Mastodawn

Started another game of #Stellaris. Switched off fallen empires, crisis and advanced starts - I want an even playing field to murder the computer while I get to grips with the latest mechanics.

I've just integrated a vassal into my empire, and suddenly I have more than double the colonies I used to, and they're all grossly mismanaged. Lots of worlds with a shitton of mining potential that have instead been set up (badly) as fortress worlds.

Trying to actually figure out what to convert to mining, manufacturing, alloy production, food, energy or trade is actually pretty overwhelming. It's one thing to go "oh, we're running low on consumer goods, time to work on my factory" and another to understand how many consumer goods I'm actually going to need and plan for that much. You don't want more resources than you need, because it's opportunity cost for getting more warships etc.

So I'm working on a spreadsheet. There isn't a planning tool ingame that will tell you "if this colony were fully upgraded in this way, this would be the income and expenditure" and that's, roughly, what I hope to achieve.

Of course, what would be even nicer is an actual UI mod... Hm. Just thought of that. I wonder how hard it is to make a Stellaris mod, I've never looked into it before...

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Len

Oh gawd.

This is incredibly difficult. I thought I'd got it about right, but having just punched in all my numbers the spreadsheet values are nowhere near the actual ones.

Turns out buildings and planet designations make a biiiig difference, which I haven't accounted for.

#Stellaris

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Len 1d ago

Also, I seem to have become Spiritualist by accident.

I suspect I pushed the wrong button in an event at some point. Not what I wanted to happen.

Kids, don't run an interstellar empire while you're drinking!...

#Stellaris

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Len 1d ago

On the bright side, the advantage of Spiritual ethic is priests, which generate Unity from Consumer Goods. And Unity is what you expend to change government ethics. So, with a bit of a waste of consumer goods, it's a self-correcting problem

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Len 1d ago

Well, at least I know how to use VLOOKUP now. Tell you what, this is all still a pain in the backside without decent variable names, having to use column letters instead!

I guess there might be a way in LibreOffice to give a column a name, but I haven't found it (though there's plenty of slop that offers obviously wrong answers)

#spreadsheets #LibreOffice

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kauer 1d ago

@Hyperlynx You may find something useful under Sheet --> Named Ranges And Expressions

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Len 1d ago

@kauer The thing is, if I've got my total Metallurgists in column AH, artisans in AI, soldiers in AJ and so on, and I have each colony on a row, I want to calculate alloy production for the colony as (eg)

=(AH4/100)*+3

I can name AH as "Metallurgists", but for the colony in row 4 I can't put in =(Metallurgists4/100)*+3 , it doesn't accept that. Metallurgists[4] doesn't work either.

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Len 23h ago

So, apparently, "job efficiency" is indeed a direct percentage plus to the input and output of a job, per pop. It is not a percentage increase to the number of pops who can work a job, as the random Steam thread I found would suggest.

So, I went and removed all the pop increases I'd put in and moved them to the relevant income/expendidures. I think. The numbers aren't what I think they ought to be, but that could just be my poor maths.

I would have thought that 100 artisans working 10% better should produce the same amount of trade goods and use the same amount of minerals as 110 normal artisans, but the numbers aren't quite lining up. And spreadsheets are a pig to debug.

I did put in district specialisations properly, since solar farm specialisation in an energy district adds farmers instead of more technicians.

Then I started to finally look at buildings, and despaired. That's going to be such an enormous pain in the backside! They each have their own upkeep, and they either add to number of jobs or they add to the production of a job or they modify the upkeep or the efficiency!... I started to just add fudge factor columns, instead of a column per building, but that's almost as complicated.

This project is definitely one of those "oh, that shouldn't be hard, it'll take two seconds" things that absolutely is not, in actual practice 😅

#Stellaris