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Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today, we're going to start talking about the Planetary Rework coming in the 2.2 'Le Guin' update - the complete redesign of the planetary management system and replacement of planetary tiles. This is going to be a really big topic, so we're spreading it out across four dev diaries, with today's dev diary being about Deposits, Buildings and Districts. Please bear in mind that everything shown is in an early stage of development, and there will be rough-looking interfaces, placeholder art, non final numbers and all those things that people assume are final and complain about anyway no matter how many of these disclaimers I write. :p

Planetary Rework
Before I start going into details on the actual rework, I just wanted to briefly talk about the reasons and goals that are behind this massive rework, and why we're removing tiles and building a new system instead of iterating on the existing systems. For me, getting away from the constraints of tiles has been my single most desired long-term goal for the game. It's not that I think the tile system is inherently a bad system - it works well to visualize your pops and buildings and for the early game it works well enough in giving the player some interesting economic management decisions. However, the tile system is also very constrictive, in a way I feel is detrimental to the very core concepts of Stellaris. The hard limitation of one pop and one building per tile, as well as the hard limitation of 25 tiles/pops/buildings to a planet, it severely limits the kind of societies and planets that we can present in the game.

Do we want to make city-planets, with enormous numbers of pops concentrated onto a single world? Not possible. Do we want to have a fully automated post-scarcity empire where robots do all the actual work? Can't be done without losing out on valuable building space. Sure, we could fundamentally alter the tile system in a such a way to allow these, by for example making it so each tile could support several sub-tiles with additional pops and buildings, but by doing this we will inevitably lose the easy visual presentation that makes the system attractive to begin with, and even then we would continue to be held back by the limit of one pop per building. In other words, we'd end up with something that superficially might resemble the old tile system but offers none of its main advantages and continues to be held back by most of its drawbacks.

When designing the new planetary management system we set out a number of design goals:
- The new system should be able to simulate a wide variety of different societies, to build on the roleplaying and diversity in play-throughs that is such a fundamental part of the Stellaris experience
- The new system needed to offer more interesting choices about how to develop your planets, while simultaneously reducing the amount of uninteresting micromanagement such as mass-upgrading buildings
- The new system should make your planets feel like places where Pops actually live their lives, as opposed to just being resource gathering hubs
- The new system had to be extremely moddable, to make it easier both for us and modders to create new types of empires and playstyles

We believe that this new system that we have created will not only vastly improve many of the features in the game that we couldn't get working properly with the tile system, but together with the resource rework discussed in the last dev diary will also make it possible for us to create truly weird and alien societies that play entirely differently from anything the game currently has to offer, or would ever have to offer if we had remained constrained by the tile system.

Deposits
Under the old tile system, deposits were simply clumps of resources placed on a tile, which would be gathered by a pop and determined what kind of buildings were most efficient to place there. Under the new system, deposits are more akin to planetary terrain and features. Every habitable planet will have a (semi-randomized) number of deposits, with larger planets usually having more deposits. Deposits represent areas on the planet that can be economically exploited, and most commonly increase the number of a particular District (more on this below) that can be build on the planet. For example, a Fertile Lands deposit represents various regions of fertile farmland, and increases the number of Agriculture Districts that can be built on the planet, and thus its potential Food output.
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(Note: All deposit pictures shown here are placeholders, there will be new art for them that isn't done yet)

Not all Deposits affect Districts however - some (such as Crystalline Caverns or Betharian Fields) are rare deposits that allow for the construction of special Buildings (more on this below) on the planet, while others yet may simply provide a passive benefit to the planet, such as a spectacularly beautiful wilderness area that increases happiness for Pops living on the planet. Deposits can have Deposit Blockers that work in a similar way to the Tile Blockers of old, cancelling out the benefits of the Deposit until the Blocker is removed through the expenditure of time and resources. A planet can have multiples of the same Deposit, and there is no hard limit to the number of Deposits that a planet can hold (though there is a cap to how many will be generated under normal circumstances). The types of Deposits that can show up on a planet is affected by the planet class, so where an Ocean World might get its Agriculture from Kelp Forests, an Arctic World would have Fungal Caverns instead.
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(Note: All deposit pictures shown here are placeholders, there will be new art for them that isn't done yet)

Districts
Districts are at at the core of how planets are developed in the Le Guin update. Districts represent large areas of development on the planet dedicated towards housing or resource gathering. For most empires, there are four basic types of Districts: City Districts, Mining Districts, Generator Districts and Agriculture Districts. There are exceptions to this (such as Hive Minds having Hive Districts) but more on this in a later DD. The total number of districts you can build on a planet is equal to its size, so a size 16 planet can support 16 districts in any combination of the types available to you. Additionally, the resource-producing districts (Mining, Generator and Agriculture) are further constrained by the Deposits on the planet, so a planet might only be able to support a maximum of 8 Mining Districts due to there simply not being any further opportunities for mining on the planet. City Districts are never limited by the deposits on the planet, so you can choose to forego a planet's natural resources and blanket it entirely in urban development if you so choose.

The effects of each District is as follows:
  • City District: Provides a large amount of Housing for Pops, Infrastructure for Buildings and Clerk Jobs that produce Trade Value and Luxury Goods
  • Mining District: Provides a small amount of Housing/Infrastructure and Mining Jobs that produce Minerals
  • Agriculture District: Provides a small amount of Housing/Infrastructure and Farming Jobs that produce Food
  • Generator District: Provides a small amount of Housing/Infrastructure and Technician Jobs that produce Energy Credits
There will be more details on most of the concepts mentioned above coming in the other dev diaries. For now, suffice to say that the way you develop your planets with Districts will shape that planet's role in your empire - a heavily urbanized planet will be densely populated, supporting numerous Buildings and specialist Pop Jobs such as Researchers and providing Trade Value for your empire's trade routes (more on this in a future DD), but at the expense of not being able to produce much of the raw resources that are needed to fuel your empire's growth and manufacturing capacity.

A planet's Deposits and Planetary Modifiers may influence this decision - a large planet with High Quality Minerals and numerous Mining Deposits will certainly make for a lucrative mining world, but what if it also sits in a perfect spot to make a heavily urbanized trade hub? No longer are choices regarding planets simply limited to 'Where do I place the capital for the best adjacency bonuses?' and 'Should I follow the tile resource or not?' but will be fundamental choices that create diverse and distinct planets that each have their own role to fill in your empire.
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Buildings
In the Le Guin update, Buildings are specialized Facilities that provide a variety of Jobs and Resources that are not suitable to large-scale resource gathering. For example, instead of having your scientists working in a Physics Lab on a Physics Deposit (whatever that is supposed to be...) you now instead construct a Research Labs building (representing not a single laboratory but rather an allocation of resources towards the sciences across the planet) which provides a number of Pop Researcher Jobs that conduct research for your empire. Buildings are limited by the planet's Infrastructure, with one building 'slot' being unlocked for each 10 Infrastructure on the planet. Some Buildings are also limited in the number you can build on a planet, while others can be built in multiples (for example, a planet can only support a single Autotchton Monument, while you can have as many Alloy Foundries as the slots allow). Buildings can still be upgraded to more advanced versions, but generally there will be far fewer upgrades to do and those upgrades will often require an investment of rare and expensive resources, so it's more of an active choice than something you simply have to click your way through after unlocking a tech.
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Infrastructure comes primarily from constructing Districts, with City Districts giving much more Infrastructure than resource gathering districts do (6 as opposed to 2 in the current internal build, though non final numbers and all that). In addition to unlocking additional Building slots, a higher Infrastructure level also makes some Buildings more efficient, as the number of jobs they provide is fully or partially determined by the planet's Infrastructure level. For example, in the current internal build, Research Labs and Alloy Foundries both have the number of jobs they provide determined by the infrastructure level, meaning that concentrating your research and manufacturing to your heavily urbanized planets is generally more efficient than trying to turn your agri-worlds into science hubs. In addition to Buildings that provide resource-producing Jobs, there is also a wide variety of buildings that provide for the material and social needs of your Pops, such as Luxury Housing for your upper class Pops, Entertainment Buildings to make your populace happy and Law Enforcement to quell unrest and crime. Densely populated planets tend to require more such buildings, as the need for Housing and Amenities scales upwards with Pops and Infrastructure.
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Whew, that was a lot of words. Still, we're only just getting started on the Planetary Rework and next week we'll continue talking about it, on the topic of Stratas, Pop Jobs, Housing and Migration.
 
Calls the tile system extremely constrictive, yet every update he has released since he has taken charge of stellaris has removed features, player choice, and dumbed the game down and made the game MORE restrictive and now we have this happening again.

Again people praising the removel of more features when they should be focusing on fixing the broken AI? Or perhaps all the things they broke in the last patch?
There has been a few, embassies, gifting planets 2.0, a few others but not every update has been removing stuff. Anyway, I'd rather than broken AI for this new update if the current one also has broken AI, it's a pretty gud update for 2.2.
 
I am looking forward to a lot of achievements related to planet specialization, like for example:

- The ivory tower
have a planet with at least X researcher-pops living under academic privilege living conditions (X being a number you only achive on a large world with full focus on research)

- Well that's a hellhole alright...
have a planet with at least X miner-pops living with impoverished living conditions or worse

- Manchester in space
have a planet with an alloy production larger than Y (or more metallurgist-pops than X)

...
 
Calls the tile system extremely constrictive, yet every update he has released since he has taken charge of stellaris has removed features, player choice, and dumbed the game down and made the game MORE restrictive and now we have this happening again.

Again people praising the removel of more features when they should be focusing on fixing the broken AI? Or perhaps all the things they broke in the last patch?

It is not like they remove to leave a blank... They are changing it for the better.

I would not like them to just remove something for nothing.

But a change like that makes the game even more interesting.

Looking forward the next DD and hoping we would not need to wait too long to start playing it.
 
You know you can currently do that? Since the FTL rework pretty much in every game I've made a Cadia, and called it that. If you have a powerful threat on the border (even an FE or the Khan) find a chokepoint system with a planet, fill it with fortresses (a shield and military planet are good too) and engineer the pops to be strong soldiers.

I know that you can heavily fortify a planet against bombing and invasion, but I was asking for more than a very hard, yet passive, nut to crack: it should be a very expensive option to make the planet a sort of additional space station in terms of influencing space battles within the system. I wouldn't compare it to a mega-structure, but it should be close to it in terms of building cost and upkeeping, making it worth only when bordering an extreme threat like an approaching Contingency or Borg/Tyranids like civs. In terms of RPG I'd love to have that sort of option and, if possible, also prison/penal colony worlds that would reduce crime in the whole sector. In terms of pure gameplay we can live without both, but they are a staple of sci-fi.
 
This is where the galactic market comes in. That'll be a later dev diary though.

Trade was already teased and it seems that exchanging resources is not 'free'. There should be some transaction fees and this is totally right.

Yet what about planets within same empire? Is there sort of internal trade planned, or there is just a common pool of resources shared by all planets?

I mean that specializing planets (City-planets with labs and industries, mining worlds, agrarian worlds et.c.) is beneficial. But in that case there should be exchange of resources between planets. It can be implicit (shared pool) or explicit - internal trade.

If there will be trade, can we expect space pirates to do real piracy stuff?
Instead of suicidal attacks on fleets and fortress by swarms of pirate fleets, small (couple corvette size) raiding parties attacking trade routes causing loss of resources (traders have to pay ransom to pirates)
 
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It's a dev diary, not a novella... gotta keep each one to a reasonable length. There's just no way I could cover the entire Planetary Rework (and the way it affects various empires type) to one or even two dev diaries without leaving a ton out.
But we *really* want to revolt.
 
How will orbital research or mining stations work with colonizble planets under the new system, for when we find that planet we don't yet have the habitability to colonize?
 
As befits an update named after Le Guin, this sounds amazing. Combat really stepped up a notch with Apocalypse, I hope this will do the same for peace-time.

Question: Will there be some kind of resource depletion implemented? Always thought that balancing maxing out resource extraction versus more careful reuse etc could add for some interesting empire choices (cliche locusts) but also some more dynamic differences between wide and tall empires.
 
Alright, I know this was some 20odd pages back now, but just read it while going over this thread again. Sorry for being late.
"Tim_Ward said: Does this mean ring worlds can now be a single size 100 entity, rather than four size 25 ones?"
Yes. We haven't taken any decision to do so in the vanilla version (it's something I'm thinking about), but at the very least it'll def be possible through mods.
I for one would definitely like to see much larger Ringworlds, even if it means majorly raising the cost and time to build them, to a point of maybe even being able to support 50 or so districts on each segment, but I do prefer for them to stay as 12 separate segments (with the 4 being habitable), as I have always used the segments themselves as "districts".
I play with a "must-have" mod that adds a new ringworld that has all 12 segments as habitable segments (the blank segments never made any kind of sense to me, please add this option in vanilla one of these days!), and I would usually use console commands to remove all natural resources and spawn in new ones in an organised way such as each segment has a specific set of resources, then I set up my buildings as "districts" on each segment (One or two segments may be full of only minerals and mines, another two of only energy and power plants, and another for research, etc.). Keeping each segment separate will help to keep things organised there, while also having the "planetary" districts set up on each segment. This way sounds like a perfect key for a greatly organized system!
To merge the entire Ringworld structure into a single "planet" would just make things harder to me.
 
I have a suggestion. Maybe it's a good idea to create a big price difference between unlocking "cheap" and "expensive" deposits, while creating structures that reward planetary specialization or diversification. In this way, forces the player to reflect more on the pros and cons to unlock a deposit, and make it a less automatic task for the richer players.
 
Would you consider a small detail for more realistic immersion: that building destruction is not immediate (takes time) and cost credits/resources?
So that there is a little more weight to the right planning.
Even demolition takes time and some budget, not to mention bulldozers and cranes to remove unnecessary buildings. It is not so easy to destroy buildings even with dynamite, as it may seem. Furthermore, you cant just blow things up in the middle of a metropolis. "Deletion" of buildings is quick and easy, but not realistic.
 
Its more realistic then bevor. In current version is energy(money?) is not so valuable like Minerals. But in Real life you just need to look to our world : many EU countries are lack of resources, but still very developed and rich. Urbans generates more wealth and science.

I like it and its courageous to change so much in a game.
 
Isn't mineral production supposed to represent industry on a planet? Like refining minerals into useable steel or something.
Why limit the industrial districts? Maybe your space mining should affect this limitation aswell? You mine more ore, so you need more factories on planets.
 
What purpose would disagreeing serve?
To a get a tile thread sticky sooner rather than later?

I guess most people have accepted the games direction even if they dislike it.
People who dislike this change will either keep playing it because the game is still fun dispite changes they dislike (the FTL change for me for example) or abbandon the game.

Well...

2.0 changes pretty much killed fun for me. The new planet tile-less system is just barely enough to keep me around here. Primarily because I keep seeing awful galaxy generation like this. Do notice that I am a devourer swarm and need to kill them as well for an achievement.

55D2EB4D491EC58179F26772E80745DD83C5159E


Notice that Omni Animus only has 3 routes through fallen empire which in effect block him off from the rest of the galaxy and contact took so long to spread to me as well. It is pretty wacky that I have to kill fallen empire first then I can cleanse them afterward. I don't think they have any wormhole access. The only nice thing about this is that they are robot so I don't get food from them so I can ignore them for a bit.