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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.

Code:
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.

Code:
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.

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1605094456491.png

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.
      1605096055953.png

      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.

1605096681033.png

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.

1605097705361.png
1605096840037.png

Slave Resettlement and Worker/Drone/Bio-Trophy Resettlement

1605097458581.png
1605097513050.png

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.

1605096949504.png
1605097021942.png
1605097088504.png

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.)

1605097811856.png

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.)

1605098298007.png

They like to move it.

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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.

1605098685353.png

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.

1605094492379.png

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!
 
I've found in other influence discussions that whether or not influence is scarce or overflowing depends a lot on galaxy settings and configuration too. If you're cramped in the middle of a bunch of empires or on a smaller galaxy, you're not burning that much influence on expansion and it's easy to hit the cap in the mid-game unless you're spamming a bunch of claims everywhere. In larger galaxies or if you're bordering a large chunk of uncontested space, it's much easier to be influence-starved.
Whether you're blocked off early or not makes a huge difference. I've had games where multiple other Empires spawned within about 5 jumps of me, and games where I had loads of room to expand, and I was as far as I remember using the same galaxy generation settings.
 
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I didn't forget Ringworlds at all, because they make Influence management easier. Normally, to have 3 Megastructures in construction, you need to have spent 900 influence, but with a Ringworld you only need to have spent 300 Influence.
Multiply it on a number of rings you needed.

As for Ecumenopoli, by the time you have more than a handful you should have already won.
On default galaxy settings - maybe. Have you ever tried other? Such combination as everything maxed out - it's still vanilla settings. I guess game design took such option as one of conventional ways to play, but it ends up as micromanagement simulator. So it's either intentional, or just a design for very narrow variety of options.
 
On default galaxy settings - maybe. Have you ever tried other? Such combination as everything maxed out - it's still vanilla settings. I guess game design took such option as one of conventional ways to play, but it ends up as micromanagement simulator. So it's either intentional, or just a design for very narrow variety of options.
For the record, I usually play on 1,000 star galaxies, typically Commodore or Admiral difficulty with Mid-Game brought forward ~50 years and endgame brought forward ~50-100 years. I know you don't need Ecumenopolises to win because I've conquered the entire Galaxy as a Hive Mind and I didn't have any.
 
For the record, I usually play on 1,000 star galaxies, typically Commodore or Admiral difficulty with Mid-Game brought forward ~50 years and endgame brought forward ~50-100 years. I know you don't need Ecumenopolises to win because I've conquered the entire Galaxy as a Hive Mind and I didn't have any.
For the record, I don't try to reduce the thread to "I playing this way" talking.
Simple as that: out-of-the-box options are for out-of-the-box design, and visa versa. Well, expected to be.
 
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How fast does it move pops? Even greater good takes very long to actually move a pop, I just hope this new mechanic works significantly faster, because you can't intervene with the crippling influence cost on resettlement.
Greater good only takes one day to move a pop. The problem is it won't move any AI in servitude. This is probably because the script can not tell whether the free job requires promotion or not and servitor pops won't promote.

Eladrin alluded to this problem when they spoke on the new transit hub and its issues.
 
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For the record, I don't try to reduce the thread to "I playing this way" talking.
Simple as that: out-of-the-box options are for out-of-the-box design, and visa versa. Well, expected to be.
And for the record, I have hit the Influence cap while continually keeping 3 Ringworlds in construction and also building new Gateways, Habitats and Ecumenopolises.
 
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For the record, I usually play on 1,000 star galaxies, typically Commodore or Admiral difficulty with Mid-Game brought forward ~50 years and endgame brought forward ~50-100 years. I know you don't need Ecumenopolises to win because I've conquered the entire Galaxy as a Hive Mind and I didn't have any.

Not everyone plays the same way. I play on 1,000 stars, Grand Admiral or Grand Admiral scaling with the default year settings. I certainly have not conquered the entire galaxy as hive mind before making any Ecumenopolisises. Please stop taking your experience to count as everyones.
 
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Every designer should read as much as they can about what their players say. They're the audience we're making the games for. (That doesn't mean that we'll always do what players suggest, but the information is always valuable.)

Open discussions like these are nice because they provide additional feedback that can trigger other tangential ideas. I've gotten quite a few ideas for new tests to try regarding auto-resettlement and the authority bonuses from this thread.


You won't need to do this anymore with the changes described in the previous dev diary. Even with no technologies, you'll start with one open building slot so you'll be able to put down the Robot Assembly right away.

Yes, you won't have the capital upgrade until the planet hits the required population level, but rapidly moving a small planet's worth of pops should probably be more of a project than it currently is in live.


It's still very much in flux. Some of our experiments have included things like adjusting the amount of growth required to build pops, to applying S-shaped logistic growth curves (the wonderful Carrying Capacity mod on the workshop implements something very similar to one of the experiments), but pretty much all of them significantly reduce the number of pops that exist in the galaxy in the late game. (With major economic effects arising from that as well.)

Reducing the number of pops in late game would have a positive impact on performance for many, which totally sounds like a positive.

Perhaps the economic impacts can be mitigated through technology since late game is lacking meaningful research options anyways?
 
Please stop taking your experience to count as everyones.
I am doing no such thing. I am arguing against people who suggest that if you want to go to war you have to resettle hundreds of pops, or that by the late game you have to have turned half of your planets into Ecumonopolises. Neither is the case.
 
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I am doing no such thing. I am arguing against people who suggest that if you want to go to war you have to resettle hundreds of pops, or that by the late game you have to have turned half of your planets into Ecumonopolises. Neither is the case.

You just said neither is the case, neither is the case in YOUR games. Many other people will have to do both of these.

You have heavily changed the game settings, so naturally your game is going to be easier and quicker.
 
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As Eladrin already said, performance. He's considering planetary buildings as an alternative though.
Thanks, I missed his reply.
Largely for performance reasons. If they operated in an aura, every time they want to move someone, they'd have to scan all of the planets in their system and adjacent systems (and possibly up to six systems away if they functioned like trade hubs) for pops to take, and then do the same while looking for places to send them to. My choices were basically planet or starbase buildings, and I initially opted for starbases to give a bit of a benefit to dense systems with multiple colonies. (Of course, those are relatively rare outside of habitats.)
My concern about the starbase module is that it will be very hard to build a starbase over most populated systems without hitting the limit cap, but I still prefer this solution rather than having an extra, nearly mandatory, building on every planet. Another solution could be to have both the station module and the building, so we can easily cover isolated colonies.

I don't quite understand the "scan" part tho. I mean, to my understanding a planet either is "migration enabled" or it is not, and it can be set/unset when the starbase module is built/destroyed. Both planets/habitats and stations are unmovable objects, so no periodic scan should be involved. Probably you are alluding to the performance hit that is introduced in the automatic resettling system alone, but what about Greater Than Ourselves then?

I didn't notice major hits in performances when I adopted Greater Than Ourselves, but if checking unemployed pop is still a major performance problem maybe it's worth thinking about reworking the pop system before this kind of update. For instance, I suggested a while back about shifting from a discrete population system to a continuous distribution, where you check-adjust one distribution for planet (or K distributions, for K species) instead of N pops (where N>>K in most case).
This is just a suggestion, I'm not saying that this solution is applicable or that it would definitely solve all the problems, since I can't be sure of that without checking the code.

Ultimately, my fear is that with this update everyone will build most of their starbases in the highest number of colonised systems possible, just to reduce the micro, causing the game performances to decrease significantly and offsetting the benefits of the recent improvements in that aspect.
 
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Replying to your comment because one agree react isn't enough. I don't want to feel like I'm playing significantly suboptimally for focusing on a small number of well developed planets.
But you are playing suboptimally. You refuse to actually engage with the wider galaxy, you refuse to expand, you refuse to get into conflict and grow. The whole "smaller number of developed planets versus a large number of underdeveloped ones" argument is and always was a fallacy. That was never the case. The core of a sprawling Empire is just as well developed if not more so than a tall empire. The usual argument I see is just wanting people who don't play tall to be arbitrarily punished and held back in some way for, being proactive, for actually engaging with the galaxy, for growing, conquering, etc.
 
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Ah so it s system, then my point still stand, it's workable with a wide empire.
No, it's not. The number of starbases does not scale equal to the number of planets by any means. The latter absolutely out scales the former.
 
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No, it's not. The number of starbases does not scale equal to the number of planets by any means. The latter absolutely out scales the former.
Yeah, if you have a small Empire you can make up the numbers using the extra fixed Starbases, but any substantial conquest usually has to be followed by a wave of downsizing as you get rid of enemy Bastions and Starbases over the least important systems.
 
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Every designer should read as much as they can about what their players say. They're the audience we're making the games for. (That doesn't mean that we'll always do what players suggest, but the information is always valuable.)
Well in that case!

The reason why moving whole pops is (currently) needed is because sometimes people want more pops in one place, and don't want a particular pop in another place. The former is easily done with growth and immigration modifiers, but the only way to do the latter is to move the pop with the pop movement interface, or move it with an automated version of the same, or force the pop to go into decline.

My preferred way would be to force the pop to go into decline, because then instead of having a whole separate pop moving system you can just tie it into the existing immigration/emigration system. A pop can't find a job, or hates their job, or hates the climate? That species gets increased emigration pressure on that planet and increased immigration pressure elsewhere, starts declining, eventually a pop of that species vanishes but the boosted growth on a bunch of other planets means they have effectively "moved" elsewhere. A planet doesn't have enough amenities, or housing, or is doomed to explode, or you turn on a decision just kind of generally telling them to go away? Everyone gets increased emigration/immigration pressure and the most heavily weighted pops start declining. It all feels much more "natural" than shipping millions of sapient beings instantly across the galaxy, there's much less player micro, and you're less likely to have people complaining that the automatic movement system put a specific pop in the "wrong" (aka not where they would have put them) place.

But you can't do that because emigration doesn't preserve species. If a bunch of space elves get emigration pressured off a planet they hate that doesn't mean more space elf growth, it just means more growth total. Declining can't be used to simulate space elves moving to somewhere more friendly because there wouldn't be a 1 to 1 ratio of space elves going away to space elves appearing somewhere else. In order for that to work you'd need to preserve that info. Not down to the individual template, there'd be no need to differentiate between tropical space elves and arid space elves, but if there's 20 points of space elves leaving horrible space planet a month then you need to be putting 20 points of space elves somewhere else. Directly onto a specific planet or spread out amongst a few other planets or into some kind of virtual "in transit space elves" empire pool or something, there's a bunch of viable solutions. But once space elves leaving a planet were guaranteed to go somewhere then you could replace the automatic move-an-entire-pop systems with something much more organic feeling.

Now that might seem like a lot of effort to just fix one system, but once it was set up you could do a bunch of neat things with it. You know how the system for applying new templates to existing pops is a horrible nightmare? Remember what I was saying about only preserving "space elf" rather than the specific space elf template? If declining was safe you could apply decline pressure on obsolete pop templates. You could have an obsolete pop template declining on a planet while boosting growth of a newer template of the same species on the very same planet, representing individuals of that species group modding themselves (or their kids) to take advantage of the latest tech. With enough decline pressure you could have one single unified mechanic handling pop migration, gene modification, assimilation, purges, the whole shebang. Your pops would take care of the nitty gritty of the application, with the player only having to make the big decisions. The Grand Strategy if you will heheheheh
 
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