Stellaris 4.0 Maintenance Drones

[Spaaaaaaaaaaace]

I'll start by saying that I really like Stellaris, and have a bit over 3.5k hours on the game, but I am really confused by how the issues with maintenance drones for gestalt machine empires got through beta testing without being flagged as an issue. Without having a specific job slot provided by any structures for maintenance drones, and instead relying on unemployed pops, growth for my beloved bots is completely hamstrung. I have to constantly adjust priority weights for jobs in order to try to keep sufficient numbers of unemployed pops, while trying not to blow out a massive excess of them. Please tell me there is some kind of change in the works to just make a actual maintenance drone jobs something that is built-in to districts. Realistically, any district should employ sufficient maintenance drones to service the drone workforce, with civil districts providing extra to service specialists working buildings. They're robots. They're going to explicitly plan for the need for maintenance bots, not go "Oh well, that one doesn't seem to have anything to do". The constant need for micromanaging job prioritization has made them too frustrating to play.
Please let me (and other bot fans) know what's happening in this area.
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[Random Players]

Honestly, I feel like there should be a option to toggle for Hives and MIs along the lines of 'Ensure at least net zero amenities' which causes the respective drones to prioritize providing amenities until at 0 or higher, even if there are 'better' jobs.

Ideally, the same code that calculates the needed maintenance drones also sets it so the planet doesn't consider them to be unemployed.

 

[Deshiba]

Setting a minimum amount of civilian level jobs would be welcome for any ethic.

 

[Artas99]

I'll start by saying that I really like Stellaris, and have a bit over 3.5k hours on the game, but I am really confused by how the issues with maintenance drones for gestalt machine empires got through beta testing without being flagged as an issue. Without having a specific job slot provided by any structures for maintenance drones, and instead relying on unemployed pops, growth for my beloved bots is completely hamstrung. I have to constantly adjust priority weights for jobs in order to try to keep sufficient numbers of unemployed pops, while trying not to blow out a massive excess of them. Please tell me there is some kind of change in the works to just make a actual maintenance drone jobs something that is built-in to districts. Realistically, any district should employ sufficient maintenance drones to service the drone workforce, with civil districts providing extra to service specialists working buildings. They're robots. They're going to explicitly plan for the need for maintenance bots, not go "Oh well, that one doesn't seem to have anything to do". The constant need for micromanaging job prioritization has made them too frustrating to play.
Please let me (and other bot fans) know what's happening in this area.
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fun fact open beta didn't consider gestalts, they only started testing around 3.99.5

 

[Ishyro]

AFAIK, the amenities production should come from buildings and not pops in 4.0 (luxury residence produce 2.5k amenities, more than a holotheatre without traits), so it's only on really big worlds you would want maintenance drones.

The only difference with standard empire is that amenities is a byproduct of a few jobs (medical workers for example), when it's maybe less the case for hives and robots.

 

[Red Death]

AFAIK, the amenities production should come from buildings and not pops in 4.0 (luxury residence produce 2.5k amenities, more than a holotheatre without traits), so it's only on really big worlds you would want maintenance drones.

The only difference with standard empire is that amenities is a byproduct of a few jobs (medical workers for example), when it's maybe less the case for hives and robots.

Well I agree that as a player using the amenity buildings like residences and drone storage is more effective than pops.

But I don't think that it should be.

Once the devs put out all the current fires, and manage to have our planets automatically adjust these amenity jobs, I hope they go back and nerf these buildings a bit. I think using pops for amenities is more interesting gameplay, because then you're dealing with workforce modifiers, etc.

 

[Spaaaaaaaaaaace]

Setting a minimum amount of civilian level jobs would be welcome for any ethic.

I agree. I am finding that regular empires are heavily over-stacking into specialist jobs. I wonder if some fix similar to the set number of pop forced to be slaves for slaver guild empires could be applied more broadly to ensure that a large portion of a planet's pops are workers/civilians.

 

[Ohirra]

How many Maintenance Drone jobs are there if you take the Virtuality ascension?

 

[RoverStorm]

How many Maintenance Drone jobs are there if you take the Virtuality ascension?

There aren't.

 

[Ludaire]

The only comment from a dev I've seen about maintenance drones is that they've considered a toggle that prevents automatic migration if amenities are negative. I asked for the toggle to affect maintenance drones switching to other jobs, since that's just as if not more important, but I got no response.

This is probably the most frustrated I've been with the dev team. There have been plenty of moments where their balance between speed/features and quality/stability favor the former way too much, which is frustrating. However, this is among the worst since it's not just some oversight or numbers issue. The fundamental way maintenance drones work breaks core play flows like building jobs ahead of the population to fill it, leveraging auto migration to fill large worlds, and so on. Hell, when you first establish a colony, gestalts are negative amenities until you build an extra building because the basic jobs provided by the gestalt new colonies don't provide amenities the way the colonist jobs do.

The bar for gestalts being shippable shouldn't be "playing them doesn't crash the game." It should be the same as non-gestalt empires.

The worst thing is that there's been zero acknowledgement of this. They've acknowledged the overall quality issues, but there's been zero acknowledgement that gestalt empires got majorly shafted. There recently was even a post talking about how their main focus is multiplayer and performance, but gestalt play still feels broken unless you do an insane amount of micro, checking in on every single colony every single month. How is that not mentioned as a priority? It just feels really bad.

 

[Ohirra]

There aren't.

Are there any buildings or districts that create maintenance drone jobs?

 

[honigbrötchen]

Are there any buildings or districts that create maintenance drone jobs?

The storm relief building provides clerks / maintenance drones, but that might be one of the tooltip issues?

The holo theatre tooltip, for instance, says it provides way less amenities than the luxury residence building, but the amount is actually equal.

Currently playing virtual and two holo theatres (one upgraded) are enough amenities for a fully developed size 25 relic world. With efficiency modifiers the amount is noticably higher than what you get from residence buildings, even before completing virtual ascension.

What I would like to know is why only one holo theater can be upgraded per planet. I fear that half my building slots will have to be tier 1 holo theatres once I get to ecumenopolis.

edit: gestalt can't build holo theatres, I know, but at least individual machines can play virtual without an amenities issue, which is something, I guess...

 

[Ohirra]

They should probably rethink the tradition tree for Virtuality, then.

The Advanced Server Maintenance that provides 1% virtual pop output per maintenance drone, yet removes the ability to HAVE maintenance drones, seems a bit silly now.

 

[RingworldUtopia]

The storm relief building provides clerks / maintenance drones, but that might be one of the tooltip issues?

The holo theatre tooltip, for instance, says it provides way less amenities than the luxury residence building, but the amount is actually equal.

Currently playing virtual and two holo theatres (one upgraded) are enough amenities for a fully developed size 25 relic world. With efficiency modifiers the amount is noticably higher than what you get from residence buildings, even before completing virtual ascension.

What I would like to know is why only one holo theater can be upgraded per planet. I fear that half my building slots will have to be tier 1 holo theatres once I get to ecumenopolis.

edit: gestalt can't build holo theatres, I know, but at least individual machines can play virtual without an amenities issue, which is something, I guess...

if you have an ecu a single entertainment district should be enough and then you wouldn't need more than that one single holo theater building, no? though it is weird that only one can be upgraded.

 

[Anzaman]

The storm relief building provides clerks / maintenance drones, but that might be one of the tooltip issues?

Built the Storm Relief Center, and now my planet shows 200 Clerks, so they do actually show up with the building.

Tho, I have feeling that they simply forgot to update the building given how Clerks don't really show up anywhere.. but, well, Ring Worlds and that building.

 

[honigbrötchen]

if you have an ecu a single entertainment district should be enough and then you wouldn't need more than that one single holo theater building, no? though it is weird that only one can be upgraded.

Didn't they get rid of entertainment districts?

I haven't built an ecu yet since the update, but the wiki says there are only two district types unique to ecus and both provide either clerks or logistic drones.

If that's true, it would be great for virtual individual machines so they could actually use the per-clerk-output modifier from the tradition.
No idea what logistic drones are supposed to be though, the wiki has them not listed in on the Jobs page atm.

nvm, no clerks of any kind on ecus for individual machines, also no amenities district, tier 1 holo theatres it is.

 

[DiscoRay]

The only comment from a dev I've seen about maintenance drones is that they've considered a toggle that prevents automatic migration if amenities are negative. I asked for the toggle to affect maintenance drones switching to other jobs, since that's just as if not more important, but I got no response.

This is probably the most frustrated I've been with the dev team. There have been plenty of moments where their balance between speed/features and quality/stability favor the former way too much, which is frustrating. However, this is among the worst since it's not just some oversight or numbers issue. The fundamental way maintenance drones work breaks core play flows like building jobs ahead of the population to fill it, leveraging auto migration to fill large worlds, and so on.

The worst part is we've been here before with it, my own bug report here from just over 4 years ago at early v3.0 which also made MEs get low/negative amenities. This has been the main thing that's frustrated me with how 4.0 has been handled, nowhere near enough testing done prior to release in checking what the new systems may unbalance, or outright break.

Making a mistake is one thing, repeating it is another. If another significant re-work comes about again, it cannot be handled like this once more. It's not acceptable needing to wait for a dozen patches weeks after a botched released to play a decent run-through of the game many have spent hundreds of pounds on. Needs to be a proper beta test next time, with extensive patching done prior to formal release, so that it's acceptably playable from day 1.

 

[StragaSevera]

Seems like they ignore it because they think that gestalts should spam flat-amenity buildings.
The fact that they still didn't implement the slider of "keep X maintenance drones on this planet" (that would be useful for normal empires with Civillians as well) - while we are on the 4.0.10 patch already - shows lots about their priorities.

 

[Red Death]

Seems like they ignore it because they think that gestalts should spam flat-amenity buildings.
The fact that they still didn't implement the slider of "keep X maintenance drones on this planet" (that would be useful for normal empires with Civillians as well) - while we are on the 4.0.10 patch already - shows lots about their priorities.

Yeah, that they're focused on all the literally game-breaking bugs before working to implement a more elaborate system to handle something that, while annoying, does have a work-around?

 

[StragaSevera]

Yeah, that they're focused on all the literally game-breaking bugs before working to implement a more elaborate system to handle something that, while annoying, does have a work-around?

No, that they find it fitting to release a game with game-breaking bugs and non-working systems, and plan to work on first without even mentioning that they'll touch the second before going on summer vacation and delaying all changes until autumn.
There shouldn't be any game-breaking bugs on release, period. They should have eliminated them before release and should work on non-functioning systems now.