A take on death spirals / treading water in 2.2
In 2.2 I feel death spirals stil exist but the feeling of treading water became also an issue. So here a little bit of a long rant about it and why I think that treading water happens and a few bandaids fix to it.
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**Deathspirals:**
To start off I would like of with a presentation that does not apply to humans but is in the game. Meet the [Great Savix'Qast Technocracy](https://i.imgur.com/uxtoGFN.jpg) who did not want to be my friend and ended up being my target instead. The war in itself already had its own little quirks as you can tell by this ["orbital" bombardement](https://i.imgur.com/qtdKyzf.jpg) . With the Technocracy submitting to my empire I was left with a substitute that had 2 ruined planets, 10 pops and was paying me 21 energy credits a month. This would not change for the next 100 years.
Being a greedy megacorporation desperate for profit I of course investigated and found out that whenever a new pop spawned, said pop would be enslaved, since it a certain % of population had to always be slaves in the staffled society empire.
So the a.i. could technically be like "If I keep on growing more slaves and put them in the mines they can make me minerals for my existing buildings to create consumer good solving my problem in the long run"
but instead it is like "if I sell my slaves now I can buy me consumer goods to last another month and then be right back in debt again, PERFECT!".
So I am stuck with a subject that will not only never repair its buildings due to a bug but will also never grow its population because it puts itself constantly back into the deathspiral. It behaves like a person in debt that wants to get out of debt by blowing any leftover money on lottery tickets just that there is not even a price to be had.
The above example does however not mean that a similar situation cannot happen to players either. Once your economy tanks it is really hard to fix it. While it certainly did hurt in previous versions to loose a planet for example, you were stil able to adjust your economy on other planets to combat it. In 2.2 however you can often find yourself in a position where you are out of options. If none of your other planets supports enough mining districts - to allow for enough minerals to be produced - to feed your consumer good production then there is only the market left. The market however will never fix your tileproblem. You will continue to suffer until you can no longer afford the marketprice and deathspiral even worse. Since loosing however means you are already in a bad spot you may never be able to fix the problems. Being the looser usualy means it is very unlikely for you to aquire new district tiles in anyway. This is not even mentioning the massive impact that population loss has.
2.2 overall added more complexity to the ressources you manage and made the maraket more volatile which are both good things but 2.2 also left you without any kind of backup mechanism to combat bankruptcy if it occurs.
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**Treading water:**
In a less severe version this feels like treading water. Specially in the early game running a lot of specialists can leave you starving for consumer goods but they are specialists too. So when you are at a point where you fix their needs your basic workerclass can be nearly non existant. It makes me feel like I am waiting for just enough drops to trickle into a glass so I can take another sip instead of having any option to just refill it even a quarter. It does not make me feel like I am good at planning ahead, it just feels like waiting and there are clicker games with timers for that.
The biggest problem for me are the techcards. With the new repeatable techs I would even go so far to claim that you MUST take discovery tradition just to unlock a guaranteed fourth techcard. As someone who plaied until 2290 before having access to a hydroponics farm choice (because making greenhouse aparently needs to be rediscovered by ftl races) I am very adamant on this.
Techcards also heavily influence wether you can fix your problems or not. For example playing a megacorp I was stuck on 70+ districts over my max. I was at 30% tech penalty. This was not the case because I did not know how to deal with it, it was because the option to fix my problem never presented itself since I was at a 10% tech penalty. With every selection of cards that did not hold my solution the way to fix my problem did not feel like becomeing shorter from knocking out cards but much more like it got longer because the tech penalty kept ramping up. This was me playing without the discovery tree first and I regret it. I could have stopped growing my population to reduce the tech penalty ramp but as anyone of you who plays the new update can probably understand halting your growth is equal to laying down and having a nap during a race.
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So how would I go about fixing it?
First of all the repeatables. Give them a higher effect but make them skip techtiers. You can lets say get research station boost level 1 on the lowest tech tier, none on the second tier and research station boost level 2 on the 3rd tier again so the clutter between techlevels clears up a bit.
Secondly the new ressources. It is absolutely a kick to the chin and nonsenstical to give a techcard that says "oh you need crystals to make this building and continuesly run it even tho you got no clue how to make them and you cannot buy them on the market unless you know how to make them, lol good luck figureing it out". The advanced building cards should either follow the card for natural gas/crystal/mole extraction or follow a replication building and NEVER appear before any of those two.
Thirdly give us hydroponic farm equivalents for mining districts. While energy got a second source in tradeincome for the missing powerplants, minerals suffer from not having another option. Sure, space minerals increased but if you are just unlucky you cannot even sacrifice other buildings to generate a basic economy. Again the market is nice to have but it should not be the only go to if you look for a solution to bad rng.
Fourth add good and bad population events. Babybooms after events like "the live broadcast of colonizing a new world, winning a war, slaying a leviathan,...", riots after a sudden policy/ethic shift that result in casulties. Or simple a mechanic like "years of prosperity" where every year that your population spends in positive income, food, amenities it is assured that your leadership will guide them into a saver future and your population is more likely to multiply (no negative effect here because negative income/food resulting in less popgrowth would be another death spiral).
Fifth disallow the a.i. from using the slave market to sell its own pops until it is back in the positive.
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My 2 energy credits.
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