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Stellaris Dev Diary #9 - Planets & Resources

Greetings Earthlings!

We have spoken earlier about how the galaxy is generated, and today I aim to expand on that somewhat by telling you about the planets and how they differ from each other.

Planet Tiles
Each habitable planet has a number of tiles on its surface, representing the planet’s size. Some tiles might be blocked by natural barriers, such as mountains, and can be cleared to open up new space. When the galaxy is generated, each tile generates a random number and checks if a deposit will be spawned there. A tile can be worked by having a Pop placed in it.

Buildings can also be constructed in tiles, and they often have adjacency bonuses for the resource they are producing. Therefore it will be advantageous to construct your power plants in proximity to each other, to achieve optimal efficiency.

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Planet Modifiers
Celestial objects come in many different sizes and shapes, and planet modifiers are a part of what can set two planets apart. In the example above, Omaggus III has particularly large lifeforms on it, which could prove fruitful to study.

Deposits
Resources are generated as deposits and they spawn on planets depending on the type of planet, and which modifiers can be found on the planet. Certain resources are also more likely to be found in systems that lie in specific parts in the galaxy, like inside a nebula. All resources cannot appear on all planets, and some planets have a higher chance of hosting certain resources. Asteroids are very likely to have minerals on them, for example.

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Orbital Resources
Planets that cannot be colonized do not use surface tiles, but they can still generate deposits. Each planet has an orbital resource slot that can be worked if a Mining Station or Research Station is built in orbit around that planet. Sometimes you encounter planets that you could potentially colonize, but that is not habitable enough for you to want to colonize it. In those cases you may also want to construct an orbital station.

The Basic Resources
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Food is a requirement for Pops to grow. If there is plenty of Food, Pops will grow faster. If there is a lack of Food, Pops will be unhappy.

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Minerals are used to produce most things in the game. If Minerals represent matter, Energy Credits represent work.

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Energy Credits represent all liquid assets and energy produced by our Empire. Actions, such as clearing tiles, cost Energy Credits to perform. This resource is mainly used for upkeep, and although it can be hoarded, that might not be the best way of handling it.

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Physics Research, Society Research and Engineering Research are used to advance technologies in different fields of science.

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Here, have a bonus screenshot! As an interstellar rogue I'm used to breaking the rules.

Join us again next week when we will be telling you about Rare Resources and the Spaceport.
 
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Does that mean each all pop are uniformly sized? And that there is a hard limit of 25 pop in a planet? If so, that is terribly disappointing. I was really hoping for a more granular system.

Another hint that pops are integers: the screenshot has a particular pop growth at 15/50. That looks a lot to me like 50 excess food required for one pop to become two. Also, the other numbers (energy and minerals) are fairly smallish, so there's probably not enough resolution there to support real-valued pop numbers. I agree that it's disappointing.
 
Another hint that pops are integers: the screenshot has a particular pop growth at 15/50. That looks a lot to me like 50 excess food required for one pop to become two. Also, the other numbers (energy and minerals) are fairly smallish, so there's probably not enough resolution there to support real-valued pop numbers. I agree that it's disappointing.

I noticed that. However, the tile selected is one that is not fully colonized yet. I am assuming the information there is for this tile specifically, so this number could be just displaying the colony progress (like in EU4). Furthermore, we don't actually know what the number means. You assumed it was the food needed to grow, but I assumed it was a population number. Your assuming seems viable, though, which is sad.

That said, I personally don't care for real valued pop numbers. It is impossible enough to figure out what would be "realistic" 2200 population numbers, but then we would have to account for different species and planets. Having arbitrary numbers, even low numbers is fine by me. What I find really disappointing is that pops are uniform within the tiles. I was hoping you could have defensively populated tiles in the same planet you have sparsely populated regions. Furthermore, I was really hoping a planet could just keep growing as long as you could support it. But if each tile can support 1 pop, and all pops are the same size, that means each planet have a hard population cap, which sucks.
 
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That said, I personally don't care for real valued pop numbers. It is impossible enough to figure out what would be "realistic" 2200 population numbers, but then we would have to account for different species and planets. Having arbitrary numbers, even low numbers is fine by me.

I meant "real-valued" in contrast to integers. So you could have 0.01 pops on a planet or 1234.5. Sorry about the confusion with "real" numbers of aliens.
 
I like the planet tiles system, but I'm not a fan of the current representation. I'm hoping it'll end up becoming something that looks more like a map, than just a grid of icons.
 
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So many tiles on one planet, great! Build them all!

But game has small range of resourses - energy and minerals in Empire scale. It is another 'local' resourses, like iron\fish\fur in EU? And will be their required to special projects? In example to make some upgrade to your ship - you need special nebula's resourse.
 
Well, you can't have half of a person now can you.

Clearly you haven't been to a magic show!

What I am trying and apparently failing to get at with the integer versus real distinction is that pops could be of different sizes. If you want to have a capital metropolis with tens of billions and a newborn colony with tens of thousands in the same game, it would be a lot more convenient to have variable-size pops. Otherwise, the new colony is one pop, and the capital is a million (with 25 of those million 'working the land').
 
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I really want the POP dev diary. :) Like how do we change or influence their outlooks. How does unhappiness affect production how do they rebel.

Going into each planet and moving POPs around sounds like potential micro intensive on mid to large empires.

On topic, I want to see the Planet Summary and Armies tabs :)

Also, looks like could be cool if a long war or insurrection was on the planet and the Planet meant different control over the tiles.
 
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Clearly you haven't been to a magic show!

What I am trying and apparently failing to get at with the integer versus real distinction is that pops could be of different sizes. If you want to have a capital metropolis with tens of billions and a newborn colony with tens of thousands in the same game, it would be a lot more convenient to have variable-size pops. Otherwise, the new colony is one pop, and the capital is a million (with 25 of those million 'working the land').
I understand that you mean 1.1 thousand or 1.1 million. I was just making a joke. With populations reaching into bilions it would be crazy to count by individuals.
Edit: Now that I think about it a mining colony might only have a couple dozen peoeple on it. Parodox would need to make it aparent if the number is in thousands (K) or some other value.
 
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I meant "real-valued" in contrast to integers. So you could have 0.01 pops on a planet or 1234.5. Sorry about the confusion with "real" numbers of aliens.

Fair enough. My mistake. That is what I want too.

I guess pops could be integers for easier understanding if you could have more than one per tile. But a single uniform pop per tile is sad.
 
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I wonder if it's too late to rethink the approach. I think it's only there because other games do it that way, but to me it's counter-intuitive. Several factories that use the same resources should not have synergy, quite the opposite as they would compete for their input. I'd think an approach more intuitive (and possibly more fun) is if each plant requires one or two resources, and the synergy would be to have plants that produce those resources next to them, or at the very least if they don't use the same resources.

Wow. Just... no.

Edit: I don't think your "intuition" is remotely accurate, especially for economies of scale related to transportation and infrastructure.
 
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So it looks like POPs are going to be like population units in Civ games rather than POPs in the vicky2 sense. The pops detail screen seems to only have a name, race, ethos and growth rating. No literacy, resource needs, classes, wealth, militancy or consciousness. I'm assuming that if these things were present they would be displayed in the panel labeled 'Pop Details'. I know that they said that POPs wouldn't be as in-depth as Victoria 2, but I had expected something a little more than this. I really hope there is more to this system then it currently appears. Perhaps the crunchy number stuff is in the hover tool-tips of those four symbols that I am assuming are the POPs' Ethos or hidden from the player?
 
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I am fascinated by the economic system without typical 'money'. Dividing basic income on 'matter' and 'energy' is so cool. It also makes sense on a deep level - why different interstellar civilisations should value each other's currency (local mineral, biological assets, symbolical stuff) so highly? Civilisations need suistaining population (food), resources (matter), energy, intellectual capital (research) and sociopolitical capital.

By the looks of it, it doesn't seem really different than the old food/hammer/money system of the average 4x game, unless I'm missing something. Same for the tile system. Even pop doesn't look very in-depth... I had hoped for something more original and refined from Paradox.
 
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This Dev Diary is, as usual, awesome and full of interesting info.

My only feedback would be that in the third screenshot, a lot of the information is slightly hard to read. The color of the empire makes the FTL starlanes a little hard to see; I'm also assuming that the question marks and fleet symbols are attached to the stars to their left, but they're just far enough away that that is in doubt. Hoping that the question mark is a placeholder icon, too, as the red symbol jars a little bit with the rest of the UI theme.

Otherwise, can't wait for next week!
 
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I'm generally ok with abstractions, but ... wouldn't it be a lot more "natural" to have the surface tiles of the planet actually on the surface of the planet? Why are they in a separate window off to the side?
 
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