Stellaris: a second Astral Planes has hit the game

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Stellaris: a second Astral Planes has hit the game

Fister Roboto: Feb 21, 2008

The job assignment AI is still way over-emphasizing maintenance drones. As long as there are available maintenance drone slots, it will fill them, so you have to disable them manually. And then of course there's no alert for having low amenities because ???

e: looks like part of the problem is that maintenance drones get 2x weight for charismatic pops, which seems kind of rear end-backwards. The whole point of having extra amenities is to make your other jobs more productive, but you don't get that if all your pops are producing amenities :shepface:

Fister Roboto fucked around with this message at 19:40 on Feb 9, 2019

# ? Feb 9, 2019 19:24

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# ? Apr 23, 2024 10:13

ZypherIM: Nov 8, 2010; "I want to see what she's in love with."

Fister Roboto posted:

The job assignment AI is still way over-emphasizing maintenance drones. As long as there are available maintenance drone slots, it will fill them, so you have to disable them manually. And then of course there's no alert for having low amenities because ???

e: looks like part of the problem is that maintenance drones get 2x weight for charismatic pops, which seems kind of rear end-backwards. The whole point of having extra amenities is to make your other jobs more productive, but you don't get that if all your pops are producing amenities

Stop building shittons of extra maintenance drone jobs?

# ? Feb 9, 2019 19:59

Mygna: Sep 12, 2011

ZypherIM posted:

Stop building shittons of extra maintenance drone jobs?

Let's assume you're playing a gestalt empire with the synchronicity traditions filled out. One of your planets only has +1 amenities, so you build a maintenance depot. Which of the following two scenarios is less annoying:

a) Five technician drones immediately quit to fill the new jobs instead, bringing you to +20 amenities (which translates into a production bonus of like 0.5-1% or whatever) at the cost of losing ~50 energy credit production until five new drones have grown or you manually disable maintenance jobs

b) The five new job slots slowly get filled at the same priority as other worker jobs, comfortably and automatically keeping you out of negative amenities without crippling your resource income

# ? Feb 9, 2019 20:56

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

Mygna posted:

Let's assume you're playing a gestalt empire with the synchronicity traditions filled out. One of your planets only has +1 amenities, so you build a maintenance depot. Which of the following two scenarios is less annoying:

a) Five technician drones immediately quit to fill the new jobs instead, bringing you to +20 amenities (which translates into a production bonus of like 0.5-1% or whatever) at the cost of losing ~50 energy credit production until five new drones have grown or you manually disable maintenance jobs

b) The five new job slots slowly get filled at the same priority as other worker jobs, comfortably and automatically keeping you out of negative amenities without crippling your resource income

How many charismatic drones do you have?

# ? Feb 9, 2019 21:01

Mygna: Sep 12, 2011

Taking the "SA forum poster" civic disables those.

# ? Feb 9, 2019 21:07

Fister Roboto: Feb 21, 2008

ZypherIM posted:

Stop building shittons of extra maintenance drone jobs?

Every loving time I post in this thread to highlight a problem I've found, there's always someone who thinks that I'm asking for advice, and it's almost always you. I know how to deal with the problem. I'm trying to say that it shouldn't be a problem in the first place. Seriously, stop doing this.

# ? Feb 9, 2019 21:51

QuarkJets: Sep 8, 2008

ZypherIM posted:

I mean, how many planets do you even have, and what percentage of your empire production is from them?

Perk wise, let's say you take executive vigor, ascension path A, ascension path B, galactic wonders, master builders. That leaves you 3 to play with. Collosus project is something you mentioned, and is always fun. The endgame crisis is going to be a legit threat, so defender of the galaxy seems good as well. I'd argue that in terms of usefulness for this build, that galactic force projection (bunch of free cap), eternal vigilance (starbases buffed a lot), or grasp the void (5 starbases is more cap than GFP but is expensive, or can be defense in depth setup) all are much better choices than gaia worlds.

I think I'd rather have gaia worlds than 5 extra starbases or eternal vigilance

# ? Feb 9, 2019 22:02

Fister Roboto: Feb 21, 2008

Also its kind of hard to not build maintenance jobs! As a perfectly generic machine intelligence, you start off with five maintenance jobs, of which you need exactly zero to support your starting population. Every time you build a nexus for housing, you get another useless maintenance job. It's stupid.

Here's a great idea: let us fiddle with the job assignment priorities within the game! If I want to have a planet emphasize food, it will assign more farmers! If I want my planets to just meet my basic demands and put everything else into research, make it do that! loving MOO3 gave you that ability, and that was a literally unplayable game that came out almost 20 years ago!

# ? Feb 9, 2019 22:11

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

That's in progress (tm) according to dev tweets. You'll be able to star three particular jobs, one per tier, and they'll be prioritised over other jobs. I hope it's smart enough to fill them with the best jobs and also replace the workers if a better worker shows up.

# ? Feb 9, 2019 22:26

ZypherIM: Nov 8, 2010; "I want to see what she's in love with."

Mygna posted:

Let's assume you're playing a gestalt empire with the synchronicity traditions filled out. One of your planets only has +1 amenities, so you build a maintenance depot. Which of the following two scenarios is less annoying:

a) Five technician drones immediately quit to fill the new jobs instead, bringing you to +20 amenities (which translates into a production bonus of like 0.5-1% or whatever) at the cost of losing ~50 energy credit production until five new drones have grown or you manually disable maintenance jobs

b) The five new job slots slowly get filled at the same priority as other worker jobs, comfortably and automatically keeping you out of negative amenities without crippling your resource income

You seem to not understand the production bonus from stability. The bonus from stability is 60% as long as you're over 50%. The actual increase to stability (or happiness if you're a normal empire) is FLOOR((Extra Amenities / Total Amenities Consumed) * 20). So the more developed your planet the less of a bonus you're getting. A charismatic race will get +24 amenities for 5 drones, bringing your total to +25. If you have 100 pops, you're using 95 amenities (since you have the harmony tree filled and there is a base usage of 5), which means you'd have a stability bonus of 5 and a production bonus from that of 3%. If you had 30 pops you'd have a usage of 32 meaning a stab bonus of 15 and a production bonus of 9%.

I don't disagree that filling all the jobs at once isn't optimal. How useful bonus production from amenities is is really dependent on the planet. If you have a world production specialist output you're usually restricted by building slots, so getting an additional bonus is quite good. If you have a world outputting raw resources getting a production bonus isn't that useful, as often even producing other raw resources and using the market is better than a production bonus. Maybe an additional weight factor based on the planet specialization type, so that rural/agri/mining/generator worlds aim to have the absolute bare minimum while others keep the current?

The way the weighting is set is that if you have the specialty trait that drone gets double weight for the job. So if you have +mining on a drone, that drone will have double the weight for mining jobs. The reason charismatic drones have a bonus weight for amenity jobs is because how pissed would you be if your non-charismatic drones were working those? How often have people complained that their mining or farming specialty drones aren't taking those jobs? There is also a varied weight based on the amount of extra amenities currently produced on the planet.

You shouldn't be crashing your economy off of stuff like this though. Do you actually wait until you've got unemployed drones before building production buildings?

Fister Roboto posted:

Every loving time I post in this thread to highlight a problem I've found, there's always someone who thinks that I'm asking for advice, and it's almost always you. I know how to deal with the problem. I'm trying to say that it shouldn't be a problem in the first place. Seriously, stop doing this.

We constantly have people in here complaining that their specialized workers aren't working those specialized jobs. So they go and double the weight for any traits associated with those jobs, and you roll in with "charismatic drones getting double weight for amenity jobs is stupid as gently caress". Or that gestalts struggle with amenities, and they add in machines getting a job on city districts and you're here with "you get another useless maintenance job. It's stupid".

I really feel like I've seen you post almost this exact same thing before, but after backtracking all the way to 2.2.4 notes I didn't find it and gave up. Maybe you have posted things similar to this in the past, where you say there is an issue but it really isn't what you posit it as, and it is intended to do something that you're ignoring, so I offer you advice to deal with it instead of trying to explain in detail what you're not getting? I've got the feeling I've tried to explain in the past and had you just ignore it, so the effort feels wasted.

QuarkJets posted:

I think I'd rather have gaia worlds than 5 extra starbases or eternal vigilance

Each starbase can give +36 raw fleet cap, or 180 from all 5, which is 216 after supremacy's +20%. Eternal vigilance isn't a perk I'm a big fan of, but the person was directly talking about a 0.25 hyperlane game where they'd be building multiple fortress systems, and this perk really increases how useful those are. The guy was also playing on 0.25 habilitable planets, so you have a lot less planets to be turning into gaias. Most normal games I'd probably prefer gaia worlds as well.

# ? Feb 9, 2019 22:58

Relevant Tangent: Nov 18, 2016; Tangentially Relevant

I take the Gaia perk for roleplay reasons, because the empire I'm running is the paradise world start. If you're not going to take it, take the FE/AE beater perk and steal those nerds' planets. Starbases having extra slots means you can mount a death cannon on all of them plus twenty other miscellaneous platforms so I usually take it. You can run a smaller fleet size because there are often at most four ways out of a system and more usually two so if you've got Citadels behind Citadels behind Citadels the enemy fleet is going to get shredded before it gets somewhere important. This assumes you make all your planets at least three systems behind your borders though which is impractical. I was just taking about how the game works at .25 lanes and .25 planets, it's a strategy that collapses pretty quickly when you need to protect a dozen systems instead of a few core systems.

# ? Feb 9, 2019 23:19

Fister Roboto: Feb 21, 2008

The problem is that in this specific case, you end up with a lot of pops doing nothing (except adding a minor productivity bonus for jobs that aren't doing nothing) unless you do a lot of fiddly micromanagement. It's really annoying and it's not that hard to understand. Maintenance jobs having double weight for charismatic pops is stupid as gently caress when you don't need amenities.

Here's what a basic starting planet full of charismatic robots looks like:

Unless I manually disable all of those maintenance jobs, they're just going to stay there no matter what other menial jobs are available (notice the two empty tech jobs). All they provide is +8% productivity to all my other jobs, which is absolute garbage. I'd need a total population of 63 for all five of those maintenance drones to be worth it. So I have to manually disable them to get them to do something useful. And then, since there's no alert for lacking amenities, I need to watch my planets like a hawk for when I need to reenable them when I need them again. And no, I can't just build less maintenance jobs because every planet starts with more than I need, and every nexus that I need for housing adds more.

So yeah, to reiterate: the job assignment AI is way overemphasizing maintenance jobs for charismatic species. They should probably do something about that.

# ? Feb 9, 2019 23:31

Fister Roboto: Feb 21, 2008

# ? Feb 9, 2019 23:43

Truga: May 4, 2014; Lipstick Apathy

IIRC, the issue is that since how job priorities usually work, you'd have negative amenities on a brand new colony until all your complex jobs fill, so maintenance drones have a higher priority so you don't get low stability right off the bat automatically.

I'd fix this by just giving a couple more flat amenities to the hive building but that's just me :shrug:

# ? Feb 9, 2019 23:47

Fister Roboto: Feb 21, 2008

There's already a line in the code to deemphasize maintenance jobs when you have more than 10 extra amenities, but the weight modifier is only 0.9x so it may as well not even be there in comparison to the 2x from charismatic.

There's also a 2x modifier for having less than 10 extra amenities, which seems way too high as well. For comparison, the modifier to the weighting for tech jobs when you have negative energy income is only 1.1x.

# ? Feb 10, 2019 00:05

MrL_JaKiri: Sep 23, 2003; A bracing glass of carrot juice!

I expect that's because a) there's no always visible UI element telling you when a planet is short on amenities and b) energy is global, not local.

# ? Feb 10, 2019 00:12

Fister Roboto: Feb 21, 2008

The UI doesn't matter, I'm talking about in-game variables that the game checks.

Here's what the entry on maintenance drone jobs looks like, just for reference:

code:

maintenance_drone = {
	category = simple_drone
	condition_string = DRONE_JOB_TRIGGER
	building_icon = building_maintenance_depot
	
	possible = {
		drone_job_check_trigger = yes
	}
	
	planet_modifier = {
		planet_amenities_no_happiness_add = 4
	}
	triggered_planet_modifier = {
		potential = {
			OR = {
				has_trait = trait_robot_emotion_emulators
				has_trait = trait_charismatic
			}
		}
		modifier = {
			planet_amenities_no_happiness_add = 0.8
		}
	}
	triggered_planet_modifier = {
		potential = {
			OR = {
				has_trait = trait_robot_uncanny
				has_trait = trait_repugnant
			}
		}
		modifier = {
			planet_amenities_no_happiness_add = -0.8
		}
	}		
	
	weight = {
		weight = @simple_drone_job_weight
		modifier = {
			factor = 2
			OR = {
				has_trait = trait_charismatic
				has_trait = trait_robot_emotion_emulators
			}
		}
		modifier = {
			factor = 1.2
			has_job = maintenance_drone
		}
		modifier = {
			factor = 0.9
			planet = {
				free_amenities > 10
			}
		}
		modifier = {
			factor = 1.1
			planet = {
				free_amenities < 0
			}
		}
		modifier = {
			factor = 1.25
			planet = {
				free_amenities < 5
			}
		}
		modifier = {
			factor = 2
			planet = {
				free_amenities < 10
			}
		}
		modifier = {
			factor = 0.8
			OR = {
				has_trait = trait_robot_uncanny
				has_trait = trait_repugnant
			}
		}
		modifier = {
			factor = 1.1
			exists = owner
			years_passed < 1
			owner = { has_valid_civic = civic_machine_assimilator }
			has_trait = trait_cybernetic
		}		
	}
}

free_amenities is a planet's net amenities.

# ? Feb 10, 2019 00:18

Truga: May 4, 2014; Lipstick Apathy

Lol, is that why a bunch of my colonies kept jumping between 5 and 35 amenities every couple days?

# ? Feb 10, 2019 00:19

Mazz: Dec 12, 2012; Orion, this is Sperglord Actual.
Come on home.

Robot changes look good, very happy to see the 3 society to 1 of each change, I tried that out (and posted about it) and it worked significantly better overall.

Probably going to give 2.2 another go soon, might wait for 2.2.5 full release.

# ? Feb 10, 2019 00:19

Demiurge4: Aug 10, 2011

So we did a quick pickup game of 2.2.4 in Mapgoons and I came away with a few observations.

Performance is up across the board, no noticeable slowdowns at all on fast even during battles.

We had a few too many mega corps in this game and it seems MegaCorps don't have a lot of leeway if they get boxed in or otherwise kept from expanding. If your immediate options for branch offices get taken away from you, you should consider reforming into a regular empire.

The AI is still dumb in a lot of ways. I managed to teach one of our players a valuable lesson about signing defensive pacts with the AI. I declared on the AI and he got pulled into the war... With no option to back out because the AI was war leader. This meant I could just roll straight into his systems and bomb his planets at my leisure, picking up pops left and right and he has no recourse! Meanwhile the AI was mosing about doing god knows what, attacking me wasn't it.

Stellaris desperately needs a separate peace option.

# ? Feb 10, 2019 00:44

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

Fister Roboto posted:

The problem is that in this specific case, you end up with a lot of pops doing nothing (except adding a minor productivity bonus for jobs that aren't doing nothing) unless you do a lot of fiddly micromanagement. It's really annoying and it's not that hard to understand. Maintenance jobs having double weight for charismatic pops is stupid as gently caress when you don't need amenities.

Here's what a basic starting planet full of charismatic robots looks like:

Unless I manually disable all of those maintenance jobs, they're just going to stay there no matter what other menial jobs are available (notice the two empty tech jobs). All they provide is +8% productivity to all my other jobs, which is absolute garbage. I'd need a total population of 63 for all five of those maintenance drones to be worth it. So I have to manually disable them to get them to do something useful. And then, since there's no alert for lacking amenities, I need to watch my planets like a hawk for when I need to reenable them when I need them again. And no, I can't just build less maintenance jobs because every planet starts with more than I need, and every nexus that I need for housing adds more.

So yeah, to reiterate: the job assignment AI is way overemphasizing maintenance jobs for charismatic species. They should probably do something about that.

All charismatic does is increase your amenities. It sounds like the actual problem is it's awkward to limit the number of charismatic robots.

e: Like, if I have charismatic robots, I want them working amenity jobs. If I don't want so many amenities the real problem is I have too many amenity specced robots.

Splicer fucked around with this message at 01:08 on Feb 10, 2019

# ? Feb 10, 2019 01:05

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

Demiurge4 posted:

So we did a quick pickup game of 2.2.4 in Mapgoons and I came away with a few observations.

Performance is up across the board, no noticeable slowdowns at all on fast even during battles.

We had a few too many mega corps in this game and it seems MegaCorps don't have a lot of leeway if they get boxed in or otherwise kept from expanding. If your immediate options for branch offices get taken away from you, you should consider reforming into a regular empire.

The AI is still dumb in a lot of ways. I managed to teach one of our players a valuable lesson about signing defensive pacts with the AI. I declared on the AI and he got pulled into the war... With no option to back out because the AI was war leader. This meant I could just roll straight into his systems and bomb his planets at my leisure, picking up pops left and right and he has no recourse! Meanwhile the AI was mosing about doing god knows what, attacking me wasn't it.

Stellaris desperately needs a separate peace option.

Did you call him Kaiser the whole time?

Mazz posted:

Robot changes look good, very happy to see the 3 society to 1 of each change, I tried that out (and posted about it) and it worked significantly better overall.

It's a good change. Now they just need to do something about it on regular empires and Hives.

# ? Feb 10, 2019 01:15

Fister Roboto: Feb 21, 2008

Splicer posted:

All charismatic does is increase your amenities. It sounds like the actual problem is it's awkward to limit the number of charismatic robots.

e: Like, if I have charismatic robots, I want them working amenity jobs. If I don't want so many amenities the real problem is I have too many amenity specced robots.

No, the problem is still that there's too much emphasis on filling amenity jobs. I'm not saying that the AI shouldn't assign charismatic to amenity jobs, just that it's doing it too much in situations that don't make sense, and the only way to deal with it requires extra UI wrangling. I can see why it wouldn't be a big deal in the late game when you have a lot of pops and a lot of different species, but it's a pretty annoying problem in the early game when your starting species is charismatic. It's something that many players might not even be aware of, causing them to struggle with machine empires because a bunch of their pops are doing almost nothing.

# ? Feb 10, 2019 01:33

MrL_JaKiri: Sep 23, 2003; A bracing glass of carrot juice!

Fister Roboto posted:

The UI doesn't matter, I'm talking about in-game variables that the game checks.

The UI does matter when you don't want a planet to fall into negative amenities and there isn't a UI element on the main screen that tells you that, unlike if your energy income goes negative so I'm ok with it being a bit generous.

HAVING SAID THAT I'm 100% sure that's supposed to say "< -10", so there is a bug there (likewise -5).

[edit]

However, that wouldn't affect the choice of weighting for the jobs in the example earlier. But I don't see that as a massive issue either - +8% output equates to about 2 non-maint worth of jobs, so there's fewer pops wasted than there could be. All in all, though, if you make your species specialised for amenities then it makes sense for it to be going for amenities jobs first. A further level of discouragement could well help.

Darkrenown posted:

They have always been upset about it, the tooltip just didn't mention it.

Got an easy bug fix for you mate ^^

MrL_JaKiri fucked around with this message at 01:57 on Feb 10, 2019

# ? Feb 10, 2019 01:52

QuarkJets: Sep 8, 2008

That seems like a broader issue with being unsatisfied that races with specialist traits prefer those jobs over others. Like if you're running an energy deficit then you probably want more technicians, not miners, but new pops may become miners regardless. And generally if you have a bunch of Industrious pops, you do actually want them in the miner jobs and not randomly jumping over to become technicians just because you're running an energy deficit right now.

I'd rather have specialists preferring to fill the roles that they're better at than a system that like... shuffles pops around to try to optimally balance things for you. Because the system won't be able to predict what you want; maybe you have a bunch of pops that you're about to resettle and take up those extra amenities, for instance.

# ? Feb 10, 2019 01:58

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

MrL_JaKiri posted:

The UI does matter when you don't want a planet to fall into negative amenities and there isn't a UI element on the main screen that tells you that, unlike if your energy income goes negative so I'm ok with it being a bit generous.

HAVING SAID THAT I'm 99% sure that's supposed to say "< -10", so there is a bug there (likewise -5).

code:

modifier = {
			factor = 1.25
			planet = {
				free_amenities < 5
			}
		}
		modifier = {
			factor = 2
			planet = {
				free_amenities < 10
			}
		}

lol you're right

Why is something called "charismatic" boosting amenities for a group mind's non-sapient drones in the first place? Seems weirdly masturbatory. "Integrated Multitools" or something would seem like a better name, and you could have it boost robot construction too.

Splicer fucked around with this message at 02:04 on Feb 10, 2019

# ? Feb 10, 2019 02:01

MrL_JaKiri: Sep 23, 2003; A bracing glass of carrot juice!

QuarkJets posted:

That seems like a broader issue with being unsatisfied that races with specialist traits prefer those jobs over others. Like if you're running an energy deficit then you probably want more technicians, not miners, but new pops may become miners regardless. And generally if you have a bunch of Industrious pops, you do actually want them in the miner jobs and not randomly jumping over to become technicians just because you're running an energy deficit right now.

I'd rather have specialists preferring to fill the roles that they're better at than a system that like... shuffles pops around to try to optimally balance things for you. Because the system won't be able to predict what you want; maybe you have a bunch of pops that you're about to resettle and take up those extra amenities, for instance.

Also it creates a much greater degree of processing overhead, and can lead to situations like the bugged one above where pops keep on switching jobs back and forth endlessly.

# ? Feb 10, 2019 02:01

Fister Roboto: Feb 21, 2008

MrL_JaKiri posted:

But I don't see that as a massive issue either - +8% output equates to about 2 non-maint worth of jobs, so there's fewer pops wasted than there could be.

That's still a net loss of three whole pops, which is pretty big when you only start with 29. That's more than -10% to overall output! That can be a pretty big deal if you're not aware of the issue.

Splicer posted:

Why is something called "charismatic" boosting amenities for a group mind's non-sapient drones in the first place? Seems weirdly masturbatory. "Integrated Multitools" or something would seem like a better name, and you could have it boost robot construction too.

tbf it's emotional emulators or something like that for machines, I just use charismatic as shorthand because that's what it is for organics. Still doesn't make much sense either, especially in a getsalt.

Fister Roboto fucked around with this message at 02:13 on Feb 10, 2019

# ? Feb 10, 2019 02:10

Staltran: Jan 3, 2013; Fallen Rib

Splicer posted:

Why is something called "charismatic" boosting amenities for a group mind's non-sapient drones in the first place? Seems weirdly masturbatory. "Integrated Multitools" or something would seem like a better name, and you could have it boost robot construction too.

Hives and non-hive organics have the same traits. There probably isn't any name for it that adequately covers both gestalts and non-gestalts. Most other traits fit both hives and normal organics fine, so it's probably not worth doing anything about.

Gestalt robots and non-gestalt robots have different traits though, and emotion emulators really doesn't fit machine empires now that it gives amenities instead of a diplo bonus.

# ? Feb 10, 2019 02:16

MrL_JaKiri: Sep 23, 2003; A bracing glass of carrot juice!

Fister Roboto posted:

That's still a net loss of three whole pops, which is pretty big when you only start with 29. That's more than -10% to overall output! That can be a pretty big deal if you're not aware of the issue.

As far as inefficiencies go, that's not too bad. It's certainly an improvement on the previous patch - this only happens if you specifically design your pops to favour making amenities, and only for the period of time before the jobs fill out. As I said, though, they may want to add in an extra level of de-weighting beyond a certain point.

# ? Feb 10, 2019 02:18

Psykmoe: Oct 28, 2008

MrL_JaKiri posted:

Also it creates a much greater degree of processing overhead, and can lead to situations like the bugged one above where pops keep on switching jobs back and forth endlessly.

Yeah I had that happen earlier where I just watched a couple of my drones bounce between Agri-drone and Mining Drone constantly for a while. I only noticed because I have barely any farmer to feed a couple of bio-trophies so that minor job hopping kept flickering my food income in and out of the red at the top of the screen. Otherwise I'd probably not have noticed - and in a late game empire I definitely wouldn't notice.

# ? Feb 10, 2019 02:25

pmchem: Jan 22, 2010

MrL_JaKiri posted:

The UI does matter when you don't want a planet to fall into negative amenities and there isn't a UI element on the main screen that tells you that, unlike if your energy income goes negative so I'm ok with it being a bit generous.

HAVING SAID THAT I'm 100% sure that's supposed to say "< -10", so there is a bug there (likewise -5).

[edit]

However, that wouldn't affect the choice of weighting for the jobs in the example earlier. But I don't see that as a massive issue either - +8% output equates to about 2 non-maint worth of jobs, so there's fewer pops wasted than there could be. All in all, though, if you make your species specialised for amenities then it makes sense for it to be going for amenities jobs first. A further level of discouragement could well help.

Got an easy bug fix for you mate ^^

Post bug report on official forums?

# ? Feb 10, 2019 02:26

MrL_JaKiri: Sep 23, 2003; A bracing glass of carrot juice!

Psykmoe posted:

Yeah I had that happen earlier where I just watched a couple of my drones bounce between Agri-drone and Mining Drone constantly for a while. I only noticed because I have barely any farmer to feed a couple of bio-trophies so that minor job hopping kept flickering my food income in and out of the red at the top of the screen. Otherwise I'd probably not have noticed - and in a late game empire I definitely wouldn't notice.

Honestly overhauling the pop system entirely seems like the way to go at the moment; making it continuous rather than discrete would solve all of these granularity problems (as well as ones like the growth issue that's been fixed in the beta patch). Quite a lot of work though (he says, understatedly)

MrL_JaKiri fucked around with this message at 02:50 on Feb 10, 2019

# ? Feb 10, 2019 02:45

ZypherIM: Nov 8, 2010; "I want to see what she's in love with."

Grabbing all the growth options you can gets you an honestly stupid amount of growth, you start with 5.52 growth per month (4 base, 20% civic 15% trait that are multiplicative). Add in techs/tradition/campaign and additional production dudes, and my capital is at +9.2 per month, worlds that are past colony but not 40+ are at 7.36, and colonies with 5 pops (so I have a replicator built) are at 5.52. I guess if you want to make gene clinics worth it you should have each medical worker add like 0.25 base growth.

AI empires might benefit from some sort of flat growth modifier as well, that might help them keep up in the economy game. Just looking at numbers (80 years, GA, no scaling), I'm at 600 pops, the closest two AI are 279 and 264, most are a bit under 200. Maybe give them a hab% bonus as well, get them to colonize more of their worlds.

Raw resource production is a little worse with extra guys on amenities because you can almost always have more jobs for those, but specialist production is almost always building limited. Some like alloys or rare resources might be better traded for (but a lot more effort to be sure either way), but stuff like tech/unity that you can't get on the market is quite good.

The real culprit for lovely worthless jobs early on are hunter-seekers. You should be crusading to adjust those weights to match deviancy before sweating so hard about too many amenities.

In other trait notes, I'm rather impressed that they appear to have skipped giving robots a cost pass. Their +amenity trait is still 1 instead of 2, their +growth is not only 1 instead of 2, it is +15% instead of +10%.

# ? Feb 10, 2019 03:51

QuarkJets: Sep 8, 2008

Splicer posted:

code:
modifier = {
			factor = 1.25
			planet = {
				free_amenities < 5
			}
		}
		modifier = {
			factor = 2
			planet = {
				free_amenities < 10
			}
		}
lol you're right

Why is something called "charismatic" boosting amenities for a group mind's non-sapient drones in the first place? Seems weirdly masturbatory. "Integrated Multitools" or something would seem like a better name, and you could have it boost robot construction too.

Maybe "amenities" in that case are the extra pheromones or psychic energy or whatever that keeps the non-sapient drones non-sapient? So if you run out then those drones start becoming noncompliant

# ? Feb 10, 2019 05:07

DeeEmTee: Jan 29, 2005

Fister Roboto posted:

The job assignment AI is still way over-emphasizing maintenance drones. As long as there are available maintenance drone slots, it will fill them, so you have to disable them manually. And then of course there's no alert for having low amenities because ???

e: looks like part of the problem is that maintenance drones get 2x weight for charismatic pops, which seems kind of rear end-backwards. The whole point of having extra amenities is to make your other jobs more productive, but you don't get that if all your pops are producing amenities

They do this even when you don't have charismatic drones. At least in my DE game, a new colony won't have a pop on mining or energy until every other job is filled, and when you upgrade at 10 pops it'll take every pop off mining and energy to fill up your new specialist/maintenance drone jobs. You can't avoid building maintenance jobs as a DE since they come with the administration building so you're microing every planet, which you should have a lot of!

DeeEmTee fucked around with this message at 12:10 on Feb 10, 2019

# ? Feb 10, 2019 11:06

Staltran: Jan 3, 2013; Fallen Rib

QuarkJets posted:

Maybe "amenities" in that case are the extra pheromones or psychic energy or whatever that keeps the non-sapient drones non-sapient? So if you run out then those drones start becoming noncompliant

Eh gestalt amenities are otherwise fluffed as infrastructure maintenance pretty consistently. And lack of amenities doesn't increase deviancy as far as I know, it reduces stability and therefore production of everything.

# ? Feb 10, 2019 12:02

Communist Bear: Oct 7, 2008

Help, I have too many planets to sort! Help me!

:negative:

# ? Feb 10, 2019 12:18

canepazzo: May 29, 2006

quote:

* Energy grids/nexus' are more expensive, but give an additional 5% bonus and add 2/4 Max Generator Districts to their planet. This also applies to Synth empires
* Mineral purification plants/hubs are more expensive, but give an additional 5% bonus and add 2/4 Max Mining Districts to their planet. This also applies to Synth empires

This part of 2.2.5, is it actually working? I'm on test branch, tooltips don't mention the extra districts nor do they seem to be generated when I build it. Tried on a brand new game with no luck either.

# ? Feb 10, 2019 12:36

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# ? Apr 23, 2024 10:13

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

ZypherIM posted:

In other trait notes, I'm rather impressed that they appear to have skipped giving robots a cost pass. Their +amenity trait is still 1 instead of 2, their +growth is not only 1 instead of 2, it is +15% instead of +10%.

Robot amenities are arguably less important than organic amenities. Low amenity organics get grumpy and riot and cause crimes and run off to join the circus. Low amenity robots just produce a little less.

I got nothing for the pop growth though.

# ? Feb 10, 2019 13:08

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