This is the first time I have ever posted on a mod, or anywhere on Steam, despite downloading and playing Stellaris with 100's of mods since release.

I'm doing so because your mod is remarkable. I had read that your mod had 'fixed Stellaris'. I was doubtful, but after playing nearly a full game, I'm convinced you have. The performance is much much better, and other elements of the game are streamlined as well. AI seems improved. Subtle design decisions force more interesting paths. You should be very proud.

I could write six more paragraphs about all the good your mod has done, but that's not helpful feedback. So in the alternative, I'll ask some questions and offer a critique.

The changes are huge. I don't mind the focus on alloys. Throughout the game, I had a lot of minerals, a good supply of alloys, not too much and not too little. I struggled with supplies until I build some dedicated worlds for them, same with food. However, energy seems to have an issue. Right now, I am the largest and dominant empire (beneath a few fallen empires which I could probably take on), and yet I am running a -3K energy deficit. It's no problem, because I can just sell gas/crystals/motes (which are abundant) for huge sums, but still, it seems like I am constantly energy starved and having to trade or sell in order to maintain. However, AI seems to have lots of energy. Maybe it's my fault, but I think that maintenance is too high. QUESTION: why no sector AI? The AI seems to do a good job of running other empires, but I noticed the lack of sector AI. Is that going to be instituted? Running a 48 planet empire with no sector AI became a bit of a chore.

Seems better than the base game. Could this be related to the performance improvements? I often find that in vanilla the AI starts off decent, and then goes senile later in the game when performance tanks. Either way, seemed more rational. Still won the wars by concentrating my fleets and taking theirs out one by one. There's a mod that lifts the AI fleet cap to try to get around that - it's a cheat but works well. Economically, they seem to do a better job keeping up. It was nice to see that their worlds were actually better developed than my own, once I conquered them. It's obviously not perfect, and the combat AI still enters suicidal battles (23K vs 98K), but I don't know how much control you have over that. The AI also repeatedly tried to invade my planets with underpowered forces than were doomed to fail.

I like the change, with less ships that mean more. Makes the late game more manageable. I personally would like to get rid of the fleet cap concept, since you can easily daisychain multiple fleets together, and it just causes more of a UI headache than a strategic issue, having to make sure they're all following the slowest fleet so they stay together. But I know you won't likely do that, it's too major a change. BUG: I left the autodesign on, and it designed ships with no shields, but with all shield boosters. It did this for every single ship class. Clearly this is a silly mistake. The AI's ships seem to have shields, so I don't know why none of mine did. I had all the best shield tech researched. I had to manually correct the issue.

The crux of the mod. Less pops=better performance. I'm happy with that. I RP'd that a pop is now a billion people, and it makes sense. They might grow a bit slow. I prioritized pop growth in every way, with every booster, even modding the species to be fast breeders, and I still find myself in the late game with a mostly empty empire. I refurbished a ringworld, but can't even come close to filling one section. I keep winning wars, but I have 10x more planets than I need. I've build robot factories on every planet from the start of the game, but they build so slowly that I only have a handful, and that's with the 'Cybrex War Forge' relic speeding them up! TLDR: pops seem to grow a bit slow, even for the intended use of this mod, but robots seem crazy slow, to the point of being broken. FYI, I have 48 planets not, although 20 of them I recently got in a war. So I think that sprawl may be killing me, perhaps more than it should. Maybe sprawl should not apply to building robots? It's 2364 and I have 358 pops on 48 worlds, and only 5 of them are robots, despite building and staffing robot factories on every planet. BUG I got the Engineered Evolution perk, but can't find the Clone Vats anywhere. Am I missing something? Where do I find it and what does it do? I was hoping it would speed up pop growth. ANOTHER BUG: I conquered an empire and enslaved them all (they started the war) and had migration controls on by default. However, I started seeing their pops popping up on my pure Terran planets. Does your automigrate system override population controls?

I have other thoughts but I'll leave it there. Amazing work, honestly. I hope you continue to develop the mod for Federation, and get machine and hive empires in. And sector AI! And maybe a little more pop growth, or at least methods for us to speed it up a bit, if we spend the resources.

Congrats on making a mod that lives up to its name, and realises the true potential of Stellaris!

Regarding the Clone vats issue, it isn't a building anymore, but a pop growth modifier that gets automatically applied to your pops. If you hover over the growing pop, you'll see a +50% pop growth speed from Engineered Evolution.

Pop sprawl was removed in the latest update, and it's no longer such a big issue.

Are there any plans to spread out production buildings more towards vanilla style? As nice as it is to gain playability, it feels also missing out on the control of what you want to produce.

If you have the mechanist civic you can have 2 robot assembly jobs per planet which is very strong early game if you don't want to use that then robots are just a tiny boost to your growth but still better then not having that boost I think.
For bio pops the traits for growth are kinda irrelevant just have some farmers as they boost growth by 10% with no tech and with all techs each gives 25% growth I had planets reach +14 growth per month and more.

For energy just make a custodian planet and build the thing that makes them produce energy, there will still be a point in the game where you will struggle with energy because you lack the techs for the custodians but it won't be -3000 energy bad but more like just barely not positive or rarely -200 if it's really bad.
I personally do this with habitats only but I also play tall and not wide.

The biggest problem I have with the overhaul mod is that it unfortunately causes tall play to be unviable. Since empire sprawl is ALWAYS going to a be a problem, even when I am playing tall, I might as well branch out and colonize as many planets as possible. A way to fix this might be to include advantages you get from staying within empire sprawl (i.e discounted tech costs, resource gain, fleet disparity bonuses, etc)

Even though the game is 10x more playable with less micromanagement, a minor drawback that I have is that planets no longer feel "special" anymore. Things such as turning worlds into purely science worlds is impsosible now that city districts include all specialist jobs. Maybe some planetary decisions that can be researched that trades the engineer jobs into scholar jobs?

It will become more diversified. Mod developers have announced an overhaul of the system. Maybe even this week will be release... .

Does developer even read this thread? Looks like you have to post in comment section to get their attention

Originally posted by avasark ♫:

Does developer even read this thread? Looks like you have to post in comment section to get their attention

you can join the discord, it's very active, and easier to submit feedback and discuss mod stuff

Sorry we haven't responded to this. We've been very busy with the economic overhaul that's coming this Friday! It was unfortunate timing for feedback because of how much things are changing.

We haven't been very active about keeping up with Workshop discussions, so my apologies for not replying to this sooner. We do appreciate this feedback! I'll use it to talk about what's coming on Friday and how we're addressing some of these issues.

Economy
- Food, Energy, and Minerals are going to require more investment. Upkeeps are higher and space deposits will require more investment to access. Overall, you'll get more of what you invest in, but you'll have to invest in it.
- Strategic Resources are no longer used or on the galactic market. They will probably come back in the second part of the economic overhaul to do special things if you have access to them, but they're being removed from the base economy.
- Sector AI isn't something we're doing until we have the economy finished because we don't want to waste a bunch of time doing it over and over again, but when the economy overhaul is done, it might appear after the actual AI.

AI
A ton of work went into the AI, which is getting completely rebuild in the economy overhaul. It's a pretty intense system that's in part taking advantage of the rework to the core systems for performance increase and in part due to designing around micromanagement to create a decision making process that is easier for the AI to handle. If only we had the same level of control for AI fleets, which we're not going to bother with. The fleet cap change is something that's likely to happen in the future though!

Ships
Ships are getting completely reworked after the economy overhaul and after gestalts. The fleet cap being lifted is one ideas we're going to try. The basic premise of the new system will be that corvettes and destroyers will be fast melee and ranged ships while cruisers and battleships will be slow melee and ranged ships. You'l start with the faster ships and be able to unlock the slow ships later to be your main force while the fast ships will always be useful for patrols, quick response, etc.

Pops
With the economy overhaul, pop growth is going to feel a whole lot better. Districts will give you 1 job each, meaning worlds will fill up quicker. Pops also grow faster and you'll be able to control the rate of growth a lot better. In the overhaul, each pop will come with a 2% pop growth reduction, meaning that your pop growth will slowly approach 0% once you hit 50 pops. Hospital buildings reduce this penalty, and that means a fully upgraded hospital will let a world hit 0% at 200 pops, and in the meantime, you'll have higher pop growth on that world. This will also make it so less effort has to be put into maximizing pop growth, which was really powerful in SI.

Again, thanks for the feedback! These are all great ideas, and I think you'll be happy that a lot of this stuff is making it into Friday's update!

Do you have any plans of adding more traditions? It would be nice if there would be more options to specialize your empire even more. The Idea of one tradition blocking another one is brilliant. Would love to see an extension of that mechanic there... .

It's certainly a possibility! I have thought that 1 tradition themed per ethic would be pretty cool, where it locks the opposing ethic's tree. None of them would require the ethic itself, but they could each be linked to a faction.

Since I am not 100% sure that this is a bug or just a few planet modifiers creating a significant boost I thought it best to post here. I have been running a few games since the new Immortal update and I want to first say that this project is rapidly evolving into probably the best mod for the game. Game performance, especially nearly 200 years in, stays almost exactly the same. This has given me the confidence to play larger maps with more empires and star systems to explore.

In other words: WOW!

The planet modifier effect stems from several factors in my recent games. I chose to have the ringworld origin for my empire and to help fill all the empty job slots the planet starts with I focus heavily on building a general hospital and upgrading it to hospital campus. The boost in population growth is logical and I appreciate how players must work hard to gear their empires toward population growth.

When I start down the path to centralization there is no immediate effect on my planet. After a few months I checked it again and saw that the world is now a galactic capital and population growth has increased by 100%. The population penalty is unchanged. In a previous game, the same effect occurred that also increased the growth of a nearby commerce world by nearly +1 a month.

I talked with one of the developers on the workshop page and he mentioned the same thing happening to another player. If so it may be a synergy effect instead of a bug in the mod itself that causes population growth to be nearly on par with vanilla.

I have screenshots I can send you guys if you want.

Thanks for a great mod!


I feel like the Spiffing Brit right now. Where's that tea?

Pop growth was recently overhauled a bit to speed up the game feel. There's more coming too. In the future you can expect planets to have a curve-based growth. Low and high pop worlds will grow slowly, if at all. But worlds in the golden center will have more significant growth.

Curves for growth would be great for population.

One thing about Stellaris has always been that population was more or less the most dominating factor of play, but when we look at our own world (granted it's pre-interstellar flight) more population does not necessarily mean more productivity/power/wealth.

My suggestion would be to tie popgrowth to some kind of relationship between population sizes and resource consumption.
Human children, at far as we can tell, tend to be born a lot more when resources are scarce, and less when they're plentiful. As cost of living increases (along with wealth) growth rates decline. The cost of raising children increases as cost of living does, and threat of child mortality drops. Leading to fewer, but more heavily invested children.

Counter to this is sheer numbers and math. Growth begets itself


I think the game would be far more interesting if players and AI were struggling to deal with _too many_ people rather than not enough.

New worlds offer a means of offloading excess. Tall worlds manage their populations carefully and maximise productivity. Etc.

Perhaps playing with Upkeep is the key, the fewer goods consumed: the more growth, but the less productive, and vice versa.

This mod has breathed new life into the game for me, keep it up and thank you!

I've been enjoying this mod a lot. I never expected Stellaris to run in the mid and late game as fast as it does in the early game, and the way in which colonies are handled was a pleasant surprise and not too hard to get used to.

On the other hand, I'm curious about the FE tech. I noticed that I can research a Sky Utopia thing, which looks great, but feels very out of place considering that a Player can't research any other FE-Tirer building technologies. Will unlocking such technologies be implemented in the future?