Stellaris 3.99.1 'Phoenix' Open Beta Release Notes

[SirBlackAxe]

Not sure what goes wrong. Colonize Guaranteed two planets, take forever to fill and resettle pop aren't 100 pops per click.

Habitability seems to be broken and always treated as 0%, so you've probably got a -50% pop growth penalty.

 

[fourteenfour]

More UI fun and games, that column of population, useless. I known I can click on one and then get taken to edit specie/etc but the point is I am managing my colony and nothing I do from this screen has any effect on the colony. It just seems to be there to scroll?




This one might be hard to understand as screen shots do not capture the cursor, but the gray area between the two dialog boxes Zone Available and Requires Technology when mouse over show the same information when the cursor is over the City district area. So its obvious those two boxes overlay but its not a good user experience to randomly have a fly over pop up on an area seemingly unrelated. Oh, again with the numbers appearing to be multiplied by 100 in the tool tip.

Last ... changing the number of workers in a job does not have an immediate effect on the output making it impossible to know the effect. I change the slider for how many work the physicist job to no effect


UI - Inconsistent numbers on amount of food produced. Clearly by jobs and top bar I produce 50+ food but when mouseover the district panel on the first tab I have a value I cannot figure out how it was determined. 1675.20?

 

[Sucellus]

Hello, please make the planet view bigger/full screen! Other stuff too... the timeline, the focus... BIGGER! The UI is too much scrolling and cramped.

 

[SirBlackAxe]

The correct day 1 play seems to be to immediately disable or destroy your Primitive Factory building in order to double your research and unity income, and set up a monthly trade buying 10+ CG. This only costs you 200/1000 laborer jobs since most of them come directly from the district rather than the building.

Maybe just halve the number of researcher & bureaucrat jobs you get from the Early Industry Zone rather than messing with modifiers (the zone itself actually seems pretty good as long as you get rid of the building, since it gives many more jobs than other zones). Perhaps then shift some of the laborers from CG production to alloys production, since you'll need less CG with half as many unity & research jobs taking it as upkeep and you don't start with alloy production.

 

[Calvax]

Few more issues. I have two focuses that I can't complete. One is asking for an industrial district which doesn't exist, the other is asking to complete first contact which I've done multiple times.

Also I'm 60 years into the game and no factions have spawned

Gene clinics seem to give entertainer bonuses too? That doesn't seem intended

 

[Lorenerd11]

OK please please please add a zone that does both alloys and cgs using 2/3rds of ur capitals zones for them means u have no choice in what to build at the start of the game limiting player options and builds.

It honestly reminds me a lot of the old system u had where the cgs and alloy building dictated what the industry district produced and u removed that because fans did not like the feature. Don't make the same mistake again

I agree with this. Sometimes you need to have industrial worlds until the economy supports better specialized planets. Having to invest in 2 different zones just for this feels bad, specially early game when resources are scarce.

An Industrial Zone that adds 50 of both jobs instead of 100 of one doesn't sound like a bad idea.

 

[Zaacplot300]

The correct day 1 play seems to be to immediately disable or destroy your Primitive Factory building in order to double your research and unity income, and set up a monthly trade buying 10+ CG. This only costs you 200/1000 laborer jobs since most of them come directly from the district rather than the building.

Maybe just halve the number of researcher & bureaucrat jobs you get from the Early Industry Zone rather than messing with modifiers (the zone itself actually seems pretty good as long as you get rid of the building, since it gives many more jobs than other zones). Perhaps then shift some of the laborers from CG production to alloys production, since you'll need less CG with half as many unity & research jobs taking it as upkeep and you don't start with alloy production.

This is again making me question why we are starting with primitive factories in the first place. I don't think anyone asked to start the game with a bad economy: we kind of need something to work with if we are to actually expand and I'd bet a thousand trade value that the AI will have issues with dismantling the primitive factory and its zone. Instead we should have an urban zone of some kind to start with: so we have a balanced number of buildings similar to 3.14.

 

[Koopatin]

can i see pop growth anywhere?

 

[Zaacplot300]

can i see pop growth anywhere?

Not yet, the functionality hasn't been added to the best of my knowledge.

 

[vulcan7200]

This seems both harsh and unnecessary. we have been told that only a fraction of planned buildings are in the game. that zone limits have been coded yet. that automation doesn't work. Not certain about that last one. Its a beta that is feature incomplete, I'd expect it to be boring.

I don't think it's harsh or unnecessary. It's not boring because it's in Beta. It's boring due to the current implementation of the system. The fact of the matter is, that currently everything IS locked and just because they say "There will be more" we don't know what that means or how it will be implemented. The point of Beta is feedback, and my feedback is that if they don't change the way Buildings effect Districts, it WILL be boring. It doesn't matter if they add in 100% more Buildings if they're all locked behind specific Zones, and if the only things those Buildings do is add +X% to Workforce or some other buff that only effects that one Resource. That's fine to have a few of those, but if that's all you can put in the Zones, then that will be boring.

 

[Calvax]

I've been investigating/observing pop promotion and it is kinda hairy. Pops can keep their original strata description for a while while working jobs outside their strata. They definitely don't update in the UI instantly. Sometimes it can take months for them to properly reflect their new strata position. (Example: Worker stops working Farmer jobs and works as Biologist. Their strata may not update to become a Specialist in the UI for 4+ months, even though they are working a Specialist job)

Demotion is equally confusing, as it is clear to me that pops do demote out of their strata, but most of the time it is VERY slowly, like 1-3 pops per demotion cycle. That simply isn't fast enough in most scenarios, as pop growth seems like it often outpaces or equals the demotion rate. It can lead to death spirals where you perpetually have unemployed specialist pops, as they won't demote into workers fast enough.

Quoting you in this thread as it's more relevant to 3.99.1. And @Eladrin just tagging you because I think this might fall under a moderate-major problem.

I did a test with my homeworld to see the rates of growth, demotion, and migration. I have approximately 1200 open jobs across 7 other colonies, all on high habitability worlds so definitely should be a migration target. I noted down the total pop number and the number of unemployed over a year exactly (new years day to new years day)

Strata	Year 0 pops	Year 1 pops
Elite unemployed	105	105
Specialist unemployed	519	564
Worker unemployed	413	425
Civilians	307	315
Total population	8944	9005

Other than elite every other strata had a net gain. So it seems like demotion and migration can't outstrip pop growth. Not only does this lead to unhappy pops and crime ridden planets it undermines the point of civilians. Since the unemployed of each strata grow faster than they demote/migrate we have to solve the problem by building up on the world which stops them becoming civilians and stops our colonies from being able to populate.

 

[Newbee53]

Weird notice. Pointed out elsewhere, but kind of needs to be said. The UI makes it look like Generator, mine, and food districts are more important than the city districts, but they are not. cities give you unity, research, alloys, and consumer goods. All of which are considerably more imporatant than energy, minierals, and food. This is backwards, and kind of needs to be fixed, somehow.

At some point my capital now has 45 unemployed elites.
View attachment 1266000
47 unemployed elites. I can't do anything about this, haven't destroyed any politic jobs, nor could they have ever promoted. this means that 200 elites reproduce so fast that demotion doesn't reduce the numbers. This is far worse, than I thought and will lead to inevitable death of any world. Kind of need a balance of these things. Harmony is now a mandatory tradition as far as I am concerned.

Also, I can't figure out why we have placeholder buttons for starbase upgrade and downgrade, that's just weird.

 

[Calvax]

New weird bug or perhaps a new feature that I don't know about: an organic empire became a hive.

I had a rival as a neighbour who started the game as a dictatorial xenophobe/fanatic militarist. We went to war early and I managed to take some systems and box them in, leaving just their home system. A few years later (presumably due to poor planet management) there was a revolution and they became an oligarchic spiritualist/xenophobe/militarist. Weirdly I got a pop up saying their empire didn't exist.

I just got another pop up saying they no longer exist and now they're a hive??

 

[Lenk]

Since the UI is getting some touch ups and 4.0 looking to be a quality of life update, could we get two optional additions to the outliner.
1. First contact progress bar (often I forget those are even happening)
2. Research Progress bars

 

[Red Death]

This is again making me question why we are starting with primitive factories in the first place. I don't think anyone asked to start the game with a bad economy: we kind of need something to work with if we are to actually expand and I'd bet a thousand trade value that the AI will have issues with dismantling the primitive factory and its zone. Instead we should have an urban zone of some kind to start with: so we have a balanced number of buildings similar to 3.14.

They have built a system where you cannot produce everything your empire needs on one planet. They realised this does not work at game start, (especially since you get only 2 zones to begin with), so they gave us a zone that breaks the normal system's rules by giving us research, amenities, consumer goods and unity. That's 4(!) resources, instead of 1. They do still want us to transition to the "proper" system later on, so they made this a "bad" zone.

The system not working from game start is a red flag. When they realized this was a problem, they should not have slapped a band-aid on it, they should have gone back to the drawing-board.

 

[The Founder]

I don't know. Being able to ignore amenities doesn't make sense. And even less for crime. Something is off. I just don't know the best way to fix it exactly.

You can't ignore it.
It should be a no brainer that employing 5000 Clerks is worse then employing 50 Entertainers.
It should be a no brainer that you don't want pops wasted in Crime and Enforcer jobs, just to prevent a rebellion.

Just because it avoid you going into the negatives when you can avoid it, doesn't mean it is the ideal solution.

This is interesting because I've yet to experience this kind of crime death spiral. Maybe I'm expanding slower, so I don't have the high unemployment?

This is probbaly all caused by the Amenities dropping the happyness. That alone will get crime to skyrocket.

I'm certainty not building automation or robots, last I heard they were broken. Maybe I should build the robots and see what happens. I'll probably wait until I can pick up some pop demotion time in case that is the cause.

3.99.00 had a bug where all Population decays, if one population doesn't grow normally
3.99.01 fixes that.

Habitability seems to be broken and always treated as 0%, so you've probably got a -50% pop growth penalty.

I thought that was only the homeworld and only on the first month?

Few more issues. I have two focuses that I can't complete. One is asking for an industrial district which doesn't exist, the other is asking to complete first contact which I've done multiple times.

You can always reroll them.

Gene clinics seem to give entertainer bonuses too? That doesn't seem intended

They gave amenities before. Makes sense they still do now.

can i see pop growth anywhere?

The "-0" on the Pop Groups is supposed to show the change last month. But that isn't implemented yet.

New weird bug or perhaps a new feature that I don't know about: an organic empire became a hive.

I had a rival as a neighbour who started the game as a dictatorial xenophobe/fanatic militarist. We went to war early and I managed to take some systems and box them in, leaving just their home system. A few years later (presumably due to poor planet management) there was a revolution and they became an oligarchic spiritualist/xenophobe/militarist. Weirdly I got a pop up saying their empire didn't exist.

I just got another pop up saying they no longer exist and now they're a hive??

The AI doesn't understand the economic system. Programming the AI comes way after they decided on the details.
As a result they can easily get into a doom spiral they don't recover from.

The only oddity is that apparently "Gestalt" somehow got on the list of "Random Ethics you can get from rebellion".

 

[Calvax]

They gave amenities before. Makes sense they still do now.

The medical workers gave amenities which did indeed make sense but this is entertainer job efficiency. Unless I've missed that medical worker jobs now count as entertainer that's a bonus that doesn't make sense and doesn't work unless the planet has entertainers. Which it won't because entertainers come from the amenities zone (as far as I'm aware, I've not found other ways to make them) and there's so much competition for zones that it's unlikely you'll build one on most planets.

 

[Zaacplot300]

In order for this system to really stand on its legs, it needs a way to boost amenities and reduce crime without relying on exclusive zones. I think civilians are intended to help with the former (while also providing unity) but currently they don’t work as intended for a variety of reasons.

As for being unable to produce all resources on a single planet, I think this would be helped by an “industrial” zone that gives an even mix of forge and factory jobs and an “urban” zone that gives low amounts of research, unity, and trade jobs. Hell, sub out the trash early industrial zone for these two and you’ll have a generalist planet that produces everything at the cost of not being as effective as a more specialized one. This sound like perfect starting planet material to me.

 

[Newbee53]

Another quote chain, this time because I'm confused.
It starts with:

I think some jobs should just be open ended, but with a defined goal.
Like "have enough entertainers to reach +0 Amenities". "Have enough Enforcers to get crime down to 30%".
And the system will just spawn jobs until there are enough to reach that goal.

Upgrades would be about increasing the yield per pop, so you need less overall people to maintain those targets.

So, you'd never have more than 30% crime because every time things get above that, new enforcers are made and you can force pops into those jobs. So you can ignore crime, which is why I said:

I don't know. Being able to ignore amenities doesn't make sense. And even less for crime. Something is off. I just don't know the best way to fix it exactly.

Only for this to be the reply:

You can't ignore it.
It should be a no brainer that employing 5000 Clerks is worse then employing 50 Entertainers.
It should be a no brainer that you don't want pops wasted in Crime and Enforcer jobs, just to prevent a rebellion.

Just because it avoid you going into the negatives when you can avoid it, doesn't mean it is the ideal solution.

I don't understand. How is this connected to auto-spawning enforcer jobs every time you get a little crime? How is this related to creating a new entertainer job every time your amenities? Somewhere a miss communication happened, and I've got no idea where it happened. So I'm confused.

Back to something I hopefully am not confused on:

This is probbaly all caused by the Amenities dropping the happyness. That alone will get crime to skyrocket.

I've got positive amenities, because I've got luxury apartments. the flat bonus is just enough to survive for the time being.

They gave amenities before. Makes sense they still do now.

The gen clinic provides amenities by increasing health, not by allowing movies to be more entertaining. Besides, they also increased pop growth--mostly by saving the lives of individuals--which now they don't. Gen clinics are just holo-theaters now, and it's stupid in my opinion. Instead, it should shift some number of entertainers to medical workers, still giving some--lesser amount--amenities and increasing pop growth again.

 

[Tannhäuser Cake]

Please move the capital and system names setting to the main species name settings. After all, in the pool of species names and their adjectives correlate with the pool of names of capitals and systems.

Or add synchronization when generating names between the name tab and the homeworld tab.

Agreed. The ship prefix should also be included on the same screen (since it is also related to species/homeworld name).

It would also be nice if the Government/Ethics tab also displayed the resulting AI personality, since it
a) would help with designing empires for the AI to play, and
b) AI personality affects human players via starting policies, ship templates, and even some diplomacy modifiers.

It would also be nice to have a "reset to default" button for the ruler room appearance, that would make it align with the corresponding AI personality.