all production requiring a resource to make a higher level resource should have zero output if there are no raw resources to facilitate the making of higher level resources.
Except it's not. If it requires pops working equal to what you'd manage with metallurgists + farmers, it'd be balanced and only matter in a 'haha negative numbers' sense. To figure it out you have to check the amount of alloys per pops employed, and since it's mostly only useful in an early game rush you'd also need to take into account the different cost/build time of ag districts vs industrial. I don't think it's there, because I really doubt the balance point was a magically perfect 50%, but it's not neccesarily as far off as people seem to think. There is no real way for ME to min-max for alloys specifically, either, so it's not like you need to account for some absolute min-max rush strat. Taking into account district limits across 3 starting worlds, different district costs and build times, all based on say...year 20 or year 30 to figure out if a player would have time to colonize and build it all out, and then comparing alloy production between negative econ and regular isn't trivial math, but it wouldn't be super hard either.
@@LowbrowDeluxe But that's hardly satisfying, you expect the floor to be zero and production to be proportional to the resources available to it. Negative food, minerals, alloys and gases make no sense, energy you could argue banks could offer loans. As is no food has to be bought to continue energy production, that they cut corners in minerals is just a cop out probably due to poor implementation. Zero minerals prevents you building so would force unemploying metallurgists to build mineral stocks.
RIGHT??????????????? Why do the other empires in my Hegemony get to vote against my interests? I should at least be able to force them to vote even if I incur an opinion malus.
That should only be something if your vassals are also your primary species or you technologically uplifted them. Otherwise they should only vote with you if you have a certain relationship level with them.
I don't often comment on RUclips videos but I feel like it's worth pointing out that machine empires also have no use for food which is another glaring part of this issue. Organic races with no minerals in their stockpile also cannot produce the following: Armies for invasion - districts and buildings - Research and mining stations. Yes they can buy the minerals as needed sure but the flip side is that machines don't use food to make these same things.
I'd hazard a guess that it isn't enough of a nerf, but the question isn't if it is viable, the question is if still works out superior to any of the methods of food generation you could be using instead. If the break even on pops employed and districts works out the same then it would be balanced and the only gain would be 'hurrr look at the funny negative number'. While I am pretty sure the numbers are still bad, I'm guessing late game empire the difference between forcing a deficit and just having an ag world or two isn't that big. Which means the only real game balance issue at stake is funny maymay multiplayer zerg rush strats and only the initial first push at that since follow up wars can be done in ships made from the previous victims. Not trying to invalidate the video, I just think that as a 'balance' issue, it needs to be addressed in terms of balance, not viability. So what if it's viable? Is it better? If so what do the numbers need to be at to make it at best break even. ETA: You can be almost certain it isn't break even between the two since food to alloy is inherently worse than minerals even ignoring all those tasty sky minerals. But still, that's a math issue, not a viability issue.
@Sanguine It's not just minerals>food, it's the specific case balance. With catalytic converter do you spend equal or more pops and districts to get the same alloys running a negative economy as you would have employed split between Industrial and Farm to not run negative. If that balances, the nerf is balanced. (except farms are cheaper and faster to make, so since rush builds benefit most, that needs to be accounted for as well. If building the farms gets you to the same alloy production faster, that's a win for a rush) And then obviously, it does scale different late game as he pointed out with the alloy forge building and whatnot. But so does food production so the math runs different at different stages.
The catalytic processing issue also applies to Lithoids, they can happily run a food deficit just as much as machines. Only real down side is you can't make use of biological pop assembly, but if you are invested in robots then that's not a issue either. Combined with merchant spam you can run a Lithoid empire without any worker jobs, skip all the base resource techs and rely on space based mineral or market production.
Here's another bug for you, Dupes. And I'm not even kidding about that, duplicate events happening at the same time; like for the rubricator once that was done I got the event for the shard twice resulting in one of them killing the other. And this was happening throughout my game.
would it be the hardest thing in the world to have the -ve mod scale with your deficit? e.g. you have a food -> alloy rate, your food deficit is food produced/food required (01 clamped). Then use that as the production mod. That way if you have a 0 food produced situation, you get a x0 modifier.
Late-game performance is also a huge consideration. It's very telling that there are no modifiers calculated on the fly for economic production, only a series of static modifiers pulled from definitions. It's probably too calculation-heavy to be checking and applying that for all empires at the turn of every month. Wouldn't surprise me if they have tested that in an internal build and decided it was too big of a hit on performance to be manage on top of all the other performance-hogging mechanics in the late-game. Late-game slowing to a crawl was the single biggest complaint after overall AI intelligence since basically 1.0, and PDX has already committed to a number of design concessions in other mechanics for the sake of performance, so I doubt they'd introduce a performance hog like generating dynamic economy modifiers on the fly just to fix a balance issue.
@@martenkahr3365 Yeah, i guess you have idea of the order of magnitude these computations fall under. This calculation could be solved for millions of empires and you wouldnt even start to notice anything. Only the recursive nature (i.e. less minerals -> less consumer goods -> less minerals) may complicate this a little bit, but i reckon, you could push that effect over to the next month. What i suspect is that their spaghetti code wouldnt allow for such a thing without refactoring, which is costly. Paradox is milking a starving cow after all.
The debacle behind the last update was so utterly incomprehensible to me... Until I figured... The developers must be reptiloids! Now that makes perfect sense - they were clearly unable to foresee obvious gamebreaking interactions with their tiny underdeveloped brains. As the saying goes - never attribute something to malice that can be explained by incompetence.
Hold on here a moment, your theory is that the developers were reptiloids so they couldn't forsee the issues, but I, a reptiloid, was then able to find them... typical primate, clutching at straws
@@MontuPlays @Montu Plays You have shown Your hand, lizard! You are proof reptiloids are only hiding behind the façade of incompetence to justify their corruption!
ye its nor really fixed its just nerfed as u still basically gain free pops as if u was doign it normally u would have to have extra people working minerals where as with this u dont have to use anyone on food now im not sure on the mineral to alloy ratio but even if late game u loss 2 alloys ok so for the usual production of 10 pops u would need 13 i think cba to do math for the same output but i think that those 3 pop working thier is stil better then the say 5 or 6 pop u would need working minerals to cover the 10 normal pops for alloy production
Heh, on top of that, everyone needs minerals for buildings and districts and (usually) consumer goods. Machine Empires don't need food unless they have biological pops, so even a Catalytic Processing nerf on par with mineral shortage one would still not be enough. Even base 2 and -50% modifier on top of that would still be somewhat manageable.
honestly the halfed base production is WAY bigger than the -50% additive modifier u get from running out of minerals because almost everything in the game is an additive percentage multiplier its supper easy to offset where as there is literally only one way to increase base output of alloys i think they had the right idea just didnt go far enough
Yeah the real problem in the math is the extra +2 flat from alloy buildings. The negative needs to be -3 flat to equal out properly, so that even in best case the machines are behind.
@@khaos9043 thats only the case if the only modifier u get is the +2 to base if u have +70% in modifiers (for machines, its less for non machines since their base is 3) it equals out and anything above that means u get more alloys per pop running negative on minerals than food its more powerful early game but depending on ur build late game its weaker and even that is a bit out there since u wont have alloy nanoforges early game ofcourse its still worth it because u dont have to bother buying minerals when u want to build anything but -2 to base hits a lot harder than -50%
I think this needs to be calculated. Compare 2 empires with all possible alloy production bonuses, one with N pops producing alloys with a food deficit, and the other with N pops split between alloy production, and the bare minimum of food production required to break even. If the empire producing alloys at a deficit produces more alloys, then it's broken, but if the opposite is true, then it's balanced, because even if you can still make significant amounts of alloys out of nothing, it would still be preferable to create food for alloy production.
With the +2 from buildings, thats only a -33% reduction to the base production (from 6 to 4). The food upkeep per worker is ariund 16, thats at least 1 pop. So it would be a 1:1 alloy to food worker ratio (roughly), so its going to be better to demolish all farm districts and just get "free" alloys
i think it figues out that late game not early 10 normal alloy pops is the same as 13-14 deficit pops so its a question of how man pops would normally be needed to work to jobs to stay out of def its its more then 4-5 then deficit is better how ever early to mid i think that deficit is worse as its basically a 2-1 compared but then u also have the fact non mes use pops for consumer goods
They could add the mineral maluses to the food malus for any empire with the Catalytic civic, that would make the penalty for going negative the exact same as without it. At such a point though, I would expect people to use lithoid xenophobe and just use another race as livestock (possibly using their origin to get that stock from the start) to avoid using jobs/districts for food, going Bio ascension to nerve staple them and boost their leaders while also grabbing the clone vats to grow their pops or assemble more livestock as needed. As a matter of fact I think I should give this idea a go, it sounds fun.
Matter of fact, going Syncretic origin and using plants with the new Budding trait gives you immediate pop assembly with them. You can start with self assembling livestock THIS IS HILARIOUS.
Another really important point even without milking free alloys. You can afford and expand without food as machine empire. But without minerals you are only left to micro buying and instantly spending them. Also loosing lots of energy credits while doing it. So negative economy should be a fall back strategy not a main one. -75% empire modifier sounds about right.
CALLED IT I mentioned this when Stefan made his tier list post and nobody listened (other than the 10 people who liked the comment because I commented like 2 days after the post), but I was right!
This is an issue with bonuses in general. I've made a bunch of spreadsheets before where even a 50% bonus can look meager combared to the 200% worth of bonuses some resources get... It's even worse with flat bonuses like the one here.
I've got an exploit I've been waiting to tell you about but it's been hard coming here on time for you to see it. So far it seems like almost no one knows about it, and it's pretty game-breaking.
@@MontuPlays Alright then, I hope you can get a pretty big video out of this. So there's a bug with the archaeology reward system that relies on having low frames, you need to be able to somehow drop your performance (fps) enough that your game will heavily stutter as it loads the reward, for me this is quite easy because I have a crappy laptop, so going in a system full of ships or waiting for a monthly save will do the trick. The actual trick is quite easy, you simply get a science ship to start working an archaeology site and whenever you get the next pop up to get a small reward like artifacts or science or whatever, you make sure your game lags a lot and then spam click the reward button. With minor rewards like 1 artifact or some science/unity, this may only give you one or two times the reward if you're lucky, because it's much easier for the game to process the reward, however where this exploit shines is the big rewards. For example, with the Zroni precursor, once you've finished their main archaeology site to get the "Zron" system, it takes a bit more processing power to be able to create that star and fill all of the planets and asteroids etc in the system. This is where you can spam click it enough times, to instead get maybe 2, 4, 6, or even 8 "Zron" systems, which can be absolutely game breaking. This also works for the "elder one" site, allowing you to have had many science ship bombs ready to deploy. (Ofcourse now you cant choose where it happens) You can also get multiple rewards for preventing it from spawning, or spawn a few of them and watch them fight each other. I imagine theres many other archaeology sites that have some pretty unique bonuses that could be exploited in some amazing ways. Hope you can replicate it in a video so we can mess with the dev team a little more!
They should change it in general how ressources are calculated so that you don't get a deficit but the buildings that don't have the ressources don't work. And change it so you can't buy one exotic gas per month manually to feed your entire science empire.
Aye, the alloy reduction for catalytic drones needs to be closer to -75%. Even if the -50% was working properly, it still hurts normal biological pops much more. Being out of minerals doesn't just mean your alloy production is lowered, it means you can't build buildings, districts, or mining/research stations. There's just a lot more to consider when you're out of minerals on a normal empire. With machine empires, taking a -50% alloy production hit is a calculable hit to your production, and may just be worth it since you wont need food producing pops, and you will need far fewer mineral producing pops.
Make the machine empires use credits instead of food AND minerals, while also making it a Civic that cannot be removed. It would be harder in the early game but broken in late game (Closer to fair)... Think of the aggression this empire would need in the early game.
Yep, still living in an imperfect universe and relying on other, equally imperfect humans. Yep, still surrounded my unfounded and unrealist expectations with a dash of salt.
Can we maybe instead have a thing that the deficit decreases production based on consumption? So if you have 300 food income but need 400 everything works at 3/4 of the efficiency, so that having 0 food income with 5000 upkeep will make it 0% eficient
@@TheSaival That's not even remotely applicable. If you want to see an actually broken game check out Ride To Hell Retribution or any of the millions of terrible Unity asset flips you can find on Steam these days. A couple of overlooked exploits does not make the whole game "broken." Get a grip.
Uhm... a -50% modifier is far more lenient than the halving of the base, so long as you have _any_ positive percentage, due to how percentages stack in Stellaris Say you have a +30% and a base of 4 so (4*1.3): 5.2 / pop when not running a deficit Halving the base takes you down to (2*1.3): 2.6 / pop -50% takes you to (4*0.8): 3.2 / pop
So does catalytic processing seem like a way for ships and robots to be made from plastic? That’s what it feels like, at least. It also seemed like a way for ringworld origins to better make “alloys” using “food”, but amusingly they seemed to release the alloy fix at the same time they “fixed” the origin.
I still maintain that the penalty should be proportional to the deficit. If you need 100 food but only have 50, that should be a 50% reduction in productivity to anything that uses food. If you have and produce 0 food then that's a 100% reduction.
I've messed with modding enough to know that there currently isn't really a way to zero out a production. I tend to think there should be. Instead of a critical resource shortage being a global debuff, any job / building that uses that resource should simply shut down, and if pops use said resource for their upkeep then apply an appropriate debuff to growth / assembly or pop decline and happiness. No more magic production, serious consequences of economic collapse. Maybe exempt energy credits from the calculation and just apply a global debuff in that case, since otherwise it's probably impossible to recover.
(raw material production / needs) - 1 = %debuff to production (maybe capped at -90% or something) Here, done. You can take it for free Paradox. Edit: for example i have +90 minerals/food, i need 100, so i should receive only 10% debuff. Easy
So mechanically, the flavor is definitely off. You really shouldn't be pulling alloys out of thin air; BUT the civic needs to be good and give you alloys. It's definitely doing that, yeah?
Have you ever thought about applying to become betatester for Stellaris? That way you could hypothetically find these exploits before the release and maybe - big maybe - have the devs fix them before the scheduled release. But let's be real they have their hands full as it is. Deadlines are always short. Though it might lessen your potential content here.
PDX's refusal to have 0 inputs = 0 outputs is baffling to me. it feels like they're so afraid of having any skill based economy to pander to casuals. its so simple, if you dont have the materials to make alloys, you shouldn't be able to make alloys. PDX insists on simulating every single pop and yet wont implement any meaningful systems with it
I always did wonder about that. Like noticing despite having -500 minerals I was still producing alloys. So I needed 500 more minerals than I was producing to make products, yet was still making products. Unless the system works in some funky big brain math way I'm too stupid to understand. At what deficit would I need to be at to actually produce zero product? Lol.
Likely that originated with food, since everyone dying really fast if you don't have any food would seem a bit harsh. Now I suspect it is just a case that resources are fundamentally coded this way so it is tricky to change.
@@dodojesus4529 im sure thats the mentality, which does make some sense, but not in the way PDX implements it. the best comparison i can think of is factories in Vic2. in Vic2, if you don't have enough resources for your factories, some will buy up the materials but the ones that cant buy the materials produce nothing. for Stellaris its doubly annoying because PDX takes up all that processing power by simulating every single pop and yet wont implement this type of system. lets say you have 0 minerals in the bank, are making 50 a month, and your alloy makers are consuming 200. then what should happen is that 1/4th of your alloy makers produce alloys but none of the rest, instead of a blanket -50% malus.
@@SeeAndDreamify i don't even think it makes sense for food because its a skill based issue. if you arent making enough food, you have multiple big warnings about how you will run out. if the player is still unable to fix things by then, its only fair that they suffer the penalties. it really feels like PDX is trying to pander to casuals and yet still maintain this faux competitive game balance and it just doesn't work
Im both annoyed and enthralled with how this games competitive players are actually not abusing bugs and exploits but rather exposing them. Not a single community I know of will do this except for Stellaris, and it both makes me proud, and pisses me off.
If you get any alloys at all you are still getting free resources so like i said before this update they need to make it -100% or its just unfair to every single other team
But is OP or just good enough to justify using the civic? The normal way to use catalyst is really weak as each alloy need 50% more food than minerals and your farmer bonus are much weaker than your miners bonus through the game.
Small question, but I have a multiplayer game with some friends and whenever we go to our fleet managers and make new fleet compositions and reinforce them, our compositions end up changing and the amount of ships requested is rarely right. Never had this problem before. Didn’t know if it was from this update or not, but it is new to us
That's been happening since fleet manager was introduced I've heard people say say dont reinforce from the manager screen and dont reinforce until all ships have made it to the fleet
From what I've noticed it seems related to the auto upgrade check (not auto generated) in that when you're building ships and have a new tech finish that'd for example upgrade your lasers to the next tier the ships already being built finish building using the old blueprint version and instead of filling one of the planned slots on the fleet simply add to the total instead, you then hit some combination of upgrade fleet and/or reinforce and end up with more of a particular ship than you first intended.
@@zacharybecker8228 it used to happen sometimes, but it got several order of magnitude worse with LEM, also transit times are several times the "normal route" travel time, further worsening the issues. Also if the fleet is in FTL it also causes an error that makes these reinforcement stranded on build. At this point I'd rather they get rid entirely of the "transit" thing, and add a feature making transit ships: 1) don't forget their designated fleets when they "can't" reach it and retry every, say couple of game day and 2) are ALWAYS accounted for in the destination fleet for reinforcement calculation. I don't know about the specifics of the game engine, but I don't think that this would require too complicated modifications, it's just annoying how it doesn't even seem to be on their roadmap for now. There are plenty of things that could be done with fleets, have finer control over fleets/groups/squads composition, tactics, have the ability to train and level up various formations, set a fleet to split up and patrol an area in smaller groups, fleet logistic lines over enemy territory, make actual space trade with other empire also cause pirates to spawn between empires because of their trades, have anti-piracy agreements, fund piracy... I really wish the fleets and space warfare gets some additional love from the devs, to me it's one of the primary attraits of the game and on my current playthrough I am not enjoying it because my fleets will take 5 years to reinforce over a 300 days of regular travel worth distance, and I end up with messed up fleet compositions, and my alternative is to build ships manually and micro-manage on a clunky interface with few options.
weird u showed the machines making 6.57 with a fully upgraded alloy plant but not the same numbers with bio in deficit because then u would disprove ur own video. Its same +4 with the bio so technically theres no difference but hey anything for the views right
so if you arent in deficit, the base cost of each alloy is 3 food. With enough modifiers, you can ge tup to +16 food (roughly the upkeep cost I was showing off to get ~7 alloys) with one pop, so that would give you an additional 2 base production of alloys per pop working the alloy job, but at the cost of having to need roughly a 1:1 ratio of pops in alloy jobs to pops in farming jobs. This basically means its not worth it, better to have all the pops just in alloy jobs and take the -2 base production modifier per pop! This is why I would say it is 'still broken'
Is math really that hard to implement? Just take the total resource available to be consumed divided by the total number needed for alloy jobs, cap it at 100%. Multiply that number by the alloy production. If you have 0, you get 0. 50% = 50%.
I don't think its broken - you have to factor in the oppotunity cost for a machine empire taking on another civic, plus the fact that machine empires NEED alloys far more? Haven't play tested, but interested in other peoples thoughts
To be honest though, when one thinks about it, for machine empires to make alloys from food with a food deficit, doesn't it kind of sound like what some aliens did in the opening scene of Transformers 4: Age of Extinction? Idk, sounds logical to me.
It is pretty... meh ? I play all paradox games and for sure they are hard to balance and cunning players always find a way to exploit things but i seen a lot more game breaking exploits in other paradox games than that example eu4 and ck3 on release
on 2.0 you sell 2k alloys and have for one month op eco boost soo all AI empire try be your vassal... 3.1 Same... Stellaris is perma broken game, you only use this knowledge or no. change my mind
Does anyone know how to, well, lessen the amount the AI can cheat for console edition? Just had the AI come at me with hundreds of battleships/cruisers and got stomped like a bug lol
I said it once and I'll say it again, the debuff for food shortage should be "Catalyst Drone output -100% or -75%"
And Catalytic technicians, since lithoids can exploit that too
At that point you can just delete it, since your mineral production is equal to your food output. The 50% higher upkeep does the rest.
Or just have it incur a penalty for your fleets as well, much like an energy deficit.
I still would like the deficit to hit mineral output. So turn a -40 food shortage for catalytic converters into a -80 mineral cost :p
all production requiring a resource to make a higher level resource should have zero output if there are no raw resources to facilitate the making of higher level resources.
Devs: "We cut the amount of alloys you can get from the catalytic processing exploit."
Players: "Half of infinity is still infinity."
Paradox rolled the bad outcome on the infinity machine this patch, that's all.
Except it's not. If it requires pops working equal to what you'd manage with metallurgists + farmers, it'd be balanced and only matter in a 'haha negative numbers' sense. To figure it out you have to check the amount of alloys per pops employed, and since it's mostly only useful in an early game rush you'd also need to take into account the different cost/build time of ag districts vs industrial. I don't think it's there, because I really doubt the balance point was a magically perfect 50%, but it's not neccesarily as far off as people seem to think. There is no real way for ME to min-max for alloys specifically, either, so it's not like you need to account for some absolute min-max rush strat. Taking into account district limits across 3 starting worlds, different district costs and build times, all based on say...year 20 or year 30 to figure out if a player would have time to colonize and build it all out, and then comparing alloy production between negative econ and regular isn't trivial math, but it wouldn't be super hard either.
@@LowbrowDeluxe But that's hardly satisfying, you expect the floor to be zero and production to be proportional to the resources available to it.
Negative food, minerals, alloys and gases make no sense, energy you could argue banks could offer loans.
As is no food has to be bought to continue energy production, that they cut corners in minerals is just a cop out probably due to poor implementation. Zero minerals prevents you building so would force unemploying metallurgists to build mineral stocks.
Man those machine empires at the start sure love their alloys. Glad to see them screaming their hearts out over such an amazing ‘gift’ from paradox.
Still waiting till paradox makes vassals vote with you in galactic community
RIGHT??????????????? Why do the other empires in my Hegemony get to vote against my interests? I should at least be able to force them to vote even if I incur an opinion malus.
@@IshgardBlues67 altho if it interests you i believe i have seen a mod that fixes this, i cant remember the name of it atm but it does exist
I would rather have 50% of their diplomacy weight or something along the lines, that way player vassals would also be affected.
That should only be something if your vassals are also your primary species or you technologically uplifted them. Otherwise they should only vote with you if you have a certain relationship level with them.
@@domehammer What You said + Nerf's opinion malus idea on other species.
Community: Are we there yet?
Custodian team: We get there when we get there!
Stellaris team fix bugs in mere days. Meanwhile it takes Blizzard 3 months to fix a simple bug in Hots.
Well that's because their hands are else where.....
Tbf hots have like one intern working on it
@@Nexielas he is on vacation now
Man I miss HotS…and being able to buy Blizzard stuff without feeling like a heel.
The way deficit should work is blocking you from using the buildings, letting you decide the priority for it (like they do in surviving mars)
I don't often comment on RUclips videos but I feel like it's worth pointing out that machine empires also have no use for food which is another glaring part of this issue.
Organic races with no minerals in their stockpile also cannot produce the following:
Armies for invasion - districts and buildings - Research and mining stations.
Yes they can buy the minerals as needed sure but the flip side is that machines don't use food to make these same things.
I'd hazard a guess that it isn't enough of a nerf, but the question isn't if it is viable, the question is if still works out superior to any of the methods of food generation you could be using instead. If the break even on pops employed and districts works out the same then it would be balanced and the only gain would be 'hurrr look at the funny negative number'. While I am pretty sure the numbers are still bad, I'm guessing late game empire the difference between forcing a deficit and just having an ag world or two isn't that big. Which means the only real game balance issue at stake is funny maymay multiplayer zerg rush strats and only the initial first push at that since follow up wars can be done in ships made from the previous victims. Not trying to invalidate the video, I just think that as a 'balance' issue, it needs to be addressed in terms of balance, not viability. So what if it's viable? Is it better? If so what do the numbers need to be at to make it at best break even. ETA: You can be almost certain it isn't break even between the two since food to alloy is inherently worse than minerals even ignoring all those tasty sky minerals. But still, that's a math issue, not a viability issue.
@Sanguine It's not just minerals>food, it's the specific case balance. With catalytic converter do you spend equal or more pops and districts to get the same alloys running a negative economy as you would have employed split between Industrial and Farm to not run negative. If that balances, the nerf is balanced. (except farms are cheaper and faster to make, so since rush builds benefit most, that needs to be accounted for as well. If building the farms gets you to the same alloy production faster, that's a win for a rush) And then obviously, it does scale different late game as he pointed out with the alloy forge building and whatnot. But so does food production so the math runs different at different stages.
That was a good intro lmao
The catalytic processing issue also applies to Lithoids, they can happily run a food deficit just as much as machines.
Only real down side is you can't make use of biological pop assembly, but if you are invested in robots then that's not a issue either.
Combined with merchant spam you can run a Lithoid empire without any worker jobs, skip all the base resource techs and rely on space based mineral or market production.
Here's another bug for you, Dupes. And I'm not even kidding about that, duplicate events happening at the same time; like for the rubricator once that was done I got the event for the shard twice resulting in one of them killing the other. And this was happening throughout my game.
I got the sentinels event 8 times resulting in having about 20k worth of armies on that specific planet
They should add a minus 50% pop build growth or energy production, maybe both. Similar to the additional consumer goods penalty organic empires get.
would it be the hardest thing in the world to have the -ve mod scale with your deficit? e.g. you have a food -> alloy rate, your food deficit is food produced/food required (01 clamped). Then use that as the production mod. That way if you have a 0 food produced situation, you get a x0 modifier.
Look at you, suggesting coding and algorithms to fix problems. Nah we cant have that round here.
Late-game performance is also a huge consideration. It's very telling that there are no modifiers calculated on the fly for economic production, only a series of static modifiers pulled from definitions. It's probably too calculation-heavy to be checking and applying that for all empires at the turn of every month. Wouldn't surprise me if they have tested that in an internal build and decided it was too big of a hit on performance to be manage on top of all the other performance-hogging mechanics in the late-game. Late-game slowing to a crawl was the single biggest complaint after overall AI intelligence since basically 1.0, and PDX has already committed to a number of design concessions in other mechanics for the sake of performance, so I doubt they'd introduce a performance hog like generating dynamic economy modifiers on the fly just to fix a balance issue.
Made the same comment and saw you beat me to it. Its a very simple equation really. I dont understand the devs logic.
There already have this for Devastation on planets. It reduces both consumption & production from jobs
@@martenkahr3365
Yeah, i guess you have idea of the order of magnitude these computations fall under. This calculation could be solved for millions of empires and you wouldnt even start to notice anything. Only the recursive nature (i.e. less minerals -> less consumer goods -> less minerals) may complicate this a little bit, but i reckon, you could push that effect over to the next month. What i suspect is that their spaghetti code wouldnt allow for such a thing without refactoring, which is costly. Paradox is milking a starving cow after all.
Doomsday science ships? Gonna go check that one out, as THAT is news to me
Link is in the description I think
@@MontuPlays I looked it up, and it was insane. Definitely needed to get patched
@@amateurishauthor2202 haha spoil sport
I wonder if Spiff has a part-time job at Paradox...
That's right, Ladies and Gentlemen. Grab a cup of tea, sit back, relax, and enjoy as infinite alloys appear on your planets.
Ahahahah that intro got me good
I'll wait until Stellaris 2 for energy condensation, energy into alloys production i guess.
Time for a petition to finally get this fixed and the murder-science-ships back in.
The debacle behind the last update was so utterly incomprehensible to me... Until I figured... The developers must be reptiloids! Now that makes perfect sense - they were clearly unable to foresee obvious gamebreaking interactions with their tiny underdeveloped brains. As the saying goes - never attribute something to malice that can be explained by incompetence.
Hold on here a moment, your theory is that the developers were reptiloids so they couldn't forsee the issues, but I, a reptiloid, was then able to find them...
typical primate, clutching at straws
@@MontuPlays What can I say? These hands were made for grasping!
Is it really a debacle? It's an exploit, there's issues with deficits, the devs said on the forum post about this update that they know it's a bandaid
@@SuperMegaCyrus true. This whole “stellaris broken” thing seems overblown
@@MontuPlays @Montu Plays You have shown Your hand, lizard! You are proof reptiloids are only hiding behind the façade of incompetence to justify their corruption!
Something they also broke is voidborne start, you get the base pop growth reduction due to pop size regardless of settings.
I think they should change the catalithy defecit to consume minerals when you have 0 food
ye its nor really fixed its just nerfed as u still basically gain free pops as if u was doign it normally u would have to have extra people working minerals where as with this u dont have to use anyone on food now im not sure on the mineral to alloy ratio but even if late game u loss 2 alloys ok so for the usual production of 10 pops u would need 13 i think cba to do math for the same output but i think that those 3 pop working thier is stil better then the say 5 or 6 pop u would need working minerals to cover the 10 normal pops for alloy production
Heh, on top of that, everyone needs minerals for buildings and districts and (usually) consumer goods. Machine Empires don't need food unless they have biological pops, so even a Catalytic Processing nerf on par with mineral shortage one would still not be enough. Even base 2 and -50% modifier on top of that would still be somewhat manageable.
i mean i've done it with minerals and just bought when i need them
honestly the halfed base production is WAY bigger than the -50% additive modifier u get from running out of minerals because almost everything in the game is an additive percentage multiplier its supper easy to offset where as there is literally only one way to increase base output of alloys i think they had the right idea just didnt go far enough
Yeah the real problem in the math is the extra +2 flat from alloy buildings. The negative needs to be -3 flat to equal out properly, so that even in best case the machines are behind.
@@khaos9043 thats only the case if the only modifier u get is the +2 to base if u have +70% in modifiers (for machines, its less for non machines since their base is 3) it equals out and anything above that means u get more alloys per pop running negative on minerals than food
its more powerful early game but depending on ur build late game its weaker and even that is a bit out there since u wont have alloy nanoforges early game
ofcourse its still worth it because u dont have to bother buying minerals when u want to build anything but -2 to base hits a lot harder than -50%
I think this needs to be calculated. Compare 2 empires with all possible alloy production bonuses, one with N pops producing alloys with a food deficit, and the other with N pops split between alloy production, and the bare minimum of food production required to break even. If the empire producing alloys at a deficit produces more alloys, then it's broken, but if the opposite is true, then it's balanced, because even if you can still make significant amounts of alloys out of nothing, it would still be preferable to create food for alloy production.
With the +2 from buildings, thats only a -33% reduction to the base production (from 6 to 4). The food upkeep per worker is ariund 16, thats at least 1 pop. So it would be a 1:1 alloy to food worker ratio (roughly), so its going to be better to demolish all farm districts and just get "free" alloys
i think it figues out that late game not early 10 normal alloy pops is the same as 13-14 deficit pops so its a question of how man pops would normally be needed to work to jobs to stay out of def its its more then 4-5 then deficit is better how ever early to mid i think that deficit is worse as its basically a 2-1 compared but then u also have the fact non mes use pops for consumer goods
Maybe after two more patches they will nail it
I just started playing Stellaris as a determined exterminator, damn I never had so much fun turning the enemy into unity
They could add the mineral maluses to the food malus for any empire with the Catalytic civic, that would make the penalty for going negative the exact same as without it. At such a point though, I would expect people to use lithoid xenophobe and just use another race as livestock (possibly using their origin to get that stock from the start) to avoid using jobs/districts for food, going Bio ascension to nerve staple them and boost their leaders while also grabbing the clone vats to grow their pops or assemble more livestock as needed. As a matter of fact I think I should give this idea a go, it sounds fun.
Matter of fact, going Syncretic origin and using plants with the new Budding trait gives you immediate pop assembly with them. You can start with self assembling livestock THIS IS HILARIOUS.
You know, I think Paradox just wants foods to be useful in any way.
I hope the next dlc revamp is for synthetic dawn. Give my bot-bois some love
Another really important point even without milking free alloys. You can afford and expand without food as machine empire. But without minerals you are only left to micro buying and instantly spending them. Also loosing lots of energy credits while doing it. So negative economy should be a fall back strategy not a main one. -75% empire modifier sounds about right.
CALLED IT
I mentioned this when Stefan made his tier list post and nobody listened (other than the 10 people who liked the comment because I commented like 2 days after the post), but I was right!
It is good to see that they are at least trying their best.
it would've been so simple to use the same modifier as bio empires, but no, a unique solution to not fix the problem! hah
They need to make it reduce pop assembly (alloys robots or otherwise) if you're negative food says catalytic processing
This is an issue with bonuses in general. I've made a bunch of spreadsheets before where even a 50% bonus can look meager combared to the 200% worth of bonuses some resources get... It's even worse with flat bonuses like the one here.
I've got an exploit I've been waiting to tell you about but it's been hard coming here on time for you to see it. So far it seems like almost no one knows about it, and it's pretty game-breaking.
Please do tell me!
@@MontuPlays Alright then, I hope you can get a pretty big video out of this.
So there's a bug with the archaeology reward system that relies on having low frames, you need to be able to somehow drop your performance (fps) enough that your game will heavily stutter as it loads the reward, for me this is quite easy because I have a crappy laptop, so going in a system full of ships or waiting for a monthly save will do the trick.
The actual trick is quite easy, you simply get a science ship to start working an archaeology site and whenever you get the next pop up to get a small reward like artifacts or science or whatever, you make sure your game lags a lot and then spam click the reward button.
With minor rewards like 1 artifact or some science/unity, this may only give you one or two times the reward if you're lucky, because it's much easier for the game to process the reward, however where this exploit shines is the big rewards.
For example, with the Zroni precursor, once you've finished their main archaeology site to get the "Zron" system, it takes a bit more processing power to be able to create that star and fill all of the planets and asteroids etc in the system. This is where you can spam click it enough times, to instead get maybe 2, 4, 6, or even 8 "Zron" systems, which can be absolutely game breaking.
This also works for the "elder one" site, allowing you to have had many science ship bombs ready to deploy. (Ofcourse now you cant choose where it happens) You can also get multiple rewards for preventing it from spawning, or spawn a few of them and watch them fight each other.
I imagine theres many other archaeology sites that have some pretty unique bonuses that could be exploited in some amazing ways.
Hope you can replicate it in a video so we can mess with the dev team a little more!
Process that like button
They should change it in general how ressources are calculated so that you don't get a deficit but the buildings that don't have the ressources don't work.
And change it so you can't buy one exotic gas per month manually to feed your entire science empire.
Aye, the alloy reduction for catalytic drones needs to be closer to -75%. Even if the -50% was working properly, it still hurts normal biological pops much more. Being out of minerals doesn't just mean your alloy production is lowered, it means you can't build buildings, districts, or mining/research stations.
There's just a lot more to consider when you're out of minerals on a normal empire. With machine empires, taking a -50% alloy production hit is a calculable hit to your production, and may just be worth it since you wont need food producing pops, and you will need far fewer mineral producing pops.
Make the machine empires use credits instead of food AND minerals, while also making it a Civic that cannot be removed. It would be harder in the early game but broken in late game (Closer to fair)... Think of the aggression this empire would need in the early game.
Yep, still living in an imperfect universe and relying on other, equally imperfect humans.
Yep, still surrounded my unfounded and unrealist expectations with a dash of salt.
Can we maybe instead have a thing that the deficit decreases production based on consumption? So if you have 300 food income but need 400 everything works at 3/4 of the efficiency, so that having 0 food income with 5000 upkeep will make it 0% eficient
That make too much sense. You`re fired!
Give them some peace, damn
Idk what's worse at this point, being a stellaris player or a stellaris dev.
poor small dev team charging 30$ for a broken product ;(
@@TheSaival But it's not broken. Nobody is forcing you to use these exploits.
@@ze_rubenator you would buy a car without doors and say car is good because nobody is forcing you to use door
@@TheSaival That's not even remotely applicable. If you want to see an actually broken game check out Ride To Hell Retribution or any of the millions of terrible Unity asset flips you can find on Steam these days.
A couple of overlooked exploits does not make the whole game "broken." Get a grip.
@@ze_rubenator iit does however make me not want to pay for a product that was halfassed by idiots
Uhm... a -50% modifier is far more lenient than the halving of the base, so long as you have _any_ positive percentage, due to how percentages stack in Stellaris
Say you have a +30% and a base of 4 so (4*1.3): 5.2 / pop when not running a deficit
Halving the base takes you down to (2*1.3): 2.6 / pop
-50% takes you to (4*0.8): 3.2 / pop
It’s -2 of the bace, which can be pushed up to 6 resulting in a end bace of 4.
Using this in a 8 player game at the moment. Definitely still broken, let's hope I win.
I didn't win Lol
So does catalytic processing seem like a way for ships and robots to be made from plastic? That’s what it feels like, at least. It also seemed like a way for ringworld origins to better make “alloys” using “food”, but amusingly they seemed to release the alloy fix at the same time they “fixed” the origin.
I still maintain that the penalty should be proportional to the deficit. If you need 100 food but only have 50, that should be a 50% reduction in productivity to anything that uses food. If you have and produce 0 food then that's a 100% reduction.
I always kinda wonder why they went with Alloys and not Minerals.
Like Food into Minerals makes more sense and is less broken.
I've messed with modding enough to know that there currently isn't really a way to zero out a production. I tend to think there should be. Instead of a critical resource shortage being a global debuff, any job / building that uses that resource should simply shut down, and if pops use said resource for their upkeep then apply an appropriate debuff to growth / assembly or pop decline and happiness. No more magic production, serious consequences of economic collapse. Maybe exempt energy credits from the calculation and just apply a global debuff in that case, since otherwise it's probably impossible to recover.
Got reminded of the fact that lack of minerals doesn't affect research for Hives
Shh! The devs are quietly buffing machine empire in a special way. Don't spoil it!
here is an idea, if u get zero of sometihng, and some building needs that something to work, it just stops producing BAM
When are we gonna get unanimous decision in the community/imperium pass the law immediately?
Don't machine empires use alloys to construct pops? Wouldn't it make sense to offset that cost they're slightly better at making alloys.
nice Intro xD
I guess we can refrain from doing the exploits while we wait for patches.
(raw material production / needs) - 1 = %debuff to production (maybe capped at -90% or something)
Here, done. You can take it for free Paradox.
Edit: for example i have +90 minerals/food, i need 100, so i should receive only 10% debuff. Easy
"Is it better? YES"
Good
Odd, an empire exploiting the ferengi, that's a first
You guys min-maxing the shit out of this game.
I'm just sitting here clicking buttons not having a clue what half of them do.
So mechanically, the flavor is definitely off. You really shouldn't be pulling alloys out of thin air; BUT the civic needs to be good and give you alloys. It's definitely doing that, yeah?
This exploit’s really good but I could never use it because I hate seeing negative numbers
Why can't they just fix it so you don't get any outputs if you don't have any inputs? That's how it works in other games.
The developer in charge of this feature probably has a degree in advanced economics. 🙄
Why not just remove idyllic processing from machine empires? What would machines be making food for in the first place?
How it's was difficult to fix this...
Have you ever thought about applying to become betatester for Stellaris? That way you could hypothetically find these exploits before the release and maybe - big maybe - have the devs fix them before the scheduled release. But let's be real they have their hands full as it is. Deadlines are always short. Though it might lessen your potential content here.
PDX's refusal to have 0 inputs = 0 outputs is baffling to me. it feels like they're so afraid of having any skill based economy to pander to casuals. its so simple, if you dont have the materials to make alloys, you shouldn't be able to make alloys. PDX insists on simulating every single pop and yet wont implement any meaningful systems with it
I always did wonder about that. Like noticing despite having -500 minerals I was still producing alloys. So I needed 500 more minerals than I was producing to make products, yet was still making products. Unless the system works in some funky big brain math way I'm too stupid to understand. At what deficit would I need to be at to actually produce zero product? Lol.
@@Kathrynerius the game asumes that You're still producing some resources, just not enough to completely fuel your economy.
Likely that originated with food, since everyone dying really fast if you don't have any food would seem a bit harsh. Now I suspect it is just a case that resources are fundamentally coded this way so it is tricky to change.
@@dodojesus4529 im sure thats the mentality, which does make some sense, but not in the way PDX implements it. the best comparison i can think of is factories in Vic2. in Vic2, if you don't have enough resources for your factories, some will buy up the materials but the ones that cant buy the materials produce nothing. for Stellaris its doubly annoying because PDX takes up all that processing power by simulating every single pop and yet wont implement this type of system. lets say you have 0 minerals in the bank, are making 50 a month, and your alloy makers are consuming 200. then what should happen is that 1/4th of your alloy makers produce alloys but none of the rest, instead of a blanket -50% malus.
@@SeeAndDreamify i don't even think it makes sense for food because its a skill based issue. if you arent making enough food, you have multiple big warnings about how you will run out. if the player is still unable to fix things by then, its only fair that they suffer the penalties. it really feels like PDX is trying to pander to casuals and yet still maintain this faux competitive game balance and it just doesn't work
Processing element 'like button'
Complete
I went from poker face to LMAO on that intro.
Im both annoyed and enthralled with how this games competitive players are actually not abusing bugs and exploits but rather exposing them. Not a single community I know of will do this except for Stellaris, and it both makes me proud, and pisses me off.
If you get any alloys at all you are still getting free resources so like i said before this update they need to make it -100% or its just unfair to every single other team
Deficits should increase their effects each month rather than staying flat.
But is OP or just good enough to justify using the civic? The normal way to use catalyst is really weak as each alloy need 50% more food than minerals and your farmer bonus are much weaker than your miners bonus through the game.
What about catalytic lithoids ?
Small question, but I have a multiplayer game with some friends and whenever we go to our fleet managers and make new fleet compositions and reinforce them, our compositions end up changing and the amount of ships requested is rarely right. Never had this problem before. Didn’t know if it was from this update or not, but it is new to us
That's been happening since fleet manager was introduced I've heard people say say dont reinforce from the manager screen and dont reinforce until all ships have made it to the fleet
From what I've noticed it seems related to the auto upgrade check (not auto generated) in that when you're building ships and have a new tech finish that'd for example upgrade your lasers to the next tier the ships already being built finish building using the old blueprint version and instead of filling one of the planned slots on the fleet simply add to the total instead, you then hit some combination of upgrade fleet and/or reinforce and end up with more of a particular ship than you first intended.
@@zacharybecker8228 it used to happen sometimes, but it got several order of magnitude worse with LEM, also transit times are several times the "normal route" travel time, further worsening the issues. Also if the fleet is in FTL it also causes an error that makes these reinforcement stranded on build.
At this point I'd rather they get rid entirely of the "transit" thing, and add a feature making transit ships: 1) don't forget their designated fleets when they "can't" reach it and retry every, say couple of game day and 2) are ALWAYS accounted for in the destination fleet for reinforcement calculation.
I don't know about the specifics of the game engine, but I don't think that this would require too complicated modifications, it's just annoying how it doesn't even seem to be on their roadmap for now.
There are plenty of things that could be done with fleets, have finer control over fleets/groups/squads composition, tactics, have the ability to train and level up various formations, set a fleet to split up and patrol an area in smaller groups, fleet logistic lines over enemy territory, make actual space trade with other empire also cause pirates to spawn between empires because of their trades, have anti-piracy agreements, fund piracy...
I really wish the fleets and space warfare gets some additional love from the devs, to me it's one of the primary attraits of the game and on my current playthrough I am not enjoying it because my fleets will take 5 years to reinforce over a 300 days of regular travel worth distance, and I end up with messed up fleet compositions, and my alternative is to build ships manually and micro-manage on a clunky interface with few options.
weird u showed the machines making 6.57 with a fully upgraded alloy plant but not the same numbers with bio in deficit because then u would disprove ur own video. Its same +4 with the bio so technically theres no difference but hey anything for the views right
Nice
what happens if u arent at a defecit? how hard is it to have 1 planet dedicated to farming?
so if you arent in deficit, the base cost of each alloy is 3 food. With enough modifiers, you can ge tup to +16 food (roughly the upkeep cost I was showing off to get ~7 alloys) with one pop, so that would give you an additional 2 base production of alloys per pop working the alloy job, but at the cost of having to need roughly a 1:1 ratio of pops in alloy jobs to pops in farming jobs. This basically means its not worth it, better to have all the pops just in alloy jobs and take the -2 base production modifier per pop! This is why I would say it is 'still broken'
It aint broken, it is fun now
if you have 0 mineral/food income you should have 0 alloy outpout period.
...what's stopping them from just removing it from machine empires? Why all the contrived nerfs? XD
Is math really that hard to implement? Just take the total resource available to be consumed divided by the total number needed for alloy jobs, cap it at 100%. Multiply that number by the alloy production. If you have 0, you get 0. 50% = 50%.
Apparently a nerf is not the same as a fix.
I don't think its broken - you have to factor in the oppotunity cost for a machine empire taking on another civic, plus the fact that machine empires NEED alloys far more? Haven't play tested, but interested in other peoples thoughts
Does catalytic processing work the same way for lithoids
ADD A USE FOR FOOD DAMN
To be honest though, when one thinks about it, for machine empires to make alloys from food with a food deficit, doesn't it kind of sound like what some aliens did in the opening scene of Transformers 4: Age of Extinction? Idk, sounds logical to me.
It is pretty... meh ? I play all paradox games and for sure they are hard to balance and cunning players always find a way to exploit things but i seen a lot more game breaking exploits in other paradox games than that example eu4 and ck3 on release
You fixed all of it right? You fixed all of it right?
At least the bugs/exploits in Stellaris are fun
I dunno, free resources from almost nothing is still kinda broken
@@lorenzamccoy7512 But you can still play the game
And what about clone origin?
Still "working as intended" no change to the balance there yet
@@MontuPlays Ayyyy lmao. Hope some dev will play it during their inside multiplayer and cheese shit out of it :D
Ty for the answer
They should have made the science ship more hard instead of removing the features.
o boi
Do you all have a discord?
Does this still work with 3.3 Libra ?
on 2.0 you sell 2k alloys and have for one month op eco boost soo all AI empire try be your vassal... 3.1 Same... Stellaris is perma broken game, you only use this knowledge or no. change my mind
Instruction unclear, I tried to process the like button, blow up a planet
Does anyone know how to, well, lessen the amount the AI can cheat for console edition?
Just had the AI come at me with hundreds of battleships/cruisers and got stomped like a bug lol
Lower the difficulty.