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[BurnedToast]

Oh, and like, the market seems brokenly cheap to buy consumer goods on. Like, 2.5 energy per good when making them takes a precious building slot, a lot of minerals, energy food and consumer goods to upkeep the job and pop... It seem way cheaper to just build generator districts and buy the goods.

The more you buy/sell the more the price adjusts. It seems to settle back to the original value over time, but relying on the market 100% for your consumer goods all game is probably not sustainable (or maybe it is?).

That said, I agree the market feels really overpowered. I went with a hive mind and I don't have to deal with consumer goods (I guess?) but I've crunched the numbers and it seems way more worth it to buy alloys than it is to produce them. Building slots just seem too valuable and the alloy furnace does not seem efficient enough - when you factor in the sell price of the metal ore, the energy required to operate the furnace, and the opportunity cost of the pops to run it, it's not actually producing much excess alloy compared to just selling everything and buying it.

It gets even worse because I've gotten a bunch of bonus techs for energy and minerals, but no bonus alloy techs. So relatively speaking it becomes more and more worth it to make energy and buy alloy.

And that was before the galactic market formed. It just formed and I managed to become the market leader which gives me a 10% discount, and now it's slanted even more in favor of just buying alloy.

Edit: also victory is 100% high score time based, which is actually worse than the old victory condition imo. Yeah I know ultimately it's just a pointless "you win" screen, but at a certain point you've already won and there's no point in playing anymore and it's nice for the game to acknowledge that. On the other hand, I guess that's one way to stop players from winning too early... make it impossible 

[Il Palazzo]

Just turn off timed victory at the start. It's entirely optional.

[Telgin]

Or lower the ending date if you really want to.

Anyway, the market really is overpowered from what I've seen, and it's taking some getting used to for me to realize that I usually have enough resources like food to dump into it that I can get anything I want at any time.  Even without it, raw resources like minerals, energy and food don't feel like they're in nearly as much shortage early game now, which is interesting.

I really like the economic changes so far, but I haven't gotten a great grasp of how it works yet.  I feel like so far I've been struggling to build new buildings to keep amenities high enough and to keep consumer goods in positive flow, although I realize now it really probably is best to just buy them on the market.  Alloys too, probably.

The pop changes are also going to take a ton of learning, but I already love it.  I accidentally kind of hamstrung myself by colonizing my two guaranteed colonies very early on, which led to population growth almost stopping on my home world in favor of emigration to the new colonies.  Oops, now instead of developing that world, I'm having to wait for pops to grow up on the new colonies so I can start building meaningful things on them.

[Broseph Stalin]

I've tried to write this post about how the market's fucked like three times but I've progressively convinced myself it's okay. It's very easy to run positive with base resources like food, energy, and minerals. You can get second tier resources either by either processing your own minerals or by buying them on the market. Processing yourself is slower and requires mineral income but the costs are consistent and you aren't going to bottleneck yourself too badly with energy for upkeep.  I think that the market often being more efficient is part of the idea.

[Telgin]

Probably so.  From what I gather, the AI empires under utilize the market right now too, so if that gets patched it will probably make the market both more interesting and less of a no brainer, especially if the AI empires frequently buy or sell basic resources frequently.  The price fluctuations might require some thought before using the market then.

I haven't gotten to the point of having a galactic market founded yet though, so I don't have a great grasp on it yet.

Anyway, all told I'm surprised that I've actually seen zero bugs so far.  I only had time to play 20 game years last night, and did so at normal speed so I could keep on top of things, but it's a good sign.

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

Is it just me or is the AI expanding ludicriously fast?

I found my first two neighbours and neither of them are advance start but while I only managed to get an additional 6 star systems, they're at around 15 additional star systems each.

I'm playing on the second highest difficulty so I know they're cheating... but in the past they never expanded this fast before.

Also did they slow down research speed? Seems much slower. I'm not complaining but I normally play 2x research length because I found vanilla way too slow. Now I feel like I'm on 6x or something.

Yeah, they pretty heavily boosted the amount of even base research needed, likely since it's easier to get really high income for it.

Say, I'm working on organizing a multi-player game on Sunday with a few others.   Anyone here interested?

[BurnedToast]

So the market is more overpowered than I ever expected. There's a bug/exploit where if you buy 5000+ of something, it skyrockets the price so much that you can instantly sell it back for more energy than you used to buy it. So, basically, once you can buy 5000 of something you can have infinite resources by abusing the market.

---------------------

After playing with the new system for a while.... I don't know. It seems a lot better, but on the other hand if you want things done correctly it's even more of a micromanagement nightmare than the old system was.

Previously you could just click through everything all at once and forget about it. Now you have to constantly go back to the planet over and over to build new stuff, and if you want to do it just right you have to calculate in advance how many houses etc you will need. Also the old system was simple enough that if you handed it over to the AI, he would screw it up but not catastrophically. I'm actually afraid to hand control of the new system over to the AI because there's just so many stupid, terrible things it could do and it just seems too complicated for him to handle even halfway decently.

I guess I could give him ONE planet as a test run and see what he does with it...

Edit: the answer seems to be..... nothing. Literally nothing. I don't know if it's bugged for everyone or just hive minds, but I set a sector with two planets in it to AI control (basic resources), gave it 10,000 resources (both minerals and energy) and.... it just didn't do anything at all. I waited a few years and it never built a single building or district.

[E. Albright]

I think I agree with that. This seems to really require micromanagement based on a few hours of play.

[Dunamisdeos]

I am enjoying playing an evil spiritualist slaving nation immensely. Playing a duo game, found a suitable primitive civ, resettled every one of them to my homeworld, and have an extremely robust economy coupled with research on par with my materialist/egalitarian science-focused partner.

Also my unity is through the roof.

I expect some of the above will level out, it seems mostly due to the ridiculous population boom I've experienced. Still early game.

[Teneb]

I am enjoying playing an evil spiritualist slaving nation immensely. Playing a duo game, found a suitable primitive civ, resettled every one of them to my homeworld, and have an extremely robust economy coupled with research on par with my materialist/egalitarian science-focused partner.

A really bizarre 2.2 change was to move the "invaded primitives" modifier from the pops to the planet itself.

Meaning you can just do like you did and relocate everyone.

[Il Palazzo]

Edit: the answer seems to be..... nothing. Literally nothing. I don't know if it's bugged for everyone or just hive minds, but I set a sector with two planets in it to AI control (basic resources), gave it 10,000 resources (both minerals and energy) and.... it just didn't do anything at all. I waited a few years and it never built a single building or district.

Mine (not a hive mind) do use them, but tend to wait with building anything until a short while before it's needed. Also, loves to build luxury housing for some reason.

And if anyone knows how to tell it not to build one type of resource districts - do tell me. I've recently switched to robotic bodies, but the governors keep building farms.

Oh, and are the 'resources' you transfer to sectors interchangeable (money=minerals)? They kinda look that way.

[BurnedToast]

I don't know how it is for regular empires but as a hive I've been having a problem with unemployment and rare resources. Specifically I consume a lot of rare crystals and gasses for buildings and I have none in my territory at all. I can manufacture them, but the building only has one job in it.

I have basically infinite of everything else, I'm constantly dumping excess resources to buy crystals/gasses but I'm buying them so much the price never has time to settle, so it's constantly going up which makes this unsustainable in the long run. So I need to manufacture some, but it takes 5 drones to unlock a building slot that only employs 1 drone leaving 4 guys with no job. Every building I make that gives them jobs is one less building slot for making more crystal/gas, which is the only thing I really need.

Edit: the answer seems to be..... nothing. Literally nothing. I don't know if it's bugged for everyone or just hive minds, but I set a sector with two planets in it to AI control (basic resources), gave it 10,000 resources (both minerals and energy) and.... it just didn't do anything at all. I waited a few years and it never built a single building or district.

Mine (not a hive mind) do use them, but tend to wait with building anything until a short while before it's needed. Also, loves to build luxury housing for some reason.

And if anyone knows how to tell it not to build one type of resource districts - do tell me. I've recently switched to robotic bodies, but the governors keep building farms.

Oh, and are the 'resources' you transfer to sectors interchangeable (money=minerals)? They kinda look that way.

I figured out the problem. The governors will only autobuild for unemployed pops, unemployed hive pops turn into "scavanger drones" which give +1 metal. The AI sees this and thinks you have 0 unemployment so it won't ever build anything. Meaning you have to micromanage every single planet for the whole game. HOORAY

As for the AI building farms... they did the same exact thing for ascended synths in previous versions so I don't think there's much hope you can stop it. At least you can sell the food now - in previous versions ascended synth lost the ability to trade excess food for some unknown reason.

[Il Palazzo]

I don't know how it is for regular empires but as a hive I've been having a problem with unemployment and rare resources. Specifically I consume a lot of rare crystals and gasses for buildings and I have none in my territory at all. I can manufacture them, but the building only has one job in it.

I have basically infinite of everything else, I'm constantly dumping excess resources to buy crystals/gasses but I'm buying them so much the price never has time to settle, so it's constantly going up which makes this unsustainable in the long run. So I need to manufacture some, but it takes 5 drones to unlock a building slot that only employs 1 drone leaving 4 guys with no job. Every building I make that gives them jobs is one less building slot for making more crystal/gas, which is the only thing I really need.

It's the same for everyone, and I think it's cool. Makes you really value those resources in space, and the special planetary features that let you build a structure generating 2 (!) jobs.

At least you can sell the food now - in previous versions ascended synth lost the ability to trade excess food for some unknown reason.

Yeah, there's even a special building you get when you ascend now (I don't remember it being there before), letting you convert food to energy on a 20:20 basis. Probably not worth the slot, though

[umiman]

Edit: the answer seems to be..... nothing. Literally nothing. I don't know if it's bugged for everyone or just hive minds, but I set a sector with two planets in it to AI control (basic resources), gave it 10,000 resources (both minerals and energy) and.... it just didn't do anything at all. I waited a few years and it never built a single building or district.

Sigh... Paradox...

[Kot]

I've had AI build things, but it's nowhere close to being actually capable of dealing with anything. They sometimes plop a random new building if there's space, but I don't think I ever saw them build a district. You need to set them to be able to do stuff in first place in sectors menu, and then I think how often they do it depends on governor skill, but I have no proofs.