Stellaris Dev Diary #370 - 4.0 Changes Part 4

[M. Real]

The point of defining "civilians" as a separate stratum from workers is that it distinguishes a group to be treated differently for migration, and having them be different from just being unemployed. Civilians will always migrate if there is work on another planet, unlike employed worker pops. If they were just clerks or some other worker stratum job, they would presumably follow the same logic as other workers and not have any particular priority to migrate. Now, this distinction could simply be handled by the "unemployed" status, but I think the developers want to keep unemployment as undesirable.

Though I don't think it's the intent here, maybe there could be a limited number of "civilians" available. Perhaps civilian openings are granted by city districts, just like clerk jobs. If civilian positions are full, then you just end up with unemployed workers. This maintains the threat of unemployment, while still keeping some pops separate from the other strata in terms of migration logic.

I see this working like so: you have a new "civilian" category with limited "job" slots. Whenever worker pops would demote, or when pops grow but there are no worker jobs available, they fill up this category (pending eligibility, maybe only certain species and non-slaves). Presumably, they would have the same living standard as workers. Unemployment would still be undesirable, and you would still avoid it by building more infrastructure for these "civilians".

Some ideas for possible alternatives to "civilian": "tenant", "temp worker", "independent", "odd-jobber"
Possible different options for different civics/policies: "homesteader", "peasant", "irregular", "freelancer", "intern"

 

[lordvagrant]

Are there any plans to rework resettlement system? Currently, especially in mid/late game, it is trivial to evacuate almost entire planet and do other massive population transfers which to me always has felt bit silly and "unrealistic" even for Stellaris. Eg. got a new planet with big research bonus, filled it with labs and then instantly moved large amount of random workers and other less important pops from the other worlds to get near instant research world.

I feel like immigration could play much bigger role in Stellaris.

That "filled it with labs" would still take a decade or more to achieve.

 

[cryptkeeper]

I would like ruler now elites&worker builds to be better, so I have a excuse to play differently then the specialist builds that are basically the go to.

 

[Shadowlyger]

The point of defining "civilians" as a separate stratum from workers is that it distinguishes a group to be treated differently for migration, and having them be different from just being unemployed. Civilians will always migrate if there is work on another planet, unlike employed worker pops. If they were just clerks or some other worker stratum job, they would presumably follow the same logic as other workers and not have any particular priority to migrate. Now, this distinction could simply be handled by the "unemployed" status, but I think the developers want to keep unemployment as undesirable.

What might be the intent here, though it's not clear from the dev diary, is that there are a limited number of "civilians" available. Perhaps civilian openings are granted by city districts, just like clerk jobs. If civilian positions are full, then you just end up with unemployed workers. This maintains the threat of unemployment, while still keeping some pops separate from the other strata in terms of migration logic.

I see this working like so: you have a new "civilian" category with limited "job" slots. Whenever worker pops would demote, or when pops grow but there are no worker jobs available, they fill up this category (pending eligibility, maybe only certain species and non-slaves). Presumably, they would have the same living standard as workers. Unemployment would still be undesirable, and you would still avoid it by building more infrastructure for these "civilians".

Some ideas for possible alternatives to "civilian": "tenant", "temp worker", "independent", "odd-jobber"
Possible different options for different civics/policies: "homesteader", "peasant", "irregular", "freelancer", "intern"

I believe the whole point is that you don't have a limited number of civilian "jobs". Any pop not otherwise employed will eventually become a civilian. You'll have to deal with the negatives of them being unemployed until they finally demote to civvie, though on the other hand it does mean that fresh pops will likely spawn in as civilians, so you don't have as much pressure to immediately employ them.

As you say, the main reason to not employ everybody is that it will crater pop growth for new colonies, as employed pops don't generate much immigration push compared to civilians.

Considering the much larger number of pops we're working with, I imagine it may also be difficult to just skip on the trade and amenities civilians produce.

 

[M. Real]

I believe the whole point is that you don't have a limited number of civilian "jobs". Any pop not otherwise employed will eventually become a civilian. You'll have to deal with the negatives of them being unemployed until they finally demote to civvie, though on the other hand it does mean that fresh pops will likely spawn in as civilians, so you don't have as much pressure to immediately employ them.

As you say, the main reason to not employ everybody is that it will crater pop growth for new colonies, as employed pops don't generate much immigration push compared to civilians.

Considering the much larger number of pops we're working with, I imagine it may also be difficult to just skip on the trade and amenities civilians produce.

If there are an unlimited number of civilians, my impression is that there would be essentially no threat from unemployment, as the number of unemployed pops will never be large enough to lower stability significantly. You would only have to deal with an unemployed worker for a short time, and then they would be perfectly happy as a civilian. If there is no real danger from unemployment anyway, then I don't see why civilians are needed in the first place. Why not just put all of the features associated with civilians on unemployed workers? It seems redundant.

At least if the number of civilian jobs is limited, then you still have to care about making sure you have enough jobs for your pops to prevent mass unhappiness. On the other hand though, unemployment is already not a huge deal in the current version of the game (not at all if you have at least social welfare), so maybe there are some other changes planned.

 

[Egodeus]

Clerks after the trade changes dev diary: I will, finally, after seven years of being terrible, have my chance to shine
Clerks after this dev diary: oh

They get their chance to shine bright like a diamond!

The only problem is that it happens after they've been cremated and the ashes compressed into industrial diamonds for the more useful workers to use as tools.

 

[Eladrin]

I'm still not sure I like this. It feels like having 200 instead of 2 for most jobs will cause the feeling of drowning in zeroes.

12 and 2 feel more distinct from each other than 1200 and 200.

Or maybe use decimals instead of actually increasing the number, so that it's 12.00 and 2.00 instead.

They'll use the shortened notation, so 1200 pops will be shown as 1.2k rather than a ton of zeroes. We experimented with decimal places earlier in development, and ended up hitting the confusion point of "what's 0.03 of a pop - can they work?" Since simultaneous growth was one of my major desires for this revamp, we decided to go with multiplying the numbers instead of having fractions.

I am interested in the effects of xeno compatibility in the late game.
How will having hundreds of crossbreeds affect you compared to the old system?

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 say "By default, every Pop generates 1 Workforce" but also "Pops are scaled up by 100". Can you clarify this - is it 100 Workforce per Pop, or 1?

1 Pop produces 1 Workforce. 1 Job will usually require 100 Workforce to fill, so will typically provide work for 100 Pops.

In the new System, will we be able to effectively have a degree of all Jobs on a planet being worked by the available Workforce, even if there are more 'Jobs' available than there are 'Pops'? So for instance on a planet with 5 'Jobs' and 6 'Pops', each Pop fills 0.83 of a 'Job', and so we get 83% of the output of that Job's comparative Workforce? I thought this was implied by the previous Pop system screenshot but it would be good to better understand.

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.)

I'm surprised there's no further screenshots - even of WIP mock-ups or similar placeholders. It would be really great to see this visually, particularly if things have moved along from the last teaser image we had in (I think?) late Dec or early January.

Right now we're all-in on implementation and there have been rapid changes, we'll have more to show in the near future.

(I relented a little later in this post and gave a small peek at a WIP UI.)

I really like the idea of resistance jobs. With pop groups being tied to factions I can see a good foundation for internal politics with unhappy factions spawning resistance or revolutionary pops.

It seems to be a relatively popular concept, even in the half-baked form that I casually mentioned it as.

To be completely transparent, the economic changes are our priority right now and are coming in hot, so we might not get to some of the cool extensions of the systems like Resistance jobs in the initial 4.0 release, but if we don't, they're likely to come soon afterwards. I really like them too.

Will the way workforce is distributed amongst jobs be different from the way pops currently select jobs?

It will be very similar to how they currently select jobs. (Though we're likely to significantly streamline some of the scripts since there were some unnecessary double-calculations going on.) As with pop growth, all declining species will decline simultaneously though.

Questions:
1. How will pop decline will work in the new system?
I'm thinking of a gradual background churn of species as some grow and some decline, slowly changing the overall demographics.

Fairly similarly to how it does now, but with the more granular pop size it'll be a more consistent decline of a number of pops every month instead of one pop every x months.

2. How have pop migration numbers have been changed?
Currently high stability and free jobs can completely overwhelm any sources of migration push (push numbers are too small), so most pop movement comes from automatic resettlement of full unemployed pops instead of migration push and pull. I hope this is looked at.

The auto-migration system that moves unemployed pops around will replace the push and pull based migration system entirely. Unemployed pops and civilians may choose to migrate to the capital of an empire you have a Migration Treaty with (after which they may migrate elsewhere in that empire, or potentially, even back.) We're going to be tweaking some of these numbers for a while once we have everything running according to the base model.

It would be good if Districts became the primary source of jobs and buildings provided only bonuses. So there should be more district types, covering all resources.

Stop looking at the DD371 draft.

(You're close. Not exactly on target with what we're planning, but pretty close.)

Will we have greater control over what species of pop (I guess now workforce) gets assigned to a job, whether that's by manual assignment or species preference? If I'm running a multi-species empire and I want the Intelligent species with Academic Privilege living standards to be my Scientists instead of the Charismatic mouthbreathers I have that's better suited for Entertainers or Servants, will I be able to prioritize them or de-prioritize the Charismatics from taking Scientist jobs?

Pops that are especially good at a job will gravitate towards those jobs naturally. We do not want you to have to micromanage pops to that level.

Cool, now everyone gets to start with an unemployment crisis!

It's kind of the opposite - everyone starts with a pool of workers ready to go into the jobs that you provide as you expand.

We were quite concerned that without them, you would end up with a situation where you were pop-starved in the early game.

I'd also love to see some images, even if they look completely cursed. Especially if they look completely cursed actually

It's still pretty cursed, but fiiiine.

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.

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

 

[Ikael]

Regarding the whole "Civilian" condrunuum; I think that a far better term for that strata would be underclass:

- It clearly convey that they are a strata below blue collar workers
- They do have both employment AND poverty
- The backbone of the private sector and of any colonization effort
- Less political power and more stable than angry unemployed workers
- Highly dependent on living standards and welfare
- As a cynical empire ruler; you want to have few of those but never too few
- Allows for many roleplaying possibilities depending on living standards and empire types: Underclass species living with Academic privilege might work as "lab assistants"; certain types of slavery might only apply to those underclass pops; while shared burden empires might have no underclass at all.

 

[Zergor]

Regarding the whole "Civilian" condrunuum; I think that a far better term for that strata would be underclass:

- It clearly convey that they are a strata below blue collar workers
- They do have both employment AND poverty
- The backbone of the private sector and of any colonization effort
- Less political power and more stable than angry unemployed workers
- Highly dependent on living standards and welfare
- As a cynical empire ruler; you want to have few of those but never too few
- Allows for many roleplaying possibilities depending on living standards and empire types: Underclass species living with Academic privilege might work as "lab assistants"; certain types of slavery might only apply to those underclass pops; while shared burden empires might have no underclass at all.

I like civilians.
We know already that drones will have their own name for it but we have to remember it's a whole strata.

It may be filled with utopian abundance main specie, slaves, servant robots and basic subsistance residents at the same time in an equalitarian xenophobe empire. All four should probably have different name for their jobs but "civilian" works reasonably well at describing the strata.

 

[Draelian]

Composer of Strands events, how will Composer of Strands events be affected?

I'm worried that "Nonurgle" is going to get a little out of control.

 

[Ilab]

You in a sense can already do this by assigning a governor to a planet (increases assigned governor's ethic attraction) and gene modding them so they are a sub species (that way you can enslave them)
You can turn that up more by making it a thrall world.

Ethics attraction along with ethics shifting can occur with pops based on factions but also based on certain actions you take within the game (can't link the wiki but it details it very well)

This is wrong. I think you might have a mod or something.

What you mention about ethics attraction is correct, and I know of all the ways to increase it: Councilors, Traits, Governors, events such as war etc.

BUT the other part is wrong. You can't enslave a subspecies of your main species. You can enslave others, but not your main one nor their subtemplates.

 

[Calvax]

The auto-migration system that moves unemployed pops around will replace the push and pull based migration system entirely. Unemployed pops and civilians may choose to migrate to the capital of an empire you have a Migration Treaty with (after which they may migrate elsewhere in that empire, or potentially, even back.) We're going to be tweaking some of these numbers for a while once we have everything running according to the base model

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.

 

[lordvagrant]

So now that we have identified the "useless" third of our population, and used a pretense of being attacked by a giant space goat in order to load them all into a giant space ark and ship them off to a colony, will we be in danger of our civilization being wiped out by a plague spread from an un-sanitised public phone?

 

[lordvagrant]

Will Colony ships now require Civilian pops to be built?

 

[Red Death]

The hybridization mechanic of xenocompatibility is likely going to be removed.

Awww, but that's the fun part!

Leave us a game rule/modding hooks pretty please?

 

[Panzerslothen]

They'll use the shortened notation, so 1200 pops will be shown as 1.2k rather than a ton of zeroes. We experimented with decimal places earlier in development, and ended up hitting the confusion point of "what's 0.03 of a pop - can they work?" Since simultaneous growth was one of my major desires for this revamp, we decided to go with multiplying the numbers instead of having fractions.

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.)

Fairly similarly to how it does now, but with the more granular pop size it'll be a more consistent decline of a number of pops every month instead of one pop every x months.

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

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)

 

[SeekingEtermity]

Pops that are especially good at a job will gravitate towards those jobs naturally. We do not want you to have to micromanage pops to that level.

I appreciate that, but THE CURRENT SYSTEM DOES NOT WORK ADEQUATELY! Instead, you constantly get stuff like the pops with integrated weaponry ignoring police-type jobs, the pops with high output bonuses refusing to work pop assembly jobs - even if you favorite them - so long as there's a resource-producing job available (so you have to close all the e.g. unity-producing jobs just to ensure your population keeps growing), pops refusing to work strategic resource producing jobs (unless favorited) if they can be metallurgists instead but you can only favorite one kind of strategic-producing job not all three, etc.

It's a mess. The fact that it mostly works, most of the time, conceals the extremely frustrating cases when "weird" stuff happens like pushing your pops to over 50% productivity bonus (easy to do far Modular machines, and becomes sufficient to override favoriting) or when you create a new job or new trait and forget to link that trait to the relevant jobs, or the relevant traits to the new job. And that's without even getting into the thing where it's random, so sometimes the right thing happens by chance, and other times your pops randomly do something idiotic even when their weighting would have gotten it right.

 

[herculeanus]

Pops that are especially good at a job will gravitate towards those jobs naturally. We do not want you to have to micromanage pops to that level.

But is it still possible to manage the micro?

 

[Questionable]

This is just like my suggestions on a new pop rework i last made months ago, makes me so happy and hype, I'm dying to get my hands on the beta, even if its months away i'm soooooo excited

 

[PK_AZ]

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?

One idea we have includes having Civilians create impromptu defensive militias to help defend their home, (...). Another idea is for aggressively invaded Civilians to take “Resistance” Jobs that they must then “demote” out of over time.

Any chance of having it extended to all POPs on planet? It's absolutely flavor nitpicking from my side, but I kinda feel planets should defend themselves even if player/AI did not invested in military infrastructure. That, and that populous planets should feel, maybe not hard to take, but at least enormous in raw number of soldiers involved.

Generally speaking: you made me interested in Stellaris, for first time in years. I'll be looking for this patch.