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!

 

[sillyrobot]

Changes do not exist in a vacuum.

Where did I state or imply that they did? One can only judge the nature and value of a change based upon known state and proposed change. One cannot project one's fears, desires, and hopes into that judgement based upon noncommittal noises from some actors.

 

[The_Meme_Man]

So, Synths can migrate themselves again finally?

 

[Pale Blue]

In general, I feel like Egalitarians should have an easier time with automatic Pop resettlement (cheaper Transit Hubs?) while Authoritarians should have cheaper manual resettlement options. The Civics given are a good idea but I would add more, like Influence-free Slave resettlement for Slaver Guilds.

I think slaves should always be influence free, but slaver guilds could also significantly cut into the energy cost for slaves. It would make slave resettlement nearly costless and allow to put them to work where you currently need them.

 

[Lorenerd11]

I think it's their way of saying "mass resettlement is not the intended way to play"

Then there's another thing that needs to be done to reduce the use of resettlement:

In order for it not to part of the core game loop, we should have more control over which species are allowed, encouraged, discouraged, or disallowed to grow, migrate, or be assembled on which planets and sectors, and it should be possible for pops on a planet to decline from high emigration instead of growing infinitely.

Don't just make it harder to resettle, actually reduce the need to resettle.

 

[GeorgieBest]

I like the idea of increasing the Pop Resettlement costs so that it is an actual decision and not something you feel you have to do since it is super-cheap if you're more than 5 years into the game. Certainly, it will not appease min-maxers with hundreds of planets but if it's not supposed to be a main/exploitable mechanic, making it more costly might be a way to go.

Not sure about Transit Hubs though, as someone said, a Planetary Decision might be a better choice. However, I like the general idea of having designated systems where Pops can migrate from/to while some systems are just...off limits, let's say. If you have several planets/habitats in the system, it would have more sense to have it as a Planetary Decision - you designate your farming planet as a valid migration target while the black site secret research habitat is off-limits for volunteers. Kinda gives me the Soviet 'secret city' kind of vibe. Same with prison planets/thrall worlds.

In general, I feel like Egalitarians should have an easier time with automatic Pop resettlement (cheaper Transit Hubs?) while Authoritarians should have cheaper manual resettlement options. The Civics given are a good idea but I would add more, like Influence-free Slave resettlement for Slaver Guilds.

I was under the impression that slaves don't ever cost influence to resettle.

Another oversight of this station/transit hub design is what you mentioned - you can't specific specific habitats/planets within a system to be off-limits. I appreciate the devs trying to fix this issue, but introducing another type of poorly designed micromanagement to fix an older worse designed form of micromanagement is not the solution I was hoping for.

 

[Andy_Dandy]

Adding influence cost makes it impossible to use. It was added to abandon colonies that you conquered by resettling pops instead of crashing your economy by unused districts and buildings. A problem most prevalent in purifier empires.
Unless you remove upkeep from unused districts/buildings this will result in the same problems we had before.

Yes it solves the colony-resettle exploit to get pops, but that is a thing that shouldn't even exist. It was often suggested that colony ships cost a pop to build and the +1 on colonies modifier get removed. 3 pops for a few resources is pretty good, but also doesn't make any sense.

The easier sollution: Destroy districts and buildings you don't need.

 

[Troyen]

I'm surprised nobody has commented on the change to democratic governments, since that looks pretty bad to me. Thematically democracies should be the ones to receive the faction bonuses, as they have the greatest need to be attuned to what the people want. And in my games pop demotion is usually a rare occurrence, which makes this bonus so much less useful than the others.

Yeah, I don't think you want to be in a situation where you're frequently benefitting from the faster demotion speed. That doesn't compare at all to +1 edict cap or increased influence from factions. (I don't think the dictator one is that enticing either, but democracy's looks really bad.)

 

[James Fire]

Where did I state or imply that they did? One can only judge the nature and value of a change based upon known state and proposed change. One cannot project one's fears, desires, and hopes into that judgement based upon noncommittal noises from some actors.

When you judged it as if it was. You judged it as though it would be added to the game with no other changes. When Eladrin already said this would not be alone.

 

[Calvax]

Moving pops is not supposed to be free, and is a huge part of the stategy early game. I guess developers wanted to keep this aspect of the early game, and at the same time create new tools to ease migration of unemployed pops later game. I totally agree with the Devs in that case.

I get that and I probably should have worded my concern a bit differently. It's not so much that it requires a cost I'm worried about, so much that this doesn't seem like it would scale well (but as Eladrin later said there are other changes in the works that might help this). When you have a handful of planets deciding on where to build stations and transit hubs seems easy and better than having to manually resettle. But if you've got dozens of planets and habitats then to prevent overpopulation flags popping up everywhere you have to keep track of your transit stations and regularly upgrade/downgrade stations and swap out modules. This seems like a hassle for no particularly reason.

 

[Enexin]

Honestly, I hate the transit hubs, I don't think pop growth related effects belong on Starbases. IMO if something to that effect needs to exist, it should be a planetary decision.

 

[sillyrobot]

When you judged it as if it was. You judged it as though it would be added to the game with no other changes. When Eladrin already said this would not be alone.

I am judging the proposal presented. Should a different/expanded proposal be presented, I will judge that one its merits too.

 

[Archael90]

Again, what about migrations, did i missed it?
Will immigration cap be taken off?
On fully overcrowded planets - will pops be migrating?

 

[permeakra]

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.

Have you considered making a Transit Hub planet-side building and/or decision?

 

[MrFreake_PDX]

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.

I've kind of alluded to it in this one and the last one, but the experiment that is not to be discussed yet has major ramifications on pop growth, immigration, and the like. I'm just not sure if I'm going to keep it yet or if it needs to bake a while longer, so it doesn't get a dev diary yet.

Just like to highlight these snippets for everyone. Some of the concerns that have been raised in the replies here may be addressed in a later DD, but we're not ready to talk about them yet.

And just to reiterate, these changes are still very much a work in progress, and not going live for awhile. Put away the pitchforks, fam.

 

[Liggi]

Have you considered making a Transit Hub planet-side building and/or decision?

Having it as a building is a pretty good idea, actually. As well as a Starbase building. Takes up a slot, so needs an investment, but allows a bit more flexibility in use.

 

[Laaaaan]

pay 100 energy, 10 influence to move a pop off a world
pay 100 energy, 210 influence to move the last one
may aswell just leave a pop being purged there and sidestep that entirely

wouldn't it be better to have colony ships cost pops in themselves or something? on the discord it was confirmed this planetary abandonment cost was to counter the super recolonisation strat

edit: for the question of +1 pop on colonisation finish, colonization fervor could unlock a policy that increases the cost of colony ships for more pops on colonisation finish in return

 

[lilsaihah]

People're talking about the bonuses for Democracy and Oligarchy;

I think it would make a lot of sense for Democracies to get more Influence from whichever faction is currently in power, while Oligarchies get more Influence from each happy faction.

 

[LystAP]

So Terravores can just crack a world once they finished eating it? Cool.

 

[Lorenerd11]

So Terravores can just crack a world once they finished eating it? Cool.

I kinda hoped for a special Consumed World planet type that could then be restored by regular empires through terraforming with additional mineral cost alongside energy.

You know, just like Crisis-created barren worlds.

 

[klingonadmiral]

Is the colony in a Sector?

• Colonies have to be in a (non-Frontier) Sector in order to use either sector or planetary automation.

For this to work, the sector system needs to be more malleable. Currently, it regularily results in "orphaned worlds" such as those:

Having single-planet sectors is pretty pointless, what should happen upon creation of a new sector from this planet is for neighboring systems to be moved into this sector. As you can see my core sector has well over a dozen worlds, so I wouldn't mind ceding some of them to another sector.

If I may add, why is there no planet designation for an unity-focussed world?

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

It can happen easily if you take a planet during war, or if a pop with better traits for the job migrates to the planet. And bugs, of course. Currently there are several ways for pops of higher strata to end up unemployed, most notably if one doesn't build a specialist-employing building after upgrading a colonial shelter.

The tooltip effect is a bit of a mouthful.

Now can we please get an option that so that starbases don't auto-generate trade routes? the hassle of having to turn it off for every. single. starbase. makes me rather built them in insignificant backwater systems than those with inhabited worlds.

Also, as others said I would like to know the speed of which pops migrate.

Because I can already see a "pop pump" strategy for Ecomenupoleis with disabled worker jobs to fill up your other worlds if it happens decently fast.

Also, maybe Trade Hubs could boost the range of the Transit Hub building.