Hi everyone!

Way back in Dev Diary 152, we discussed some planetary changes that we experimented with during summer 2019. At the time, we decided that while we learned a lot from the experiment, they required significant additional refinement before being something we wanted to incorporate into Stellaris.

Summer 2020 gave us the additional time we needed to revive these (and some other) experiments. Our primary objectives were to reduce the mid to late game micromanagement burden and provide quality of life improvements, including generally making the prebuilding of planets more viable, making planetary automation reliable enough to be trusted in the mid to late game, and making dealing with unemployment and pops easier.

We’ll be talking about these subjects in multiple dev diaries over the next couple of months.

Industrial Districts

Azure Chalice is… er, was... a lovely place.

The planet view has shifted things around a bit and now supports the display of up to six district types. Most planets will have five district types available. This extra real estate could also be of special interest to modders.

The new brownish-orange district next to the City District is the revived Industrial District. Industrial Districts are treated as urban districts (and as such are not limited by planetary features), but rather than the Laborers that split their output from the original experiment, we’ve decided to have the districts provide regular empires one Artisan and one Metallurgist job. Gestalts have either two Foundry Drones or Fabricators as appropriate.

Work, work, work.

Factories and Foundries will still exist but are now planet unique, with the first tier building adding 2 jobs to the planet just like the old versions. The upgraded versions, however, will now add either 1 or 2 jobs of the appropriate type to each Industrial District on the planet.

Ecumenopoli will retain their specialized districts, but can be boosted by the Foundry or Factory buildings. The number of jobs per district on ecumenopoli have been adjusted somewhat as part of an overall economic balance pass. Since Industrial Districts are considered urban, a planet with a mix of City and Industrial Districts can be paved over and turned into an Ecumenopolis using the Arcology Project decision.

Since districts are now much more critical to the development of your civilization, the average size of homeworlds has been increased by 2, and as an additional side effect, the Mastery of Nature Ascension Perk may also become a bit more desirable.

Building Slots

I’m sure you’ve already noticed from the above screenshot, Building Slots no longer list population counts. Instead of relying on population, they're opened up by increasing the infrastructure of the planet. This is generally done by building City Districts (or their equivalent) or by upgrading the colony's Capital building. As a pleasant side effect of this, your buildings will no longer get ruined when a pop gets resettled, ritually killed, or eaten by mutants.

Build up that infrastructure.

Two new technologies that unlock additional Building Slots have also been added, Ceramo-Metal Infrastructure and Durasteel Infrastructure. They represent the civilian adoption of military technology, and as such require some government techs and the associated armor technologies. The Adaptability tradition tree, for those that have it, still has a tech that grants a Building Slot as well.

As specialized and advanced worlds, Ecumenopoli, Ring Worlds, Hive Worlds, and Machine Worlds start with all of their building slots unlocked.

Habitats are intended to feel a bit cramped, so while Habitation Modules do not open up Building Slots, the Voidborne Ascension Perk will continue to grant two Building Slots to those that choose to embrace living in space.

The MegaCorps out there may ask “but what about our Branch Offices?” - we’ve got you covered.

Insider Trading. Institutionalized corruption exploited by the upper classes, or just greasing the wheels of trade?

Branch Offices will tie their slots to the level of the colony’s capital building. For example, a Planetary Administration building will grant one Branch Office Building Slot, a Planetary Capital will grant two, and a System Capital-Complex would grant three. If the target empire has the Insider Trading tradition, you’ll have one extra Branch Office Building Slot. (This may grant you a Branch Office building even on newly colonized worlds, if your business plan expects it to be profitable.)

But Why?

By decoupling the building unlocks from population growth, it makes it much easier to “prebuild” a planet to varying degrees. It removes some of the tedium of waiting for that last pop to finish growing before a slot unlocks, as well as the negative experience that occurred when a critical pop moved or died right at the wrong time. This change went through many iterations - in one of them the rural and industrial districts added "fractional" slots, in another the capital buildings gave more slots at each upgrade. The combination of having both City Districts and the Capital Building contributing to the slots, along with the additional techs, finally felt right. It's nice when even a newly founded Colony possesses at least one open building slot since it lets you immediately begin construction of a Spawning Pool or other high value building right away.

Moving the essential secondary resources of Consumer Goods and Alloys to districts frees up the building slots a little bit and creates a greater differentiation between heavily urbanized or industrial planets and resource generating colonies. Qualitatively we also felt that it "feels nice" to be getting more of your physical resources from the district level, leaving the Building Slots for more unique and specialized needs.

Both of these changes also happen to make some planetary automation decisions a little easier - your Tech Worlds should clearly build a mix of City and Industrial districts, for instance, to make room for Research Labs as well as to provide the Consumer Goods needed to pay for them. We do recognize that it may be difficult - or even impossible - to unlock all Building Slots on a planet that has not been urbanized, but those resource generating planets often do not have quite as strong a need for a large number of buildings.

Ideally in the mid to late game you could colonize a planet, set the colony designation you want for the planet, turn on automation, and reasonably expect the planet to be in decent shape - and doing what you told it to - the next time you look at it. (In the early game it's certainly possible, but your empire's economy may not be stable enough to support dedicated worlds and your colonies may be better off with direct caretaking.)

We have a few other experiments that are still ongoing that affect the relationship between urbanized vs. less developed planets that are not entirely conclusive yet. If they prove out we'll discuss them later on in this series of diaries. Our current plan for next week's diary is to talk more about the automated colony management overhaul as well as the automatic and manual resettlement of pops.

As a reminder, we have an ongoing feedback thread related to AI improvements we have in beta on the stellaris_test branch. We'd love to get more people on it and telling us what they think about them. (Please note that 2.8.1 is an optional beta patch. You have to manually opt in to access it. Go to your Steam library, right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> betas tab -> select "stellaris_test" branch.)

Thanks!

 

[Olterin]

Yes, it's a dirty, dirty exception.

How terrible of an idea would it be to make hydroponics farms give a farmer job to habitation/city districts (possibly with a job output debuff)? As realistically, the farms need to be housed "somewhere", and at least for habitats that's what's probably going to happen anyway, mix of farms and hab districts. Then you have two specialist buildings for separate use cases: hydroponics for when it's an urban place, and agri boosters for when it's a rural breadbasket.

 

[Lorenerd11]

Currently we have them producing alloys with their Industrial Districts, but they have access to the Factory line if they want to add Artisan Drone jobs to them. The Organic Sanctuaries also come with an Artisan Drone job.

That reminds me, this has less to do with the economy, but are Rogue Servitors going to able to access Amoeba pacification the way Xenophile and Pacifist empires can?

How terrible of an idea would it be to make hydroponics farms give a farmer job to habitation/city districts (possibly with a job output debuff)? As realistically, the farms need to be housed "somewhere", and at least for habitats that's what's probably going to happen anyway, mix of farms and hab districts. Then you have two specialist buildings for separate

That does sounds interesting, although with colonies being able to sustain more than 4 districts, I wonder if Habitats don't deserve a whole new Hydroponics district.

There have been changes to Ring World segments (like this one that you correctly guessed - it's now all Clerks and Merchants), as well as some changes to Shattered Ring.

What's the ratio on this? 15 Clerks and 5 Merchants on Commercial, and 10 Artisans and 10 Metallurgists on Industrial, I'm guessing?

Also, which rare resource will Industrial segments consume?

 

[Troyen]

One thing I haven't seen mentioned yet is relic worlds have those special planetary features that let you build two special mote trap/gas/crystal buildings that don't require minerals. With building slots becoming more competitive, I think those buildings may need to be tweaked. They already come at the cost of not building labs that would benefit from the +30% tech bonuses from the spire and ruins features, and if we have only 7 slots instead of 15, I think it's a harder pick.

 

[Lorenerd11]

One thing I haven't seen mentioned yet is relic worlds have those special planetary features that let you build two special mote trap/gas/crystal buildings that don't require minerals. With building slots becoming more competitive, I think those buildings may need to be tweaked. They already come at the cost of not building labs that would benefit from the +30% tech bonuses from the spire and ruins features, and if we have only 7 slots instead of 15, I think it's a harder pick.

Yeah, I just never bother building any rare resource extraction buildings on Relic worlds because of this, and probably still won't.

Rare resource extraction in general should be tweaked to account for the building slot change. Instead of constructing one building for each rare resource deposit, we should only have to construct one planet unique building for each rare resource type. Each building would add 1 job for each rare resource deposit present on the planet.

So, one Crystal Mines building on a planet with 2 rare crystal deposits would add 2 Crystal Miner jobs.

 

[Olterin]

That does sounds interesting, although with colonies being able to sustain more than 4 districts, I wonder if Habitats don't deserve a whole new Hydroponics district.

I'd thought about making this the proposal, but then realized that it would make hydroponics farms a pointless building instead of buffing it - also, a breadbasket habitat is the biggest candidate around for fortress habitats that aren't dedicated fortress habitats, given the new limits on building slots - I feel like that would probably go against the nerfage of spamming navy cap via fortress habitat spam, just a little bit. But yes, having a food district around when no other resource extraction is available would not be entirely against how other artificial habitats work (specifically, ringworlds can build dedicated farm, research and trade districts, why can't habitats dedicate space to farms the same way? logically it should be possible, so the reason lies elsewhere).

Also, you'd still need hydroponics farms to enable an ecumenopolis utilizing urban space for local intensive farming.

 

[RabbaDooDabba]

One thing I haven't seen mentioned yet is relic worlds have those special planetary features that let you build two special mote trap/gas/crystal buildings that don't require minerals. With building slots becoming more competitive, I think those buildings may need to be tweaked. They already come at the cost of not building labs that would benefit from the +30% tech bonuses from the spire and ruins features, and if we have only 7 slots instead of 15, I think it's a harder pick.

Yeah, I just never bother building any rare resource extraction buildings on Relic worlds because of this, and probably still won't.

Rare resource extraction in general should be tweaked to account for the building slot change. Instead of constructing one building for each rare resource deposit, we should only have to construct one planet unique building for each rare resource type. Each building would add 1 job for each rare resource deposit present on the planet.

So, one Crystal Mines building on a planet with 2 rare crystal deposits would add 2 Crystal Miner jobs.

Honestly, I think Planetary Features that give rare resources should just give the specific job without the need for a building.

 

[BrokenSky]

Stellaris needs more things than Go, naturally.

But to think that there are things in it which could be removed without replacement, and the game would be better for doing so, is perfectly reasonable.

That's certainly true, yes, but in each of those cases, it is important to have a specific reason to remove them rather than either tweaking them to fix the problems with them or adding complementary features which whatever issues exist with the system.

Stellaris, being a Roleplay heavy Grand Strategy-4X hybrid, runs off a more-is-more approach specifically because with Grand Strategy, a significant part of the gameplay comes from dealing with a large number of complex and interconnected systems, and being RP heavy also requires a degree of validation of player choice, which again means adding more stuff.

The upshot is that removing things for the sake of having a more streamlined experience is not a good thing in Stellaris the way it would be in an abstract strategy game like Go, so your original quote doesn't actually answer the question being asked.

I mean, to look at the original example, do you honestly think the game would be more engaging if they stripped out buildings and just had districts? I imagine that would get pretty dull for anyone playing pacifist really fast, for example.

 

[Lorenerd11]

It would be nice if the production of the industrial district could be tied to planetary designation.

On any other world the Industrial district produces 1 Artisan and 1 Metallurgist jobs.

On Foundry worlds, the Industrial district produces 2 Metallurgist jobs instead, but the Factory building would still add Artisan jobs per district.

On Industrial worlds, the Industrial district produces 2 Artisan jobs instead, but the Foundry building would still add Metallurgist jobs per district.

I'm not totally sold on it since I wanted to keep the specialized districts of the ecumenopolis as something special, but it seems like the most intuitive solution.

So, if this change were applied to an Ecumenopolis, the Industrial and Foundry districts would be merged into a single Industrial district that provides 5 Artisan and 5 Metallurgist jobs, or 10 of either based on planet designation?

Or would the numbers be reduced to account for the jobs added by Factory and Foundry buildings?

 

[Mik_C]

Even if I like a lot the direction and the idea of improving a district with unique buildings I think it is not balanced as they are now.

With Industrial districts I see that the meta will become to always building foundries AND industries because they add that large amounts of jobs with almost no cost and would be silly to not use all. Then, if the planetary specialization shifts all artisans to metallurgists you double the metallurgists of a planet again (gestalts will not be able to do that as they don't have industries). If the specialization jobs shift only works on jobs provided by the district then it will be more balanced, but I have mixed feelings on that.

The other problem I have with the unique buildings is that it does not make sense to be able to have both in a planet. My understanding is that they make processes on the district more efficient, so if the 50% of the district is dedicated to alloys it makes that 50% more efficient and provides more jobs for that. Then, why if the 100% of the district is dedicated to alloys it adds the same amount of jobs? Why if 100% of the district is dedicated to alloys an industry adds jobs?

As I said I love the concept and I want to do suggestions to make it apply to improve city districts (make policies+planet specializations+unique buildings affect city jobs), but when I start writting a post on that I encounter the same problems I explained with industry districts and the buildings and I can't make a suggestion that convinces me.

 

[MrFreake_PDX]

Yes, a few grenades, don't you mean some high explosives on a surprise timer?

Schrödinger's explosion. Gotta love it.

 

[Lorenerd11]

Then, if the planetary specialization shifts all artisans to metallurgists you double the metallurgists of a planet again (gestalts will not be able to do that as they don't have industries).

Only one job would be shifted by planet designation, so the jobs added by Factories and Foundries would not be affected.

Meaning that both Gestalts and regular empires can only get +4 Metallurgist jobs from a single Industrial district. Regular empires would need to use the Foundry world designation to replace the Artisan job, whereas Gestalts only produce Foundry jobs by default.

 

[Spaceception]

Are there potential plans to give more sinks to resources that are underutilized once you have enough? Like food, and CGs?

Since pops aren't tied to building slots, can we get pops dying of starvation if you run out of food? Even better if planets can get local stockpiles, so you can effectively attempt to starve out an Empire by cutting planets off from the rest. Planets would have an incentive to build the planetary silo (partially expanding total stockpile, partially limited to a planetary stockpile). Trade could be incorporated into this somehow. Food/CGs would flow along the same lanes, but maybe if you have a strong trade network, colonies can get bonuses?

 

[Serenity84]

Regarding the cg/alloy ratio: I think I will actually end up needing all these consumer goods. Since there is no longer a restriction on building slots based on pops, you can immediately tech-rush, and since you get alloys and cg from districts now, there is no reason not to spam research labs on every single one of your planets.

That would be problematic as new tech already comes too fast as it is. Ever since the administrative capacity rework. Sprawl just isn't as punishing as it used to be. Even if you don't compensate it that much

Trade could be incorporated into this somehow. Food/CGs would flow along the same lanes, but maybe if you have a strong trade network, colonies can get bonuses?

Ideally all non-local resources would flow along trade routes and you'd need to pay shipping costs for it. Like transporting the minerals to your industry worlds. But that's more in theory. It's probably not practical for performance reasons.

 

[Spaceception]

Ideally all non-local resources would flow along trade routes and you'd need to pay shipping costs for it. Like transporting the minerals to your industry worlds. But that's more in theory. It's probably not practical for performance reasons.

I do agree, but I'd at least want supply lines meant for pops, since that has greater consequences if you're unable to provide for them. And if you are blockcading pop resources, I wonder if you could 'simulate' the rest by just cutting off what resources they don't have in excess of without needing lanes or anything. Or just giving a strong debuff. I don't know how that would work in practice, or if it would apply to food/cg as well though. Just a couple thoughts

 

[NHunter_rus]

As the topic of living standards was raised (by @Pancakelord), perhaps we can finally have the ability to add custom one via mods (as opposed to overwriting existing ones)?

I also agree with the topic of that post: pop upkeep is entirely too easy to meet once the game is past the first two-three decades. You can even do that for CGs entirely with trade (and appropriate trade policy).

 

[AaronArx]

While not an amazing buff, the Food Processing Center is currently expected to increase the number of jobs it has.

Hmm, not bad. Also follow up question what will become of the ministry of production?

Besides that, will you add an additional arcology district? Like besides the current existing 4?

If I may I think it would be worth considering addying a sort of food production arcology district, probably limited in number and requiring a considerable amount of energy and minerals to function? Kind of like hydroponic towers?

Or pheraps a type of scientific district? Producing massive amounts of researcher jobs and similar?

Ps. Can we build industrial districts on the habitats too?

 

[notonlyprussia]

This will be a real difference to the old system. Especially the industrial district will help standard empires/mega corps a lot in the early game. I'm really looking forward for this changes to go live!


Be patient... I want espionage too, more then anything else. But give it some time.

Early game yes, but then i am concerned with this change as with trade league mid to late game there is no need to build consumer goods at all, just alloys

 

[Lorenerd11]

So, if this change were applied to an Ecumenopolis, the Industrial and Foundry districts would be merged into a single Industrial district that provides 5 Artisan and 5 Metallurgist jobs, or 10 of either based on planet designation?

Or would the numbers be reduced to account for the jobs added by Factory and Foundry buildings?

One thing to note here is that this would reduce the amount of districts types available on an Ecumenopolis from 4 to 3.

Perhaps this is a somewhat bold suggestion, but what if we added a Research arcology to fill that 4th spot, right between Industrial and Leisure arcologies? 10 Researcher jobs would definitely be waay too much, so they could produce 5 Researcher jobs per district instead.

It would balance out the reduced amount of building slots, and offer some more variety to developing an Ecumenopolis, allowing players to build them up as a research hub.

 

[Mealya]

Yes, it's a dirty, dirty exception.

Make them only available for the void dweller origin (and the hives ?) (just saying... I never user the hydro farms so not sure about the impacts, it's just a suggestion like others)

Btw, I think many will agree on that but have so many feedbacks on your side is of course a very good thing ! All the players need something like that.

 

[JosunUrashima]

This actually sounds nice and I love the idea of not having to focus so much on having 3+ of either foundries or civilian industry factories on a planet, but this I freely state again just makes me look back at when this game first came out and laugh at past me for thinking this was "a finished product".