Stellaris Dev Diary #306 - Habitat Experiments

[Blood Gatherer]

What I'm imagining is that instead of seeing the pop growth ticker on a planet, you see it on the species screen for example, for each species. When a pop is created, its then placed on a colony based on some automatic weight calculations.

Thats honestly a pretty good solution, the main reason I never play Xenophile is because whenever I accept even one xeno in, they always start growing on all my planets, crowding out my main species.

 

[Zetesofos]

Thats honestly a pretty good solution, the main reason I never play Xenophile is because whenever I accept even one xeno in, they always start growing on all my planets, crowding out my main species.

Yeah - my idea is that by moving pop growth to the species tab, you can control the rate of pop growth for each species via the species rights.

 

[Blood Gatherer]

Agree to disagree. There have already been many posts in this thread and previous ones as to peoples complains with habitats.

I don't think people dislike habitats, I think they dislike ai habitat spam, either from not being able to demolish them after you conquer a system, or from the lag they cause.

 

[currylambchop]

Ah, ok, I see the confusion. That's now how I imagine it would work. The base rate that your empire produces pops is not a static number that never changes - the modifier would be based on your current pops, your empire size, your available housing, and modifiers from things like planet stability.

In short, you can adjust the math so that an empire with 100 pops and an empire with 1000 pops grow at different rates based on policies and resources of the empires.

Yea, I wouldn’t mind something like that. perhaps it could be an empire wide logistic growth curve, with the carrying capacity based on the number of systems, planets and districts. It also does somewhat make sense in mid-late game when the empire is integrated much more, so that planetary resources are shared.

 

[Millbot]

Overall, this looks really promising.

-It deals with the annoyances of habitat spam pretty effectively. You only have to invade one thing instead of how many habitats are in the system.

-It indirectly solves some of the issues with warfare. I think currently, unoccupied colonies in an occupied system still give full resources. Now with the ability to damage modules and reduce an empire's output. I does force player and AI unlike to consider how they go about with warfare and adds some real value towards playing defense. I'm pretty sure orbital bombardment and army invasion destroy districts and ruin building now as is (haven't played much lately because the AI being super eager to vassalize has killed the fun factor for me). If that parity isn't completely there, it should be added.

-The fact that we can ruin buildings and destroy districts is also nice in that it's another way to slow the snowball down. Currently it's too easy to make conquered pops a net positive, but even with max techs for building, ruined and destroyed building not only require resources to fix and rebuild, but also time. This also puts would be conquerors in a position where they have to choose between building up to start maikng conquered pops useful (loss of resource efficiency since unworked districts and buildings do still suck down some energy, might want to look into that and see if the upkeep is high enough) or deal with lots of unemployed and unhomed conquered pops on their newly acquired colonies from their last war. Regardless, it does seem like this will force players to have to wait between major bouts of conquest instead of conquering someone, absorbing the pops and being almost able to instantly put all those pops towards conquering an even larger amount of territory.

-Love the rework to voidborne and void dweller; especially, in how they can get more building slots. I will say a problem currently is that too much of the benefit for habitats is available upfront and for a certain part of the game, it makes them a non brainer.

-Solves some of the pop gaming nonsense. Not sure if void dweller will need some compensation here or not.

I'll also say some of the concepts here might be good to consider in regards to strategic deposits that require buildings to exploit. Currently, the value is rather debatable given how valuable building slots are and the output of those building. I always thought a good fix would be if a planet or habitat has any access to deposit like volatile motes, exotic gases or rare crystals, they should only have to build one build and then the build has a number of upgrades equal to the deposits that can be exploited. So this means something like Fen Habitis only needs one build that get upgraded an additional 5 times to get full access to all the deposits instead of eating six very valuable building slots. I think it made more since when we had more building slots, but now it doesn't work so well. I'll admit the only downside to this setup is the UX might not support focusing on just one strategic resource on colonies that have access to more than one.

Also hopefully, there won't be any weird interaction with the surveyor activate. Not sure if it is still the case, but I know at one point colonies were just snapshotting the deposits on a planet at the time they were built. So you could use this to get around how terraforming a nanite world would remove a nanite deposit. At the same time, it did make you not want to build a habitat around a planet if you had the surveyor until that planet had the deposits you wanted for districts.

 

[Zetesofos]

Yea, I wouldn’t mind something like that. perhaps it could be an empire wide logistic growth curve, with the carrying capacity based on the number of systems, planets and districts. It also does somewhat make sense in mid-late game when the empire is integrated much more, so that planetary resources are shared.

That's exactly what I mean. I have a more detailed right up on my idea, I'll maybe post in suggestions later this week, but the short idea is that your overall empire growth rate is influenced by a variety of factors, and then is split based on the number of species in your empire (such that all else being equal - an empire with one species grows the same as an empire with 10). What matters is the current number of pops, technology and general welfare/housing available - NOT how many colonies you have at a given time.

 

[Ohm is Futile]

We still want the player/AI to need to invest something in making use of the deposits for jobs, hence the orbitals. Having tried the "max district amount is linked to deposit size" it got pretty frustrating when you couldn't find a system with large enough deposits. Currently we have the max district amount = 2 + (NUM_HABITAT_ORBITALS × CAPITAL_BUILDING_TIER).

Planet-based district amounts are mostly random though, why would habitats be standardized? I think it makes sense that different systems should have different value as targets for habitat building. The main counterpoint I could see is to make habitats a way to balance things for empires who got unlucky/bullied into territory that doesn't have access to good systems, but that still doesn't change that non-void dwellers who are unlucky still have to get to habitats to start making up that gap anyway, so empires in this situation will still struggle to catch up for a significant portion of the game.

***

Anyway, currently there's nothing to discourage players/AIs from spamming habitats if they can spare the resources. It's just a good investment and I definitely find it annoying in two ways: the usual pain when attacking AIs with habitat spam AND getting bogged down myself managing tons of colonies. I can't stress how annoying it is to have my outliner filled with so many habitats to check every now and then.

That said, I think I'd prefer a solution that discourages spam without necessarily preventing multiple habitats per system. In other words, it might make sense to have more than one in some scenarios.

On a different note, I've seen people suggest making starbases and habitats work together more and I don't think it's such a great idea. What happens with invasions? Ships can currently take over a starbase without an army invasion. Would you lose the habitat without an army fight? Would you be unable to disable a starbase without invading it?

I think having slots that let you choose how to expand/specialize your habitat just like starbases would be pretty fun though.

 

[Bitzo]

I really don't like the approach of buffing a single Habitat in any given system to have a dozen or several dozen Districts and - like in one of the screenshots - 67 Pops with 54 Housing still to spare. On a Habitat with zero dedicated Habitation Districts, no less!

In my mind, Habitats should continue to have less overall capacity to house Pops and not be able to have more Districts than even some planets! An artificial structure in orbit of a planet potentially having 21 Districts when there are planets that are only capable of supporting as little as 12 Districts (not counting unique outliers like the Size 6 Gaia moon in the Ubogleet system) strikes me as portraying the opposite of the "cramped/claustrophobic" feel Habitats with their 4/6/8 max Districts and intentionally limited Building Slot access are supposed to convey in the current and past versions.

I like the general idea of the experiment of using uninhabited stations to buff Habitats in the same system, but the execution - limiting it to one Habitat per system and supercharging it beyond what some planets can support in terms of Pops and Districts feels like an overcorrection.

I would prefer a middle ground between these two approaches, where there would still be more than one Habitat per star system (just like you can have more than one habitable planet in the same system; I don't think I have ever heard someone dread how much lag it would cause down the line when stumbling over Trappist's three guaranteed habitables, for instance), but also cut down on the micromanagement and lag by using Pop-less supporting Orbitals for those two or three smaller, individually less inhabited Habitats, rather than spamming up to ten micro-planets in each system.

 

[Bloodbat]

Edit: In fact, I would say that pop growth (and assembly) should be strictly empire wide - thinks like cloning vats, gene clinics, robot assembly, spawning pools would likewise affect the empire wide growth rates.

(I imagine it might work where on the species tab, each species now has its own seperate growth rate - and as you gain more species in your empire, they each take a percentage of the total growth rate +/- any unique species traits, sort of like factions and unity generation).

This would just make the vassal spam problem even worse.

 

[MHC]

I like this style of dev diary. Looking forward to seeing more.

As for the proposal, I like it conceptually, but have some concerns.

First, there are more potential district types for a habitat then UI can currently display. For Void Dwellers specifically, this takes away the ability to have all of that stuff being made efficiently in the same system (across multiple habitats). I hope there's some solution for this that's not just "you need multiple systems to get all the different types of districts".

Second, Void Dwellers have historically been a "tall" empire type that focused on pop efficiency. They also got 3 "bad" planets out of the gate that created a lot of interesting economy management challenges. (Aside from having to work around space constraints and pop location, you'd also get a lot of pop growth early, but then pop growth would fall off a cliff as the small habitats filled up. Forcing you to come up with some plan to address this.)

These changes take that management challenge away and feel like Void Dwellers will be another variant of "start on a big planet with extra bonuses but with a habitability limitation for your pops". Overall, it also seems to incentivize wider play in order to get sufficient pop growth and resource scaling.

If you can find a way to balance it to preserve the tall play in a compact region of space, I think the ideas here are good. But I think it will also result in a need to revisit gaia world and other similar starts to make sure that they all have something unique and mechanically distinct.

Finally, I actually liked the idea of fortress habitats. If you have shields and FTL inhibitors. Then a reasonable defense strategy is to make a bunch of them scattered across an entire star system and backed up with lots of soldiers in order to slow down an invading force. This hasn't had much of an impact in the latest patches, but it was a thing for a long time and fully removing it weakens defensive options overall. So I hope there's some offsetting idea that keeps the intended trade-off of offense vs defense in the game as a whole.

 

[BamBamtheDestroyer]

First off, I wanna say:

I am a habitat lover, and have been from Day 1. I like building them, I like upgrading them, I like specializing them, I've built over 20 of them in the L Cluster on a few occasions, yadda yadda. Void Dweller is my favorite origin, and has been since origins were added to the game. I have liked all of the changes to Habitats so far.

My take on habitats in the current game version is:

• I really like having a lot of growth tickers in a single system. I know it can be OP with Hive Minds, but, it is one of the major strengths of habitats in their current form.
• I really like being able to specialize individual habitats. Habitats were generally more 'specialize-able' than planets, and often more efficient than planets overall per pop. There was just a lot less fluff.
• I think the addition of planetary rings, while a good addition overall to the game, weakened Habitats. Habitats could not use rings, and were therefore weaker.
• I will confess the way the AI uses habitats is a bit annoying, mostly because the AI habitats were suboptimal at best. AI habitats are so sloppy in both placement and build out. I generally do not build out AI habitats, and instead use them as growth tickers for my empire's core.
• I think Habitats are at their best when used to squeeze extra productivity out of well defended systems. It's a sort of semi-tall quasi-wide play. Next best was to use fortress Habitats to lock down choke points, which they were also really good at.
• Moons and asteroids are a pain in the butt because of how incredibly useless they are from a Habitat builder perspective. "Oh look, an awesome deposit! Oh wait, it's on a moon! I can't build a Habitat there! Darn!"
• I couldn't care less about Habitat trade districts. They were only useful if you had more pops than you knew what to do with or went full Trade meme empire.
• Habitats ruthlessly gobble up your influence in the mid to late game. Building a lot of Habitats keeps me away from Claims and the Galactic Community.
• Habitats are much stronger for Gestalt's because Energy districts are almost always more useful than Trade districts.
• The habitat tech costs are too expensive. 40k engineering for t3 habitats is a lot.

Now, what I like from the Dev Diary:

• I love the idea of actually being able to use moon resources for Habitats! That is my biggest gripe with the current system.
• I like the idea of being able to boost the number of jobs per district. Habitats primary weakness is that they are small (I often say a good habitat is worth about 2/3's of a good planet), though once full they are growth tickers for everywhere else.
• I like the idea of being able to gain build slots. Right now, you basically have to tailor your entire build around Habitat build slots if you want to use them to the fullest. Some habitat types (i.e. mining) don't need a lot of build slots, but others (i.e. refining) it's a make-or-break deal.
• Having habitats be a single, less influence hungry unit could grant more options in the game.
• If players want an option to disable habitats wholesale, I don't see a problem with it. I wouldn't touch that option though.

What I don't like:

• I think the loss of the extra growth tickers (while debatably necessary for balance) makes both of these proposed changes a nerf overall. Pops are power, as the saying goes.
• I think the loss of specialization capacity (having one mixed use habitat vs a mining, tech, and energy habitat) is also a bit of a nerf.
• I think tying the district availability to the strength of the nodes is sensible, but also a nerf. Most nodes suck. Just sayin'.
• If you boost jobs per district, you may run yourself out of housing space too hard too soon. Housing is almost always a problem on Habitats, and I think this fits with their theme. Also, adding a ton of jobs at once often results in a poor pop spread that has to be managed manually. This change feels like it may backfire hard.
• I think this makes habitats too contained by the system's planet count. I generally prefer to stick to larger systems anyway (8+ planets if available), just to get the most out of starbase cap, but if the right node is in a system with 2 planets, I'm building. This new system may make that inadvisable.
• I think making Habitats use Starbase capacity is a bit overkill. Habitats already compete with Starbases (and fleets, for that matter) for Alloy income. I often go Unyielding not for strong starbases (though strong starbases are wonderful) but for the alloy savings that can be dumped into Habitats.

What I'm confused or concerned about:

• For the second proposal, what about mixed output planets? For instance, some precursor systems would have a planet that was 10 energy 5 gas. I loved building a Habitat there to squeeze so much gas out of it. The Energy was useful, but mostly an afterthought. The platform system seems dedicated to a single purpose.
• I'm suspicious about the Habitability penalties. I think they would stack too hard and too high for a big system.
• What about resources from stars? I would really like the ability to use resources from stars, though it would not surprise me if this was not added.
• What about interactions w/ the Matter Decompressor or Dyson sphere? Right now both block habitats and vice versa. I don't like not being able to build a Fortress habitat to protect my expensive Dyson sphere from one of those pesky raiding fleets. Yah, its cold and does not get sunlight. I'll pay extra energy upkeep or something.
• I think the primary thing that keeps most players away from Habitats is the tech cost. The costs are painful, and they are all in the most important tech tree (Engineering). I think spreading those costs out would be an improvement. I think most players that hate or ignore habitats would still hate or ignore them due to tech costs.
• Pirates or AI's interrupting my Habitat construction makes me want to end their existence (though that can be said for megastructures in general). Is this system as susceptible to raiding as the current one? Can some pirate blow up my habitat platforms and block district construction?
• What would planets with no yields add with the second system? I use planets w/o nodes now for all kinds of stuff (goods, alloy, refineries, etc.)
• How does this system interact w/ the Surveyor Relic? The Surveyor relic is utterly fantastic for Void Dwellers, but a bit limited if it spawns resources on a planet that is already built out.
• What about asteroids? Can I grab their resources for the Habitat too?
• What about total district cap for the second system? I mean, yah, you got that transit system, but I generally dislike district cap bouncing around (i.e. old, old stellaris where ascension perks gave you more habitat districts) The current system upgrades the habitat itself. I like the concept of the habitat transit hub, but I think it make cause complications. One of the upsides of the current system is you can cram a lot of districts into an otherwise useless (or saturated) system. If the district cap is too low, it could be inferior to vanilla mining platforms.

And then there is blind suggestions:

• If there was a way to scrap habitats (w/o blowing them up) I think a lot of players would do it, though it looks like this is not the goal.
• If you wanted something interesting, you could make an option for planets to also use Support stations/platforms (i.e. research habitat tech, get planet decision to upgrade spaceport infrastructure, and then use all the resources in the system on the planet while blocking Habitat core construction), though this may cause issues with systems with multiple habitable planets or Ecumenopoli.
• If implemented, I wholeheartedly endorse the idea of the marauders using this system rather than their current one as others have started. Blowing up their stations is such a waste, and you get so few (if any) pops for it. It would also make the Khan start with a capital.
• If you want to go hard sci fi, you could gate the orbitals behind tech (mine asteroids first, then moons, then gas giants, then uninhabitable planets) but I think that might be more annoying than fun

I am first and foremost curious regarding these changes, but I'm skeptical. I like Proposed System #1 better overall for expansion potential, but I think most players would like Proposed System #2 better due to its relative simplicity.

 

[Thiend]

I expected to (really, really,) hate this rework. I actually really like the looks of it. My main concern is that this sounds like it might be a huge pain with colony designations when there's only one colony but it will (especially as void dwellers) almost always be a completely random mix of available districts that you do actually need to work. With one per system, void dwellers don't really have the option to specialize each one given the amount of relevant deposits per system. That doesn't seem insurmountable to make satisfying, however, so this still looks good.

 

[Zetesofos]

This would just make the vassal spam problem even worse.

I commented on this in another post - the thing you have to keep in mind is that your growth rate would now be a variable rate modified by your empire size - the result would that the math would work such that spliting your empire into vassal states wouldn't increase your effective pop growth rate - what matters is your species, technology, government policies, and welfare infrastructure & stability

 

[VictorWJ]

I think Habitats should have more influence on everything else in the system, and in turn the system itself should be able to influence Habitats more.

This influence could be humanistic. Not an big fan of Mobile Suit Gundam, but it does a good job of showing me the struggle between the surface dwellers who live on the planet and the cosmic dwellers who live in Habitats. If a system or a country is dominated by surface dwellers, then the planet sucks blood from Habitats, sacrificing the well-being of the cosmic dwellers to meet the needs of the surface dwellers. And if a system or a country is dominated by the cosmic dwellers, then of course they will oppress the surface dwellers in some way, such as by blocking the sunlight from the surface of the planet below, affecting the planet's tides with Habitat’s weight, or just dumping large amounts of garbage directly onto the planet, as in the relationship between SALEM and Scrap Iron Town in Battle Angel Alita. And if a system or a country has an equal number of cosmic and surface dwellers, or if the player doesn't properly manage their relationship, a civil war may happen sooner or later. Considering we have a faction system, I think this is a good opportunity to make it come in handy.

That influence could also be material. Being man-made structures, and definitely no bigger than a real planet, Habitats should logically be more susceptible to space weather like solar flares, geomagnetic storm, or even just a swarm of migrating space creatures or meteors! Meteors that just make stability -1 for a planet could be deadly for a Habitat Of course, to reflect this, I think it might require an overhaul of the existing space weather system to make it more dynamic and rich, as well as something that can interact with the player. And the possible effects of Habitats on system are as stated above: dumping garbage on planets, blocking out light, affecting tides ------ Oh yeah, and if a Habitat above a settled planet is destroyed, it's sure to crash down towards the planet causing a big explosion - a scene that's been replayed countless times in Gundam



On the other hand, I really like the concept of upgrading Habitats, but I don't like the idea of just mechanically and monotonous upgrading all Habitats. To me, a Habitat is an imitation of a habitable planet. Natural planets grow and evolve as living things do, and become Gaia, the ultimate habitable planet, when conditions are right. Habitats, on the other hand, "grow" in the form of civilizations, and their inhabitants’ constantly construct and the history it has been through determines their growth trajectory, eventually becoming a "man-made Gaia". So I don't really like the idea that the properties of a Habitat are determined by its planet. After all, it's precisely to be free from the constraints of the environment that we decide to build a Habitat, isn't it? So I think every Habitat should be the same to begin with, say all of them only have one of each type of district. Once a Habitat is colonized, over time and as the population grows, various events will occur to determine its future development. For example, if a Habitat is in a system with a particularly high trade volume, there will be an event in which Habitats develops into a trading Habitat, with option a increasing the maximum number of Trade District, and option b increasing the amount of trade produced by each Clerk member. And when a Habitat becomes a trading Habitat, all sorts of crimes may occur, and if not properly dealt with or intentionally indulged, it can become a popular smuggling port. And if a trading Habitat borders another country, it may become dependent on trade with that country, generating more trade in peacetime but declining rapidly once the player goes to war with that country. By analogy, a Habitat that is constantly bombarded by enemy fleet would easily develop into a fortress, one filled with different races would be a center of cultural exchange, and one situated on the bountiful planet of Gaia might easily develop agriculture ------ I may be getting too far into this, but it does seem to be full of endless possibilities.



Lastly, given the gameplay, I think Habitats should be more extreme in the direction of fewer but better. Habitats should be built in more harsh conditions, or often damaged by space weather, and be expensive to maintain. The population of Habitats should be smaller, and more bonuses should be gained. Each Habitat should be more scalable, and in the end develop to rival even real planets.

 

[TommyJ89]

This seems really interesting, I really look forward to see what you come up with.

I only have one small request... Please give the fanatical purifiers & determined exterminators out there the option to just blow all the AI's stuff in space up.
(Maybe they want to keep it but I feel atleast those races should have the option to blow it up, to use as they see fit)

They're habitats in space, they should have shields & hull integrity that should be able to have a catastrophic failure IF bombarded long & heavily enough in my opinion.
This also would make buildings like shieldgenerator more useful (if reworked to suit the habitats), techs like "Escape pods" could also be a thing but i'm not sure how to implement it.

Thank you for reading!

 

[AHertes]

I love the idea of habitats using starbase slots! However, the solutions to the number of habitats feel overly complicated. A siege mechanic like in the "Under Siege" mod by michelmakesgames featured in Mod Highlight #3 on July 13 seems the most straightforward solution. From an RP perspective, habitats would need to import a lot of resources to support even a small population. While they would likely be able to withstand a short blockade, they would fold much more quickly than planets. It makes sense that gameplay would save the ground combat for planets and let the habitats starve.

Regarding the population issue, I would be fine if habitats could hold only a single pop at each stage of development. Habitats have always felt like they can hold too many pops, given the one pop represents somewhere between 100 million and a billion people. But working in increments of 1 makes sense from a gameplay and RP perspective.

I am not sure I like the direction the support modules are going. Habitat specialization would realistically be limited by what resources are available in the body they are orbiting, as it is basically done now. You should seriously consider adding some base output of amenities, food, and unity on habitats though as habitats would reasonably include some of these things as part of their basic design. It always frustrates me that I need to waste an entire district or building slot just to keep my 4 pops happy.

It might be neat to merge starbases and habitats entirely! If I have already built a starbase, why wouldn't I build habitation out from it? You could tie a starbase's defenses to the number of fortresses (maybe even a military district) built in the habitat UX.

Lastly, I would love to see asteroid habitats built into the base game. It makes sense that a civilization would start by building habitats in asteroids and moons rather than giant floating habitats. Adding this to the base game would help improve RP.

 

[Halberdier King]

I wonder if letting orbitals be built on non-planets, like moons or stars, is in the cards, or if that would allow there to be too many orbitals. Because it can be rather frustrating when you have some resource that you want to build a habitat to exploit, but can't because its not a planet.

 

[FluffyVanguard]

I have mixed feelings about this one. As someone who almost always goes for habitats and the voidborne ascension perk I like the idea of having only one habitat per system to reduce micromanagement. But I do see some issues here.

Unless I misunderstood something, it looks like all of these implementations would require us to go into system view to upgrade our habitats, potentially looking araound for planets we haven't build around yet.
I don't want that. At all. If orbitals are going to act like planetary features for a habitat, why not put them in the respective menu? It's not like this particular UI space has much purpose for habitats at the moment. We could just have all our orbitals listed there, and put an upgrade button where the clear blocker button normally would be. That would allow us to manage a habitat completely from the planet menu.

The part about reducing habitability - be it a shorthand to get the effects or not - goes completely in the opposite direction that it should go. If the number of habitats in the galaxy is to be reduced, then it should always be better to expand every existing habitat to the maximum possible level before building a new one. Making habitats worse by expanding them, means that it will be better to build a new habitat than to expand an existing one, thus increasing the micromanagement for builders and conquerors alike. Which is already the case, considering a new habitat right now gives more growth, more districts and more building slots than upgrading.

Speaking of growth, one habitat per system will cut the initial growth of void dwellers to one third of its current value. It will also drastically reduce the potential of any empire to grow its own population rather than "recruiting" pops from other empires through warfare. I am by no means a fan of breeder habitats, or the concept of breeder worlds in general. But currently there isn't much else a pacifist or diplomatically minded empire can do to fill ecus and ringworlds, or keep up in general.

On another note, what is the intended use case for habitats when not taking the voidborne ap? It looks like they're intended to be rather underwhelming without it. If habitats need the ap to be good, they might as well be locked behind it, which would really help with the ai spamming habitats

 

[Sirrobert1]

I really like this as a concept.

 

[Tennyson]

Impossible to read this whole thread, so sorry if anything here has already been discussed (or dismissed!).

1. Love the idea of all the habitats in one system contributing to a single, planet-like management screen.
2. Love the idea of a system habitat starting small and being upgraded.
3. I like the idea of workable districts being based on energy, mineral, and research values of the bodies within.
4. I think instead of creating individual habitats that add to the whole, you should just jump straight to a [Glitter band](https://revelationspace.fandom.com/wiki/Glitter_Band) approach. You've got systems in the game with few planets but large asteroid belts - those could hold quite a civilization. Orbiting planets doesn't really do anything for you.
5. To that end, instead of adding new habitats, what you are instead doing is adding habitation capacity, just like you would add habitation modules to an orbital ring. Now, they can be expensive, and provide more than the one district the ring upgrades do. But the UI flow is essentially the same. You could cap it at 1 for every survey object in the system.
5a. Heck, you could create one habitation add-on per survey object in the system, at different costs, adding those different district types based on their mining station bonuses and/or what kind of object they are. How close they are to the sun. Then instead of a construction ship building a new habitat, you just go to the expansion screen and pay for the module for that object.

Another good analog is Belters from the Expanse. They spread everywhere, every large rock, every barren moon. But when they live on a moon, they live ON the moon, not in orbit.