Stellaris 3.99.1 'Phoenix' Open Beta Release Notes

[Newbee53]

I have no doubt that people will learn those two scales and it won't be that much of a problem but I feel that small numbers are way more readable. Plus gaining 0.01 pop instead of one kinda makes sense as you need 100 pops to man one "complete" job so saying that it's 1 pop feels natural. And 0.01 shows that this single extra pop doesn't change a lot in the economy. In fact I personally found no reason to track that number as precisely in the beta (as a player I mean, it's great that the game does for pop growth purpose).
I feel that the slider will also make more sense : sliding to 4 pops mean you get the base production 4 times. More intuitive than 400.

while probably the best suggestion to go back to old numbers i've heard. Please no. I'd rather not deal with decimal places. At least for me, they are so much harder to work with and think in. Plus, whole numbers just look better. Removing every instance of a fractional number in the UI is one of those things I think the game should do automatically because its just a real pain.

I really don't understand the problems with large numbers. at least for me it doesn't feel that odd to deal with and flows rather intuitively. I do think the numbers for resources could use a change. but some of that appears to be tool tip issues.

Do the colonist jobs on new planets seem useless?

They've mentioned in several places--most recently the stream i think--that they want to remove the colony designation and move all its bonuses to the colonist jobs. So I think that's what is the plan in the future. I'm guessing that job is to go away when you upgrade the capital building or something like that. hopefully they don't just poof away when you reach a certain number of pops.

 

[Darlf]

Because figuring out what 20% of 100 is, is very, very easy.

until it not... like let say you desing planet, for future, so evrythign go perfect and boom now suddenly everything will be scaled up in tens of thousands of jobs, amenities, apartments, populations... converting into much smaller amounts of resources -_- and god knows what else, these numbers are just hard to read, especially amenities, even now we have populations absorbing something like 1.2 amenities, or 0.3 ect, scaling amenities to thousands looks weird, if they cut off one zero it would still look good and wouldn't have too many numbers after the comma.

 

[MrGuyPerson]

They've mentioned in several places--most recently the stream i think--that they want to remove the colony designation and move all its bonuses to the colonist jobs. So I think that's what is the plan in the future. I'm guessing that job is to go away when you upgrade the capital building or something like that. hopefully they don't just poof away when you reach a certain number of pops.

Even so, I'm not sure those bonuses are really worth keeping the job around for. The designation gives amenities, a little stability, migration attraction, and some happiness. Even if the colonists get those (they already provide amenities at the moment), it seems unhelpful. Amenities is still solved by luxury housing, and stability and happiness are basically a bonus to output. But if all your pops are getting sucked up into the colonist job, you're not producing anything that would receive that bonus anyway, so what's the point? I'd rather close the job and have everyone working a resource job. The migration attraction is the only thing lost by doing this, and I'm not sure it would pay for itself over the course of planet's time as a colony.

It might be better to do away with colonists as a job, give new colonies a ten-year bonus or something that provides the colony designation benefits, and then treat colonists like civilians rather than a job that takes away from what you actually want to achieve with the planet.

 

[Zergor]

while probably the best suggestion to go back to old numbers i've heard. Please no. I'd rather not deal with decimal places. At least for me, they are so much harder to work with and think in. Plus, whole numbers just look better. Removing every instance of a fractional number in the UI is one of those things I think the game should do automatically because its just a real pain.

I really don't understand the problems with large numbers. at least for me it doesn't feel that odd to deal with and flows rather intuitively. I do think the numbers for resources could use a change. but some of that appears to be tool tip issues.

They've mentioned in several places--most recently the stream i think--that they want to remove the colony designation and move all its bonuses to the colonist jobs. So I think that's what is the plan in the future. I'm guessing that job is to go away when you upgrade the capital building or something like that. hopefully they don't just poof away when you reach a certain number of pops.

Just to be clear : I want to get rid of decimals in the main ui. 1531 would be replaced by 15. And puting the cursor on it would show a small window showing 15.31. For big numbers, at a glance 15000 can seem close to 151111 depending on font (the later is in fact 10 times bigger) that s why i want to avoid them.

 

[The Founder]

until it not... like let say you desing planet, for future, so evrythign go perfect and boom now suddenly everything will be scaled up in tens of thousands of jobs, amenities, apartments, populations... converting into much smaller amounts of resources -_- and god knows what else, these numbers are just hard to read, especially amenities, even now we have populations absorbing something like 1.2 amenities, or 0.3 ect, scaling amenities to thousands looks weird, if they cut off one zero it would still look good and wouldn't have too many numbers after the comma.

The difficulty of figuring out what 20% of 100 is, does not change just because there are other numbers in the room.

 

[princeseth]

Ok i am deeply dissapointed , how many years do we have to wait until the outfit (for leaders) bug will be fixed ? Is it so difficult to fix that ?

 

[Newbee53]

Even so, I'm not sure those bonuses are really worth keeping the job around for. The designation gives amenities, a little stability, migration attraction, and some happiness. Even if the colonists get those (they already provide amenities at the moment), it seems unhelpful. Amenities is still solved by luxury housing, and stability and happiness are basically a bonus to output. But if all your pops are getting sucked up into the colonist job, you're not producing anything that would receive that bonus anyway, so what's the point? I'd rather close the job and have everyone working a resource job. The migration attraction is the only thing lost by doing this, and I'm not sure it would pay for itself over the course of planet's time as a colony.

It might be better to do away with colonists as a job, give new colonies a ten-year bonus or something that provides the colony designation benefits, and then treat colonists like civilians rather than a job that takes away from what you actually want to achieve with the planet.

I don't know. The colonist job could use a slight buff. but I'm not a huge fan of just removing it. Mainly for vibes and thematic however. it just feels right that the first people on the planet are entirely working to support themselves and provide little or no bonus to the empire.

Just to be clear : I want to get rid of decimals in the main ui. 1531 would be replaced by 15. And puting the cursor on it would show a small window showing 15.31. For big numbers, at a glance 15000 can seem close to 151111 depending on font (the later is in fact 10 times bigger) that s why i want to avoid them.

please no. That is just back to the problems from before. Entire months of no population growth, despite entire planetary populations. Tiny numbers that make it feel like cities instead of planets. to quote myself from another thread:

10s of pops instead of 100s of pops would still be causing issues in a couple of places. To have pop growth being similar to where it started you still need dead months with no growth. Which is weird and unintuitive for planetary scales. readability can be fixed with some tweaking to the UI, hopefully. Which is a major concern of the beta.

Personally, I think the biggest issue with the UI is the attempt to put all unemployment in its own category on the summery screen. Instead they should be pooled, with a tool tip if you really need to know. and the outliner needs to not show unemployment before it reaches at least a few hundred pops. that notice is seriously to common.

with those changes the number of pops can be more carefully displayed and readability shouldn't suffer, in my eyes anyway. The UI is kind of bad, but hopefully its not locked in yet.

To add to it, another advantage of 100s, is it opens the possibility of different requirements form different jobs. I'd like to see a zone that's 50 alloys and 50 cg per city. Things like the gen clinic could turn 25 entertainers into medical workers per city. the advanced resource buildings could change some number of jobs to produce their resource instead of directly converting things--if appropriate of course--and if not the buildings, the planetary features. it would be cool if 'volatile atmosphere' feature added something like -25 technicians per district, but with the right tech +25 mote trappers per district. then it wouldn't be the best place for energy to start with, but a good place for motes when you can.

assuming an industrial district set up isn't utilized of course. that might be better than the cg alloy thing.

 

[MrGuyPerson]

I don't know. The colonist job could use a slight buff. but I'm not a huge fan of just removing it. Mainly for vibes and thematic however. it just feels right that the first people on the planet are entirely working to support themselves and provide little or no bonus to the empire.

I agree that from a flavor perspective, having colonists is cool. The devs either need to make the job worth keeping or harder for the player to get rid of. Perhaps taking the latter approach, colonists could be changed to an elite position, such as "Colonial Director". The buffs might even make more sense RP-wise for elites (top-down provisions of amenities, stability, improved build speed and advertising the colony to attract new settlers) and mechanically they would be harder for the player to simply get rid of. Additionally, as Elites, there should be fewer of them overall, making it easier to start booting up the colony for something productive.

 

[Zergor]

I don't know. The colonist job could use a slight buff. but I'm not a huge fan of just removing it. Mainly for vibes and thematic however. it just feels right that the first people on the planet are entirely working to support themselves and provide little or no bonus to the empire.

please no. That is just back to the problems from before. Entire months of no population growth, despite entire planetary populations. Tiny numbers that make it feel like cities instead of planets. to quote myself from another thread:

To add to it, another advantage of 100s, is it opens the possibility of different requirements form different jobs. I'd like to see a zone that's 50 alloys and 50 cg per city. Things like the gen clinic could turn 25 entertainers into medical workers per city. the advanced resource buildings could change some number of jobs to produce their resource instead of directly converting things--if appropriate of course--and if not the buildings, the planetary features. it would be cool if 'volatile atmosphere' feature added something like -25 technicians per district, but with the right tech +25 mote trappers per district. then it wouldn't be the best place for energy to start with, but a good place for motes when you can.

assuming an industrial district set up isn't utilized of course. that might be better than the cg alloy thing.

Understandable. I think we'll have to agree to disagree. I prefer small numbers even if they increase by only a fraction each month and that fraction is hidden if you don't specifically look at it.
But I can understand the appeal of having something that seem to increase all the time even if that increase isn't that meaningful for a "realism" perspective.

 

[Tannhäuser Cake]

I could see people in a colonisation scenario reverting high fertility. There is plenty of land to claim, lots of work to do.
The main worry is players keeping the population numbers artificially low/never upgrading, to have a good place to grow population.

Alternatively, Colonists could focus on attracting and enabling immigration (resettlement destination chance, and things that raise it).

For instance, early colonies (pre-capital) could suffer from a construction speed penalty (which would slow down the creation of new housing and job spots) while the colonist job adds a construction speed bonus that counters it. The things that previously gave +1 pop on new colonies could then also unlock a greater number of colonist jobs, speeding up colony development substantially.

 

[Darlf]

The difficulty of figuring out what 20% of 100 is, does not change just because there are other numbers in the room.

no but yes, kinda.
becuse it still more difficult overall, like many super complicated calculations are ultimately large amounts of simple calculations or their simplifications, and in principle operating on small or large numbers works similarly (of course if the numbers are too small something like 0.002304 etc. well then it's exaggerating in the other direction). instead of 100 it could be 10, the jump would be smaller and the calculations for dev when scaling very similar.

But I appreciate actually sensible arguments, which I have to think about, even if I don't agree.

 

[MHC]

I tried this out this weekend and did my best to answer the survey questions. But it is hard to evaluate things like how the empire focus affects pacing with the economy in so much flux. Even playing Common Wealth of Man or UNE, you can very much feel that the economy stuff is only partially done because some of the numbers are still "off" and there are still a ton of bugs. (For example, I had one small pop group that kept bouncing workforce between mineral and agricultural jobs back and forth every single day. And so I had no clue what was I was actually getting at month end.)

I also don't really understand how to balance the economy and population in the early game without console commands. I would guess that this is because of the missing buildings for the early space age zone and probably other things that aren't there yet. I expect that the planetary management stuff will be fine once it's all actually all there and once I understand what is going on, but I didn't want to put in substantial effort into figuring things out since that wasn't the focus of this beta and you've already said that future betas are coming hot and heavy and will be further along when it comes to the economic changes.

So, bottom line, I like the idea of the timeline and empire focus stuff. I'm not sure how I feel about it costing 50 unity to swap on day 1 and locked to starting with exploration. But I'll be in a better position to give you more pointed feedback once I understand how the economy is shaking out better, and it's working well enough to let me do a couple of full playthroughs so I can evaluate how the later stages of those rewards ends up working out.

I'll do those playthroughs once you make it clear that, at least for simple empires like UNE and CWM, all the planet management stuff is "in" or at least "in enough" to give an evaluation of how that whole change is going. Because as-is, it's just too hard to determine how much of a pacing impact the focus stuff has when I already can't tell whether my economy is bad because I don't understand the new system or just because the new system isn't finished yet.

Looking forward to the next few rounds of betas and to seeing this slowly evolve into the finished version.

 

[grommile]

The right move is to cut their losses and cancel most of these changes

That doesn't cut the losses, it reifies the losses.

(Because rolling all this back means delaying everything planned for this year.)

 

[MHC]

I'm looking at getting some game time in on Sunday, but still reviewing the thread(s), and - wow, this does not look good. Really not filling me with confidence that the 4.0 release won't be another extremely rough landing.

I remain extremely concerned about the very limited development time remaining, versus the level of both bugfixing, feature updates, and rebalancing that remains to be done. It may even be worth talking about pushing back 4.0 into early June - better that this is all ironed out and done right, than be done wrong early.

For what it's worth, I haven't been disappointed with any of the free release changes they've put out since the start of the custodians initiative. And last year's main DLC is the best one they've made since the very first one.

They are putting this out there to get feedback and to rapidly iterate. If it doesn't work or isn't ready in time, it'll get ripped out and reworked. So, I'm not worried. I'm mostly impressed that so many people are giving this much detailed feedback on what is essentially an experimental pre-beta build that isn't even fully functional. If you really aren't sure. Just wait until there's a proper beta and things are much further along and more stable. "Jank af alpha build" is not how I'd judge any product's potential.

 

[Imp0815]

Ok, I need a reality check:

In the scenario where I have only my capital and two new colonies, and I need more Consumer Goods (CG):

• I have a factory zone and an early industrial zone on my capital.
• Now I want 100 more Artisans.
• I upgrade my city district to create these new jobs.
• BUT now I also create 300 Researchers, 200 Laborers, 100 Bureaucrats, and 100 Enforcers.

The district is built, I get my Artisans, but also all the other jobs.

• My worker class notices that new Specialist jobs are available.
• They all promote to fill those jobs.
• I now have no Miners, Technicians, or Farmers anymore.
• The jobs flip-flop around, and I disable Specialists hectically, trying to manage the sliders in a frantic, terrible way.
• None of the unemployed Specialists demote.
• I have constant resource shortages.

Is this intended?

• Creating TONS of unwanted jobs just by upgrading districts?
• Heavy micro to manage unwanted jobs BEFORE they get filled?
• Demotions not working properly?

Or did I fundamentally misunderstand something?

 

[Velaroz]

Criminal jobs don't seem to show up at all. Don't know if they're enabled yet or not, though.

Getting amenities seems a bit hard now, since only Clerks/equivalent atm give them early on, without the dedicated amenities zone.

Building up early game CG+alloys seems rather difficult, especially when the Zones for them only give 100 jobs per city district each... And 100 jobs now is equal to 1 job prior to this. Laborers could probably be buffed to do both CG & alloys, while the dedicated Factory & Foundry Zones should probably give 200 jobs per district per zone.

Science feels a bit weird with all universal Researcher having been broken up into the specialized categories again, since their upkeep & production feels a bit weird overall when accounting for that. Part of this is likely from the CG throughput feeling very low overall, but I think the output of the various scientist types is also too low, as well. If memory serves me right, they made 3 of each when universal, right? We currently get a base of like 4 science per 100 pops/workforce, which is ridiculously weak.

While pop growth feels interesting, it feels like the net growth rate of population & economy is very much curtailed to before, and trying to move pops around between jobs is very finicky as always. On top of that, I think Favoriting jobs at the moment does not do anything to direct where new pops grown go to.

Due to these factors, playing terribly far into a game feels a bit hard, since the lacking economy potential slows down the ability to really do much of anything.

 

[Thiend]

Ok, I need a reality check:

In the scenario where I have only my capital and two new colonies, and I need more Consumer Goods (CG):

• I have a factory zone and an early industrial zone on my capital.
• Now I want 100 more Artisans.
• I upgrade my city district to create these new jobs.
• BUT now I also create 300 Researchers, 200 Laborers, 100 Bureaucrats, and 100 Enforcers.

The district is built, I get my Artisans, but also all the other jobs.

• My worker class notices that new Specialist jobs are available.
• They all promote to fill those jobs.
• I now have no Miners, Technicians, or Farmers anymore.
• The jobs flip-flop around, and I disable Specialists hectically, trying to manage the sliders in a frantic, terrible way.
• None of the unemployed Specialists demote.
• I have constant resource shortages.

Is this intended?

• Creating TONS of unwanted jobs just by upgrading districts?
• Heavy micro to manage unwanted jobs BEFORE they get filled?
• Demotions not working properly?

Or did I fundamentally misunderstand something?

This seems like a possible reason to scale back if it can't be adjusted.

That's a really, really bad way to suddenly and relatively unavoidably have your economy collapse.

Maybe with reduced demotion time, and improvements to the automatic management of pops so they don't swing resources negative doing that (or at least not as badly)?

 

[Troyen]

Do the colonist jobs on new planets seem useless? They provide amenities and build speed, but I could just build luxury housing to cover all early amenities needs and close the colonist jobs to get the pops working in whatever I want the planet for. Build speed is meaningless because the planet develops much slower than my need for building anything new. Furthermore, there aren't many options for building at all at that stage of planet development. After you build your first zone and add your specialization building, all you do is build more districts.

TBF this is true on live as well where they give a tiny amount of food and planetary build speed. They have not been a very valuable job ever since their nerf a few patches ago and yet they have incredibly high job preference weight (and job prioritization is broken on the beta).

For what it's worth, I haven't been disappointed with any of the free release changes they've put out since the start of the custodians initiative. And last year's main DLC is the best one they've made since the very first one.

They are putting this out there to get feedback and to rapidly iterate. If it doesn't work or isn't ready in time, it'll get ripped out and reworked. So, I'm not worried. I'm mostly impressed that so many people are giving this much detailed feedback on what is essentially an experimental pre-beta build that isn't even fully functional. If you really aren't sure. Just wait until there's a proper beta and things are much further along and more stable. "Jank af alpha build" is not how I'd judge any product's potential.

They gave us time-limited feedback surveys and then as you yourself noted, not really the tools to fairly evaluate those surveys. If the early game is "in progress", it's difficult to offer feedback about systems that lead into the midgame.

Stellaris is also a very time-consuming game to test. I think I spent 30 hours per version of the tech beta back with 3.11. There's no way I have time to retest after a twice-weekly update, so I'll probably just pick one or two versions and provide as much detailed feedback from that version as possible.

The free patch record is kind of mixed because any one element can overshadow the rest of the patch. I think the 3.3 unity rework went over relatively well, 3.4 was rushed, 3.6's fleet rework had an open beta but they ran out of time to incorporate feedback until much later, 3.8 had the controversial leader change that took until 3.10 to get right only for 3.10 to also push the new Outliner without customization (which required a rush fix), 3.11 tech changes went well, but then 3.13 was rushed again. You can throw in the 3.9 habitat rework which is just now getting some important QoL in 4.0.

We aren't in five-alarm mode territory yet because there is still time out there. The hard deadline would be the end of June when everyone in Sweden goes on summer vacation. Any pushback from the May date will eat into the post-patch support timeframe, and major changes have tended to need post-patch support (like how 3.0's cycle added pop growth sliders for the vocal crowd that wanted them and 3.10's added customizable Outliner tabs).

 

[Troyen]

Demotions not working properly?

This one at least is noted as not working as desired.

 

[GnoSIS]

Ok, I need a reality check:

In the scenario where I have only my capital and two new colonies, and I need more Consumer Goods (CG):

• I have a factory zone and an early industrial zone on my capital.
• Now I want 100 more Artisans.
• I upgrade my city district to create these new jobs.
• BUT now I also create 300 Researchers, 200 Laborers, 100 Bureaucrats, and 100 Enforcers.

The district is built, I get my Artisans, but also all the other jobs.

• My worker class notices that new Specialist jobs are available.
• They all promote to fill those jobs.
• I now have no Miners, Technicians, or Farmers anymore.
• The jobs flip-flop around, and I disable Specialists hectically, trying to manage the sliders in a frantic, terrible way.
• None of the unemployed Specialists demote.
• I have constant resource shortages.

Is this intended?

• Creating TONS of unwanted jobs just by upgrading districts?
• Heavy micro to manage unwanted jobs BEFORE they get filled?
• Demotions not working properly?

Or did I fundamentally misunderstand something?

no pop demotions is a confirmed bug. go back a page or two and look for a download or edit the file yourself for the fix.

As for the rest, yes It sucks...