Stellaris Dev Diary #375 - Notes on the Open Beta

[Tisifoni12]

I note the gradual replacement of pink triangle placeholders with other icons. I am intrigued and await what icon will be used to represent the restoration of order on X planet. Also will the same icon be used whether the restoration of order is by peaceful initiative / negotiation or suppression ?

 

[SirBlackAxe]

Would it make sense to include all achievements as entries in the empire timeline? That'd let you see them even when playing modded.

 

[exi123]

In Victoria 3, the migration attraction of your state is influenced by available jobs (among other things). Unemployment tanks it. Lots of open jobs adds a bonus (somewhat outweighed by the available arable land bonus but still notable if you have a lot of openings). You can also use a decree to add +25% migration attraction.

I'm hoping to finally try the beta this weekend, but on live we have planetary decisions like "Distribute Luxury Goods" and "Exhibit Art Museum" which increase migration pull. Those could become our equivalent of the Greener Grass Campaign decree if you want strong encouragement beyond general weights. But yes, hopefully the automatic migration weights in the background are tuned right so we can push enough pops to the worlds that need them.

I know that, but V3 is not really good in pushing pops around. It is super rough to build up states that do not have arable land but otherwise plenty of resources. The migration system in V3 is really not up to the task at the moment.

The Equivalent in Stellaris would be if you settle a new world, try to get the planet to get some science with housing going but no one is coming over from overpopulated worlds because the planet is to small and can in theory only offer 10 districts, while an other planet with size 25 soaks up all migration without offering anything else.

The main driver for migration should be open jobs and stability.

 

[The Founder]

Would it make sense to include all achievements as entries in the empire timeline? That'd let you see them even when playing modded.

The should probably cut out the "just happens during play" ones.
Like 1st Colony, 1000 Energy, 5000 Energy.

I think they currently do the ones that are worth a descision. So they should maybe limit it like that?

 

[Troyen]

Now that I've played some time on the beta (3.99.3 UNE) and reflect on my experience, I have some overall thoughts. Individual issues were posted in the patch notes thread.

I kind of see how the zone system might work in the late game. You set your designation and zone template and just build more city districts when the planet is ready to expand. In theory this should let you scale multiple jobs with fewer clicks when you're micromanaging dozens of planets.

However, this paradigm doesn't work well for the early game, specifically the very early game. You can't easily specialize your capital world and first couple colonies because you're trying to get basic production of everything running, so the opening moves on your capital are a mess. It's one thing to create an industrial zone on a brand new colony and add jobs by increasing the city district. The UNE's capital starts with 4 city districts so if you aren't careful, your first move will provide one of the most dramatic shifts (especially as a % of your empire income) of resource production/consumption in the game. It's also really hard to figure out what to do first because the zone system expects that you know how you're going to specialize your world and build it up over time, but it's my capital - I don't know what I want to lock my second starting zone to right away because it's too early in the game to commit to that.

I found the whole UI around buildings, zones, and districts confusing. There's a lot of flashing "build stuff" here in the city districts which you don't necessarily want to do because you need a solid base of input resources and pops working other jobs, so in the current state I think this will trip up a lot of players. The buildings/zone restrictions are WIP so I suspect this will change, but I can build a research building in my capital zone now, but that locks me out of building a research building in my research zone later (and doesn't require me to replace the starting research building, which I didn't because having both buildings doubled my starting research).

Population system change is ok, I guess? Hard to evaluate without functioning growth/migration/employment tooltips (please prioritize the tooltip bugs, it is the single biggest obstacle to actually evaluating the beta fairly and would help with learning the new system properly). I was able to settle my two guaranteeds about the same pace as live and it looks like at least one colony was growing, though I don't know how much was pop growth and how much migration. Like I hinted at above, I used the Colony designation because it's too early for me to start specializing planets and so I went with the extra migration attraction.

Basic resource value is unbalanced. Minerals are in high demand in the early game. Energy (as non-robots) was pretty worthless, and food is about the same priority as live (i.e. "meh"). I also have no idea where all my trade income was coming from (busted pop tooltips) but I seemed to have enough to buy minerals. This kinda sucks, I don't think we should have useless resources just to dump on the market, and food was already in that middling spot. Whereas in 3.14 I don't care about Food, 4.0 does not make me care about Food, Energy, and Trade. (CG are kinda meh on both, but are at least more impactful than Food in that CG upkeep is influenced by living standards and economic policies.)

Empire timeline might be a nice for a recap, but really needs to fit more than three elements at a time. I didn't play long enough to fill up more than two pages, but the first page was filled up within three years.

The Empire Focus system is...I guess inconsequential? The tasks I was given did not at all relate to my Empire Focus which blocked progress. The tasks themselves ranged from OK to "why would I want this?" to "this is offered at the wrong time." I get that it's hard to come up with a bunch of relevant sidequests (I've added something similar to Empire Focus as a mod in another game in the past). If the intent is to guide new players, then you need tighter restrictions on when certain tasks appear. "Enact a Planetary Decision" is not a Tier 1 task - there's no real reason to do this at the start of the game. It'd be fine as a mid-tier task when you can enact the Artisan Festival or when Luxury Goods makes more sense. "Recruit a commander" should also probably bump to Tier 2 because you don't need to be spending unity on a second commander at the start. Defense platforms and stuff are situational, but I'm thinking this'll probably go the way of the Vic 3 "Learn the Game" tutorials where they fire at weird times and aren't kept in date with game changes, so they end up largely ignored by experienced players. I don't hate Empire Focus as much as I thought I did going in, but I also don't see myself going out of my way to engage with it. (Also, from a discoverability POV, it's buried in the Situation Log, and it'd be nice if you could pin certain tasks somewhere so you can track them.)

In general, I like playing small starts and underdog empires, but this is one of the first times where I wanted to actually just Speed 5 through the first couple decades because there was so little to do on my capital. Instead of building up two pop jobs at a time, I made a single zone change and it shifted over a bunch of resources and that removed the need to tweak my capital for a long time.

Relative to live, the beta is less fun in its current state. Wasn't motivated to play long enough to see if it at least addresses the mid and end-game tedium, but early game is worse.

 

[KatKombat]

I would like to see a preview of job upkeep and production when I adjust the job priority sliders. If I'm trying to achieve a certain level of production (such as, keeping food or CGs balanced), I kind of have to guess where to put the slider. I think the production screen should include both current production/upkeep and the estimated values if all open jobs (set by the slider) were filled. That estimate would have to update dynamically as the slider moves. Also, I'm finding it hard to figure out the upkeep and production per job (or per hundred jobs) and I think those numbers should be included somewhere in the UI.

 

[Tisifoni12]

Generally feel this is a great improvement, obviously some tidying up of the interface to be done.

It does seem that only one building of any type is permitted per planet, which seems okay. The one problem I have had is demand for consumer goods can outstrip supply and while there's the provision to use some of your 'trade mountain' to buy consumer goods (modelling tax reductions that let your people buy their own consumer goods) maybe an expansion of consumer good production would make more sense ?

I seem to generate so much trade (currency / mana ?) that I wonder why there's no inflation. Yes have some way of evening out imbalances in resources (trade), but if you have more trade than resources then you will have inflation.

I am not recommending building inflation into the model, but refining the model so it's more possible to balance resource 'income' without needing vast amounts of 'trade' to spend as a currency.