Stellaris 3.99.3 'Phoenix' Open Beta Release Notes

[Newbee53]

This is a very subjective topic, but I disagree very strongly. Hopefully I can help people understand the differences here?

The new building and planetary system feels restrictive, unintuitive, and simply not fun. The old system, while not perfect, allowed for flexibility and creativity when managing planets. Now, it’s a rigid, frustrating mess that doesn’t improve anything.

The new building system is a little more restrictive, compared to the first beta update, it's in a lot better place now. I don't have a problem with a more restrictive system currently. In fact, a system more restrictive than 3.14 seems like it would be good, and it sounds like the restrictions are going to be reduced so I'm hoping it will shed those problems latter.

I do have fun building in this system, even if some elements remain frustrating, I'm just glad I'm not building ten thousand copies of the same building, districts handle that part very well. And it looks like the final product will allow both general planets and focused specialized ones which was a goal of the entire project. To level those two a little better.

So, I think it improves things by removing the slog of spam building, spam building, spam building.

Planet size barely matters anymore. What’s the point of finding a large planet if I’m stuck with arbitrary limitations that make it feel the same as a smaller one?

Planet size never really mattered. Large planets only ever gave you more districts and more capacity for pops. Presumably, capacity is still a thing, and districts still depend on planet size. UI issues aside, I don't see how size was affected in the beta compared to 3.14.

• Information is hidden or missing. Why is it harder to see population growth? Where are my food requirements? Instead of improving the UI, this update makes it harder to understand what’s happening in my empire.

UI is bad, its also half done and place holder. This is a beta, are you surprised about this? I find it odd to make this a point against the change, rather than something you'd like the beta to improve.

The Real Problem – The Clausewitz Engine

I don't know enough about programming, the engine, or the time it takes to fix it to say anything about this. But I think it's safe to say that Paradox doesn't believe a major change to this engine would be worth the time and effort required to make the change. And that's really their decision.

I want Stellaris to improve, but right now, this update is just sacrificing fun and complexity for performance, and that’s a trade-off I’m not happy with.

I want stellaris to improve as well. But 'Fun' and 'Complex' aren't the same thing. At least not to me. Some of my favorite games are amazingly simple. Rogue likes and bullet-hell style games. These aren't that complex, but I have a lot of fun with them.

Stellaris is my favorite game, and part of that is that I can put very little thought into it or put a ton. part of that is familiarity, but parts of it is that the complexity isn't insanely deep or required to be dealt with all the time.

My biggest frustration with the Beta right now is that pop growth is outstripping demotion times to the point I can't manage to kill unemployment and that pops aren't--in effect--becoming citizens. Of course there are other things I don't like, but I can't tell if they are bugs, hot code, on the 'to-do' list, or something else so get little time from me.

Other issues have either been acknowledge by the devis--amenities--or are clearly a result of hot code--UI--and so not something I need to worry about too much. Not yet. Give it a couple updates and those things might start to change as it feels like things are getting closer to release

 

[tappi]

It is a timer right now.
See Stellaris\common\pop_jobs\15_unemployment.txt
Doesn't matter if the game keeps shuffling around pops

Meant like it should be visible in the game, or at least a rough estimation.

 

[Zaacplot300]

So, its gotten to the point where I don't hate the starting situation of the UNE. Could stand to have a higher alloys or CG income but its nothing that can't be handled by a player or possibly even the AI. I also really like the urban and industrial zones, as they solve the two main complaints I had about the zone system. I have however noticed that migration and pop demotion is still, as far as I can tell, broken and not working as intended. 20 years in and I've got a sizable backlog of unemployed pops of all starts on Earth and none of them seem to be demoting at a noticeable rate. Same for migration, my colonies aren't filling up which is making planetary expansion rather difficult.

There's also a problem that empires are now starting with ~500 unemployed worker pops, which causes the Rising Unemployment event to have a very high chance of firing within the first few years. On one play through, this lead to crime events firing on Earth (which had zero crime) that tanked the planet's productivity and lead to me scrapping the save. The "pirates sighted" event also fired in Alpha Centauri for some reason, which may or may not have been related. I can only assume that the pops that caused all of this should have been civilians.

For some positivity however, I love that you can now forgive the Radical Cult by paying some unity. Very appreciated QoL and free ships.

 

[NorseGod]

Am I do something wrong, or does everyone start with a huge defecit on food? Day 1, and it's 200 Food at -43 per month.

Edit: and now a few months in and food usage has halved. For some reason pops seem to be using twice as much food for the start of the game.

 

[tappi]

Just remembered, what's up with pirates in 4.0? Have they actually reverted to pre trade routes randomly spawning pirates or is there something planned with them. While I was playing every few years I'd get a notification that pirates were spotted, but the game wouldn't tell me where and most of the time I couldn't find them. The one time I did, it was a random 7k fleet floating in an unoccupied system relatively far from everyone, when the highest fleet power in the galaxy was around 4k.

 

[NorseGod]

Getting a weird cycle of flcikering in jobs on my capital in the worker stratum, about 25 years in. Every day they trade which job they max out, and rotate constantly. There are about 30 unemployed pops on this level, and they're not getting jobs either.

 

[mirco297]

I'm not sure if/where I should report issues at this point in the Open Beta, so I decided to place it here, just to be sure:
It seems that with the rework to the “Names” section of the Custom Empire creation screen, that the Biography section has been shrunken and doesn’t display the full biographies anymore.
As can be seen with the screenshots of the Akujaman Kingdom (a custom empire I made before any iteration of the current Open Beta).
I used the full space allotted in the biography of the pre-Open Beta version of Stellaris, a biography that end with the line “The Akujamas did not return the favour once they came out on top and ruled henceforth with might, scheming and sovereign authority.”, yet the 3.99.3 Open Beta biography ends 2-3 sentences earlier. This seems to be the case with all custom empire I made.

In-game the biography seems to be displayed just fine when I hover over my own empire in the contact screen (not seeing the lowest sentence is likely due to long list of traits in combination with a full biography). So this shortcoming seems to be exclusively present in the new “Names” section of the custom empire creation screen.

This is quite the issue, at least for me.
Biographies are an important aspect to me. I like the pre-Open Beta biography limit, it made it interesting to write and fit a short but comprehensive background in the biography.
I fear that this shrinking the biography space will make it very difficult and troublesome to fit a full biography in the future.

 

[Troyen]

Performance is an issue, but I wish Paradox had tackled the root cause: the Clausewitz Engine itself. It has been holding back Stellaris (and other Paradox games) for years due to poor optimization. Instead of redesigning entire game mechanics to work around the engine’s limitations, they should have focused on making the engine itself actually good. If they put effort into optimizing Clausewitz, it would not only benefit Stellaris but also Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis, and Victoria—all of which suffer from the same performance issues.

Thought IR, Vic 3, CK3, (and presumably Tinto Talks) are all on a new version of the engine, a.k.a. Jomini. Swapping out the engine of an existing game is quite hard (and the primary reason a sequel would be beneficial) and improvements to Jomini are difficult to port backwards.

 

[Calvax]

Getting a weird cycle of flcikering in jobs on my capital in the worker stratum, about 25 years in. Every day they trade which job they max out, and rotate constantly. There are about 30 unemployed pops on this level, and they're not getting jobs either.

I wonder if that's why migration still seems to be stalled. It's meant to be 4x faster now but that's only if a pop gets to civilian. If pops are rotating between jobs and unemployed it might be resetting the timer.

 

[Falrinn]

The current problem with unemployment is I think a result of old conventions on unemployment crashing into the new pop growth system.

In the current game pops are always created in the lowest strata and promote into higher stratas if jobs are available on the planet. However in the new system you are getting a constant flow of pops across all stratas, and the elite strata in particular tends to fill up very quickly. Meaning you are going to have constant unemployment even if there are lots of available jobs/civilian capacity.

So I don't think this is even a question of demotion time and reducing demotion time is just treating the symptom and doesn't solve the core issue. Rather unemployment created by pop growth specifically needs to demote instantly.

 

[Hastet]

quick question: were factions fixed in this version or are they still broken?

 

[Skeletr0nKing]

I must say after trying it for a while, it all seems very confusing as expected.

-Population shifts employment wildly back and forth, making the values hard to read.

-I did manage to fix unemployment after a while, but there is a sign for "Unemployed civilians" in red all the time. Is being a civilian a job or is it not? The red makes it seem like you shouldn't have any of those and that you are doing something wrong, yet I read the notes and it says civilians are a good thing. It's misleading to say the least, remove the red number I'd say and label them as "Civilians", and not as "Unemployed civilians"

-Unemployment is hard to read and understand. There is a tiny tab around the city picture where you can see all the unemployed groups, but that isn't very helpful at all. THings like "Unemployed top-echelon-citizens don't seem too useful either since they are so few in number compared to the unemployed of other categories. Who cares if there's 5 unemployed rulers while there are 900 unemployed workers? I think it should be easier to find. info about them and it should be displayed in a more clear fashion. Also the pops shift jobs and employment/unemployment at light speed, making it hard to hover the mouse to read this info.

-I am concerned about the difficulty in learning the zone/district/Building/pop mechanic for new players. I've been playing the game for years and I've read the patch notes and it is all very confusing to me, I can't imagine how a new player will cope with all of this info being bombarded into their cerebral cortex. I am a believer in that it can be done, but it needs to be explained very well to new (and old) players alike so that they know what they're doing at all times. Perhaps even a system that offers suggestions on how to fix problems for the red alarm lights on your screens?

-The "Unemployment on planet X" event notification kicks in all the time, offering you to ignore it for crime or offer aid for consumer good costs. I'm not sure which values is it using to tell if unemployment is bad and fire up the event, but with pops shifting jobs once every two seconds, it seems to keep kicking in consistantly.

-Building a colony ship and sending it to a planet to colonize opens the colonization menu which could induce you to error, as in, starting the building of a new colony ship at your home system while you actually wanted to colonize with the ship that's standing right there in front of the planet.

That's all I've got for now.

 

[Noctealis]

quick question: were factions fixed in this version or are they still broken?

Still broken

 

[Miuramir]

Some initial notes; new game started for this version, no mods:

* As others have said, your home planet triggers the unemployment / crime crisis quite early on, even with the Enforcer allocated and a Crime of 0%. I think this is due to a blob of pops moving from Civilian to Unemployed due to some sort of shuffling?

* The "persistent ping" bug is back. Same problem as before, if you don't acknowledge or dismiss the top notification at exactly the right time, the planet / system pings forever. Seems to be particularly a problem with the terraformable planet notification. Even persists through a save and reload. Can we get some sort of "reset / refresh interface" console command to clear up these sorts of things?

* It's still not clear which things add jobs directly, and which things add jobs-per-district. There doesn't seem to be any place that will show you exactly what you will get when you add a district (or development level, whatever we're calling them now).

* It's possible to get a tiny amount of Priests now, which is an improvement, but it's frustrating that you can't add more (they're jobs per building, not jobs per district, and a 1/planet building limit); and that even as a Spiritual empire, most of your Unity is coming from Bureaucrats.

* I don't know if it's just random chance, but while I normally turn habitable planets up a little, the number of them seems to be significantly up on this save. I'm at 2x on a 1000 star galaxy (6 arms), and at this point ~23 out of ~80 systems have at least one habitable planet, about ~30 total.

* Possibly related to the above, the Expansion Planner doesn't seem to be working, it shows about 6 systems even with all filters off; the four I've surveyed and two seemingly random others out of the 30ish.

* The "faintly dimmed" strip behind the numbers at the bottom of the planet picture is not nearly opaque enough; it's hard to read the numbers which are fairly small as it is. Not as bad, but the mostly-clear buttons are also low contrast.

* In general the planet screen looks tiny and cluttered, and hides important information off in difficult to find places. I hate to say it, but we need less art and more interface.

* Unemployed pops are not moving into available jobs. I have 729 / 900 clerk jobs, and 342 unemployed workers. Plus some number of civilians I think; it says zero in one place, 6 in another, and they're producing some trade, and either zero or 7% upkeep reduction, etc. Then there's a different spot that says 605 civilian unemployment; are these civilians, or unemployed, or both, or neither?

* The Empire Focus cards flip into level 2 far too soon. I'm at the end of year 6 and I've got "2: Finish an Archaeology Site", "2: Explore a Wormhole" and "2: Sign a Research Agreement" taking up half my slots, I can't afford the 200 Unity to flip them. I've not even had time to finish first contact with another Empire yet. Explore a Wormhole should really be a level 3 in any case.

Important question not answered by the interface: does paying the 100 Unity to discard a card remove it forever, or put it back into the deck so it can be redrawn later?

Maybe the cost to discard could be lowered, but multiplied by Empire Size? 25 * Level * Size Mod perhaps? (Currently it's 100 * Level)

 

[oreopirate]

Anyone else auto get the Planned obsolence achievement despite not having any robots? I did change around ethics and civics, but still.

 

[SirBlackAxe]

Is there any way to enable/disable planetary automation after a planet is colonized? You can open the settings from the gear on the Surface tab, but I don't see a way to actually activate it.

 

[Ohirra]

Habitat stuff? Awesome! I live for (and on) habitats!

 

[Velaroz]

By the looks of it, Spiritualist Empires currently only get Priests from the Temple building itself--none from the Unity or Amenities zones.
The number tweaks adjusting the count of jobs to 180~ and treating roughly every 60 "workforce" jobs as 1 job prior to this update, while maintaining roughly the same numbers of pops overall, does feel a lot better for overall economy.

I am not quite sure what sort of suggestion I'd shoot off myself for amenities, but I'd probably err towards the notion that not all jobs need to be absolutely split up completely.

Priests giving some feels good, so likely some way of combining Unity & Amenities; many planets, if players are wanting to avoid trade loss from planetary deficits [code having a small typo, causing a bug; the negative is negatived again, making it give a positive income instead of subtracting from the gains as it should], will likely need to have Amenities and Consumer Goods at a minimum, and then whatever the planet itself wants to have specialized. This means 2 zones are forcibly eaten up unless minor planetary deficits are fine for players/empires in general, though given the numbers I see atm on just 1:1 on these values, I expect those values to actually end up being rather painful and somewhat of a hindrance/thing to avoid in early game.

Other than that, possibly the biggest thing I am glad to see, is the Zone itself being what dictates the jobs gained from districts, rather than the District gaining jobs from whatever zones are active. Means mods will be able to potentially play together more without overriding the same vanilla file left, right, up and down. Also means better customization on any further zones y'all create, without having to continually just add more and more to City Districts in general. Probably the bigger reason for that change, overall, rather than friendliness to modders--that's likely just a bonus.

A suggestion: Colonists/Clerks could scale on City Districts from the Capital Building itself, rather than needing the 'Urban Zone' in general to grant it.
Urban zone, in turn, could give a weakened mixture of jobs for the various other effects, like those three buildings that are now present in it.

I still feel like research is a bit UP/hard to get going otherwise, though. Will be doing a few more tests before I give a more final verdict on that front though.

Potential income gains of alloys & CG do feel a lot better now, though.



A query to other people testing this: Has anyone else managed to get their colonies upgraded from the Shelter?

 

[Newbee53]

A query to other people testing this: Has anyone else managed to get their colonies upgraded from the Shelter?

Not on this or the last patch. I think the pop count requirement is way too high, like 5k pops or something.

 

[Soren Altigo]

Not on this or the last patch. I think the pop count requirement is way too high, like 5k pops or something.

I haven't had any issues with this in any of the beta versions. At 1K pops, I can upgrade my reassembled ship shelter into a real capital building.