The new economy is drastically different than the tile system, and it has to do with the pops. There’s no way to model a Trantor-like cityworld in the previous tile system, for example.
With the move away from tiles and into Districts, you have real customization options when it comes to determining what your planet is. City Districts provide all the surplus housing but give nothing in terms of resource production themselves. Those city districts (and the housing they provide) is what allows a planet to support researchers, priests, entertainers, administrators, etc.
A city world is absolutely going to be the hub of your empire. It’s where the vast majority of your research and unity are generated from. But they are incapable of supporting themselves – they need colonies to supply the minerals, food, and other resources necessary to maintain that level of population that largely isn’t producing that basic stuff themselves. A planet consisting of mostly City districts can easily exceed 100 pops. In the old tile system, it was just based on planet size which meant planets ranged from 10-25 max and resulted in each planet being indistinct and samey. I feel like I 'know" my planets a lot better now, whether it be Neo-Trantor, a hive world, or that godforsaken iceball that has enormous amounts of mineral reserves with a few undesirables scratching out a living.
I mean, the numbers are precise as you say, but there are a lot of numbers. For something like you were seeing with the Districts, it’s probably not worth getting hung up on or obsessing over. Sometimes these things end up clicking into place with a little more time or experimentation, but I understand that your brain is likely wired quite a bit different than mine and that might be easier said than done. :)
I’ve been wondering about that. Up until a few months ago, Wiz would tweet heavily about various things about things in the works for Stellaris or various playthroughs, but that has dropped off recently. Dev diary duties were largely moved over to other people on the team as well.
Wonder what he’s working on? Stellaris was a passion project for him, so I wonder what drew him away (other than maybe it was time for a change of scenery, creatively speaking?).
Stellaris improved significantly when he took over the reigns. I’m disappointed to see him step away, but hopefully Daniel picks up where he left off.
From my experience in the game and reading a bit on the forums, I am pretty convinced now that Machine Empires are way off-track in terms of economic balance. They were presented as being more efficient but slower-growing that organic Hives and regular empires.
They got the slower-growing part right, since machine pop growth is very expensive and slow. As for efficiency, they seem a lot worse than a regular empire, especially in terms of energy budget and amenity production.
At first I thought not needing consumer goods was a boon, but consumer goods are relatively cheap to produce and most organic pops don’t need a lot of them. Jobs like researchers that require consumer goods for a regular empire require a lot more in terms of minerals for a machine empire. The minerals you need to sink into building the pops would pay for a lot of consumer goods anyway.
I’m very much on the left side of the Chick parabola on this game so far very much enjoying the complexity. Although I do share Tom’s frustration with the lack of ways to figure things out.
So for instance I was exceeding my admin cap by a large amount it was like 120 and my cap was 80. It was not so much I built too many systems, districts, colonies, but my cohesion was at like 70-something %. I search in vain on the wiki and the forum for how to fix cohesion. Finally the miracle of google found a reddit posted, that was framed as PSA. “warning If your cohesion is low you need to build more starbases”. Viola problem solved, and it is not an unreasonable approach to increasing cohesion, but also not obvious.
Likewise, I keep seeing the option early on to get research facilities and upgrade to labs. Yes, I want to increase the number of researchers, so I research. Oh, and but I need gas extraction. Ugh, I don’t see that for age. So I restart, next game I’m much more careful to check what resource is needed before researching them. Also, in order to keep my admin cap from going crazy, don’t put an outpost on “safe” system that has strategic resources I can’t use. So I get the option to expensive tech to harvest rare crystals so I research it, many months later. Only to find out that I researched the tech that lets me synthetically produce a crystal. Now A. I have 4 crystal mines next to my empire, I don’t need a building when mining outpost is much easier to build B. I don’t have an empty building slot available for at least 10 pops per planet and C. I’m not entirely sure what crystal do, other than help with some edicts, to know if maybe I should be stockpiling them.
I really want a chart like you had in railroad tycoon or even some business games. That say here is a list of the resource, here is a list of the buildings that need them, and here is the technologies you need to unlock both.
Sadly the Wiki is still painfully incomplete. I think it is BS that Paradox largely depends on members of the community to keep the Wiki up to date and not having a staff member do it at the same time the expansion is released.
Oh, @tomchick I play strategy games the same way you do, on pause looking at all the numbers and trying to figure stuff out
Just so you know, you’ll likely never have enough mining stations to supply the gas/crystal/whatever you will need, and you’re not guaranteed to even have any of a particular resource in your region of space. Anything you get via mining stations should be treated as a bonus, as you would with research.
Buildings to produce those resources are a good source, but don’t forget the market. Markets in most games of this type just feel like a resource dump if you have a big excess of something, and my mistake was approaching it in the same way with this game. It is not, it is a fundamental part of balancing your economy. I recommend using monthly buy (and sell!) orders so you don’t have to micro and also don’t have to deal with ballooning prices if you bulk buy. I don’t just buy the higher tiers of resources, in my current have I am importing over 150 minerals a month to feed my industry.
The MegaCorp civic is one of my favorite in the game now, due to how much I use the market! Getting the overhead down to 15% saves me a ton of resources!
I did what you said. I bided my time and built my economy the best I could while I waited for the Khan’s demise. It happened and I took my big fleet I was building and took one of my systems back. They sued for peace.
I’ve got a couple more years of peace left and my first titan is on the assembly line. I hope to grab a bigger chunk of their systems this time around.
I’m started to realize that in much the way that HOI IV, is an economics game disguised as a wargame. Stellaris is economics game disguised as a 4x game, in fact probably more so. I’m definitely going to get the DLC now since I imagine it has lots of cool things for corporations. So you specialize in making few things and buy the rest.
It’s so frustrating that there’s no warning about empire cohesion until it drops below 100% and suddenly your admin costs go flying up. And the tooltip only tells you what it is, not how it’s calculated.
Anyway, the other day I finally found where the empire cohesion breakdown lives: it’s in the government display that is otherwise almost never worth looking at.
Are end game crisis only part of DLC? In my current game, I am well past the year 2400 and everything is normal. I checked the default game settings and in the year 2300, that is the earliest for some mid game crysis. Year 2400 is for some bigger crysis (like FE waking up). I am just plodding along, conquering and getting bored.
The only DLC I own is synthetic dawn. I was thinking of picking up more DLC for the christmas sale, whenever that starts. I was thinking of getting utopia and maybe more smaller DLC. Any recommendations?
Most of the midgame stuff was added as DLC to address the (valid) complaints that the midgame was rather dull. Leviathans added the potential for space monsters and the War in Heaven. Apocalypse added the space Mongols that robc04 ran into. Distant Stars added the L-cluster which is also midgame related.
The endgame stuff should be mostly base game from what I remember, 2400 is the year that they start having a chance to trigger, not a guaranteed fire date. You’ll see techs the are red in color and are flagged as dangerous, those are related to the crises. The default endgame crises date of 2400 is way too late, IMO, and the default strength is too low as well. The really went conservative with making the default settings very easy.
Utopia is great for the megastructures and habitats and especially the Ascension perks. It also lets you play Hive Minds if I’m not mistaken, but you’re already playing a Gestalt with the robots so it will have some similarities. Apocalypse gives you the Mongols, new super ships like Titans and Collosus, and some more civics and Ascension perks.
Distant Stars is mostly about adding a bunch of new events and anomalies to give more variety while exploring.
Yeah, I feel like changing the settings as mentioned a few times tightens things up. Crises come faster, the AI is more of a threat and more aggressive, etc. I’m not sure if you’re on defaults for this playthrough, but I do feel like those settings can kind of drag on. Of course, that’s a similar complaint I have with basically every 4X I play so it’s not entirely unique to Stellaris.
At the point you’re on, I’d just build a Collosus and start cracking planets like eggs. :)
I did play at the default since I haven’t really touched this in a long time. If I play another I’ll probably need to follow your suggestions.
I saw the planet cracker perk, but I took the end game damage one. I may eek out another perk before the end of the game, but with my admin penalty things are slowing to a crawl.
One thing I can’t quite figure out is how on earth I can create fleets that match the strength of the fallen empires. I think my fleet is around 25K in strength while they have 3 of over 60K. I’m just about at naval capacity. I could go over, but I’m not sure I could afford to go around 7 times over. I don’t know how quickly costs scale.
Points-wise I am number two, behind the fallen empire (26K vs 17K). The next closest has less than half of my points.
But a size 384 empire should be capable of supporting more than 2x as many scientists as a size 160 empire. So you should be research FASTER than if you’d stayed small, assuming you’ve scaled up research as you’ve gone along.
Build more fortresses for soldier pops to boost naval capacity?
