There are a couple of things I think could use a little polish but overall it broadens the strategy space significantly and does a good job of freshening the game up if you were starting to burn out on it, mostly by dint of Origins being diverse and impactful.
New federation stuff: Everything here is pretty great with the exception that I think the rate of federation xp gain could use another pass. It's both very slow and essentially fixed - ostensibly it's supposed to be dictated by your Cohesion which you then have to manage and/or invest in using your Envoys, but in practice Cohesion just sits at max almost all the time while your federation sloooooowly ticks up 10xp/month for 80 years, and goosing your federation with extra envoys only matters for the small window in which you're trying to regenerate Cohesion after taking a hit. It makes the decisions about how to allocate your envoys pretty uninteresting and I'd like to see a version of the system where the role envoys play in managing a federation is more meaningful - and ideally one in which a player who invests in doing so can plausibly get a level 5 federation early enough for it to matter.
Galactic Community: The system is very cool in concept but not as consistently interesting as I'd like in practice. Luckily, this is very easy to fix, because the bones are all well-designed and the only thing holding it back is that there aren't actually enough laws available to keep the votes engaging throughout the game - generally you've got a tree or two you want to get passed and once you've got them in place you spend the rest of the game half-ignoring the votes while the AI faffs around passing and repealing random sanctions and tier 1 laws. I know they're already working on a couple new laws for the next patch, and once there's more to do WITH the Community it'll be an unreservedly great addition.
Origins: The actual key feature of the expansion, in my opinion. There are a couple specific Origins that could use some balance work (and Void Dwellers is already getting some), but aside from that they're great, no complaints.
Juggernaut/Mega Shipyard: Eh. They're fine, but I think this is mostly just ticking the 'new megastructure!' box; I've not yet had a game where I felt like either of them mattered (but that might go back to some of the issues still underlying the fleet combat systems, which probably won't be addressed until that whole part of the game gets another pass).
Spawl/Admin cap rework: I like this system much better than the old admin cap one in general. It's currently probably too permissive in the sense that bureaucrats are very efficient so sprawl is very 'cheap', which limits the system's ability to actually deliver on its intended purpose (which is to tax wide strategies to keep them from always being strictly better than tall strategies), but that's a fairly easy thing to adjust in patches.
Envoys and favors: These systems give you a lot more agency over your relationships with other empires. Again, I think they could use some tweaking - I'd like to see more stuff you can do with envoys, and the influence cost of cashing in favors is probably a little too high given the current influence economy (solve one problem with the other, maybe? an option to assign envoys to generate influence would make influence income less of a fixed value and also create more actual strategic decisions about how to spend your envoys) - but the system overall is definitely a valuable addition.
I'm going to dispute the whole "colonize everything" because that meme got kneecap a few major patches ago. From the wiki
Every 1% of Habitability under 100% increases the Pop Upkeep and Amenity Usage by 1%, reduce their job output and Pop Growth by 0.5% and happiness by 0.25%. It caps at 0% Habitability, giving +100% Pop Upkeep and Amenity Usage, -50% Job Output and Pop Growth and -25% happiness.
I've bolded things that really make this a very bad strategy and very bad advice early in the game. Take for example, the researcher job, you need 2 consumer goods for base upkeep. At 0% habitability, you'll need 4 consumer goods and that researcher is taking a 50% reduction in their research production before we factor in things like stability, which is going to be a result of happiness, which is already taking a 25% malus. You now need 100% more amenities to meet their needs and if you ignore that, they'll be even more unhappy and thus you have less stability. So you're taking massive hit to production and they'll eat into more of your expensive consumer goods. Not to mention, now you do actually have to keep greater tabs on those planets and more micro to ensure you don't get a rebellion and lose the system.
I think too many people fall into the trap of assuming pops are everything. For example, you don't want tons of unemployed pops because they use resources and lower stability, costing you an opportunity to get more resources, assuming you aren't running something like utopian abundance. Even if you run utopian abundance, you more or less want that as a last result in non-gimmick setups because most other jobs are better production. What actually matters in Stellaris is having really good jobs that help you facilitate your goals. Pops are resource to fill those in. So 50% malus on a zero habitable world, and let's be honest the pop growth is going to take more than a 50% hit in most cause because people are emigrating off of shit world, isn't a good use of your resources. I'm pretty sure someone that ignores stuff below 50% habitability will pull ahead enough in tech, over someone still stuck on colonize everything, that they can get the tech to just straight up terraform or gene mod their pops or colonize it with droids to make sure they aren't pissing away tons of resources on various maluses.
Rule of thumb is maximizing what you get out of your jobs. If a habitable world doesn't give you a good return with the pops you have, leave it be until you have bots, synths, access to a species that doesn't mind the rock, can gene mod a sub-species that doesn't mind the rock or just straight up terraform it. You can take all the resources that would be pissed away on that rock dealing with maluses and use them to do other things. I mean, this gets very much into why gene clinics suck. Yeah, you have more pop growth, but your wasting shit on a return that won't make up for what you spent. Just like any job is better than medical worker, any job on a planet with 70% habitability or higher is doing more for you than one on a world with low habitability. Not just in being more productive, but also in needing less upkeep.
As for migration treaties, those aren't a straight forward. There are some setups where they are a huge advantage for you. Like life seeded, your pops won't leave but their pops will gleefully migrate to your homeworld and you can no maybe colonize some of the rocks around you. Or synthetic ascension, last I checked synths don't migrate, so you just suck in their pops and can them into something that won't leave. On the other hand, you don't want a migration treaty with an empire that has gaia worlds because you're pops are more likely to leave at a greater rate than you'd get from stuff immigrating in. Then you get stuff where it's a mixed bag. Void dweller can both benefit and be screwed by a migration treaty currently. The treaty gives you more options because you don't want your pops on rocks, but at the same time you really don't want pops that aren't your original or high trait robots on your habitats. Not to mention, if you're min/maxing habitats without some sort of cheese, they are going to have a how push towards pops leaving their cramped confines. I suggest new players learn the ins and outs of migration treaties and learn where they can benefit you and when they can be a detriment.
GoodKingJayIIIThey wanna get mygold on the ceilingRegistered Userregular
I know it's the nature of these games, but there are a lot of systems. It's hard to know where to go or how to use them appropriately, let alone manipulate them. And sometimes the way they behave can really mess with things.
I'm fooling around with the Ringworld start and I thought it would be a good idea to build a research district early on. Well, as you can imagine, all my farming pops moved to research and completely tanked my economy. I basically had to start over because my food and consumer goods went so far into the red I would've spent the rest of the game recovering. Of course, I know that a worker pop will graduate to a specialist if there is a slot open, but I did not think that everyone would just abandon all the farming jobs for the research district.
I'm currently doing as @Abbalah suggested and colonizing most planets I find. So far it's working pretty well. But I've also signed a bunch of migration treaties, and my starting empire race got busy with the caravaneers and now I have a half-dogman who can live in a lot of places. So I'm not really dealing with any planets that are just straight up in the red. But I'm with @Mill in terms of trying to balance colonization with and pop efficiency.
It's always seemed to me that research is king. Expansion is probably the "correct" first tradition, but for me it's either that or Discovery. If I can get the research machine really humming then I feel like I can far outpace other empires in everything else.
But then, I am also the guy trying to figure out how to get the kind of absurd numbers that I see in others' games, so everyone here is probably on a completely different level than me.
I'm going to dispute the whole "colonize everything" because that meme got kneecap a few major patches ago. From the wiki
Every 1% of Habitability under 100% increases the Pop Upkeep and Amenity Usage by 1%, reduce their job output and Pop Growth by 0.5% and happiness by 0.25%. It caps at 0% Habitability, giving +100% Pop Upkeep and Amenity Usage, -50% Job Output and Pop Growth and -25% happiness.
I've bolded things that really make this a very bad strategy and very bad advice early in the game. Take for example, the researcher job, you need 2 consumer goods for base upkeep. At 0% habitability, you'll need 4 consumer goods and that researcher is taking a 50% reduction in their research production before we factor in things like stability, which is going to be a result of happiness, which is already taking a 25% malus. You now need 100% more amenities to meet their needs and if you ignore that, they'll be even more unhappy and thus you have less stability. So you're taking massive hit to production and they'll eat into more of your expensive consumer goods. Not to mention, now you do actually have to keep greater tabs on those planets and more micro to ensure you don't get a rebellion and lose the system.
Couple problems here:
First off, habitability impacts pop upkeep, not job upkeep. These values are tracked and modified separately. That 2 consumer goods for base researcher upkeep is job upkeep, and left alone by habitability. Pop upkeep is generally just whatever food they eat and whatever amount of consumer goods their stratum and living standards dictate. Your researcher will be more expensive to upkeep on a 0 habitability world, but he won't be going from 2 consumer goods to 4, he'll be going from 1 food and 2.5 consumer goods to 2 food and 3 consumer goods - a much-less-sharp increase.
Secondly, you picked a high-upkeep job as your example, but that's mostly just a demonstration of why you shouldn't put Researchers on 0-hab planets. A planet with 0% habitability should absolutely still be colonized, but it's also a garbage planet you should be filling with unsightly mines and farms, not shiny expensive research facilities. If you fill your planet up with worker jobs, the consumer goods portion of their upkeep will be 0 or near 0 and the only thing that will happen to their upkeep is that they'll eat twice as much food. It's a cost, sure, but a small one compared to the value of having more pop growth.
Thirdly, you're not actually trying to fill the planet. You need a colony on it so you get another pop growth meter that's constantly filling, but you don't have to leave the pops on it if there are more efficient places for them to be. Grow 'em there, resettle 'em where you need them. The important thing is just that you're getting more growth.
Fourthly, robots. Even if all you have is basic early-game bots that can only fill farm and mine jobs, that's fine. Get a couple organics on the surface to work your admin jobs (which mostly have non-resource outputs that aren't penalized by low habitability), build a bot factory and some mine districts, and let the place fill up with workers who don't have habitability penalties or happiness bars.
The point isn't to work the crappy planet (although doing so is definitely still a net gain over leaving it empty) but to access another set of monthly pop growth points. The planet that comes with them is just a fringe benefit you'll be able to take advantage of later. Unless you're doing something weirdly and specifically wrong like filling the place with consumer-goods-intensive ruler and specialist jobs while also neglecting amenity generation, you really can't lose production by colonizing an extra planet. A bad planet will definitely gain you less than a good one, but founding a colony even on the shittiest possible planet is still a substantial gain compared to just leaving a colony site empty.
Well, ran into my first quirk with Federations. My neighbors who are quite friendly with me so far... well let's start a step back.
I've got the Enigmatic Fortress blocking my expansion, and just unlocked Destroyers so I figured, what better way to clear out my old stock of corvettes and upgrade than do a test run at the Fortress so see what it's range in that system is.
The instant my fleet was destroyed, both my neighbors demanded I become their vassal because I was suddenly weaker in fleet power.
There's no plan, there's no race to be run
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
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GoodKingJayIIIThey wanna get mygold on the ceilingRegistered Userregular
Well, ran into my first quirk with Federations. My neighbors who are quite friendly with me so far... well let's start a step back.
I've got the Enigmatic Fortress blocking my expansion, and just unlocked Destroyers so I figured, what better way to clear out my old stock of corvettes and upgrade than do a test run at the Fortress so see what it's range in that system is.
The instant my fleet was destroyed, both my neighbors demanded I become their vassal because I was suddenly weaker in fleet power.
That’s happened to me twice when I’ve buddied up with neighbors and completely ignored fleet power while expanding. I said no and nothing happened.
Well, ran into my first quirk with Federations. My neighbors who are quite friendly with me so far... well let's start a step back.
I've got the Enigmatic Fortress blocking my expansion, and just unlocked Destroyers so I figured, what better way to clear out my old stock of corvettes and upgrade than do a test run at the Fortress so see what it's range in that system is.
The instant my fleet was destroyed, both my neighbors demanded I become their vassal because I was suddenly weaker in fleet power.
That’s happened to me twice when I’ve buddied up with neighbors and completely ignored fleet power while expanding. I said no and nothing happened.
For those who may not know:
Refusing grants them the CB that allows them to start a war to make you their vassal, though the window's not long. If you rebuild they'll probably never act on it.
If they also either ditch the Encourage Growth planetary decision or turn it into a toggle instead of something you have to manually re-up every ten years on every planet that alone will probably be a top five QoL improvement for me.
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GoodKingJayIIIThey wanna get mygold on the ceilingRegistered Userregular
I got the worm in waiting event which is super cool, but for some reason I wasn't able to finish it. I research the necessary tech to build the omega alignment but I couldn't find it anywhere as a build option. I'd read you can only build it on your home world, but my homeworld was a ring world, so I don't know if there was an issue with that. The other thing I can think of, is that I went down the "precursor" route which changed my home species into a warlike race of ancients. I don't know if that cuts off the option to finish the quest.
Anyway, I'm disappointed. Would have been a super cool build, especially because it's so rare.
Well, ran into my first quirk with Federations. My neighbors who are quite friendly with me so far... well let's start a step back.
I've got the Enigmatic Fortress blocking my expansion, and just unlocked Destroyers so I figured, what better way to clear out my old stock of corvettes and upgrade than do a test run at the Fortress so see what it's range in that system is.
The instant my fleet was destroyed, both my neighbors demanded I become their vassal because I was suddenly weaker in fleet power.
That’s happened to me twice when I’ve buddied up with neighbors and completely ignored fleet power while expanding. I said no and nothing happened.
For those who may not know:
Refusing grants them the CB that allows them to start a war to make you their vassal, though the window's not long. If you rebuild they'll probably never act on it.
Agreeing to the demand is pretty bad if you're not prepared to fight for your freedom. I spent years building my fleet, maxing my relationship with my overlord and earning favors, but it was completely impossible to get them to agree to release me peacefully. It might have changed since, though.
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AuralynxDarkness is a perspectiveWatching the ego workRegistered Userregular
Well, ran into my first quirk with Federations. My neighbors who are quite friendly with me so far... well let's start a step back.
I've got the Enigmatic Fortress blocking my expansion, and just unlocked Destroyers so I figured, what better way to clear out my old stock of corvettes and upgrade than do a test run at the Fortress so see what it's range in that system is.
The instant my fleet was destroyed, both my neighbors demanded I become their vassal because I was suddenly weaker in fleet power.
That’s happened to me twice when I’ve buddied up with neighbors and completely ignored fleet power while expanding. I said no and nothing happened.
For those who may not know:
Refusing grants them the CB that allows them to start a war to make you their vassal, though the window's not long. If you rebuild they'll probably never act on it.
Agreeing to the demand is pretty bad if you're not prepared to fight for your freedom. I spent years building my fleet, maxing my relationship with my overlord and earning favors, but it was completely impossible to get them to agree to release me peacefully. It might have changed since, though.
Except the two most important resources after pops are research and alloys. Again, your pissing away a shit ton of resources to ensure that you keep that shitty world, that none of your pops like. Those resources could be going into stuff to get your more alloys or research. The extra minerals from shit world matter not, if they entirety of what you get there is going towards pop upkeep and not towards getting you more research or alloys. You've essentially created the gene clinic, only instead of being a shitty building, it's entire planet. So that extra bar of growth on another planet really doesn't matter because it's not helping you get further into research or supplying alloys for various other needs.
As to the whole you can resettle pops. You need energy for that and at the start of the game, most players aren't going to be in a situation where they can just move pops because they'll quickly run out of energy. Also in order for those pops to be worth a damn, the planet you settle them to needs to have the infrastructure in place. So on top of having to produce enough energy to move them, you also need to produce enough energy to keep that infrastructure rolling. Again, this is going to be a huge hurdle that players aren't going to easily surmount in the early game.
There is a reason why people considered machine empires overpowered after the habitability change because they really can colonize every fucking world in the context that "colonize everything and habitability be damned" is understood by the community and since that's a thing for them, that's what it's likely always going to mean. Probably applies to lithoids too, IIRC they get a bonus to and that puts everything on the table, even if some are a break even point. For biological, 0% habitability is not worth wasting resources on, that extra pop growth bar isn't worth it when you can't really justify moving pops there to unlock the administrative building. You're better off building up stuff that won't be a resource sink until you either have bots or access to pops that have a much higher habitability percent for that rock. Again, like how gene clinics are crap, a colony isn't worth having if all it's doing is sucking down resources just to keep it from rebelling, those resources (energy, minerals, consumer goods and in some cases alloys if you have a roboticist) could all go else where to get you more immediate returns, that in turn make it so you can make that rock worth putting pops on. There are two scenarios where I would consider putting pops on a planet with zero habitability for them. The first, would be if I had the stuff to make an ecumenopolis, no point wasting resources terraforming it when all I need to do is build out all the districts into cities and let the arcology project terraform it into a 100% habitable world. If I had access to bots and a species that grows slowly because if this is early game, I don't want to constantly spend time and energy credits moving bio pops off the planet. I only want enough there for filling the ruling jobs and the roboticist job, so if they have the negative trait for growth, it means I don't have to mess with them that much. Oh, I forgot option number three, get the boal relic, activate said relic before you have a complete colony and grats once that colony complete, you can just turn it into a gaia world and get some free pops.
Actually, some of what makes you advice here bad is that it assumes people want to micro manage the fuck out of their empire, which is what you'd have to do in order to avoid losing systems to rebellions and to even make that extra pop bar remotely worthwhile. People that like micro will eventually figure this stuff out, people that hate it would be rather unhappy.
I'm wondering when we get the pop growth diary because today's strongly hints that they have some major changes in mind. I'm a bit worried that if they don't hit the mark, well nutritional plenitude will be a required edict, so you only get to choose one at game start, barring picking certain things. I do hope they have some changes for democracies in mind because they look like a worse and worse option every time they add something. Also wondering if they'll touch on planetary decisions (IMO encourage growth probably should be canned if they can't fix the current pop dynamic because it's never going to be an interesting choice and not stop being busy work. Let's say it stays up permanently with a monthly cost, then the complaints become I have to pay attention to this and I have to still activate it for every planet). Anything that deals with slowing pop growth is considered a trap because you can always resettle pops and outside of void dweller, most empires don't run into that issue until resettlement is a trivial cost and void dweller might be there in may with the habitat changes. If you need to stop bot construction, non-synth and non-machine empires have an easy fix for that, replace the building and no more bot construction. Actually, since this is in the woodworks so to speak, I'd be loath to give people advice on gaming population growth, when that advice is very much in the realm of stuff that isn't intended because the devs might actually kill it finally in the next major patch.
Except the two most important resources after pops are research and alloys. Again, your pissing away a shit ton of resources to ensure that you keep that shitty world, that none of your pops like. Those resources could be going into stuff to get your more alloys or research. The extra minerals from shit world matter not, if they entirety of what you get there is going towards pop upkeep and not towards getting you more research or alloys. You've essentially created the gene clinic, only instead of being a shitty building, it's entire planet. So that extra bar of growth on another planet really doesn't matter because it's not helping you get further into research or supplying alloys for various other needs.
Yes, research and alloys are the two most important resources.
You need minerals to make them, and food to upkeeps the pops producing them. The game's economy is a pyramid, with research and alloys near the top, necessarily supported by a larger base of minerals, energy, and food production. The extra source of minerals and food does matter, because it means more pops on other planets who can produce alloys and consumer goods instead of having to mine minerals themselves. It's not a gene clinic, because the thing that makes gene clinics bad is that they have to be worked by pops who don't produce anything. You don't have to do anything to prevent a rebellion, because your stability is unlikely to be low because it'll be a low-pop world and all you really need to do to maintain a reasonable level of stability is keep your two administrators reasonably happy because their political power means they'll dictate the overall approval, and that's easy to do because rulers get bonus happiness that offsets any habitability penalty. It's really not that much of a micromanagement task; I suppose you could micromanage less if you left colony sites empty and had fewer planets, but the question was 'how are people getting a million fleet power before year 2400?', not 'how are people doing sort of good enough to win without having to manage their colonies?'.
If the extra pop growth bar didn't matter the next dev diary wouldn't be about how they're gonna nerf stacking pop growth bonuses to try and address the way pop growth warps the whole game around itself.
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GoodKingJayIIIThey wanna get mygold on the ceilingRegistered Userregular
Man I just... don't like the consumer goods mechanic. Especially when there are builds that can completely ignore it. And I feel like I'm constantly fighting from behind while I make sure I keep that resource in the black when I could be building research facilities or something else useful.
I'd have to check to see if they actually did something with the gimmick utopian abundance builds that could ignore it. I want to say they made it so that you can't get the research if you don't have consumer goods. I don't bother with slavery builds or authoritarian builds, so don't know if they have bullshit builds that bypass consumer goods. Really the only stuff I can think of that might have something that let's them get their consumer good needs down low enough to just flat out not have to bother with it because it gets covered by trade. I've seen plenty of complaints of authoritarian builds being too strong in the current patch. So I'm wondering if at some point, they'll saddle slavery with a setup that makes it less administratively efficient. It would make some sense, you'd need a bigger government footprint to run all the police that would be required to keep the slaves in check. Also might let them set things up so that slavery builds aren't much stronger than non-slaver builds, if they are allowed to have more freedom with resettlement, after resettlement nerfs get implemented.
I know resettlement is on the radar for a date with the nerf bat. I suspect we haven't see it yet because there are some empire types where they do need cheaper resettlement than others. I doubt doomsday even plays a factor here because that origin has room for a very easy fix. Just stick a modifier on the doomed planet that makes it cheap to move the pops of said world. Was hoping we get the dev diary on pop changes. I'm willing to bet when we get it, there will be nerfs to both pop growth and resettlement. Probably even tweaks to immigration as well, since that mechanics has some issues.
GoodKingJayIIIThey wanna get mygold on the ceilingRegistered Userregular
Having fun with my current Hive Tree of Life Build. Currently it's ~2450 and I'm approaching endgame crisis. I am trying to see if I can invade and overtake the stagnant ascendancy before the crisis hits. I've researched just about everything I can and if I want the last shield tier I'm going to have to take them out and subsume their tech.
Afterwards I'll take a break until the path hits, at which point I'd like to try some diplomatic driven assimilators. I don't know if that's even possible, but it would be great if I could get people to willingly join the collective.
I'm curious if greater than ourselves is the test run on a change to resettlement. We also now have evacuation protocols edict for doomsday origin empires, which on top of helping them, might have also been viewed as a chance to test drive a mechanic that might be utilized in the future in regards to resettlement. Based on what a fucking pain it is to shift pops around because the menu isn't setup to make it easy and how the devs have stated they aren't happy with resettlement. It should be pretty obvious that the devs didn't intend for people to just move pops on whim. They also dealt with one of the events that increased pop growth on a planet. So it's pretty clear they are getting a better idea of what they want to do with resettlement. They probably don't want to completely nuke being able to do so because of the following:
-Something goes south and you need to evacuate a planet outside of the doomsday origin.
-Slaving empires do need to be able to move their slaves around.
-There needs to be the option to bring in your pops to "gentrify" the world you just conquered.
-For whatever reason you got a ton of unemployed pops on a world (refugees, event or just built up)
Probably the biggest sticking point they've had is setting it up so that people can move pops when there is a legitimate need to do so, rather than just gaming the system with a planet build to be a pop factory, while making sure that it can't be easily gamed. Going to call it now, but I see them tackling this with three approaches.
-Improvement to passive migration
-Edicts, I could see something added that lets an empire implement an edict that is probably pricy to implement, that would be time limited and make it easier to move slaves. I say they'd probably make it time limited and expensive, to ensure that slaving empires don't just continuously roll the edict but only implement it when they have a need to shuffle a ton of slave pops around and limit it only to slave pops. Could also have one for robots that are in servitude.
-Also surprised they didn't make evacuation protocols a planetary decision, which would be the third option. If planets get certain modifiers, they gain access to a planetary decision that allows for the pops to be more easily and cheaply moved.
Once they get that hammered out, they probably up the cost on resettlement and possibly add other restrictions, so that players are less keen to move pops unless they have a compelling reason to do so.
We definitely are starting to see steps implemented to neuter the current pops above everything else meta. They removed the planetary decisions, all the old edicts and the food policies that dealt with increasing pop growth. They also trimmed the immigration growth modifier from diplomacy. Not to mention nerfing an event that boosted pop growth. Will be interesting to see where they go from here.
Don't really agree with the map the stars change. I think they just ensured that it won't see much use because currently the meta is go expansion first and they really didn't do too much to make the discovery tree stronger. Only real change is that it looks like they renamed research grants and had it unlock through one of the discovery tree perks. I'm assuming that's what they did, which is some appeal, but IMO not enough. Also suspect that was probably intended to be more a nerf to the materialist ethic by ensuring that edict was no longer unique to the ethic. Problem is either many of the other trees need massive buffs or expansion needs major nerfs. I can list off the three big reasons that tree is the first pick for the vast majority of builds.
-Reduced influence cost for claiming unowned systems, should be pretty obviously for why this is a big deal.
-Double pops from the colony ship when a colony is founded, again this should be pretty obvious as to why people want it.
-Pop growth boost, also pretty obvious on why it's a big deal. I'm a bit surprised this one didn't get trimmed in the upcoming patch and it's probably on borrowed time. If they decide the tree is in need of nerfing, this is probably the easiest one to justify replacing because it has broad reaching impacts. Reduced costs to claiming unowned systems is limited impacts because you do run out of such systems until new ones are found through events or something rampages across the galaxy destroying starbases. Double pops from colony ships does stay relevant, but that's limited to just the initial colony founding and that one may also be on borrowed time as well.
All that said, we still have a few days before patch drops and they are continuously working on things, so we may see one or two things added by then, assuming they are ready and if community feedback indicates they'd be well received. Also possible we get a mini-patch after this one that mostly addresses bugs, but could also bring online changes they wanted to make, that weren't ready for this patch.
Gonna say probably the next two big changes are going to deal with pop growth and tradition trees. Pop growth was an obvious one, but tradition trees are probably going to get pushed up based on the edict changes. I mean a ton of people are going to complain about it because why wouldn't you take that first. Though pretty sure there will be a group that will not be happy with the changes because I seriously doubt the devs intended people not to get all the trees. Biggest reason why I doubt this is that if that was the goal, they could have implemented a limit on tradition trees from the get go, but they didn't. Also any energy that would go into creating 4 more tradition trees, that would likely result in us ignoring 4 trees altogether, is energy better spent on implementing changes that would ensure that not every build goes down the trees in the same order and make sure that each tradition perk feels impactful because just about every tree has at least one, if not two, where you really don't notice anything and some are probably worthless by the time you get around to them.
I think these looks like good changes, and ditching the Encourage Growth policy is definitely a big QoL improvement, but I'm not convinced that dinging pop growth down is going to change the 'pops above all else' status quo - making it harder to get pops makes them more valuable, not less. There will be less you can do to peacefully increase your pop base, and fewer decisions will be determined by their impact on your pops as a result, but as a result, whatever things you still can do to boost your pop growth will just become even more strategically decisive.
Creating a space where the dominant strategy doesn't include increasing your population as much as possible as fast as possible probably requires some sort of mechanic that applies diminishing returns to net pop yields, not just to growth bonuses. I'm not sure what that would end up looking like, but I'd probably start by tinkering with pop upkeeps that increase with population - having each pop increase empire sprawl by more than the last seems like a good place to start thematically, but you'd probably have to also make sprawl management more expensive than it is now for it to really bite into overall yield to a noticeable degree.
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AuralynxDarkness is a perspectiveWatching the ego workRegistered Userregular
My suspicion is that they don't mind that getting more populations is increasingly the be-all end-all of Stellaris and just wanted to curb the rate at which they appear somewhat plus remove the planetary edicts generally in this go-around at least.
So much about their post-2.0 decision-making indicates that they're fine with the general trend that it's hard to imagine they want it to stop. Increasingly the choices are about how you'll manage your huge number of pops, not whether to have one.
Well there are two ways you can go about "pop growth above all."
-One you actually implement changes that change that meta.
-Two you don't actually change the meta, but make sure that it's dominance doesn't come into play for everything.
I suspect they might go with two because if you look at the game. A huge problem with pop growth above all, is how it pretty much dunks on so many decisions. Look at tradition trees, notice how expansion is the go option. Look at food policy and how nutritional plentitude is the go to policy. Look at edicts, notice how anything pop growth is prioritized before anything else. Same deal with planetary decisions and tech. So shaving off stuff that gives pop growth solves that problem. If you have less plus pop growth stuff, there are less cases of a set of choices being generated and the player immediately seeing pop growth and giving no shits about any other option. It might not seem like a solution because any pop growth stuff left is still a brainless choice, but it sort of is because there are less cases now where the player brainlessly picks a pop growth choice.
It probably is also being done with performance in mind, since pops are still the biggest source of calculations. Slowing down pop growth, slows down the rate that pop numbers get high enough that the game starts wheezing like an asthmatic, obese dude that attempted to run a marathon the first time in his life, after like not doing any physical activity for a few decades It also alleviates some of the other complaints that come about in regards to various rush tactics. If people can't rush pop growth as quickly, it means there is a slow down in their ability to do other rushes since every rush is rather reliant on having pops to work jobs.
The only thing that isn't really touched much is conquest to get pops. Sure indirectly nerfing the rushes to build up a fleet helps, but eventually people hit a point where they can invade and then they can snowball. Part of me wonders if we'll see future tweaks to sprawl, make it so that slaves and newly conquered colonies are much rougher on that and that they'll eventually find a sweet where sprawl matters without it feeling god awful. Thus, even if someone does find a way to outpace everyone on tech and invade, they are limited on how many colonies they can absorb before they are forced to stop expansion and focus on consolidating their hold on what they've taken. IIRC you really don't have much of that in the current game, taking a colony just makes it easier to grab even more systems in your next conquests, regardless of whether those systems have colonies or not.
Iron WeaselDillon!You son of a bitch!Registered Userregular
So the console edition is getting updated to 2.2 next week and I'm wondering if y'all have any suggestions as it looks like the entire economic system is about to change.
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I wasn't here for 2.2 on PC, but IIRC that was the patch that shifted everything to pops above all else (just note gene clinics are the exception here and are complete trash that is best avoided).
Granted, I do wonder how faithfully console follows the roadmap that PC had, as in do they get some changes earlier because those are the changes to address something that was really broken.
My suspicion is that they don't mind that getting more populations is increasingly the be-all end-all of Stellaris and just wanted to curb the rate at which they appear somewhat plus remove the planetary edicts generally in this go-around at least.
So much about their post-2.0 decision-making indicates that they're fine with the general trend that it's hard to imagine they want it to stop. Increasingly the choices are about how you'll manage your huge number of pops, not whether to have one.
Which makes sense, ultimately - at a fundamental level, 4x/grand strategy games are resource management games where the objective is to start with a small pool of resources and grow that pool bigger and better than the other players. Pops are essentially the ur-resource that you're shepherding, since they're the primary means by which you collect all the other ones. At the end of the day, pops should be the primary measure of success.
All they really need to do is prune out the places where pop growth as a core objective distorts or trivializes other decisions, or where the ability to increase growth by doing things that shouldn't increase growth (colonizing 0-habitability planets is a prime example) creates incentives that are counterintuitive to players and/or contrary to developer intent.
I think a lot of those issues would be solved in one stroke by ditching per-planet growth bars and moving to a single empire-wide pool that gets distributed between your planets based on extant population and other factors, similar to the way immigration growth already works.
Yeah, it's a bit surprising that they don't just have pop growth as empire wide instead of per planet. That would probably be a great way to squash colonizing 0 habitability worlds. If there concern is how do they balance it for empires that have both organic/lithoid and machine pops, well they could finally do a setup where you essentially have three bars. organic/lithoid pop growth bar, machine construction bar and then cloning bar. Then decide if cloning bar and machine construction bar will grow mutually exclusive from one another (aka if one is growing, the other isn't) or not.
The only other hurdle is coming up with a code that determines where the newly grown pops will be dumped. An obvious one is if you only have one machine assembly plant, then the planet with it will be the only one getting machine pops. If done right, would pave the way to maybe justify getting rid of planetary decisions that have to deal with stopping/slowing pop growth. The game can run it's check of stuff and see that X world has no housing or jobs and that it has a sizable amount of jobless and homeless pops, so it just stops throwing pops on that planet, if there are other planets that have jobs and housing available. It's pretty established that these really aren't great things to leave to the player because the min/maxers will ignore them, given that they can shuffle the pops around.
So is anyone else encountering an issue I seem to have with my megacorporation where I've abstained from electing a new ruler, even though there is only 1 option to pick from, and the new ruler is the same as the previous ruler except they're reset back to level 1?
Well, this is free to play and I'm about 8 hours in. I made a friend. And 4 enemies. But I haven't actually had a fight yet which is rather refreshing... I have no idea what I'm doing.
So is anyone else encountering an issue I seem to have with my megacorporation where I've abstained from electing a new ruler, even though there is only 1 option to pick from, and the new ruler is the same as the previous ruler except they're reset back to level 1?
Looking around the internet, it seems you are not the only one.
Well, this is free to play and I'm about 8 hours in. I made a friend. And 4 enemies. But I haven't actually had a fight yet which is rather refreshing... I have no idea what I'm doing.
Oligarchy election bugs aside, I am super glad they made it a thing where you can disable Xeno Compatibility in the galaxy generation menu.
It's a super-rad idea that utterly destroys your ability to usefully manage anything via the species screen if anyone opts in at all, yeah. To say nothing of the other mechanical effects.
Well, it seems my first game is really going to be screwed because I somehow manage to have my empire cut in half. I guess I didn't close my borders soon enough and someone claimed a system in the middle. So, I'm trying to learn as much as I can about the game otherwise (and in the meantime, trying to goad them into attacking me). I also won my first combat! (it was against an asteroid)
Questions!
Why did it take me this long to figure out how to build districts? This might have been a major problem in my growth... On the other hand, I don't have administrative capacity for them, so are they maybe meant to be a later way to develop after expanding (since a new system seems to produce more resources than a district?
I got Automatic Exploration early on from some event, but it doesn't seem to work? My science vessels will just sit idle even after I turn on the mode. Do I misunderstand what this does, or need to control it somehow? Wiki doesn't seem to explain - also, if I get it working, do they only explore, or will they survey as well?
And my biggest question at this point, because the rest is all detailed and because this seems to differ from the 4x games I've played in the past (I played a *ton* of both MOO games (you heard me... both.): How should I be thinking about growing and expanding?
I was sort of floundering as I learned that building outposts further away from your current ones costs more influence, and essentially a waste if you're going to claim systems in between anyway. However, at least for my species, habitable planets are somewhat sparse, so I wanted to explore further in order to be able to actually develop colonies. The slow pace of the game really changed the way I was thinking about it too (it's not a bad thing, just very different), because after I did establish colonies, they had to spend time to actually be established, and now they are growing slooooowly, so I am not sure whether I want a lot of colonies anyway?
Not a fan of the changes to map the stars. I don't think it'll be worth taking even if they nerf the expansion tree the way I suspect might. Sure it might make the Discovery tree more competitive, but map the stars doesn't do enough in it's current form to justify a 300 influence cost, 200 to enable and another 100 to disable. The kicker is the 200 to enable because you have to wait several in game years to start it, which means the window to get use out of it will have shrunk. Also it's pretty niche right now, so it's not really something people want to keep running past a certain, which varies based on empire density. If you have nothing else in the galaxy it's good until you map everything. If you're at max density, you probably don't really get 10 years. So either the cost needs to come down or it needs to do more or they need to make it a temp edict again.
It kind of sucks because I loved activating map the stars when my science ship entered the first new system. Now, I can't really justify taking it. 200 influence is just too much that early in the game, I have to pick discover, which still doesn't give enough to really compete with the current expansion tree. It actually works against research subsidies because that's 200 influence to use as well, you really can't dump 400 influence into edicts that early in the game; especially, with one that requires you to have a larger energy income, which would be helped by having more systems.
Also autocracy is bugged, assuming they didn't make getting your second edict a tech because it only has capacity for one edict and I don' see anything about edict capacity starting out as only one. We were told it would be two and then stuff could increase that.
Once I try something less bugged, I'll re-evaluate my stance on void dweller, but I get the feeling that it probably either needs advanced habitat tech fully research or that in addition to that being permanent, void dweller have a discount on the tech.
Also hope they nerf the asshole fanatical purifier geckos because I've had a few games where they get freed in the first 10 years. Have a citadel and probably some other tech advantages and proceed to rapidly expand far faster than anyone else and can easily crush most AI empires in their path. Maybe some of those tech bonuses they get made sense earlier because I do believe you needed scientists at a certain level to accidently free them, but with that requirement gone, they shouldn't have those tech advantages. Either that or is using the problematic advanced start, that will base tech off of neighboring empires, including FEs and marauders, which it really should ignore, but doesn't.
Well, this is free to play and I'm about 8 hours in. I made a friend. And 4 enemies. But I haven't actually had a fight yet which is rather refreshing... I have no idea what I'm doing.
Awesome! Welcome! I am a relatively new player myself. Bought the game a year or two ago and didn't explore it too much. Federations brought me back. This is my first 4x game. It took me sooooo many games to feel like I have a basic handle on things. I started over before any run was even half over probably... 20 times? I'm probably still terrible. But I can at least get things up and running and become competitive with the other Empires.
Looking forward to reading your experiences and stories! Best thing about this game is crazy shit always happens.
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What's the consensus on Federations?
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
Easily one of the top Stellaris expansions.
There are a couple of things I think could use a little polish but overall it broadens the strategy space significantly and does a good job of freshening the game up if you were starting to burn out on it, mostly by dint of Origins being diverse and impactful.
New federation stuff: Everything here is pretty great with the exception that I think the rate of federation xp gain could use another pass. It's both very slow and essentially fixed - ostensibly it's supposed to be dictated by your Cohesion which you then have to manage and/or invest in using your Envoys, but in practice Cohesion just sits at max almost all the time while your federation sloooooowly ticks up 10xp/month for 80 years, and goosing your federation with extra envoys only matters for the small window in which you're trying to regenerate Cohesion after taking a hit. It makes the decisions about how to allocate your envoys pretty uninteresting and I'd like to see a version of the system where the role envoys play in managing a federation is more meaningful - and ideally one in which a player who invests in doing so can plausibly get a level 5 federation early enough for it to matter.
Galactic Community: The system is very cool in concept but not as consistently interesting as I'd like in practice. Luckily, this is very easy to fix, because the bones are all well-designed and the only thing holding it back is that there aren't actually enough laws available to keep the votes engaging throughout the game - generally you've got a tree or two you want to get passed and once you've got them in place you spend the rest of the game half-ignoring the votes while the AI faffs around passing and repealing random sanctions and tier 1 laws. I know they're already working on a couple new laws for the next patch, and once there's more to do WITH the Community it'll be an unreservedly great addition.
Origins: The actual key feature of the expansion, in my opinion. There are a couple specific Origins that could use some balance work (and Void Dwellers is already getting some), but aside from that they're great, no complaints.
Juggernaut/Mega Shipyard: Eh. They're fine, but I think this is mostly just ticking the 'new megastructure!' box; I've not yet had a game where I felt like either of them mattered (but that might go back to some of the issues still underlying the fleet combat systems, which probably won't be addressed until that whole part of the game gets another pass).
Spawl/Admin cap rework: I like this system much better than the old admin cap one in general. It's currently probably too permissive in the sense that bureaucrats are very efficient so sprawl is very 'cheap', which limits the system's ability to actually deliver on its intended purpose (which is to tax wide strategies to keep them from always being strictly better than tall strategies), but that's a fairly easy thing to adjust in patches.
Envoys and favors: These systems give you a lot more agency over your relationships with other empires. Again, I think they could use some tweaking - I'd like to see more stuff you can do with envoys, and the influence cost of cashing in favors is probably a little too high given the current influence economy (solve one problem with the other, maybe? an option to assign envoys to generate influence would make influence income less of a fixed value and also create more actual strategic decisions about how to spend your envoys) - but the system overall is definitely a valuable addition.
I've bolded things that really make this a very bad strategy and very bad advice early in the game. Take for example, the researcher job, you need 2 consumer goods for base upkeep. At 0% habitability, you'll need 4 consumer goods and that researcher is taking a 50% reduction in their research production before we factor in things like stability, which is going to be a result of happiness, which is already taking a 25% malus. You now need 100% more amenities to meet their needs and if you ignore that, they'll be even more unhappy and thus you have less stability. So you're taking massive hit to production and they'll eat into more of your expensive consumer goods. Not to mention, now you do actually have to keep greater tabs on those planets and more micro to ensure you don't get a rebellion and lose the system.
I think too many people fall into the trap of assuming pops are everything. For example, you don't want tons of unemployed pops because they use resources and lower stability, costing you an opportunity to get more resources, assuming you aren't running something like utopian abundance. Even if you run utopian abundance, you more or less want that as a last result in non-gimmick setups because most other jobs are better production. What actually matters in Stellaris is having really good jobs that help you facilitate your goals. Pops are resource to fill those in. So 50% malus on a zero habitable world, and let's be honest the pop growth is going to take more than a 50% hit in most cause because people are emigrating off of shit world, isn't a good use of your resources. I'm pretty sure someone that ignores stuff below 50% habitability will pull ahead enough in tech, over someone still stuck on colonize everything, that they can get the tech to just straight up terraform or gene mod their pops or colonize it with droids to make sure they aren't pissing away tons of resources on various maluses.
Rule of thumb is maximizing what you get out of your jobs. If a habitable world doesn't give you a good return with the pops you have, leave it be until you have bots, synths, access to a species that doesn't mind the rock, can gene mod a sub-species that doesn't mind the rock or just straight up terraform it. You can take all the resources that would be pissed away on that rock dealing with maluses and use them to do other things. I mean, this gets very much into why gene clinics suck. Yeah, you have more pop growth, but your wasting shit on a return that won't make up for what you spent. Just like any job is better than medical worker, any job on a planet with 70% habitability or higher is doing more for you than one on a world with low habitability. Not just in being more productive, but also in needing less upkeep.
As for migration treaties, those aren't a straight forward. There are some setups where they are a huge advantage for you. Like life seeded, your pops won't leave but their pops will gleefully migrate to your homeworld and you can no maybe colonize some of the rocks around you. Or synthetic ascension, last I checked synths don't migrate, so you just suck in their pops and can them into something that won't leave. On the other hand, you don't want a migration treaty with an empire that has gaia worlds because you're pops are more likely to leave at a greater rate than you'd get from stuff immigrating in. Then you get stuff where it's a mixed bag. Void dweller can both benefit and be screwed by a migration treaty currently. The treaty gives you more options because you don't want your pops on rocks, but at the same time you really don't want pops that aren't your original or high trait robots on your habitats. Not to mention, if you're min/maxing habitats without some sort of cheese, they are going to have a how push towards pops leaving their cramped confines. I suggest new players learn the ins and outs of migration treaties and learn where they can benefit you and when they can be a detriment.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
I'm fooling around with the Ringworld start and I thought it would be a good idea to build a research district early on. Well, as you can imagine, all my farming pops moved to research and completely tanked my economy. I basically had to start over because my food and consumer goods went so far into the red I would've spent the rest of the game recovering. Of course, I know that a worker pop will graduate to a specialist if there is a slot open, but I did not think that everyone would just abandon all the farming jobs for the research district.
I'm currently doing as @Abbalah suggested and colonizing most planets I find. So far it's working pretty well. But I've also signed a bunch of migration treaties, and my starting empire race got busy with the caravaneers and now I have a half-dogman who can live in a lot of places. So I'm not really dealing with any planets that are just straight up in the red. But I'm with @Mill in terms of trying to balance colonization with and pop efficiency.
It's always seemed to me that research is king. Expansion is probably the "correct" first tradition, but for me it's either that or Discovery. If I can get the research machine really humming then I feel like I can far outpace other empires in everything else.
But then, I am also the guy trying to figure out how to get the kind of absurd numbers that I see in others' games, so everyone here is probably on a completely different level than me.
Couple problems here:
First off, habitability impacts pop upkeep, not job upkeep. These values are tracked and modified separately. That 2 consumer goods for base researcher upkeep is job upkeep, and left alone by habitability. Pop upkeep is generally just whatever food they eat and whatever amount of consumer goods their stratum and living standards dictate. Your researcher will be more expensive to upkeep on a 0 habitability world, but he won't be going from 2 consumer goods to 4, he'll be going from 1 food and 2.5 consumer goods to 2 food and 3 consumer goods - a much-less-sharp increase.
Secondly, you picked a high-upkeep job as your example, but that's mostly just a demonstration of why you shouldn't put Researchers on 0-hab planets. A planet with 0% habitability should absolutely still be colonized, but it's also a garbage planet you should be filling with unsightly mines and farms, not shiny expensive research facilities. If you fill your planet up with worker jobs, the consumer goods portion of their upkeep will be 0 or near 0 and the only thing that will happen to their upkeep is that they'll eat twice as much food. It's a cost, sure, but a small one compared to the value of having more pop growth.
Thirdly, you're not actually trying to fill the planet. You need a colony on it so you get another pop growth meter that's constantly filling, but you don't have to leave the pops on it if there are more efficient places for them to be. Grow 'em there, resettle 'em where you need them. The important thing is just that you're getting more growth.
Fourthly, robots. Even if all you have is basic early-game bots that can only fill farm and mine jobs, that's fine. Get a couple organics on the surface to work your admin jobs (which mostly have non-resource outputs that aren't penalized by low habitability), build a bot factory and some mine districts, and let the place fill up with workers who don't have habitability penalties or happiness bars.
The point isn't to work the crappy planet (although doing so is definitely still a net gain over leaving it empty) but to access another set of monthly pop growth points. The planet that comes with them is just a fringe benefit you'll be able to take advantage of later. Unless you're doing something weirdly and specifically wrong like filling the place with consumer-goods-intensive ruler and specialist jobs while also neglecting amenity generation, you really can't lose production by colonizing an extra planet. A bad planet will definitely gain you less than a good one, but founding a colony even on the shittiest possible planet is still a substantial gain compared to just leaving a colony site empty.
I've got the Enigmatic Fortress blocking my expansion, and just unlocked Destroyers so I figured, what better way to clear out my old stock of corvettes and upgrade than do a test run at the Fortress so see what it's range in that system is.
The instant my fleet was destroyed, both my neighbors demanded I become their vassal because I was suddenly weaker in fleet power.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
That’s happened to me twice when I’ve buddied up with neighbors and completely ignored fleet power while expanding. I said no and nothing happened.
For those who may not know:
Refusing grants them the CB that allows them to start a war to make you their vassal, though the window's not long. If you rebuild they'll probably never act on it.
RIP food policy, I guess.
If they also either ditch the Encourage Growth planetary decision or turn it into a toggle instead of something you have to manually re-up every ten years on every planet that alone will probably be a top five QoL improvement for me.
Anyway, I'm disappointed. Would have been a super cool build, especially because it's so rare.
Overall I like those changes, makes edicts feel more meaningful but I will miss the food policies.
Agreeing to the demand is pretty bad if you're not prepared to fight for your freedom. I spent years building my fleet, maxing my relationship with my overlord and earning favors, but it was completely impossible to get them to agree to release me peacefully. It might have changed since, though.
Yep. Definitely not endorsing that.
As to the whole you can resettle pops. You need energy for that and at the start of the game, most players aren't going to be in a situation where they can just move pops because they'll quickly run out of energy. Also in order for those pops to be worth a damn, the planet you settle them to needs to have the infrastructure in place. So on top of having to produce enough energy to move them, you also need to produce enough energy to keep that infrastructure rolling. Again, this is going to be a huge hurdle that players aren't going to easily surmount in the early game.
There is a reason why people considered machine empires overpowered after the habitability change because they really can colonize every fucking world in the context that "colonize everything and habitability be damned" is understood by the community and since that's a thing for them, that's what it's likely always going to mean. Probably applies to lithoids too, IIRC they get a bonus to and that puts everything on the table, even if some are a break even point. For biological, 0% habitability is not worth wasting resources on, that extra pop growth bar isn't worth it when you can't really justify moving pops there to unlock the administrative building. You're better off building up stuff that won't be a resource sink until you either have bots or access to pops that have a much higher habitability percent for that rock. Again, like how gene clinics are crap, a colony isn't worth having if all it's doing is sucking down resources just to keep it from rebelling, those resources (energy, minerals, consumer goods and in some cases alloys if you have a roboticist) could all go else where to get you more immediate returns, that in turn make it so you can make that rock worth putting pops on. There are two scenarios where I would consider putting pops on a planet with zero habitability for them. The first, would be if I had the stuff to make an ecumenopolis, no point wasting resources terraforming it when all I need to do is build out all the districts into cities and let the arcology project terraform it into a 100% habitable world. If I had access to bots and a species that grows slowly because if this is early game, I don't want to constantly spend time and energy credits moving bio pops off the planet. I only want enough there for filling the ruling jobs and the roboticist job, so if they have the negative trait for growth, it means I don't have to mess with them that much. Oh, I forgot option number three, get the boal relic, activate said relic before you have a complete colony and grats once that colony complete, you can just turn it into a gaia world and get some free pops.
Actually, some of what makes you advice here bad is that it assumes people want to micro manage the fuck out of their empire, which is what you'd have to do in order to avoid losing systems to rebellions and to even make that extra pop bar remotely worthwhile. People that like micro will eventually figure this stuff out, people that hate it would be rather unhappy.
I'm wondering when we get the pop growth diary because today's strongly hints that they have some major changes in mind. I'm a bit worried that if they don't hit the mark, well nutritional plenitude will be a required edict, so you only get to choose one at game start, barring picking certain things. I do hope they have some changes for democracies in mind because they look like a worse and worse option every time they add something. Also wondering if they'll touch on planetary decisions (IMO encourage growth probably should be canned if they can't fix the current pop dynamic because it's never going to be an interesting choice and not stop being busy work. Let's say it stays up permanently with a monthly cost, then the complaints become I have to pay attention to this and I have to still activate it for every planet). Anything that deals with slowing pop growth is considered a trap because you can always resettle pops and outside of void dweller, most empires don't run into that issue until resettlement is a trivial cost and void dweller might be there in may with the habitat changes. If you need to stop bot construction, non-synth and non-machine empires have an easy fix for that, replace the building and no more bot construction. Actually, since this is in the woodworks so to speak, I'd be loath to give people advice on gaming population growth, when that advice is very much in the realm of stuff that isn't intended because the devs might actually kill it finally in the next major patch.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
Yes, research and alloys are the two most important resources.
You need minerals to make them, and food to upkeeps the pops producing them. The game's economy is a pyramid, with research and alloys near the top, necessarily supported by a larger base of minerals, energy, and food production. The extra source of minerals and food does matter, because it means more pops on other planets who can produce alloys and consumer goods instead of having to mine minerals themselves. It's not a gene clinic, because the thing that makes gene clinics bad is that they have to be worked by pops who don't produce anything. You don't have to do anything to prevent a rebellion, because your stability is unlikely to be low because it'll be a low-pop world and all you really need to do to maintain a reasonable level of stability is keep your two administrators reasonably happy because their political power means they'll dictate the overall approval, and that's easy to do because rulers get bonus happiness that offsets any habitability penalty. It's really not that much of a micromanagement task; I suppose you could micromanage less if you left colony sites empty and had fewer planets, but the question was 'how are people getting a million fleet power before year 2400?', not 'how are people doing sort of good enough to win without having to manage their colonies?'.
If the extra pop growth bar didn't matter the next dev diary wouldn't be about how they're gonna nerf stacking pop growth bonuses to try and address the way pop growth warps the whole game around itself.
I know resettlement is on the radar for a date with the nerf bat. I suspect we haven't see it yet because there are some empire types where they do need cheaper resettlement than others. I doubt doomsday even plays a factor here because that origin has room for a very easy fix. Just stick a modifier on the doomed planet that makes it cheap to move the pops of said world. Was hoping we get the dev diary on pop changes. I'm willing to bet when we get it, there will be nerfs to both pop growth and resettlement. Probably even tweaks to immigration as well, since that mechanics has some issues.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
Afterwards I'll take a break until the path hits, at which point I'd like to try some diplomatic driven assimilators. I don't know if that's even possible, but it would be great if I could get people to willingly join the collective.
-Something goes south and you need to evacuate a planet outside of the doomsday origin.
-Slaving empires do need to be able to move their slaves around.
-There needs to be the option to bring in your pops to "gentrify" the world you just conquered.
-For whatever reason you got a ton of unemployed pops on a world (refugees, event or just built up)
Probably the biggest sticking point they've had is setting it up so that people can move pops when there is a legitimate need to do so, rather than just gaming the system with a planet build to be a pop factory, while making sure that it can't be easily gamed. Going to call it now, but I see them tackling this with three approaches.
-Improvement to passive migration
-Edicts, I could see something added that lets an empire implement an edict that is probably pricy to implement, that would be time limited and make it easier to move slaves. I say they'd probably make it time limited and expensive, to ensure that slaving empires don't just continuously roll the edict but only implement it when they have a need to shuffle a ton of slave pops around and limit it only to slave pops. Could also have one for robots that are in servitude.
-Also surprised they didn't make evacuation protocols a planetary decision, which would be the third option. If planets get certain modifiers, they gain access to a planetary decision that allows for the pops to be more easily and cheaply moved.
Once they get that hammered out, they probably up the cost on resettlement and possibly add other restrictions, so that players are less keen to move pops unless they have a compelling reason to do so.
We definitely are starting to see steps implemented to neuter the current pops above everything else meta. They removed the planetary decisions, all the old edicts and the food policies that dealt with increasing pop growth. They also trimmed the immigration growth modifier from diplomacy. Not to mention nerfing an event that boosted pop growth. Will be interesting to see where they go from here.
Don't really agree with the map the stars change. I think they just ensured that it won't see much use because currently the meta is go expansion first and they really didn't do too much to make the discovery tree stronger. Only real change is that it looks like they renamed research grants and had it unlock through one of the discovery tree perks. I'm assuming that's what they did, which is some appeal, but IMO not enough. Also suspect that was probably intended to be more a nerf to the materialist ethic by ensuring that edict was no longer unique to the ethic. Problem is either many of the other trees need massive buffs or expansion needs major nerfs. I can list off the three big reasons that tree is the first pick for the vast majority of builds.
-Reduced influence cost for claiming unowned systems, should be pretty obviously for why this is a big deal.
-Double pops from the colony ship when a colony is founded, again this should be pretty obvious as to why people want it.
-Pop growth boost, also pretty obvious on why it's a big deal. I'm a bit surprised this one didn't get trimmed in the upcoming patch and it's probably on borrowed time. If they decide the tree is in need of nerfing, this is probably the easiest one to justify replacing because it has broad reaching impacts. Reduced costs to claiming unowned systems is limited impacts because you do run out of such systems until new ones are found through events or something rampages across the galaxy destroying starbases. Double pops from colony ships does stay relevant, but that's limited to just the initial colony founding and that one may also be on borrowed time as well.
All that said, we still have a few days before patch drops and they are continuously working on things, so we may see one or two things added by then, assuming they are ready and if community feedback indicates they'd be well received. Also possible we get a mini-patch after this one that mostly addresses bugs, but could also bring online changes they wanted to make, that weren't ready for this patch.
Gonna say probably the next two big changes are going to deal with pop growth and tradition trees. Pop growth was an obvious one, but tradition trees are probably going to get pushed up based on the edict changes. I mean a ton of people are going to complain about it because why wouldn't you take that first. Though pretty sure there will be a group that will not be happy with the changes because I seriously doubt the devs intended people not to get all the trees. Biggest reason why I doubt this is that if that was the goal, they could have implemented a limit on tradition trees from the get go, but they didn't. Also any energy that would go into creating 4 more tradition trees, that would likely result in us ignoring 4 trees altogether, is energy better spent on implementing changes that would ensure that not every build goes down the trees in the same order and make sure that each tradition perk feels impactful because just about every tree has at least one, if not two, where you really don't notice anything and some are probably worthless by the time you get around to them.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
Creating a space where the dominant strategy doesn't include increasing your population as much as possible as fast as possible probably requires some sort of mechanic that applies diminishing returns to net pop yields, not just to growth bonuses. I'm not sure what that would end up looking like, but I'd probably start by tinkering with pop upkeeps that increase with population - having each pop increase empire sprawl by more than the last seems like a good place to start thematically, but you'd probably have to also make sprawl management more expensive than it is now for it to really bite into overall yield to a noticeable degree.
So much about their post-2.0 decision-making indicates that they're fine with the general trend that it's hard to imagine they want it to stop. Increasingly the choices are about how you'll manage your huge number of pops, not whether to have one.
-One you actually implement changes that change that meta.
-Two you don't actually change the meta, but make sure that it's dominance doesn't come into play for everything.
I suspect they might go with two because if you look at the game. A huge problem with pop growth above all, is how it pretty much dunks on so many decisions. Look at tradition trees, notice how expansion is the go option. Look at food policy and how nutritional plentitude is the go to policy. Look at edicts, notice how anything pop growth is prioritized before anything else. Same deal with planetary decisions and tech. So shaving off stuff that gives pop growth solves that problem. If you have less plus pop growth stuff, there are less cases of a set of choices being generated and the player immediately seeing pop growth and giving no shits about any other option. It might not seem like a solution because any pop growth stuff left is still a brainless choice, but it sort of is because there are less cases now where the player brainlessly picks a pop growth choice.
It probably is also being done with performance in mind, since pops are still the biggest source of calculations. Slowing down pop growth, slows down the rate that pop numbers get high enough that the game starts wheezing like an asthmatic, obese dude that attempted to run a marathon the first time in his life, after like not doing any physical activity for a few decades It also alleviates some of the other complaints that come about in regards to various rush tactics. If people can't rush pop growth as quickly, it means there is a slow down in their ability to do other rushes since every rush is rather reliant on having pops to work jobs.
The only thing that isn't really touched much is conquest to get pops. Sure indirectly nerfing the rushes to build up a fleet helps, but eventually people hit a point where they can invade and then they can snowball. Part of me wonders if we'll see future tweaks to sprawl, make it so that slaves and newly conquered colonies are much rougher on that and that they'll eventually find a sweet where sprawl matters without it feeling god awful. Thus, even if someone does find a way to outpace everyone on tech and invade, they are limited on how many colonies they can absorb before they are forced to stop expansion and focus on consolidating their hold on what they've taken. IIRC you really don't have much of that in the current game, taking a colony just makes it easier to grab even more systems in your next conquests, regardless of whether those systems have colonies or not.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
The Division, Warframe (XB1)
GT: Tanith 6227
Granted, I do wonder how faithfully console follows the roadmap that PC had, as in do they get some changes earlier because those are the changes to address something that was really broken.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
Which makes sense, ultimately - at a fundamental level, 4x/grand strategy games are resource management games where the objective is to start with a small pool of resources and grow that pool bigger and better than the other players. Pops are essentially the ur-resource that you're shepherding, since they're the primary means by which you collect all the other ones. At the end of the day, pops should be the primary measure of success.
All they really need to do is prune out the places where pop growth as a core objective distorts or trivializes other decisions, or where the ability to increase growth by doing things that shouldn't increase growth (colonizing 0-habitability planets is a prime example) creates incentives that are counterintuitive to players and/or contrary to developer intent.
I think a lot of those issues would be solved in one stroke by ditching per-planet growth bars and moving to a single empire-wide pool that gets distributed between your planets based on extant population and other factors, similar to the way immigration growth already works.
The only other hurdle is coming up with a code that determines where the newly grown pops will be dumped. An obvious one is if you only have one machine assembly plant, then the planet with it will be the only one getting machine pops. If done right, would pave the way to maybe justify getting rid of planetary decisions that have to deal with stopping/slowing pop growth. The game can run it's check of stuff and see that X world has no housing or jobs and that it has a sizable amount of jobless and homeless pops, so it just stops throwing pops on that planet, if there are other planets that have jobs and housing available. It's pretty established that these really aren't great things to leave to the player because the min/maxers will ignore them, given that they can shuffle the pops around.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
HQ version
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Looking around the internet, it seems you are not the only one.
New patch, new bugs, I guess.
If you have any questions, feel free to ask!
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
Steam profile - Twitch - YouTube
Switch: SM-6352-8553-6516
It's a super-rad idea that utterly destroys your ability to usefully manage anything via the species screen if anyone opts in at all, yeah. To say nothing of the other mechanical effects.
Questions!
Why did it take me this long to figure out how to build districts? This might have been a major problem in my growth... On the other hand, I don't have administrative capacity for them, so are they maybe meant to be a later way to develop after expanding (since a new system seems to produce more resources than a district?
I got Automatic Exploration early on from some event, but it doesn't seem to work? My science vessels will just sit idle even after I turn on the mode. Do I misunderstand what this does, or need to control it somehow? Wiki doesn't seem to explain - also, if I get it working, do they only explore, or will they survey as well?
And my biggest question at this point, because the rest is all detailed and because this seems to differ from the 4x games I've played in the past (I played a *ton* of both MOO games (you heard me... both.): How should I be thinking about growing and expanding?
I was sort of floundering as I learned that building outposts further away from your current ones costs more influence, and essentially a waste if you're going to claim systems in between anyway. However, at least for my species, habitable planets are somewhat sparse, so I wanted to explore further in order to be able to actually develop colonies. The slow pace of the game really changed the way I was thinking about it too (it's not a bad thing, just very different), because after I did establish colonies, they had to spend time to actually be established, and now they are growing slooooowly, so I am not sure whether I want a lot of colonies anyway?
It kind of sucks because I loved activating map the stars when my science ship entered the first new system. Now, I can't really justify taking it. 200 influence is just too much that early in the game, I have to pick discover, which still doesn't give enough to really compete with the current expansion tree. It actually works against research subsidies because that's 200 influence to use as well, you really can't dump 400 influence into edicts that early in the game; especially, with one that requires you to have a larger energy income, which would be helped by having more systems.
Also autocracy is bugged, assuming they didn't make getting your second edict a tech because it only has capacity for one edict and I don' see anything about edict capacity starting out as only one. We were told it would be two and then stuff could increase that.
Once I try something less bugged, I'll re-evaluate my stance on void dweller, but I get the feeling that it probably either needs advanced habitat tech fully research or that in addition to that being permanent, void dweller have a discount on the tech.
Also hope they nerf the asshole fanatical purifier geckos because I've had a few games where they get freed in the first 10 years. Have a citadel and probably some other tech advantages and proceed to rapidly expand far faster than anyone else and can easily crush most AI empires in their path. Maybe some of those tech bonuses they get made sense earlier because I do believe you needed scientists at a certain level to accidently free them, but with that requirement gone, they shouldn't have those tech advantages. Either that or is using the problematic advanced start, that will base tech off of neighboring empires, including FEs and marauders, which it really should ignore, but doesn't.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
Awesome! Welcome! I am a relatively new player myself. Bought the game a year or two ago and didn't explore it too much. Federations brought me back. This is my first 4x game. It took me sooooo many games to feel like I have a basic handle on things. I started over before any run was even half over probably... 20 times? I'm probably still terrible. But I can at least get things up and running and become competitive with the other Empires.
Looking forward to reading your experiences and stories! Best thing about this game is crazy shit always happens.