Hi all!

As mentioned last week, our plan for today is to go over some changes to automated colony management and pop resettlement. As a reminder, these are still under development, and as such may undergo significant changes and won't be going live for quite some time.

Major goals here were to reduce the micromanagement burden in the mid to late game when individual decisions are less oppressive, and to significantly decrease the need to manually move pops at all. As with the economic changes we were discussing before, a lot of this is still a work in progress to varying degrees.

Automated Colony Management

Some sector management improvements have already been made in the 2.8.1 test branch (you can experiment and leave feedback on it by following the instructions in this thread), but here we’ll be focusing on planetary designations and individual planet automation.

A major pass has been done on automated colony management to improve its effectiveness. After manually setting a colony designation and turning on automated colony management, our intent is for the colony to develop into something you would reasonably expect if you were building it on your own. It should build districts, clear deposits as necessary, and upgrade buildings when there is a need for it.

Planet automation will upgrade capital buildings whenever possible (gotta unlock those building slots!), and will otherwise generally try to build or upgrade from its list if there are less than 3 open jobs. We’ve erred a bit on the side of caution, so it is currently extremely opposed to running deficits. It may require manual intervention if, for example, your energy credits per month are negative, but we figured it was better to leave those sorts of risky economic decisions in the player’s hands.

Spoiler: Foundry Automation (Hive) - Click to Expand

automate_foundry_hive_planet = {
    available = {
        has_designation = col_foundry
        owner = { has_authority = auth_hive_mind }
        free_jobs < 3
        has_building_construction = no
    }

    prio_districts = {
        district_industrial
    }

    buildings = {
        1 = {
            building = building_hive_capital
        }

        2 = {
            building = building_spawning_pool
        }

        3 = {
            building = building_clone_vats
        }

        4 = {
            building = building_hive_node
            available = {
                owner = {
                    hive_node_upkeep_affordable = yes
                }
                num_buildings = { type = building_hive_node value = 0 }
            }
        }

        5 = {
            building = building_foundry_1
            available = {
                owner = {
                    foundry_1_upkeep_affordable = yes
                }
            }
        }

        6 = {
            building = building_galactic_memorial_1
            available = {
                owner = {
                    has_valid_civic = civic_hive_memorialist
                }
                NOR = {
                    has_building = building_galactic_memorial_1
                    has_building = building_galactic_memorial_2
                    has_building = building_galactic_memorial_3
                }
            }
        }

        7 = {
            building = building_betharian_power_plant
        }

        8 = {
            building = building_mote_harvesters
        }

        9 = {
            building = building_crystal_mines
        }

        10 = {
            building = building_gas_extractors
        }

        11 = {
            building = building_chemical_plant
            available = {
                num_buildings = { type = building_chemical_plant value = 0 }
            }
        }

        12 = {
            building = building_hive_node
            available = {
                owner = {
                    hive_node_upkeep_affordable = yes
                }
                num_buildings = { type = building_hive_node value < 2 }
            }
        }

    }
}

This script will attempt to build a forge world for a hive empire. If there are less than 3 free jobs and there is nothing currently in the build queue, it will check to see if there is anything that it can build. Planetary automation has a tendency to favor districts over buildings, but will construct buildings if there are 1.5 times as many districts already built than there are buildings. (This ratio is able to be set in 00_defines.txt as COLONY_AUTOMATION_DISTRICT_PREFERENCE.) When selecting a building, it will move down the list until it finds something that it is capable of building and meets the scripted restrictions. The building’s upkeep is always taken into consideration. The scripted “_affordable” checks are to estimate whether you can afford the jobs it creates as well.

Blockers are fairly low priority for planetary automation, and will only be cleared if they are blocking a district slot that it actively wants to construct, or if there are no free district slots remaining. (Thus it will eventually clear all those random blockers once the rest of the planet is finished.) You can, of course, intervene and clear those Sprawling Slums or sleepy Lithoids earlier.

Buildings (other than the capital) will be upgraded if there are no other things that it wants to build right now, it can upgrade without causing resource deficits, and there are pops available that would want to work there. (Either because they’re unemployed or they prefer it to their current jobs.)

The scripts will attempt to handle various issues that may crop up on a planet such as low amenities, high crime, or failure to build buildings dedicated to extra-dimensional beings that love you and just want to be loved in return. These are tucked away in 00_crisis_exceptions.txt.

Spoiler: Amenity Crisis Exception (Regular Empire) - Click to Expand

automate_amenity_management = {
    available = {
        free_amenities <= -5
        owner = {
            NOR = {
                has_authority = auth_machine_intelligence
                has_authority = auth_hive_mind
            }
        }
        OR = {
            NOT = { uses_district_set = city_world }
            free_district_slots = 0
            has_resource = { type = exotic_gases amount < 75 }
        }
    }

    crisis = yes

    buildings = {
        holo = {
            building = building_holo_theatres
            available = {
                owner = {
                    is_spiritualist = no
                    is_megacorp = no
                }
            }
        }

        temple = {
            building = building_temple
            available = {
                owner = {
                    is_spiritualist = yes
                    is_megacorp = no
                }
            }
        }

        commerce = {
            building = building_commercial_zone
            available = {
                owner = {
                    is_megacorp = yes
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

This "exception" will intervene if a planet’s amenities are -5 or below, and it’s either not an ecumenopolis or if it is an ecumenopolis, it’s either totally full or you’re running low on exotic gases. Based on your ethics and authority, it’ll pick one of the amenity buildings to add to the queue.

A few jobs, buildings, and planet designations have gotten a bit of a touch-up during this pass. Notable examples of designations include the Urban World, which now has a Trade Value bonus, and the Colony, which is now intended to satisfy the needs of a newly colonized world rather than provide pop growth bonuses.

Urban and Colony Designations

The old Colony bonus was changed because it was a bit problematic - growth bonuses made it somewhat stronger than many other more specialized bonuses. We’d greatly prefer if you could flag that newly settled Mining World as such right away and immediately turn on automation, rather than it being optimal to manually develop the world until it reached 5 pops and no longer qualified for Colony.

Due to its inherent terror of deficits, the automation scripts tend to be a little bit more conservative than players may be, but I’ve personally enjoyed the dramatically reduced mental burden my mid to late game colonies require. It’s also convenient that several designations (such as Forge, Factory, Tech, and Urban) will build out colonies that qualify for the Arcology Project decision. In our dev multiplayer games, I've been making a point of using colony automation as much as possible in order to give everyone else a chance get a feel for what it's doing. (Except my capital. I'll admit that I do manually build that so I can take care of sudden shifts in priority.)

If you're using planetary automation but it doesn't seem to be doing anything, the three most common things to check are:

• Is the colony in a Sector?
  • Colonies have to be in a (non-Frontier) Sector in order to use either sector or planetary automation.
• Am I running an energy deficit?
  • Most districts and buildings have energy upkeep. While it's possible for the district or building to theoretically produce enough energy to overcome that and help work off the current deficit, the automation scripts are as light as possible and without deeper analysis can't assume that pops moving into those jobs wouldn't worsen the shortage. Manual intervention is necessary to dig out of an energy crunch.
• Do I have resources in the automation pool for it to use?
  • There's a notification for this, but if the pool is running low it might not be able to afford whatever it is it wants to build. Remember, you can hold Ctrl to change the units moved from hundreds to thousands.
    
    
    
    Save mouse-clicks, use Ctrl.

Resettlement

Manual resettlement and the mitigation of unemployment is a huge burden in mid to late game Stellaris. It is generally our belief that manual resettlement should be an extremely rare occurrence, not something done expected to be done as part of the core game loop. When you must, it should be a simple process, but it should be an unusual act.

One quality of life change we’ve made is to filter Unemployed pops up to the top, and highlighted them. The pops underneath are then sorted from lowest stratum to highest.

You're unlikely to see this specific scenario unless you intentionally create unemployment problems by turning off jobs in every pop strata.

We've also adjusted resettlement costs, and added an Influence cost to many pop types. These influence costs are nominal for worker tier pops, but get fairly expensive when you're forcing Rulers to move.

Slave Resettlement and Worker/Drone/Bio-Trophy Resettlement

Specialist Resettlement and Ruler Resettlement

Slaves and unintelligent robots can still be moved without expending Influence, and certain civics permit you to waive these Influence costs.

Hey wait, what's that about colony abandonment?

Despite their best efforts the Servitors still haven't found a good way to get their Bio-Trophies to shift their consciousness to a different planet using OTA updates, so you still have to pay for them.

Manually resettling the last pop off a colony you own carries an additional influence surcharge in our dev builds. There will very likely be an exception made for Doomed planets and Holy Worlds that are risking initiating a war with a Fallen Empire. A planetary decision to abandon a recently conquered planet is under consideration, though it'll likely use displacement purging to do so. (With the diplomatic penalties associated with it.)

But we just finished building it!

With Federations, we introduced a galactic resolution in the Greater Good line that provided limited automated resettlement called Greater Than Ourselves. As noted by some, that was partially intended as a means to allow Egalitarian leaning empires a way of handling resettlement without forcing it on their pops. There have been many requests to make that core game functionality, but we’ve been somewhat wary of doing so without some restrictions.

We've come up with a way for every empire to have easier access to a similar effect. The following new Starbase Building will handle it, unlocked by the Hyperlane Breach Points tech. (The Hyperlane Registrar has moved to Interstellar Economics.)

They like to move it.

The tooltip effect is a bit of a mouthful.

The Transit Hub will operate as a limited variant of Greater Than Ourselves, moving unemployed low strata pops between planets that are in systems with Transit Hubs. (This will allow movement within a system as well, for example if you have a bunch of habitats in a single system.) We're investigating ways to expand the scope of pops it's willing to move - the original Worker limitation was put into place because while a Worker could promote themselves to fill any free job, a Slave or Specialist might find themselves restricted from the free job on the new planet. We're currently experimenting with a more robust variant - if it works out without performance concerns, the Transit Hub will prioritize high strata unemployment and then move down the ranks.

Building out the Transit network does function best when you have a developed starbase above most of your colonies since it will only move pops between nodes on the network.

Tangentially related, we've also cut demotion time in half across the board, and made some changes to give each Authority type a unique bonus.

Yes, Shared Burdens pops demote pretty much instantly.

We have some other experimental changes going on that have significant effects on the number of unemployed pops in the late game, but we're not ready to talk about them quite yet.

The empire type that perhaps faced the most obnoxious burden of frequent manual resettlement were Terravores, the Lithoid Devouring Swarms. When devouring planets, they occasionally created pops on the consumption world. As a quality of life improvement, when they’ve finished the planet off we now resettle them back to the capital. (Since gestalts can also use the Transit Hub, I highly recommend that Terravores build one in their main system to send those drones someplace where they can be of use.)

Oh, and we also clear that pesky red habitability planet marker from completely consumed planets that was unnecessarily cluttering your map.

HP/MP restored! ...But you're still hungry.

As a reminder, we have an ongoing feedback thread related to AI improvements we have in beta on the stellaris_test branch. We'd love to get more people on it and telling us what they think about them. (Please note that 2.8.1 is an optional beta patch. You have to manually opt in to access it. Go to your Steam library, right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> betas tab -> select "stellaris_test" branch.)

Next week we plan on going through some more of the remaining economic balance changes. See you then!

 

[dekeche]

Thank you for the update, these are interesting developments.

I have a couple of thoughts. First, instead of making transit hubs a building, why not make them a module with a range, like the trade hubs? That way you don't need star bases above all your colonies to manage the flow of people, but also utilising this functionality presents opportunity costs (e.g. by not having anchorages).

If you did this, it would then lead on to a second suggestion - make the Hyperland Register boost the range of both transit hubs and trade hubs. It would then have greater strategic value and be fulfilling a thematically appropriate function.

One reason they might not do this, is because all modules require models to attach to starbases, so they'd have a not insignificant amount of graphic design they'd need to do to implement this solution.

 

[mial42]

To add more fuel onto the "making resettlement cost influence is a bad idea" fire, consider the situation where an empire that bans land appropriation conquers a planet from a gestalt. Resettlement is required to stop the colony from vanishing, and making it cost influence is too punishing (no, 10 influence is not nominal. That's three months worth of production early game, and nearly a month's worth late game).

 

[The_Draco]

Why strata promotions are instant though? Miner instantly learns how to be a scientist, but scientist has to spend years learning to be a miner?
This is kind of backwards.

well that part is not of "learning how to" but a "want to do that" i mean, if you are a promoted doctor of whatever, would you take 1/10 of your possible earned money and work as a plumber just because there is no better job for you atm? thats why demoting from higher strata takes longer and going up from lower is more easy, the learning part a plumber have to do to be a doctor is decent "easy" and "fast" and "not part of this thing" important is just, what the pop will get if it changes its strata, will it become higher, more money and political power, or will it have to change its lifestyle to arrange with the lower money?

 

[Lorenerd11]

well that part is not of "learning how to" but a "want to do that" I mean, if you are a promoted doctor of whatever, would you take 1/10 of your possible earned money and work as a plumber just because there is no better job for you atm?

I mean, when it's more like "we got an opening for a scientist job" and promote a clerk, and then go "actually, nevermind, the position's closed" within like 5 seconds, you'd expect a pop to go back to being a clerk.

Recently promoted pops should have a modifier within the first 10-20 days of promotion that allows them to be immediately demoted before they get "settled in".

 

[The_Draco]

To add more fuel onto the "making resettlement cost influence is a bad idea" fire, consider the situation where an empire that bans land appropriation conquers a planet from a gestalt. Resettlement is required to stop the colony from vanishing, and making it cost influence is too punishing (no, 10 influence is not nominal. That's three months worth of production early game, and nearly a month's worth late game).

well, yah i think the influence cost is not a nice twist, if you look at the current thing, but if i understand the goals right, the manuel resettlement will not be used so much anymore, cause most chall work with these "transit Hubs" wich will resettle pops for free (well you can't choos wich pops will be moved there, but i think thats just a little problem if any), so the influence used for resettlement will be similar nothing, if they are doing it right as planned

 

[Scourgeclaw]

Everything in this post was fantastic until I saw you brought back influence costs for resettlement. Holy hell I thought we all realized a long time ago that was a bad idea but here we are yet again.

When I need to rapidly abandon a world the inhibiting factor to my doing so absolutely should not be “oh I dont have the political clout to have these pops flee absolute certain death right now”

Please reverse this because this is a massive detriment to pop management and not everyone can or will want to waste a civic slot on Corvee to correct it.

 

[kwheeler]

...There is one very important thing lacking – per species jobs restrictions. . . . Without per species jobs restrictions all the pops will end up mixing up, with the cockroaches filling up clerk and scientist jobs on the ring and normal people suffering on xeno-tainted ecumenopolis.

What I'd like is when you view the demographics of your empire, you could have a radio-box button or a pulldown menu beside each species for "specialized for X occupation." If that option is selected, the species will seek an open work slot in that occupation first before falling into another job. Once per year or two, the computer would run an empire-wide check, and species that have a designated preference will run another check to see if there is an open slot for that occupation OR an opportunity to swap roles with a different species that is not working at its designated job preference.

That might clean up a lot of the problem I have with species genemodded for science running off and becoming miners, and vice-versa.

 

[Lorenerd11]

All I know is, this will definitely lead to a rise in resettling by closing job slots. Which in itself doesn't speak particularly well of this resettlement change, that it just leads to players using unwieldy workarounds for their micromanagement.

And there better be a way to set custom job prioritization for specific species templates, now that unemployed pops are being resettled out.

 

[The_Draco]

I mean, when it's more like "we got an opening for a scientist job" and promote a clerk, and then go "actually, nevermind, the position's closed" within like 5 seconds, you'd expect a pop to go back to being a clerk.

Recently promoted pops should have a modifier within the first 10-20 days of promotion that allows them to be immediately demoted before they get "settled in".

well, that is a situation i can't talk about, but would you go back to the plumber job if you recently promoted like a day before wich costs you time and much to learn and you ecpacted to get the better job, wouldn't you look a time if another job will be aviable in that strata you promoted into before you give up and go back?... but yah, i understand that... thats one of the reasons why our planets need Clairvoyants to plan these stuff ... xDDD

 

[Unendingfear]

A tiny orbiting installation around the planet would rock visually actually. Would give some "alive" feeling.

Something similar to the hegemony federation event monument would look cute.

 

[The_Draco]

Everything in this post was fantastic until I saw you brought back influence costs for resettlement. Holy hell I thought we all realized a long time ago that was a bad idea but here we are yet again.

When I need to rapidly abandon a world the inhibiting factor to my doing so absolutely should not be “oh I dont have the political clout to have these pops flee absolute certain death right now”

Please reverse this because this is a massive detriment to pop management and not everyone can or will want to waste a civic slot on Corvee to correct it.

well for that reason i would implement a "flee the colony" dicision wich drive all pops to leave the colony for free, just cost some influence (like the sole cost for resettle the last one to abandon the colony or half of that in influence rest in ec) to activate and done in some time, like a year or something like that, what do you think?

 

[MightySultan]

The transit hub is a great addition but a bit more care needs to be taken with this implementation. As it stands, I do not believe the transit hubs will reduce micro-management. Quite the opposite in fact. The obvious point that comes to mind is due to an inability to set a prioritised world, this will lead to tactically producing and destroying the transit hubs repeatedly as well as removing jobs to create unemployment temporarily to redirect pops to a certain planet for free.

The no influence for moving slave pops makes some sense, but the fact I have to pay for my slavers to go to a planet to get promoted to ruler pops where they overlord the slaves - what? "Nah, I'm happy working in the factory, I don't want to get promoted to everyone in the empire's dream of running a slave colony." Having the system base the influence on the strata of job that they would automatically take up when they move to the planet makes far far more sense. Likewise a clerk refusing to move back to the capital for a promotion to a bureaucrat, whilst one on the capital is willing to entirely give up developed society to move to a backwater planet, is nonsense.

But as people noted as well, taking planets in late game, with or without land appropriation, often requires at least some degree of moving pops on/off to avoid instant collapse or outright colony abandonment if they were say hive minded. Influence is a resource we have little control over. Corvée System in this current proposal is an outright double growth speed buff to a massive portion of your game. Normal empires would have to choose between moving their workers over and getting full growth speed at the cost of influence for expansion, where as Corvée System empires would freely be able to both grab more planets and utilize their free movement to maximize growth on them by spreading their pops. Further factor in the removal of pop growth speed on the colony designation and non Corvée System empires are pressured even further to spend influence to get to that magic pop-growth speed boosting planetary administration.

 

[mial42]

well, yah i think the influence cost is not a nice twist, if you look at the current thing, but if i understand the goals right, the manuel resettlement will not be used so much anymore, cause most chall work with these "transit Hubs" wich will resettle pops for free (well you can't choos wich pops will be moved there, but i think thats just a little problem if any), so the influence used for resettlement will be similar nothing, if they are doing it right as planned

...That just adds another layer of micro (having to upgrade the starbase and maybe downgrade another to stay below the cap, and build the building, then keep disabling jobs to get enough unemployed pops to hope that one randomly migrates to the planet you want it too, unless you also destroy every other transport hub in your empire, which just sounds awful to deal with) to dealing with the situation I laid out (needing to resettle to keep a colony; it applies to non-land appropriation empires conquering from gestalts or species they want to purge, but it also applies to things like resettling a dominant species pop to a colony full of xeno slaves to keep stability up). Considering the whole point of this change is to reduce micro, that's a bad thing.

 

[The_Draco]

...That just adds another layer of micro (having to upgrade the starbase and maybe downgrade another to stay below the cap, and build the building, then keep disabling jobs to get enough unemployed pops to hope that one randomly migrates to the planet you want it too, unless you also destroy every other transport hub in your empire, which just sounds awful to deal with) to dealing with the situation I laid out (needing to resettle to keep a colony; it applies to non-land appropriation empires conquering from gestalts or species they want to purge, but it also applies to things like resettling a dominant species pop to a colony full of xeno slaves to keep stability up). Considering the whole point of this change is to reduce micro, that's a bad thing.

well, thats why i say "if they doing it right as planned" and thats maybe one of the reasons why they say that all of this is still "in development" not finished and just experimenting

 

[Capt. Tane]

well, yah i think the influence cost is not a nice twist, if you look at the current thing, but if i understand the goals right, the manuel resettlement will not be used so much anymore, cause most chall work with these "transit Hubs" wich will resettle pops for free (well you can't choos wich pops will be moved there, but i think thats just a little problem if any), so the influence used for resettlement will be similar nothing, if they are doing it right as planned

Most of my system will not be in that automatic system because of the starbase limit...

 

[STABBY5]

I really don't like the direction of this. Turning terrible side effects into game mechanics and doubling down on pop resettlement. This is all making it better but none of the deeper problems are being fixed. I still can't see myself playing after this.

 

[Brael]

well, that is a situation i can't talk about, but would you go back to the plumber job if you recently promoted like a day before wich costs you time and much to learn and you ecpacted to get the better job, wouldn't you look a time if another job will be aviable in that strata you promoted into before you give up and go back?... but yah, i understand that... thats one of the reasons why our planets need Clairvoyants to plan these stuff ... xDDD

This would depend heavily on your living standards wouldn't it? If your society gives everyone everything, then there's little risk to change employment. If there's disproprotionally higher benefits do being a higher tier worker, then there would be more incentive to keep that employment, and if you're too high to care then you just enjoy more of that chemical bliss. Or to put this on a simple formula, the higher the difference in consumer goods upkeep between two tiers, the less likely a pop would be to go down and more insistent it would be on looking for similar/better employment.

 

[charliex3]

Just my point of view about the difference:

• a colony you settled and want to get rid of --> failed real estate project, you pay a political toll for it (influence);
• a colony you acquired, in war, and want to get rid of --> real estate management, no political cost for it.

Again... What If I move pops from that planet first?
I'm still getting penalized even though I acquired that planet and not colonized it myself.

I still don't think it's a good idea to charge influence here, even as I usually have a bunch of spare influence by the mid-end game, this is basically just annoying to be charged for something like this. If it was 50 influence I wouldn't mind probably but 100 or 200 is simply overkill.

 

[The_Draco]

Most of my system will not be in that automatic system because of the starbase limit...

well, maybe that starbase limit needs a rework too, hm? like deversing military and civil used starbases? or maybe making starbases less impacting on that limit if they are in a system with a colonised planet

 

[grommile]

one on the capital is willing to entirely give up developed society to move to a backwater planet,

on the capital, you live in a badly soundproofed shoebox and spend two hours a day marinating in other sophonts' BO on mass transit.

on the backwater, you have an actual house and get to see the sky.