Stellaris Dev Diary #211: 3.0.3 Beta Updates

[Roboduck3000]

Great work as always devs! Looking forward to try out the new tweaks once they are live on the beta branch.

In another thread, I made the suggestion to make it easier for players to understand the growth system by getting rid of planetary carrying capacity and use housing instead (https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...capacity-why-not-use-housing-directly.1471713). It was well received by the community.

May I ask what your thoughts are on this? I think a lot of frustration with 3.0 comes from the fact that carrying capacity is obscure and hidden from the players, making the system appear illogical. Furthermore, it does not account for housing modifiers on pops, leading to many scenarios where planets stop growing even though they have plenty of free housing and jobs. Applying the currently implemented growth curve on housing instead, which is something that is prominently displayed in the UI and the players are familiar with, could be a solution to this problem.

Yes! Housing looks to be useless information now. only CC matters for growth and stability for output.

 

[Sedrel]

the slider is the way! thanks guys, that's giving me peace again

 

[alwayssleepy]

I'm looking forward to increase AI.
I didn't want to see voluntary protectorate offer chain of bankrupted empire...

 

[RobInconformista]

I get the need to reduce jobs, but why remove the ability to specialize planets using the tier 2 resource buildings? I loved that they essentially doubled the basic resource job. It felt like I was truly exploiting the planet, squeezing in more farms or digging deeper mines. Incremental changes to production numbers just feels... lackluster. Not exciting.

Also, something that has always confused me: why has food been removed completely from pop growth? Maybe I am dumb and am missing something, but having excess stores of food seems to be pointless nowadays, since we still don't have the planatery decision to dump that food into a planet to boost growth there. All food seems to be good for is selling in bulk for less and less energy. Food just feels useless beyond ensuring you are producing a positive net result for population maintenance. I get the feeling logistical pop growth is supposed to represent, in some form, the limits of being able to feed and support a population, but the immersion falls apart every time I have reached max food storage and dump all of it into the market without any noticeable effects. Just... weird.

So it powered up alloy & cg production, leaving slots & districts free, but moving to the 2nd tier was drastic, adding a vast number of jobs. A 1 tier alloy/industry added 2 jobs, the 2nd may be 8.
You needed to limit jobs and redevelop districts at times.

Then, what about all the buildings without such a super multiplier effect and those without districts?

It was fun, but not what a casual player expects and hard to manage.

 

[King Harkinian]

Yes! Housing looks to be useless information now. only CC matters for growth and stability for output.

Rather than ditching Carrying Capacity, it would be better to ditch Housing and simply have Carrying Capacity replace it. They're nearly the same thing, but CC has the benefit of having undeveloped districts provide "housing" depending on planet habitability, and moreso than basic resource districts. Which is a great addition. It also makes Blockers a little more relevant since they hold the CC back.

 

[grommile]

Empire Pop Growth Scale should never be zero, it's dangerous and the product is broken at/past the endgame.

So don't put it there in your playthroughs!

You can put all kinds of broken setups into galaxy gen. 25x crisis + 5x tech cost + .25x habitables + minimum midgame+endgame dates is infinitely more broken than 0x empire-wide penalty, but the game is quite happy to let you do it.

 

[OnyxAbussos]

LOVE IT! Thank you.

 

[GARAP]

The new balance changes are welcome and my god finally we got a clerk jobs buff. We've been talking about how they're terrible since 2.2 released. Better late than never.

But let's not forget about species trait while we celebrate, alright? Conformists is too expensive; Deviants doesn't reduce enough government ethics attraction; Unruly gives too many trait points OR doesn't increase empire sprawl from pops enough; Solitary is literally a free pick since free housing is not an issue and Communal is useless for the same reason.

 

[Archael90]

Great changes, Hope all will be as good.
I have a one thing tho - clerks. Maybe instead of reducing their numbers, You could make game to see them as unemployed pops in terms of automatic resettlement depending on empire politics:
- all clerks
- when amenities on planet are >0
- when amenities on planet provide 20% happiness

 

[GnoSIS]

So don't put it there in your playthroughs!

You can put all kinds of broken setups into galaxy gen. 25x crisis + 5x tech cost + .25x habitables + minimum midgame+endgame dates is infinitely more broken than 0x empire-wide penalty, but the game is quite happy to let you do it.

No galaxy setup should bring the game to a halt. That setting at zero, would stop any PC. The others you quoted will not.

 

[grommile]

No galaxy setup should bring the game to a halt. That setting at zero, would stop any PC.

Eventually.

Many people quite reasonably give zero damns what happens after the victory date, and any value low enough to satisfy the "kill the feature entirely" contingent will "stop any PC" only very slightly less effectively than zero would.

(and strictly speaking, sooner or later even 0.5 would "stop any PC" because it's not an absolute hard cap) .

 

[Schlafendes Wiesel]

Yay more options. And i still dont know what the best combination for endgame year+crisis stength is

When too many pops in the endgame are the reason for performacne issues why the solution isnt just to half the amount by double the productivity of jobs and reduce the growth by half? Needs a lot of balancing for sure.
Would also love too see, that pops have a stronger impact on the empire sprawl (exponential) so that other empires have a little chance to catch up.

 

[Velaroz]

I feel like the change to the Industrial buildings is interesting... But the lack of the extra jobs initially felt like it would result in a loss of throughput.

So I did the math, using 1 industrial on a forge world/gestalt-owned planet, so 2 per district, plus 2 from building as reference.

Base mineral upkeep of 24, base alloy production of 12, ignoring the potential gains current or before.

Currently, the building adds another 2 jobs, bringing us up to 36 minerals drained to make 18 alloys.
Tentative change removes the extra jobs, but bumps us up to I believe 40 minerals and 20 alloys...

Each additional district would have been +4 jobs, for 24 more minerals going into 12 more alloys.
Now we'd have just 2 jobs, for 20 minerals and 10 alloys.

So they would be completely equal at 2 districts + building... But past that point, extra jobs wins out. However, this heavily reduces the amount of jobs used to maintain a comparable amount of alloy production, allowing more pops to be put to use actually getting the needed resources to fuel those forges and fund the war coffers and so on.

 

[mial42]

Currently pops do a lot of daily calculations, many which seem unnecessarily to calculate each day.
Among your approaches are you looking into reducing the amount of calculation caused by a single pop?



If I understand this correctly that means the maximum bonus is the +3.00 that is currently possible.
There's been some discussions how a higher limit would benefit "tall" playstyles. have you considered increasing that slider to a x3 or even x4?

This is from people misunderstanding how LG works. A higher cap doesn't benefit "tall" playstyles, it:
1) Benefits big planets. "Taller" playstyles (however that is defined), do not have bigger planets then "wide" playstyles.
2) Makes the "optimal growth range" much smaller; instead of getting max growth from say, 25-50 pops, you might be getting it from 30-35 pops instead. This makes expansion even more important, since you'd start losing max growth earlier (and thus need new planets to shift excess pops to quicker).

 

[fourteenfour]

I get the need to reduce jobs, but why remove the ability to specialize planets using the tier 2 resource buildings? I loved that they essentially doubled the basic resource job. It felt like I was truly exploiting the planet, squeezing in more farms or digging deeper mines. Incremental changes to production numbers just feels... lackluster. Not exciting.

Why would technology increase the number of jobs? Technology should both improve production versus the amount of people required to work it. Now when you upgrade your building it represents efficiency of the technology freeing pops to work other jobs!

 

[sillyrobot]

Thanks for explaining. So, the incentive is to maintain as much capacity as possible - on worlds which we want to see grow in terms of pops?

Sort of. Under a true logistic curve, having a pop count equal to half capacity would give the greatest growth. This curve is capped at both ends and also caps the maximum growth a colony receives.

The curve isn't straightforward, but in essence, the incentive is to get capacity to at least 65. At 65, a band forms at the half-way point +/- 4 which grants +3 growth. As capacity rises past 65, the band widens and is always centred on the half-capacity point, but the band widening grows faster than the centre shifts, so at higher capacities, more pop counts hit the +3 point. 100 capacity grants +3 growth for pop counts between 22 - 78 , for example.

 

[GnoSIS]

Eventually.

Many people quite reasonably give zero damns what happens after the victory date, and any value low enough to satisfy the "kill the feature entirely" contingent will "stop any PC" only very slightly less effectively than zero would.

(and strictly speaking, sooner or later even 0.5 would "stop any PC" because it's not an absolute hard cap) .

In that case, 0.05 or 0.10 works perfectly.

 

[cardinal_z]

I think the planet capacity system implies that fully developed worlds that are stagnate should have 0 housing. After the changes to district modifying buildings, this would be rather hard on rural worlds. To reach the balance, the planet should have no city district and building slots. Otherwise pop will keep grow even if theres no jobs avaliable. The balance between housing and job is even harder for species with communal trait. They would have close to +10 housing and continue pop growth on fully developed world that are supposed to be stagnate. This might be good for gameplay but I wouldnt say it logically make sense. The balance is also hard to achieve on city worlds. On a planet with size 13+ and maxed out city districts, only comercial building can create enough jobs to balance the housing. A tech world only needs 8-10 city districts. Creating a tech arcology from tech world "naturally" is barely possible. Government city world is just a complete waste of planets.

Maybe city districts can provide 2 less housings just like building provide 2 less jobs? Maybe building slot limit can be increased or even lifted? There is now a hard cap to building slots according to planet size and since expected buildings on rural worlds is further reduced maybe the buildings on city worlds can increase a little?

I think to be able to reach job-housing balance and to be able to progress to arcology smoothly are some of the main criteria that adds immersion and realism into the game. The population-jobs-production balance is a marvelous success even without those balances in my opinion, but maybe housing-job balance can also have some attention?

 

[maxirage]

Rather than ditching Carrying Capacity, it would be better to ditch Housing and simply have Carrying Capacity replace it. They're nearly the same thing, but CC has the benefit of having undeveloped districts provide "housing" depending on planet habitability, and moreso than basic resource districts. Which is a great addition. It also makes Blockers a little more relevant since they hold the CC back.

Carrying capacity is a nebulous and abstract term, while housing is comprehensible to the average person. Personally I'd prefer if we got rid of both of them, since I never found housing to be fun nor add anything to the game.

 

[Zxcpoi]

Please consider clerks producing +1 administrative capacity