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[MorleyDev]

Yeah but the tiles system was also like...really really dull.

The district/building system gives so many more options for planets to have specialization and roles and detail and for your core worlds to matter into the late game rather than just being "that place I used to have to care about before it filled up". I'd rather pops go away as discrete units and become just counters on a planet than they go back to that system. Give us the Vici 3 in space we all know Stellaris should be, darn it!

Before 3.0 I was mostly playing with Alphamod in part because Industrial districts just 'click' so much better for gameplay, and in part because being able to colonise asteroids and turn barren planets and stuff into habitats and have your entire home system colonised and nowhere else is fun. Actually made a custom mod based on 'Lightspeed' that makes building outposts cost nearly 1k influence until some midgame tech unlocks so that the entire galaxy couldn't be colonised for ages and you were forced to go tall and try and balance growth with food without access to agri planets.

Then you get the tech to expand at the midgame you launch the grand crusade!

---

Another thought I had is warfare is still probably the least directly interesting part of Stellaris. You can do interesting things, but against the AI more often Warfare itself is just "big number go brrrr" and don't pay much attention to countering their weaponry until the end game crisis comes.

Which got me thinking, I wonder if a system like HoI4 would work. So rather than building ships and sending them, you have frontlines at your hyperlanes that you have to expand out and into like HoI4 armies.

[forsaken1111]

Which got me thinking, I wonder if a system like HoI4 would work. So rather than building ships and sending them, you have frontlines at your hyperlanes that you have to expand out and into like HoI4 armies.

It would work but it wouldn't feel like Stellaris. It is a really interesting idea though.

[ChairmanPoo]

I hadnt played Stellaris in a while. I got the expansion and booted up. Like the new content but mostly the "old" new content. AKA the last couple of DLCs that I didnt really play through, and the 3.0 changes.

they keep trying to fix lag caused by pops and never once consider why performance was so much better when they had tiles

Like sure call it a problem of complexity doing it, but I swear I never once had to worry about lag by pops whenever the planetary tile system existed, yet nowadays its the most common issues.

I´ll take any performance improvement than I can get 
I honestly dont get why the pops system is so inefficient. I do think that they should strongly reconsider that aspect of the game if they cannot optimize it.

Nemesis itself? Eh, it´s fairly light content wise, I feel?
- The intelligence thing is neat but lighter and more limited than I expected
- The galactic federation into imperium thing, OK, it´s there. havent tried that yet so I dont know how content heavy it is.
- Become the Nemesis seems meh? for practical intents and purposes it´s kind of turning fanatical purifier midgame. Doesnt even have a particularily developed interface, I think? Could use some work.


It´s not bad in itself but some of its star points are grossly underdeveloped, and I get the feeling that other, previous, cheaper DLC like Lithoids or Necroids added more meaningful content for less €€€

[forsaken1111]

From my understanding, the pop system is inefficient just due to it's nature. They wanted every pop to have an ethic and happiness and such, which means every tick the game has to iterate through every pop to consider changes to every one of their stats. That is a heavy loop to run every game tick and causes significant lag lategame as it scales with number of pops AND number of factors affecting said pops.

[Telgin]

Right.  By its nature it just has a lot of work to do.  It's always been like it is, but got a lot worse in 2.2 when the number of pops increased significantly.  Each month, every pop in the game has to calculate if there are better jobs on the planet they're on, whether to change ethics, resource output (which is based on traits and planet modifiers), and so on.  It's just a lot of calculations it has to do, which can't really be abstracted into anonymous population pools and numbers because you lose all of the nuance of the traits and ethics.

I feel like they've probably done about all that can be done to optimize the work the game is doing per pop, so reducing the number of pops was the only way to improve it further.  Mind you, I think they could have gotten away with just doing something like doubling resource output per job and halving the number of pops, which they did to a point, but then they slapped the empire penalty on top for extra confusion...

It´s not bad in itself but some of its star points are grossly underdeveloped, and I get the feeling that other, previous, cheaper DLC like Lithoids or Necroids added more meaningful content for less €€€

I have similar feelings, but I've put over 1,000 hours into Stellaris so in a way I feel like spending money on the DLC wasn't outrageous for me.  It feels a bit more egregious for me since I usually play peaceful isolationists who don't interfere with other empires, so the intelligence system wasn't going to get a lot of use by me anyway and there was no way I was going to use the Become The Crisis AP since I don't play evil empires to begin with and always thought that it was a little too on the nose as Evil Mode Engage.

[MorleyDev]

They actually talked a lot about the design of the pop system and why they couldn't just half/double things. Basically any change to one factor of the economy has a lot of knock-on consequences that impacts everything else, so if they just halved/doubled by itself then you'd get all sorts of weird second-order effects that break the game. Stuff like clerks suddenly becoming the single most OP job in the game, losing all of your food because you built a single industrial building.

For all the jokes about Paradox Testing, they actually spend every Friday evening playing a complete multiplayer game of Stellaris with the hot code to stress test things.

[Great Order]

The big pop issue I don't get is why do they do calculations on a daily basis? What's the point? Nearly everything else that relates to them is worked out on a monthly basis. Your resources tick on a monthly basis, your income updates on a monthly basis. Your research and traditions are done on a monthly basis. Pops migrate on a monthly basis as far as I'm aware. Pop growth is monthly.

Why not make it so that the only time they're calculated is at the start of a month or on a planetary scale when a building or district? While there's still the same number of calculations per population tick, there's no longer 30 of the things in a month to slow things down.

[forsaken1111]

Welp, the AI still can't cope with the economy. I decided to try it out by setting all of my planets to automated in a machine empire run. The AI builder spammed industrial districts to the point that I was negative by about 200 minerals a month. It would build them even when there were no free pops to work them, and they sucked up all of the drones working maintenance jobs thus tanking amenities.

Good job guys.

[Telgin]

Welp, the AI still can't cope with the economy.

For all the jokes about Paradox Testing, they actually spend every Friday evening playing a complete multiplayer game of Stellaris with the hot code to stress test things.

I do fully believe they do this, but it also seems like they rarely test single player, because the AI really did get dumber in this patch.  As quoted above and as I mentioned before, I saw multiple rebellions in every AI empire in my last game because it can't manage the economy anymore at low difficulties.

I will say that the crisis seems to have finally gotten better.  For the first time ever I got the Unbidden to spawn early by researching jump drives, and they completely cleaned my clock in 2425 on 5x since I wasn't ready for them.  Maybe next game I'll survive long enough to see how they fare if they attack the galaxy at large instead of beelining for me.

The big pop issue I don't get is why do they do calculations on a daily basis? What's the point? Nearly everything else that relates to them is worked out on a monthly basis. Your resources tick on a monthly basis, your income updates on a monthly basis. Your research and traditions are done on a monthly basis. Pops migrate on a monthly basis as far as I'm aware. Pop growth is monthly.

Why not make it so that the only time they're calculated is at the start of a month or on a planetary scale when a building or district? While there's still the same number of calculations per population tick, there's no longer 30 of the things in a month to slow things down.

I know they talked about this at one point and I think some of the calculations are only done once per month now, but one of the concerns was that they wanted to give immediate player feedback, so doing daily calculations helped with that.

That said, I think the resource production calculations are only done once per month per pop now, and it's probably amortized so that each game day a fraction of the pops run their calculations.  But when the galaxy has 50,000 pops in it it's still slow.

[Great Order]

Well, I basically formalised my "master of the galaxy" position by declaring the Galactic Imperium.

Everyone is my subject, bar a single planet fanatic purifier empire and an FE. My last war was against my parent empire (Since I did the Lost Colony origin).

I also discovered you can yoink the bonus from On the Shoulders of Giants. I integrated my protectorate just after they'd had that special system spawn, so I just hopped in there, finished the archaeology project, and got the Full Circle modifier.

[MorleyDev]

Funnily enough at higher difficulties the AI has been reported as being quite improved. It'll deliberately seize chokepoints, launch coordinated wars on threats, and generally give you a harder time of things and keep you on your toes. A higher difficulty with scaling difficulty on can pull ahead of the player quite well long before the AI bonus mid-game peak.

I think they optimized the AI to manage itself well on higher difficulties, meaning on lower difficulties it can sometimes explode in on itself.

Although it'd be nice to be able to mix up the AI difficulty for different empires within a game, pick a range that AI empires get sorted into. Would be nice for some AI empires to explode in on themselves regardless since not every empire should be a success, rather than either all empires being dumdum or all empires being exponential boomboom.

[ChairmanPoo]

From my understanding, the pop system is inefficient just due to it's nature. They wanted every pop to have an ethic and happiness and such, which means every tick the game has to iterate through every pop to consider changes to every one of their stats. That is a heavy loop to run every game tick and causes significant lag lategame as it scales with number of pops AND number of factors affecting said pops.

Sounds like that´s something that should be abstracted into something more functional.

[Chiefwaffles]

Really it looks to me like the current pop system is effectively a hold-over from the initial design of Stellaris. Back when pops worked different tiles on planets they were far more discrete units compared to the pops of today. But yeah, as others have said it's probably a hard sell to completely rework the system without any easy features that make it appealing to players.

[ChairmanPoo]

As a side note, I´m really enjoying the machine intelligence I cooked up. Basic setup is a quickly replicating machine intelligence which starts in a ruined ringworld.

My headcanon is that they´re emergent programming from the ringworld´s maintenance system subroutines. As such, their goals are to repair the ringworld and get up and running, and build tall instead of wide. Unless there are particular strategic resources to be taken from them, neighbouring organic empires would be made into tributaries rather than conquered outright.

[EuchreJack]

As a side note, I´m really enjoying the machine intelligence I cooked up. Basic setup is a quickly replicating machine intelligence which starts in a ruined ringworld.

My headcanon is that they´re emergent programming from the ringworld´s maintenance system subroutines. As such, their goals are to repair the ringworld and get up and running, and build tall instead of wide. Unless there are particular strategic resources to be taken from them, neighbouring organic empires would be made into tributaries rather than conquered outright.

One ring to rule them all indeed!