum optimization level the devs can reach, then it is a sad story... But I really hope 2.2.5 optimizations are just a beginning and 2.2.6 will perform better.

In that last playthrough I finally tried to give away manual control to the sector AI to see what it does. I mentioned few things:

1) TOO MUCH FOOD. Seems like sector AI is paranoid about hunger - I had to manually destruct agri-districts and food farms the AI prioritizes for no reason. Just to not let the food income go above 1K per month. Even then the AI was trying to build food farms sometimes.

2) Strategic resources. Seems like the AI builds refineries of a random kind - not prioritizing the resource, which income is smaller. It was building the teldar crystal plants (4K stored with +50 produced) while volatile motes was at negative (140 stored, -9 produced). Aside from that, without supervision the monthly income of strategic resources may go like +50 and above. Considering how inefficient is to synthesize the SR, I think AI should be tought to build refineries only when income is below certain threshold.

3) Seems like the AI does not see a reason to build advanced buildings like Ministry of Production, Research Institute or Galactic Stock Exchange.

4) The sector AI never upgraded buildings for me. Strange, because I've seen upgraded buildings on conquered planets...

5) Not sure, but it seems like the sector AI does not resettle pops from overcrowded planets to the undeveloped ones. Resettlement was allowed, I checked.

6) Sector AI does not enforce any decisions. Understandable, sure, but would be nice if it could stop population growth at least. I had around 70 overcrowded planets when I realized that all of them popping pops becoming criminals and beggars. I would need 25*70=1750 influence to stop that, you know... I expected the AI to babysit my planets, and it failed to save me from wasting my attention.

7) Never seen the sector AI to destroy/replace buildings. The consumer goods seem to have much higher priority than alloys, so I had to manually fix this all the time. Also, the precinct houses and residences appear quite too often. See no reason to build residence if the free district slot is available for city. But the AI has different logic...

Truly, considering by endgame one would have hundreds of planets some reliable automated planet-management AI is required. Since 2.2.0 the AI become better, but still not even close to the level when the player can rely on it, IMO.

 

[Mohreb]

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.

There have been many posts about it (now with it's own sticky)
* Some want make all decisions by themselves on each planet (works now)
* others would like to automate a good chunk of their planets (completely and without needing to babysit the sector view for resources, which is hard now)
* some would like in-between and not always in the way sectors are organicly created (example bootstrap new colonies but would not to see it's well developed neighbor in the outliner)

 

[Emperor Orsain]

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

No please, don't change it one of the most fun playthroughs I had recently was with a species that had this. It also makes sense even, because if a species can survive and thrive on a nuclear wasteland it makes sense they'd be able to adapt to any other environment as well.