Stellaris Dev Diary #328 - New Year, New Beta

[Abdulijubjub]

tl;dr at the bottom

No, it should work great for Anglers / Idyll, too.

If they have food excess, they can turn it into energy. They can control exactly how much by putting their Bio-Reactors on colonies with the appropriate number of Technicians. If they want lots of Farmers -- which is quite appropriate for Idyll -- they can use their excess food to meet their energy requirement with fewer Technician jobs.

The converse is the problem: the current proposed solution leaves lithoids / robots / overlords out in the cold when they get too much food income.

My solution should apply to BOTH scenarios.

This is the disconnect. In my experience, this is not true at all.

In every Anglers game I've played (and every Agrarian Idyll game, since I only pick it with Anglers), I have 0 (zero) technicians. Either they're a true trade build or the economy is buoyed on the incidental trade produced by Anglers and sales to the market. The ability to skip all the technician techs and have no generator world is half the draw of the Anglers civic. If the effect on farmers were removed, it would be useless for Anglers (or nearly useless).

And even if they did use Technicians, it would be much, much less useful: making the extremely efficient food job that's already making net 10 output base (8 food, 2 trade) produce less food and more energy lets you employ more of them without going into food surpluses. But making the few incidental technicians you have around burn a bit of extra food to make more energy lets you squeeze in much fewer Anglers.

ex. If a Bio-Reactor removes 25% of the Angler's output, you can have 33% more of them and produce the same net food (4*6=3*8). But if a Bio-Reactor causes technicians to burn 25% of the Angler's output, you'd have to already have as many Technicians as Anglers to get the same increase in Anglers (the efficient job). It's just a weaker effect unless you have more technicians already.

Pretty sure I said -1 food upkeep -> +1 energy output.

-2 food -> +2 energy might be fine, perhaps as a building upgrade.

I picked -2/+2 because it was the existing bioreactor effect. But the same logic applies to -1/+1.


I'd argue that -1/+1 is too small to matter, though. For -2/+2, 3 technicians and 1 farmer do the work of 4 technicians, so an Agrarian Idyll empire effectively gets +.25 amenities per technician. With -1/+1, it would be 6 technicians and 1 farmer, so effectively +.14 amenities per technician. And a e.g. lithoid empire with an unneeded +500 food per month from vassals would need to produce/use 3500 energy per month to burn through it.

Anglers Trade Build is a valid concern but I would argue that Bio-Reactor -- which has always turned food into energy -- is the wrong tree to bark up about that issue.

In other words, no version has catered to that niche, so leaving that niche uncovered is reasonable.

I was referring more to synths/lithoids that have unwanted food from vassals (the segment you're proposing this change to help). If they primarily use trade for energy, then tying the bioreactor to technicians doesn't help them (though the farmer version obviously didn't help them either).

Not really sure what your concern is here. Bio-Reactors always worked the same on food from purged pops as they did on food from farm-grown ultra-corn.

It's just a question of whether it should help more for dumping unneeded food for farmerless empires that end up with food anyway (Terravores purging, lithoids/synths with vassals, etc.) or for civics with buffed farmers that are desperately trying to keep those farmers relevant past the early game. That's more a question of dev intent than a "concern" though.

That's not really an alternative, but it's a fine addition and I wouldn't mind if the building also did that.

And yeah, it would be planet-unique in my suggestion, just like it appears to be in the beta patch notes.

I don't really see how it's not an alternative. It does what you want to achieve with the technician change (bulk conversion of food to energy without needing farmers). It can completely replace the technician alternative you proposed (or supplement it).

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As a side note: I think the -2 food/+2 energy from farmers version has an important property that the -1 food/+1 energy (or -2/+2) on technicians wouldn't. There's no incentive to build it just for it's own sake; you don't have a need for the dev's proposed farmer modifying version unless you have too much food already. -1 food/+1 energy on technicians would make it more efficient to add bio-reactors and produce food to fuel the bio-reactors even if they didn't need it otherwise:

With +60% energy from technicians/+60% food from farmers (from tech), +4 food/energy base (from buildings/rings), and around +100% to output from other sources:

• 14 technicians make 10*14*2.6=364 energy.
• 13 technicians with a -1/+1 bio-reactor and 1 farmer elsewhere make 11*13*2.6=371.8 energy, burn 1*13*2=26 food in technician upkeep, and produce 10*1*2.6=26 extra food.
• So adding the bio-reactors and using farmers to support technicians makes 2% more energy (around 3% of the net, if you count upkeep). This is on par with a +5% bonus to job output. Even if you had no surplus to start with, you're encouraged to use bio-reactors as yet another technician boosting building.

It makes it more complex to play optimally.
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I'd almost rather the bio-reactors remained even more niche, with on-paper suboptimal conversion ratios. The old bio-reactors converted 25 food to 20 energy. They were intentionally suboptimal unless you had food you didn't need, in which case they were slightly better than the market.

The farmer modifying one has this property (ish): the reduced output is more painful than the increased energy because farmer jobs miss out on important buffs to energy production unless you're already making more food than you need. It just doesn't help the original bio-reactor users.

But if you just keep the existing -25 food/+20 energy base bio-reactor effect, the original bio-reactor users can keep doing their thing (albeit, more diffusely). And if you add the planned upgrade which converts food to gas (ex. another -25 food, +2 gas, to keep the original ratios), then you let it scale and let it be universally useful. But it continues to be pop-free production (and continues to produce energy/gas from almost nothing if you put it on a planet with heavy upkeep reduction).

So each approach has its tradeoffs. Personally, I'm partial to something like Bio-reactors having the following effects:

• Technicians produce -3 food/+2 energy (bulk energy production from excess food)
• Farmers produce -1 food/+1 energy (more efficient but lower bulk than technicians, though the +60% food output would eat into that gain).
• Upgrade causes both jobs to burn another -1 food and produce 0.1 gas.

But then the tooltip would be really long.

tl;dr:

• The beta farmer-modifying change helps Anglers and Agrarian Idyll, but leaves lithoids/machines out in the cold. This is bad.
• Doing just your proposed technician-modifying change doesn't expand the role of bio-reactors, it just makes them more scalable. And it leaves out trader lithoids/synths, so it's even more limited than the current version. And it makes bio-reactors obligatory (or at least, optimal) even if you don't have excess food.
• Doing the farmer changes and keeping the old food upkeep/energy production of bioreactors lets them be useful to everyone. Excess food from vassals/starbases? Make a bioreactor on some random planet. Excess food from farmers that are too good? Make a bioreactor on your agriworld to divert some food to energy.
• Make no changes to the building (other than giving it an upgrade which makes gas as well as energy to add density) would seem to cover all the bases but make Urban worlds weird.
• Doing both the farmer/technician changes still leaves out lithoid/synth traders, but otherwise covers all the bases (as the two don't conflict). But it still makes bio-reactors optimal for vanilla energy generation. Nerfing the technician ratio slightly fixes that.

 

[Millbot]

Curious what the numbers are for anglers and pearl divers, in regards to the bio reactor rework.

Also, I'm hoping any slider rearrangement will move game length above some slider and maybe have those sliders autoadjust with game length. That if someone puts their game on shortened time frame, tech and tradition costs will based on pacing in mind. In theory cutting down how much work players have to do to fine tune things. I'd argue this is part of the point in have a curb, is it make easier to predict.

Though curious if the devs have any plans to revisit tree bloat, when techs are available and ensuring that builds that hinge on having certain technologies haves way to get them, despite bad RNG.

 

[HFY]

This is the disconnect. In my experience, this is not true at all.

In every Anglers game I've played (and every Agrarian Idyll game, since I only pick it with Anglers), I have 0 (zero) technicians. Either they're a true trade build or the economy is buoyed on the incidental trade produced by Anglers and sales to the market. The ability to skip all the technician techs and have no generator world is half the draw of the Anglers civic. If the effect on farmers were removed, it would be useless for Anglers (or nearly useless).

And even if they did use Technicians, it would be much, much less useful: making the extremely efficient food job that's already making net 10 output base (8 food, 2 trade) produce less food and more energy lets you employ more of them without going into food surpluses. But making the few incidental

Okay. It looks like you're saying that no version of Bio Reactor would be useful for your Anglers Trade build. That's fine, don't build any Bio Reactors.

But don't pin that on my suggestion -- if you don't need energy, then the other types of Bio Reactor would be equally worthless.

This is not a complaint which is specific to my suggestion, so please drop it since you wouldn't build the vanilla beta patch version either.

And again, I'm not the one suggesting a food reduction. That's the vanilla beta patch. That's not me you're arguing against. I'm the one suggesting to NOT do that.

I picked -2/+2 because it was the existing bioreactor effect. But the same logic applies to -1/+1.

Fair enough, let's start it at -2/+2 for Technicians (and only for Technicians, food-production jobs are unaffected), and then scale it up to -4/+4 with an upgraded reactor.

I was referring more to synths/lithoids that have unwanted food from vassals (the segment you're proposing this change to help). If they primarily use trade for energy, then trying the bioreactor to technicians doesn't help them (though the farmer version obviously didn't help them either).

Yeah I'm not trying to make trade builds suddenly want more Technicians.

I'm just trying to cover more cases where you would have food and want to get rid of it in trade for energy. The beta farmer version covers fewer cases. I'm not trying to solve every problem, just trying to make the Bio Reactor useful to more kinds of empires which could have wanted to build one in the past.

The beta patch is less useful than the current one for some empires, and that's a problem because the current one kinda sucks. Being worse than something which kinda sucks is not a good direction to move.

The beta patch version looks okay for very early Idyll but it doesn't seem to scale well with +% buffs, and that's why my suggestion would be better -- it should start reasonable, and remain reasonable through the late game.

It's just a question of whether it should help more for dumping unneeded food for farmerless empires that end up with food anyway (Terravores purging, lithoids/synths with vassals, etc.) or for civics with buffed farmers that are desperately trying to keep those farmers relevant past the early game. That's more a question of dev intent than a "concern" though.

I mean, even the civics which try to keep farmers relevant don't do that particularly well. If you don't want food at all, then the current beta patch won't do enough to make Farmers attractive, especially in the context of Overlord where you have access to non-job food income from Vassals and Tributaries.

I'm not here to solve that issue. The beta patch doesn't seem to solve it, either -- moving some high +% food productivity into low +% energy production becomes a bad trade when the +%s start to roll in (mid-game).

Like, how is letting Farmers reduce base food for base energy supposed to be competitive on an Ascended Agri-World?

In contrast, spending -food upkeep for +base energy on an Ascended Generator World is a good trade which just gets better as you accumulate +% to energy.

I don't really see how it's not an alternative. It does what you want to achieve with the technician change (bulk conversion of food to energy without needing farmers). It can completely replace the technician alternative you proposed (or supplement it).

No, non-scaling building output is not competitive with technicians beyond the early game. Also, building slots are not so freely available that the building output would be relevant past the very early game. That's why nobody uses Bio Reactors right now.

As a side note: I think the -2 food/+2 energy from farmers version has an important property that the -1 food/+1 energy (or -2/+2) on technicians wouldn't. There's no incentive to build it just for it's own sake; you don't have a need for the dev's proposed farmer modifying version unless you have too much food already. -1 food/+1 energy on technicians would make it more efficient to add bio-reactors and produce food to fuel the bio-reactors even if they didn't need it otherwise:

With +60% energy from technicians/+60% food from farmers (from tech), +4 food/energy base (from buildings/rings), and around +100% to output from other sources:

• 14 technicians make 10*14*2.6=364 energy.
• 13 technicians with a -1/+1 bio-reactor and 1 farmer elsewhere make 11*13*2.6=371.8 energy, burn 1*13*2=26 food in technician upkeep, and produce 10*1*2.6=26 extra food.
• So adding the bio-reactors and using farmers to support technicians makes 2% more energy (around 3% of the net, if you count upkeep). This is on par with a +5% bonus to job output. Even if you had no surplus to start with, you're encouraged to use bio-reactors as yet another technician boosting building.

It makes it more complex to play optimally.

I'd almost rather the bio-reactors remained even more niche, with on-paper suboptimal conversion ratios. The old bio-reactors converted 25 food to 20 energy. They were intentionally suboptimal unless you had food you didn't need, in which case they were slightly better than the market.

No, that's the kind of argument which got Bio Reactors nerfed from -20/+20 to the current (worthless) -25/+20.

Spending a building slot SHOULD get you a net increase.

The old 2.x Farmer + Bio-Reactor cost a district and a building slot. It SHOULD have been better than what a single Generator district could provide. Nerfing it into its current niche made it worthless, and I think that's why it's being changed.

We have a sub-optimal way to convert food into energy, it's called the market, and it sucks. I don't want another equally bad mechanism which costs a tech and a building slot. If there's supposed to be a viable way for food to be converted into energy, and I need to research it and build it, then it should be non-sucky.

Farmers produce -1 food/+1 energy (more efficient but lower bulk than technicians, though the +60% food output would eat into that gain).

This is a useful mechanic but it's in the wrong place.

What should happen is that the Agrarian Idyll civic should reduce Farmer food production. You're supposed to have more Farmers than average, and that means you should need more of them. In trade, Farmers should produce Unity, Amenities, and TV in some proportion.

I think Anglers would be okay if there were some way to increase Pearl Diver throughput separately, so they could be tuned to consume more food when you have a surplus for some reason.

We could also get a new building which gives Entertainers some Food upkeep in trade for TV ("Fine Dining" / "Celebrity Chefs Kitchen" / etc.).

 

[VetMax]

I did like the breakthrough technology mechanics. It's a pity that it is postponed. May be reward an empire with a artifact (like a wonder competition in civilization)

 

[SirBlackAxe]

I've been playing Machines recently and want to echo the sentiment that new Bio-Reactors no longer fulfill their previous use case of burning the food income you get from Hydroponics Bays and taxes/subsidies better than bottoming out the sell price on the market. They do look interesting for Agrarian Idyll, but reducing their remit from Machine authority + Lithoid archetype + Synth ascension to a civic or two seems like an excessive downgrade to applicability.

Maybe the tech that unlocks the new Bio-Reactor could also unlock an edict that adds the proposed +2 food upkeep / +2 energy output to technicians? That fills the use case for farmerless empires that want to dispose of their food income, and the edict cost & scaling should address @Abdulijubjub 's concerns about the effect becoming optimal for everyone as output bonuses outpace the added upkeep.

At least for me, part of the fantasy of playing Machines involves not investing any pops or infrastructure in food production (and ideally not being forced to research those techs because there simply aren't enough tier 1 society techs for Machines to reach tier 2 without doing so)

Like, how is letting Farmers reduce base food for base energy supposed to be competitive on an Ascended Agri-World?

Pretty well, unless I'm missing something? Agri-Worlds give +25% farmer output, whatever that output happens to be, rather than +25% food. So it'll also boost the energy they produce.

 

[HFY]

Pretty well, unless I'm missing something? Agri-Worlds give +25% farmer output, whatever that output happens to be, rather than +25% food. So it'll also boost the energy they produce.

Ah, looks like I had mis-remembered, thank you.

Maybe the tech that unlocks the new Bio-Reactor could also unlock an edict that adds the proposed +2 food upkeep / +2 energy output to technicians?

That's too chunky. If I have excess food income, I want to fine-tune my consumption to match it, not go into a food deficit every two months if I forget to unsubscribe from the Edict in this new and horrible invisible rhythm game.

=======

EDIT: Just to be clear, here's why I like the idea of modifying Technicians instead of Farmers:

- Works for most empires. Everyone has access to Technicians. Worker-Owned Void Dwellers might use a Bio-Reactor Generator Habitat to burn off excess food from trade conversion, Lithoid Purifiers might use a Generator Planet to burn off excess Forced Labor or Processing purge resources, and so on. Maybe you have one colony with a sometimes-disabled Bio-Reactor; maybe you have a Bio-Reactor on every Generator colony (vassal-heavy Overlord).

- Granular and controlled cost. For a Purifier empire, I might want to disable the building between purges. For an Overlord empire, I want to be able to gradually expand (or reduce) my food consumption to match my food income -- and this income might be beyond my control. For an Agrarian Idyll empire, I want to burn off excess food from RP'ing a society which has a lot of farmers. And so on.

- Worth using. It costs a tech and at least one building slot, so it should be worth those costs at least.

 

[Blazoran]

They do different things.

The Tech Costs slider acts as a blanket multiplier for all tech costs.

The Difficulty Adjusted Technology Costs slider also adjusts technology costs (unless you're playing on Civilian difficulty), but skews the increases towards higher tier technologies.

Consider changing the slider name?

It took until this post for me to realise that "difficulty" referred to tech tier and not game difficulty.

I was trying to figure out why having techs research slower on grand admiral than admiral would solve anything.

EDIT:turns out i'm wrong, as per Peter Ebbesen's correction below.

 

[Sam Illingworth]

Why on earth is it linked to difficulty? What if I want tech speed like in the previous beta but without giving the AI Grand Admiral scale buffs (which is exactly what I want)? I hate this change.

Why not just give us the tech curve adjustment slider (in addition to the flat multiplier slider) but decouple if from difficulty - let me set it to the maximum (slowest) curve even if I'm playing on Commadore, or Admiral with mid-game scaling, which is how I like to play. That seems like such an obvious solution, I really have no idea why you want to tie it to the difficulty setting.

 

[Peter Ebbesen]

Consider changing the slider name?

It took until this post for me to realise that "difficulty" referred to tech tier and not game difficulty.

I was trying to figure out why having techs research slower on grand admiral than admiral would solve anything.

It does refer to game difficulty. The graphs and numbers in the OP makes this explicit.

The problem this solves is the one where tech nerfs anywhere near as severe as those we saw in the first beta were, at the same time, potentially crippling for people playing on low difficulties while being quite fine for many playing on the highest difficulties, simply because they play that much more efficiently.

So if you just want to adjust all tech costs by a fixed multiplier and work the same way across all difficulty levels, same as in 3.10, you set the technology slider to 1x or 2x or whatever you want, and set the Difficulty Adjusted Technology slider to OFF. Then, when you feel you are ready to play at a different tech costs will remain the same you are used to.

On the other hand, if you want to increase the costs more for each tier rather than using a fixed multiplier, giving more of the first tech beta experience, you will get that by enabling the Difficulty Adjusted Technology slider, and set its its rate to low, normal, high, extreme. Whatever you choose will be gentler than the first tech beta experience, but the higher difficulty level you've chosen and the higher rate for this slider, the closer it will get.

To put it bluntly, it allows people playing on higher difficulty levels to have fun too by slowing the tech system down for them (without just using a high multiplier, which mainly makes the early game unbearably long... and rewards no-research early game rush tactics), whilee using a system that is calibrated for people playing on normal difficulty.

So some Commodore players who loved the beta scaling might choose to play it with extreme DAT scaling to get much of the first tech beta experience without playing on a higher difficulty level, while some Grand Admiral players who thought it was basically right but overtuned might end up playing with normal DAT scaling, and gluttons for punishment might play GA and extreme DAT scaling.

And of course you can combine the two, if that's what you prefer.

 

[Drullo321]

Technical question about the new bio-reactiors.

A) From reading I assume energy credits are flat without any further (positive) modifiers?
B) Does the food penalty to farmers take place on the base production before or after any modifiers?

Depending on the answer to A and B the new bio-reactors are either really good or totally useless/awful. Why?

You can push the output of farmers/anglers to really high numbers (as with other raw ressources too), so something between 50-90 food per angler isn't unusual (agri-world, A.Idyll council, techs, etc.). If you then use the bio-reactor -2 food on base before modifiers (equally to 25% of base angler) it will result in a loss of 12.5 to 22.5 food, which worth alot more then measily 2 energy credits, even with lowest possible market prices.. That is one side of the extreme.

The other extreme would be to just subtract the 2 food from production after modifiers (see above, 50-90) which then is more or less nothing for a decent surplus of energy (with 10-50 farmer jobs).

This is just my observation on the discussion about the new bio-reactors, aside from other pro/cons about them.

 

[fourteenfour]

What a slider affects should be unique and not affected by any other slider. No overlap.

This removes confusion because as of right now I need to refer back to this post to have a still incomplete idea of what effect I am getting in game.

 

[Blackened30]

I really dislike the idea of the new research slider being tied to difficulty. I want all the sliders I can get for game customization, and I've often felt that research in this game happened way too fast, but don't want to feel locked into playing certain higher difficulties in order to get them.

 

[Simpledc123]

The new Bio-Reactors:
View attachment 1075070View attachment 1075071

Do the new Bio-Reactors affect output from anglers & livestock pops in a similar way to farmers?

 

[Abdulijubjub]

Okay. It looks like you're saying that no version of Bio Reactor would be useful for your Anglers Trade build. That's fine, don't build any Bio Reactors.

But don't pin that on my suggestion -- if you don't need energy, then the other types of Bio Reactor would be equally worthless.

This is not a complaint which is specific to my suggestion, so please drop it since you wouldn't build the vanilla beta patch version either.

And again, I'm not the one suggesting a food reduction. That's the vanilla beta patch. That's not me you're arguing against. I'm the one suggesting to NOT do that.

No, I'm not saying that no version of the Bio-Reactor would be useful for Anglers trade.

The beta version of bioreactors would be great for Anglers. It still wouldn't require you to research the energy techs, and it would allow you to use the incredibly efficient Angler job for energy production (and the incredibly efficient Pearl Divers for CG) instead of Traders/Clerks.

Ex. before Bio-Reactor, 2 Anglers, 2 Pearl Divers, and 2 Traders make 16 food (and burn 6), 12 CG (and burn 2), and 24 TV (which becomes another 12 energy/6 CG). Add in a Bio-Reactor, and it becomes 3 Anglers and 3 Pearl Divers making 18 food (and burning 9), 18 CG (with no Trade upkeep), 6 energy, and 12 TV (6 energy/3 CG). The bioreactor produces 1 fewer food, but 5 more CG, and the same energy from the same pops (though it's also burning 4 extra minerals).* With larger numbers of pops/a more complex example, you can balance it so you get more of everything. But 5 CGs are more valuable than 4 minerals and 1 food.

It lets you use more of the efficient Angler jobs.

If you were to try the same thing with Technicians, you just... can't.

"An Angler trade build has no need for technicians" and "an Angler build has no need for energy" are not the same thing. That Traders are more valuable than Technicians doesn't mean Traders are also more valuable than Anglers.

I mean, even the civics which try to keep farmers relevant don't do that particularly well. If you don't want food at all, then the current beta patch won't do enough to make Farmers attractive, especially in the context of Overlord where you have access to non-job food income from Vassals and Tributaries.

The sentence you're replying to is explicitly communicating that there are civics which buff farmers, but farmers become irrelevant. I'm not saying that those civics somehow make farmers relevant by themselves.

I'm not here to solve that issue. The beta patch doesn't seem to solve it, either -- moving some high +% food productivity into low +% energy production becomes a bad trade when the +%s start to roll in (mid-game).

Like, how is letting Farmers reduce base food for base energy supposed to be competitive on an Ascended Agri-World?

In contrast, spending -food upkeep for +base energy on an Ascended Generator World is a good trade which just gets better as you accumulate +% to energy.

The beta patch absolutely solves that issue. They only thing you're missing is the +60% from tech. The designation, ascension, governor, etc. all still apply.

An Angler with a Bio-Reactor and only +100% to their energy output is still more efficient than a technician with +160%. They'll be missing 1.2 energy (60% of 2 base), but the extra TV more than makes up for it.

No, non-scaling building output is not competitive with technicians beyond the early game. Also, building slots are not so freely available that the building output would be relevant past the very early game. That's why nobody uses Bio Reactors right now.

The buildings don't scale, but your total throughput scales because you just build more bioreactors.

I've used Bio-Reactors every time I play non-RS machines or Terravores. They're very useful for converting starbase/vassal/purging food to energy.

No, that's the kind of argument which got Bio Reactors nerfed from -20/+20 to the current (worthless) -25/+20.

Spending a building slot SHOULD get you a net increase.

The old 2.x Farmer + Bio-Reactor cost a district and a building slot. It SHOULD have been better than what a single Generator district could provide. Nerfing it into its current niche made it worthless, and I think that's why it's being changed.

We have a sub-optimal way to convert food into energy, it's called the market, and it sucks. I don't want another equally bad mechanism which costs a tech and a building slot. If there's supposed to be a viable way for food to be converted into energy, and I need to research it and build it, then it should be non-sucky.

I don't think it's necessarily true that a building which solves a problem (too much food, can't convert to energy in bulk via the market) must be universally better than making energy without it, or else it's useless. It only has to be better than the market.

If you're not a Angler or Agrarian Idyll empire (who have more efficient farmers than average), I would argue it's too strong if you're incentivized to keep extra farmers around just so you can feed their food into technicians. Stellaris isn't that kind of game; though Anno 1800 or something would absolutely implement a "complexity just for the sake of complexity" feature like "your energy produces become 2% more efficient if you make the supply chain more complex by feeding food into everywhere you make energy".

This is a useful mechanic but it's in the wrong place.

What should happen is that the Agrarian Idyll civic should reduce Farmer food production. You're supposed to have more Farmers than average, and that means you should need more of them. In trade, Farmers should produce Unity, Amenities, and TV in some proportion.

I think Anglers would be okay if there were some way to increase Pearl Diver throughput separately, so they could be tuned to consume more food when you have a surplus for some reason.

We could also get a new building which gives Entertainers some Food upkeep in trade for TV ("Fine Dining" / "Celebrity Chefs Kitchen" / etc.).

I would also like if AI reduced farmer food production and added something else. I've long advocated for it.

This is an opportunity to effectively get that change.

It's just a useful mechanic. I don't think it's clear that it's in the wrong place.

 

[Abdulijubjub]

Do the new Bio-Reactors affect output from anglers & livestock pops in a similar way to farmers?

Anglers, yes. And Titan Hunters/Puddle Technicians (the event farmer jobs).

But Livestock, no. They're not in the planet_farmers class.

Assuming that's an auto-generated tooltip using the planet_farmers_food_produces_add modifier (which is what the similarly worded Food Processing building uses).

 

[Drullo321]

The beta patch absolutely solves that issue. They only thing you're missing is the +60% from tech. The designation, ascension, governor, etc. all still apply.

An Angler with a Bio-Reactor and only +100% to their energy output is still more efficient than a technician with +160%. They'll be missing 1.2 energy (60% of 2 base), but the extra TV more than makes up for it.

So just for clarification: The base energy credit output provided by bio-reactor to farmers actually get boosted by whatever modifiers?
Which modifiers affect the energy output? All the same boosting the farmer jobs?

 

[Peter Ebbesen]

I really dislike the idea of the new research slider being tied to difficulty. I want all the sliders I can get for game customization, and I've often felt that research in this game happened way too fast, but don't want to feel locked into playing certain higher difficulties in order to get them.

You aren't locked into higher difficulty settings if you want research slowed down substantially. If you want extreme scaling, set it to extreme.

If you play on, say, Captain, solid middle of the pack, with extreme Difficulty Adjusted Technology scaling, you won't get as hard tech scaling for later tiers of tech as somebody choosing extreme scaling on Grand Admiral would, but on the other hand, if you are playing on Captain odds are that you are playing much less efficiently than those on Grand Admiral, and that your tech progress curve will resembles theirs despite the lower difficulty resulting in milder scaling, the harsher tech cost scaling of GA and increased player efficiency of GA to some degree canceling out.

Look, why not try it out? Play the beta with 1x tech slider, your preferred difficulty, and extreme DAT scaling; It will be less harsh than tech was for you in the first tech beta, but much, much, harsher than the current live game than 1x. Then if you think that's too fast, use the linear tech multiplier slider to fine tune.

 

[Doldenberg]

I haven't been able to check out the Beta yet, but from the description, this seems like a step in the entirely wrong direction. The first Beta created two benefits - a bit of rubberbanding through breakthrough technologies, and an overall slowdown of research - while introducing one major problem, late game technologies getting too expensive. The solution here would have been adjusting the overall curve.

The new system is essentially the old system, with technology speed simply turned into another aspect of "difficulty". If the new overall speed at minimum settings is the old overall speed at minimum settings, and there is no rubberbanding, I don't see how this improves anything. And this isn't really to the benefit of new / less min-maxing players, who would be better served by proper catch up mechanics, it simply unchains the competitive min-maxers. Tech rush, and only tech rush, is back on the menu I guess, sadly.

 

[Abdulijubjub]

So just for clarification: The base energy credit output provided by bio-reactor to farmers actually get boosted by whatever modifiers?
Which modifiers affect the energy output? All the same boosting the farmer jobs?

Bonuses that say "resources from jobs" (tons of stuff), "energy from jobs" (the pop trait Ingenious, a few leader traits), and "farmer output" (the Agri-world designation) would all affect the energy output.

The only bonuses to energy output that you'd be missing out on are the kind given by those 3 techs ("energy output from Technicians") and the bonus for a Generator world (which is a bonus to Technician output, not energy specifically).

The food output change is also affected by modifiers. It's effectively undoing the effect of Food Processing (or, rather, replacing it with energy).

 

[Troyen]

if I may suggest, quite a few of the settings options could be put into a "galaxy preview" page of game creation. This would need to make it clear that it's showing you a hypothetical, not the actual galaxy that would be generated.

I think some of those settings (like galaxy shape) are changed somewhat frequently. But I would absolutely love for them to be on a preview page so I know what "starburst" or "bar" galaxies look like without having to tab out of the game.

Finally, now that I know there is a tempo gap between players, I hope other things start offering sliders as well, such as the speed of the Galactic community that is absolutely impatient to wait, and the speed of Megastructures.

Too many sliders can be a headache even for advanced users. There was a proposal a few years ago to have a GC resolution that sped up the voting/recess interval and a corresponding one to slow it down. The AI could be made to just support whatever the player offered kinda like they do with custodian resolutions. That way your GC interval can adapt to the pace of your game. Sometimes you hit late game and are happy with the current set of resolutions in progress and the GC devolves into pass/repeal sanctions or pass/repeal whatever was just passed. Sometimes you get a galaxy-wide War in Heaven and would like a bunch of policies considered in short order.

Also, I'm hoping any slider rearrangement will move game length above some slider and maybe have those sliders autoadjust with game length. That if someone puts their game on shortened time frame, tech and tradition costs will based on pacing in mind. In theory cutting down how much work players have to do to fine tune things. I'd argue this is part of the point in have a curb, is it make easier to predict.

Though curious if the devs have any plans to revisit tree bloat, when techs are available and ensuring that builds that hinge on having certain technologies haves way to get them, despite bad RNG.

The time sliders don't just control the length of the game, they also control the difficulty. I think 1x with shorter durations is actually a fairly common combination because I don't think many people play past the crisis and 100 years is plenty of time for that to be resolved.

I do think they should look at tech tree bloat. I noticed very keenly in the last beta that society in particular has a lot of mid-tree bloat. I know there have been some suggestions in the past to e.g. maybe combine some of those blocker removal techs. Physics has a lot of A-slot components that I think rarely see use.

To put it bluntly, it allows people playing on higher difficulty levels to have fun too by slowing the tech system down for them (without just using a high multiplier, which mainly makes the early game unbearably long... and rewards no-research early game rush tactics), whilee using a system that is calibrated for people playing on normal difficulty.

So some Commodore players who loved the beta scaling might choose to play it with extreme DAT scaling to get much of the first tech beta experience without playing on a higher difficulty level, while some Grand Admiral players who thought it was basically right but overtuned might end up playing with normal DAT scaling, and gluttons for punishment might play GA and extreme DAT scaling.

And of course you can combine the two, if that's what you prefer.

I understand why they're trying it this way, because it addresses the new player/laid-back game experience problem the last beta has. It's also slightly easier (potentially) to understand compared to a setting that requires a bunch of math to figure out. The tables in the DD are very helpful for seeing the exact impact of each setting, and I anticipate they'll move to the wiki if the changes go live, but I highly doubt they'll be described in-game in-context for people evaluating that setting.

The issue with this method is it restricts the middle difficulty players. I'm in the 20% that were mostly okay with the last beta's tech costs, but to get anything approaching that I'd need to play GA Extreme. I can't play Admiral, the best I can manage is Commodore, which caps out 2/3rds of the last beta cost. That's better than live, but not quite the same as the last tech curve.

The old tech cost multiplier is still around, but as you noted this significantly impacts the lower-tier technologies. The first few hours after the DD came out I was trying to answer questions on reddit about approximate translations of difficulty and slider costs between live/old beta/new beta, and those T2/T3 numbers with the tech multiplier cost are pretty harsh if you want your T5 to approximate the previous beta's cost, especially when you consider the research speed and output nerfs.

The current setup is aimed at addressing low-end and high-end players but it looks like it screws the middle-difficulty players who might also enjoy not blazing through mid-tier weapons tech. (Also worth nothing now that breakthrough techs are gone, you can potentially roll weapon upgrades or ship class tech upgrades back-to-back again, so all the benefits of making destroyers and cruisers more useful may return. Especially since those ship techs are weighted to appear more frequently after 20/40/60 years in the game.)

All of this is conjecture, I'll give the beta a run on Commodore using Normal (even though I think I'd prefer Extreme, the beta is looking for feedback around Normal) and see how it plays. I did notice I was far from the only one asking about middle-tier difficulty impact in the reddit comments.