Stellaris 3.99.6 'Phoenix' Open Beta Release Notes

[NorseGod]

Yes and no on the bargaining. What I've written there is basically the original design description, while factoring in the amenity changes and the capital zone switch from 3 and 3 to 6 and 2 (e: both of which are good iterations on the original design)

Here's a discussion from February about the exact problem static jobs could cause, and there are a ton of early posts, many from myself, about the importance of building variety for this to work (Yes, I can provide receipts for those too).

Where I'm bargaining is that every time I included a qualifier of "assuming they don't fall into these obvious pitfalls" I firmly believed they would not.

But here we are. And my bargaining is "OK so now we can try the thing your originally described that I really liked right? Right?"

Right, but your change to Amenities makes them so generic that they might as well be built-in, they might as well be provided by Districts by default, like Housing. And with you advocating to remove "Add +X jobs" buildings and leave Jobs with Districts, Housing also becomes fairly meangingless as well, as the only reason you'd run out of either is when you run into deep Unemployment anyway, which has its own way to affect Stability. And if you do run into that situation, how do you "over build" Amenities to compensate, espcially specific choices as they related to Origins and Civics? Having more-effective Enforcers isn't that helpful, when you build them at the same time as Entertainers and Medical Workers, in a lump. You took away all the choice and granularity, and have reduced the impact of a bunch of Origins and Civics, expecially stuff from the DLCs.

Or you leave your "All-Amenities" idea as a building, turning the City District into a de facto Amenities District once planets fill with Pops.

 

[Critical Ethics]

And with you advocating to remove "Add +X jobs" buildings and leave Jobs with Districts, Housing also becomes fairly meangingless as well, as the only reason you'd run out of either is when you run into deep Unemployment anyway, which has its own way to affect Stability.

Civilians don't negatively affect stability and require housing. Did your forget they're a thing?

Right, but your change to Amenities makes them so generic that they might as well be built-in, they might as well be provided by Districts by default, like Housing. [Snip] And if you do run into that situation, how do you "over build" Amenities to compensate, espcially specific choices as they related to Origins and Civics.
Having more-effective Enforcers isn't that helpful, when you build them at the same time as Entertainers and Medical Workers, in a lump. You took away all the choice and granularity, and have reduced the impact of a bunch of Origins and Civics, expecially stuff from the DLCs. Or you leave your "All-Amenities" idea as a building, turning the City District into a de facto Amenities District once planets fill with Pops.

What change to amenities? I said amenity buildings were fine to stay as they currently are. I specifically called them out. I also suggested an additional zone building to help flesh out the current zone options, but that wasn't instead of everything else. I even explicitly said that they shouldn't be sufficient to carry amenities for the zone they're built in.

If you're going to make fun of someone at least read what you're making fun of. Helps make it more effective.

 

[NorseGod]

Civilians don't negatively affect stability and require housing. Did your forget they're a thing?

What change to amenities? I said amenity buildings were fine to stay as they currently are. I specifically called them out. I also suggested an additional zone building to help flesh out the current zone options, but that wasn't instead of everything else. I even explicitly said that they shouldn't be sufficient to carry amenities for the zone they're built in.

If you're going to make fun of someone at least read what you're making fun of. Helps make it more effective.

You mean like this?

Add an "on site amenities" building that adds a small number of medical workers and entertainers (and enforcers?) per district. Not enough to cover all the requirements but enough to take pressure off the capital. Or maybe just applies additional amenities and housing per district or reduces amenity and housing consumption for the zone's base job capacity, or reduces pop upkeep, or one or more of the above.

That's you arguing that we should put in an option so that Districts provide Amenities per District, just like Housing. It's Amenities Zone all over again.

And yes, I am aware of CIvilians. That's why I specifically talked about unemployed Pops, as Housing and Jobs shortages still exist in the game.

 

[Critical Ethics]

You mean like this?


That's you arguing that we should put in an option so that Districts provide Amenities per District, just like Housing. It's Amenities Zone all over again.

...you read that entire paragraph as a single thing instead of a list separated by "or"s, didn't you? Otherwise describing it as my "change" singular and bringing up both fixed amenities and enforcers wouldn't make any sense. Nor would highlighting both the fixed amenities option and the amenity reduction option but assuming the former meant fully covering amenities.

E: you're also glossing over the part of your last post where you claimed I was removing any way to add bulk amenities.

 

[DeathMaker900]

ground invasion is still completely broken. troops immediately reembark for space, the notification for ongoing invasion never goes away, and control of a planet never changes, even when landing against 0 defenders. against targets willing to surrender you can take planets by bombing them but against FP/DE or pre-ftls this leads to uncapturable planets.

 

[NorseGod]

...you read that entire paragraph as a single thing instead of a list separated by "or"s, didn't you? Otherwise describing it as my "change" singular and bringing up both fixed amenities and enforcers wouldn't make any sense. Nor would highlighting both the fixed amenities option and the amenity reduction option but assuming the former meant fully covering amenities.

E: you're also glossing over the part of your last post where you claimed I was removing any way to add bulk amenities.

And you're glossing over the part where I said:

Right, but your change to Amenities makes them so generic that they might as well be built-in, they might as well be provided by Districts by default, like Housing.

The rest of the paragraph is based on that.

And as for the earlier parts of your comment:

Or you leave your "All-Amenities" idea as a building, turning the City District into a de facto Amenities District once planets fill with Pops.

Stands, that is what it's basically become.

 

[Ternega]

I'd like to add my two cents on static Job buildings. I think the 3.99.5 did them fairly well - they were objectively worse option than district jobs, especially with urban district where you got about third the jobs from building than you did from district, but they were there if you needed them. I think having fallback to create more jobs if you can't get more planets/right districts or if you just need a lttle more of certain resource to balance the books is a great thing. I do not think the game should revolve around them, nor does it, but I honestly don't quite understand the opposition to them existing at all.

I think they should cost about twice the district upgrade price (360) for basic resources and a bit less than full urban district (standard 400) minerals for advanced/unity/research.

 

[Alastor]

@Developers
I was trying the most recent open beta and I was shocked to observe that despite the removal/redesign of the pop system Stellaris was performing as bad as ever. I was then told by other people in the forum that "no performance fixes" will be in the beta. What does that even mean? The old system that was meant to be the bottleneck is out, the new pop group system that is supposed to be more performant is in. Are you saying that all performance benefits will be added in the last moment shortly before release? Or is the intention to just "fix them" later on, as it has been the case so many times before? If so, why the open beta then? For the new features alone?

Please understand the following, I have supported Stellaris nearly from the start, almost a decade now. I have bought all DLCs up to this point. I have thousands of hours on this game and my patience is getting increasingly exhausted. Stellaris has performed unacceptably poorly since v2.2 that's 7 years and many DLCs or so-called seasons ago. At this point, I don't care how nice or fancy the new features you will add in this game are or will be if I still can't play the game at a reasonable pace. You have yet again promised performance improvements. Please, please deliver on that promise. Prioritize that promise. It is the only promise that matters.

 

[Tannhäuser Cake]

Do orbited planets, rings, and other things still show up in the colony background?

It is, for me, a very big part of worlds feeling different...
(to the extent that I sometimes relocate my capital, just to get a more special capital background)

@Developers
I was trying the most recent open beta and I was shocked to observe that despite the removal/redesign of the pop system Stellaris was performing as bad as ever. I was then told by other people in the forum that "no performance fixes" will be in the beta. What does that even mean? The old system that was meant to be the bottleneck is out, the new pop group system that is supposed to be more performant is in. Are you saying that all performance benefits will be added in the last moment shortly before release? Or is the intention to just "fix them" later on, as it has been the case so many times before? If so, why the open beta then? For the new features alone?

Please understand the following, I have supported Stellaris nearly from the start, almost a decade now. I have bought all DLCs up to this point. I have thousands of hours on this game and my patience is getting increasingly exhausted. Stellaris has performed unacceptably poorly since v2.2 that's 7 years and many DLCs or so-called seasons ago. At this point, I don't care how nice or fancy the new features you will add in this game are or will be if I still can't play the game at a reasonable pace. You have yet again promised performance improvements. Please, please deliver on that promise. Prioritize that promise. It is the only promise that matters.

The beta is using pre-optimized, debugging-friendly code. This means that it runs slower than what is expected from the final product, but it is easier for the developers to identify exactly where in the code any reported bugs are taking place. The big performance gains will supposedly be implemented later in the process, after the bug-stomping phase is over. That is my recollection of the process, at least.

 

[Alastor]

The beta is using pre-optimized, debugging-friendly code. This means that it runs slower than what is expected from the final product, but it is easier for the developers to identify exactly where in the code any reported bugs are taking place. The big performance gains will supposedly be implemented later in the process, after the bug-stomping phase is over. That is my recollection of the process, at least.

It is the "supposedly" part that really concerns me. Along with the "later" of course.

 

[Blackened30]

I'd like to add my two cents on static Job buildings. I think the 3.99.5 did them fairly well - they were objectively worse option than district jobs, especially with urban district where you got about third the jobs from building than you did from district, but they were there if you needed them. I think having fallback to create more jobs if you can't get more planets/right districts or if you just need a lttle more of certain resource to balance the books is a great thing. I do not think the game should revolve around them, nor does it, but I honestly don't quite understand the opposition to them existing at all.

I think they should cost about twice the district upgrade price (360) for basic resources and a bit less than full urban district (standard 400) minerals for advanced/unity/research.

I love buildings, they are the most flexible way to deal with planetary issues and have been for a long time. Right now Zones are themed containers that provide a certain number of jobs and that's all they do. The buildings are the star, they provide tons of jobs and also modify the outputs later on. I find percentage increases very boring in every game they're in, but if you also add flat jobs to that building as well it feels much better to use. I'm sure numbers will be re balanced, but I like the Beta in its current state much more than at its earlier. The "Zones add jobs to your City and you click to get jobs" style was horrific and made me feel the game was being heavily simplified. I think its important that Districts (other than City), Zones and buildings all provide jobs. Its also fine if they do other things, but in the early to mid game job numbers are much more important to me than a small bonus. But I think any kind of one click Zone sort of design where all you do is occasonaly put down a single building and then don't look at that planet again for years is uninteresting

 

[WoodenP]

I love buildings, they are the most flexible way to deal with planetary issues and have been for a long time. Right now Zones are themed containers that provide a certain number of jobs and that's all they do. The buildings are the star, they provide tons of jobs and also modify the outputs later on.

They also have super cool icons compared to pretty much anything else! It's a crime those little boxes in the betas. But thankfully mods can fix that.

 

[HighPriest]

Another one: the storm buildings give 200/400 scientists of each type and it's obtained fairly quick.

Urrrrg noooo now I'm going to feel like I've got to play with the storm DLC on and I really don't want to interact with storms at all.

 

[Archael90]

Urrrrg noooo now I'm going to feel like I've got to play with the storm DLC on and I really don't want to interact with storms at all.

Don't.
I mostly just ignore them.

 

[ArcTan]

By happenstance I also explored stormchasers and the like, a few thoughts and perceived quirks on the beta:

1. Many unity buildings do not offer jobs of any kind nor modify "civilians" in any way, p.e. storm theater, monuments, etc. The do nothing.

2. Pop growth is the lowest I've seen. It feels a combination of "bad strata" growth (having elites unemployed on capital with nowhere to go) plus a sort of overall reduction. Also it would be appreciated having hard data on pop growth on the planets, now it is impossible to know what's what.

3. Science feels slow, a combination of bad job/building-zone generation plus the aforementioned low growth. One gets little open jobs and the take way longer to fill.

4. Moving pops around is simply impossible. On the economy panel, every pop appears unemployed, also, only possible to move pops in bulk (you have 1k specialist doing whatever? too bad, only option is moving them all).

5. There's only indirect info on job efficiency. Before one could click the pop and glare at the modifiers and the math behind them, now there's no way to check individual modifiers at one.

6. On planet flexibility... dunno, now there's just a couple of ways of developing them: science/industrial-alloys districts and cramming every other utility building in the urban slots (amenities, maybe some unity, one-per-planet buildings etc)

I like a lot the idea of the pop/planet rework and streamlining planet development but I feel this iteration is robbing players of agency. Also there's lots of hidden info that were available before, plus this indirect nerf to pop growth.

There, my two cents.​

 

[Shadeseraph]

2. Pop growth is the lowest I've seen. It feels a combination of "bad strata" growth (having elites unemployed on capital with nowhere to go) plus a sort of overall reduction. Also it would be appreciated having hard data on pop growth on the planets, now it is impossible to know what's what.

Funnily enough, that's the complete opposite of what I felt. Yes, new planets fill slowly, but established ones with already lots of pops (like your capital) snowball, and then migration moves the excess population to the other planets. In my last game I had 16 worlds, including 2 ecus and many of them including orbital rings and mastery of nature-expanded, and nearly all of them were at full capacity, with cosmogenesis buildings on them (which add 600 jobs each). And this is without any conquest because conquest is broken. This is a picture of one of my ecus, fully developed:

I don't think there have been that many games where I was able to complete one ecu, let alone two...
I actually had a hard time sometimes keeping up with pop growth due to the low amount of jobs generated by most districts.

 

[Troyen]

Funnily enough, that's the complete opposite of what I felt. Yes, new planets fill slowly, but established ones with already lots of pops (like your capital) snowball, and then migration moves the excess population to the other planets. In my last game I had 16 worlds, including 2 ecus and many of them including orbital rings and mastery of nature-expanded, and nearly all of them were at full capacity, with cosmogenesis buildings on them (which add 600 jobs each). And this is without any conquest because conquest is broken.

Out of curiosity, what's your total pop count? The top bar number is gone, but I think it still shows on the Empire Size tooltip even if some of the numbers are a bit off.

 

[Red Death]

I love buildings, they are the most flexible way to deal with planetary issues and have been for a long time. Right now Zones are themed containers that provide a certain number of jobs and that's all they do. The buildings are the star, they provide tons of jobs and also modify the outputs later on. I find percentage increases very boring in every game they're in, but if you also add flat jobs to that building as well it feels much better to use. I'm sure numbers will be re balanced, but I like the Beta in its current state much more than at its earlier. The "Zones add jobs to your City and you click to get jobs" style was horrific and made me feel the game was being heavily simplified. I think its important that Districts (other than City), Zones and buildings all provide jobs. Its also fine if they do other things, but in the early to mid game job numbers are much more important to me than a small bonus. But I think any kind of one click Zone sort of design where all you do is occasonaly put down a single building and then don't look at that planet again for years is uninteresting

I agree that buildings are the most interesting part of Stellaris planet management, but the current overall system clearly isn't designed for flat jobs-providing buildings. For example, you are currently heavily incentivised to build at least one of every district type on every planet, just so you can build another zone with three building slots. The number of building slots is now also completely unrelated to both the planet size and population. Meanwhile if you happen to have 0 available of any of the basic resource districts, you get 3 less building slots, even if it's a size 30 planet!

This whole system only makes sense if buildings only modify what you get per District(/Zone), with the possible exception of the capital zone buildings. That can still include something like +30 jobs per district.

 

[Shadeseraph]

Out of curiosity, what's your total pop count? The top bar number is gone, but I think it still shows on the Empire Size tooltip even if some of the numbers are a bit off.

165.9K pops. Yeah, it shows on the empire size. Doesn't sound wrong - most of the worlds are capped at around 10K-12K pops, and ecus at 20K (admittedly, these were small ecus)

 

[Blackened30]

I agree that buildings are the most interesting part of Stellaris planet management, but the current overall system clearly isn't designed for flat jobs-providing buildings. For example, you are currently heavily incentivised to build at least one of every district type on every planet, just so you can build another zone with three building slots. The number of building slots is now also completely unrelated to both the planet size and population. Meanwhile if you happen to have 0 available of any of the basic resource districts, you get 3 less building slots, even if it's a size 30 planet!

This whole system only makes sense if buildings only modify what you get per District(/Zone), with the possible exception of the capital zone buildings. That can still include something like +30 jobs per district.

I think the system works fine as it stands. City Districts provide housing, Zones provide some jobs of a certain type or types as well as focus your planet on the production you specialize in, and Buildings provide additional jobs and later make them better. Its odd to say it only makes sense if done another way, because its working fine in my opinion. I suspect it wasn't their first vision of what they wanted, but visions change as you develop a project. Its similar enough to live that I can't find much reason to complain, and I really like where the live game is right now so all of this was worrisome to me.

Obviously its great to get those 9 extra building slots for an investment of 3 District Slots, but those 9 are very heavily focused in whatever that resource is. If your planet can't produce food then losing access to 3 slots for buildings that only produce or modify food isn't really much of a loss. In any case you're well ahead of where live is, though granted with a small amount of less freedom (6 universal vs 12 universal.) However having dedicated slots for buildings that I tend to build multiples of anyway (research and unity buildings especially) I think goes a long way to making that more even.