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[Paul]

Ironman files are compressed, you can't open them and get anything meaningful. At least not without hacking the game's compression algorithm, which seems disproportionate.

Ironman saves are literally just zip files. You can open them as a zip file and read them. Now you can't edit and recompress them because it has a checksum, but you could look at it or even disable ironman.

For instance, you could disable ironman in a copy, survey the whole map, and then plan out your game based on that info.

[Telgin]

So I finally got this, since it was on special on steam.
not finished my first game, but I've gotten bogged down a bit with the colony stuff. it feels kinda boring and distrcting from the game, which is a shame, since I read that it'd been recently changed in a patch to make it more interesting and engaging, not sure what it was like before, but the constant unhappiness from unemployment is just meh, especially when it's so restricted in what you can do to improve it. maybe I'm missing something, but it feels like a poorly designed puzzle game where you have to calculate what building will get the correct amount of housing vs jobs... or something. idk it didn't make a whole lot of sense.

It used to be a lot simpler, with the good and bad that had.  On one hand, it made colony management much easier, but on the other hand, it largely consisted of just plopping buildings down on tiles with the right tile bonuses.  Colony management is more like a minigame of its own now, which does at least give you something to do when not at war.  I also found that it becomes a lot more intuitive after you've set a few colonies up, so it's not such a chore planning out how to address shortfalls of various resources.

The early game is also a lot slower now as a result (not talking about frame rates), which is more of a mixed bag.  I kind of like the slower, more leisurely pace that the update brought, but some people find it boring.

[Shooer]

You can also turn off pop growth on planets.  So you don't have to baby sit their unemployed getting too a planet where they can get a job.

I didn't turn it off on a any planet when I was playing my last game as a machine empire.  Even though machine empires don't have natural migration and you have to manually move pops around.  But having 4-5 fully developed worlds that could make 2-3 pops every couple months allowed me to fill up brand new worlds to 30 pops and just let them go really fast.

Super helpful when turning from a passive isolationist into a neutron sweeping exterminator.  So many empty new worlds to colonize.

I honestly like that I can now sort of store pops to drop onto freshly colonized worlds to really jump start them WITHOUT taking away from the production of my more settled worlds.

[Cruxador]

Ironman files are compressed, you can't open them and get anything meaningful. At least not without hacking the game's compression algorithm, which seems disproportionate.

Ironman saves are literally just zip files. You can open them as a zip file and read them. Now you can't edit and recompress them because it has a checksum, but you could look at it or even disable ironman.

For instance, you could disable ironman in a copy, survey the whole map, and then plan out your game based on that info.

Oh, are they editable once you unzip them? That's new to Stellaris then, it doesn't work that way in older Paradox games.

[Radsoc]

I like how the game has progressed since last time I played, but I'm confused about the planetary revamp. What was the reason? Less micro and better AI? Not sure about that, but I'm glad the geographical (adjacency and what not) tile management is gone, even though I miss the presentation and the "tactility" part of it (in that you could drag pops around - I take it there's an auto best fit now - which is fine). Yet, now there can be hundreds of pops and variable density (which wasn't modeled before).

The economy part of the game has improved a lot, and I like the challenge of balancing/adapting the budget for dynamic needs (e.g how far can you push efficient alloy production and if you can increase living standards in the meantime). The trader enclave trade of previous versions might have been the worst feature of any modern strategy game, but the new market has completely remedied this. Not sure how the price mechanism works though, but it's as if the galactic empires are minor market players due to relatively small dynamic perturbations on a seemingly set equilibrium price (unlimited supply somewhere - but I guess one could be set based on galactic resource availability). Maybe there would be too little trade to achieve stable markets with only 10 partially trading empires or so. Piracy and trade is much more convincing now as well.

Securing resources is a good incentive for war, but the market could have an even bigger potential to that end if it could introduce competition, embargoes, and interface local markets.

The AI still lags behind. Year 2400 fleets are still less than 20k. (Everyone except the FE are rated "pathetic"), and now got a War in Heaven on my hands. The biggest AE has fleets rated at 90k for a total of 600k. I struggle with a fleet cap of 280 and probably 60k fleets (maybe settle for anti admin cap tech stagnation toward end game?). I guess I could have played even more aggressively to have a go at the Non-aligned achievement, but would be a senseless fight currently it seems.

The L-gates are much harder than people make them out to be. I had to go multiple fed+mercenary (cannon fodder)+regular+allies+dual titan rounds on massed 250k fleets. Small picket vessel swarms are good diversion, but some ships just got to pack a punch too.

Space communism is now a thing (and makes sense where slavery, feudalism and capitalism does not - as reflections of modes of production tied to obsolete non space faring tech : ). The empire voice over is a bit on the paradox-humorous side though.

[E. Albright]

(unlimited supply somewhere - but I guess one could be set based on galactic resource availability)

It's more confusing when you recall there's an equally-unlimited local market until the galactic one is founded, even if you're all alone in the night.

[BurnedToast]

I like how the game has progressed since last time I played, but I'm confused about the planetary revamp. What was the reason? Less micro and better AI? Not sure about that, but I'm glad the geographical (adjacency and what not) tile management is gone, even though I miss the presentation and the "tactility" part of it (in that you could drag pops around - I take it there's an auto best fit now - which is fine). Yet, now there can be hundreds of pops and variable density (which wasn't modeled before).

Less micro, better AI, and a better ratio of meaningful choices to mindless busywork were the goals.

I guess 1 out of 3 is... something? There are more meaningful choices and less mindless busywork, since instead of building upgrades we now just get flat resource boosts from research. Unfortunately the AI is amazingly somehow even worse than it was at the old system. The sector system has also gotten so much worse/more annoying which combined with the bad AI means there's a massively larger amount of micromanagement past early game (say, 10+ planets)

Also there is no "auto best fit" system. The AI is perfectly happy to put say, mining boost pop on farms and then put farm boost pop in mines and you can't change it without a lot of tedious fiddling with the "priority" arrows (which aren't priority at all and are actually just "open/close job slots" arrows). It's even worse because pops take 10 years(!) to "demote" their social status so if the AI promotes a mining boost pop into a specialist job, he will sit unemployed for 10 years before you can get him back in the mines.

Edit: I forgot, better performance was another goal... and another failure since the game runs like garbage now. I had zero problems before 2.2, even late game in a large galaxy but now I start getting stuttering and lag after ~100 years and it just slowly becomes unplayable. I've never actually finished a 2.2 game due to increased micro + slowdown/lag

Space communism is now a thing (and makes sense where slavery, feudalism and capitalism does not - as reflections of modes of production tied to obsolete non space faring tech : ). The empire voice over is a bit on the paradox-humorous side though.

Slavery makes perfect sense in a universe where building an undefined "unit" of robots takes up to 5x as long as an undefined "unit" of population takes to be born and grow up to working age. Also space law says you can only have one guy building robots per planet.

[Cruxador]

(unlimited supply somewhere - but I guess one could be set based on galactic resource availability)

It's more confusing when you recall there's an equally-unlimited local market until the galactic one is founded, even if you're all alone in the night.

And it's fully available even if you're a hivemind or something, without any domestic economy.

[Radsoc]

I read about performance concerns, but maybe the beta patch has solved some of it. I'm on a 10 year old AMD budget CPU that runs the game on linux, large galaxy size and expected bad performance in the mid to late game (at which point I would switch to a laptop or main comp). The L-Cluster reduced performance a bit, and especially the battles which lagged on super-slow, but improved somewhat afterwards. However, now there's a day per second, at maximum, again. There are about 3 lags a day, where space ships freeze on their routes etc, and when the market seems to update.

"Balance" is another thing. I think they are too worried about that to a point where the civs basically turn into different graphics as a front for similar mechanics. What they should be thinking is to provide civs with a spectrum of tools to achieve the same ends through asymmetrical balance. The dominions series does this wonderfully.

A final issue is the battles. All lasers fire simultaneously etc. But that's just cosmetics Ground battles are better now, with the disengagement and so on, but Master of Orion 2 did this nicer more than 20 years ago.

[Cruxador]

The dominions series does this wonderfully.

It's also had nearly ten times the development time and (without putting too fine a point on it) it's designed by a different caliber of man. It's not reasonable to use this as a benchmark for groups like Paradox.

[Nelia Hawk]

A final issue is the battles. All lasers fire simultaneously etc. But that's just cosmetics

https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=1524731904

the bottom 4 of that list might help a bit with that

[Paul]

What bugs me is the new pop growth mechanic.

You only grow one pop at a time, and it seems to favor aliens over the predominant species on the planet. So as soon as you get another alien species, even if you only have a single pop of it, you'll suddenly grow almost nothing but that species. Even if your current species has rapid breeders and the new species has slow breeders, your rapid breeders will just suddenly stop breeding and you'll get the penalty of slow breeders unless you specify which species you want to grow (population controls, which also hurts growth) or limit them to zero migration and put them all on a single world.

If they just made the simulation a tiny bit deeper and kept track of the different species growths and migration individually it would be so so much better. Then my one little pop of aliens would grow very slowly on their own and not impact the growth of my main species.

[forsaken1111]

there are already a few mods that somewhat improve the pop growth weights so it will favor pops with rapid breeder traits and such

[BurnedToast]

I've managed to get to midgame with my first non-hive race and I'm starting to understand why people talk about a mineral crunch. There's just not enough of them. I've got virtually every possible mine built in my whole empire, with production targets running and I'm still running a -500 deficit. I didn't even go too crazy with the alloy forges - I've got one refinery planet covered in them, and a small handful on other planets and that's it, but I just can't keep them fed. I don't even have any ecumenopolis since I don't have megacorp, I can't imagine how bad it would be with a couple of those.

It feels especially bad because there's no way to get more. You can spam hydroponics for food, and spam commerce buildings for energy but nothing for minerals. So every new planet I snag is only useful up to however many mine slots it has - and anything more than that is dead weight, paying consumer goods (indirectly minerals) to get stuff I don't need and that feels really bad.

For now I'm managing to afford buying hundreds of minerals per month from the magic unlimited market but I feel like I probably can't sustain that forever. At least the only penalty for running out of minerals is half alloy production so it's not actually a very big deal... but I want to try and at least pretend I'm playing "correctly" and not abusing a stupid design decision.

It almost seems pay2win (matter decompressor, hive mind for hive worlds or robots for robot worlds) except there have been so many other oversights and questionable design decisions with 2.2 that I suspect they probably just didn't think it all the way through.

Edit: oops, 500 deficit was without production targets which I didn't notice had run out, but still - minerals are too rare imo.

[Paul]

Try the consumer benefits trade policy. It basically buys consumer goods at a value of 2 using half your trade income (you get 0.25 CG and 0.5 energy for every trade value).

Using that I'm able to run my empires consumer goods fully off trade income and use the militarized economy policy for +25% alloy production. I replaced all my consumer goods factories with commercial zones and research labs. Without having to produce consumer goods, I can use my entire mineral income on alloy production and I don't run into mineral shortages.

This is MUCH more effective with a Thrifty species, as the +25% trade value bonus is a huge benefit. Even better if you're also xenophile, but thrifty is the biggest one.

With Thrifty and consumer benefits trade policy, the Clerk job is actually useful .