Stellaris Dev Diary #370 - 4.0 Changes Part 4

[Critical Ethics]

This is part of the Economy tab of Earth. to show off some of how it'll work, I reduced the amount of Artisan jobs and prioritized Bureaucrats.

View attachment 1254209

Got a meeting now, I'll continue going through the thread a little later. (I've read through everything up until this morning.)

Well this does help me realise I was completely and utterly wrong about how this was all going to work! Or rather how I thought it was going to work from the original dev diary is how it's going to work and I completely misunderstood everything from all the dev diaries afterwards. I did kind of like the simplicity of the version I apparently made up in my head but I like this version too!

 

[Critical Ethics]

In our implementation, all of the Specialist stratum Jobs will demote to Unemployed Specialist; Unemployed Specialist will demote to Unemployed Worker, and Unemployed Worker will demote to Civilian

I... really don't like this concept. First off, why civilians? Civilian, by definition, is someone who is not in navy, nor army, nor (through that Is More Complex) law enforcement. Second, I don't know, it just doesn't feel right. Its literally class of people who do nothing, and who can be used to fill workplaces.

They don't necessarily do nothing they just don't work in state constructed state run organisations. The last few lines of the dev diary says they will probably produce a lot of your trade and I'd also hope that various things like species rights and living conditions have an impact.

 

[Jashkar]

We have some ideas about ways to expand upon this in the future, such as replacing part of the Workforce with automation by using a building.

How it works, flavor-wise, with Robot Pops? Aren't they representing people being replaced in workplace by more and more sophisticated machines?

In our implementation, all of the Specialist stratum Jobs will demote to Unemployed Specialist; Unemployed Specialist will demote to Unemployed Worker, and Unemployed Worker will demote to Civilian

I... really don't like this concept. First off, why civilians? Civilian, by definition, is someone who is not in navy, nor army, nor (through that Is More Complex) law enforcement. Second, I don't know, it just doesn't feel right. Its literally class of people who do nothing, and who can be used to fill workplaces. Such group has its name and it is unemployed. From Dev Diary, I feel you wanted to represent services sector (i.e. all that people who do not make more guns, but make people making guns more happy), but that also do not work - why someone with stable job would seek for extraterrestial adventures, but someone else with stable job in industry would not?

I totally agree with you with this not liking this "Civilian" idea. The idea that there are unemployed people who are "happy" seems absurd...would make more sense to manage that with the "Living Standards" with a living standard that makes the effect of Unemployment less impactful, by lowering the negative impact of Unemployment or by creating an "Employment Center" building which employs workers and reduce the negative impact of unemployment...

Or, possibly, could create a certain share of a special kind of low-priority Job called "Odd Job" which is based on population like Criminals are based on the planet's Crime...and make both them and the Unemployed more likely to migrate!

This would limit the negative impact of Unemployed Workers without making a nonsensical "Civilian" stratum, which seems some sort of totally unlikely parasitic individual who feed off of the rest of society (which is more a "Living Standard" concept than a "stratum" concept!)!

( Note that most Elites who would tell you that such stratum could exist would be likely to be planning a purge of the non-Elite population! )

 

[Jashkar]

They don't necessarily do nothing they just don't work in state constructed state run organisations. The last few lines of the dev diary says they will probably produce a lot of your trade and I'd also hope that various things like species rights and living conditions have an impact.

They seems more like they own nothing and are -inexplicably- happy... and seems more like a non-existent politically correct stratum!

If they were created out of concern of the existence of Colonists, the solution would be to have more Colonist jobs created!

After all, if other planets were colonized, what do you expect would happen to populate?

Either the State or the Corporations would hire Colonists which would attract population on the planet.

The Colonists jobs could either reduce their priority when the Colony reaches a certain population or be very low priority to start with...

 

[Imp0815]

1 Pop produces 1 Workforce. 1 Job will usually require 100 Workforce to fill, so will typically provide work for 100 Pops.
You should be able to have partially filled Jobs. (If you have 83 Workforce in that Mining job, it'll produce and consume 83% of the job's resources.)

So there are jobs that can be filled by a smaller workforce? For example, a researcher job should not need 100 Pops, let alone unskilled workers, but rather highly skilled workers—only about 10 or so per job. It would be interesting to see some sort of education system that promotes "Workers" to "Skilled Workers" by providing education facilities and such. But maybe just an abstraction through a calculation that promotes Pops when open jobs exist would be fine too, just like it used to work.

EDIT: Maybe I should stop posting and think more.

So this might mean two major things:

1. A Pop that is good at researching will provide more workforce to researcher jobs, meaning you need fewer Pops per job to "fill" it. This, in turn, means that if a Pop is good at researching but is instead thrown into mining, it will only provide 1 workforce per Pop.
2. On a completely different note, this would mean you can't simply stack traits onto a Pop to increase the output of a researcher job to absurd values. Instead, the researcher job has a capped output, and all Pops do is provide more efficient workforce for the job. Or did I get this wrong?

Ah yes, there was a mention of overcapped workforce: "Bonus Workforce is allowed to go over the required Workforce for a job, yielding extra production." This doesn’t really make sense. So we can decide to either overcap by traits, or we can just fill the job with fewer Pops?

 

[Jashkar]

So there are jobs that can be filled by a smaller workforce? For example, a researcher job should not need 100 Pops, let alone unskilled workers, but rather highly skilled workers—only about 10 or so per job. It would be interesting to see some sort of education system that promotes "Workers" to "Skilled Workers" by providing education facilities and such. But maybe just an abstraction through a calculation that promotes Pops when open jobs exist would be fine too, just like it used to work.

Seems like they wanted to introduce this "Workforce" mechanic (apart from the fact that, again, calling it "Workforce" is nonsense, given that Workforce are people...not work or labor!) to reduce the calculations...I have hard time seeing how doing that would reduce the calculations. Moreover, touching the strata seems just "solving a problem by messing things up and adding a new pointless problem"...

 

[Imp0815]

Seems like they wanted to introduce this "Workforce" mechanic (apart from the fact that, again, calling it "Workforce" is nonsense, given that Workforce are people...not work or labor!) to reduce the calculations...I have hard time seeing how doing that would reduce the calculations. Moreover, touching the strata seems just "solving a problem by messing things up and adding a new pointless problem"...

Well, without looking at the code, it's hard to guess, but as I understand it, before, each Pop was an entity with its own values and attributes to "check." So if you had 1000 Pops, each Pop needed to be checked individually. Now, Pops are gone and are instead part of a "Planet," meaning only the Planet as an entity needs to be calculated/checked.

This sounds like a good way to improve the system.

In addition, I gravitate toward less abstraction by depicting real population numbers instead of "1 Pop" representing a million or billion people.

The conversion of Pops to workforce seems to be a tool to differentiate the value each Pop provides to resource production. Now, they have two balance values to tweak for controlling game progression: do they change workforce per trait, or do they adjust output per job?

Also, we have the option for a more authentic depiction of stratification and the value of labor. Additionally, each game could see a shift in most empires regarding how many people need to work low-skilled jobs like mining, as efficiency increases over time—allowing fewer people to generate the same output as methods develop. Or, we might just see the same basic output increase we have now, where the required workforce per job remains constant throughout the game. Or just both.

 

[Alfray Stryke]

Firstly: Cheers very much for the reply, the additional detail, and this juicy WIP image!

This is all very interesting, and (to me anyway) very positive. Although I am now/still slightly confused about Pop numbers, given they're 'scaled up by 100' in some instances but they still produce 1 Workforce each.
Currently, we normally start with between 24-32 pops, on average. So, will we now be starting with:
A. Still 24-32 Pops (and therefore, as I currently understand it, quite a low Workforce figure?);
B. Between 2,400 - 3,200 Pops (i.e. the current norm * 100 to reflect the up-scaling);
C. Something else - possibly a few hundred to a thousand or so? (i.e. a smaller number of 'equivalent' Pops given the system changover, but redesigned for the brave new world).

I'm deducing that 100 Pops produces 100 Workforce, and so what was 1 Pop's worth of 'Pop unit' has now been increased to 100. So, in effect, 1 Workforce in 4.0 is equal to one-hundredth of a Pop Job in 3.14.15826?

Also, does this mean that Pop Growth (of a particular Pop 'Group') will manifest as 100 Pops gradually growing to 101, 102, 103 etc as the months go on? If so that's really, really cool, and really shows the benefits of the new granularity.

(Also also I really can't wait for the Open Beta of all this - I'll need to know when that is ASAP so I can book time off work and run away from my family for a week to really get to grips with it)

Going by memory here, since I've been working on other things. I'll use "pop" to mean a pop in 3.14 and "Pop" to mean a pop in 4.0

• A pop is equivalent to 100 Pops.
• This means that if you started with 32 pops, you'll start with 3,200 Pops.
  • However, you'll likely start with a bunch of Pops in the Civilian strata, so I'd expect the actual figure to be around 5,000 Pops.
• 100 Pops produce 100 Workforce
  • There will be modifiers to this, for example a cyborg species with the power drills trait may provide +10% Bonus Workforce to Miner jobs.
• A job that required a pop in 3.14 will now generally be 100 Jobs that require 100 Workforce.
• Pop Groups should grow simultaneously and gradually, yes

 

[GnoSIS]

The hybridization mechanic of xenocompatibility is likely going to be removed. It was cool, but pooling all of the species together for logistic growth calculations feels like a good enough niche for the AP. (I'm actually a bit concerned that it might feel too "required" for Xenophilic empires.)

You can support xenocompatibility by making it into a single abstract unified species. Then use the mechanics of assimilation to meld other pops into it.

You can also have a seperate bonus category just for the xenocompatibility species - since the individual traits of the melded species would vanish. Quite difficult to find the average of all the traits of all the species that would be melding for sure - I wouldn't go that route. Instead have them all be a kind of universalists with an all-planet type preferece. I could and you could think of other types of exclusive bonuses or mechanics that xenocompatibility pops would have - and this solution has 0 performace cost. Infact it's better than an empire with just 2 species.

And of course in this mechanics, you would need to assimilate xenocompatibility species of a conquered empire into your own.

 

[GnoSIS]

I totally agree with you with this not liking this "Civilian" idea. The idea that there are unemployed people who are "happy" seems absurd...would make more sense to manage that with the "Living Standards" with a living standard that makes the effect of Unemployment less impactful, by lowering the negative impact of Unemployment or by creating an "Employment Center" building which employs workers and reduce the negative impact of unemployment...

Or, possibly, could create a certain share of a special kind of low-priority Job called "Odd Job" which is based on population like Criminals are based on the planet's Crime...and make both them and the Unemployed more likely to migrate!

This would limit the negative impact of Unemployed Workers without making a nonsensical "Civilian" stratum, which seems some sort of totally unlikely parasitic individual who feed off of the rest of society (which is more a "Living Standard" concept than a "stratum" concept!)!

( Note that most Elites who would tell you that such stratum could exist would be likely to be planning a purge of the non-Elite population! )

But that's the gist of the problem

If they occupy living space and have some job that they are doing and they are making resources or whatever, then...

...the autocratic imperialist leader would like to clear them out and build more alloy plants for the war effort and make them alloy workers.

But it seems that those civilians they occupy some quasi-real real estate on the planets. Do civilians live and work in the Shroud? Can I master this ability?

 

[MarkDey]

But it seems that those civilians they occupy some quasi-real real estate on the planets. Do civilians live and work in the Shroud? Can I master this ability?

Remote work, taken to the next level

 

[Miguelinileugim]

Stratum were supposed to be "social classes". Elite/Rulers is the upper class, Specialists are the middle class, Workers are the lower class and the Criminals are the outcasts. Adding "Civilians", "Residents" or even "Artisans" don't make any sense...those are just another job within the "Worker" or of "Specialist" strata...

@Jashkar @ImperatorRoman I was joking about how Stellaris was becoming like Victoria 2, hence renaming "civilians" to (Victoria 2) "artisans" as they have a pretty similar concept. Of course it would be absurd to actually do but it's funny! Eladrin please back me up don't make me look silly.

 

[Critical Ethics]

They seems more like they own nothing

Where are you seeing that?

 

[Jashkar]

But that's the gist of the problem

If they occupy living space and have some job that they are doing and they are making resources or whatever, then...

...the autocratic imperialist leader would like to clear them out and build more alloy plants for the war effort and make them alloy workers.

But it seems that those civilians they occupy some quasi-real real estate on the planets. Do civilians live and work in the Shroud? Can I master this ability?

Yes. I feel it is a badly cooked up idea that have no rightful equivalent nor in real world nor in fiction:

The social strata represent "social classes". It is pretty obvious that whomever set them up had that concept pretty clear and then people who "took over that mantle" forgot that fact: They are not supposed to be "messed with" just to solve a minuscole problem like "dropping clerks" or "dealing with unemployment without putting some thought on it"!

One can actually look to the real world for good examples of how people cope with lack of "standard jobs":

They end up finding "odd jobs", but the bottom of the situation are either "unemployment" or "crime"...because none feeds you for doing nothing meaningful (unless the living standards allow for it).

"Odd jobs" could be simply added based on the population, which is already something easily implementable.

Those would lessen the unemployment problem and, given that they are jobs, they could be tweaked to allow people in them to be more willing or available to migrate.

As for "Colonists"...we should again...look at fiction or at reality...are astronauts going in the space on their own?

...no...they are hired and paid to be astronauts by State or corporations!

So another solution could be to generate more Colonist jobs with the initial Colony building...and add "Odd Jobs" based on Population:

People will migrate to Colonies because either they are "Unemployed" or have "Odd Jobs" and because "Colonists" jobs are available there.

Colonist jobs could either be tweaked to have higher priority than Odd Jobs but less priority than normal jobs or to have a priority which

"shrinks" as the population grows! I think the former is probably a cleaner soultion, however...

Moreover, what if Colonist jobs added a little boost to population growth until population reaches a certain level?

These seems all easily implemented solutions that make sense, are realistic, do not stink of bad politics and do not needlessly mess with strata!

 

[Eladrin]

I'm a bit confused about the whole Civillian thing. So unemployed POPs demote to civillians, that are... content with being unemployed and give a stability bonus because they are non-disruptive? Huh? So once there is a job to fill civillians will promote to workers and become unhappy? What?
I don't think I understand this system at all.

A broad civilian underclass is present in a lot of sci-fi, usually subsisting on some variant of universal basic income or odd jobs. We envision the Civilians as fitting into that sort of role - they're not exactly happy about their position, and are ready to jump into an opportunity on another world, but aren't generally causing trouble as long as they have their bread and circuses. Living standards, civics, and the like are very likely to have a significant effect on exactly how happy they are.

Can we have propaganda between empires affect growth down to civilians, and have that civilian travel between empires i.e., so if I want to send TV shows to local nations using a TV platform (size 1-5 or so to go to farther planets) about the benefits of moving from there empire to our empire. You get refugees from their civilian base.

It would be a very cool idea to explore in the future, but unlikely to be within scope for 4.0.

Is the immigration system still represented by growth transferring from one planet to another planet or is that getting reworked to civilian workforces actually leaving their home planet?

How would this work for external migration pacts? Would civilians actually leave one empire to join another?

We are planning on using the auto-migration system to handle all migration, rather than the growth push-pull one. We're planning on letting them move to other empires that have Migration Pacts.

I think Civilians are more abstracted as non-important jobs, atleast in the perspective of the empire: Basic service industry personel, lower rank employee in factories, aides and none notable officials, petty criminals. The kind of people that in a historical sense would be the base for a colonization pool. That goes in line with the fact they still generate trade, being the base of the economy and it's output.

More or less. Exactly what they are will largely depend on the living standards you're providing them - whether they're scrabbling for subsistence in giant slums or living lives of Utopian Abundance should be reflected.

If you shut down a bunch of labs then the ex-scientists become unemployed because initially they'd rather sit around being angry about it than accept the pay and prestige cut to go be a farmer or go do whatever it is civilians do all day. If you open a new science facility on the planet, or at least an alloy plant or CG plant, they will be first in line at the door waving their credentials and work experience in your face and start straight into sciencing or at least get put in charge of alloy science or whatever. Or if you open a new science planet they'll jump on the first spaceship out of there to go do more science far away.

If none of that happens and they're stuck sitting around being grumpy for long enough then they'll start thinking OK, fine, maybe being a farmer isn't so bad. They call it agricultural science don't they? Also they're running out of cash and had to downgrade their lifestyle anyway, and also they haven't published in a while so everyone's kind of avoiding them at parties. So they go be farmers and yeah it's not ideal but it's better than doing nothing all day (or maybe a few other scientist/cg/alloy pops start to burn out and decide they want to be farmers for the country air so they go take farmer jobs and the ex-scientists run up to the door waving their credentials and work experience etc, whichever works best for your headcanon at any one time).

But let's say there are no free worker tier jobs either so now they're even madder because they swallowed their pride and went to the farms and were told to go home anyway! (or maybe they're agrarian so they shove out a bunch of existing farmers onto the unemployment line, maybe that's a thing, we don't know). In either case there's a bunch of angry unemployed worker tier pops who consider being a civilian beneath them... until they either get a new job, emigrate to work somewhere else, or accept that they need to go sign up for UBI/get a job at space mcdonalds/sit at home grumbling at Foxoid News while their spouse takes a job at space mcdonalds/go home and write a book or a videogame or whatever/age out into retirement age/die (delete as inappropriate for your empire settings and or personal preferences)

Meanwhile someone who's already chronically unemployed or is fresh out of college and has never entered the workforce is going to be less annoyed by living off UBI/taking a temporary job at space mcdonalds/opening a space etsy store to kill time because it's not a drop in living standards, and we just invented space travel so sure something'll come up before they get bored.

And presumably if you give their species awful living standards for civilians they will get pretty mad anyway!

This is pretty much exactly how I envision it.

Does this mean the only growth play for colonies is forced resettlement to quickly get them up to whatever the threshold size is where they actually grow on their own?

If you provide jobs out there and allow automatic resettlement, then if you have a pool of Civilians they should naturally migrate to the planet. Balancing depopulating your homeworld with populating the colonies might be something relevant too.

Perhaps assembly buildings give a number of jobs per planet population, or they add assembler jobs to city districts.

@Gruntsatwork , double check that the DD371 draft isn't publicly available.

Pops moving between empires sounds great. Though if they only move to a foreign capital sounds like it might be hard to take advantage of different habitability preferences. If I’m playing an ocean world species who have made a desert world colony seems my treaties would get stuck. No desert dwellers are going to move to the ocean world meaning none will more onto the colony.

Our current thought is to send them to the capital even if it's not where they actually want to be, and the next wave of migration would send them to a planet they'd rather be on or potentially to a different empire. We wanted to minimize the number of extra planets being added to the automatic migration checks.

So there are jobs that can be filled by a smaller workforce? For example, a researcher job should not need 100 Pops, let alone unskilled workers, but rather highly skilled workers—only about 10 or so per job. It would be interesting to see some sort of education system that promotes "Workers" to "Skilled Workers" by providing education facilities and such. But maybe just an abstraction through a calculation that promotes Pops when open jobs exist would be fine too, just like it used to work.

This is correct, jobs are not required to need 100 workforce to fill.

 

[Jashkar]

@Jashkar @ImperatorRoman I was joking about how Stellaris was becoming like Victoria 2, hence renaming "civilians" to (Victoria 2) "artisans" as they have a pretty similar concept. Of course it would be absurd to actually do but it's funny! Eladrin please back me up don't make me look silly.

Ah...ok!

I have missed the reference...sorry, Milelinileugim...I have never played Victoria 2!

 

[Gruntsatwork]

@Gruntsatwork , double check that the DD371 draft isn't publicly available.

Ohhh, so when you said you wanted feedback you didn't mean pub....oops, my bad, lemme delete that quickly.

 

[Alfray Stryke]

Ohhh, so when you said you wanted feedback you didn't mean pub....oops, my bad, lemme delete that quickly.

Hey, you removed my access to it as well!

 

[Jashkar]

A broad civilian underclass is present in a lot of sci-fi, usually subsisting on some variant of universal basic income or odd jobs. We envision the Civilians as fitting into that sort of role - they're not exactly happy about their position, and are ready to jump into an opportunity on another world, but aren't generally causing trouble as long as they have their bread and circuses. Living standards, civics, and the like are very likely to have a significant effect on exactly how happy they are.

As you correctly point out those aren't "Civilians"...are "Underclass"!

In essence, it is a split assuming that Workers are "Proletariat" and those so-called "Civilians" are "Lumpenproletarian", but suggesting that they are "happy" seems a complete misunderstanding of their condition.

However I can't help feeling that touching strata to add them is pointless:

Why not go for a simpler solution like adding "Odd Jobs" for workers based on population (which is a sort of Population-based fringe group equivalent of Criminals, but, unlike them, have a very low priority)?

...why not simply "beefing up" the "Colonists" jobs added by the initial colony building, so that people get attracted to colonies?

...why not add a little "population growth" boost (maybe even gradually shrinking) to the "Colonist" job?

...why not add some kind of "Colony expansion" building which grants more population growth boost and then could be replaced by normal buildings?

Why one has to touch the well-conceived and stable strata which are "social classes" to solve such simple problems such like the "existence of clerks" and the trouble of "needing unemployed to transfer people to colonies to produce population" and "being unable to transfer people because colonies have no jobs"?

The thing is simple:

If "Odd Jobs" and "Unemployed" allow to auto-transfer to Colonies and "Colonist" jobs allow growth, people with Odd Jobs and who are unemployed would move to colonies. In the Colonist role, they'd boost the population and then would move to more normal jobs.
At the same time, due to the population shrinking, the old "Odd Jobs" on the planet of origin would disappear!

"Odd Jobs" are a way to lump together occasional and underpaid jobs...they are not a social class and they indeed aren't what you are left to do if you aren't unemployed...it is what you do to avoid being unemployed!

P.S.: A further enhancement could be to add some decision like "Implement the Net or the Web" and then generate better paid Specialist Odd Jobs like "Influencers"...which would be still based on the population, but would reduce "Unemployment" in the Specialist stratum.
However, being based on a decision, the player doesn't need to have them and could just opt for having Specialists demote to Workers as usual...

 

[Tim_Ward]

I would rename 'pop group' to 'demographic' or something, the former sounds like they've just released a new single that's charting well in eastern europe.