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Zurai posted:But each one gives less and less. It's diminishing returns. Is it worthwhile to spend alloys, influence, time, and attention to increase your empire's pop growth by 0.0000001%? Obviously, that's hyperbole, but there will be a point where it isn't worthwhile now, it just depends on where they put the numbers whether that's a reasonable, reachable point, or if it's too low/high. It's not like pop growth is the only reason to build a habitat, though. You also get alloys, research, energy, minerals, trade, rare resources etc etc etc - habitats can produce almost every resource an empire could want. Habitats are also pretty drat cheap. The alloy cost is pretty small, construction ship time is no meaningful limit, influence costs aren't that high (you can make enough for a new habitat every year and a half or so by the later game). The time and attention cost is why I'm annoyed that you can build so many habitats. Playing efficiently should not be tiresome, it should be fun. You shouldn't ever have to make choices between playing well and having a good time in a strategy game. Same reason why I'm glad they're ditching the endless resettlement that plagues the game right now. The game would only benefit if you were limited to say, twenty or so habitats - a similar limit to what we have on starbases.
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Nov 19, 2020 21:01
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Gort posted:It's not like pop growth is the only reason to build a habitat, though. You also get alloys, research, energy, minerals, trade, rare resources etc etc etc - habitats can produce almost every resource an empire could want. No, pops produce those, not habitats. An empty habitat produces nothing. If the pop growth is small enough because you're ICSing, there'll be a point where it's just not worth it.
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Nov 19, 2020 21:05
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Zurai posted:No, pops produce those, not habitats. An empty habitat produces nothing. If the pop growth is small enough because you're ICSing, there'll be a point where it's just not worth it. I don't think pop growth is going to get as small as you think it is - I bet building new habitats will get tiresome long before they stop being worthwhile, simply because they're so cheap after the early game. However, I guess we can't know until we see the numbers Paradox come up with, so I'll stop arguing about it now.
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Nov 19, 2020 21:43
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Part of the problem, admittedly, is the same as the problem Civilization 1/2/Alpha Centauri had in that there's no real consequence for founding a new city/colony. There's actually even less than in those games since at least settlers cost a pop from the old city in them.
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Nov 19, 2020 21:46
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I think the game in its current state just puts way too much emphasis on pops as they are the sole bottleneck for all growth and production. Upgraded buildings never produce more resources per worker, they just allow you to jam more workers onto the same slot. This of course leads to a totally linear more pop = more economy growth system, and leads to massive pop bloat as technology mostly just lets you cram more housing and more jobs. Would so much prefer a system with multiple situational bottlenecks for growth with real options and choices. For instance if you could upgrade districts/buildings not to simply hold more jobs, but for the existing jobs to produce more per worker. Have the costs for basic infrastructure low, but upgraded get exponentially more expensive with robotics/automation technology bringing those costs down. So for instance you are a pretty wide empire with lots of planets and room to grow. You set up your policies to focus on population growth, you invest in transport infrastructure to keep those pops moving to the frontier, and you carpet your planets with the basic level 1 infrastructure to provide tons of basic jobs. Why pay triple to upgrade a farm to the next level of automation that only gives +25% output when you could build 3 normal farms for the same price. Your society is also set up to have cheap workers with low upkeep, you can work them hard in basic jobs and not worry too much about consumer goods or their politics. You have plenty of land and plenty of cheap workers so this is the optimal plan for your situation. But for another empire the situation could be very different. They could have limited "land" so they are forced to build up rather than out. They invest their resources in labs and focus on automation technologies to bring upgrade costs down. Those upgraded districts and buildings need middle-tier workers now and their happiness plays a bigger part in your empire, so you make sure they have good living standards. Instead of having 10 basic farms employing 20 workers and producing 40 food, you've got 4 semi-automated farms employing 8 skilled workers and producing 40ish food. But of course it cost you a fortune to get there. Later on the first empire runs out of room to expand so has to finally start building more up, but since they are so big and wide they have admin penalties for tech, and their vast throngs of low-skill workers with no rights also adds to this difficulty in switching to a more high-tech skilled-worker focused economy. Of course they're still out ahead of the other empire, but at least some choices were made given different situations and different societies.
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Nov 19, 2020 21:47
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Long ago I started working on a design document for a mod that would have done stuff like that—it's entirely possible with just basic modding—but I just don't have the time for it, unfortunately.
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Nov 19, 2020 21:55
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It's funny to me because MoO pretty much solved the issue a long, long time ago, and SotS did something similar. In MoO, you set sliders to allocate production. Base production scales from 0.5BC to 2.0BC based on tech, and pops can command a certain number of factories based on tech (2 to begin with, many more later). Each factory that is staffed produces 1BC. Setting sliders to allocate production in different areas, including producing more factories, means that the actual calculations for how planets do things and how pops produce things is pretty much trivial compared to any simulation that models each pop individually. And honestly, when you get right down to it, what I really want to do is allocate a % of each planet to different tasks (analogous to districts), and then specialize them a bit further (analogous to limited building slots that provide special modifiers). From there I don't really care at all what each individual pop does, just that my stuff is being operated to produce resources for me. This would mean overhauling the genetic system a bit, but that's probably not a bad thing.
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Nov 19, 2020 22:08
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Zurai posted:Long ago I started working on a design document for a mod that would have done stuff like that—it's entirely possible with just basic modding—but I just don't have the time for it, unfortunately. You could do a ton of that with simple modding, but I think to make it really work you'd need to do a bit more. I think there'd need to be a sort of education/skills system for pops. I think pops shouldn't really have a demotion time as if your fancy research job goes away you'll go work in the fields so you can still eat as soon as the money runs out. But the opposite should not be true, it should actually take a long time for low-skill workers to become a researcher for example. This would open up an education mechanic that I think would add a ton of the game. A wide labour-intensive empire would not be doing massive investments in public education. If they wanted to start building tall they'd need to first do a massive education investment, which would make their pops more expensive, which would cause some serious issues with their big wide peasant based economy. An educated high skill workforce would be a long term investment, something you plan for rather than flip on a dime. Nothing stops you from setting education policies to educate everyone, so that farmers or miner could quickly go up and fill a skilled-worker job, it just means your basic workforce is going to be more expensive to maintain. Higher level buildings would have education have more of an impact as well. Like for example on a level 1 basic farm education wouldn't give any bonus, so you can have a vast peasant workforce or slaves. But for a level 2 farm, now it expect at least an education level of "1" to work, and every level above provides a minor bonus. As the levels go up so do the minimum education level and bonus for being above it. So you'd have a tall empire that does massive investments in education for all, where even farmers basically have a doctorate in automated farm management which would make each pop incredibly productive but also incredibly expensive to maintain their education and consumer needs. Or you'd have a fat wide empire with an education policy to only invest in the ruling class and minimum to no education for the working class. Racist empires could then of course have education policies per species. Perhaps you don't have outright slavery, but by denying blorgs a higher education they'll never be able to hold higher class jobs, limiting their political power. Education its self would just be a stat from like 0-10 or something that would slowly tick up until it reached the target level based on your education spending for that class/species. Now if say a middle-tier job opened up and the highest educated free worker has too low of an education they could fill that slot, but they would suffer a large productivity penalty until that population was brought up to the new education standards of that class. The specifics don't matter that much, the main thrust is to make it so you can't just flip a rural peasant economy to high-tech in a year by upgrading all your poo poo. You'd need to actually invest in your people, which would be a long term investment that would end up really defining your economic plans and policies.
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Nov 19, 2020 22:16
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PittTheElder posted:It's not really a solvable problem. Even if you left the player to micro all their pops (which I mean, dear god no), the AI still has to run it's empires, and that just will be more computationally complex as you add more elements to manage. It's a discrete population problem. Make population continuous and the calculations are much easier because you justifiably LLN everything. Also easier for the AI to micromanage because you can optimise things more easily.
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Nov 19, 2020 22:38
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Baronjutter posted:You could do a ton of that with simple modding, but I think to make it really work you'd need to do a bit more. I think there'd need to be a sort of education/skills system for pops. I think pops shouldn't really have a demotion time as if your fancy research job goes away you'll go work in the fields so you can still eat as soon as the money runs out. But the opposite should not be true, it should actually take a long time for low-skill workers to become a researcher for example. This would open up an education mechanic that I think would add a ton of the game. First, I don't think this is necessary. It goes a bit too far into the nitty-gritty for me. Second, you can get 98% of the mechanical impact of your first paragraph without the other three. Step one, set a per-tier, or possibly per-job (because it shouldn't take as long to promote to a factory worker job as a researcher etc), pro/demotion timer. Step two, implement one or more Education policies that modify those timers at a cost. Alternate step two, do it on the species level instead. Step three: there is no step three.
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Nov 19, 2020 22:58
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It takes ~5 months to build the quickest building with all the build speed increasers, presumably as soon as you hit the build button you start speed training gene clinic workers or whatever. Or part of your farmers' day to day is a few hours on the study channel learning how to work a centrifuge.
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Nov 19, 2020 23:24
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Zurai posted:First, I don't think this is necessary. It goes a bit too far into the nitty-gritty for me. Yeah that sounds good. I'm actually generally a big fan of abstracting things down to the absolute most simple level possible so long as the results and mechanics work.
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Nov 19, 2020 23:33
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It seems way more appropriate to this game to have MoO1 planet management. It shouldn't be tracking 'jobs' anyway so that'd avoid the performance issue. I'm the ruler of a vast stellar empire in a RTwP game why do I care who has what job. Just gimme sliders or whatever to set the broad strokes and leave those implementation details to the game to abstract into numbers without any simulating. You could also directly focus this into interesting choices instead of it being the vague aggregate of your buildings/district (ag worlds, tech metros, etc).
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Nov 20, 2020 02:10
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Baronjutter posted:You could do a ton of that with simple modding, but I think to make it really work you'd need to do a bit more. I think there'd need to be a sort of education/skills system for pops. I think pops shouldn't really have a demotion time as if your fancy research job goes away you'll go work in the fields so you can still eat as soon as the money runs out. But the opposite should not be true, it should actually take a long time for low-skill workers to become a researcher for example. This would open up an education mechanic that I think would add a ton of the game. Although this could be done in a simpler manner as others have pointed out, this really reminds me of the education/specialization system from Sid Meier's Colonization. As a DOS era game the calculations behind the system couldn't have been all that complex.
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Nov 20, 2020 03:57
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Funnily enough, Sid Meier's Colonization is also a game whose economy was delightfully complex and fun enough to toy with, but also totally unable to be handled by its AI.
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Nov 20, 2020 08:36
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FuzzySlippers posted:It seems way more appropriate to this game to have MoO1 planet management. It shouldn't be tracking 'jobs' anyway so that'd avoid the performance issue. I'm the ruler of a vast stellar empire in a RTwP game why do I care who has what job. Just gimme sliders or whatever to set the broad strokes and leave those implementation details to the game to abstract into numbers without any simulating. You could also directly focus this into interesting choices instead of it being the vague aggregate of your buildings/district (ag worlds, tech metros, etc). Well, the job stuff is impactful and interesting... when you've got three planets total. After that point, absolutely, it should just be "mining planet", "forge world", "trade hub" and who cares what the pops on them are up to as long as they fulfil their quota. I've always been a big fan of the "zoom" feature in games like Predynastic Egypt (which is a fun little civ-like everyone should at least try the demo of) - basically the scope of the game changes when you hit certain milestones. So when you first start, you're in charge of a dozen or so people, and sending Bob to the river to gather reeds is an interesting and impactful choice that changes the course of the game. You play in that scope for a bit, and when you get fifty or so people, the game zooms out. The map's a little larger, and you're no longer dealing with individuals, you're dealing with families. Now Bob getting reeds is too small for you, now you're telling Bob's family to become weavers. Later you join your tribe with another, and the game zooms out again. Now you order around villages, not families. Later, it's cities and thousands of workers moving around with a single click. Now, you can't really do the "map zooms out and the scale changes for everyone" in a game with multiplayer, but you can keep the other features - maybe pop management disappears after you get your sixth planet and it's just "pop 20 mining planet, 100 minerals a month" or "pop 40 industrial planet, -200 minerals, +60 consumer goods a month". Then after planet forty you stop even needing to worry about energy, food, minerals and consumer goods and you just have "research sector", "government sector", "unity sector", and "alloy sector", with like eight planets each.
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Nov 20, 2020 11:16
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Gort posted:Now, you can't really do the "map zooms out and the scale changes for everyone" in a game with multiplayer, but you can keep the other features - maybe pop management disappears after you get your sixth planet and it's just "pop 20 mining planet, 100 minerals a month" or "pop 40 industrial planet, -200 minerals, +60 consumer goods a month". Then after planet forty you stop even needing to worry about energy, food, minerals and consumer goods and you just have "research sector", "government sector", "unity sector", and "alloy sector", with like eight planets each. With planets (hopefully) having unique traits that make different things more efficient, I like designating each planet, but I'd ideally only need to designate each planet once after the early game is done and I no longer need to adjust my production on the fly. The early game of Stellaris has a lot of decisions to be made with exploration and claiming systems. The midgame sees more colonization and the beginnings of diplomacy as borders solidify, then wars start being declared and federations form. Late game sees the crisis hit, and large wars that span half the galaxy. Detailed planet management just doesn't really need to be a major thing outside of broad, sweeping changes like "I need more alloys because I'm gearing up for war" or "I'm at peace and feel safe, I can divert more resources to research." I really like the idea of 3-5 building slots that can be queued up all at once (with each one coming online and being built as requirements are met), with each building slot conferring some major bonus or specialization. I also like the idea of shifting production of everything towards districts; the combination will make it much easier for the AI to understand what's going on. I think it can go a step further and players could just designate a % output for each product, with a hard cap based on how mineral/energy/food rich a planet is, and hopefully some more planet modifiers that confer some more efficient alloy/consumer goods/research production for some % of the planet's output. The other big advantage is that by not tracking pops as individuals, you stop needing to have them individually move around the galaxy, and it's a lot easier to have populations grow and deplete from migration pressures, purging, or other things.
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Nov 20, 2020 11:52
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Yeah I wish instead of super detailed planet management that can't scale up and remain fun beyond like 10 planets, and the AI can't handle it with even 1 planet, things were far more MOO1 and abstract. I wish instead the details came more at the empire level and were a bit more detailed than a single planet. But because it would be a single empire or sector-wide set of selections, it would never scale out of control. Just have like population, infrastructure, mines, factories or what ever. Then have empire or sector wide sliders and policies and settings that influence the details of those more abstract stats a planet has. Like in MOO you only had population and factories. Depending on your factory automation technology 1 pop could control X number of factories. A factory was a very abstract thing which simply produced "production" which the planet could spend on basically everything from ship building to terraforming to research to defenses. Your planet is spending 50% on research? Right, that just means half your "factories" are actually research labs. Easy. Of course it meant you could flip your production on a dime, which isn't that realistic or interesting. But this is easily solved by just having a re-tooling cost when you flip your sliders around. Moo1 also had pretty great automation and general interface features for a game that came out in the early 90's. For instance if you researched a new ecological tech which means your factories produce less pollution, the game automatically adjusts all your sliders spending on ecology to compensate. Did you just research a new type of terraforming? Game asks you if you want to set terraforming on all your planets to a specific amount. Bam, click 25% or something and you know every single relevant planet will get upgraded and automatically re-adjust its spending once done. If you were managing 10 planets or 100 planets, the management micro never really increased linearly like it does in Stellaris.
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Nov 20, 2020 21:24
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Cool, when you play as a lost colony you get psychic leaders and pops if your progenitors go psychic ascension - even if you have not!
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Nov 20, 2020 22:20
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The Bramble posted:Cool, when you play as a lost colony you get psychic leaders and pops if your progenitors go psychic ascension - even if you have not! Ooh, that's actually neat. It does say the Species awakens psionic potential. I'm actually amazed they thought of that.
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Nov 20, 2020 22:24
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Do you still get that weird bug sometimes where your fairly normal empire gets hivemind-progenitors of the same species for some reason? That was always hilarious when starting as Lost Colony.
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Nov 20, 2020 23:02
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Libluini posted:Do you still get that weird bug sometimes where your fairly normal empire gets hivemind-progenitors of the same species for some reason? I had that last patch. The Lost Colony were fanatic xenophobe imperialists. the Parent empire was a devouring swarm. Both of them were sandwiching me. 
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Nov 20, 2020 23:03
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Yami Fenrir posted:I had that last patch. I made an empire of cybernetics-obsessed Humans that left Earth to fullfill their transhuman dreams of being freedom-loving cyborgs. But then it turned out the original Humans had turned into the BioBorg at some point after they left. 
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Nov 20, 2020 23:06
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Libluini posted:I made an empire of cybernetics-obsessed Humans that left Earth to fullfill their transhuman dreams of being freedom-loving cyborgs. For posterity - do they still hate your guts (as long as they are inside you and not them, at least) or are they actually friendly?
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Nov 20, 2020 23:08
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Yami Fenrir posted:For posterity - do they still hate your guts (as long as they are inside you and not them, at least) or are they actually friendly? They were a devouring swarm, so they definitely would not have liked me (after seeing that poo poo show up during my set-up with the observe-command, I immediately abandoned that game).
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Nov 20, 2020 23:24
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Libluini posted:They were a devouring swarm, so they definitely would not have liked me (after seeing that poo poo show up during my set-up with the observe-command, I immediately abandoned that game). That's the thing - Fanatical Purifiers (the specific empire type) actually are a-ok with other empires of their own species. You can even cheese this in empire generation by having the same species name and portrait as another player in a MP game, it will count them as the same species even with different traits and planet habitability.
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Nov 20, 2020 23:25
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Yami Fenrir posted:That's the thing - Fanatical Purifiers (the specific empire type) actually are a-ok with other empires of their own species. In this case, I didn't want to test what would happen, since hive-pops and normal pops are supposed to work differently. Especially not after I ran into another nasty bug in another game, where freeing my robots caused my empire to auto-purge all robo-pops. Based on this, I took an educated guess that if I'd ever gain control of pops from my progenitor-empire, it would probably end badly for everyone involved. Though it would have been hilarious if it turned out the Human Borg would be friendly to me and me alone, because the game thinks we're of the same species.
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Nov 20, 2020 23:31
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Baronjutter posted:Yeah I wish instead of super detailed planet management that can't scale up and remain fun beyond like 10 planets, and the AI can't handle it with even 1 planet, things were far more MOO1 and abstract. I wish instead the details came more at the empire level and were a bit more detailed than a single planet. But because it would be a single empire or sector-wide set of selections, it would never scale out of control. I don't need the AI to be perfect I just need it to stop falling over at the slightest provocation. e: Also being able to queue up buildings will make it much easier to get the important stuff down and hand the rest off to sectors to handle the basic job of keeping amenities and housing in the positives. Splicer fucked around with this message at 00:41 on Nov 21, 2020 |
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Nov 21, 2020 00:38
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Lost colony is hilarious because it over-rides the galaxy option to not have advanced starts AND over-rides advanced start placement too. I've started a few games recently where my neighbour is like 3x as big as powerful as me at first contact because they're actually the progenitor of some other empire that rolled lost-colony. I feel like setting advanced starts to 0 should prevent any other empire from rolling lost colony origin. But it's a fun surprise.
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Nov 21, 2020 01:21
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Libluini posted:Do you still get that weird bug sometimes where your fairly normal empire gets hivemind-progenitors of the same species for some reason? This is just a Forever War reference, clearly
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Nov 21, 2020 01:23
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Gort posted:Well, the job stuff is impactful and interesting... when you've got three planets total. After that point, absolutely, it should just be "mining planet", "forge world", "trade hub" and who cares what the pops on them are up to as long as they fulfil their quota. That idea of the 'zoom' would work really well for the narrative style of Stellaris. Just starting your interstellar journey would involve careful management of your home system and your newest colonies, but later everything is broadly abstracted when ruling a true interstellar civilization. Like building dyson spheres shouldn't just be a popup of 'did a cool thing' but kick to an even broader abstraction layer since you are totally new type of civ. I dunno how anyone plays strategy games in multiplayer, we can barely organize friends together to play a few rounds of something a few times a month, but I'd think max zoom all the time would make games less insanely long. Unfortunately that is definitely the territory of a sequel and I wonder if Paradox has even started pre-production.
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Nov 21, 2020 03:18
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The beta patch is finally out full time. Promise that sector AI is finally working #9842. Maybe this time they got it! They've claimed to have fixed crisis AI, again. Maybe this time it's true!
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Nov 21, 2020 04:07
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Baronjutter posted:The beta patch is finally out full time. Promise that sector AI is finally working #9842. Maybe this time they got it! They've claimed to have fixed crisis AI, again. Maybe this time it's true!  I remember feeling like that with Le Guin 2.2
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Nov 21, 2020 04:54
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Splicer posted:It takes ~5 months to build the quickest building with all the build speed increasers, presumably as soon as you hit the build button you start speed training gene clinic workers or whatever. Or part of your farmers' day to day is a few hours on the study channel learning how to work a centrifuge. This and habitats is exactly why I play with all building slots unlocked and ~5x faster build rates, as I've posted about before. The production bottleneck is population anyway and many buildings have maintenance, so it really only helps when you get to the point where you can just dump a huge pile of minerals on a colony to get it set up exactly how you want without worrying about micromanagement or sector automation. Private Speech fucked around with this message at 05:06 on Nov 21, 2020 |
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Nov 21, 2020 05:02
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Baronjutter posted:The beta patch is finally out full time. Promise that sector AI is finally working #9842. Maybe this time they got it! They've claimed to have fixed crisis AI, again. Maybe this time it's true! Preemptively quoting this to laugh at Paradox fixing economic AI later.
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Nov 21, 2020 05:07
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Baronjutter posted:They've claimed to have fixed crisis AI, again. Maybe this time it's true! Stefon Annon ran a few test games with the preview version he got; spoiler alert, it's not true
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Nov 21, 2020 07:58
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Private Speech posted:This and habitats is exactly why I play with all building slots unlocked and ~5x faster build rates, as I've posted about before. The production bottleneck is population anyway and many buildings have maintenance, so it really only helps when you get to the point where you can just dump a huge pile of minerals on a colony to get it set up exactly how you want without worrying about micromanagement or sector automation. What mod does that?
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Nov 21, 2020 11:13
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Is there any fix for assault armies getting stuck when invading a colonizing planet, or are you just sort of hosed until they emerge a decade later?
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Nov 21, 2020 16:52
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FuzzySlippers posted:What mod does that? This one gives all the slots: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1888323637 For the build speed I use a custom tech given at start, it's 12 lines long mod. Here it is: http://www.mediafire.com/file/5wx5r9v3vxcli24/CustomFinalOverrides.zip/file (extract into [Documents]/Paradox Interactive/Stellaris/mod/) It also speeds up population growth a bit if using carrying capacity, depending on your preferences you can delete "carry_defines.txt" in the common/defines subfolder to get rid of that part. Also you can turn the building speed down a bit by changing the "planet_building_build_speed_mult = 4.0" line in common/technology to "planet_building_build_speed_mult = 2.0", which is a decent middle ground.
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Nov 21, 2020 19:33
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Does unlocking all the slots gently caress up the AI at all? Like do you find planets with 10 pops and 32 understaffed buildings or is the AI at least smart enough to only build based on free workers?
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Nov 21, 2020 19:58
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