Stellaris Dev Diary #121 - Planetary Rework (part 1 of 4)

[Wizzington]

Will there be a diary on how this affects factions? And what crime is?

Yes.

 

[Wizzington]

So how does colonization work now? Is there still a settlement phase before it "levels up" into a proper colony?

Yeah. The colony shelter adds special 'colonist jobs' that provide basic amenities and resources, and you have to build up a certain level of infrastructure before you can upgrade the capital and access most building types.

 

[Wizzington]

This sounds a lot like what I'd hoped the teased changes would be so I'm happy.

Questions:

Under the old system when someone bombed a planet it would often ruin buildings.
What happens with orbital bombardment under the new system? Will districts take damage and need repairs?

Also, is blockading going to be a viable option Vs directly assauling a planet, i.e. a planet with only city districts likely depends on agri-worlds to keep it fed. If I park my fleet over this city planet, can I starve the population and weaken the defenders (e.g. damage x% army HP each month for every unit of food that is lacking, to make invasion easier)?

Keep up the good work.

Bombardment will work a bit differently. More on this later.

 

[Wizzington]

Will it be always beneficial to have 3 planets as urban planets and the rest as ressource production for a 10 planet empire?
Can we, for example, create empires that

• have only city planets and buy the raw materials
• have mostly raw material worlds and sell said raw materials for ships/research
• all planets having an equal amount of both

with an comparable efficiency to the first case described above?

This is where the galactic market comes in. That'll be a later dev diary though.

 

[Wizzington]

Have pre-sentients and primitives been re-worked? Do they have their own districts now and can co-exist with your colonists?

Primitives have their own jobs and such, pre-sapients no longer compete with your colonists for space on the planet.

 

[Wizzington]

Seems interesting, but quick question. Will be planetary resource output increase building? Such as the mineral processing plant right now.

There are buildings such as Mineral Purification Planets and Food Processing Plants that improve raw resource production on planets.

 

[Wizzington]

A little weird question: Will be there a way to build 1984-style totalitarian society? Make people life really harsh and negate this with propaganda/wires/etc?

Yeah, this should be possible.

 

[Wizzington]

Will this be what life seeded gives now? along with Gaia planet.

Planets don't have infrastructure inherently. It's something you build.

 

[Wizzington]

I'm sorry if this has been already asked, but if I may ask; how does this affect specialised pops? i.e. Will super-proficient researcher pops be automatically placed in research or will it be first-come, first-served?

New planet system is looking awesome!

Jobs are weighted based on Pops' suitability, species rights, etc, and Pops can take over jobs from other, less suitable Pops. More on this next week.

 

[Wizzington]

So life seeded will now just give a Gaia world start?

It'll probably do the exact thing it did previously, a size 25 gaia world. I'm not sure what you think is changing there.

 

[Wizzington]

Some of the deposits have a two next to them, while other occur twice. Is there some reason for this difference (in the planet view).

Some deposits currently use the same placeholder art, so they only appear to be the same.

 

[Wizzington]

How "raw output" fare against "infrastructure"(buildings)? I mean, if i have a mid-sized planet with a lot of Deposits that increase the amount of Mining Districts, should invest everything into Mining Districts or i should build some City Districts anyway, since a building may provide more bonuses to raw production than just a couple more Mining Districts?

You'll probably need a couple city districts for housing, but there's only a few buildings that affect raw resources so stacking city districts comes at the expensive of raw material output.

 

[Wizzington]

how will you decide which deposit will get paved over when building a city district?

It doesn't work like that. Think of it as being 4 different caps: Overall cap, mining cap, farming cap, generator cap. You can always build a city district as long as you have 1 of the overall cap free, but a mining district requires *both* 1 mining cap & 1 overall cap free.

 

[Wizzington]

@Wiz
From the info we have here 5 districts of the same type on one planet will give the same output as 1 district of the same kind on 5 differnt planets.

Are buildings going to be how we specials planets or will there be some kind of scalling bounes for having X+ of one kind of district on one planet?

There are buildings to buff specific types of districts.

 

[Wizzington]

It's wrong since now game clearly distinct between "energy" and "money" (credits?) in form trade value, luxury good and probably something else.


Wiz gave us "non-final" numbers. City District gives 6 Infra-points, all other give 2. A building require 10. For mid-sized planet, there is that much spare infa for a mining planet. But Wiz answered we need some City Districts anyway, for housing.

Well, you *probably* need city districts for housing. There's ways to reduce pop housing requirements and you could always just choose to deal with the bad effects of overcrowding through other means so not to damage the productivity of your mining hell-hole planet.

 

[Wizzington]

Sounds great to me, the only qualm I have with it is, why do away with the physics (or research in general) deposits? For me a physics depot for example is maybe some spectacular natural formation or phenomenon that seemingly bends the laws of physics or some such. Quite a few anomalies that give more research ressources are even explained with things like that.
You could still keep them in as (rare) deposits and make the urbanized districts the ones that can exploit them (or add a reasearch/academic district type).

You can still have for instance, a deposit that's a weird storm system that improves physics output on the planet. But most research doesn't take the form of building a lab on a physics deposit and mining physics from the ground.

 

[Wizzington]

are you trying to tell me real scientist dont just dig science out of the ground?

I mean, geologists are great and all, but...

 

[Alfray Stryke]

Utterly minor request connected to this, but would it be possible for planets to get titles like "Mining World" when sufficiently specialised? Like how systems get described as Research Outposts/Mining Systems/etc.

Possibly as an addition to the bit where it says world type, so instead of just "Ocean World" you get "Ocean Agriculture World."

The outliner already auto-titles starbases with appropriate titles depending on specialisation, so this seems like a great suggestion.

 

[Wizzington]

I wonder how livestock slavery will work in the new system

Livestock have a special job that produces food. They require very little housing, so can be held alongside your regular pops.

 

[Wizzington]

I just realized, Solitary and Communal are going to affect housing requirements instead of happiness directly now, aren't they?

Yep.