Stellaris Planetary Automation Explained

look at me sure look at me sure i'm the captain now planetary automation is a very new feature to stellaris and there does seem to be quite a lot of misunderstanding around this tool now bear in mind it is a tool and it can be used incorrectly yes you can get bad results out of it however in today's video i'm going to look at what the rules are surrounding planetary automation how we can make use of them and how we can slightly abuse them and by abuse them i mean constructing upgraded buildings that require rare resources without paying any rare resources itself yes we're going to be getting some massive discounts on our building construction across our empire and it's going to be absolutely crazy so stick around for that but without any further ado let's dive in and find out how planetary automation works in stellaris to show off the new automation features i am going to welcome you to the ganlarev commissariat which are fnatic egalitarians so you can see why i've gone for a system of planetary automation yes we've given control back to the people aside from my capital here which i have not automated i've chosen all these buildings and districts myself because the automation for the capital i don't believe it's quite there yet due to the designation and the fact you can't change that designation for all of these other worlds i have not built a single building or district myself yes not a single one they have all been automated now in order to do this i've had to bear in mind what the rules of automation are i am going to go through all of those rules so don't worry once you actually know these rules you will be able to understand what is happening with the automation why it is behaving in certain ways and why sometimes it seems like it's simply not working and before you say that my empire is total trash it's actually not doing that badly yes yes we have a slight consumer goods issue but i could fix that by changing the designation of this ford world here very very easily and we do have a middling size fleetie of just under 5000 and if you're enjoying this video please automate that like button the first thing you want to be aware of are there are two different types of automation there is the planetary automation which you control here and that is by left clicking to turn it off or left clicking to turn it on at this cog if we go to planets and sectors menu then we get access to the sector automation now i would not recommend you turn on sector automation at the moment sector automation that one doesn't really work that's a vestige of a previous time where we could set an entire sector to be balanced production focused manufacturing focused research focused etc before you turn on automation you will want to manually set the designation of your world you can choose from all of the different colony designations but whichever designation you pick will be very important to the choices the planetary automation chooses when it chooses to build new buildings and districts before you let the game unpause and let the automation run wild you will want to right click on the automation here to open the settings now here we have a whole host of different settings that we can turn on or off the default comes with all of these turned on what do each of them do well the first one here designation this enables the planetary ai or the planetary council whatever it is that's choosing this automation behind the scenes to construct buildings and districts that align with the planet's designation in this case we are an industrial world so it should build more industrial districts possibly some alloy megaforges and the consumer goods building to turn on or off the automation in these areas simply click on the tick mark there are also two different type of clicks we can do if we shift click on this option that will change the default here from enabled to disabled and back again the default only matters when you colonize a new planet it will set the automation settings for that planet on top of that if you are to control click that toggles this automation setting on or off for every planet in your empire enabling upgrade buildings means that the colony will automatically upgrade your buildings and this will have priority over constructing new building remember this setting because we will come back a little later to see how it could be uh slightly abused amenities will enable the automatic management of planet amenities in setting job priority and constructing new buildings that provide amenity jobs what is really interesting about this amenity setting is that it will do things like unemploy excess entertainers if you don't need them rare resources enables the automatic constructions of buildings that will provide uh rare resources that is your rare crystals your volatile moats your exotic gases now bear in mind you probably want to leave this unchecked because at the moment it will keep building these rare resource buildings until you have a net of plus three resources in each category which early on in the game is actually quite a high amount that's two of each special building across your empire and you probably don't want six of these special buildings when you've only got say 50 to 100 pops so generally speaking i would untick this one most of the time pop assembly enables the constructions of buildings that assemble pops for example that is my robot assembly plants here it will prioritize building something like a robot assembly plant here before it prioritizes basically any other type of construction which is quite nice meaning it will put down a robot assembly plant as the first building on a new colony if this is tick housing enables the construction of additional housing be that city district or a luxury housing building if you are underneath the housing capacity and building slots will enable the automatic construction of a city district to add an additional building slot if you don't have one available generally speaking i'd recommend you leave this ticked on because it's always great to have that building slot ready crime enables the automation of crime prevention and that will also enable you to build extra crime buildings now for the moment i wouldn't recommend you leave that on turn it off you can probably deal with that one yourself manually and finally clear blockers is the automatic clearing of blockers when it is needed to unlock more districts now this one will clear a blocker if there is nothing else in the priority queue which could mean if there are some things going slightly wrong with your automation your planets will just sit there burning energy and clearing blockers which is definitely not what you want to do for that reason i would generally turn clear blockers off and just do it myself manually what do you think about the new planetary automation features have you been able to use them if you have any issues any questions at all please follow the link down below in the description to a pdx forum post your screenshots tell them your issues give them your feedback that will be very very helpful for offee who has designed and implemented this feature so you've turned automation on you've chosen the automation settings for your planet but it still seems like your colony isn't building anything now colony automation only triggers at the end of the month so you will have to wait until it ticks over one month before a building will start being constructed however you do actually need to give them some resources to use and that's where things start becoming a little bit broken in order to take resources for these buildings you have to access one of the shared stockpiles that is either the shared stockpile or the local stockpile you can either give some of your monthly energy credits or minerals into this shared stockpile or transfer resources to either of these manually i'd recommend doing it manually at the beginning because that's a little bit easier to keep track of once resources end up in the shared stockpile you can never get them out either so it is important to not give too much into these areas what you're basically going to want to do here is only ever give the planetary automation energy credit and that means we can build all of our buildings and i really do mean all of our buildings using the cheaper and easier to access resource which is energy credits rather than minerals we still want mineral income we will still need mineral income that is for the upkeep on things like a metallurgist artificer or any of our rare resource producers which will take mineral upkeep and on top of that you probably will want to build the occasional building or district manually with some minerals so it's good to have some around but otherwise you might as well let the ai build buildings with your energy credits because it is much much cheaper it's cheaper because energy credits as i said are much easier to get you can produce them more easily let's take a look at our energy producers here each one each worker is making 15 energy credits whereas on our home world each miner is only making eight minerals so our minerals are really worth more on an individual level now when you put resources in the stockpiles first your planets in a sector will take their resources from the local stockpile before taking them from the shared stockpile both options are fine it's just a little bit of personal preference where exactly you want to put the resources now you might at this point be a little confused you've enabled automation you've given some resources either to the shared stockpile or the local stockpile that your planet which is automated is in but there's still nothing being built and that is where i need to draw your attention to deficits if you have a deficit in a resource which is required for whatever building you would like the planetary automation ai will not build anything that requires those resources be they resources for the building or upkeep for the jobs themselves and instead it will sit there and do either nothing or something a little unexpected so in order to make sure the ai actually builds buildings you will need to make sure you have positive gain on the resources those buildings and jobs will consume for example on this tech world in order to get another research lab under production i need to make sure i have positive energy credits because this is going to take some energy credit upkeep and positive consumer goods because the job is going to take some consumer goods upkeep as well if for example i don't have positive consumer goods it might build something else like a city district but that really depends which automation settings you have turned on so now we've enabled automation we've made sure to place some resources in the stockpiles we've made sure that we have a positive income of all the resources the potential building or district could need but it still isn't building anything well that comes to the next rule we have which is that the planetary automation must have no available jobs in order to decide to build something so in this case what i'm going to do is unemploy this clerk they'll then get employed as an entertainer i can also unemploy this enforcer so we have some actual unemployment and now that we have unemployment it will now build the building it decides based on the priorities in its automation settings in this case we are going to get our hands on another research lab and i'd like to say a really big thank you at this point to all of the channel members and patrons for supporting this channel if you'd like to support this channel you can do so by following the link to patreon down below in the description or clicking the join button and becoming a channel member down below this video now i talked a little bit about how we can use this system to our advantage and what did i mean by that well i did mean partly to do the fact that by spending energy credits we can get our hands on buildings that are much much cheaper but that is not where it actually ends you see if we want to make sure that a colony is consistently built up let's say we want to fill up all of these industrial districts and we want to spend as little as possible on it what you can do is make some artificial unemployment as long as we have unemployment and i actually here have a single pop which is unemployed because i've reduced the number of artificers and metal urges down the planet is going to continually build these industrial districts for us it's actually not even going to ask it's just going to keep doing it as long as we have resources in our shared pools it will keep building these very cheap buildings and this provides us with a very easy very cheap and very reliable way if we maintain for instance just the designation setting here i can keep pumping out industrial districts as long as resources stay in as long as i keep getting the right amount of resources and this provides me with a really easy and convenient way to build up a planet but there is one step further we can actually go here and that is the construction of buildings that require rare resources so here i have a planet which is about to have a reassembled ship center upgraded i've made sure to have some unemployment and i've turned my automation settings to exclusively be set to upgrade building that means the only thing it's going to try and do if i qualify for building a building and remember all of the rules here automation is turned on we have resources in the local and or shared stockpile the incomes that those buildings will need are positive in this case i do actually need a positive income of volatile moats for this but as long as you're producing one you could use your market just for a month or two to offset any problems and then instead of having to spend 540 minerals and 90 volatile moats in this case i can spend only energy credits and that means i'll be upgrading this alloy megaforge for a much much lower cost because i'll only need to have energy credits in order to do this overall this means the uses for automation are as follows you could turn it on set it and forget it and the planet will roughly manage itself as long as you have a fairly balanced economy and you don't have resource deficits otherwise you could use it for a short amount of time to push down a single designation and build all of the districts if you wanted to or anything like that to build all of the districts or as many districts as your actual unemployment is necessary for and then come back to the planet every now and then to change either these settings around or to build additional buildings like hollow theaters or rare resource buildings and just have a a general balance between some automation and some micro management or you could come to a planet and only turn it on for the specific purpose of building a building much much cheaper and then once you've started the building's construction simply turn it off again and go back to your manual management bear in mind the cost of each of these rare resources isn't one energy credit but instead 10 energy credits whilst yes it is cheaper than buying them directly from the market because you'll have to pay a market fee the savings here aren't over 90 it's more like a 30 to 40 percent saving in this video we explore planetary automation and how you can use it to both ease the burden of micromanagement on your poor fingers and give you a slight leg up in this game something else that can give you a massive advantage is becoming a bulwark in stellar if you'd like to know more about bulwarks and why you should definitely be one click the video on screen now

Channel: Montu Plays

Views: 146,040

Keywords: Stellaris, stellaris gameplay, montu plays, montu plays stellaris

Id: oLIbzY6xH_A

Length: 15min 0sec (900 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 06 2022