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In fact I've been doing far less micromanagement since 4.0, the pacing of growth and economy is different, sure, but the overal gameplay cycle feels nearly identical, i've declared war on my first neighbor in 2016 and I was at the capital of the 2nd a little over 2022, if anything I feel like the organic ships are WAY too OP compared to the natural fleet designs, at least as far as I've played, they stand absolutely no chance.
Economy is the same as always, except with far less tweaking and micromanagement as I don't have to ensure my breending worlds have no jobs other than essentials so I can force pops to go unemployed to migrate to the worlds I'm developing, things are much simpler right now and I don't have to open/close jobs manually every 2 minutes to ensure none of my resources are being wasted in surplus.
I dunno whether to try the previous patch or not, cause if this is the way forward I should probably learn the new way even if it sucks?
either way regretting my purchase at the moment, should have done some research and waited.
It's not unplayable it's just not an improvement. I'm still here, it still works.
This is paradox through and through though. Once they unscrew it and it's working, expect another update that trashes it.
Once you figure out which districts to build, the economy is so absurdly strong that you can max out the tech tree before 2400 and crush the entire PVE section of the game with casual ease.
The problem with 4.0, insofar as the economy is concerned, is the dismal UI and the tooltips' inability to explain things properly.
A few tips that'll help with what you specifically described -
1: Resource Silos. They're actually pretty damn useful, and you should get a couple before the start of midgame. Put them on your starship producing starbases, along with hydroponics farms (balance which one to get depending on your individual needs that game).
2: Planetary specialization is king in 4.0. Planets should never be built around being generalists in 4.0, always, always, ALWAYS specialize them out to be good at one or two specific things.
3: Be deliberate about colonizing and developing your planets. The swinginess that your describing is probably being caused by colonizing a planet and then just building everything about it as soon as the colony comes online. This can and WILL cause you to experience large resource drain from a colony as you'll have LOTS of resources going out due to district and building spam, but not enough population to man it. You can afford to do this mid/lategame (just spec out a planet as soon as it's colonized) because mid to lategame economy is so strong that having several planets just done and ready to fill out isn't a problem, but you *can't* do this early game. This is a really common mistake people make and it's not a 4.0 problem, but 4.0 did make it worse due to having SO MANY building slots available from the get go.
4: If you're seeing a tech upgrade take 80+ months it means you're behind on your research output. If you're seeing it on just deflectors, then it means you haven't so much as started any research production yet. A single dedicated research planet, provided it has a reasonable number of districts, is enough to carry you into the end of the midgame. What you're describing here is a strategic problem - you need to plan out your colonization strategy better.
After you have your dedicated menial planets built up and developing, you should get at least one industry planet going. Once that planet is colonized and has had a few years to develop, that's when you should start on a research world. This should be happening around year 40 at the latest (year 20 is more realistic if you haven't run into any hiccups), provided you're playing on normal planet distribution and don't get unlucky with planet spawns. If you want to tilt the scales in your favor, go early Conquer Nature (adaptability agenda) and rush Terrestrial Sculpting. Early terraforming can be game changing, and it's a strategy that a lot of people sleep on, but you need to be smart about when to pick it because not all galaxies favor it. Beyond that, after your research world is going, do the same for a dedicated commercial world and unity world. If you do this and you allow the planets to develop within their specializations, you're going to be so strong economically that you'll steamroll the game EASY.
5: Energy credits... I genuinely have no idea how you're having a problem with this? There are SO MANY strong options for generating ECs that I've never really had to think about it as a concept since the launch of kilostructures like Dyson Swarms. Especially if you have "3 dedicated planets" to EC production. Like, unless those planets have a bunch of modifiers against EC production and very few districts, this shouldn't be an issue. Hell, I've had games where I've skipped out entirely on dedicated EC planets and just relied on structures combined with Bioreactors and still ended up with so much excess EC production that I would spend entire years dumping thousands of ECs into the market just to make sure I didn't waste production despite having silo capacity into the millions.
Can you show your EC planet builds, please?
So just bypass them and get to the fun part. Because they are deliberately developing this game for a specific game target audience that is not you. Some people enjoy getting dragged into this unnecessary troubleshooting rabbit hole just to have an economy and working empire. But it's not supposed to be rocket science.
the game is a lot more fun when you can actually just get into why you are in the game, which is to build up an empire and then enjoy some battles
We know the ai is
They have other plans and you can see where the focus is misplaced in development by this release.
all the other fluff stuff is there specifically to frustrate low intelligence people that allow themselves to be subjected to a bunch of nonsense unnecessarily elaborate systems that make no sense and are contrary to fun gaming, except for people that like to unravel huge balls of heavily knotted yarn that the devs create specifically for that purpose.
This game has a case of over complicating itself to be more complex in places that it doesn't need to be while always ignoring the ever present issues that are still not addressed, and as you and I are experiencing
Their method of developing the game is to break things apart into various pieces and then set it up so you have to go find all the hidden pieces they spread out all over the game and they make it difficult deliberately because you are essentially playing broken game of easter egg hunting
sadly this is where things are at with developers and the mob they lead on in this cult of gaming
1. The new "be the planet" origin. You build stuff with biomass, but apparently biomass is also your pops.
So if you spend it all, you lose workers and suddenly your econ tanks into the potty.
2. The Market. It fluctuates WILDLY. If it does and you are using it to balance your resources, it WILL ride you into the dirt if some other empire bloats the cost of something you buy or dumps tons of the resource you're selling.
3. Fleet/station cap, penalties thereof and conquest.
Ships are hella expensive now. Talking hundreds of resources per month if you undock them lategame and massive multipliers if you exceed your naval capacity.
Actually had to give up on a round because I had chosen bioships and undocking my fleets during the end game crisis tanked my food to -2000 a month.
I just couldn't afford to replenish my ships in a timely manner because they ate up all my stocks during the fight so nothing was left to build new ones after.
If you conquer planets, be aware the garbage heaps if the AI managed them. Also keep an eye on your starbase limit - the AI likes having terribad starbases that will bloat the cap and eat into your resources until you disband them.
Also vaguely bad is how storms can wreck your econ if a bad one affects one or more of your more vital colonies, but I disable those because I find that they add nothing fun to the actual gameplay.
Just tons of frustration trying to be efficient only to get punished for it because a storm RANDOMLY SPAWNS and causes the pops on my main farming planet to produce nothing and cost double maintenance.
No thanks. "You can mitigate it". Yeah, by spending years worth of science on buildings that cause my pops to be slightly less useless or the storm to take 20 instead of 30 years to F off out of my territory.
Generally you can absolutely be a production powerhouse in the game still, but there might be a few too many factors that can absolutely wreck you and make it feel frustrating.
Maybe the game could benefit from some sort of fail-safe that makes changes in the economy or to your planet income less "all or nothing".
Instead of blowing the market from 0.2 market value per mineral to 20 from month to month, have it give you a warning of inpending fluctuations so you can actually attempt to switch jobs over from consuming to producing minerals, for example.
Or having storms apply their negative modifiers over the course of a year (simulating the disaster relief systems, stockpiled resources and infrastructure slowly buckling under ongoing heavy adverse weather conditions) instead of the sudden collapse we currently have.
It's also worth keeping in mind that they seem to have made it much harder to play tall unless you use gimmicks. Planets produce decent resources but it feels like everything got more expensive explicitly so you'd actually want more planets to produce basic resources on.
I too have been only playing devouring swarm. Perhaps my issue is that I play over-tuned origin, and pick only pop-growth traits. I have lots of population and they fill up open jobs quickly.
And I build a lot of agriculture to support my "damn the consequences" edict. But that is normal, I am fine with food jobs with over-tuned. But I will be +100 food and 6 months later, -100 food. And I just keep yo-yoing around. And I don't build a single research/unity building. Though the starting districts on home planet often just stay empty and produce research as I build city districts.
I don't know what I am doing wrong. I pretty much only build base resources. Still anemic.
I haven't tried 'be the planet' yet. Still haven't mastered base devouring swarm.
The market, I don't generally buy lump sums, I put orders monthly to try to limit swings, like "40 minerals per month" but then all of a sudden I am -100 food and have to scramble etc... and even though I know the market can swing big-time, I still think I have the experience to mitigate the swings, but they happen anyway. I just have extreme swings even though I try to build base resource production.
About the cost of fleet costs, this is a good point and I finally observed the cost of supporting my fleet when I took 3x 40 count fleets into a system to take on crystal entities and 1 fleet was wiped and other 2 lost 25% and escaped. And I saw my energy go from -## to +150. And I thought, hmm, that seemed like an excessive swing. And I wasn't over fleet cap or anything.
And I don't have the storm expansion, but maybe they are happening and i don't realize it.
So yeah, fleet cost is a new thing to manage, and accounts perhaps for my energy swings, but what about the food/minerals?
Pre 4.0 I had a resource silo on 80% of all starbases. Just a filler as part of my game-play template. Post 4.0 I have not built a single silo because I never even build a level 3 starhold, and usually I have conquered someone who researched and built one. I have no resources to fill them. Actually I frequently have minerals get full 15k and spam some armies or districts about to use it. But for most part never max out the resource cap. Can't play a game long enough without getting exhausted and not caring.
This realization helped me a lot. I no longer flag a planet as mineral, build just minerals, and specialize 2x research/unity. Then maybe some energy/food once no minerals left.
Now I go full minerals, and build city districts too instead of miscellaneous energy/food.
And this helped a lot, but still have many issues. For example, i rarely get any research planets until year 30 because economy is SOOO BAD I can't support them.
Similar to me realizing the cost of fleet maintenance I have also realized this point. And I have adjusted my gameplay accordingly. however, I still have immense swings and deficiencies. I think if anything I have to adhere to these comments even MORE than I currently do. I always pick Over-tuned "excessive endurance" so I can colonize everything in sight... and I do... and this is a reason for economic swings... and yes mid game impact is much less.
True, Perhaps I am playing too wide and must build only resource planets at first to keep up, and only later am I safe enough to find and develop research planet.
Ok, as you say year 20-40 is a decent target for research/industry planet, and that is almost when I can start these efforts, I just felt this was way too long to wait. But hearing you say this means I am kind of on par with expectations.
I am baffled too, I think perhaps my fleets are eating the energy. I really don't know. I have yet to build a kilo structure, can't sustain them or get things lined up. I have conquered them.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3482533965
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3482533607
But you can't really turn off pop growth, sure you can turn off normal growth, but not spawning pool growth.
Also Hives are easier to play, since no consumer goods and depending on ships, not even really alloys, and ore. And no leaders to manage, just nodes. I didt try bots yet, but i heard they have bad growth, so bad infact they die out -.-
You goofed up on posting your screenshots. xD
One thing to bare in mind - your capital should be producing Industry/Research to tide you over until you get dedicated worlds for those fields online after 20 to 40 years in-game. The further you get into the mid-game, the more you should be phasing out menial districts on your capital toward districts that produce research/unity/consumers/alloys.
Also - using armies as a resource sink for minerals is PROBABLY part of why you're suffering resource woes. Those armies have upkeep.