3.99 Zones, one question

[ShaTiK]

Why?

I don't meant to sound rude, the game dev is a creative and difficult process. But for the life of me I can't see why zones are even a thing. Is there an answer somewhere that I missed in Dev diaries?

As of right now I can't see why zones shouldn't be made into separate districts with their own levels. The game already have most of the stuff related to them - between planets, habitats, rings and ecus we already have practically every type of district. And we can keep the new building slot system from zones - for example by tying number of slots to progressively increasing levels of districts, first level gives one slot, third gives the second, sixth gives the third.

Current zones system is a messy thing, which is why the beta is even a beta, but I can't see how this messy thing can be improved so it would be better compared to simple district. What zones give, apart from them being an absolute nightmare to balance for the player, and excessively restricting player into hyperspecialising planets from the first day?

Again, that's a genuine question, I'm not attacking anyone. I feel I'm missing something here and I'm taking crazy pills, like there is some fundamental thing I'm missing about this system. And that's scary, I'm already pretty anxious about long term cognitive effects of covid on top of just getting older. Some help clearing this stuff up is appreciated.

 

[Ryika]

There has been a bit of clarification here:

One of the primary intents of zones is to provide more long term flexibility to the development of planets. Not all of that potential will be reached in the initial implementations where we're trying to make the systems similar to the 3.x economy.

Benefits that we see include:

1. More ability to customize your Urban Districts. Where before you had City Districts and Industrial Districts, with a designation toggle to switch your Industrial Districts between Forge and Factory, we no longer need to create extremely specialized zones for other resources - you can make your picks yourself. Want Research and Unity? Go for it.
2. Use that to create unique Zones based on planetary features, to make different planets feel more interesting and unique. In one of next week's beta updates, the Betharian Fields planetary feature will let you shift miner output from Minerals to Energy as a prototype of this. I expect we'll have a lot more as we take advantage of the system more in 4.1/4.2.
3. Create a clearer distinction between Districts and Buildings. (Though admittedly we've backed off on this a bit.) Districts provide jobs, Zones change which jobs, Buildings modify jobs.

Amenities shouldn't be a Zone though. The beta's shown that clearly enough already - they need to be provided in a different manner

There have been a few responses to this in the vein of "But a simple building can do the same thing", which I think is mostly a fair point, but personally, I think the idea of zones as a "middle management" kind of tier that has more control over what a planet "is" than a district or a building makes a lot of sense. It's just a much more flavorful structure compared to having a building that gives you some researcher jobs, and then another building that totally changes how your districts work take up the same potential slot.

The current implementation doesn't live up to the potential, and there are some significant downsides that are yet to have a good solution, but it's still in the very early days, so it'll be interesting to see how things develop.

 

[Thiend]

There has been a bit of clarification here:

There have been a few responses to this in the vein of "But a simple building can do the same thing", which I think is mostly a fair point, but personally, I think the idea of zones as a "middle management" kind of tier that has more control over what a planet "is" than a district or a building makes a lot of sense. It's just a much more flavorful structure compared to having a building that gives you some researcher jobs, and then another building that totally changes how your districts work take up the same potential slot.

The current implementation doesn't live up to the potential, and there are some significant downsides that are yet to have a good solution, but it's still in the very early days, so it'll be interesting to see how things develop.

My stance on it right now, personally, is;
1. Zones have some potential I can see for the future
2. But right now, they won't do a dang thing that buildings can't
3. They have downsides that I find completely unacceptable (such as birdshot output expansion of multiple things when I only want one, messing up my economy)
4. I've not yet seen any evidence 3 will be fixed

If they fix 3, I'm willing to tolerate them for future potential even if they're currently pointless. If not, I don't want it.

 

[ShaTiK]

There has been a bit of clarification here:

There have been a few responses to this in the vein of "But a simple building can do the same thing", which I think is mostly a fair point, but personally, I think the idea of zones as a "middle management" kind of tier that has more control over what a planet "is" than a district or a building makes a lot of sense. It's just a much more flavorful structure compared to having a building that gives you some researcher jobs, and then another building that totally changes how your districts work take up the same potential slot.

The current implementation doesn't live up to the potential, and there are some significant downsides that are yet to have a good solution, but it's still in the very early days, so it'll be interesting to see how things develop.

I would somewhat get the overarching idea, if the global intention was to build an independent civilian economy that works on its own and then have player's controlled one, like a goverment one. Then this idea of player being able to direct the flow of economy instead of making everything - this would make sense. But nothing in the current game implementation indicates such a system is feasible or even necessary.

Again, I'm missing something here. Flavor is a good thing to have, but this comes after the underlying system is functional, engaging and useful. Making basic districts and going from there seems more logical and reasonable compared to introducing 2 major reworks at the same time, POPs/Jobs and zones.

Not disrespect but it is almost like dev team had opted for a extra challenge. 'Let's fix the thing players being complaining for years and while we at it - let's completely rework the building system for the third time'.

There is also this to consider - this is third or even forth iteration of planetary building system in Stellaris. Last move to districts was pretty much working after specialized districts nerf. And now we are getting next round of 'trying to make new system work'. And this would take multiple patches to iron out. Making all the effort went into previous system vanish into the night. I mean, seriously, game have so many things that need devs attention and we are throwing out mostly functional system to replace it with completely new one? This would mean military rework, diplomacy tweaks, internal politics, mid game content etc would be delayed yet again.

 

[tappi]

In my opinion the zones are a vastly better system than the 3.14 building spam. The biggest reason for this is that it allows large planets to actually scale in job output. It's not a perfect system and does need a way to handle/control the amount of jobs a zone produces that is seperate from the city district size. It's currently not game breakingly bad but it is way too easy to create untold amounts of specialist jobs, depriving all worker jobs from pops. You of course can control that with turning jobs off, but that feels more like a stopgap measure.

I personally extremely dislike the idea of turning every job into a district, or even the major ones. It would flatten the complexity of planetary management to such a degree that it would be boring.

In 3.14 one of my most used mods was extra building slots, and it essentially solved the same issue as what I have with the scaling planets, but it majorly increases the building spam problem. The zones feel like a pretty elegant solution in solving this, although in their current state do still need tweaks relating to amenity production and buildings that are essentially forced to be built on each planet (robo manufacturing, gene clinic, etc.) and the current job flooding from city districts. An easy way for that would be to give zones their own development level, but I have a feeling a lot of people wouldn't like that.

 

[ShaTiK]

The biggest reason for this is that it allows large planets to actually scale in job output.

How is it any different? You get jobs from city district that is (dev level x zone specific jobs). Or you get jobs from just specific district level. You are limited by dev level and this is limited by planet size. And specific numbers are just balancing. I fail to see any difference honestly

It's not a perfect system and does need a way to handle/control the amount of jobs a zone produces that is seperate from the city district size. It's currently not game breakingly bad but it is way too easy to create untold amounts of specialist jobs, depriving all worker jobs from pops. You of course can control that with turning jobs off, but that feels more like a stopgap measure.

There is a system. You just make a zone it's own district.

I personally extremely dislike the idea of turning every job into a district, or even the major ones. It would flatten the complexity of planetary management to such a degree that it would be boring.

I'm clearly missing something here, because I cannot see how making a player to choose 3 mono-resource outputs (mixed in case of newly added generalized Industrial zone) per planet adds complexity to planetary management. It forces player to hyperspecialize planets, regardless whether he can (depending on chosen starting empire) or want.

An easy way for that would be to give zones their own development level, but I have a feeling a lot of people wouldn't like that.

Am I on crazy pills? This literally is what separate districts are. You want to have urban district with 3 dedicated zones within and each zone would have their own level? What's the point of any of this? I'm pulling my hairs out, I literally cannot understand this logic. I'm sorry if this feels personal, I'm just trying to understand and failing miserably.

 

[Ryika]

It forces player to hyperspecialize planets, regardless whether he can (depending on chosen starting empire) or want.

With how the design has been outlined, as soon as the need for Amenity Zones has been remedied, you can have one industrial Zone for Alloys/Consumer Goods, one Zone for Research and one Zone for Unity in the City district, and then you can also have all three rural districts, since they have their own slot. That means you can literally cover all major resources on a single planet.

Now granted, it'd probably be annoying to shift jobs around since you likely would not want them in equal quantities so there are certainly problems in the system... but how exactly does a planet that literally produces all major resources count as "hyperspecialization"?

 

[ShaTiK]

With how the design has been outlined, as soon as the need for Amenity Zones has been remedied, you can have one industrial Zone for Alloys/Consumer Goods, one Zone for Research and one Zone for Unity in the City district, and then you can also have all three rural districts, since they have their own slot. That means you can literally cover all major resources on a single planet.

Now granted, it'd probably be annoying to shift jobs around since you likely would not want them in equal quantities so there are certainly problems in the system... but how exactly does a planet that literally produces all major resources count as "hyperspecialization"?

Currently the inability to tune the number of jobs is what leads to hyperspecialization in that realistically you would have single type of resource per planet, maybe 2, since a lot of things need CGs. And I don't see how this would be alleviated by tweaks to the system.

I still fail to see anything zones gives you that discreet districts wouldn't, I just don't.

 

[Ryika]

Currently the inability to tune the number of jobs is what leads to hyperspecialization in that realistically you would have single type of resource per planet, maybe 2, since a lot of things need CGs. And I don't see how this would be alleviated by tweaks to the system.

...that's a decision you're making, not something that's forced on you though. If it turns out that hyperspecialization is the way to go, then it does not seem much different to me than how currently, hyperspecializing your planets is already optimal play. But I think there's a good chance that the new system actually at least partically encourages somewhat less specialized planets, if balanced properly.

I still fail to see anything zones gives you that discreet districts wouldn't, I just don't.

The fact that it has building slots that are not generic would be one obvious thing that comes to mind, especially when combined with the fact that doubling down on the same district type does not give you additional building slots. This gives less specialized planets their own advantages, since you'll have more building slots available in total, and the infrastructure needed to boost the output of researchers and the output of metallurgists no longer compete for the same set of slots. This also more significantly differentiates fully specialized planets and more generalist planets.

This is very different and, arguably, much more interesting than having a set of generic district slots and a set of generic building slots.

 

[ShaTiK]

The fact that it has building slots that are not generic would be one obvious thing that comes to mind, especially when combined with the fact that doubling down on the same district type does not give you additional building slots.

Given the fact that all three basic districts have their own 'zones' (that are only zone in name only, they only provide building slots for their respective districts) we already have the basics. Make each district have it it's own 'zone' with special buildings limited to said district and tie the number of provided building slots to level of district. Same idea as zones, but without need to make an entirely new system from scratch. Just with an added benefit of player choosing what districts and at what level to control the job slots.

This is very different and, arguably, much more interesting than having a set of generic district slots and a set of generic building slots.

Given how system works so far - every research zone would have a lab, every alloy would have a foundry etc. Can't progress very far into current tech tree on account of game being an early alpha and as such not having 40% of it's mechanics working, but I don't think there are choices down there. You would get some neat bonus buildings and you would always build them in their respective zones. Every zone on every planet would be the same.

Still not seeing the benefits. I would 100% agree that old system wasn't great when it came to building spam. But as far as I can see it is fixed by having the most spammed things (labs, forts, monuments) as their own districts. I can only assume there were some limitations that prevented such implementation, probably about work slots and POPs. But now it makes no difference whether a job comes from a district or a zone, the calculations stay the same.

Let's compare 3 ways - the old, current (zones) and full district one. At the end of the day the player want to archive some goal when doing stuff on a planet, and this is getting useful resources to do stuff. So how would a player goes about getting these resources?

Say we want to massively increase our unity production using regular planets.
- Currently you fill the planet with housing districts to get max building slots, leave only clerk jobs so the amenities balance is acceptable and fill the planet with monuments or upgraded their versions. Depending on your needs and personal preferences you might need/want a precinct, fort, pop growth/creating building etc. This system isn't perfect for a variety of reasons.
- Under the new zones system you create unity zone on a planet and then upgrade urban district to max level. Unity zone is filled with its own buildings. Absolutely no idea how you are supposed to balance things like crime and amenities. Best case scenario - you would get by with a single crime and amenities building in a goverment zone, which would make them mandatory. You get to choose what other zone to build, but our goal was to increase unity, and by adding new zone we would create a ton of new jobs for a resource we don't need yet. Not to mention the mad swing economy would take after suddenly having 15 newly available specialist slots. Sure, you can disable some of them, but that's a whole lot of unnecessary micro
- If we replace zones with dedicated districts, then suddenly we don't have problems with scale, we build just what we need. The building slots would be tied to number of said districts. We might even place some hard cap. Obviously crime, army, stability, amenities would need balancing, their special buildings and the like, since making everything a district might be too much - this one I would agree. But main ones - CGs, alloys, research, unity and army (for Cadia fans and for non-starbase naval limit) can absolutely be fixed. And no need to make a new system and spend valuable dev resources on it, since it is already here.

 

[Ryika]

It's kind of funny that you asked a question (twice I might add, since you also asked that same question in the OP), got an answer, and instead of acknowledging it, immediately went on to argue about other things.

But you do agree that I provided a proper answer to the question you asked, right? That you now understand one of the things that the new system provides that buildings and districts currently don't provide, and you just think that it's not worth the negative side effects and would instead prefer a different system? If so, great, I'm glad I could provide that answer for you. Not interested in arguing about the rest though.

 

[tappi]

How is it any different? You get jobs from city district that is (dev level x zone specific jobs). Or you get jobs from just specific district level. You are limited by dev level and this is limited by planet size. And specific numbers are just balancing. I fail to see any difference honestly

In 3.14 you're not limited by planet size, you're limited by building slots for jobs that don't come from districts. The zone system allows way better scaling of jobs on a planet, now making the planet size the limiting factor, not the building slots even outside ring worlds and ecumenopoli.

I'm clearly missing something here, because I cannot see how making a player to choose 3 mono-resource outputs (mixed in case of newly added generalized Industrial zone) per planet adds complexity to planetary management. It forces player to hyperspecialize planets, regardless whether he can (depending on chosen starting empire) or want.

The zone -> building system allows much nicer modifications to jobs than the previous just more jobs. I also don't really know anyone who'd want to mix more than 3 different advanced resources production on a single planet, but if that truly is an issue for you, yeah it's an issue.

Am I on crazy pills? This literally is what separate districts are. You want to have urban district with 3 dedicated zones within and each zone would have their own level? What's the point of any of this? I'm pulling my hairs out, I literally cannot understand this logic. I'm sorry if this feels personal, I'm just trying to understand and failing miserably.

Might've been assuming a bit, but most people who talk about wanting just districts want 3.14 type districts. Yeah the difference between the new districts and zones is pretty much nonexistant, but what I was suggesting is essentially to have the zone levels be separate form the district limitations and have the zones have their own upgrade path within the city district. Limiting the amount of different districts on a planet would be healthier in the long run for adding new types of zones/districts and would allow better moddability in adding them and not having massive headaches with UI shenannigans.

I'd be fine with adding more zones, but from my 10 hours or so playing the beta, 3 is mostly fine. Mainly would love more building slots for government zone to allow for more of the mandatory buildings to be built without having to rely on urban zones.

 

[Troyen]

The zone -> building system allows much nicer modifications to jobs than the previous just more jobs. I also don't really know anyone who'd want to mix more than 3 different advanced resources production on a single planet, but if that truly is an issue for you, yeah it's an issue.

Other than the Empire Capital? Maybe your first Ecu depending on how many planets you have available.

My suspicion is zones will be better in the late game, but their current form is worse in the early game. When you have enough planets to specialize maybe they'll turn out better. The devs need a better experience for the first 30 years of the game though, since everyone has to make it through that before they can start seeing the potential benefits zones can offer.

 

[tappi]

Other than the Empire Capital? Maybe your first Ecu depending on how many planets you have available.

Maybe this is a me thing, but I don't really have the capital produce multiple advanced resources either. You want to be grabbing the guaranteed habitable planets as soon as you can anyway so that's already plenty of area to spread the rest of your production to. Sure if you're playing a build that doesn't have guaranteeds it might become an issue, but I think that's still being worked upon and urban districts do allow a decent amount of spreading if you want to produce a lot of different stuff in smaller quantities.

By no means do I think the current system is perfect or the best ever, but I also don't think it's as catastrophic or bad as many people are painting it to be and I see a lot of potential in it.

Also to comment on the hyper specialization complaint, in my opinion this reduces the amount of hyper specialization by a decent amount. Having multiple zones of the same type on a planet gives you a bunch of building slots you can't use for anything, making it more optimal to mix multiple types of zones on a single planet. It also remains to be seen how the trade deficit is going to affect this as it's not working correctly at the moment.

 

[ShaTiK]

In 3.14 you're not limited by planet size, you're limited by building slots for jobs that don't come from districts. The zone system allows way better scaling of jobs on a planet, now making the planet size the limiting factor, not the building slots even outside ring worlds and ecumenopoli.

The zone -> building system allows much nicer modifications to jobs than the previous just more jobs. I also don't really know anyone who'd want to mix more than 3 different advanced resources production on a single planet, but if that truly is an issue for you, yeah it's an issue.

We are going in circles. Having new districts behave like current beta resource ones, with its own zone, fixes the issue of building slots while giving the player ability to easily balance output with district level. Current zones for urban district don't do the second part.

Yeah the difference between the new districts and zones is pretty much nonexistant, but what I was suggesting is essentially to have the zone levels be separate form the district limitations and have the zones have their own upgrade path within the city district. Limiting the amount of different districts on a planet would be healthier in the long run for adding new types of zones/districts and would allow better moddability in adding them and not having massive headaches with UI shenannigans.

Now I'm truly lost. You think nesting zone levels inside urban district is fine UI-wise, but adding 4 new districts would be a massive headache. Not to mention the fact that all 4 are called districts and have zone, but the fact is base district zones don't behave the same as urban ones. Such an easy to understand system...

 

[tappi]

Now I'm truly lost. You think nesting zone levels inside urban district is fine UI-wise, but adding 4 new districts would be a massive headache. Not to mention the fact that all 4 are called districts and have zone, but the fact is base district zones don't behave the same as urban ones. Such an easy to understand system...

I feel like you're being obtuse on purpose. What I said was that adding all the districts to the game, similar to 3.14 as they are is a UI and modding nightmare because it quickly leads to scrollbars which you can see in some 3.14 stuff if you've played with any larger mods. Limiting the amount of districts/zones per planet, (having 3 selectable ones) which seemed to be your problem earlier when complaining about 3 monoproduction areas, is healthier for UI and flexibility in the long run as you can have more specialized zones/districts without having to add them to the UI every single time. I also don't really care about the UI and nesting, especially at the moment where the UI is so extremely raw.

Sure you could change the zones to districts but now they all fight for the same planetary sizes instead of the 3 zones using the city districts capacity. I just kinda feel like that'll get annoying and even more in the way of having a more mixed economy per planet.




I will also point out that having played for a while now, the city district upping the amount of jobs isn't as bad of a "job explosion" that many make it be, as long as you don't spam everything full of city districts. Having all 3 zones built is essentially equivalent of 6 jobs (slightly less cause 180 per zone instead of 200 for some reason?) per city districts. That is equivalent to an average ecumenopolis district in the current game. Sure it's a different way of acting than in 3.14 (at least for me whose base actions when colonizing a new planet was to build a bunch of city districts the moment a planet is colonized), but if you just change the approach a bit, it's not as bad as many think. Yes I still think that it'd be better to have more granular control of it, but just saying.

 

[Imp0815]

In my opinion the zones are a vastly better system than the 3.14 building spam. The biggest reason for this is that it allows large planets to actually scale in job output. It's not a perfect system and does need a way to handle/control the amount of jobs a zone produces that is seperate from the city district size. It's currently not game breakingly bad but it is way too easy to create untold amounts of specialist jobs, depriving all worker jobs from pops. You of course can control that with turning jobs off, but that feels more like a stopgap measure.

I personally extremely dislike the idea of turning every job into a district, or even the major ones. It would flatten the complexity of planetary management to such a degree that it would be boring.

In 3.14 one of my most used mods was extra building slots, and it essentially solved the same issue as what I have with the scaling planets, but it majorly increases the building spam problem. The zones feel like a pretty elegant solution in solving this, although in their current state do still need tweaks relating to amenity production and buildings that are essentially forced to be built on each planet (robo manufacturing, gene clinic, etc.) and the current job flooding from city districts. An easy way for that would be to give zones their own development level, but I have a feeling a lot of people wouldn't like that.

I never heard of this issue before the beta—"building spam." It feels like people pulled it out just to give this rather ill-advised feature some meaning.


I don't want to repeat my points from other topics, but there are secondary and tertiary reasons why we build some buildings more than others. We already have remedies, like having buildings just modify jobs and limiting them to one per planet—just as we have now with zones.
Mostly, we repeat buildings because there isn't much else to build, and we have clear game goals and success metrics that demand we repeat the same loop over and over again.
I find it more and more abhorrent that the building slots or building system is now being blamed for repetitive gameplay, when the actual reason is far more overarching. Spoiler: it's doomstacks.

And on a more personal note—you went and modded the game to have more slots, and now argue it's "too much building spam," when you removed the limit that’s there to make slots more valuable—forcing you to make a decision for each slot, rather than just repeating the same building on the same planet where you stacked all the modifiers? I find that a bit odd, to say the least—rather unreflected.

Anyway, we could have made slots even more valuable by giving planets more features that buff different things—so deciding what to build becomes more of a challenge.
In addition, a local deficit of resources could incur much heavier penalties, which would encourage us to balance out local shortages with local production. That feature is already in the beta, but now we need to stack this convoluted zone change on top of it before we even see how the new local resource system would have worked with the old building system.

I'm more and more bewildered—and even frustrated—by this zone system overall.

 

[tappi]

I never heard of this issue before the beta—"building spam." It feels like people pulled it out just to give this rather ill-advised feature some meaning.


I don't want to repeat my points from other topics, but there are secondary and tertiary reasons why we build some buildings more than others. We already have remedies, like having buildings just modify jobs and limiting them to one per planet—just as we have now with zones.
Mostly, we repeat buildings because there isn't much else to build, and we have clear game goals and success metrics that demand we repeat the same loop over and over again.
I find it more and more abhorrent that the building slots or building system is now being blamed for repetitive gameplay, when the actual reason is far more overarching. Spoiler: it's doomstacks.

And on a more personal note—you went and modded the game to have more slots, and now argue it's "too much building spam," when you removed the limit that’s there to make slots more valuable—forcing you to make a decision for each slot, rather than just repeating the same building on the same planet where you stacked all the modifiers? I find that a bit odd, to say the least—rather unreflected.

Anyway, we could have made slots even more valuable by giving planets more features that buff different things—so deciding what to build becomes more of a challenge.
In addition, a local deficit of resources could incur much heavier penalties, which would encourage us to balance out local shortages with local production. That feature is already in the beta, but now we need to stack this convoluted zone change on top of it before we even see how the new local resource system would have worked with the old building system.

I'm more and more bewildered—and even frustrated—by this zone system overall.

Sure building spam might be a personal problem of mine, can't say I've seen other people talk about it, but that was my opinion on the situation so. And my main problem with building spam is that it's just mindless busywork you need to do on every planet every time you get one. It's micro heavy and annoying, to me at least, and makes me play tall way more than wide cause I end up not wanting to deal with all that.

Doomstacks are also a problem, but I kinda feel like that is unrelated to the discussion at hand.

And yes, me modding in more building slots does indeed make building spam a bigger issue than in base game, but as is it's the easiest way of uncoupling planet scaling from building slots and putting it instead into planet size, which is in my opinion how it always should be.

I'd also argue, the new system has made building slots more valuable as now they serve a better purpose than "give X amount of jobs". This does slightly hinge on the condition that they do add more buildings and effects as the betas continue, and my understanding is that this is the plan.

Can't really comment that much on the local shortage/logistics system as it's utterly broken at the moment, and I could see that give some grief later on, but cross that line when we get there. I don't think it'll have that big of a effect though, just makes it necessary to build at least some trade zones instead of the none that are needed currently.

 

[Ryika]

Mostly, we repeat buildings because there isn't much else to build

I'd say the main reason we repeat them is because we want to produce science.

Now I don't think "building spam" is that big of an issue... at least not much more than "district spam" is an issue, aside from having the added annoyance of having to upgrade them all individually, but it's also not a complete non-issue.

I find it more and more abhorrent that the building slots or building system is now being blamed for repetitive gameplay, when the actual reason is far more overarching. Spoiler: it's doomstacks.

Quite honestly, doomstacking never felt "repetitive" to me. It's simplistic, sure, and it'd be cool if it were expanded by a more interesting system, but it does not make me go "Ugh, it's the same thing again!". I guess when one plays the game as a war simulator, one might feel differently, but for me... upgrading all of my buildings, that's much closer to making me feel that way than engaging in wars.

 

[ShaTiK]

What I said was that adding all the districts to the game, similar to 3.14 as they are is a UI and modding nightmare because it quickly leads to scrollbars which you can see in some 3.14 stuff if you've played with any larger mods.

I don't even know what to say to this. Currently game is using at best 1/3 of visual real estate for planetary view, not to mention the size of the window itself. There are tons of space to make good UI for any number or districts on a planet. I absolutely don't see how making science, CGs, alloys, unity and army their own districts would break the UI. Even separating housing and governing is not an issue. As for amenities - it being its own zone is just absurd imo, neither a zone nor a district should be devoted to pop maintenance.

I will also point out that having played for a while now, the city district upping the amount of jobs isn't as bad of a "job explosion" that many make it be, as long as you don't spam everything full of city districts.

I would like to test the game, but it is barely working with no migration, no demotion and non-working civilians. So I only limited my playtime with 3 2-hour game sessions. Maybe this specific point isn't that big of a deal when playing the game. For now it looks like it makes a new issue when there was non before for no apparent benefit.