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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.

1605094446038.png
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.

1605098342337.png

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!
 
The way I've typically done it, is use claims to get a couple systems that are key, and then war for humiliation to get a rebate on some of that claim cost, then after 1-2 of those, subjugate and if you want (i prefer not to), integrate. That gets me key systems for far less than it would cost to build my systems all the way out to someone and then claim everything on the way there.

I'm not a particularly high caliber player, but I've found doing this ends up in a far better allocation of resources than trying to instead take every single system with a claim.

Anyways, I’m not saying this is the best way to play or that you even should play that way. Influence has struck me as something of an issue because of it’s non scaling nature and that system probably needs a revamp but I’m not sure that’s actually an issue here because their goal is to avoid needing manual resettlement for the most part and instead set the majority of it to be automatic by default and resettlement shouldn’t require adding/changing a million other systems to incorporate. Which they’re accomplishing with a mix of discouraging manual resettlement and trying to encourage more passive systems. If they want to do that, then maybe a citizen without a house and/or job should be free to move while a citizen that has their needs met is more costly to move (more than currently proposed).
Once again, you're bending into weird pretzels to get anywhere remotely close to a desirable outcome. And in the end, chose to simply not expand at all for the most part. That's not proof that "claims totally save influence!", it merely shows what kind of weird behaviour the claim cost tends to encourage.

Their goal and the way they go about it don't align. They actually HAVE a solution, several solutions on how to fix manual resettlement. They refuse to take most of them. Solely because they've been refusing to do so for quite some time. Most of what they're doing now is overcomplicating a matter that could easily be solved in several ways. When simple solutions such as GTO have been shown to be pretty effective all in all.

Punishing players for resettling pops is not a solution. It leaves them largely at the same place but punishes them for shortcomings of the game. The same issues remain, people will still feel forced into this. Except now it has become even more frustrating and unfun.
 
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Well I'm glad that you're finally addressing building and population management, but I think that the way to solve both problems is to let the player just decide what he wants the filled planet to look like.

1. For buildings: the way to fix automated colony management is just to get rid of it. Reworking the UI so that players can queue buildings, districts, and building upgrades before the slot unlocks would solve everything. Just make everything queueable. AI management will never make the control freaks happy.
2. For population: As long as pops can only be pushed, resettlement will always be a burden. The way to make it convenient is to also allow the player to request what species he wants on the planet and then have the game pull the pops to their destination. Resettlement could even be combined with species modification.
 
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TL;DR

Old immigration system is being added back into the game, but this time at the cost of a starbase building

Do I have that right? And why not just rework the immigration system as its current incarnation is clearly not getting its job done?
 
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Multiply it on a number of rings you needed.


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.
I always play huge Galaxies. In my current game with two ecu's and about 10 forge planets I make more alloys than I can literally spend. I'm popping out full sized battleship fleets as soon as I have the fleetcap for it and I'm spending most of my influence on habitats to turn into fortress worlds to get that fleetcap.

I'm always so confused by people who say you need many planets and ringworlds and whatnot to get anything done. The Unbidden spawned at 460 at 10x strength and I utterly crushed them using a third of my fleets at the time losing a grand total of 10 battleships.
 
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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.)

yes please. my own quick and dirty experiments were simple, i reduce pop growth by 33%, in later versions by 50% and lastly even by 75% while giving comparable boost to production of pops. And it is surely hard to balance if numbers are just cut that way the whole game over. Every new (freed) slave was so much more valuable for example.
 
Pretty sure it's already a thing, tho the numbers may be slightly off.
Population has no effect on the starbase capacity. If it did it would be much better. As it stands it's number of systems owned which impacts your starbase capacity.

Starbase capacity isn't based on population, but owning more systems (which directly increases starbase cap) does tend to (on average) also increase the number of planets you have, which increases growth, which increases pop count. So while there is no direct causal relationship, the two are partially correlated.

Interestingly the proposed system gives new value to systems devoid of habitable planets as they'll still count for extra starbase capacity. Game settings will also play a role, specifically the habitable planet ratio. The higher you set that the more systems will have a planet you can settle and might want to build a starbase over.

In total this means 14 resettlements per colony. Currently this costs you only 700 energy if a slaver and 1400 energy if you aren't. Now it will also cost non-slavers 140 influence. PER COLONY. That's a massive, massive setback in ability to grab land. Every colony is roughly 2 more systems you can't take.

I can see that as a balance argument for competitive multiplayer, but if we're talking singleplayer or RP focused multiplayer the AI does not do any of that so it'll balance the gap between AI performance and the performance of most player empires. It will also help improve the Corveé System civic and make it worthwhile. Given how Stellaris is primarily a singleplayer game I'd say the net balance is favorable.

I do agree that Egalitarians are getting shafted and the combos you mentioned will be too strong. But I'd rather PDX deals with those on their own rather than have edge cases dictate general game mechanics.

Why do we need more influence sinks? Wasn't the Galactic Community with 100 different laws that require several hundreds of influence to pass + influence cost from using favors enough? By the mid game there is habitats too. If you're gonna do this then slash the influence cost to propose laws in the GC to like 50 or something.

Wait, people actually propose GC laws? I always found that given how slowly the GC works some alien empire or another is going to propose the vast majority of resolutions I want passed anyway, so my influence is better spent elsewhere. I see little point in proposing resolutions unless I have 900+ influence or I'm trying to become the senate.

Ohh, so its just another reason to play authoritarian slaver guilds. Well OK then. Don't think it needs a buff but all of my builds will stay the same.

Yes, that is an issue. Egalitarians and democracies in particular do need some serious love to make them more competitive.
 
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[...], 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.)

You say that like it's a bad thing. :D

I cannot imagine a stellaris game when I'm not constantly bouncing of 0 influence. I have never had an "excess of influence".

How much influence you burn can vary a lot with game settings and playstyle. In my own games I am constantly running low in the early game, but once I've established my borders it tends to start pilling up throughout the entire midgame until I get to the point where I've researched gateways and megastructures and start spending it again.

This is largely due to my own personal playstyle though because I simply do not do most of the things that cost influence after the initial scramble to occupy empty space:
1. I tend to absorb one neighbor and then not make any more claims. This is because I found that managing 10-15 colonies is enjoyable but more than that is micro hell and I'd rather have a weaker empire than endure micro hell.
2. I don't build habitats. The reasonig is mostly the same as why I don't make claims. I might make an exception if I have issues with minerals and need a mining world, but that's rare.
3. I don't absorb vassals. See above. I also prefer making tributaries over making vassals.
4. I do not propose GC resolutions. I prefer to instead back favorable resolutions proposed by other empires as there is always at least one I like in any decently populated galaxy. The only exception to this rule is if I'm trying to become the senate (give myself a permanent seat on a size 1 Galactic Counsel) which is a one time expenditure and typically only happens in the late game.
5. I don't swap edicts. I pick the ones I deem best and just keep them on indefinitely.

I imagine you probably don't limit yourself to a handful of colonies so you keep making claims and build habitats, which is why you use up much more of it than me.
 
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... 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.)
Just a quick question the previous poster reminded me of, bacause it's not iherently clear from your wording:

We do agree that significantly reducing late game pop numbers is a good thing, right? Because our CPU's agree as well.
 
I always play huge Galaxies. In my current game with two ecu's and about 10 forge planets I make more alloys than I can literally spend. I'm popping out full sized battleship fleets as soon as I have the fleetcap for it and I'm spending most of my influence on habitats to turn into fortress worlds to get that fleetcap.

I'm always so confused by people who say you need many planets and ringworlds and whatnot to get anything done. The Unbidden spawned at 460 at 10x strength and I utterly crushed them using a third of my fleets at the time losing a grand total of 10 battleships.
Well, try to set tech/tradition cost to, for a start, 3x. Along with increased crisis strength. You'll need at least two industrial ecus just to feed all scientists you need to keep research barely sufficient to fight even awoken fallen empires with something else but sticks and stones. Plus one ecu to feed pops. Plus some forge ecus. Plus, you'll need to grow pops to fill those ecus, planets that will feed those ecus and everything else. Ever thought pop growth speed is too fast? No, it's not. Can't be. Even with all exploits, policies, edicts, traits and stuff. Every pop critically valuable and any unemployment is crime. Empire just can't afford not to resettle.

And again, all within vanilla galaxy options.
 
And again, all within vanilla galaxy options.
Cranking those options to maximum masochism is always going to wildly distort the dynamics of the game.

(And your post demonstrates why putting things into a "Game Rules" screen instead of just providing a modding framework is an exercise in masochism for the developers.)
 
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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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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.
      View attachment 651640
      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.

View attachment 651642
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.

View attachment 651651View attachment 651643
Slave Resettlement and Worker/Drone/Bio-Trophy Resettlement

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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.

View attachment 651644View attachment 651645View attachment 651646
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.)

View attachment 651652
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.)

View attachment 651655
They like to move it.

View attachment 651656
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.

View attachment 651657
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.

View attachment 651634
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!

  1. Stellaris need macromanagement since 1.0, but it seem you're determined to use a disjointeded automation...
  2. Purple mana is one of Stellaris's worst features, it need to be replaced with an actual role playing political system. But even if you want to use this flawed design you cant have only one mana pool connected to multiple independent systems to imped the players's progression (implemented because of faulty balance)
 
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I think the game should be balanced around the default options. And while players are free to use any setting they want there ought to be some measure of understanding that the game might not be balanced for some settings.
 
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Cranking those options to maximum masochism is always going to wildly distort the dynamics of the game.

(And your post demonstrates why putting things into a "Game Rules" screen instead of just providing a modding framework is an exercise in masochism for the developers.)
For me it demonstrates how much underdeveleped game's structure is. In some setups player feels quite freely and don't need to hit edge cases at all. But anyway, when player hits them, edge cases are.. simple capacity limits. Not tight balancing between efficiency ratios and raw outcomes, not cost of careless planning, but just hard limits. Whoop! - and you can't go further, except at a cost of flat penalty multiplier: the further you already are, the less acceptable even slightest penalties are. Player have hit the wall and that's it.
 
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But I'd rather PDX deals with those on their own rather than have edge cases dictate general game mechanics.

People brought up so many edge cases in this thread that it already is a super polygon. If that's the case it maybe is an indicator that the proposed system isn't such a good idea after all and instead needs to be adjusted.
 
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Well, try to set tech/tradition cost to, for a start, 3x. Along with increased crisis strength. You'll need at least two industrial ecus just to feed all scientists you need to keep research barely sufficient to fight even awoken fallen empires with something else but sticks and stones. Plus one ecu to feed pops. Plus some forge ecus. Plus, you'll need to grow pops to fill those ecus, planets that will feed those ecus and everything else. Ever thought pop growth speed is too fast? No, it's not. Can't be. Even with all exploits, policies, edicts, traits and stuff. Every pop critically valuable and any unemployment is crime. Empire just can't afford not to resettle.

And again, all within vanilla galaxy options.
Yes. But Those are choices *you* make to make the game more challenging. You can't do that and then complain that the game the devs balanced around the standard settings becomes more difficult if you make it more difficult.
 
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People brought up so many edge cases in this thread that it already is a super polygon. If that's the case it maybe is an indicator that the proposed system isn't such a good idea after all and instead needs to be adjusted.

Out of curiosity, what are all these edge cases? I'm only aware of the change giving an advantage to slavers and punishing egalitarians. I'm interested to know what else people listed (I admit I haven't read all 22 pages of the thread).
 
Out of curiosity, what are all these edge cases? I'm only aware of the change giving an advantage to slavers and punishing egalitarians. I'm interested to know what else people listed (I admit I haven't read all 22 pages of the thread).

How do you see it as punishing Egalitarians?

Egalitarians normally don't resettle anyways because it angers their faction [and thus costs lots of influence generation] to do so, which is not worth it.

Transit hubs seem to offer a way to resettle FOR FREE and in a way that bypasses the ban on government-enforced resettling for Egalitarians who want happy factions.

Maybe I'm overlooking something, but to me this looks like a huge buff to Egalitarian playstyles.
 
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