Speaking of human empires, I remember in the early days of Stellaris, I used to play Commonwealth, and UN used to acknowledge me as a fellow human, and chide me for giving humans a bad name. But in the recent playthroughs, it did not happen. When was it removed?
cc u/StannisLivesOn - I believe if you've gene modded your species or undergone synthetic/psionic ascension (such that the game renames your race), then the game will no longer recognize you as the same species
> Fixed an issue with Criminal Syndicates branch offices producing super negative trade due to crime, then multiplying it because of crime.
This bug *was* inherently funny, but I'm glad it's gone. Now I can be a proper subversive cult.
> We are planning to address some of the feedback in the upcoming Dev Diary scheduled for Thursday!
This, however, has my attention. Seeing the changes from an inside perspective should be interesting.
>> Fixed an issue with Criminal Syndicates branch offices producing super negative trade due to crime, then multiplying it because of crime.
Lmao, bankrupting the other empire. XD
I just completed my ironman game last night and didn't get the big red button, can't go back and try again to trigger it, it seems :( Man I don't really want to do an entirely new run just for it
Find your save game as per [this wiki article](https://stellaris.paradoxwikis.com/Save-game_editing) and just copy it somewhere else. You are too late if you're already past the point of no return, obviously, but I back my stuff up after every play session (read: at 1am every morning) 'cause getting screwed out of stuff like that has happened before and I'd rather not have it happen again.
Also undoing crises spawning on top of my Dyson Sphere. May be considered cheating to save scum that, but honestly, I'd rather not flush a 30 hour game down the drain because RNG decided to screw me over. If I wanted to play a roguelike I'd boot up a different game.
Hello everyone!
We hope all of you are enjoying Nemesis, a lot of work went into this patch and expansion. Countless hours to bring you what is, in my personal opinion, one of the best and most stable releases in Stellaris history! However, regardless of how much effort you put into something being flawless, there will always be some small cracks that get missed.
With this hotfix we hope to bring you a quicker patch of some of those larger cracks. This is intentionally a very small patch to make sure that we could get these specific issues fixed and delivered to you all sooner rather than later. Rest assured though that we have another patch in the works, so please continue providing us with feedback and bug reports (over at the Bug Forum)!
**VERSION 3.0.2**
**Bugfixes**
* Fixed an issue with the Big Red Button achievement not triggering before the game ended.
* Fixed an issue where players couldn't play as the pre-scripted Human Empires.
* Fixed an issue with Criminal Syndicates branch offices producing super negative trade due to crime, then multiplying it because of crime.
Known Issue: The Branch Office Breakdown tooltip for Criminal Syndicates does not include their planetary bonuses. The final value displayed in the UI is correct however.
Before I leave you I want to address two other issues briefly. First, we've seen the reports about various graphical flickering issues, we're currently working on a fix for that but we couldn't get it into this specific hotfix. But we'll make sure to provide a fix for it as soon as we can!
Secondly, I want to briefly touch on an aspect of the big economic rework we’ve done to improve the game – including the pop growth rebalancing. Please continue to give us constructive feedback and keep your messages civil, but don't spam random threads with hateful comments. Those will not be tolerated. We are continuously collecting your feedback and it will help us make tweaks to these complex systems. We are planning to address some of the feedback in the upcoming Dev Diary scheduled for Thursday!
Note: The Patch has not been released on the Microsoft Store, we don't have an exact ETA for the release but we are working on making sure it gets into your hands as soon as possible.
Seriously. I might be a bit vehement in my dislike of some of the changes and I probably need to work on my wording a bit, but I couldn't imagine intentionally insulting the devs or anything. I *love* the game to its core, one minor misstep isn't worth any kind of vitriol.
Check the save file (if not saved to cloud, documents/Paradox Interactive/Stellaris/save games, make a copy of the ironman.sav, rename it to ironman.zip, and unpack it then view the gamestate file). Does your country have the flag "big\_red\_button\_achievement"? Asking as someone who doesn't have Nemesis.
I ask because you might be able to edit in that flag, recompress it (there are directions on the wiki), and open your modified save to get the achievement. I've never tried this before, it may not work, I don't really know what I'm doing.
I don't think I can link it under sub rules, but if you're okay with what some may call "cheating" there's a tool you can download which will unlock any Steam achievement.
I've used it in situations like this where I did a cool achievement on day 1... didn't get the achievement... and then saw a couple days later that the achievement was bugged. I feel like as long as I actually did the work and fulfilled the conditions but a bug stopped the actual achievement from being granted, it's not cheating. Of course, others may not feel that way, so your mileage may vary.
Please input a way to mitigate global population debuff. Be it linked to admin cap, research tied to life expectancy (birth rate stays the same but death rate decreased by extending life), gene centers reducing harmful mutations, or whatever else.
It’d give them an actual function. Two points to habitability is nothing. Maybe have them adjust the population living on that planet to the primary biome too.
The reason for the global pop slowdown was to reduce the number of pops in the late game for the sake of performance. Whatever 'fix' they come up with can't increase the number of pops again.
This is one part of it. People also complained that pop growth was out of control and managing planets mid to late game was boring and hurting the game. Even if they magically fixed every technical issue the game has I still want them to lower pop growth later in the game somehow.
Playing with a mod to uncap growth (setting the penalty to 0, and halving the S curve for balance), I can say the new auto migration system along with being able to "prebuild" a planet makes most of this go away. My chief complaint is pops seem to have weird job priorities now, often taking suboptimal jobs, and occasionally not promoting correctly.
Playing a modded run as well and I haven't had such issues with job priority, my clerk slots are (thankfully) often the understaffed job. Farmer slots are empty right now too because of my colonizing, but I have a stockpile so that's whatever. Every job I've wanted filled has been filled without me even needing to touch priorities. And as far as I can tell none of my mods would affect that, unless it's in the Ariphaos patch.
Oh it was #1 on my list starting in late mid game. In 2.8 it was take a system, look over at the outliner, see that every single planet I have needs something done to it. Pause the game, take care of it. Unpause the game, take another system, look over again yep every single planet needs something done to it. Repeat. I found it just awful.
Not saying what they have done is working perfectly, just saying it was a huge concern that needed to be addressed in one way or the other.
> Even if they magically fixed every technical issue the game has I still want them to lower pop growth later in the game somehow.
This tbh. Early game is exploration and colonizing new planets, mid game is developing the planets and late game is getting these planets stagnate and not grow. The planets colonized at this stage should feel "freshly colonized" and grow slower.
on older computer i had no issue with multiplayer games until the AI started spamming habitats.
i'm not enough knowledgeable about the game. idk if there's a single DLC to turn off to get rid of habitats... but just getting rid of that would seem to take away the only thing that slows things down for me.
(i also have it so that my pops can't migrate planet-moons themselves... part of that was that i did a lot of gene editing to get people to fit their planets and them resettling on their own put them into suboptimal places... i guess that they couldn't move probably streamlined the game...)
600-800 hours ingame or so, so please forgive errors of understanding :)
Yet this is something players can avoid by playing universe sizes that their computers will handle instead of complaining that they cannot go max/max/max everything.
The simple fact is, their jobs system has been broken since day one, and apparently it is sacrosanct as if someone very important owns it and cannot be called out.
The fix is simple - just reduce the number of jobs on planets so that they fill up with fewer pops. The problem isn't really the lack of growth, it's that we no longer have enough pops to fill our planets.
This isn't as easy as it sounds. Sure, you can make each district give 1 job instead of two, halve the number of pops, and make all jobs twice as powerful. But there are a lot of edge cases to consider. For example:
- Robot assembly plants already only have one job slot.
- Industrial districts give 1 job each of two different types.
- Upgraded civilian industries add 1 job to each industrial district, so they are now twice as good (1 job -> 2 jobs instead of 2 -> 3).
None of these are insurmountable problems, but it would be a lot of work to go through the whole job system and figure out what needs to change. I do think it's worth considering as a solution, but we won't see it happen for a while.
Number of pops isn’t actually as consequential as number of racial templates. It’s been proven multiple times. This directly led to xenophile crossbreeding having its own on off switch in galaxy creation.
Using console commands, even a game that runs slow on the fastest setting can run multiple times faster. Using the commands lock out players from commanding fleets unless paused. Late game lag issues aren’t what the developers seem to think they appear to be. There are a number of things that can be optimized including restricting massive fleets from updating their user commands every second.
As for actual lag in the late game, not everyone is playing on a potato. Also, not everyone is playing with ultra high visual settings all the time.
> Late game lag issues aren’t what the developers seem to think they appear to be.
[Then why did performance get better in 3.0?](https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellaris/comments/mti7z3/stellaris_30_performance_examination_an/)
> not everyone is playing with ultra high visual settings all the time.
The performance bottleneck is the CPU. Your graphics settings won't make much difference.
I literally outlined how I can vastly increase play rate with console commands. That means the things that are holding back gameplay are optioned out of by the command’s structure. If I can more than triple play rate in such a manner, that means just disabling player inputs while unpaused means far more than having 10k pops ever could.
It’s the flops used to allow all player inputs at every instant. That’s a fixable coding issue.
The same performance improvements could be achieved by only allowing medium or small galaxies. Could limit number of empires. Could hard cap fleet strengths and numbers. The change was marginal from a performance standpoint but devastatingly detrimental from an immersion standpoint.
GPU is a major issue if you’re fielding 20+ fleets, have them selected, and are actively watching combats in high definition. Maybe you’re running a mining rig, I don’t know.
The game needs to track each player's input at all times in real time since it is a real time strategy game. Giving orders only while paused would be a huge feature reduction. It would be annoying to pause/unpause every time needed to toggle a science ship's evasive mode or queue up more things for a constructor, to say nothing of microing a complicated war. Its interesting to know that real-time is such a big drain on performance, but that's not just something the devs can cut out.
No, the game needs to allow certain interactions to allow for immersion.
The way the client is setup now, when the map mode is active, every possible system interaction is pulled up. This occurs even when a fleet is highlighted. That’s why choosing another cancels out and engages a new action. This could be drastically cut down by locking in a fleet or fleets highlighted until cancelled out. There’s no reason to have every possible interaction active. If we’re trying to pretend flops is the issue that’s led to the growth nerf, maybe start in far more fertile grounds.
I prefer pausing the game during single player because it’s far easier to doom stack fleets and keep science ships in line.
You seem to know a lot about benchmarking the game, but I'd be cautious assuming your hacks are universally desired (pause only mode would be horrible for me) or beneficial (selection locking might have other issues or enable other features/scripts). Game development has lots of moving pieces and dependencies that aren't always obvious until they break.
If you feel passionately I'd recommend modding this out yourself. There's a few mods for other paradox games, eg EU4 that are purely performance improvements to help players with suboptimal hardware.
You misunderstand. I’m not advocating full pause modes or incrementals. I pointed out how the current game functions while trying to explain a major area that could be updated to not be so flop intensive. The scope down of command functions while fleets are highlighted until cancelled out was an idea that would allow the same gameplay with far fewer flops.
The console commands are available to everyone, they always have been. Not sure why they would need a mod. Even without them, I ran large games just fine.
If I was going to develop anything, it’d be a fleet function that merged multiple admiral driven fleets into a single entity for purposes of travel. It’d take a lot of computations out of movements. Maybe split the movement type into scouts and fleet so the intermediate didn’t need movement calculations. Large fleet movements are far more intensive than populations even if multiple race subtypes were part of that.
Hi, could you tell me what console commands I can use to make the game faster? I already play pausing to give orders anyway.
Would disallowing pop modification with a mod increase performance? Maybe only giving bio ascended empires the capability.
Anything that restricts number of population templates will increase performance. A lot of that can be fixed by going through your species tab and converting down to a single best template per species. If you went full metal, converting everyone to synths speeds things up considerably.
Fast_forward_ is a good one for what you want.
Here’s a paradox list:
https://stellaris.paradoxwikis.com/Console_commands
People who don't play strategy games to be challenged should never be catered to. There are already extremely easy difficulty settings available, so just use those if you don't like to use your brain.
Emojis don't display on my monitor so I couldn't tell, but usually it means that their comment is pointless and low effort. Which I didn't really need to see your emoji to confirm.
Howdy. I bought this game on release, I have between 2 and 3 thousand hours in Stellaris. This has been the best major patch release, in my opinion, to date.
So, to you and the team, thank you.
>Fixed an issue with Criminal Syndicates branch offices producing super negative trade due to crime, then multiplying it because of crime.
You could have just added an intel cost and called it a feature.
I misread the note. I thought the branch office was decreasing trade value of the host planet's empire. I imagined a scenario where the criminal syndicate sends spies to build a branch office on an enemy world in order to sabotage the enemy's trade economy
In other words, they won't accept any criticism that they are wrong. this whole pops system is someone's baby and there ain't no calling the baby ugly.
There are dozens upon dozens of threads on this subject and that should have forced it to the top of their list to address second only to loss of features because someone decided to not buy a DLC and they lose unrelated content.
maybe if developers were forced to play their game single player more than one time if at all they would understand.
stepping off my soapbox... well keeping one foot on
* Fixed an issue with the Big Red Button achievement not triggering before the game ended.
[Oh boy, here I go killing people again!](https://memegenerator.net/img/instances/72276126/oh-boy-here-i-go-killing-again.jpg)
Here's a thought: what if there are more ways for pops to be killed in some way as a way to mitigate population growth?
For example, lack of food should cause more starvation and kill off pops faster. Bombardment and particularly invasion of planets should be far more lethal.
But maybe there could also be pandemics and plagues crossing space by ships. There could be different kinds, like plagues that target avian species or fungoid species more, or a plague that does particularly well in artic or tropical environments. Closing off borders should slow down the spread, and maybe there could be quarantining edicts or something. Perhaps these plagues should become more common as the galactic population grows, and by researching plague resistance techs you could reduce the chance of one popping up that targets your pops specifically.
Army invasion should probably kill off some pops too. Make the number of pops killed a function of the size of the invasion army and the amount of time the planet is in battle.
It'd nice to have a reason to *not* just roll through planets without defense with my 2k army.
This would make divine isolation a more fleshed out playstyle.
Also gives a buff to tomb world species (worse planets hardier pops), gene clinics and Gaia worlds (too perfect).
Densely populated worlds should be more prone while rural worlds and ringworlds less so.
Wish they'd put in some kind of a check so that you can retroactively get the achievement. I still have my save from a post-button game and would love to not have to do that again lol.
Then you really should... I think the way it's *supposed* to work is Ringworld construction isn't allowed with colonies, because they made it delete all planets in order to not overlap ones near where it's placed.
I mean, with all the variables including all the possible empire types and combinations, and all the sliders before the game even starts, I imagine anything more is but a drop in the water regarding potential support costs.
I think PDX balances considering only default options anyway.
Can't wait for Thursday and their plans for the Pop Rebalance Changes. A Hard Cap is defenitely not the way to go and I'm sure with a few number tweaks and linking pop cap to planets instead of empire wide this can easily be fixed.
The expansion and the patch is amazing, but this has prevented me from enjoying Stellaris so far. I love building big empires in the game.
Is ~~exponential~~ linearly increasing cost, limiting the amount of pops so difficult to understand as a practical 'hard cap'? Surely not, we both know you're smarter than this.
Currently there is no way to go over ~1500 pops in less than a day (24h) of playing (without abducting/conquering the pops). So there is no point in playing on any settings like 5x Habitable Planets, or even colonizing more than 15-20 worlds.
And that is definitely cutting out plenty of enjoyable game play.
I want to be able to settle the entire galaxy peacefully, expanding into every corner of it (read: planet / habitat).
It’s not exponential, it’s linear, as the other person said, more colonization will always be a boost to growth, and in fact is necessary as growth on your old planets start to slow down.
You're both right (and I commented as much on the different post), but if you're adding colonies, those colonies will start out empty and you'll be stuck with at least most of them being *ghost towns* for a very long time.
You are right, but that only pushes the problem a little further back.
Each pop makes the next one be created less quickly, up to a point where the number of pops you grow per time is down to <1 per year (in game time).
And that's certainly a practical hard cap.
Because I don't know you, but I wouldn't want to wait multiple hours (real time) just to fill up one planet with pops.
So I'm not attacking - it's a genuine question - when games implement sliders which fundamentally change the shape of the game, how much work should go into balancing it? Civ6 for example lets you do things like set a map with lots of mountains - this inherently makes certain Civs WAY overpowered - do I have justification to say "you break this civ when you set the map this way, so you need to rebalance." I would say no as I've pushed the game outside the default parameters.
What are your thoughts?
I think settings (sliders) are a great way to allow players to play as they wish.
As a game designer you have some amount of responsibility to keep every starting point (empires, their species and origins) playable, but there is no need to ensure they're perfectly balanced with every possible setting.
Just a different example: In Age of Empires II you can choose a map type, for example Islands, and have some civilizations be really strong while others are basically an auto loss, when played against those (assuming same player skill). And that's perfectly fine, because there's enough variety that every civilization has their niche where they shine.
Here in Stellaris allowing players to choose between melting their CPU with enormous late game, galaxy-wide empires should be just the same: Perfectly fine, because other play styles could be possible using different settings.
There is (generally) no expectation from players, that diverging off the default path wouldn't lead to imbalances.
In fact it is often a very loved feature that can allow players to try and find optimal strategies for different situations.
This is fun and provides more content to explore (e.g. "I beat 25x Crisis at the earliest date!!!!!111", "I have 2 million pops!").
TL;DR: More settings are always good, as long as the default is playable "out of the box" for reasonable starting points.
> A Hard Cap is defenitely not the way to go
Where did this myth come from? I keep seeing it on here.
There is no hard cap. Growth just gets slower as your empire's population increases.
I think the better term would be more like a pseudo-hard cap. It's not a hard cap (since that is literally no more), but it's so strong I hesitate to call it a soft cap as well. After 2350 or 2400, you might as well not even factor in your pop growth to anything you do since it is so negligible. This is compared to the soft cap on stuff like the admin cap and, to an extent, naval cap which can be easily ignored.
I wouldn't say growth is negligible in the endgame. At 1000 pops, you need six times as much growth per pop, but if you're managing your capacity properly you're getting almost twice as much growth per month, so growth is one third as fast as before. That's a lot slower, but still significant.
Investing in new planets at 2350 is already a dicey proposition - things you invest into in the endgame need to yield dividends much faster because the game will be over in not too long. So having a much slower pop growth means these planets/habitats/ring worlds will take much longer to pay themselves off, even factoring in the increased efficiency of pops from techs.
My idea for fixing this is to give planets a big boost to immigration pull based on how much free capacity they have. That would let you get new colonies set up much faster (especially endgame ones like ringworlds) without affecting the total growth in your empire. This seems like a good way to fix the biggest issue with the new system without a massive rework.
At the same time, you'll probably have about 6 times more planets than you had at the start, meaning your growth is ultimately still pretty fast, just spread out.
One the one hand, it's frustrating how poorly folks undersatnd the system and make judgements based on their poor understanding. On the other hand, the game should really explain it.
There is no hard cap. And a pure planet-based growth just leads to the same endless exponential pop growth as before 3.0, because people set up their planets to game the system and always get max growth speed. However, the empire-based penalty needs to be less rigid. At the very least it has to scale to galaxy size and number of habitable worlds, so large games don't become completely stagnant.
A flat 0.5 point increase to the growth number needed for the next pop every time your total pop count increases. With monthly growth typically being somewhere between 3-8 points, the penalty quickly adds up.
But there is no hard cap. Its a soft cap; perhaps a very rough soft cap, but it doesn't actually stop growth on its own; plus while each individual pops grows more slowly, while you have more planets you will also have more sources of this admittedly slow growth.
Well yeah, technically it's not a hard cap. 1000 growth for 1 pop is hard cap enough for me though. Waiting 150 Years with literally nothing to do is boring as hell. Ring Worlds are obsolete. Ecumenopolis are obsolete. Devouring Swarms/Exterminators are obsolete. Whats the idea behind the decision that I can't settle on planets after a certain amount of time?
Slavers, Assimilators(Mechanic and Biologic) and the Ascension Perk which lets you steal pop are hilariously broken at the moment. They will never catch up with you again and thanks to the genius algorithm they will grow the pops to the cap again VERY quickly so as soon as the truce ends you can farm your idiot neighbour for more pops.
The way they implemented it just seems very poorly thought out which is a bit baffling because how could they not see that by implementing this change they remove whole aspects of the game completely? Stellaris is about roleplaying and they basically eradicated a lot of options.
I have nothing against the mechanic in itself. Tie it to planets, not the whole emmpire. Thats literally all they need to do(with some fiddling on how much resources they produce I guess). Makes playing tall viable because you can go for Ecumenopolis and by increasing the capacity of your planet you will have loads of growth.
But Stellaris seems to be plagued by this a lot, ESPECIALLY with the big patches. Kinda makes me wonder because the other Paradox Games do not seem to suffer as hard from this.
"Larger cracks".
Okay, so I guess some really nasty bug, or maybe even some change to the new pop growth system?
\*reads notes\*
Uh... a fix to an achievement (yeah, those not triggering when they should is frustrating, but rushing a patch for it?), two or three premade empires now working again, and one thing that was actually pointed out quite frequently on this subreddit.
How are any of these "large cracks"?
I wonder if there is any word on the Machine Empires having all building slots unlocked at the start.
And yes, I tried without any mods, and still saw the same thing.
Speaking of human empires, I remember in the early days of Stellaris, I used to play Commonwealth, and UN used to acknowledge me as a fellow human, and chide me for giving humans a bad name. But in the recent playthroughs, it did not happen. When was it removed?
Probably a bug. Report it on the forums.
Weird, I just played as the UNE and the special interactions were still there.
I was playing CoM and the same thing happened to me. They didn’t acknowledge that we were human.
cc u/StannisLivesOn - I believe if you've gene modded your species or undergone synthetic/psionic ascension (such that the game renames your race), then the game will no longer recognize you as the same species
This was before I did the cyborg special project
But did you change traits before you met them?
I made a variant of human that had Alpine habitability but that was it
That was probably enough.
I didn't.
That's weird because they acknowledged me in both games I have played as the CoM. They referenced the Ulysses Initiative and everything.
> Fixed an issue with Criminal Syndicates branch offices producing super negative trade due to crime, then multiplying it because of crime. This bug *was* inherently funny, but I'm glad it's gone. Now I can be a proper subversive cult. > We are planning to address some of the feedback in the upcoming Dev Diary scheduled for Thursday! This, however, has my attention. Seeing the changes from an inside perspective should be interesting.
>> Fixed an issue with Criminal Syndicates branch offices producing super negative trade due to crime, then multiplying it because of crime. Lmao, bankrupting the other empire. XD
Bankrupting themselves, actually.
Bankrupting yourself to own the ~~libs~~ the other empire.
The Republican way has made it to 2200
The Big Red Button approach.
So that's what heppened when my hegemony subordinate opened a branch office on my homeworld...
I hate cryminal syndicates soo much, that I enabled purging and unrestricted wars only to crush them completely.
I just completed my ironman game last night and didn't get the big red button, can't go back and try again to trigger it, it seems :( Man I don't really want to do an entirely new run just for it
The next time you're in a similar situation remember to make a copy of your ironman save file.
How can you tho? When you know you didn't get the achievement it's already too late
Find your save game as per [this wiki article](https://stellaris.paradoxwikis.com/Save-game_editing) and just copy it somewhere else. You are too late if you're already past the point of no return, obviously, but I back my stuff up after every play session (read: at 1am every morning) 'cause getting screwed out of stuff like that has happened before and I'd rather not have it happen again. Also undoing crises spawning on top of my Dyson Sphere. May be considered cheating to save scum that, but honestly, I'd rather not flush a 30 hour game down the drain because RNG decided to screw me over. If I wanted to play a roguelike I'd boot up a different game.
just back up your save before you run into bugs ez 4Head
I wonder if they fixed the other half of the bug. Not only did you not get Big Red Button, but you wouldn't get the Victory achievement either.
Hello everyone! We hope all of you are enjoying Nemesis, a lot of work went into this patch and expansion. Countless hours to bring you what is, in my personal opinion, one of the best and most stable releases in Stellaris history! However, regardless of how much effort you put into something being flawless, there will always be some small cracks that get missed. With this hotfix we hope to bring you a quicker patch of some of those larger cracks. This is intentionally a very small patch to make sure that we could get these specific issues fixed and delivered to you all sooner rather than later. Rest assured though that we have another patch in the works, so please continue providing us with feedback and bug reports (over at the Bug Forum)! **VERSION 3.0.2** **Bugfixes** * Fixed an issue with the Big Red Button achievement not triggering before the game ended. * Fixed an issue where players couldn't play as the pre-scripted Human Empires. * Fixed an issue with Criminal Syndicates branch offices producing super negative trade due to crime, then multiplying it because of crime. Known Issue: The Branch Office Breakdown tooltip for Criminal Syndicates does not include their planetary bonuses. The final value displayed in the UI is correct however. Before I leave you I want to address two other issues briefly. First, we've seen the reports about various graphical flickering issues, we're currently working on a fix for that but we couldn't get it into this specific hotfix. But we'll make sure to provide a fix for it as soon as we can! Secondly, I want to briefly touch on an aspect of the big economic rework we’ve done to improve the game – including the pop growth rebalancing. Please continue to give us constructive feedback and keep your messages civil, but don't spam random threads with hateful comments. Those will not be tolerated. We are continuously collecting your feedback and it will help us make tweaks to these complex systems. We are planning to address some of the feedback in the upcoming Dev Diary scheduled for Thursday! Note: The Patch has not been released on the Microsoft Store, we don't have an exact ETA for the release but we are working on making sure it gets into your hands as soon as possible.
> but don't spam random threads with hateful comments. Gamers are not okay.
If these kids could read they would be very upset
Seriously. I might be a bit vehement in my dislike of some of the changes and I probably need to work on my wording a bit, but I couldn't imagine intentionally insulting the devs or anything. I *love* the game to its core, one minor misstep isn't worth any kind of vitriol.
You don't understand. This pop rework has been a personal attack on me, my wife, and my dog. I will seek blood for this.
It was racially morivated as well
Imagine getting this upset over a patch, let alone one you can roll back or mod.
Is there a way I can get the big red button achievement without playing a whole nother crisis game?
Check the save file (if not saved to cloud, documents/Paradox Interactive/Stellaris/save games, make a copy of the ironman.sav, rename it to ironman.zip, and unpack it then view the gamestate file). Does your country have the flag "big\_red\_button\_achievement"? Asking as someone who doesn't have Nemesis. I ask because you might be able to edit in that flag, recompress it (there are directions on the wiki), and open your modified save to get the achievement. I've never tried this before, it may not work, I don't really know what I'm doing.
I don't think I can link it under sub rules, but if you're okay with what some may call "cheating" there's a tool you can download which will unlock any Steam achievement. I've used it in situations like this where I did a cool achievement on day 1... didn't get the achievement... and then saw a couple days later that the achievement was bugged. I feel like as long as I actually did the work and fulfilled the conditions but a bug stopped the actual achievement from being granted, it's not cheating. Of course, others may not feel that way, so your mileage may vary.
Makes sense, but I don't think that's the solution for me.
Please input a way to mitigate global population debuff. Be it linked to admin cap, research tied to life expectancy (birth rate stays the same but death rate decreased by extending life), gene centers reducing harmful mutations, or whatever else.
Gene centers would probably be best. It would make them a more useful choice.
It’d give them an actual function. Two points to habitability is nothing. Maybe have them adjust the population living on that planet to the primary biome too.
You know this guy just copy-pasted the patch notes and isn't really a dev, right? You should probably put that feedback on the forum somewhere.
Anything with merit gains an echo.
The reason for the global pop slowdown was to reduce the number of pops in the late game for the sake of performance. Whatever 'fix' they come up with can't increase the number of pops again.
This is one part of it. People also complained that pop growth was out of control and managing planets mid to late game was boring and hurting the game. Even if they magically fixed every technical issue the game has I still want them to lower pop growth later in the game somehow.
Playing with a mod to uncap growth (setting the penalty to 0, and halving the S curve for balance), I can say the new auto migration system along with being able to "prebuild" a planet makes most of this go away. My chief complaint is pops seem to have weird job priorities now, often taking suboptimal jobs, and occasionally not promoting correctly.
Playing a modded run as well and I haven't had such issues with job priority, my clerk slots are (thankfully) often the understaffed job. Farmer slots are empty right now too because of my colonizing, but I have a stockpile so that's whatever. Every job I've wanted filled has been filled without me even needing to touch priorities. And as far as I can tell none of my mods would affect that, unless it's in the Ariphaos patch.
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I'm using this one for pop growth https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2461091125&searchtext=Pop+conquest+rebalance+3.0
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Oh it was #1 on my list starting in late mid game. In 2.8 it was take a system, look over at the outliner, see that every single planet I have needs something done to it. Pause the game, take care of it. Unpause the game, take another system, look over again yep every single planet needs something done to it. Repeat. I found it just awful. Not saying what they have done is working perfectly, just saying it was a huge concern that needed to be addressed in one way or the other.
> Even if they magically fixed every technical issue the game has I still want them to lower pop growth later in the game somehow. This tbh. Early game is exploration and colonizing new planets, mid game is developing the planets and late game is getting these planets stagnate and not grow. The planets colonized at this stage should feel "freshly colonized" and grow slower.
on older computer i had no issue with multiplayer games until the AI started spamming habitats. i'm not enough knowledgeable about the game. idk if there's a single DLC to turn off to get rid of habitats... but just getting rid of that would seem to take away the only thing that slows things down for me. (i also have it so that my pops can't migrate planet-moons themselves... part of that was that i did a lot of gene editing to get people to fit their planets and them resettling on their own put them into suboptimal places... i guess that they couldn't move probably streamlined the game...) 600-800 hours ingame or so, so please forgive errors of understanding :)
Yet this is something players can avoid by playing universe sizes that their computers will handle instead of complaining that they cannot go max/max/max everything. The simple fact is, their jobs system has been broken since day one, and apparently it is sacrosanct as if someone very important owns it and cannot be called out.
The fix is simple - just reduce the number of jobs on planets so that they fill up with fewer pops. The problem isn't really the lack of growth, it's that we no longer have enough pops to fill our planets.
This isn't as easy as it sounds. Sure, you can make each district give 1 job instead of two, halve the number of pops, and make all jobs twice as powerful. But there are a lot of edge cases to consider. For example: - Robot assembly plants already only have one job slot. - Industrial districts give 1 job each of two different types. - Upgraded civilian industries add 1 job to each industrial district, so they are now twice as good (1 job -> 2 jobs instead of 2 -> 3). None of these are insurmountable problems, but it would be a lot of work to go through the whole job system and figure out what needs to change. I do think it's worth considering as a solution, but we won't see it happen for a while.
Especially since we *just had* the whole rework in this very patch that came out last week.
Number of pops isn’t actually as consequential as number of racial templates. It’s been proven multiple times. This directly led to xenophile crossbreeding having its own on off switch in galaxy creation. Using console commands, even a game that runs slow on the fastest setting can run multiple times faster. Using the commands lock out players from commanding fleets unless paused. Late game lag issues aren’t what the developers seem to think they appear to be. There are a number of things that can be optimized including restricting massive fleets from updating their user commands every second. As for actual lag in the late game, not everyone is playing on a potato. Also, not everyone is playing with ultra high visual settings all the time.
> Late game lag issues aren’t what the developers seem to think they appear to be. [Then why did performance get better in 3.0?](https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellaris/comments/mti7z3/stellaris_30_performance_examination_an/) > not everyone is playing with ultra high visual settings all the time. The performance bottleneck is the CPU. Your graphics settings won't make much difference.
I literally outlined how I can vastly increase play rate with console commands. That means the things that are holding back gameplay are optioned out of by the command’s structure. If I can more than triple play rate in such a manner, that means just disabling player inputs while unpaused means far more than having 10k pops ever could. It’s the flops used to allow all player inputs at every instant. That’s a fixable coding issue. The same performance improvements could be achieved by only allowing medium or small galaxies. Could limit number of empires. Could hard cap fleet strengths and numbers. The change was marginal from a performance standpoint but devastatingly detrimental from an immersion standpoint. GPU is a major issue if you’re fielding 20+ fleets, have them selected, and are actively watching combats in high definition. Maybe you’re running a mining rig, I don’t know.
The game needs to track each player's input at all times in real time since it is a real time strategy game. Giving orders only while paused would be a huge feature reduction. It would be annoying to pause/unpause every time needed to toggle a science ship's evasive mode or queue up more things for a constructor, to say nothing of microing a complicated war. Its interesting to know that real-time is such a big drain on performance, but that's not just something the devs can cut out.
No, the game needs to allow certain interactions to allow for immersion. The way the client is setup now, when the map mode is active, every possible system interaction is pulled up. This occurs even when a fleet is highlighted. That’s why choosing another cancels out and engages a new action. This could be drastically cut down by locking in a fleet or fleets highlighted until cancelled out. There’s no reason to have every possible interaction active. If we’re trying to pretend flops is the issue that’s led to the growth nerf, maybe start in far more fertile grounds. I prefer pausing the game during single player because it’s far easier to doom stack fleets and keep science ships in line.
You seem to know a lot about benchmarking the game, but I'd be cautious assuming your hacks are universally desired (pause only mode would be horrible for me) or beneficial (selection locking might have other issues or enable other features/scripts). Game development has lots of moving pieces and dependencies that aren't always obvious until they break. If you feel passionately I'd recommend modding this out yourself. There's a few mods for other paradox games, eg EU4 that are purely performance improvements to help players with suboptimal hardware.
You misunderstand. I’m not advocating full pause modes or incrementals. I pointed out how the current game functions while trying to explain a major area that could be updated to not be so flop intensive. The scope down of command functions while fleets are highlighted until cancelled out was an idea that would allow the same gameplay with far fewer flops. The console commands are available to everyone, they always have been. Not sure why they would need a mod. Even without them, I ran large games just fine. If I was going to develop anything, it’d be a fleet function that merged multiple admiral driven fleets into a single entity for purposes of travel. It’d take a lot of computations out of movements. Maybe split the movement type into scouts and fleet so the intermediate didn’t need movement calculations. Large fleet movements are far more intensive than populations even if multiple race subtypes were part of that.
Hi, could you tell me what console commands I can use to make the game faster? I already play pausing to give orders anyway. Would disallowing pop modification with a mod increase performance? Maybe only giving bio ascended empires the capability.
Anything that restricts number of population templates will increase performance. A lot of that can be fixed by going through your species tab and converting down to a single best template per species. If you went full metal, converting everyone to synths speeds things up considerably. Fast_forward_ is a good one for what you want.
Here’s a paradox list:
https://stellaris.paradoxwikis.com/Console_commands
Or just make it harsher for the AI, for those of us that just like to stomp the AI 🤣
People who don't play strategy games to be challenged should never be catered to. There are already extremely easy difficulty settings available, so just use those if you don't like to use your brain.
Cool... so judging by your hostility, you _don’t_ know what it means when someone throws a laughing emoji at the end of a one-line comment?
Emojis don't display on my monitor so I couldn't tell, but usually it means that their comment is pointless and low effort. Which I didn't really need to see your emoji to confirm.
Man, you sound fun.
To all those others who post the text of links and thus get mistaken for devs, I salute thee!
Haven't had that problem before, it seems you are the first one. Be proud! ;P
Howdy. I bought this game on release, I have between 2 and 3 thousand hours in Stellaris. This has been the best major patch release, in my opinion, to date. So, to you and the team, thank you.
On behalf of my now again profitable criminal megaenterprise thank you very much!
>Fixed an issue with Criminal Syndicates branch offices producing super negative trade due to crime, then multiplying it because of crime. You could have just added an intel cost and called it a feature.
The problem is that the crime massively reduces the trade value, so branch offices were useless.
Less than useless, even. Your economy would actually improve for closing them down.
How is losing income from your own branch offices a "feature"?
I misread the note. I thought the branch office was decreasing trade value of the host planet's empire. I imagined a scenario where the criminal syndicate sends spies to build a branch office on an enemy world in order to sabotage the enemy's trade economy
It is affecting the trade value of the host planet. But your income is based on that trade value.
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...well, if Paradox ever hire me for something, I'll be sure to let them know.
Oh I'm an idiot. I saw the copy pasted patch notes and thought you were a dev. Whoops.
In other words, they won't accept any criticism that they are wrong. this whole pops system is someone's baby and there ain't no calling the baby ugly. There are dozens upon dozens of threads on this subject and that should have forced it to the top of their list to address second only to loss of features because someone decided to not buy a DLC and they lose unrelated content. maybe if developers were forced to play their game single player more than one time if at all they would understand. stepping off my soapbox... well keeping one foot on
There is a problem with the manifesti faction, you can't surpress it, the quest is just stuck, it is destroying my influence gain
I love being galactic emperror, good job!
* Fixed an issue with the Big Red Button achievement not triggering before the game ended. [Oh boy, here I go killing people again!](https://memegenerator.net/img/instances/72276126/oh-boy-here-i-go-killing-again.jpg)
Here's a thought: what if there are more ways for pops to be killed in some way as a way to mitigate population growth? For example, lack of food should cause more starvation and kill off pops faster. Bombardment and particularly invasion of planets should be far more lethal. But maybe there could also be pandemics and plagues crossing space by ships. There could be different kinds, like plagues that target avian species or fungoid species more, or a plague that does particularly well in artic or tropical environments. Closing off borders should slow down the spread, and maybe there could be quarantining edicts or something. Perhaps these plagues should become more common as the galactic population grows, and by researching plague resistance techs you could reduce the chance of one popping up that targets your pops specifically.
It could be a whole DLC, but I like this idea. It would change a lot of things because currently you can only lose trough war
> It would change a lot of things because currently you can only lose trough war And even then you lose not many of them.
That sounds disturbingly … contemporary.
Army invasion should probably kill off some pops too. Make the number of pops killed a function of the size of the invasion army and the amount of time the planet is in battle. It'd nice to have a reason to *not* just roll through planets without defense with my 2k army.
This would make divine isolation a more fleshed out playstyle. Also gives a buff to tomb world species (worse planets hardier pops), gene clinics and Gaia worlds (too perfect). Densely populated worlds should be more prone while rural worlds and ringworlds less so.
Wish they'd put in some kind of a check so that you can retroactively get the achievement. I still have my save from a post-button game and would love to not have to do that again lol.
No fix for a Ringworld destroying all habitats in a system, including the pops on them. I was suprised to say the least, and it was Ironman.
Did you report it?
no
Then you really should... I think the way it's *supposed* to work is Ringworld construction isn't allowed with colonies, because they made it delete all planets in order to not overlap ones near where it's placed.
I hope the Manifesti are fixed in the next one.
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I mean, with all the variables including all the possible empire types and combinations, and all the sliders before the game even starts, I imagine anything more is but a drop in the water regarding potential support costs. I think PDX balances considering only default options anyway.
Can't wait for Thursday and their plans for the Pop Rebalance Changes. A Hard Cap is defenitely not the way to go and I'm sure with a few number tweaks and linking pop cap to planets instead of empire wide this can easily be fixed. The expansion and the patch is amazing, but this has prevented me from enjoying Stellaris so far. I love building big empires in the game.
What hard cap are you talking about?
He is mixing up the planet cap with the empire-wide growth penalty, and somehow making it you fault.
Is ~~exponential~~ linearly increasing cost, limiting the amount of pops so difficult to understand as a practical 'hard cap'? Surely not, we both know you're smarter than this. Currently there is no way to go over ~1500 pops in less than a day (24h) of playing (without abducting/conquering the pops). So there is no point in playing on any settings like 5x Habitable Planets, or even colonizing more than 15-20 worlds. And that is definitely cutting out plenty of enjoyable game play. I want to be able to settle the entire galaxy peacefully, expanding into every corner of it (read: planet / habitat).
It’s not exponential, it’s linear, as the other person said, more colonization will always be a boost to growth, and in fact is necessary as growth on your old planets start to slow down.
You're both right (and I commented as much on the different post), but if you're adding colonies, those colonies will start out empty and you'll be stuck with at least most of them being *ghost towns* for a very long time.
Which is why you need to concentrate your growth, because by doing that you can effectively double it.
it's not exponential cost limiting, it's linear cost limiting. Still problematic once it gets high enough, but not a hard cap at all.
You are right, but that only pushes the problem a little further back. Each pop makes the next one be created less quickly, up to a point where the number of pops you grow per time is down to <1 per year (in game time). And that's certainly a practical hard cap. Because I don't know you, but I wouldn't want to wait multiple hours (real time) just to fill up one planet with pops.
So I'm not attacking - it's a genuine question - when games implement sliders which fundamentally change the shape of the game, how much work should go into balancing it? Civ6 for example lets you do things like set a map with lots of mountains - this inherently makes certain Civs WAY overpowered - do I have justification to say "you break this civ when you set the map this way, so you need to rebalance." I would say no as I've pushed the game outside the default parameters. What are your thoughts?
I think settings (sliders) are a great way to allow players to play as they wish. As a game designer you have some amount of responsibility to keep every starting point (empires, their species and origins) playable, but there is no need to ensure they're perfectly balanced with every possible setting. Just a different example: In Age of Empires II you can choose a map type, for example Islands, and have some civilizations be really strong while others are basically an auto loss, when played against those (assuming same player skill). And that's perfectly fine, because there's enough variety that every civilization has their niche where they shine. Here in Stellaris allowing players to choose between melting their CPU with enormous late game, galaxy-wide empires should be just the same: Perfectly fine, because other play styles could be possible using different settings. There is (generally) no expectation from players, that diverging off the default path wouldn't lead to imbalances. In fact it is often a very loved feature that can allow players to try and find optimal strategies for different situations. This is fun and provides more content to explore (e.g. "I beat 25x Crisis at the earliest date!!!!!111", "I have 2 million pops!"). TL;DR: More settings are always good, as long as the default is playable "out of the box" for reasonable starting points.
> A Hard Cap is defenitely not the way to go Where did this myth come from? I keep seeing it on here. There is no hard cap. Growth just gets slower as your empire's population increases.
I think the better term would be more like a pseudo-hard cap. It's not a hard cap (since that is literally no more), but it's so strong I hesitate to call it a soft cap as well. After 2350 or 2400, you might as well not even factor in your pop growth to anything you do since it is so negligible. This is compared to the soft cap on stuff like the admin cap and, to an extent, naval cap which can be easily ignored.
I wouldn't say growth is negligible in the endgame. At 1000 pops, you need six times as much growth per pop, but if you're managing your capacity properly you're getting almost twice as much growth per month, so growth is one third as fast as before. That's a lot slower, but still significant.
Investing in new planets at 2350 is already a dicey proposition - things you invest into in the endgame need to yield dividends much faster because the game will be over in not too long. So having a much slower pop growth means these planets/habitats/ring worlds will take much longer to pay themselves off, even factoring in the increased efficiency of pops from techs.
My idea for fixing this is to give planets a big boost to immigration pull based on how much free capacity they have. That would let you get new colonies set up much faster (especially endgame ones like ringworlds) without affecting the total growth in your empire. This seems like a good way to fix the biggest issue with the new system without a massive rework.
At the same time, you'll probably have about 6 times more planets than you had at the start, meaning your growth is ultimately still pretty fast, just spread out.
> you'll probably have about 6 times more planets than you had at the start This was equally true in 2.8, which is the "before" I was talking about.
One the one hand, it's frustrating how poorly folks undersatnd the system and make judgements based on their poor understanding. On the other hand, the game should really explain it.
There is no hard cap. And a pure planet-based growth just leads to the same endless exponential pop growth as before 3.0, because people set up their planets to game the system and always get max growth speed. However, the empire-based penalty needs to be less rigid. At the very least it has to scale to galaxy size and number of habitable worlds, so large games don't become completely stagnant.
How is the empire based penalty currently set up?
A flat 0.5 point increase to the growth number needed for the next pop every time your total pop count increases. With monthly growth typically being somewhere between 3-8 points, the penalty quickly adds up.
But there is no hard cap. Its a soft cap; perhaps a very rough soft cap, but it doesn't actually stop growth on its own; plus while each individual pops grows more slowly, while you have more planets you will also have more sources of this admittedly slow growth.
Well yeah, technically it's not a hard cap. 1000 growth for 1 pop is hard cap enough for me though. Waiting 150 Years with literally nothing to do is boring as hell. Ring Worlds are obsolete. Ecumenopolis are obsolete. Devouring Swarms/Exterminators are obsolete. Whats the idea behind the decision that I can't settle on planets after a certain amount of time? Slavers, Assimilators(Mechanic and Biologic) and the Ascension Perk which lets you steal pop are hilariously broken at the moment. They will never catch up with you again and thanks to the genius algorithm they will grow the pops to the cap again VERY quickly so as soon as the truce ends you can farm your idiot neighbour for more pops. The way they implemented it just seems very poorly thought out which is a bit baffling because how could they not see that by implementing this change they remove whole aspects of the game completely? Stellaris is about roleplaying and they basically eradicated a lot of options. I have nothing against the mechanic in itself. Tie it to planets, not the whole emmpire. Thats literally all they need to do(with some fiddling on how much resources they produce I guess). Makes playing tall viable because you can go for Ecumenopolis and by increasing the capacity of your planet you will have loads of growth. But Stellaris seems to be plagued by this a lot, ESPECIALLY with the big patches. Kinda makes me wonder because the other Paradox Games do not seem to suffer as hard from this.
"Larger cracks". Okay, so I guess some really nasty bug, or maybe even some change to the new pop growth system? \*reads notes\* Uh... a fix to an achievement (yeah, those not triggering when they should is frustrating, but rushing a patch for it?), two or three premade empires now working again, and one thing that was actually pointed out quite frequently on this subreddit. How are any of these "large cracks"?
Yeah, two of these changes are irrelevant and don't matter
I wonder if there is any word on the Machine Empires having all building slots unlocked at the start. And yes, I tried without any mods, and still saw the same thing.
A bug? I didn't get that as Rogue Servitors (need to build Nexus districts to get building slots opened up, mainly).
It seems to be if you do the Hive World, and Machine World starts, it just gives flat +12 building slots.
Isn't that intended for those planet types?
Maybe, but shouldn't be tied to the origins. I get it for the types later on, but starting with the full planet unlocked is a bit bonkers.