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!

 

[soulcleave]

Resettling now costing influence means i will turn off land appropriation in my first war as purifiers. was already annoyingf enough that it makes pop settle on 20% habit, but it was fine dealing with it, but now that it costs influence, theres no need to risk it, and im better off doing it manually.

 

[Eladrin]

Have you considered a global growth per empire?

We've been looking at a number of aspects of pop growth.

I hope resettling unemployed pops is cheaper in influence then the regular ones.

I suspect that this would create significant incentive to shut off jobs, which could end up making things worse.

First, instead of making transit hubs a building, why not make them a module with a range, like the trade hubs?

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.)

I'm going to experiment with them as planet-side buildings - while I preferred the decision point of whether to build your starbases exclusively at chokepoints or as support for your planets, I accept the arguments that it may be better as the other alternative.

<Many comments regarding Influence>

One of the major influence sinks in the game disappeared with the change to toggled edicts, and many empires find themselves at or near the Influence cap a significant amount of the time. Yes, I understand that aggressive and expansionist empires prioritizing claims and outposts may struggle with it.

And the −10% Edict Cost / −5% Edict Cost for the Spiritualists. Can we have something decent here ? x)

I concur that this is a pretty sad bonus.

 

[SteelCrow]

Y'all got short memories. Back in the tile system, every pop resettlement cost Influence, 50 iirc.

Also, the cost of upgrading to a basic Starport is negligible: 200 Alloys, reduced to ~half through The Great Game and Corp of Engineers. Not hard to get. I RP it as the infrastructure necessary to move millions or even billions of individuals.

One more thing, starbase limit is a soft cap. The penalty climbs harshly, but I see no problem enduring 2 or 3 starbases, more for a very large empire with tens of thousands of Energy to blow, over the limit. I expect some starbases to be temporary and I think that is fine.

 

[Shirasik]

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

Pfff. Easy. 1k-star galaxy, 5x habitable worlds. Legit scenario for core features as this is vanilla settings. You'll never get starbase cap much enough to cover all systems with, at least, habitable planets. Not to mention habitable megas spamming.
So, along with introduced influence cost for resettlement, pop resettlement micromanagement assumed to be replaced by starbase-with-a-bay management. Therefore whole mechanics will be ignored - either by picking resettlement civic and sticking to APM, or by removing a cap for starbases and getting fully automated network of instant migration.

 

[CReaper210]

Currently Gestalts have almost no incentive to build starbases above worlds as they have no need to protect trade value, no blacksites, and it's more efficient to build at chokepoints. At first glance that this solution is painfully limiting migration, as it's possible to have far more inhabited systems than spare starbase capacity (and obviously influence generation does not scale with colony number for manual resettlement, so lots of overcrowded worlds), and extra harsh for Gestalts (will be forced to position starbases sub-optimally). Also as another user pointed out it has the perverse incentive of building and demolishing starbases to avoid the influence costs... which is obviously an unintended consequence of the 2 contradictory costs in the proposed changes.

Perhaps a local building or decision could also apply this mechanic?
e.g.
Planetary Transport Hub (building with influence cost, -5 energy upkeep) OR
Establish Transport Network Connection (Decision costing influence, adds a deposit/modifier with -5 energy upkeep)
Close Transport Network Connection (No cost, removes deposit/modifier)

Also to avoid the exploit of constructing and deconstructing I'd add an influence cost to the starbase module (to make it more of a permanent cost rather than a temporary one that encourages cycling starbases between systems). It's the exact solution you've added for colony resettlement to prevent the exploit of founding and abandoning colonies and is needed for the exact same reason.

The result would be that the starbase module would be more efficient in habitat/ringworld systems as it would cover multiple planetary bodies while a building/decision would be used when there's no spare starbase capacity.

I really feel that for gestalts, this kind of mechanic should just be an inherit feature for them. There's no real reason a gestalt would leave their useless population sitting there doing nothing, except for the potential monetary cost of moving them.

Although at the same time, I also don't really like the idea of deviancy and find it to represent the complete opposite of a gestalt empire as it only seems to serve the purpose of restricting hive minds to be even more like regular empires.

For me, this whole unemployment and resettlement issue is one of the things I think was just outright better with the old tile system. Having it so the pops simply stop growing without space made this a total non-issue altogether.

With most of us seemingly annoyed at having to deal with this for such a long time, it's very strange to see the developers attempting to make the actual fix into this costly feature instead of just making it a by default, automatic thing that just works. Or even just a simple planetary decision no matter which kind of empire you use.

 

[Shirasik]

Y'all got short memories. Back in the tile system, every pop resettlement cost Influence, 50 iirc.

IIRC, it was completely free of charge and automatic: single pop on overcrowded planet will migrate to planet with a free tile.

 

[Benjie164]

One of the major influence sinks in the game disappeared with the change to toggled edicts, and many empires find themselves at or near the Influence cap a significant amount of the time. Yes, I understand that aggressive and expansionist empires prioritizing claims and outposts may struggle with it.

I want to open up with the understanding that yes, I understand you are supposed to have to think about when and where to spend your influence, but the amount of places you need to spend it is massive.

I have to disagree with that quote completely, I don't remember a single game where I wasn't struggling with a lack of influence. In the early game, it's expanding your empire and colonising planets, practically always bouncing off zero as your science ships find more than you can inhabit.

Then later on, you've got proposals for the galactic community, let alone actually becoming part of the council and being able to veto abilities or using the influence to call in favours to get things blocked or passed. What about mastery of nature decisions? More influence. God forbid you want to make a non-aggression pact or join a federation, because guess what, that costs influence per month.

Then as you get in the later game, expansion from claims, megastructures, habitats being an extremely important one.

Throughout the whole democratic process of your game, using your influence to get in leaders that you may need at the time or that are just in general strong. Now on top of that we want to add resettlement costs as well?

There is no time in the game where you don't need influence, and I struggle to fathom what kind of game is being played when the player is hitting their influence cap. I know not everyone will play the same, but I think that the "many comments about influence" speak for themselves.

Removing one influence sink and replacing it with another doesn't fix the problem. This just feels like a way to punish players for not using the new sorting system in my opinion.

Honestly, if we're going to be doing that, we need a better way of earning influence. We have bits like rivalries, factions or late game ambition to give us a plus 5. This is not enough though, I practically always feel like I'm sat around waiting for influence. It's feels like a way to just slow you down in the game. It baffles me that you can specialise into science, alloys, consumer goods, unity or even admin capacity on planets, but you can barely do anything much to improve your influence.

I know this is just my opinon, and others may or may not share it, but I believe influence is the biggest problem in this game at the moment. It's the one resource you just cannot generate extra of in a meaningful way.

Another idea could be to split it between internal and external influence, as a way to make sure you can act in a certain place outside your empire, for example the galactic community, but also act within your empire, say in elections. Why do we need to have it all lumped under the same group? Why does building a megastructure mean I can't put forward a motion in the galactic community. Why does forming an non-aggression pact increase the amount of time for me to be able to build my next megastructure? I don't believe it is a great solution, but I feel if I'm going to make complaints, I should also attempt a solution.

I can already see people echoing these comments both here and on the steam post. Quite of lot of them are pretty insulting, which I don't agree with but it seems players feel quite strongly about this.

Thank you for taking the time to read. I would love to hear if you disagree with me on this or have any comments on it.

 

[mial42]

Also, the cost of upgrading to a basic Starport is negligible: 200 Alloys, reduced to ~half through The Great Game and Corp of Engineers. Not hard to get. I RP it as the infrastructure necessary to move millions or even billions of individuals.

It's not the cost of the starport that's the problem, it's that there literally aren't enough starbase slots to put one over every planet.

 

[laptor]

I feel the changes to automated colony management and pop resettlement will come nearly two years late - but late is better than never.
Pdx please consider not to restrict the functionality of the Transit Hubs to heavily - I dont't want to move anyone manually anymore!

 

[mial42]

One of the major influence sinks in the game disappeared with the change to toggled edicts, and many empires find themselves at or near the Influence cap a significant amount of the time. Yes, I understand that aggressive and expansionist empires prioritizing claims and outposts may struggle with it.

How do you play? Every empire always needs more influence. You need it for pacts, for the GC, for outposts, for claims, for habitats, for planetary decisions, most importantly the arcology project, and for gateways and megastructures. The only sort of empire I've found that doesn't always need more is genocidal gestalts, who don't have the Arcology project and do have total war.

 

[Lorenerd11]

One of the major influence sinks in the game disappeared with the change to toggled edicts, and many empires find themselves at or near the Influence cap a significant amount of the time. Yes, I understand that aggressive and expansionist empires prioritizing claims and outposts may struggle with it.

Would at least reducing Influence costs to what I've suggested, 5 for Workers, 10 for Specialists, 20 for Rulers be a option?

 

[Mealya]

I concur that this is a pretty sad bonus.

This is why I love the last diaries. There is some crazy positive exchanges. It gives me the impression to move forward and faster than never in a good way. Keep it up !

 

[LystAP]

This is why I love the last diaries. There is some crazy positive exchanges. It gives me the impression to move forward and faster than never in a good way. Keep it up !

What should the new Spiritualist bonus be? Ethics Attraction - although there is already a Ethics attraction bonus from the faction being active? There's already a Unity boost. Happiness boost? Or reduced Organic upkeep - like how Materialists have reduced Robot upkeep? Reduced Organic upkeep can represent Spiritualist being less materialistic? Or perhaps a Spiritualist counterpart to Academic Privilege - Theocratic Privilege?

 

[Cryswar]

Generally looks really cool! Anything to cut down the late-game busywork is great, and I like that there's still good reason to play manually earlygame and keep an eye on colonizes all game, but lategame trading some efficiency for laziness seems like a fair trade.

One concern - I didn't see any mention of Unity planet designations or automation - is that at all planned? I realize unity isn't THE biggest issue in vanilla, but it's frustrating to have no options whatsoever to automate it, and if you use mods that add traditions (or vanilla with additional tradition costs) there are very large use cases for wanting unity-focused worlds.

 

[MarkAngelo]

I don’t see the benefit and locking this behind another mechanic. I get that as a game designer you want to create the right “feel” of running an empire, but too often this game has attempted that with more mechanics and left us with cluttered game systems that leave us feeling more like interns doing busy work.

Give us the option to stop immigration/migration if we want it and then just let the pops move freely of their own accord. Especially in an egalitarian empire. I don’t see the purpose for making this behind a mechanic -at all-. What balance negatives are there if the pops just move of their own volition? In egal empires make it automatic and impossible to stop and in authoritarian ones make it a toggle. Boom, finished. Pops move and everyone is happy.

Let us focus on other aspects of the game that aren’t a pain in the ass and take away from the immersion, right? definitely don’t leave this on star bases though if you have to keep it. Having to take up (a now limited) building slot is already enough of a penalty. Locking this behind star bases will just cause more angst. I feel like you’re creating more problems for yourself as a developer. If this were just an inherent property/rule of this game, like the fact that we get resources monthly, we wouldn’t be having this discussion at all.

edit: I’m open to being wrong on this I just don’t understand why. Maybe it’s because I don’t understand game design. But I feel that making it simple and easy so we don’t think about it is great. Why do a half measure? Just eliminate this as a clickable mechanic from the game so we can focus on fun stuff.

 

[Eladrin]

Would at least reducing Influence costs to what I've suggested, 5 for Workers, 10 for Specialists, 20 for Rulers be a option?

All numbers are subject to change.

 

[PatateMan]

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.)

Would it be possible for them to be built by construction ships (such as mining stations, research stations, starbases, etc).

Have one be built for each planet? Many are already asking for a planet side building anyway. This would allow for "the feel of building out a network" (much like players build out a gateway network). It would also grant access to a QoL improvement, without having to penalize the output of a planet or utility of a starbase (or a starbase slot).

If that is not the intention, costs for their construction could be raised, making it a harder choice to build.

 

[mial42]

I don’t see the benefit and locking this behind another mechanic. I get that as a game designer you want to create the right “feel” of running an empire, but too often this game has attempted that with more mechanics and left us with cluttered game systems that leave us feeling more like interns doing busy work.

Give us the option to stop immigration/migration if we want it and then just let the pops move freely of their own accord. Especially in an egalitarian empire. I don’t see the purpose for making this behind a mechanic -at all-. What balance negatives are there if the pops just move of their own volition? In egal empires make it automatic and impossible to stop and in authoritarian ones make it a toggle. Boom, finished. Pops move and everyone is happy.

Let us focus on other aspects of the game that aren’t a pain in the ass and take away from the immersion, right? definitely don’t leave this on star bases though if you have to keep it. Having to take up (a now limited) building slot is already enough of a penalty. Locking this behind star bases will just cause more angst. I feel like you’re creating more problems for yourself as a developer. If this were just an inherent property/rule of this game, like the fact that we get resources monthly, we wouldn’t be having this discussion at all.

100% agree. Often, the simplest fix is the best.

 

[MightySultan]

We've been looking at a number of aspects of pop growth.


I suspect that this would create significant incentive to shut off jobs, which could end up making things worse.


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.)

I'm going to experiment with them as planet-side buildings - while I preferred the decision point of whether to build your starbases exclusively at chokepoints or as support for your planets, I accept the arguments that it may be better as the other alternative.


One of the major influence sinks in the game disappeared with the change to toggled edicts, and many empires find themselves at or near the Influence cap a significant amount of the time. Yes, I understand that aggressive and expansionist empires prioritizing claims and outposts may struggle with it.


I concur that this is a pretty sad bonus.

I made a post earlier addressing some of the concerns about exploitability and micro-management of the new Transit Hub compared to manual relocation, as well as the unfair advantage it seems to apply to a Corvée System empire's growth. You mentioned you were looking at growth but could we get some more concrete response to these serious balance concerns? Especially with regard to Corvée System, as this civic is a flat +50% growth speed for the first 8-9 pops on a planet or it saves 80-90 influence per planet - both massive buffs. This same argument can be stretched to slaves. A lot of people are already playing authoritarian because egalitarian mechanics are disruptive and not always fun whilst the extra influence as authoritarian gives you more fun to play as you wish. As it currently stands this balance will divide massively even further in authoritarians favour, especially with egalitarians getting their extra influence gains so much later than authoritarians. Authoritarians will both have more influence to claim systems and with slave guilds, at the same time get free movement of pops to maximise their growth speed.

 

[SteelCrow]

...influence. It's the one resource you just cannot generate extra of in a meaningful way.

That's the point. Spending the resource means making decisions affecting the whole empire, regardless of size.

Another idea could be to split it between internal and external influence, as a way to make sure you can act in a certain place outside your empire, for example the galactic community, but also act within your empire, say in elections. Why do we need to have it all lumped under the same group? Why does building a megastructure mean I can't put forward a motion in the galactic community. Why does forming an non-aggression pact increase the amount of time for me to be able to build my next megastructure? I don't believe it is a great solution, but I feel if I'm going to make complaints, I should also attempt a solution.

This idea interests me, though. The way I see it, Unity should be that resource for internal changes. When Administrative Capacity is kept under control, Unity costs are rather low. It's not tough to max out all Traditions and Ambitions. It makes sense to me that people have to be united to make something like a Dyson Sphere or reorganize the government.