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Stellaris Dev Diary #153 - Empire Sprawl & Administrative Capacity

Hello everyone!
We’re back with yet another dev diary to showcase some more fruits of summer experimentation. As with the previous dev diary, this involved a lot of work carried out during the summer and involves something I’ve wanted to explore for a good while now.

Today we’ll be talking about empire sprawl and administrative capacity. Do note that these changes are still fairly young in their development, so numbers and implementation details may not be representative of what it will look like in the end.

As a background, I can mention that I have a grander idea of where I want to take these mechanics, but it will not all happen at once. These changes aim to mimic state bureaucracy or overhead created by managing a large empire. As a minor aspect I also wanted you to be able to experience the funny absurdity of having a planet entirely dedicated to bureaucracy. The movie Brazil is a great source of inspiration here :)

Empire Sprawl
We wanted to expand on how empire sprawl is used, so that it becomes a more interesting mechanic. The largest change means that pops now increase empire sprawl. Most things in your empire should be increasing empire sprawl to various degrees, to represent the administrative burden they impose.

upload_2019-8-29_10-40-35.png

Empire Sprawl can now be modified from its different sources, and as an example, the Courier Networks expansion tradition will now reduce empire sprawl caused directly by the number of planets and systems. As another example shows, the Harmony traditions finisher now reduces the total empire sprawl caused by all your pops.

We are also able to modify how much empire sprawl each pop contributes, and we’ve added a couple of new species traits that affect it. There are also machine variants of these traits.

upload_2019-8-29_10-41-13.png

We have also increased the penalty for the amount of empire sprawl that exceeds your administrative capacity. The goal is not to make administrative a hard cap, but we want to make it necessary to invest some of your resources into increasing your administrative capacity. More on that later.

upload_2019-8-29_10-41-49.png

The current plan is for machine empires to be more reliant on keeping their administrative capacity in line with their empire sprawl, so machine empires will suffer a much harsher penalty for exceeding their cap. We want machines to feel “centralized” and to perhaps favor a more “tall” playstyle.

upload_2019-8-29_10-42-12.png

Hive Minds, on the other hand, should be more tolerant of a sprawling empire where unmanaged drones are able to fall back on their instincts whenever they cannot maintain a responsive connection to the hive mind. Therefore, hive minds should be more tolerant of a “wide” playstyle.

Administrative Capacity
With all these changes to empire sprawl, what about administrative capacity, I imagine you asking? Well, since empire sprawl is becoming an expanded concept, administrative capacity will naturally be a part of that. Increasing your administrative capacity will now be a part of planning your empire’s economy.

upload_2019-8-29_10-42-48.png

For regular empires, the bureaucrat is a new job that increases your administrative capacity at the cost of consumer goods. This is also a specialist job, and has needs accordingly. Administrators are unchanged, and do not currently affect administrative capacity or bureaucrats.

For machine empires, the coordinators have changed roles from producing unity to now increasing administrative capacity instead, and they are more effective than bureaucrats. A new job called Evaluators now produce unity for machine empires.

Hive Minds currently have the hardest time to produce administrative capacity, but it has been added as a function of the synapse drone job.

upload_2019-8-29_10-43-26.png


Certain sources that previously increased administrative capacity by a static amount now increase is by a percentage amount instead. This doesn’t affect the output of the jobs, but rather increases the total administrative capacity directly.

Summary
Personally I’m very excited for these changes and I’m very much looking forward to taking it to its next step in the future. I hope you enjoyed reading about the changes that will come to Stellaris sometime later this year. As always, we’ll be interested to hear your thoughts.

As mentioned in last week’s dev diary, the schedule for dev diaries will now be bi-weekly, so the next dev diary will be in another 2 weeks.
 
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grekulf said:
pops now increase empire sprawl.
Click to expand...
I, honestly, fail to see the point of adding pops into equation. Slowing down research? (at the cost of slowing down game? >.>)

In order to make tall more attractive, you have to lose more unity/research in penalties
Code: 
(1+[planet sprawl]*[penalty multiplier])
than you would gain by expansion
Code: 
([Amount of Planets]+1)/[Amount of Planets]

Basically, it all simplifies down to administrative capacity that makes tall play attractive being calculated as
Code: 
AC > 1/[penalty multiplier]
So, only thing that's important is the
grekulf said:
increased penalty for the amount of empire sprawl that exceeds your administrative capacity.
Click to expand...

Currently, in case of normal empire 'tall' AC is:
  • 100 for leaders/edicts
  • 200 for Unity
  • 333.[3] for science
(go over it and you'll start to slow down)
Since it's linear function, if you increase it by a factor of 3, you'll get 3 times smaller AC, resulting in 100 AC for science, for example.

To more "real" numbers:
  • average planet is 17.5 districts (17.5 sprawl),
  • x1 is 5 systems per planet (12 sprawl),
  • you want to have at least 70 pops per planet (70 sprawl),
resulting in ~100 sprawl per fully-developed planet (on average), which is 3 times more than it currently is (even if you factor in reductions) - kind of getting close to one-planet strategy here. Still, how much science, do you think, increased alloy output and larger fleet is worth? >.>
 
Kuronan said:
This is the equivalent of saying 'Unspecialized Hive-mind doesn't matter because Devouring Swarm exists.' Maybe I don't want to kill, assimilate or devour everyone I meet? I'd Pamper them, but I don't like farms on principle that if I wanted to have farms, I'd play Default.
Click to expand...
Yeah. And maybe you DO want to, in which case this change directly punishes YOU.
 
Cawi said:
In real life, Singapore has an easier time administrating their 5,5 million citizens crammed up in a city than Finland has administrating their 5,5 million citizens spread out in a relatively large territory.
Click to expand...
Do they now? I couldn't find an official World Bureaucracy Efficiency Index, but what I found seems to indicate that both countries have comparable administrative efficiency. Sure, the site I just linked puts Singapore above Finland, but they occupy the second and third place, respectively — not a big difference by a long shot, even more so if you consider they are ranked against another 142 countries.
 
It would be cool if sector capitals with some bureaucrats got little bonues for the sector. Make centers of administration more important (capture moscow!!). Now taking out the capital will have a greater impact, before nothing special happened.
 
This diary seems somewhat lacking in explanations on why you think that these changes make the game more interesting and what you actually tried to achieve.
So maybe I'm wrong, but you seem to have turned empire sprawl into just another ressource to manage on your way to blob heaven.

The problem that Sprawl was supposed to fix was snowballing. This seems to "fix" it's intended purpose.
 
Would it be a good idea to add a new policy to focus on either wide development, tall, or balanced, where the policy would determine the amount of penalty from pops and districts?
 
One idea I haven't seen tossed around yet to make "tall" styles easier to administer is to have the total sprawl for everything in your core sector multiplied by 0.5 - it's easier to maintain supply routes and proximity to your empire capital makes for an easier to manage population. Anything in a sector that's not your core sector would count as standard sprawl and lastly, anything on your frontiers - not in any sector at all - would count as 1.5 or even 2.0 the sprawl multiplier. This would necessitate an increased proportion of infrastructure dedicated to maintaining bureaucratic efficiency for wider, sprawling empires than for centralized taller empires.
 
Why not make clerks and administrators provide admin capacity and make a trader job dedicated to trade instead? I always liked the concept of having a planet dedicated to trade but clerks suck right now.

Actually, i believe most admin capacity should come from ruler jobs, not worker and specialist jobs.
 
TonyP said:
One idea I haven't seen tossed around yet to make "tall" styles easier to administer is to have the total sprawl for everything in your core sector multiplied by 0.5 - it's easier to maintain supply routes and proximity to your empire capital makes for an easier to manage population. Anything in a sector that's not your core sector would count as standard sprawl and lastly, anything on your frontiers - not in any sector at all - would count as 1.5 or even 2.0 the sprawl multiplier. This would necessitate an increased proportion of infrastructure dedicated to maintaining bureaucratic efficiency for wider, sprawling empires than for centralized taller empires.
Click to expand...
I like this idea. I would also add a tech/tradition/civic/whatever that increases the number of systems on your Core Sector and bring back the Sectors limit of old — so a huge, sprawling empire would be forced to have a lot of systems on the Frontier Sector, instead of making tiny one-planet sectors to circumvent the penalties.
 
Haven't been around since late utopia, (took a break from the game, recently got back into it), but i have to admit i'm not a huge fan of this idea at present. The changes that have taken place whilst i was away have honestly transformed the game in a mostly very good way. The combination of districts, jobs, (and job tiers), Consumer Goods, Amenities, and Alloys have made it feel like i actually have individual worlds with their own quirks to manage. It's also greatly expanded the good aspects of the feel of economy management. it hasn't been without a few flaws of course. But overall a lot of the macro and micro scale economics and the way fleet stuff ties into that feel absolutely great.

Admin cap is absolutely one of the weak points of the current system IMO, but at the same time unlike the old system it provides a lot more flexibility in terms of how big you can build your empire, at least in theory. The problems all tie into how you build up sprawl vs how you build up admin capacity and what that means in terms of the balance between the two in any given style of empire.

Right now it's trivially easy to exceed your admin cap and the penalties aren't overly severe, whilst it's rather hard to increase it. On top of which as i think our prior dev blog about industrial district experimentation acknowledges there's a bit of an issue atm with it being fairly hard, especially in the early phases of expansion, to keep on top of alloys, consumer goods, and amenities whilst also producing enough food and EC, (minerals never seem to be an issue TBH), to cover your expenses. There simply aren't enough building slots or pops to go around until your worlds develop some, (which is fair, but only to a point). So in that respect adding yet another building with yet another job to handle admin capacity feels like it's only going to make a bad situation worse and probably push things past the tipping point where there really is more things to do than you have the pop or slots to actually make happen.



At the same time as someone else said we're allready paying sprawl for the districts which house the pops and provide the basic resources off which everything else runs. Being charged a second time for the pop's themselves when were allready being charged for them in another way feels a bit silly.

That said that line of thinking did give me an idea. I get why you want sprawl to more directly scale with pops. Rather than having jobs provide admin capacity, why not make it an innate feature of districts, have the admin capabilities built right into them, with Housing districts providing more than resource districts, (you could even make the resource ones neutral and have only housing provide it), that way where not taking up needed early building slots or jobs, but where still providing a scaling way to add Admin capacity. In effect where treating Admin capacity like another basic resource, (e.g. EC, Food, Minerals), which honestly is what it should be.


Of course the above idea doesn't address the tall vs wide thing. But i think expected Admin capacity alone to do that is a bad idea. Any discrete element in any system can allways be solved to a single optimal path, so Admin capacity is allways going to end up favouring one way or the other without additional variables interacting with it. I'm not sure with my idea how you'd do that right now, need to think some more on that aspect. Ultimately though it needs to work in a way that sacrifices future sustained admin growth for a larger more imiddette bonus to it.

Maybe somthing similar to the consecrate world system where it's a planetary decision you can only have active on a limited number of planets thats gives you a large flat bonus to admin capacity but reduces your admin income from districts empire wide?
 
After a short afternoon nap and a cold coke my thoughts on this:

I like the idea that the admin cap will be something we really play with in future. It also opens the door for new mechanics fore certain empire types. I see many comments here and i would say its at best mixed by this core players. So whats going on?

- I really liked to play Rome 2: Total War for some time. This game has also a technology tree to go through over the time of the campaign but the technology cost doesnt scale with the size of your empire. Why should it actually? The costs are increasing with better technologies, but not if your empire is bigger. You can boost the research rate with libraries for example from 100 to 105% per building. But this boost got scaled down by "corruption", the malus big empires have in this game. So the baseline is the same for all and you can boost it. If you overextend your empire to much these bonuses fade away... This worked really well in that game. I think this could also work well in Stellaris to get rid of bigger empires are also better at everything. Disconnect technology cost from the size of the empire and just connect the bonuses to the empire sprawl and its balanced once and for all.

At this point you can do really fancy stuff with the different empire types. Why not giving Megacorps a hard cap on planets they can manage like we had with the core sector in pre 2.2? Why do we see machine empires as one unit? Split the way to play. Exterminators get a wide play style, Rogue Servitors are tall... And so on and on...

Just my little thoughts during my afternoon nap...
 
It would be interesting to know which the ratio Consumer goods and administration is going to be.

On a side note, they said we could create an econumepolis filled with beaurocrats.

Thats nonsense, try out a Resort world filled with offices :)
A holiday planet filld only with civil servants.
 
I can understand the idea behind the changes and they sound fun/justified.
I wonder how the AI is going to handle another resource and the need for even more RG, and how this will affect performance.
I cannot be excited for these changes if no serious work is being done to greatly improve the AI and performance.

Edit: will we also get a "bureaucratic colony/world" such as the penal/resort world :)
Edit 2: As an answer to the above, grekulf said this "Yes, there will be a planet designation." So we will be able to designate a planet and thus this would remove the need for a penal/resort world kind of thingie.
 
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I feel like districts and pops both increasing sprawl feels a bit like double taxation, I think the system would be more elegant the less factors exist that increase empire sprawl. It also feels like players are going to have a tough time figuring out if the best way to increase tech speed is to get researcher or bureaucrat pops. This sort of math feels like bad gameplay, solvable only by spreadsheet. However if the Empire sprawl penalties are changed it will be less of a problem (maybe if it also affects things like planet stability)

How will this affect megacorps? And more importantly will megacorp bureaucrats be called accountants (or better yet HR...)
 
I like the idea of Admin capacity/empire sprawl, and I think these changes are moving the game in the right direction. Currently, I find it easier and more rewarding to ignore sprawl altogether--the benefits of expansion greatly outweigh the negatives of exceeding the cap.
 
I've played Stellaris since the first version and despite all the improvements made through these three years (huge improvements, I think), I miss so much a big rework of the Goverment Authorities in order to basically differentiate them (economically and politically), distinguishing the four game styles from each other and improving both Grand Strategy and RPG sides. Also, a big work on Diplomacy, Federations and International Trade is required (in my opinion).

I can't speak for everyone but I don't like this schedule for Dev Diaries and even the contents. I haven't wait all this time to see something that could be shown with an image and few words on your twitter profile.

What I hope you do, is to come back to a regular weekly schedule, explaining us what are your intentions about massive reworking (on diplomacy, as you've said in the Dev Diary 141) and other big features (espionage, for example) that will be present on the next major update. Something like the stunning Dev Diaries about the LeGuin update.

Sorry for my bad english and I wish you good work.
 
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