Stellaris Dev Diary #177 - Edict Rework

[OnyxAbussos]

I am annoyed there is not a way in vanilla to focus research into one of the three fields over the others.
For example, a policy choice could subtract Researcher productivity in one field and add to another.

Looking forward to Pop Growth changes. Robots are ridiculous, Medical Worker is an underwhelming job, and Encourage Planetary Growth is a micromanagement timesink.

Yes please. Add Toggle Edicts for "focus on this field and reduce the others," like we had in the way back when. Plz.

 

[klickor]

About the pop grow thing, instead of ripping pop grow out, why not instead of making pop modifiers like habitability - happiness - ethics - factions be handled by pop, be handled by planet?

A planet with 200 pops, with those 200 pops being a mix of 4 races with 8 ethics, will have 32 calc threads rather than 200

1. Human group 1 has 70% habitability and 60% happiness and is materialist, and have 30 pops
2. Human group 2 has 80% habitability and 50% happiness and is spiritualist, and have 20 pops
3. Human group 3 has 100% habitability and 55% happiness and is authoritarian, and have 40 pops
4. ...
5. Klingon group 1 has 30% habitability and 30% happiness and is shackled, has 60 pops
6. etc

Instead of every single pop having that modifier and monthly calculations, the planet make the parent calculation (influenced by the empire modifiers ) and the pops receive the child result

And there are way less planets than pops, so its compressing calculations. so no real need to GUT pop grow, but rather redirect the way pops are handled monthly, that is the direct cause of lag

I even theorise a galaxy full of exclusively gestalt empires played by humans is WAY less laggy than a galaxy full of normal empires played by humans.

In my games the gestalt empires perform better than the others despite not being able to grow by taking the pops from others. Doubly so for machine ones. Probably has to do with the AI not having to juggle resources and having 100% habitability on all planets so penalties doesnt gut them. Last game I played most of the AI had 60-120 pops on 3-6 planets after 115 years in to the game on Grand Admiral. They had another few planets without colonies for no good reasons since they had multiple species. A few had about 200 and then the 2 friendly machine empires had 580 and 620 pops in total. They had just started building and colonizing habitats when I invaded.

So not only are they probably having less of an impact on performance. They even perform better. Gives a lot of validity to the thread about perhaps letting the AI not play the exact same way as the player. Improving performance in two ways.

 

[Everstill]

Prediction: everyone will always be using Nutritional Plentitude. And with the exception of "Map the Stars", no one is ever going to switch edicts once picked.

This is obvious.

Specially as Fortity the Borders is totally useless and Fleet supremacy make your ships WEAKER, as they don't get any buff to damage but increase upkeep.

 

[Red Earth]

While we're on the subject of things being timed out changing to an on/off switch, how about planetary decisions?
Most players put most planets on encourage growth perpetually, refreshing it every ten years on every planet. I would suggest making it cost half as much to start (500 food) and then cost 10 food a month until turned off.
And do likewise with distribute luxury goods. 100 consumer goods to start and [pop/10] minimum 1, maximum 10 per month of cg upkeep until turned off.

Another point I'd like to bring up since if you did the above it could exacerbate an existing problem:
The game doesn't correctly know when you're broke. The game cancels trade deals even though I have positive income with the resource I'm giving away, because I don't have enough of the resource stockpiled. I assume it's calculating spending before income. While I don't think the game handles it the same way, I don't want dozens of luxury goods decisions being cancelled because I was keeping less than 120 cg on hand at the end of every month.

 

[Everstill]

Yes please. Add Toggle Edicts for "focus on this field and reduce the others," like we had in the way back when. Plz.

The most obvious change is adding a new Policy for "Research Focus".

"No focus: +5% Research too everything."

And then a Focus: X research for +15% in that field.

 

[NinjaBus]

Literally every Stellaris player: "Robots are a requirement because of the way pop growth works, biological empires can never hope to keep up! Pop Growth needs to be boosted for biologicals as a trade off!"

@grekulf : "In this update, we nerf biological growth."

If you wanted to nerf biological empires that build robots, a very easy way to do that would be to split the existing robot assembly speed over 2 specialist jobs instead of 1.

Crosses Fingers

 

[BlackUmbrellas]

The most obvious change is adding a new Policy for "Research Focus".

"No focus: +5% Research too everything."

And then a Focus: X research for +15% in that field.

I'd rather the old edicts returned as a policy toggle. Focusing on one field gives +15% research to it, at the cost of -15% research to the other two.

 

[Rodahtnov]

In my games the gestalt empires perform better than the others despite not being able to grow by taking the pops from others. Doubly so for machine ones. Probably has to do with the AI not having to juggle resources and having 100% habitability on all planets so penalties doesnt gut them. Last game I played most of the AI had 60-120 pops on 3-6 planets after 115 years in to the game on Grand Admiral. They had another few planets without colonies for no good reasons since they had multiple species. A few had about 200 and then the 2 friendly machine empires had 580 and 620 pops in total. They had just started building and colonizing habitats when I invaded.

So not only are they probably having less of an impact on performance. They even perform better. Gives a lot of validity to the thread about perhaps letting the AI not play the exact same way as the player. Improving performance in two ways.

The question is, less pop modifiers = more performance.
Gestalts have way less pop modifiers so less calculations.

If you wanted to nerf biological empires that build robots, a very easy way to do that would be to split the existing robot assembly speed over 2 specialist jobs instead of 1.

Crosses Fingers

This would be a very bad change, it just would worsen the robot fantasy and still keep robots as mandatory. Bad for everyone, even balance and performance.

 

[SuiciSpai]

Maybe is good to also have another cap on ambitions (without sharing the cap with the others edicts?) At the end of my game I just select all of them without thinking too much. The major problem would be what to do with the extra unity if we had cap there.

 

[Peter Ebbesen]

Good to hear that pop growth is being looked at.

The Fleet Supremacy edict seems useless to. It doesn't make one's fleet more powerful in a meaningful way and paying additional maintenance is counterproductive. The resources saved by not enacting this edict could probably be spent on more ships, which might end up being more powerful than the starting XP. Maybe change it to increased ship damage. Maybe make an edict called "training exercises" that gives XP for admirals and ships docked at stations.

Your training exercises idea is much better than this silly edict.

In principle "Fleet Supremacy" does something of value by giving those 100 XP which is enough to take a ship to experienced status for +10% damage. Which absent other considerations seems a meaningful power boost in the "straight from the shipyard to battle" situation.

In practice by the time anybody would be willing to spend influence on a fleet edict their shipyards will already have fleet academies giving 100 XP, rendering the above irrelevant.

In that situation the only benefit from the edict's +100 XP is seen for the duration after construction where the ship has earned 800-899 XP (reaching veteran faster) and when it has earned 9800-9899 XP (elite faster). At all other times it'll be at the same level of efficiency as it would without the edict upon construction.

So I guess it is intended for those situations where a player is desperate for another +10% ship build speed or diplomatic weight from ship power.

Or for somebody wanting to try a rush build attacking in the very early game where fleet academies aren't available, who doesn't realize that he'd be better off spending the influence to toggle a resource edict instead to allow more jobs to fuel the war machine.

 

[BlackUmbrellas]

Your training exercises idea is much better than this silly edict.

In principle "Fleet Supremacy" does something of value by giving those 100 XP which is enough to take a ship to experienced status for +10% damage. Which absent other considerations seems a meaningful power boost in the "straight from the shipyard to battle" situation.

The point of the Edict isn't to buff your navy permenantly - it's to shift production power to churning out ships rapidly. This is something you'd activate before or after a war and turn off when you're done building your fleet up.

 

[GuardianGI]

Hope you noticed that ship starting experience doesn't work as a global modifier (already reported) and Martial Federation starting bonus doesn't work.

 

[Shark7]

Ok, where to begin? As always just my opinions on matters.

Some of the changes I can live with, especially the part of having limits in place and being able to click it and forget it. For me the two will be capacity subsidies and fleet, which I'm going to guess will be a lot of folks. And since I tend to play authoritarian, might as well click on the one that adds star-base capacity too for anchorages, right?

On the other hand, Nutritional Plenitude is a non-starter for me in this form. It's just not worth it for the increase in sprawl. I am not going to do anything that could potentially hurt my game start by putting me over admin capacity early on and hurting the early game research speed. And by the time I do have the admin capacity to turn it on, honestly I don' t need it. I find nutritional Plenitude is mostly useful in the early game when you only have 1-3 planets and need those building slots opening up as quickly as possible. Of course this is also the point of the game where I am on a shoestring budget with admin capacity and don't have it to spare because I have better things to put in building slots than bureaucrats. Not to mention that +10% growth speed is not that big of a difference in the bigger picture (0.3 in most cases).

Now with that out of the way.

I do like the idea of being able to switch some edicts on and leave then running until I no longer need it. I also think that instead of costing more influence to turn it off, you should rather have to spend influence to keep it going similar to treaties in diplomacy.

Galactic Ambitions:

My honest opinion is that these should have a one time activation cost, stay enabled until you turn it off, but also have a monthly unity cost associated with them as a unity sink in game. I also think that this monthly cost should be affected by empire size (example: base cost +10% for every 100 empire sprawl). By increasing the cost according to empire size, you will have to choose which ones you want on and which ones you don't. This really needs to be balanced so that yes you can turn them all on, but you'd likely end up with a unity deficit that once you hit zero sees them all turned off automatically. As it sits I make so much unity that I can literally bank millions of unity even when I'm using ALL of the ambitions so I'm all for something that forces me to make a decision as opposed to just mindlessly turning them all on.

 

[SteelCrow]

I am pretty sick that pops and the time they take to growth is the only measure of how good/bad something is. I don't even care if it's a good or bad change as long and it make that people shut-up

Pops shouldn't be the only way to power.

I get what you are saying, and agree with your frustration, but there is a definite reason Pop Growth is so impactful.

Think of this analogy: Position, Speed, and Acceleration.
Position = resources in the bank
Speed = Jobs (and the Pops working them)
Acceleration = Pop Growth

Your position changes over time depending on your speed. You change position faster when you are at a faster speed, and slower at a slower speed.
Speed also changes. The change in speed is called acceleration, just as the change in position is called speed. These measurements form a sort of logical ladder, where in the short time span, position matters the most and acceleration the least, but in the long time span, acceleration matters the most and position the least.
It gets complicated when we have initial conditions to consider, but in Stellaris's case we all start out the same: 100-200 of each resource, ~30 Pops, and ~0.03 Pops per month.

Good to hear that pop growth is being looked at.

The Fleet Supremacy edict seems useless to. It doesn't make one's fleet more powerful in a meaningful way and paying additional maintenance is counterproductive. The resources saved by not enacting this edict could probably be spent on more ships, which might end up being more powerful than the starting XP. Maybe change it to increased ship damage. Maybe make an edict called "training exercises" that gives XP for admirals and ships docked at stations.

Fortify Borders seems very situational. There are moments when I really need stations to upgrade faster but it's not common.

We all need to note how these edicts have costs built into them. They are meant to have only slight net benefits. These aren't just to pick one to get a boost. They are to sacrifice some things in order to focus on others.

Edit: Personally, I would like to see Fleet Supremacy be more of a fleet construction edict than boost the navy's side benefits.
Something like +50% upkeep costs, with -10% build costs and +25% build speed.

 

[verybad]

How 'bout some Faction based edicts that can affect politics in Empire? Could make for some interesting things if factions required an edict to be passed in order to be happy, but those particular edicts took say an Envoy to be functional. Or another faction wanted a particular building to be made on a particular planet.

There's a lot of unused potential for edicts that could make for interesting stuff.

 

[tinculin]

Although we felt that Edicts do fit this role pretty well, there were a couple of issues with the system that we think could be improved. The fact that Edicts would always time out felt like a little bit of unnecessary micromanagement at times, and didn’t really emphasize the feeling of “I am choosing to focus on these 2 things right now”. We felt that it would fit better if Edicts had a greater emphasis on making choices that you can go back and change, rather than being things you constantly go in and refresh.

​

In a game like Stellaris, it seems that you're missing what makes the game micromanagement hell if you believe the current Edict system is one of those things. Having to re-click something once every 10 years pales in comparison to having to deal with over-population of planets in the mid-game as planets start to fill or the general management of larger empires.

This seems like such a small quality of life improvement when there are pages upon pages of threads on this very forum which high lightning some of the more fundamental flaws in the game.

Now I appreciate we can't fix all the major issues at once (yes science, i'm looking at you), but this seems a fairly weak explanation as to implement a change to a system that you already acknowledge seems to 'fit the role pretty well' when there a gaping issues in other areas of the game. i.e. you're making a very questionable to change to a system which in reality has very little wrong with it already.

On Pop Growth:
Perhaps of equal concern is this statement:​

Pop Growth is problematic, so we have made some changes in the upcoming patch that will reduce Pop Growth from different sources across the board (more on that later). Food Policies are no more, and the popular Nutritional Plenitude is now a toggled Edict instead.

You are right that Pop Growth is problematic - though I think that's being overly polite. It's a complete nightmare currently and screaming for a better solution.

However, the hinted at solution 'reducing pop growth from different sources across the board', is not a fix for the problem.

The fundamental problem for pop growth is not the modifiers achievable through tech or traditions (i.e. the 10% modifiersa), it is the per colony value of '3' as a base figure for growth.

There is an entire thread here which discusses the issue in far more detail: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...wth-and-research.1377838/page-3#post-26487004

 

[Jman5]

This is obvious.

Specially as Fortity the Borders is totally useless and Fleet supremacy make your ships WEAKER, as they don't get any buff to damage but increase upkeep.

+2 starbase capacity is pretty nice in the early game. I could see people swapping into it when they get the starhold or star fortress tech for a timing attack. Also, that 25% upgrade reduction knocks an entire year off the upgrade time from Star Fortress to Citadel.

 

[klickor]

I am annoyed there is not a way in vanilla to focus research into one of the three fields over the others.
For example, a policy choice could subtract Researcher productivity in one field and add to another.

If I remember right we did have an edict for that at release I think. Like you got +15% to your chosen field but - 5% to the others. Would be neat since at different times in the game you need different techs. Would help if they buffed society a lot so you wouldnt just keep it on engineering through the whole game.

I think I used to get society first back then since robots werent as broken and you needed way more techs to get influence and able to even colonize different worlds. Also had border bonuses. Society were much stronger and even good to rush while now its mostly crap if you dont go bio ascension. Then changed it to physics for the upgraded FTL techs since they were vital in war when you didnt have choke points. And then mostly engineering for the rest of the game.

But they need to fix the tech categories as if it were introduced now you would never ever take it off engineering until you are in repeatables. Then maybe go for physics since upkeep cost for fleets hit EC harder than minerals so its slightly better but you could as well keep it at engineering.

 

[M@ni@c]

This is obvious.

Not to the gameplay designers somehow.

 

[Squared79]

My first thought when reading this was, “what the hell am I going to spend influence on now?”

My second the thought was, “was this change made so I have more influence available for the new habitats? If the tech is now much sooner. Will still probably have a period of maxed out influence with nothing to spend it on though.”

^2