Stellaris Open Beta Population Scale Re-Rework suggestion

[DarthWick]

Firstly, I want to state my opinion on some of the work done in the 3.99 so far:

Very nice additions especially performance wise, and the game is now a quite a bit more playable with the new fixes in 3.99.1. Still need to fully fix automation buildings since I have no idea what they do.

Also, Robots seem to really be a lot more easy to grow now. The overall pop growths seem very good. Cant wait to see hives.



Now to the main thing:

I wonder, would it be possible to instead of having the base pop ratio 100/old pop, make it be similar to billions? Increase the scale, so it's not half way. I want Earth with a few billions instead of 5k.

Maybe scale up from 100/1 old pop to 200k/1 old pop, that way Earth could have 10 billion hoomans in 2200(Some predictions estimate if to 10.4 irl). Would it be possible?

I know this would involve re-scaling all the jobs, there will probably be mods doing it too, but this all feels a bit half-baked. Why not go full scale? The same calculationss apply, just with bigger displayed numbers. Would make the game a bit more closer to a simulator, while still being gamey and sandboxy as before, due to the new calculations.

What do you think?

 

[herculeanus]

I can't do anything with the 5000, 6000, etc. It destroys the immersion.

 

[Ryika]

Pops are an abstract number that's intentionally not scaled to Earth-ish population sizes because while it might work for humans, it will most certainly not work for every other species. That has been the logic from the first time someone asked on one of the pre-release streams how many billions a pop represents, and that same answer has been given on the recent beta stream.

 

[Enero]

With the new system a pop could be 1,000,000 people, so the only thing the devs need is to change K (thousand) to B (billion) and we will get a realistic and sensible number.

5.25 K (5251 pops) -> 5.25 B

 

[Newbee53]

The devs have consistently argued that they do not want to talk about how many actual beings make up a single pop. This makes a lot of sense, as this number can change throughout the play through, not just from species to species.

Its easy to imagine a scenery where earth starts with 2 or 3 million per pop. that would get us around 8-12 billion population which fits nicely enough with sci-fi population numbers.

But your first colony isn't going to have 100 million people living on it the first day it is 'complete.' 5 thousand would be enough assuming you are looking for 'no genetic engineering minimum.' at that number you don't need to worry too much about inbreeding for generations or more. 500,000 and you don't need to even think about it. And 500,000 is reasonable for an early stellaris empire to send in a few months to a couple years for 'colony development' to complete.

Then what does the resource technologies mean? is it really just 20% more per worker? or does it mean 50% more, but you also don't need as many workers in your factories or farms anymore?

So what about other species? Ultra efficient but solitary blorg could have fewer 'individuals' per pop. Or maybe they all work staggered shifts because spending that much time around other blorgs is just that stressful, so they actually have more individuals to do the same amount of work in a day. Cause if they don't mental breakdowns become a species wide concern.

Maybe those tiny floating aliens in the toxic category are super-efficient and you need two or three humans to do the same job. Or maybe their small size means they need two or three to do the same job as humans.

Maybe 1 of their entertainers does the same job as one human, but five of their miners are needed to do the same job as one human miner.

So, one pop might not be consistent per job.

I like to think of it as millions at the planetary population level, but it doesn't actually work that way all the way to the end. So I can have some personal leeway based on whatever role play I want.

 

[paetaer]

What's the reason behind the new pop scaling? Does it serve any system that couldn't work with old pop/amenities/housing scaling?

 

[Newbee53]

What's the reason behind the new pop scaling? Does it serve any system that couldn't work with old pop/amenities/housing scaling?

It makes monthly pop growth more possible, allowing slower but more consistent growth. the other parts of the rework--pop groups mostly--also make it more possible to have all your species growing at the same time. Some combination of the above allows them to do certain per pop calculations per group instead, which they hope will greatly reduce the number of calculations our computers will need to do.

 

[Archael90]

With the new system a pop could be 1,000,000 people, so the only thing the devs need is to change K (thousand) to B (billion) and we will get a realistic and sensible number.

5.25 K (5251 pops) -> 5.25 B

For people it would be... But there are other species, some can be much smaller and some much bigger, some may work harder, and some may work less, yet still fits work done by 1 pop. So pop is not a set number, it's set workforce. While billions humans could work, billions blorgs could not.

 

[Calvax]

But your first colony isn't going to have 100 million people living on it the first day it is 'complete.' 5 thousand would be enough assuming you are looking for 'no genetic engineering minimum.' at that number you don't need to worry too much about inbreeding for generations or more. 500,000 and you don't need to even think about it. And 500,000 is reasonable for an early stellaris empire to send in a few months to a couple years for 'colony development' to complete

It seems perfectly plausible to me that an early colony would have a million people. That’s after a few years where thousands, then tens of thousands of engineers, construction workers, and administrators had finished building a city and several towns.

So a pop being around a million people in 4.0 works fine for me when considering humans. The earth starting with about 6 billion then wouldn’t be too implausible. Yes it’s less than now IRL but there are projections that the planet’s population will peak this century before declining. I can imagine it getting back down to that by 2200.

 

[Thiend]

There exists no flat amount that would be sensible in all scenarios, hence the "it is however many you imagine" abstraction.

As far as mechanics go, base 100 is probably the ideal point. I wouldn't be opposed to base 1000. Base 10 isn't sufficiently granular, ans base 10000 is harder to interpret.

 

[Newbee53]

So a pop being around a million people in 4.0 works fine for me when considering humans

That would have 100 million people at the start of a colony. Which starts at 100 pops as I understand it.

Yes it’s less than now IRL but there are projections that the planet’s population will peak this century before declining. I can imagine it getting back down to that by 2200.

I've never bought those projections, mainly because they are based on assumptions that are enterally social based. Which changes with every shift in culture, and fails to take into account the bump in births that will come when people realize the world's population is shrinking and start pushing everyone to have babies.

 

[Thiend]

That would have 100 million people at the start of a colony. Which starts at 100 pops as I understand it.

I've never bought those projections, mainly because they are based on assumptions that are enterally social based. Which changes with every shift in culture, and fails to take into account the bump in births that will come when people realize the world's population is shrinking and start pushing everyone to have babies.

Its the same doomsday projections as are available in almost every category. If you look slightly further back, you see the same type of projections made by the same type of people that we have already broken.

For just one off the top of my head, it was predicted that making a flying machine would take a million years... I want to say 7 years before the Wright brothers in fact made an airplane, but that number is probably wrong. "We're at/close to the limit of X" is almost invariably made up nonsense.

But as far as this topic goes, I just don't see how any given number could accurately represent all scenarios without a pretty drastic increase in detail and granularity, which would probably make the game unplayably slow.

 

[Enero]

For people it would be... But there are other species, some can be much smaller and some much bigger, some may work harder, and some may work less, yet still fits work done by 1 pop. So pop is not a set number, it's set workforce. While billions humans could work, billions blorgs could not.

But according to the portraits, all species in Stellaris are more or less comparable is size. And intrinsic differences should be shaped by traits.

I think that pop "relativity" is questionable.

 

[fourteenfour]

I am sorry but the recent multiply by one hundred really doesn't work. Instead of useless numbers of a smaller sort I now I have big useless numbers and the colony management screen is replete with useless information.

Honestly the best fix is simple.

Assign a simple number to planet capacity and population xx/yy. Use percentage sliders for each job to allocate workforce which at no times shows you a number of pops, we don't need to know the numbers, just the percent of work force allocated.

So overall we have three macro percentage movers which define how much to colony leadership, specialist, and workers. Within each category we have sliders by jobs with lock buttons to say - no matter what I move this one no longer moves. We remove all the cutesy numbers of which pop/faction is in each because while we had a granular view of those pops you could not actually force them between different jobs in a macro category

 

[Newbee53]

But according to the portraits, all species in Stellaris are more or less comparable is size. And intrinsic differences should be shaped by traits.

I think that pop "relativity" is questionable.

Are they?

Which is larger? Are they the same size? How can you tell? The portraits do not give a sense of scale, even the backgrounds fail at this, as you'd expect the room to be framed to make the person in it look 'the best' which doesn't necessarily mean larger or smaller than normal.

But more importantly--regardless of size--which one would be more efficient working in an alloy foundry?

Nothing in the portraits give any kind of indication of size or ability, just shape and form.

colony management screen is replete with useless information.

based on your post this is your only issue, the numbers aren't important.

Personally, having only a dozen pops made me feel like I was managing underpopulated planets, not actual planetary populations. Which the larger numbers does very well. As having .11 pops would be confusing, having the number large enough that whole pop growth can happen monthly is a big boon overall.

I just wish the 'management' tab was completely reworked so that it showed your pop groups in a big grid instead of a list. there is a lot of unused space that doesn't need to be there. The symbols for planetary features and blockers on the summery screen would be great, I don't care if the interface for removing them is somewhere else.

I do think its nice to see the actual numbers for work force, as that is useful if you feel the need to cut 'x number of amenities' from your planet rather than some fiddly precentage that will be a problem if you only need to cut 150 out of 600 jobs or whatever. Of course this all hinges on the UI being fixed to show all the correct numbers, but I'd expect that to happen only in the last two to three weeks of the beta.

 

[Archael90]

But according to the portraits, all species in Stellaris are more or less comparable is size. And intrinsic differences should be shaped by traits.

I think that pop "relativity" is questionable.

What? How? Where?
Please, show me comparison so I can see if rat mammalian is same size as unicorn lithoid, or at least simmilar.

This is a joke of course, you can't show that. Nothing in game indicates species are simmilar.

One pop of species 1 may contain 1B individuals, while one pop of species 2 may contain only 100 individuals. The only thing this imply is that 1 pop perform job similar to other 1 pop, despite of differences in quantity of individuals inside those pops. Maybe those 1000 humans perform simmilar to 100 blorgs because they have less arms? The fact is that pop = pop in terms of work done.

 

[Trigaea]

Pops having a set equivalency to humans would give the game world greater verisimilitude, but the juice probably isn't worth the squeeze with the amount of work that would need to be done.

A dedicated enough modder could probably make it happen, but I would prefer Paradox focus on other things than get bogged down in trying to make sure that pops are the correct amount everywhere and in every situation.

 

[The Founder]

I wonder, would it be possible to instead of having the base pop ratio 100/old pop, make it be similar to billions? Increase the scale, so it's not half way. I want Earth with a few billions instead of 5k.

That would cause at least two problem:
1. It doesn't work out for all species people might imagine.
2. People would absolutely bombard the forum with stupid threads about how "the math for X Billion humans isn't realistic", in so many flavors.

They are still not going to fall for it

 

[grommile]

Assign a simple number to planet capacity and population xx/yy. Use percentage sliders for each job to allocate workforce which at no times shows you a number of pops, we don't need to know the numbers, just the percent of work force allocated.

Not all of us have nostalgia for the original Master of Orion.

 

[MarkAngelo]

Yes please! I was literally about to make a post exactly like this because I thought it should be discussed. I am extremely happy someone already did! Please please. 1000s is such a missed opportunity. Figure out how to make the UI work with billions so we can truly make the universe immersive.