(Cross-post in the Sector Discussion thread)
While I think the suggested fixes for sectors are a step in the right direction I still have to wonder what the point is. What is the point of sectors? Is it just to organize your empire in smaller units which you can collapse in the UI? Is it just to deal with not needing a new governor for each planet?
If that is the point then you might just as well remove sectors completely. And now that sector focus is going away and planet designation is becoming a thing (much needed change!!) there’s even less of a reason to keep sectors around.
You could just let the player bunch planets together however they wished. Set a limit of 5 planets in each “Administrative Unit” and set a Governor for it. Boom. Solved. No need for hyperlane distances, sector capitols, nudging systems, etc. Automated Construction Ships can be built by the player and just set loose on automated, no need to have one per sector.
Or have a couple of “Ministries” which control the various designations. War Ministry would for example contain all Forge Worlds, Tech Ministry all Tech Worlds and so forth. Set a Minister (Governor) for each Ministry and you’re good.
All of the suggestions in the Dev Diary feel like a good band aid, nothing more. There needs to be a plan for sectors if they are to even stay in the game.
I hope there’s a plan and that the band aids are just to make them “functional” while a more robust system is being built. Anything else would be pretty sad..
These are my thoughts on how I would make sectors work. Turning them into something that can be built upon and refined but with a stable core and clear function. I’ve tried to not go into too much detail on each section and paint with broad strokes.
General Goal and Idea
Sectors are pre-generated and consists of the clusters of systems with choke points connecting them. We’ll call these clusters Regions for now.
The player/AI designates a Region as part of a Sector. A Sector can contain 1 (one) Region at start. With research (Traditions? Ascension perks? Civics? Etc?) you can extend this limit and add more Regions to a Sector. Exactly how many Regions will be the upper limit can be determined later but with some napkin math I’d say 3-5 Regions. You can rearrange your Regions and Sectors when you want as you expand and increase your limit. There are limitations to this so you need to be sure and not just constantly move the Regions around. Sector Stability (see below) could take a hit, active Sector Focuses (see below) could block changes, Influence costs, etc.
To catch some of the systems that get caught in between you can add region less systems one hyperlane away to your sector.
Hierarchy and UI
From the top:
1 Empire
2 Sectors
3 Region
4 Planet/habitat/system
This would allow for a big empire view and then you can dig deeper and deeper to affect change, make decisions, set policies, etc. Some decisions are only available at certain levels. Like empire wide edicts are only available on the empire level and affect everything below. While piracy suppression settings will be at a sector level.
This will allow the player to control what level of detail they want to view their empire at. If you only want to check your number of planets, total resources, buffs and so forth you don’t have to dig deeper than the first layer, Empire View. To see a better view of the makeup of your sectors, which sector produces what, assigned governors, etc you go down to the Sector View. Down to Region View and then lastly you can go down to each individual planet to see what is going on. All these layers can be filled with info that is of use at the level. For example sectors can give indicators for if there are unemployment and housing shortages. So if you see those you can investigate and dig deeper, if you wish. No need to check every single planet in your empire. Sector layer has a summary of it all.
Add a filter to the outliner for automated and non automated planets to make it easy to keep track of the planets you want to keep track of.
Sector Capitol
One planet per sector can be declared the sector capital with a bonus similar to the empire capitol. (stolen idea, can’t remember from who)
Sector capitol could get a special building, or a special upgrade to the planet's capitol. This goes for all planet designations. A mining colony has a capitol aimed towards that goal. The difference doesn't have to be massive. More flavour. The mining capitol could replace a few administrators with foreman. They could be producing some minerals like half a miner plus admin production, lower the upkeep of miners, lower upkeep on mining districts, increase miner political power, etc. Something small but flavourful. I would heavily caution against anything that ups the production directly, no +x% minerals, as we don't want this to feel like another thing to be optimized. These bonuses should stay in the lower range and just feel like fun, making a mining colony gives you foremen feels natural and like a nice little touch. The +% mineral building should also grant a foreman per level.
“Sector Focus”
Sector focus would be replaced by more interesting mechanics (with a new name). Or just buffs to certain areas, stability, workers, and so on. Probably have like a positive thing and a negative thing so it just doesn’t come down to which buff is the best. Switching costs influence and has a lockout timer. Setting a focus should be a decision. Focuses can be locked behind civics. This gives civics another knob to tune for balance and make boring +30 admin cap civics more flare.
Alternatively these focuses could be set on Regions instead.
Different governments could have effects on focuses as well. Like space communists could have a 50% reduction in time and costs to allow for more rapid switches, a five year plan instead of a ten year plan tied down in red tape, elections, votes etc.
Examples just to give a general idea of what I'm going for. And obviously all numbers would need to be tweaked and balanced.
- Experimental Engineering “increases engineering research by 10% of all alloy production but alloy production is lowered by 20%”. This would be something for peacetime. Turning it on locks that sector into it for x years. So turning it on is a risk/reward decision. Overproducing alloys during peace? Turn it on, but be weary if the galaxy is unstable and you've got aggressive neighbours.
- Cutting the Red Tape “reduces the empire sprawl produced by districts by 10% but increases the energy upkeep of all districts and buildings by 30%”. Requires the efficient bureaucracy civic.
- Grand Tournament “duelist jobs increases stability by 1 in the sector and 0,5 on every other planet in the empire, lasts 1 year and only one tournament focus can be active at a time in your empire. Grand tournament has a 10 year cool down.” locked behind the warrior culture civic. Stability bonus could be changed to reduce crime, increase happiness, trade value..
- Tournament League “duelist jobs also produce 1 trade value. Lasts 5 years and only one tournament focus can be active at a time in your empire.” locked behind the warrior culture civic.
- Hasty War Machine “metallurgist produce 1 more alloy but each alloy costs 1 additional mineral” so they will produce 4 alloys at the cost of 12 minerals making them less efficient overall.
Governors
Less +output traits and more about governing and development. More bonuses about stability, crime, growth, building cost, building speed, empire sprawl, piracy, upkeep, etc. If there are output bonuses give them small +% so that the other bonuses feel strong and good and output more like a small boost if you want, but not the mandatory and obvious choice. Be creative! Less “+5 stability” or “-20 crime”. The end effect can result in a +5 but try to make them fun, colourful and immersive.
Example “each pop working a ruler job increases stability by 0,5”. The end result might be ~5 stability on a decently developed planet but there is also room for player choice, customization and more of a sense of fulfillment.
Trade and Piracy
Trade value would be collected on a region level. Sectors collect all trade from regions. Personally I'd like to get rid of the trade routes unless they're given some interesting mechanics. All other resources are simply collected and instantly available to the empire without the need for transportation. I’m assuming the actual trade is located at its source and that all the clerks aren’t commuting to Homeworld every day. So trade value is also collected to the sector and converted to energy or whatever your policy is set to. That policy can now be set at a sector level.
Piracy is also handled on a sector level. This will tie into sector stability and sector cohesion. You can assign ships to a sector that suppress piracy. These ships are now owned by the sector and won't show up on the map unless you unassign them. What they do during war could probably be set as a policy or just a preset mechanic. Like if a starbases in the sector is attacked they join the fight after X time as long as the base still stands.
Piracy is affected by things like total trade value, starbases, patrols, sector cohesion (uncontrolled systems in your regions make for perfect pirate bases from which to strike), etc.
Additional thoughts for keeping trade routes.. They would go from the sector capitol to the empire capitol. But otherwise function as now.
Sector Stability and Cohesion
Cohesion from the empire level is moved down to sector level. Cohesion is determined by how much of each region in the sector you own.
Sector stability is influenced by things like planet stability, piracy, sector cohesion, events, unrest, governor, etc.
What the effects of sector stability are can be discussed. Risk of rebellions? Events? Trade? Internal politics?
Automation
Tax
Set sector tax like earlier and let them fill up resources up to a modest cap. When the storage is full all resources are turned over to the empire. You can also set it to 0% and handle all their resources manually. Sectors have a much lower storage limit than pre-2.2 and you cannot use them as banks and withdraw resources. 1-2k per planet in the sector? 500 per upgrade level of capitals of all the planets in the sector? Or let the player set the limit? Or maybe just an empire-wide storage that all sectors draw from? With that a wealthy sector can fund a poorer newer one by pumping in resources in the storage.
Along with this we’ll have an indicator at the sector level that the sector wishes to build something but is lacking resources. Basically that it has a build order in the queue but lack resources. A warning that you either need to pump in resources manually or raise the tax somewhere to keep up with the build orders.
Pre 2.2 sector controls with construction ships, colonising, redevelopment, etc. Ships and mining stations are built using the sector resources.
By turning redevelopment off a player could set up the planet as she wishes and then let the AI handle building upgrades and filling out the last districts. Or if the player returns to the planet, rebuilds some things and turns off redevelopment they know the AI won’t change it again. Getting us closer to being able to “finish” a planet.
Planet Designations and AI
Like what grekulf talked about. “Sector Focus” is now set on a per planet basis. The AI will however not build hyper specialised and optimized planets! That is a trade-off the player has to make in order to let her colonies be automated.
Example: A Tech World designation would build lots of Research Labs while also building a round generalized planet. It would have some alloy, consumer goods production along with a few resource districts. Striving to be somewhat self sufficient with whatever designation it has. So a tech world would prioritize consumer goods over alloys along with minerals and some food. This is so that if the planet falls to an enemy it will not utterly destroy the economy as all planets share some of the overall production. Losing a forge world will not result in a loss of all your alloy production. Just a good chunk of it.
Players can make that decision to heavily specialize but I don’t think the AI can. The player has a plan for her empire while the AI, at least currently, is just trying to put out fires by building what is needed at that very moment. At least not now.
This system should be pretty good for AI empires where they can identify good candidates for specialization through their anomalies, proximity to the front lines, district distribution, personality and need. If they have a forge world already they should be less inclined to building another until they’ve got “one of each”, with for example militant empires being more inclined to getting more forge worlds or materialists getting more tech worlds and so forth.
The AI also needs to be able to redevelop worlds so they can change their focus depending on the circumstances. This can be turned on and off like before for the player.
Say a war gives them a large chunk of new systems pushing their frontlines forward. Then they could turn their previous frontline planets into specialized planets from generalised. Anything closer than 3-4 jumps away from an enemy (borders to friends are more relaxed), would be deemed a frontline planet and be more generalised but also contain fortresses as they are more in danger of being lost in a war. Planets away from the borders would not need fortresses. Fortresses are built and demolished along with all other changes to planets from changing circumstances.
The frontline border depth could be dynamic, the more aggressive and threatening neighbour the deeper into your territory the frontline planets “line” is.
All these AI controlled planets will be less optimized than if a player built them completely. I think this is a good thing. If you wish for 100% optimal planets then you need to handle them yourself. But if you wish to reduce micromanagement you pay a price in efficiency. But you also know that the planet won't suddenly explode your mineral/consumer goods expenditure by for example overbuilding Research Labs. There is a difference between AI and player empires. Player AI controlled planets would have less emphasis on being self sustained as you'd have to assume the player knows what they're doing when setting a designation. The player can plan for the increased upkeep in the long term that the AI can't. Say a players planet would strive to produce 20-30% of all needed resources locally while the AI might aim for 30-40%. These numbers would be highly dependant on how good you can make the AI run.
The designation AI would of course check for resource production before building. So for example it wouldn't care as much for building mines if the empire is running a huge surplus from other sources, mining worlds.
Quick example Tech World for players to give you a basic understanding (haven't done any math here) :
6 research labs
1 civilian factory
2 mote factory
4 mining districts
4 farming districts
X city districts
Future Ideas
Ideas for the future on where you can go with a solid Sectors/Regions base.
Building Weights
Governors (and ethics) affect the weights of buildings slightly. Other things to affect weights could be civics, emperor personality, mandates, etc. Lots of potential. The important thing here is to make each empire feel more unique and less cookie cutter which is a risk of having the same AI develop all planets.
Government
Different governments and ethics could have varying degree of control and input over their sectors/regions/empire. For example Authoritarian might have full control over sector and empire policies etc while egalitarian have less (but other advantages).
Starbases - Civilian and Military
Each region can have one civilian station. These provide trade, piracy protection, bonuses to mining and research stations. Some Buildings would have a region wide effect. Like hyperlane register. But there also would need to be enough buildings that it doesn't devolve into a set of mandatory buildings that every base has. Reduce the number of slots on civilian bases to 4? Military bases have their own set of buildings. Some could be shared.
Potentially you could add pops to civilian bases. Like a habitat. Jobs could come from modules and buildings but also what kind of resources that are mined in the region. Mining stations without pops working them would be mostly automatic and thus not yielding as much as a fully staffed station. They would still yield what it says on the galaxy map. Stationed pops would yield extra resources. Pops working on starbases would probably not produce growth as they don’t really live there full time. They are probably working shifts, seasonal jobs while having their homes and families planetside.
Who controls the region and can build the Starbase? The empire that first own 50% or more of the systems. If systems changes owners then so can the region.
Military stations would be primarily built on choke points. While you can have one civilian per region the military stations are limited like they are today. Military stations have more levels. The last step(s) are a huge undertaking. These fortresses would be super expensive and take a long time to complete but are extremely strong. Not the kind of station you build every time your border moves. These are the stations you might have protecting your core regions.
Galactic Market
The resources on the market are now finite. In order for someone to buy Minerals someone else has to have sold them. There is some leeway here. There are private companies selling to the market but not in the quantities that an entire empire needs to run its economy. Trading Enclaves could use the market more as well, tie them into it. Heck, they might even be the ones running it!
The galactic market belongs to a region or sector and can move every X years with a new nomination process.
Sector/Region Jobs
Regions and sectors could generate jobs depending on space resources, megastructures, starbases, etc. These jobs could draw from pops on planets or civilian Starbases as suggested above.
Sector/Region Completion
Sectors and regions have varying levels of importance depending on government, ethics, civics, etc. This means that some empires will be more inclined to war to complete their regions and others don't care as much about how cohesive their regions are.
This will bring more variety to wars. But also Diplomacy! Trading systems can become a powerful tool in the arsenal of diplomatic options.
Internal Politics
A basis has been laid for future development of internal politics. Regions and sectors can easily be used as a stepping stone.
Wars and Raiding, Espionage and Piracy
You can now actively pay to support pirate activity in other empires regions. Or you can send in your own fleets as pirates and raid your neighbors. This could be something for fleets to do in peacetime. Events for fleets! One fleet of unmarked corvettes goes on a raiding op in empire bBregion. Empire B responds by sending a few cruisers to investigate this uncharacteristic uptick in piracy. Cat and mouse event types begins. Sharing a region between you increases the efficiency of raiding/piracy. There can be lots of ways to destabilize a region, fits in well with a espionage system. Of course you’ll be able to perform espionage on systems deeper in enemy territory but you’ll have an easier time in a shared more chaotic region with more borders to keep check. Destabilizing a region can have lots of different results; anything from reduced output to outright rebellion in the region and them joining you.
Declaring wars over the ownership of a shared region is now a thing, new CB.
I really like the idea of skirmishes, border wars and more relaxed borders for civilian ships. I think it'll open the door to a lot of potentially fun and rewarding play styles.
Raiding your opponents neighbouring systems would be interesting. Could be two versions. One which is more like an event, your shop disappears from the map for a time but act like piracy for the opponent. You'd get a bunch of resources for a relatively low risk. Your opponent might send an armada to the area though which would nullify your raid, might even destroy a bunch of your ships. You'd probably want to keep the raiding fleet small as to easier avoid enemy patrols and such, corvettes and maybe a single cruiser at tops. The bigger fleet you send in this way the greater the rewards, but also greater risk of getting spotted and angering your neighbour.
The second is a full blown raid where you go in with your fleet and forcefully just grab whatever you want. Far more aggressive and it's fairly obvious who's doing the raiding as you aren't trying to hide it. This'll have far greater diplomatic consequences. Raiding actions is what the Barbaric Despoiler would excel at.
UNRELATED
Borders
Three levels. Fully closed, closed to military ships and open. Borders closed for military ships would be the “default” unless you really hate the other empire (purifiers, genocidal, etc). This would allow Science and Construction ships to move through the galaxy and open up for more exploration. Border status is now something you can trade for. Want military access through a neighbour to attack the enemy on two fronts. Pay up and you could get it!
Discovering a new empire would not reveal all their planets and systems, just a note where their Homeworld is located. You can trade star charts of each others systems but it is not automatic like it is now. Since Science ships can still move about freely (in most cases) you’d extend the exploration phase and the excitement of it.
Later on you could add a new exploration phase where science ships can have a second round of exploration. Some events mid-game unlocks a bunch of new anomalies/events to be explored/researched all over the galaxy. Ruins of newly discovered ancient civilizations? Mysterious portals opens up? Simultaneous mutations in the local wildlife on a bunch of planets? Strange signals? Distress signals from ships in need? Pre-events for the different crisis? The possibilities are endless!
Amenities
Amenities are fairly similar to consumer goods in what they represent. I suggest combining them. Producing amenities locally on a planet is more efficient. Consumer goods are shipped empire wide and used for trading. CG pick up the slack from missing amenities before being distributed evenly on all planets. Decisions can alter the flow of CG.
Add a second or even third tier of CG. Make it into something of true trading value. Like tier 3 CG increases happiness by 5% if available in enough quantities. Only certain empires, mega corps, produce them though.
I keep thinking of Asmimov’s Foundation trilogy. Where the Foundation produced luxury goods and sold them. Like atomic toasters. When they were declared war on by their former trading partner they just bunkered down and waited for the population of their enemy to get upset when their toasters stopped working and there were no new one. Had they gone to war and started attacking then the population would be more willing to suffer. But as they never felt any war they got upset and pressured their government to stop it. Or something like that. Haven’t read them in 20 years.
My point here is that I want trade to somehow matter more!
Job fill order
Allow the player to shift which order they want jobs filled in. Would solve a lot of issues and allow more pre-building and planning without getting as punnished. Especially if the pop requirement per building is either removed or lessened. On the mining world you might want to set the order to worker-ruler-specialist. On a tech world you’d go ruler-specialist-worker. New pops first fill the highest prio stratum and work their way down.
Migration
I think migration is a great mechanic. It should have the more prominent position. I love how new colonies have reduced growth but increased migration. This should have a bigger importance to colonizing, get rid of the “resettle 8 pops and go” tactic. Resettlement should be “nerfed” somehow and more emphasis should be placed on pops migrating on their own accord. Exceptions being gestalt empires who doesn’t care for its citizens.
However! Migration should also move pops, not just moving growth around. If pops move they'll over time seek out better planets, habitability, and opportunities, jobs (according to traits) and housing. This would essentially solve the issue of having to micromanage “finished” planets and allow the player to trust that excess pops migrate to developing worlds. Add in more decisions that increases emigration and immigration pulls, without giving negative effects.
New ascension path - Voidborne Step 2
Basically your empire has forsaken their planetary roots and moved to huge habitats. They might even have cracked or are strip mining their former worlds to get to their resources, something similar to a colossus but more varied and interesting than a mineral deposit. Or they've turned them into giant experiments in the name of science! Or the planets are used up in the construction of these habitats, similar to ring world creation. Could tie into having pops on Starbases. They can have more pops or really expand their bases into true habitats.
Science
Research Labs no longer grant X Physics, X Engineering & X Society. They now grant a unified "Research Point". These points are divided amond the three categories. BUT you can change how they are allocated through either sliders or policies. Space resources stay the same, granting points in a specific research. Sane goes with special jobs that normally only produce research in one area. Planet buffs that att % science still does that but read something like “adds 15% of all research points generated as extra society research”. The point here is to allow the player to focus on specific areas of research. In desperate need of new ship designs? Go heavy Engineering for a while. Need more admin capacity/naval capacity? Focus more on Society.. You get the idea. Power to the people!
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