by Eladrin

Hello everyone!

This week we’re going to look at the upcoming changes to Pops in the Stellaris 4.0 ‘Phoenix’ update.

Last week I said we might also look at the Planet UI, but I’m going to save that until next week since there’s quite a bit to cover here (especially if you’re into the technical details), and I’d rather not split the feedback.

As mentioned in Dev Diary 366[forum.paradoxplaza.com], the Pop and Jobs system introduced in Stellaris 2.2 ‘Le Guin’ has always had significant performance implications in the late game, and we’ve been working on incremental improvements ever since. In the Stellaris 4.0 ‘Phoenix’ update, Pops will be grouped into Pop Groups based on species, strata, ethics, and faction, and these Pop Groups will produce Workforce that is used to fill (or partially fill) Jobs. As part of this change, we’re changing the overall scale of Pops - most things that previously affected or manipulated 1 Pop would now affect or manipulate groups of 100. The new systems can manipulate any number of Pops within a Pop Group just as easily as manipulating one, and I’ll go into some of the benefits of the finer resolution below.

Our primary desire with these changes is to improve late-game performance, but while working on it we took the opportunity to streamline some aspects of planetary management and improve the planet UI.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the details.

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In Stellaris, the core economic loop since 2.2 has been: Pops fill Jobs, and Jobs produce resources.

With the 4.0 ‘Phoenix’ update, we’re making a subtle but important change - Pops will now generate Workforce, which is used to fill Jobs, and planets themselves will produce resources.

At a basic level, this works almost the same way. By default, every Pop generates 1 Workforce, so Jobs are still filled at the same rate. However, this shift is crucial for backend performance improvements, reducing the number of calculations the game needs to make each month.

Example: Then vs. Now​
Before (3.14):

• Take a planet with 100 Pops working Metallurgist Jobs, where 20 of them have a +10% Production Bonus from a Species Trait.
  
• These 100 Pops produce 612 Alloys per month.
  
• Every Pop is individually checked - 80 produce the standard amount, while 20 get a 10% Alloy production bonus from their species trait.

Now (4.0):

• Instead of tracking individual Pops, we track Workforce filling Jobs.
  
• Jobs are now filled by 10,000 Workforce (since Pops are scaled up by 100).
  
• 8,000 Workforce comes from regular Pops, while 2,000 Workforce comes from the bonus-earning Pops.
  
  • The species bonus is now “10% bonus Workforce when working Alloy jobs” - those Pops contribute an extra 200 Workforce, making the total 10,200 Workforce. Bonus Workforce is allowed to go over the required Workforce for a job, yielding extra production.
• If 100 Workforce still produces 6 Alloys, the planet still produces 612 Alloys - same output, different system.

Why This Matters:​
The key benefit is efficiency. Instead of iterating through and calculating production for every individual Pop, the game now only checks once per planet. This makes the system more scalable and improves performance, while still allowing for species based bonuses and modifiers.

Most existing species traits that affect Job production will be converted into Workforce bonuses or planet-based modifiers. As always, the final balancing will be refined through the Open Beta.

There are a few quirks and subtleties about how this interacts with other modifiers - bonus Workforce as a modifier is more powerful than bonus Production due to the two of them stacking multiplicatively rather than additively.

Pop groups are currently split up by Species, Strata, Ethics, and Faction. If you end up in a case where a Pop group is not completely uniform (for example, if 20% of the Pop group are recent refugees and thus happier than the rest), then the differences get averaged across the Pop group.

If none of this feels like it makes sense - it’s okay. It’s mostly a behind-the-scenes change. Jobs require Workforce to fill them, and that’s generated by Pops. We have some ideas about ways to expand upon this in the future, such as replacing part of the Workforce with automation by using a building.

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With more granular Pop units, we have more ability to support simultaneous growth of Pops on a planet. Each species present on a planet will grow normally, and with the smaller unit size, will grow every month.

This results in several benefits, including multi-species empires not getting their growth dominated by underrepresented species, and also lets us remove the floor on colony Pop growth. This does mean that newly settled colonies will be very reliant on migration to grow their population until they develop to the point where they can support their own Pop growth, and removes a long-running issue where spamming colonies regardless of habitability simply for the minimum flat Pop growth was optimal.

Xeno-Compatibility will pool all species on a multi-species planet together to calculate their growth rate, then split the growth proportionally across the various species.

Assembly works largely the way it did before, except that fractional Assembly will become “microPops” thanks to the finer resolution of Pops. Machine and Organic Assembly will no longer conflict with one another, as the Organic Pops will handle their own growth, while all mechanical assembly will be channeled towards the highest “score” mechanical Pop templates available.

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Since your new colonies will be extremely reliant on migration from their homeworld until they reach a critical mass of inhabitants where they can begin to support themselves, we’re adding a new population stratum called Civilians (or Residents, for species without full citizenship). These Civilians form the generally content base of your empire, and will trickle out to the colonies, looking for better opportunities. Unemployed Pops will still exist and downgrade through the strata, with unemployed Worker stratum Pops demoting to Civilians over time. This will have an impact on stability, as Civilians are largely content and non-disruptive.

Spoiler: More Technical Details

This is mostly for you modders out there to abuse, but in the new system, “Unemployed Specialist” will technically be a Job - there’ll be one for each stratum. Every Job can have a demotion target assigned to it, and a time.

In our implementation, all of the Specialist stratum Jobs will demote to Unemployed Specialist; Unemployed Specialist will demote to Unemployed Worker, and Unemployed Worker will demote to Civilian as they give up on their dreams of productivity and veg out in front of the holoscreen.

Your homeworld will start with a fairly large pool of Civilians to support your early expansion. We’re a bit worried about early conquest of homeworlds being too easy of a snowball with this increased starting Pop count, so are considering various ways of making it more challenging to take homeworlds in the early to mid game. One idea we have includes having Civilians create impromptu defensive militias to help defend their home, and possibly starting you off with a few Defensive Platforms. Another idea is for aggressively invaded Civilians to take “Resistance” Jobs that they must then “demote” out of over time. The number of Civilians converted to this new Job and how long it takes them to drop out of it would be modified depending on how their people are being treated by their new and old masters.

We welcome your ideas and suggestions.

We’re currently still experimenting with the effects Living Standards have on Civilians (and Pops in general) - it’s likely that more of the Trade generation from Living Standards will be shifted to the Civilian stratum, and production from Unemployed Pops in the old system may also move to the Civilians. This will give them some of the functions of Clerks in the old economic model. In Gestalt empires, they are likely going to be outright named Maintenance Drones rather than “Civilians”.

We’re also renaming the Ruler stratum to “Elites”, so “Ruler” isn’t double-dipping between your Empire’s ruler at the top economic stratum.

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Next week we’ll be going through the new Planet UI, and how all of this changes things there.

by Eladrin

Hello everyone!

Today we’re going to take a glance at the Trade and Logistics changes coming in the Stellaris 4.0 ‘Phoenix’ update, then check out some new portraits.

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Trade as a Standard Resource​

The Trade system introduced in the Stellaris 2.2 ‘Le Guin’ update was raised as an especially frequent point of confusion for many players. UX issues around disconnected trade stations combined with some quirks of being a modifier based system (like ignoring habitability) made some of it unintuitive. The system had a major impact on performance as well, so while examining Stellaris for optimizations, we decided that we wanted to revamp the system.

In 4.0, Trade will become a standard advanced resource, generally produced in the same way as before, but will follow all of the standard rules around resource-producing jobs. The Trade Routes system has been removed - any produced Trade will be immediately collected like any other normal resource.

We’ve done some cleanup to the top bar while we were in there.​

Logistical Upkeep​

Hello, Gruntsatwork[forum.paradoxplaza.com] here, with Eladrin’s UI wizardry done, I shall step in to reveal some of our trade secrets to you.

The majority of your trade upkeep will come from 2 sources in the new system.

First, local planetary deficits will carry a small trade upkeep, a fraction of the missing resources value on the galactic market. This represents the logistical effort required to commandeer freighters to supply a world that is not self-sufficient and therefore requires resources to be transported in from off-world. Mind you, this will occur in addition to normal deficits, if your entire empire is not capable of supplying those needs either.

In short, your planets will either satisfy their own local needs, or require trade to offset the logistics cost.

The second major trade upkeep will come from Fleets. Any fleets currently docked at one of your starbases have no trade upkeep.

Once your fleets start to move they will gain a small Trade Upkeep, representing the logistical efforts required to support them. This small upkeep will increase if your fleets are in hostile territory – that is territory owned by another empire you are at war with, as supplying them becomes so much more dangerous and space insurance coverage is no joke.

In the future, logistical upkeep could potentially be used to counter-act Doomstacking, for example by scaling upkeep with the number of ships in a fleet, dividing by the number of fleets, fleets per system etc, we have no concrete solution yet, but welcome your thoughts.

With these new sources of trade upkeep, it is of course important to mention that we will also introduce a new trade deficit. Like Unity, this will not create a Deficit Situation but a country modifier that persists until the deficit is dealt with. Running a trade deficit will reduce advanced resource production (alloys, consumer goods, unity, and research) and all ship weapons damage.

Stockpiling Trade and Using Trade in the Market​

Our intent is for Trade Policies to continue to exist going forward. Currently, we expect to have half of your net Trade income (after paying Logistical Upkeep) converted to other resources using your Trade Policy, plus any that might otherwise overflow your storage. Some of the current Trade Policies may be tweaked a bit. The rest will go into your resource stockpile as an advanced resource.

In addition, the galactic market has been adjusted so that its primary trading resource is Trade. As such, energy is now available on the market as a standard resource. The energy storage cap has been brought to the same level as minerals and food, while Trade’s storage cap has been set to 50.000 at the base level.

As we are in the middle of implementation, we are adjusting this as we receive internal feedback and will continue to do so when it is time for our open beta.

We will be keeping a close eye on the value of trade as a resource. If necessary, we’ll keep turning the dials to ensure it is an actually interesting resource to focus on.

For modders, the main market resource is set as a define and can be switched to something else.

Gestalt Empires and Trade​

Rejoice, friends of bugs and bolts, for you too will be able to enjoy the benefits of trade starting with 4.0.

As part of the Phoenix update, Gestalt empires will be able to collect trade like normal empires do, from both jobs and deposits.

In contrast to normal empires, Gestalt empires will rarely do so with Traders and Clerks, instead their most basic drones, maintenance drones for example, will create trade in addition to their normal resources and modifiers. In addition, they will also have access to Trade Policies, to enrich their common wallet.

Of course, with benefits come drawbacks, and so Gestalt Empires will also deal with the logistical upkeep for local planetary deficits and Fleets that are not docked and/or within hostile territory. The Galactic Market will of course also accept gestalt trade as its main resource.

In the future, we are also considering Megacorp Gestalt Empires, for your corporate drone needs, but whether we will have time to do that for 4.0 or later remains to be seen.

Corporate Branch Office Updates​

For Branch Offices, we have a plethora of improvements ready for your enjoyment, courtesy of our ever industrious Mr.Cosmogone.

Branch office buildings are now all limited to 1 per planet and now give more appropriate jobs to the host planet. They also increase local trade production based on those jobs and their corporate resource output is in turn increased by local trade.

Most Corporate Civics now also give bonuses to a specific branch office building, increasing its trade value bonus and receiving Merchant jobs on their Capital from it.

Numerous changes have been made to Criminal Syndicates:

• Criminal Empires can now establish commercial pacts. Having a commercial pact with a Criminal Empire will replace all criminal buildings with their "lawful" counterpart. As long as the commercial pact remains, criminal branch offices will not be removed from the planet.
  
• All Criminal branch office buildings have had their crime value set to 25 and give one Criminal Job alongside a regular Job.
  
• We have also added a crime floor to non-criminal branch office buildings on empires they have a trade agreement with, which means there will always be a minimum amount of crime on the branch office planet. Criminal branch offices are also up to 25% more profitable on high crime planets.

Balance-wise, these buildings are more impactful, so branch office buildings now cost influence, and branch offices now take up 5 empire size instead of 2.

Oh, and we have also allowed Megacorps to open branch offices on other Megacorps... The influence cost is doubled when built on a planet owned by another Megacorp.

Mammalian Portraits​

Thanks, Gruntsatwork. Now a message from Content Design Lead CGInglis[forum.paradoxplaza.com]:

And now my deer friends, one mooo-re surprise for you! The Stellaris 4.0 ‘Phoenix’ update brings ten paws-itively stunning new Mammalian portraits to the base game!

Glass of milk, standing in between extinction in the cold, and explosive radiating growth…

The Gremlin

A regal Hippopotaxeno

My, what big teeth you have.

The secrets of enlightenment are waiting.


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Next week we’ll start talking about how Pops will change and might pull up the new Planet UI. Since the branch itself is still very full of placeholders, we’ll be using the design mockups while explaining the changes.

See you then!