Paradox has big plans for Stellaris 4.0. The next major update for the space game is giving it a hefty rework for its ninth birthday. Currently targeted for May, the Phoenix update aims to act as a reigniting spark, and one of the biggest focuses for the strategy game giant is tackling the performance issues that have cropped up as Stellaris continues to grow ever larger and more complex. As part of this process, game director Stephen ‘Eladrin’ Muray explains how Paradox is dramatically rescaling populations, and what that means for your next game.
Pops and Jobs, as they’re most commonly known, were introduced in Stellaris 2.2, and Muray says the system “has always had significant performance implications in the late game.” It’s something almost all the best 4X games suffer from – whether in Stellaris or Civilization, the longer a game goes, the more each turn begins to chug. The reworked system primarily aims to reduce the number of calculations the space game needs to make, helping everything flow more smoothly, but Muray explains that the team took the chance to also streamline planetary management across the board.
In the existing system, Pops fill Jobs, and those Jobs produce your resources. When 4.0 arrives, Pops will now generate Workforce, which is used to fill Jobs – but the planets themselves will produce resources. “At a basic level, this works almost the same way,” Muray notes. “By default every Pop generates one Workforce, so Jobs are still filled at the same rate.” Alongside this, the scale of Pops has been changed. Now, things that would have previously affected a single Pop affect them in groups of 100.
While this shouldn’t make too many changes to the results you see from your population allocation, it gives Paradox more ability to support the simultaneous growth of Pops on a planet. That means you shouldn’t see the growth of multi-species empires dominated by underrepresented species, and means you’ll no longer be able to just spam colonies regardless of their habitability to stack up lots of flat Pop growth. Newly settled colonies will now be much more reliant on migration for their initial growth until you get them established.
To help support this change, Paradox is adding a new stratum of the population called Civilians, or Residents if the species in question doesn’t have full citizenship. “These form the generally content base of your empire,” Muray explains, “and will trickle out to the colonies looking for better opportunities.” Unemployed Pops will still exist, though unemployed Workers will gradually demote to Civilians over time.
Muray adds that the team is “a bit worried about early conquest of homeworlds being too easy of a snowball with the increased starting Pop count,” so the team is looking into ways to make taking a homeworld more challenging during the early and mid stages of the game. This could include using a Civilian home guard to defend their planet or taking on ‘Resistance’ Jobs when aggressively invaded, or implementing Defensive Platforms as a starting protection for homeworlds. “We welcome your ideas and suggestions,” he says in closing.
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