Stellaris Dev Diary #294 - 3.8 ‘Gemini’ Coop Open Beta Release Notes

[ZomgK3tchup]

Venus should be a terraforming candidate together with Mars for any empire starting on Sol -- not matter if it is customized or not. Even if the "terraforming" is just a few Bubblehabs floating high in Venus's atmosphere.

Yeah, I assume these are oversights.

It doesn’t make sense why Venus is terraformable as the UNE but not as any other empire starting in the Sol system.

 

[Idle America]

The devs already fixed that problem with the pre-ftl civs always killing themselves in a nuclear war. But your idea sounds far better than their solution for the problem.

Yeah, I'm glad it's no longer a guarantee, but the fact that the RNG can still decide to glass them without warning undermines my whole reason for buying Primitives.

 

[DamnedLackOfTropicalFruit]

You call this an "exploit" - and I suppose in a sense I see the argument, since it lets you sell 3000 food per month for full price, if you want to play the world's most terrible rhythm clicker game - but it's been the behavior for over three years now?! Through a ton of rounds of work on "fixing" the market? Through the existence of entire empire types rising to prominence on the basis of being able to do this and falling out again as balance changes were made? Through all the many versions when Farmers were so much more efficient than Technicians that generator districts were nigh-worthless? Through the many versions since where Technicians (or especially machine Tech-Drones) are so much more efficient than Miners that the only sane thing to do in the early game is build Generator districts and constantly buy as many minerals per month as the game will allow without screwing you over on price? Through the constant-to-this-day bug where market prices go haywire on loaded games, causing the buy/sell prices on internal market monthly orders to quietly snowball into disaster if you don't forget to disable them before saving/resuming?

After literal years of that, you've now decided that this specific behavior is an exploit and seek to fix it?

Wow. I'm not sure which is worse: the world where you thought the existing behavior was fine for 40 real-world months before deciding it was an exploit, or the world where you noticed it and only just now got around to fixing it. Either way, that's kind of depressing.

I agree that removing tick-selling (and presumably the 52 magic number) will have some important meta-implications, but I think you're massively overstating them here.

Tick selling with farmers is only more efficient than technicians if you're playing Anglers, and even there you can only expect it to net 25% to 15% extra yields. The basis of these builds is not the marginal technician improvement, but the efficient alloy conversion using Catalytic Converters (something which will only be more important with 52 monthly minerals going down to 12).

Buying minerals instead of mining them is only 15% more efficient than miners at base, 7% more efficient with the +1 buildings, or 35% more efficient with energy grids and not mineral purification plants. Since this caps at 52 minerals per month, this nets, in the best case (no other modifiers), 2/1/4 pops.
And the builds that were relying on this conversion aren't even affected that badly, because since 3.4, it's been really easy to shepherd Plantary Automation to build the vast majority of your buildings and districts out of EC, at a better ratio than market conversions.

The "constant-to-this-day bug" is the direct result of the same root cause as the tick selling exploit they just patched. Without the price reset behaviour that tick selling relies on, it doesn't matter if market prices are wrong by a tiny sub-fraction of an energy credit, because going past the magic number doesn't cause the price to snowball.

There are bugs in the game that cause your entire fleet to just not shoot at the enemy and get entirely wiped out, crippling flaws in AI trade acceptance that let you trick them into giving you huge quantities of free resources (to say nothing of vassalisation), and origins that are so wildly unbalanced that they might as well be exploits.
The long-standing existance of a micro-exploit that lets you employ your pops slightly more efficiently to net 4 pops of output has to be really far down their priority list. I'm not at all surprised that it took them 40 months to get around to it.

 

[SeekingEtermity]

I agree that removing tick-selling (and presumably the 52 magic number) will have some important meta-implications, but I think you're massively overstating them here.

Tick selling with farmers is only more efficient than technicians if you're playing Anglers, and even there you can only expect it to net 25% to 15% extra yields. The basis of these builds is not the marginal technician improvement, but the efficient alloy conversion using Catalytic Converters (something which will only be more important with 52 monthly minerals going down to 12).

Buying minerals instead of mining them is only 15% more efficient than miners at base, 7% more efficient with the +1 buildings, or 35% more efficient with energy grids and not mineral purification plants. Since this caps at 52 minerals per month, this nets, in the best case (no other modifiers), 2/1/4 pops.
And the builds that were relying on this conversion aren't even affected that badly, because since 3.4, it's been really easy to shepherd Plantary Automation to build the vast majority of your buildings and districts out of EC, at a better ratio than market conversions.

The "constant-to-this-day bug" is the direct result of the same root cause as the tick selling exploit they just patched. Without the price reset behaviour that tick selling relies on, it doesn't matter if market prices are wrong by a tiny sub-fraction of an energy credit, because going past the magic number doesn't cause the price to snowball.

There are bugs in the game that cause your entire fleet to just not shoot at the enemy and get entirely wiped out, crippling flaws in AI trade acceptance that let you trick them into giving you huge quantities of free resources (to say nothing of vassalisation), and origins that are so wildly unbalanced that they might as well be exploits.
The long-standing existance of a micro-exploit that lets you employ your pops slightly more efficiently to net 4 pops of output has to be really far down their priority list. I'm not at all surprised that it took them 40 months to get around to it.

So, broadly you're correct, but for the first like 1.5 years after the market came out (2.2), Technicians only had base production of 4 (not their current 6) and buildings like Energy Grid gave a percent bonus (additively stacking, like all the others). During that time, using farmers (which gave 6 food right from the start of the current jobs system) was just significantly more efficient; per pop growing food and selling it only gave 5% more energy than generating it at baseline outputs and market fee, but there were all sorts of associated benefits (no need for researching energy production techs, ways to boost food production like Agrarian Upbringing governors, the incredible power of OG Shattered Ring farming segments). Get a market fee reduction or two - not that hard, there's one you can (unreliably) start with, and in the early days you could drive the fee to zero - and it becomes a lot more efficient.

I'm not at all unhappy that they fixed this (by making Technicians produce 6 energy baseline, same as Farmers produce food). I am unhappy that they didn't fix Miners at the same time! Right now, 25 months of Miner output is worth 20 energy less than 25 months of Technician output, once again at base production rates and market fee. Mining Guilds fixes that, as do other bonuses to Miner base output, but it's still very distasteful (and inherently nonsensical) for there to be a job that is strictly less valuable than another in the same tier in the default state of things (aside from the thing where you can't lean on it too much because market buys take longer to return to equilibrium).

Without the price snap-back, strategies based around relying on the market will obviously be less viable, and the market in general will be much less useful at least until we get the galactic market.

 

[Orange1861]

Maybe it used to be, but from the data I have our OOS rate is very very low.

Coop is also an optional feature, if it's unstable it can be avoided until fixed.

Also..why do you think we're doing an Open Beta?

Could Paradox bring back the resync feature please?

 

[velles]

• Added unique textures for Mercury, Venus, Neptune and Uranus for Sol system.

Nice, Uranus and Neptune definitely needed custom textures, way more than Mars or even Jupiter. I'd like to see such ice gas giants spawn in other systems though.
Io and Europa probably should have unique texture as well. Also IMO Titan should be toxic world since it's the only celestial body in Solar System other than Earth and Venus that has a dense atmosphere (it doesn't need to have a unique texture since toxic worlds already have yellowish haze)

 

[Rock Gunnar]

how much longer for toxoids on console and the rest it’s been months now