Stellaris is in such a weird way right now. As soon as 2.2 hit, I gave it a shot after a year or so having not played the game and fell in love hard. Not having played since before the Apocalypse overhaul, experiencing both combat and economy overhauls, I was like "goddamn, this is it. This is the game I was waiting for" and in so many ways, it really is. The game is absolutely almost top notch.
But then it is this "almost" that kills me, it's like they are so close, but the AI right now is not functional. It's great for you to learn the systems and experience content, but the AI is kind of placeholders, so you have to use the Glaivus AI mod for the enemy to seem like a competitor.
But what is really killing me is the strata and job system and how it is perfection in theory and disappointing in practice thanks to half-baked AI.
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So you have these three stratas: Rulers, Specialists, Workers/Slaves. Each do a type of job and different government types each distribute resources differently among them.
And then you have the different races and ways of, during the game, to modify them, via gene-modding or robo-modding. Also you have xeno-compatibility where races can produce mixed races with traits from both parents.
What I dream: whenever creating a new pop, the AI would at least give more weight to the available options in order to maximize pops and their jobs. So if a pop is really good at mining (either because I modded it that way somehow or because xeno-compatibility happened to mix someone like that), it would go to mining, and the previous miner would do something else (even if it means unemployment).
That would mean you could micro-manage at a macro scale either by fiddling with templates if you are doing the modding personally, or by letting the beautiful chaos of mass immigration and mixing naturally do its thing via xeno-compatibility.
How it works: AI don't care and just try to create equal parts of every race for whatever weird reason which means that, in a xenophile empire with 10 or 20 races you just accept your fate that your economy won't be optimized.
What is worse is when you are of a mechanical race and there isn't a system for create specialized robots for the job because, again, the AI don't care.
And it sucks because it's something that ultimately maybe don't matter, really, but the flavor is there, the system is there, we have very specific jobs and pops with very specific bonuses created in a myriad of ways that we... urgh... can't just match... I have this race that have very high habitability in this one world and also with bonuses to research jobs and the AI will ignore it. The only way I can kind of force it is by messing with which pop grows where (at the very hefty cost of a pop growth penalty), but then my natural scientist might just become a miner.
It's there! lol! I can taste the system working in such a way where I can be either an eugenics dictator or an egalitarian beacon of liberty and both will have their own unique ways of making the maximum out of the possibilities already in the game, but one crucial little part of the puzzle is simply missing.
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Sorry for the rant, lol.
2.2 is full of little things right these where I am like "oh wow, this game is so great....... almost...... so very close...."
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Edit:
Wait did I do this long rant and the game already tries to do that?
Why it isn't working? I guess the game does try to pair the best people with the best jobs given what it currently has on the planets, but what really messes it up is pop growth?
Goddamn it, see? Almost there. So close.
