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[EuchreJack]

Indeed, it has that Star Wars feel to it.

[Bralbaard]

Thanks!

It seems my empire is facing other problems now as well. I have only played a few months since the victory and the  two other fleets have not arrived yet, but the latest game patch is having some big effects.
I was already facing unemployment issues with the large numbers of refugees I was receiving each year before the patch but the patch has made this ten times worse. Some planets have over a dozen of unemployed refugees.
I simply have no planets within my borders where I can put all these people and all the planets outside my borders are being turned into nanite worlds right now. The overpopulation crisis is ironic since I hear most people complain about the new version saying that they can't get enough pop growth to fill their planets. I desperately need tech to terraform non habitable worlds into habitable ones, because I do have many terraforming candidates within my borders. I will not close my borders for refugees for roleplay reasons.

Also someone has woken up a powerfull fanatic purifier race near my southern border far away from my fleets. Even more shocking, the purifiers are humans. Just what this galaxy needed.

[Telgin]

Do you have the tech to build habitats yet?  That would be a potential solution, and the unemployed pops should eventually resettle to them.  The alloy and influence cost is probably steep at that point, but it's probably faster than waiting for climate restoration tech and then terraforming the barren worlds.

[Bralbaard]

No not yet, but the situation is more manageable than I expected. I got some new techs that create jobs and I still had plenty of opportunities to build districts on some worlds.
Also, the other two grey tempest fleets have been destroyed, and I can focus on other issues for a bit.
Issues such as my "loyal" subsidiary empire the Giranshu with whom I had a migration treaty. I've just found out that they have been selling my migrated citizens as slaves to a hive empire on the other side of the galaxy who are using them as a food source. I am a corporate empire so my control over subsidiary empires is apparently limited, but there are also limits to what they can get away with. Diplomatic ties have been broken, and I released the Giranshu as a "free" empire. I have also marked a day in my agenda, exactly ten years from now. 

[Telgin]

I find it a little strange that there isn't any protection against pops migrating to empires that they know will enslave them.  It's one thing if the empire later changed laws to allow slavery, but I'm pretty sure they'll gladly migrate to one that allows slaves already, leading to that strange behavior.

Meanwhile, right now I'm struggling with the fact that I'm playing pacifists as always, but have an empire to the south that not only murdered the crew of one science ship but also won a humiliation war against me because I was 20 months too slow on FTL inhibition tech.  I'm tempted to try imposing my ideology on them, but will definitely leave them to be eaten by the crisis or Gray Tempest if they threaten them later.

[Paul]

I'm pretty sure you can still sign migration treaties as a xenophobe and have pops migrate to be livestock. It's silly.

[Telgin]

Wow, that's even more blatantly broken than I realized.  That said, when I've played xenophobes I've always played inward perfectionists, which I don't think can sign migration treaties, so I've never seen that happen.

Anyway, I got revenge on the evil tree people to my south that murdered my scientists and humiliated me for being too slow on FTL inhibitors.  First of all, the AI still gets rebellions a lot on Captain difficulty apparently, and 3 of their planets rebelled and joined me.  Free pops.

Then the Unbidden spawned 9 months into the end game in 2400 because I got tired of seeing jump drives as an option and eventually clicked it in like 2350.  I was somewhat prepared since I was actually playing xenophiles this time and got in on the ridiculous research speed bonuses from a research federation very early into the game, but even so the Unbidden managed to make it to the L-cluster and start spreading through the galaxy before I could muster enough ships to stop them.  Fighting them was pretty dicey for a few decades as I replaced my destroyed battleships with kinetic focused battleships and doubled down on shield harmonics and kinetics repeatables, but I was able to keep them out of my territory and distracted for the most part.  Except the L-gate system I had, which is impossible to keep during a crisis because they pop in, zap even a citadel in about 3 seconds and convert it into their own station...

But that Unbidden fleet that used an L-gate to infiltrate my neighbors to the south?  I just ignored that fleet for a while.  I pretended that I didn't know where those refugees were coming from for a while.

The best part is that I decided to get the achievement for becoming the galactic empire, so I passed the resolutions to become the custodian, abolish its term limit and then become the galactic empire all with 100% support from the galactic community.  50 years after the Unbidden were beaten, and with no active crisis.  Truly, liberty died to thunderous applause.

[Telgin]

I'm cautiously optimistic about the dev diary released today: link.

In short, they're committing to releasing free updates on a regular schedule from a dedicated team that will be working on longstanding issues and even adding content and features to old DLC.  I think the one thing I'm most looking forward to is the tradition changes where there will finally be more than 7 tradition trees available and you can pick between them.  People have been asking for this forever.

[Criptfeind]

I hope that they make the AI, if not good, at least functional. I think that at least is probably the biggest issue a tweaking and polishing crew can be hoped to fix. More traditions are very cool as well. Right now I just run a mod that has a billion traditions and you essentially never run out of ones to pick, but limiting to 7 with a lot of choices sounds like it might be an interesting game design as well. Overall though I'm happy to see a team devoted to polishing since stellaris has desperately needed it for a long time.

Also playing in a multiplayer game today I found out that if you have trade deals that are for more then your excess goods in storage they will automatically cancel at the end of the month, even if you have a net positive income in that good, which is pretty wacky. Hopefully that's fixed.

Edit2: Also, performance enhancements. Growth Required Scaling is a really bad bandaid patch for pops slowing the game down in the late game, I hope they come up with something better. I just play without it but the slow down is pretty rough.

[E. Albright]

I for one am very happy to see them going back and making early species packs as fully-featured as later ones. Plants in particular playing exactly like anyone else always annoyed me.

[Rolan7]

I for one am very happy to see them going back and making early species packs as fully-featured as later ones. Plants in particular playing exactly like anyone else always annoyed me.

Thanks for mentioning this because it got me looking at the feature list - this looks a lot better than I expected!  I play plantoids a lot but their lack of quirk was always a little disappointing.  I wonder what it'll be.  ...Likely something about agriculture, meh.  But what if it's something like their ships getting a bonus/malus depending on a system's luminosity?  I always loved that in Space Empires IV, making ships that were all-or-entirely reliant on solar power and reserve fuel.
Hopefully it even involves a few unique trait points like lithoids!

I don't have Necroids yet, but good to see them giving some much-needed love to hive minds.  I could just use the mod that fleshes hive minds out a lot... or the one that adds tons more traditions... but it's good to see them putting more such stuff into the base game too.

[Telgin]

People mentioned photosynthesis as a possible trait for plantoids, which makes sense and is low lying fruit even if it's not very scientific.  Not that Stellaris really is, but you know.  Giving plantoids a trait that would let them use energy for upkeep instead of food would be one way of doing it, or maybe half energy and half food.  I could also see a similar trait that lithoids get for producing gases per pop, or maybe motes.  It would be interesting if there were a trait for plantoids to produce food in a similar way.

Edit2: Also, performance enhancements. Growth Required Scaling is a really bad bandaid patch for pops slowing the game down in the late game, I hope they come up with something better. I just play without it but the slow down is pretty rough.

Agreed.  I'll make a quick note here though that in the last major patch they added the option to turn the growth scaling down or off, and if you do you should really take heed of their warning to also reduce the logistic growth scaling.  I'm playing as long as I can to see how it pans out, but I disabled the growth penalty but not the logistic scaling, and with 10 planets my economy has utterly crashed due to consumer goods costs because my stupid bird people keep reproducing too fast.  I'm running Social Welfare on them so they aren't unhappy due to it, but the consumer goods costs are killing me.  Even in 2265 I haven't completely dug myself out of the hole, despite building industrial districts constantly.

This wouldn't be nearly as bad if I had other species to settle some of these 20% habitability planets, but everyone around me hates my guts, so...

[Rolan7]

On plants:  Using energy for some/all upkeep would make a weird sorta-sense, yeah!  Not really scientific but close enough, and it'd be unique.  Sure it overlaps with robots/ME a bit, but they remain biopops and thus very different from robots constructed out of alloys.  (Jeez the strategic resource traits for lithoids are just *awful* though, and a natural food production would be kinda weird whether the plants eat food or not)

Interesting about the growth scaling.  I had sorta accepted it as a decent trade off for avoiding lag in the late-game...  I don't think there's any easy efficiency solution once too many pops are involved.  There's a reason I was playing on small galaxies, and now I don't have to.

That said, removing the limiter is interesting because an underlying mood in Stellaris always seemed to be, well, trying to maximize pop growth in the early game then trying to find them habitation in the mid-end game.  Hence all my habitat spam, which both boosted growth and accomodated it- at the cost of excessive grind.  I also tended to acquire pops through being a lovely nation to immigrate to, being xenophile and egalitarian in most games.  Or just conquer worlds and welcome their pops - I don't tend to play pacifist.

The obvious alternative is when one *doesn't* want a xenophilic hodge-podge of species, and is displacing noncitizen pops from conquered worlds.  I think that suffered the most from this growth scaling mechanic, since one's precious ubershrooms will completely fail to populate the conquered worlds after a certain point.  That's got to be frustrating, while xenophiles and particularly Nihilistic Acquisitioners do relatively fine.

Maybe I'll try another small galaxy with the growth limiting off, and see if I can handle the end-game pop levels.  I'm pretty used to spamming habitats, not to mention ring worlds and ecumenopoli.  And it's *waaaay* easier than it used to be, since they finally made pops migrate reasonably within one's nations.  So instead of tedious reshuffling pops, I can just build the homes and let them come.

I feel like AI nations seem less concerned about living space, content to just freeze planetary growth or whatever.  Which I don't mind morally, it's just such a waste in terms of preparing for the endgame.  Though maybe I'm just used to establishing my nation's strength by the midgame such that nobody dares try to take my districts.

[Egan_BW]

Maybe plantoids greatly prefer inhabiting planets over artificial habitats, where when they get sunlight they have very little food need, but in space they need to consume energy?

[Criptfeind]

Agreed.  I'll make a quick note here though that in the last major patch they added the option to turn the growth scaling down or off, and if you do you should really take heed of their warning to also reduce the logistic growth scaling.  I'm playing as long as I can to see how it pans out, but I disabled the growth penalty but not the logistic scaling, and with 10 planets my economy has utterly crashed due to consumer goods costs because my stupid bird people keep reproducing too fast.  I'm running Social Welfare on them so they aren't unhappy due to it, but the consumer goods costs are killing me.  Even in 2265 I haven't completely dug myself out of the hole, despite building industrial districts constantly.

This wouldn't be nearly as bad if I had other species to settle some of these 20% habitability planets, but everyone around me hates my guts, so...

This is an interesting issue to have, since generally more pops equals more production, so you should have less issues with consumer goods with more pops, not more?
Do you specialize your worlds to industrial and forge worlds? I find that helps a lot with balancing of upkeep on consumer goods, although a lot of the time it's more helpful in the sense that I don't have to make more consumer goods then I need when I want more alloys, but it helps both ways, specially in the early game and makes it a bit cheaper to roll out the consumer goods boosting buildings.