Cascading Civilization Failure
I started a multiplayer game with some friends and we stream each session on my YouTube channel. I messed up pretty bad in our last session and I'm still not sure what I did to cause such a drastic and sudden crash in my economy, my friend Concidius offered his wisdom once he had reviewed the footage:
"There is about a 25 minute clip from this stream that the stellaris reddit would love to analyze as an example of cascading failure of a civilization."
"Basically you ran out of the strategic resources. this then closed the upgraded plants that helped keep your economy going. Then instead of just buying the resources you used what you had to try to try to make things better on a world to world basis. As each resource then failed it created the spiral you found yourself in near the end, also the reason that the commercial complexes were not covering amenities was that most of them were upgraded. They were the second strat resource you ran out of. As they went down they cut off both energy and amenities. As this hit most worlds at once you also hit food production. The losses in amenities cratered your stability and this resulted in losses across the board of all basic and refined production that remained."
"If you look at the video the crisis starts in 2296ish. This is when Varx's crystal shortage becomes acute and the meltdown starts. The overbuilding was a major contributing factor to the crisis but not the main issue during it. Varx had upgraded many buildings. This is normally good. However his entire economy was running on crystals and without them there was a cascade failure of all vital systems. Overall I rate him Comrade Dyatlov. Not great not terrible."
For your consideration: https://youtu.be/jsmKkwprZoU
Posted Jul 19, 2019, 5:01 PM UTC · edited
I think it's important to know that you cannot build your way out of a large-scale deficit. Any job you create is useless unless you have pops to work it. You have to grow your way out of a deficit. When you have worlds with 10, 15, 20+ open jobs, those jobs are not doing anything. If some of those jobs are being created by upgraded buildings, then that means you're also throwing strategic resources away for nothing.
On a small scale (4 or 5 open jobs) this isn't a big deal because pops can shift around from low-priority jobs and it won't impact your economy that badly. But on a large scale it can be catastrophic.
Imagine a scenario where you have a planet with 10 miners on it and nothing else. You have a healthy mineral income and decide you want to use it to get alloys. Hypothetically, if you build and then upgrade two alloy plants, that'll give you 10 metallurgist jobs. But metallurgist jobs are higher priority than miner jobs, which means all your miners will move into the newly created jobs. Suddenly you have 10 metallurgists all consuming minerals, and 0 miners producing any. Now you're running a huge deficit and eating up strategic resources in the process and everything is terrible. If you had expanded slower and just built 1 alloy plant, then a second after you grew two new pops, then upgraded one after you grew two new pops, then upgraded the other after you grew 3 new pops, you will eventually be getting the alloys you wanted without wrecking your mineral production in the process.
I love it when a simulated economy makes so much sense and feels so real. What you just said is basically a crash course for expansion vs. growth. I know I'm not adding much to the conversation, but I really love the mechanics in Stellaris. I haven't played that much yet, but it's honestly amazing.
It seems self-evident that if you're lacking some resource, you just need to build the building that makes it. But if you are just haphazardly spamming that building everywhere, it can easily cause more worse problems as your entire workforce shifts around because of the newly opened jobs.
Combating deficits is as much a game of reducing consumption as it is a game of increasing production, and it is important to remember that everything you make has some sort of cost to it, one way or another.
Robots fix this problem pretty well, though. You can just build a bunch of them and never worry about running out of basic jobs
Or nerve stapled pops, though they take up the space that grows pops. On the bright side they never rebel.
So what you're saying is Keynesianism (stimulus to increase aggregate demand, i.e. building buildings/districts) doesn't work in Stellaris and instead we should focus more on Hayek-like growth in real demand and real people, growing the economy naturally as labor becomes available(i.e. not building out a surplus 20 housing and jobs on a planet and waiting on the come)
I swear man this game has so much to teach us about the nature of societies, they really nailed the economic depth in 2.2, issues aside.
Keynesianism would work if there were "construction" jobs that were generated by having build queues that in turn increase the output of everything on the planet (similar to how for machine empires, Coordinators improve pop output).
Yeah, if they increased pop output rather than just increase build speed or something, kinda like how medical workers add pop growth and amenities.
But the economy in Stellaris is not really focused on growth in terms of space GDP or supply and demand market principles, it's more focused on resource production due in large part because it's a strategy game. Then again the economies in Stellaris feel more like economies pre-1945, where countries competed for resource and market access, because if you didn't have a strategic resource your economy, like the one in the link above, went into a death spiral quickly.
This is why I often have empty building slots in the early game - sure, I'd love some more alloys or research or whatever, but losing those miners, farmers and technicians would be a disaster. Can't do anything without the basics.
Hmm. I always use all my building slots in the early game (= before I can upgrade buildings). Since each slot only provides 2 jobs at that time, I tend to have plenty of basic resource districts anyway.
It does sometimes result in minor food deficits, but that's an insignificant issue that fixes itself before it gets out of hand.