Stellaris 3.99.3 'Phoenix' Open Beta Release Notes

[Calvax]

2) The ability to decide which zone(s) a building can go into adds a lot of design space. Bioreactors as energy zone buildings would be different to bioreactors as agricultural zone buildings would be different to bioreactors as planet limit 1 but able to go into either slot.

This is well put and is what I was trying to say with my previous comment. There's plenty of buildings that I could see affecting the zones they're in differently and resulting in a different feel. I'm not 100% sold on zones as we're still testing but to me that's the key difference between the three layer system and a two layer one. In two layers a building might affect the output of a particular job but it will be fixed, meaning you'd need to have many more buildings if you want all the effects.

 

[Arcvalons]

Habitats feel like hard mode currently. Having districts cost alloys (to build and upkeep) isn't great when the entire game revolves around alloys. Maybe it can be changed to energy?

 

[wisecat]

Will we ever have options to destroy habitats or better yet turn them off in game setup?

 

[cerberus189]

so i have an idea for a problem I have encountered in the beta regarding city districts not allowing u to target economic problems. in the old system, if you needed, say, CGs, you could just level up ur industry district, and that would give you just CGs (with the focus), or it would give you 1 cg and 1 alloy job. This is not much of a problem; you just disable the one job. However, in the new system, if I want just CGs and I upgrade my city district, I get CGs, researchers, alloys, enforcers, and many other jobs, causing all my workers to promote messing with the economy and, in some cases, killing you. so i have thought of a somewhat solution to the problem Have it get all those jobs but don't increase the workforce available for those jobs. keep it as it was with the new jobs avaliable to be worked if u move the slider up, unlocking the jobs

so a example would be, say, 600 researchers, 300 alloys, and 300 cgs. When you level it up instead of increasing right to 700, 350, 350 it goes to 600/700 300/350 and 300/350 then u go to the management tab and assign people as you would normally. u could even make it a toggle for each world so if u have a world with lots of pops, it will just auto-populate the jobs but if the world has only a few pops, you can increase only the jobs you need working at that time. this would be very useful to help with new colonise and your home world at the start, where u are setting up ur economy and dont want pops moving around all the time

 

[Critical Ethics]

I like that both @Newbee53 and I both zeroed in on astral studies buildings for our example problems

This is well put and is what I was trying to say with my previous comment. There's plenty of buildings that I could see affecting the zones they're in differently and resulting in a different feel. I'm not 100% sold on zones as we're still testing but to me that's the key difference between the three layer system and a two layer one. In two layers a building might affect the output of a particular job but it will be fixed, meaning you'd need to have many more buildings if you want all the effects.

Even if the effect stays the same regardless of zone, having to give up an agriculture building slot would be different mechanically than having to give up an energy building slot, and getting to choose which would make it different again. The building's effect itself changing depending on the zone is a really cool idea that didn't occur to me. The artist enclave's art monuments would be perfect for that - art is all about context, so of course it would do different things if you put it in a field compared to if you put it in the capital zone. Oh that's very very cool.

I'd also just love to see the artist enclave gushing about the avant-garde genius of you spending all that money on their art pieces and then burying them all in a mine.

 

[Imp0815]

If you add a new building it's now competing with every other building. That's a balancing nightmare. Zones add several benefits, including but not limited to:

1) Zones silo what a building is competing with. A science zone building isn't competing with an agriculture building. If Astral Research centers are only able to be placed into Science Zones that makes them much less spammable and makes investing into astral threads a much bigger consideration.

2) The ability to decide which zone(s) a building can go into adds a lot of design space. Bioreactors as energy zone buildings would be different to bioreactors as agricultural zone buildings would be different to bioreactors as planet limit 1 but able to go into either slot.

3) Zones themselves can be thought of as buildings++. Even within the siloing paradigm there may be things that are simply "too good" to be a building while maintaining the coolness they "should" have. A non-choice is not a choice, it's makework. Having the option to instead spawn a zone is, again, more design space and flexibility than "thing that slots into one of your 12 building slots".

4) Zones are visible. If a planetary feature adds a cool zone then that zone is visible right on the building screen. "Dimensional Portal Research Zone" sitting right on the main screen seems a lot more fun than the dimensional research modifier sitting buried amongst the toxic algae.

Rampant speculation: I don't know if planet-specific zones are going to be additional zones or zone swaps, but assuming the latter adding a second zone to the agricultural zone would add (up to) three new building slots. Rather than the current setup where special planetary deposits eat up a building slot instead we'd have planetary resources adding planetary development space. This would open up a lot of design space, including things like making small planets more likely to get unique deposits (and therefore more building slots) vs large planets simply having a lot of room for districts.

This is the first angle I’ve read about the new system that has merit attached to it and a clear improvement over the 3.14 system.

Building competition is something I can get behind, and it’s not solely attached to the main gameplay loop—as we sometimes have buildings that are just better than others, even if they fall into the same category.
With dedicated slots for building category types, you remove this competition.
But you also remove the decision. Which makes slotting buildings into their respective slots not an interaction of interesting choice—or even a choice at all—it becomes a paint-by-numbers task that could just be fully automated.

Overall, the number of buildings for each zone we currently have is too small, and even if we introduce more, we’ll still end up with competition and building types being left behind anyway.

So ultimately, writing this, I see that your point was good to begin with—but we can, and probably will, encounter the same issue you pointed out as a positive for the new system compared to before.

Yes, they are Buildings++, roughly 6 zones to slot if we count the zones in the resource output zones, and then a limited selection to modify said zones.
Albeit we now have urban zones, which provide 3 more versatile slots.

I would guess we’ll have planet-specific zones, same as we have planet-specific buildings—but they did so little with planets and planet features (compared to mods that add a ton more fun features and planet types) to begin with, that I wouldn't get my hopes up.
I don’t see why they would now start adding more flavor and mechanics to planets if they didn’t do it before. I don’t see the zone system as the enabler for new additions in this department, and you won’t convince me otherwise.

 

[Imp0815]

Lets see if I can make this work without it being confusing. But, here we go.

To focus in on an example, what changes would make research lab spam less powerful? Other than making late game techs an only minor advantage over early game techs that I can think off. Diminishing returns on labs would only make spam worse--and conquests stronger--and increasing the cost of late game techs does the same. Maybe requiring late game tech buildings could help, but the faster you research said buildings the faster you can spam them. So that doesn't help at all either.

The same problem seems to exist everywhere. And it really doesn't even fit that well. Want to cut down on unity building spam? same problems except its even harder to believe you'd need to tech up to late game unity buildings. want to cut down on advanced resource spam? also the same problem, except they are already--supposedly--mid game buildings so adding a tier 2 is a bit odd.

So after a certain fashion you can't really end spamming in stellaris--at least as long as the scale remains the same--so the thing you have to do is control it. Spam city districts both makes sense and is a lesser problem to spamming a half-dozen different things. plus, if you then allow zones to limit buildings you can also limit the spam of planet unique buildings like those astral threads science buildings that got slapped down on every single planet no matter if it made sense.

Limiting the power of conquest is a nice goal, but I'm not certain it can be done without extreme effort. Stellaris is a game about playing with fantastical science fiction stories. and one of those is the conquest of the galaxy. destroying that--by making it something you can't do--would be devastating to the game. It would also require several rather blatantly artificial limits that are hard to justify. What's worse, is that anything you could do to limit the power of conquest wouldn't actually do much to eliminate the spam problem.

With weaker fleets, you need more fleets and thus more alloys. With Less powerful conquest you need a more powerful economy and a way to grow stronger diplomatically, so related building projects get even more powerful. Thus you spam more research--get the tech you need faster--and more economy related buildings. Probably alloys and cg again.

If you make it easier for low tech fleets to match high tech ones--less research needed--so that resources are the limited factor. Now you spam minerals and alloys. Do you need officers--or crew--to man your ships? spam related buildings. Much like we currently do with navel capacity. At the end of the day, the actual problem here seems to be something different.

As far as I can see, the root cause behind spamming buildings and such is that Stellaris is opened ended. Unless you have an empire looking to destroy you in the next couple of decades you can afford to take your time. Do you really want to end building spam without restricting buildings? Make it so the game forcefully ends before you can do everything. Make it so that you can't afford to both build the biggest fleet in the galaxy and the most technologically advanced, because the game ends and you have to start over first.

Limit galaxy size and don't let you keep playing after victory. make the end game crisis the end of the game. And then ensure that players know this is how it works. Make it so everything you can do cannot be completed before victory, and their is no single win condition. A diplomacy win, that ends the game. A science win, that ends the game. a military win, that ends the game.

Even then you might need to limit buildings in some way, otherwise things might just end the same way, but at least you'd probably not need to do it to much. However, we now have a new problem. The game has lost a lot of what makes Stellaris unique.

Open ended fantasy in a science fiction universe. 4x with a heavy sandbox element. Those kinds of things. It might even be a fun game, but its not Stellaris.

See, I don't get this at all. The planet grids limited your building options far more than the current system. to the point where it was actually preferable to completely ignore the local deposits and just concreate right over everything. At one level, it was even more focused on only specialized planets. All because of that adjacency bonus stuff.

I'm still a little miffed about the loss of my wormhole generators. But not the planet grid thing. There was no puzzle there, just 'which planet would be best for plastering with mines.' if you didn't mind actively harming yourself, you could instead follow the local deposits. but that wasn't worth it unless you only had one or two planets.

Well, this is for another topic—how or what I see needing to change to have the game progress differently and allow for real alternative playstyles that don’t revolve around ready access to massive fleet power. This includes things one could do to limit or carve out a niche for excessive focus on research, which should be a playstyle, but not the best one, and should come with drawbacks that need to be balanced. Just as all things should be.

On the topic at hand, I find it hard to follow your main gripe of “spam” more and more, as you now declare even building different things on different planets as “spam.” Yes, I know I loosely declared Stellaris to be a spam game, but that was more of a polemic side remark, mostly aimed at the fleet power snowball we all need to abide by.

I don’t see the task of building more science labs to access more research, or creating more industrial districts for more consumer goods to support more scientists, as “spam.” I just never heard of this issue before we started criticizing the perceived simplistic nature of the new system—where we build three zones and wait around until colonies grow to support a new zone, or wait for our research to unlock the next building for said zone.
This feels like a step back and doesn't solve any problems i had before—it just introduces new ones.

 

[Newbee53]

Well, this is for another topic—how or what I see needing to change to have the game progress differently and allow for real alternative playstyles that don’t revolve around ready access to massive fleet power. This includes things one could do to limit or carve out a niche for excessive focus on research, which should be a playstyle, but not the best one, and should come with drawbacks that need to be balanced. Just as all things should be.

On the topic at hand, I find it hard to follow your main gripe of “spam” more and more, as you now declare even building different things on different planets as “spam.” Yes, I know I loosely declared Stellaris to be a spam game, but that was more of a polemic side remark, mostly aimed at the fleet power snowball we all need to abide by.

I don’t see the task of building more science labs to access more research, or creating more industrial districts for more consumer goods to support more scientists, as “spam.” I just never heard of this issue before we started criticizing the perceived simplistic nature of the new system—where we build three zones and wait around until colonies grow to support a new zone, or wait for our research to unlock the next building for said zone.
This feels like a step back and doesn't solve any problems i had before—it just introduces new ones.

why call it spam? because it doesn't feel good to return to plants over and over just to build more and more labs/offices/whatever over and over. Building more cities makes sense--its the place where most people live--and building more mines/farms/power plants also make sense. It also feels bad to unlock something like the astral threads lab or whatever, only to immediately go through every single planet and build the same thing again.

Now with zones, at least I'm only spamming new cities and new mines. I'm only building special buildings on planets with the zones--infrastructure in my mind--to support them. Of course, this can be overdone. but I'm hopeful it will feel better in the long run.

The waiting for the colony to grow appears to be so much worse because of a problem with the migration code somewhere. I expect the 'time' it takes to wait on a colony to grow to the point to update the capital in the live version. Though probably with more variation depending on how my citizens you 'keep on hand.'

The problems I have that it solves? I sometimes feel I need to deliberately build buildings in weird locations just to make my planets different in 3.14. Otherwise I end up with weirdly empty planets with nothing but alloy plants. or weirdly empty worlds with nothing but cities and labs. the old building system just encouraged to much specialization as far as I can tell. I think I shouldn't feel like I've screwed up by designating three or four 'urban' planets and a similar number of 'rural' plants and just maybe have one or two specialized. If I'm feeling like it.

Also, I always found it weird that buildings dominated planetary development. not cities or larger groupings. It's kind of just a 'vibes' thing.

Were there other ways to fix these problems. Yes. Are their problems with the current system. yes. Other than the 'if I build a city I get everything instead of just what I want' problem I don't see any big ones that might be unfixable. And while that is a problem for some people, to me its just a matter of learning how this new system works. And hopefully fixing other bugs to make it less of a problem.

 

[Critical Ethics]

This is the first angle I’ve read about the new system that has merit attached to it and a clear improvement over the 3.14 system.

Building competition is something I can get behind, and it’s not solely attached to the main gameplay loop—as we sometimes have buildings that are just better than others, even if they fall into the same category.
With dedicated slots for building category types, you remove this competition.
But you also remove the decision. Which makes slotting buildings into their respective slots not an interaction of interesting choice—or even a choice at all—it becomes a paint-by-numbers task that could just be fully automated.

Overall, the number of buildings for each zone we currently have is too small, and even if we introduce more, we’ll still end up with competition and building types being left behind anyway.

So ultimately, writing this, I see that your point was good to begin with—but we can, and probably will, encounter the same issue you pointed out as a positive for the new system compared to before.

Yes, they are Buildings++, roughly 6 zones to slot if we count the zones in the resource output zones, and then a limited selection to modify said zones.
Albeit we now have urban zones, which provide 3 more versatile slots.

Absolutely at current we don't have enough buildings for the zones, which is why it seems like there's no decisions. But if there's more than three types of science zone buildings then you have decisions to make every time you build a science zone - they're just independent of the decisions you make when building your CG zone (or are they? maybe you made science building decisions that boosted your local CG requirements which chains down to you wanting quantity over efficiency...)

e: Man, a bunch of words just fell out of this section somehow. Added them back in.

This of course requires there to be enough buildings that you can't just build everything. Fortunately:

Some points I'd like to make concerning an often brought up issue, which is building diversity.

A)The goal is roughly to have at least 6 possible buildings for the 3 slots for every district, that is the minimum.
B) The buildings you saw in the mockups, especially the robot factory, are placeholders. And to be super specific about the robot factory, outside of the government zone, the robot factory will not effect pop growth but instead handle automation.
C) The final goal for planet diversity is that the bonuses the buildings can give you should be roughly equal in their resource-impact. Production/Upkeep/Workforce/NewResource/PlanetModifiers/Automation are some of the categories we are considering for this.

Six seems ambitious to me, but even if there's only four "basic" research buildings then you still need to choose which one not to build. Then along comes the astral studies building - if you slot that into your research zone you can only choose two of the base, and which two are best for the astral studies boosted science zone might include the one you discarded as less useful when you were looking at the interactions between the base buildings.

I would guess we’ll have planet-specific zones, same as we have planet-specific buildings—but they did so little with planets and planet features (compared to mods that add a ton more fun features and planet types) to begin with, that I wouldn't get my hopes up.
I don’t see why they would now start adding more flavor and mechanics to planets if they didn’t do it before. I don’t see the zone system as the enabler for new additions in this department, and you won’t convince me otherwise.

Yes, there was definitely a very long dearth of new planet modifiers, but one reason I think this might happen is because there's been a slow but steady trickle for a while now (in live), some of them pretty neat. I especially liked the first time I spotted the one that adds engineering research to technicians. If you regularly play with Guilli's or other planet modifier adding mods you probably wouldn't have noticed but as a mainly vanilla player I definitely have.

The other reason is because @Eladrin said so:

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

Actions speak louder than words, but we've got both recent actions AND recent words so I'm optimistic!

 

[Iadria]

Right now, Zones feel bad to me because they're very punishing for empires that have civic or origin buildings. I don't think you get enough vanilla building slots to take stuff like necromancers, memorialists, or idyllic bloom, and marginal-at-best core buildings like the gene clinic or luxury housing will probably never get used. Using the necrophage building is going to feel really bad as well. I don't mind having one or two sub-optimal buildings in my 11 building slots, but it feels pretty crummy to have even one in my 2 (5 if I devote a zone to them) spots, because there's a lot more stuff competing for those spots.

I think it would help if the restrictions for origin/civic buildings were much more relaxed (although having necromancer jobs scale with agricultural districts sounds like a complete mess, but having buildings scale with districts they're not in also sounds like a mess!). It would also help if e.g. the research labs upgrades actually upgraded the buildings instead of being new additional buildings you also have to cram in. Right now it seems like there's too many good buildings competing for the limited slots they can be built in, and since every good building multiplies the benefit of the districts it means that making an even slightly suboptimal choice ends up really hurting you. I'm not losing out on like 6 researcher jobs by not building one more research complex, I'm losing out on six researcher jobs per city district. That's a huge downside that other buildings have to be balanced again and it feels like it's going to either cause a lot of power creep, or just make a bunch of existing buildings completely unusable.

If the long term plan is to remove those buildings and bake this stuff into the civic somehow, that's great, but if that's not happening then I think it's going to be a problem.

 

[Iadria]

Oh also I might have just been unlucky but it felt like it took FOREVER to get the tech to unlock the resource district building slots. I wasn't setting any records but I had decent science and stuff and I was trying to make sure I hit any of the pre-reqs and I don't think I saw mineral purification or food processing until like 2240 or something. I was well into T3 tech at that point, and it felt pretty bad.

 

[Calvax]

Oh also I might have just been unlucky but it felt like it took FOREVER to get the tech to unlock the resource district building slots. I wasn't setting any records but I had decent science and stuff and I was trying to make sure I hit any of the pre-reqs and I don't think I saw mineral purification or food processing until like 2240 or something. I was well into T3 tech at that point, and it felt pretty bad.

I also had this problem. I got the energy and food ones early, then mineral purification didn't appear for decades.

 

[tappi]

Right now, Zones feel bad to me because they're very punishing for empires that have civic or origin buildings. I don't think you get enough vanilla building slots to take stuff like necromancers, memorialists, or idyllic bloom, and marginal-at-best core buildings like the gene clinic or luxury housing will probably never get used. Using the necrophage building is going to feel really bad as well. I don't mind having one or two sub-optimal buildings in my 11 building slots, but it feels pretty crummy to have even one in my 2 (5 if I devote a zone to them) spots, because there's a lot more stuff competing for those spots.

This is the main reason I think the government zone should have more building slots available in it, just 2 more would alleviate the issue a lot. Some of the civic buildings can also be replaced with zones, but that is a small amount of them.

 

[tappi]

Oh also I might have just been unlucky but it felt like it took FOREVER to get the tech to unlock the resource district building slots. I wasn't setting any records but I had decent science and stuff and I was trying to make sure I hit any of the pre-reqs and I don't think I saw mineral purification or food processing until like 2240 or something. I was well into T3 tech at that point, and it felt pretty bad.

Had the same issue. It's a bit unfortunate but could just be fixed by increasing the weight of those techs a bit.

 

[vulcan7200]

Absolutely at current we don't have enough buildings for the zones, which is why it seems like there's no decisions. But if there's more than three types of science zone buildings then you have decisions to make every time you build a science zone

Just wanted to focus a bit on this bit here, as I agree in theory but not in practice.

There are currently six Research Buildings (Ignoring Archaeostudies as that's Empire 1), as it seems Institute has become Planet Limit 1. These are Research Labs (+20% Research, +60 to each Research Job), Research Complexes (-20% Researcher Upkeep), Advanced Research Complexes (+16% Job Efficiency and +600 of each Research Job), Research Institute (+2 Research from each Research Job, at the cost of +1 Consumer Goods Upkeep), and Automation Building (Currently doesn't seem to do anything, but I assume will lower the amount of pops needed to fill up the workspace), and Astral Studies. We need to sacrifice three of these. This is an incredibly simple choice. Research has been, is, and always will be the best thing to get. This is true for most 4X Games, and there's no real way around it. Research Labs, Advanced Research Complexes, and Research Institute are going to boost your Research by a very large margin. Sure this will be at the cost of Consumer Goods, but Consumer Goods are not necessarily difficult to come by, by the time you're getting these buildings. You almost certainly will have a Factory World up and running, and if need be you can have Trade make up any difference you might need. This would net you +660 Reserach Jobs to each category, +20% Research, +16% Job Effeciency, and +2 Research from every Researcher, which you will likely have 1,260+ depending on Planet Size. I could see some cases where maybe you're hurting for Consumer Goods so you take the -20% Upkeep, but you would only do that UNTIL you get your Consumer Goods to where it needs to be so you could go back to getting one of those other buffs to your Research.

This is what I would call a false choice. It's the illusion of choice, without there being much at all. There will always be edge cases where more unorthodox picks are better of course, but those are the small minority. You could argue it just needs "number tweaking", but anything that boosts your Research will almost always come out on top over something simply reducing your Upkeep unless you make the number ridiculous. This will be true for basically every Zone the way 4.0 is currently shaping up. You'll get three Building Slots, identical type buildings (Increasing Output, reducing Upkeep, ect) and you'll likely pick the same choices as you did for the Research equivalent unless you're in a niche situation.

 

[FPSCanarussia]

Just wanted to focus a bit on this bit here, as I agree in theory but not in practice.

There are currently six Research Buildings (Ignoring Archaeostudies as that's Empire 1), as it seems Institute has become Planet Limit 1. These are Research Labs (+20% Research, +60 to each Research Job), Research Complexes (-20% Researcher Upkeep), Advanced Research Complexes (+16% Job Efficiency and +600 of each Research Job), Research Institute (+2 Research from each Research Job, at the cost of +1 Consumer Goods Upkeep), and Automation Building (Currently doesn't seem to do anything, but I assume will lower the amount of pops needed to fill up the workspace), and Astral Studies. We need to sacrifice three of these. This is an incredibly simple choice. Research has been, is, and always will be the best thing to get. This is true for most 4X Games, and there's no real way around it. Research Labs, Advanced Research Complexes, and Research Institute are going to boost your Research by a very large margin. Sure this will be at the cost of Consumer Goods, but Consumer Goods are not necessarily difficult to come by, by the time you're getting these buildings. You almost certainly will have a Factory World up and running, and if need be you can have Trade make up any difference you might need. This would net you +660 Reserach Jobs to each category, +20% Research, +16% Job Effeciency, and +2 Research from every Researcher, which you will likely have 1,260+ depending on Planet Size. I could see some cases where maybe you're hurting for Consumer Goods so you take the -20% Upkeep, but you would only do that UNTIL you get your Consumer Goods to where it needs to be so you could go back to getting one of those other buffs to your Research.

This is what I would call a false choice. It's the illusion of choice, without there being much at all. There will always be edge cases where more unorthodox picks are better of course, but those are the small minority. You could argue it just needs "number tweaking", but anything that boosts your Research will almost always come out on top over something simply reducing your Upkeep unless you make the number ridiculous. This will be true for basically every Zone the way 4.0 is currently shaping up. You'll get three Building Slots, identical type buildings (Increasing Output, reducing Upkeep, ect) and you'll likely pick the same choices as you did for the Research equivalent unless you're in a niche situation.

I strongly suspect they'll bring back the separate physics/society/engineering specialisation buildings.

 

[NorseGod]

Habitats feel like hard mode currently. Having districts cost alloys (to build and upkeep) isn't great when the entire game revolves around alloys. Maybe it can be changed to energy?

Right now the beta is being optimized just for UNE and

Just wanted to focus a bit on this bit here, as I agree in theory but not in practice.

There are currently six Research Buildings (Ignoring Archaeostudies as that's Empire 1), as it seems Institute has become Planet Limit 1. These are Research Labs (+20% Research, +60 to each Research Job), Research Complexes (-20% Researcher Upkeep), Advanced Research Complexes (+16% Job Efficiency and +600 of each Research Job), Research Institute (+2 Research from each Research Job, at the cost of +1 Consumer Goods Upkeep), and Automation Building (Currently doesn't seem to do anything, but I assume will lower the amount of pops needed to fill up the workspace), and Astral Studies. We need to sacrifice three of these. This is an incredibly simple choice. Research has been, is, and always will be the best thing to get. This is true for most 4X Games, and there's no real way around it. Research Labs, Advanced Research Complexes, and Research Institute are going to boost your Research by a very large margin. Sure this will be at the cost of Consumer Goods, but Consumer Goods are not necessarily difficult to come by, by the time you're getting these buildings. You almost certainly will have a Factory World up and running, and if need be you can have Trade make up any difference you might need. This would net you +660 Reserach Jobs to each category, +20% Research, +16% Job Effeciency, and +2 Research from every Researcher, which you will likely have 1,260+ depending on Planet Size. I could see some cases where maybe you're hurting for Consumer Goods so you take the -20% Upkeep, but you would only do that UNTIL you get your Consumer Goods to where it needs to be so you could go back to getting one of those other buffs to your Research.

This is what I would call a false choice. It's the illusion of choice, without there being much at all. There will always be edge cases where more unorthodox picks are better of course, but those are the small minority. You could argue it just needs "number tweaking", but anything that boosts your Research will almost always come out on top over something simply reducing your Upkeep unless you make the number ridiculous. This will be true for basically every Zone the way 4.0 is currently shaping up. You'll get three Building Slots, identical type buildings (Increasing Output, reducing Upkeep, ect) and you'll likely pick the same choices as you did for the Research equivalent unless you're in a niche situation.

Or, you just make 2 research zones on the planet, and get all of the buildings.

 

[Calvax]

Or, you just make 2 research zones on the planet, and get all of the buildings.

Second zones of the same type don't give any more buildings.

 

[NorseGod]

Second zones of the same type don't give any more buildings.

They don't allow you to build any copies of the buildings that you've already built, but they absolutely give you 3 more building slots of that type. If you have more buildings you want on a given planet, just double up. Been that way for the entire Beta.

Who needs a Science Nexus when you have a dedicated Research Planet?

 

[Newbee53]

I started an ocean paradise playthrough because people have been wondering about 'one planet' problems and it got me thinking. Day one--of the second month just in case--I've got 400 unemployed workers. I have no idea if this is intended or because ocean paradise hasn't been worked on. Thoughts?

I've also just had the wonder lust event chain happen. I just realized how punishing it can be with the more limited early unity. you lose a leader and have to preplace them right away, probably right after you just bought yourself a new scientist. I think it would be less of an issue if it had a 'year 3 at least' limiter so you weren't so tight on resources in general.

Buy 2211 I've had the 'scum and villainy' event pop twice. no crime anywhere and honestly a tiny amount of unemployment based on the new system the event definitly needs a rework cause nothing I do will eliminate unemployment.

Still, while I'll be the first to admit there are balance issues--do you build an industrial zone first, or research--I think its something that with balance can get you pretty far. certainty far enough to start building robots and using them to settle planets. the biggest issue I can see is unity--for leader upkeep--or research. And of course you have to go research, and that might see you fire high level leaders to keep unity upkeep down.

Gai world might be in worse condition, because you want have angulars to give you a rather large cg buffer. I didn't choose that because I was worried they hadn't been given the balance pass 'regular' ocean planets have.

We shall see how this goes into the future. but I think with a little balance this should work out surprisingly well.