Why another economy redesign?

[Annihilat0r]

I have not been following Stellaris recently. Coming back after 4.0 was rather disappointing.

What were the reason why they decided to spend ressources on another economy rework? Is there a dev diary you can point me to? The search function wasn't helpful and I don't have time to read through all of them.

Thanks!

 

[Red Death]

1. Pop and job rework: mainly that the new structuring is supposed to allow better optimisation, making the game run better when there are a lot of pops.
2. Trade rework: mainly performance also.
3. District and building rework: mainly somewhat nebulous statements that it will allow them to do fun things in the future.

Performance benefits have not really manifested (hopefully yet), potentially because the Phoenix update was released rather on fire, and does not give the impression it was really "finished". Some of these did have side benefits. For example, science and unity are not limited by the max building slot limits anymore, but use district slots. Pop growth makes more sense now.

 

[RoverStorm]

Performance benefits have not really manifested

To expand on this, performance results this patch are "mixed".

From what I've heard, some people's systems are doing better, some are doing worse. Some people are lagging on the month tick, others have no month tick lag but a persistent lag. Developers seem to be suspecting different hardware is getting different results; they have requested people with especially bad performance to list system specs and provide a save file.

Late game lag still exists, but a lot of "in-the-know" modders kind of expected some late-game lag to remain since two big sources of lag are rendering ships and fleet pathfinding, neither of which got updated this patch.

 

[Enero]

And it is not just a redesign, it is a really bad redesign. The new district system is inflexible and removes competition for space. You basically can't have mixed planets. Rare resources have lost their rareness and function as an addendum to alloys and cg. Instead of expanding the old system, they came out with this nonsense

 

[SS Boss]

2.0 was a mess but you could at least see why it was needed, even during the mess. And most of the mess was because they launched the patch in December, 2018 and only returned in mid-January 2019 or whatever to patch the chaos. Also, Stellaris was a 2 to 3-year old game at that point.

4.0 ? I can't see any reason to believe the changes introduced would be as good as 2.0 changes were at their time. On the contrary, some of them seems to make the game worse. And the disaster is in another proportion, we are reaching 20 patches post-4.0 and the game is still broken and bad, full of unbalanced and forgotten things still trying to work in 3.14.

One of the big reasons for the patch was "late game lag", that the patch barely scratches (actually as right now it's worse than before, so a great achievement). And late game lag is an overrated problem anyway, the 3.14 version was sitting gracefully at ~90% recent positive Steam reviews before the earthquake of a patch arrived in May 5th, with late game lag and all of that, a rating the vast majority developers out there would cry for, but I guess PDX wanted Stellaris well into mixed ratings.

I just can't understand any of that. Right now I only hope I can play Biogenesis in the live version of the game (not this glorified beta that's going right now) before Shadows of the Shroud launches.

 

[RoverStorm]

You basically can't have mixed planets.

What?

Mixed planets are much more justified now, as it saves on trade if that's what your economy demands. Especially with "wide" play styles.

Specialized planets are still stronger, but there are real advantages to mixed planets now.

The new district system is inflexible and removes competition for space.

Can you explain what you mean by this? There is just as much incentive to fight over systems as in 3.14.

Rare resources have lost their rareness and function as an addendum to alloys and cg. Instead of expanding the old system, they came out with this nonsense

This was an issue in 3.14. It was always just shove a bunch of refineries onto a backwater rural planet with extra buildings slots and that's it. It was just "minerals+".

The new version hasn't changed that, except now there's a little bit more nuance since in addition to dedicated refinery worlds it's possible to sidegrade an industrial world to make strategic resources, though without the advantages of the planetary designation or other advantages of specializing specifically for refineries.

Personally I think strategic resources are overdue a revisit to their role, acquisition, and production.

 

[Enero]

What?

Mixed planets are much more justified now, as it saves on trade if that's what your economy demands. Especially with "wide" play styles.

Specialized planets are still stronger, but there are real advantages to mixed planets now.

You have just 2 specializations for the major district. This is what the districts do. All other things are done by buildings.

It would be more logical to have multiple district types to cover everything and create competition for district space. Buildings should be used for special effects. Current system is nonsense. It mixes everything up in an illogical mess, where buildings have to back district functionality because district mechanic is crippled.

Can you explain what you mean by this? There is just as much incentive to fight over systems as in 3.14.

Competition for district space on a planet.

 

[Kava]

I enjoy the new district specs and especially how certain planetary features like Betharian Fields work.
My only complaint is that I want my slaves to stick to the jobs I genetically engineered them to be good at. Battle Thralls in soldier jobs, farmers farming, so on. I sort of think slaves should let me select their jobs in their species tab. It would be accurate for them to have no control over their lives.

 

[Annihilat0r]

Thanks for all the input everyone. I still struggle a bit to see the overall motivation and direction envisioned here, but I guess I will just wait and see what the "fun things in the future" will be.

 

[Foxosaur]

I think they are graduating the game to be in its long-form and at the same time, they have to make the end game more accessible from a performance and stability perspective. And in order for them to do that, they have and have been gutting parts of the game to achieve it. So whilst yes people can play shorter games even on smaller galaxies for which the game was centred around (Medium galaxies), they want everything to be potentially bigger and longer and address pacing issues.

Purely my own opinion of course.

 

[Verx90]

The whole point of the rework was performance, and for me specifically it worked, I and my friend managed to play a game in 600 stars no freeze/slowdown problem till late game.

The real killer are all the OSS.

Also

Rare resources have lost their rareness and function as an addendum to alloys and cg

Strategic resources does not mean there are "few" , and "rare" even on a system scale does not really mean much. Strategic means that a resource has an important use for the state. There is no such thing as something you can't replicate on a material scale, we with our current technology can already transform carbon into gold, the moment you find a resource that has an interesting and worth use, you can just replicate it.

 

[Enero]

The whole point of the rework was performance, and for me specifically it worked, I and my friend managed to play a game in 600 stars no freeze/slowdown problem till late game.

The real killer are all the OSS.

Also


Strategic resources does not mean there are "few" , and "rare" even on a system scale does not really mean much. Strategic means that a resource has an important use for the state. There is no such thing as something you can't replicate on a material scale, we with our current technology can already transform carbon into gold, the moment you find a resource that has an interesting and worth use, you can just replicate it.

RR don't mean anything now and are produced alongside alloys and cg. So basically they can be safely removed from the game as thet do not represent an independent mechanic.

 

[currylambchop]

2.0 was a mess but you could at least see why it was needed, even during the mess. And most of the mess was because they launched the patch in December, 2018 and only returned in mid-January 2019 or whatever to patch the chaos. Also, Stellaris was a 2 to 3-year old game at that point.

2.0/2.2 was far worse than 4.0 in terms of logic, like, most of 4.0 was trying to fix the bad pop system that came with 2.2. It led to the strange 'colonising always good' meta where planets = pop growth which was not a good design.

 

[Verx90]

RR don't mean anything now and are produced alongside alloys and cg. So basically they can be safely removed from the game as thet do not represent an independent mechanic.

That's a logical jump. They were chained to buildings before, and now they are natural resources, chained with districts, or artificial chained with.. buildings. Nothing really changed. They are not RR, they are strategic resources, the only "rare" thing are the cristal, but "rare" is not really something that has meaning when you can reproduce something, it's just rare in natural occurrences.

 

[grommile]

Competition for district space on a planet.

Pretty sure the 3.x meta was hyperspecialization, because the most efficient use of planets was to go as close to all-in on a single resource as you could.

 

[Enero]

Pretty sure the 3.x meta was hyperspecialization, because the most efficient use of planets was to go as close to all-in on a single resource as you could.

Because of designations. This it true for Stellaris 4 as well, but have become much more convoluted and inflexible.

 

[Madzai]

2.0 was a mess but you could at least see why it was needed, even during the mess. And most of the mess was because they launched the patch in December, 2018 and only returned in mid-January 2019 or whatever to patch the chaos. Also, Stellaris was a 2 to 3-year old game at that point.

Can you really? Like conceptually new system was better than tile system. And ofc, new actual implementation was better than old specific tile implementation Stellaris had back when. But it took years to fix the performance issues caused by new system, we only really fixed it in 4.0 (i'm specifically talking about POP caused lag). And we had quite some major and minor attempts to fix it between when and now. That's years of work that could be used on other things. Also things we lost in process, like any actual internal politics that won't happen, because no way they add some more calculations to the POPs. Not to mention that the POP change made major overall shift in that game is. I like both versions, but it's not like old system wasn't salvageable, allowing the game to focus gameplay on other elements.

 

[Annihilat0r]

we with our current technology can already transform carbon into gold

As a scientist myself, this one hurts to read. We can most definitely not transform carbon into gold, nor can we transform any other element into another aside from very limited attempts in nuclear fusion test reactors, which fuse two Hydrogen isotopes into Helium; and unless we can safely replicate an entire star we will never be able to turn carbon into gold.

Edit: If we apply hard sci-fi, transforming minerals into rare elements would require a megastructure not unlike a dyson sphere and be a very late game tech.

 

[Verx90]

As a scientist myself, this one hurts to read. We can most definitely not transform carbon into gold, nor can we transform any other element into another aside from very limited attempts in nuclear fusion test reactors, which fuse two Hydrogen isotopes into Helium; and unless we can safely replicate an entire star we will never be able to turn carbon into gold.

I'm happy to tell you that "scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have successfully transformed lead into gold, albeit for a fleeting moment"

I wrote carbon, I was wrong.

 

[Annihilat0r]

I'm happy to tell you that "scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have successfully transformed lead into gold, albeit for a fleeting moment"

I wrote carbon, I was wrong.

This a bit off-topic, but colliding two individual atoms is not really "transforming carbin (lead) into gold" - and as you pointed out yourself, the gold isotope quickly degraded again. If you wanted to do this at scale, unimaginable power would be needed, hence my reference to an actual star and a dyson sphere.