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Stellaris Dev Diary #152 - Summer Experimentation

Hello everyone!

Summer vacations are reaching their end and most of the team is back as of last week. Work has started again and we're really excited for what we have in store for the rest of the year.

While most of us have been away during most of the summer, we’ve also had some people who worked during July. July is a very good time to try out different designs and concepts that we might not otherwise have time to do, and today we thought it might be fun for you to see some of the experiments we ran during that period of hiatus.

Although we learned some useful insights, these experiments didn’t end up being good enough to make a reality.

Industrial Districts
As I have mentioned earlier, I have wanted to find a better solution for how we handle the production of alloys and consumer goods. I often felt like the experience of developing a planet felt better with an Ecumenopolis rather than with a regular planet. I think a lot of it had to do with their unique districts and that it feels better to get the jobs from constructing districts rather than buildings. Not necessarily as an emotion reaction to the choice, but rather that the choice perhaps feels more “pure” or simple.

An experiment I wanted to run was to see if it was possible to add an industrial district that provided Laborer jobs, instead of having buildings for Metallurgists and Artisans. Laborers would produce both alloys and consumer goods but could be shifted towards producing more of either.

This meant we added a 5th district, the Industrial District. By adding another district we also needed to reduce the number of building slots available. Since there would be no more need for buildings that produced alloys and consumer goods, this should still end up being similar.

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A Laborer would consume 8 minerals to produce 2 alloys and 4 consumer goods, and that amount could be modified in either direction by passing a Decision. What I wanted was to have an industry that could have a military and civilian output, and where you could adjust the values between these outputs.

Having a laborer job that generates an “industrial output”, which could be translated into either alloys or consumer goods did feel good, but the specific solution we used didn’t feel quite right.

City Districts & Building slots
Another experiment was to see how it felt if city districts unlock building slots instead of pops. This experiment didn’t have a specific problem or issue it was trying to address but rather it was to investigate how that would feel and work. It was interesting but ultimately it felt less fun than the current implementation. It would have needed more time to see if it could be made to work.
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This experiment did include increasing the number of jobs you would get for the building, so a research lab would provide 3 jobs instead of 2.

City District Jobs from Buildings
At the same time, we also tried a version where buildings applied jobs to city districts instead of providing jobs by themselves. One upside would be that you’d need less micromanagement to get the jobs, but the downside is that it would also be quite a large upswing in new jobs whenever you built a city district. In the end, it felt like you had less control and understanding of what a planet was specializing in.

Summary
Although these experiments were interesting, they didn’t end up quite where we wanted to, so they never became more than just experiments. We did learn some interesting things though, which we will keep in mind for the future. The industrial districts are still something I want to keep looking into, but we have to find a better solution.

Dev diaries will now be back on a regular schedule, but we will be looking into changing the format a bit this time around. For now, dev diaries will be coming bi-weekly, which means we will be back again in another 2 weeks with a similar topic.
 
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Cant we already change economy focus in policies? Ie. more consumer goods and more alloys with Militarized or Civillian industry?
 
The idea behind making it a planetary decision, is that it would let the player have a bit more control. The policies are all or nothing, you either boost all alloy production at the expense of consumer goods or your boost consumer goods at the expense of alloys or you don't boost either one. Gestalts IIRC are a bit different where the boost is to resources produced by complex drones at the expense of what is made by menial drones and vis versa. Some times the balance setups are turning out enough of the resource you need and the policies could create other issues (too much of a resource, while not enough of the other).

As for making things simpler. I'd say yes and no. As others have pointed out, there are some normal/megacorp empire setups where the consumer good needs are completely care of by trade generation. Even if trade generation doesn't do it, if you know what you're doing, it's fairly easy to keep a limited number of building slots/districts dedicated towards consumer good production. So it's not a huge loss of complexity for empire setups that needed to juggle consumer good production. Not to mention, we have a huge issue where gestalts, with the exception of rogue servitor, can just dumb all their minerals into alloys and strategic resources. So industrial districts would help to put all empires on a more even footing. Regular empires and megacorps still have to manage consumer goods, but doing so doesn't come at the expense of other resource generation. Then that would just mean finding a setup that forces machines, that aren't rogue servitor or driven assimilators, to give a damn about districts, so that they are less brain dead. I currently suspect that most MEs are ahead because they can colonize everything, don't have to waste minerals or slots on consumer goods and can completely ignore agricultural districts. DA is only slightly better and rogue servitor is probably the most interesting empire type currently. That's not to say that both DA and RS aren't grossly OP in the current setup, but I suspect balance would get easier if no one could completely ignore certain resource districts.

As for making thing more interesting, probably part of the issue right now is that people are focusing too much on trying to do so with the current resources. Sure we could make get one or two unique feeling empires (bioforms has been listed as feeling interesting), but I think to make empire types feel drastically different, is going to require getting away from "well you need a rock, then you need to build districts and science and then you build a fleet to kill everyone else's fleets if you don't want to out science or out crisis them. Even if you do, you still need to build that fleet to discourage others from encroaching on your lands."
 
I'm not particularly eager to see those "industrial districts", for the simple reason that in a strategic game you should be forced to choose between different options and then live with them. If I neglect the military industry in favor of civilian one and then somebody attacks me, I must undergo a painful industrial conversion process or spend an awful lot of energy to buy alloy, and that's perfectly fine because it is the result of a wrong choice. Instead, with these new districts I simply click a button and voila, my entire highly specialized civilian sector is immediately converted in a military powerbase for no cost. It would be quite sad.

That said, I think the planetary/economy management part deserves improvements and these experiments are always welcome :)
 
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I'm not particularly eager to see those "industrial districts", for the simple reason that in a strategic game you should be forced to choose between different options and then live with them. If I neglect the military industry in favor of civilian one and then somebody attacks me, I must undergo a painful industrial conversion process or spend an awful lot of energy to buy alloy, and that's perfectly fine because it is the result of a wrong choice. Instead, with these new districts I simply click a button and voila, my entire highly specialized civilian sector is immediately converted in a military powerbase for no cost. It would be quite sad.

That said, I think the planetary/economy management part deserves improvements and these experiments are always welcome :)

Excellent point that I completely agree with! CGs represent all sorts of products that the average "space joe" and civilian businesses can buy, from toilet paper to computer software, to cable service. Alloys represent heavy-duty space construction materials, ship engines, space station plating, etc.

There's no way a company that specializes in tentacle-rolled cigars could make the transition to producing deep space sensors, and that's exactly what this experimental idea would imply. The blanket policy changes we have now, are completely different, as it's analougus to a government subsidizing/prioritizing an entire economic sector over the other in a million little ways which gives an overall boost or nerf to that particular sector. There's a reason why it has a 10-year cooldown, you can't just flip-flop on grand policies like that on a weekly basis. I think it works just fine
 
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First of all sorry for my english I hope all will understand what I mean and meaby find some ideas intresting. If I stealed someone idea I'm sorry
As some people already mentioned i think separate consumer goods and alloys districts are better option. If you screw up something you don't have to wait 10 years to change policy and it would be easier to balance for unexperienced players.
Also I think that giving up on some building in favor of districts is a good idea:
- mining (could produce rare resources if planet have deposit)
- food
- energy
- housing
- tech
- alloys called heavy mettalurgy or something like that
- consumer goods
- artistan unity/amentities
8 could fit nice into UI with little changes to it
Also planet specialization could be changed. Building some districts could let you specialize your planet giving better output to specific district and penalty to others. For example having like 5 alloy districts you could declare world a forge world giving 10%(just random number) to alloy production and because of air pollution -10% to food district output. It would require reworking of planet specialization but in my opinion now they are irrewelant mostly.
If planet specializations take role of % bonusses to production instead of builds, buildgs could focus on things like rare resources rafinery,trade,army, navy, defense, or wonders like buildings like Mining guild headquater, imperial university or something along that lines giving additional bonuses to your empire or just planet. Something like building additional level of planet surface (heavy penalnty to food production and meaby mining) adding districts could be requied before terrafoming into ecumenopolis and constructed districts would change into ecu districts.
Also habitats should have unique districts to make them worth. Let them orbit rare resources depostis and mine them or be trade centers.
Trade could also see some changes. I would like to see flow of resources from my mining world to forge world and penalty to production op growth etc if pirates take some minerals before they reach forge world. Also please add trade route with other empires if we are selling things to them.
This probably would require changes in district numbers and specific district numbers but meaby add more planet modifiers like fertile ground instead of max specific districts to encourage planet specialization
 
I seem to be missing the part with the explanation why the results "didn't feel right". This seems like the most interesting lesson that could be derived from those experiments, so it would be nice to know that.
 
Some interesting theories to test, but ultimately im glad you decided not to implement them. As to why ties into my question for the current state of the AI.

Im curious to find out if we can expect any major overhauls to AI within the next patch? Over the holidays I have seen many modders and community members discussing this very topic and it is still seemingly getting ignored. Sure, we get some very very minor changes to AI with each patch, but none that fix the overall usefulness and challenge that an AI should provide in this day and age.

I don't want to seem complainy, or whiny here, but after spending hundreds on dollars on the base game and DLC, watching 90% of and subbing to twitch, its making me very sad that at some point, if the issue isn't fixed, ill never ever reinstall Stellaris, which would be a shame.

So i guess my overall question is, when will AI be the focus of some hardcore fixing and when can we expect it? Im sure most of us would even pay for a $9.99+ DLC for a major overhaul to AI.

Cheers,

Tesh
 
I experimented myself with a few numbers. I gave Metallurgists and Artisans both Alloy and consumer good production. Just more in their own field. I did that because i saw that most AI in my games were crippled because of a big consumer good deficit.

I also cut the pop base growth to 1/3 and halved fleet through doubling the fleet cap usage of ships (and starbases were somewhat useful). It felt fine for me, of course a little slow at the beginning ( too slow maybe for the majority of players) but it did reduce lag. Without a lot of other tweaks that all was of course absolutely not balanced but i was happy for at least a few games.

Maybe its something to think about. Pops a re nice and all but by the time you have 5000 or more i guess you would not miss a few thousand.
 
@grekulf I like very much the idea of industrial production but why making another district for that. It's a call for a full district economy whereas there is actually a meaning in building because they provide jobs that aren't for specialist or ruler. A solution would be to fuse forge and civil industry in the same building with decision to orient the production or a wide empire war economy status à la HOI with bonuses and maluses in a wide range of stats.
 
One thing I've long wanted is for Strategic Resources to be harvested by districts instead of buildings. While manufacturing them from a building makes perfect sense, harvesting resources from natural deposits should be district-based, representing the large amount of land that must be set aside for such things. Imagine an entire desert dotted with mote harvesting traps, or a vast series of pipes drawing gases from an entire swampy region into a network of refineries.
There is a mod (I forget which) which moves all strategic resource harvesting to being on the planet feature itself (it adds +X jobs). Buildings could add efficiency or EXTRA jobs, but the strategic resource itself added the first few jobs. I thought that was a great idea.
 
I'm not particularly eager to see those "industrial districts", for the simple reason that in a strategic game you should be forced to choose between different options and then live with them. If I neglect the military industry in favor of civilian one and then somebody attacks me, I must undergo a painful industrial conversion process or spend an awful lot of energy to buy alloy, and that's perfectly fine because it is the result of a wrong choice. Instead, with these new districts I simply click a button and voila, my entire highly specialized civilian sector is immediately converted in a military powerbase for no cost. It would be quite sad.

That said, I think the planetary/economy management part deserves improvements and these experiments are always welcome :)

Excellent point that I completely agree with! CGs represent all sorts of products that the average "space joe" and civilian businesses can buy, from toilet paper to computer software, to cable service. Alloys represent heavy-duty space construction materials, ship engines, space station plating, etc.

There's no way a company that specializes in tentacle-rolled cigars could make the transition to producing deep space sensors, and that's exactly what this experimental idea would imply. The blanket policy changes we have now, are completely different, as it's analougus to a government subsidizing/prioritizing an entire economic sector over the other in a million little ways which gives an overall boost or nerf to that particular sector. There's a reason why it has a 10-year cooldown, you can't just flip-flop on grand policies like that on a weekly basis. I think it works just fine

I live in Metro Detroit. I can tell you that we did EXACTLY THAT in World War 2. Our factories stopped producing cars overnight and switched to producing tanks and airplanes. Literally in a matters of days. And we produced enough tanks and planes to blanket Europe. When Hearts of Iron came out and the IP of Michigan wasn't high enough (I was in the beta) I lost it and got it changed, since we're the place Roosevelt was talking about when he was talking about the Arsenal of Democracy.
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I live in Metro Detroit. I can tell you that we did EXACTLY THAT in World War 2. Our factories stopped producing cars overnight and switched to producing tanks and airplanes. Literally in a matters of days. And we produced enough tanks and planes to blanket Europe. When Hearts of Iron came out and the IP of Michigan wasn't high enough (I was in the beta) I lost it and got it changed, since we're the place Roosevelt was talking about when he was talking about the Arsenal of Democracy.

I also want to add that the whole CG industry of Soviet Union was like that. It was as dual-purpose as possible(usually at the expense of quality of CG).
 
I live in Metro Detroit. I can tell you that we did EXACTLY THAT in World War 2. Our factories stopped producing cars overnight and switched to producing tanks and airplanes. Literally in a matters of days. And we produced enough tanks and planes to blanket Europe. When Hearts of Iron came out and the IP of Michigan wasn't high enough (I was in the beta) I lost it and got it changed, since we're the place Roosevelt was talking about when he was talking about the Arsenal of Democracy.

No to stray too far off topic, but considering the fairly low level of technology in WW2, and that assembly was mostly done though manual labor, that was still a possibility. After all, there was not that much difference between a civilian car and a military vehicle, except for the chassis they put on the wheels. Today factories are mostly automated and the assembly machines are specialized to a ridiculous degree. A Tesla factory would not be able to produce a Leopard 2A7V tank unless they replaced the entire assembly line with completely different machinery. And that's all laughable technology compared to the starships we see in Stellaris, which would be a at least million times more complicated tech.

So I'm fairly sure civilian economy could not switch over to military in this context. Maybe a very small portion of the economy could, but that's well represented in the current Edict effects.
 
No to stray too far off topic, but considering the fairly low level of technology in WW2, and that assembly was mostly done though manual labor, that was still a possibility. After all, there was not that much difference between a civilian car and a military vehicle, except for the chassis they put on the wheels. Today factories are mostly automated and the assembly machines are specialized to a ridiculous degree. A Tesla factory would not be able to produce a Leopard 2A7V tank unless they replaced the entire assembly line with completely different machinery. And that's all laughable technology compared to the starships we see in Stellaris, which would be a at least million times more complicated tech.

So I'm fairly sure civilian economy could not switch over to military in this context. Maybe a very small portion of the economy could, but that's well represented in the current Edict effects.
On the other hand, with the development of things that already exist like smart metal and 3d printers, it's entirely possible that such a switch could be done literally overnight in the future to a even greater degree.
 
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