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Fascinating. So to be clear, essentially everyone has massively inflated trade to use to fix problems, especially if they are NOT actually trying to manage their economy in detail anyway?
That would explain a lot. I've been trying to prevent having the logistics deficit, but that means people who are ignoring it (the people who seem to just be specializing, while I've been unable to do so because I wouldn't be able to pay a trade deficit that is apparently currently income) are actually not seeing either end of the problem. They specialize and don't have to fine-tune outputs as much, yet simultaneously aren't suffering the penalty we will in 4.0 for ignoring that and get enough faux income to forcibly fine-tune their economy until it fixes itself.
Yeah, it's a hell of a bug to know about and not fix for weeks (it seems like a tiny -- typo that should be easy to fix since the number is calculated properly).
It is ruinous to any discussion of balance, logistical upkeep or the early game economy. And it frustrates me greatly every time someone says you should just use the internal market to fix things... they can only do that so easily in the beta because of big bug. I've no idea what the balance will be like in 4.0
That's actively insulting. Genuinely so. I have posted extremely long, point by point responses to things you've said and you know it. In a previous thread you have even asked me to basically repeat a previous post I made in response to you in the same thread, I linked to the post, other people responded going "Oh, that makes a lot of sense actually", and then you ran off to another thread to make the same complaints because you know you don't have any actual answers. You've invested yourself into being the harbinger of doom and actually addressing actual responses would get in the way of that.
I'm sorry, it was not meant as an insult but a polemic description of my perception of the nature of the discussion. I think I’m not the only one who sometimes strikes somewhat belittling or insulting notes—maybe I SHOULD go out and touch more grass.
I just genuinely just read a post that said, "let them cook" - this is also not meant as a directed insult, but rather the overall sentiment I perceive when criticizing the new system.
One very important thing about Trade I feel I need to stress: Trade is completely broken. Trade consumption from planetary deficits counts as income.
(It was mentioned as a known bug in 3.99.0 dev diary two weeks ago: "Planetary Logistic Upkeep currently pays you Trade if you have surpluses. While it takes money to make money, that’s not exactly what we were going for.")
My test game last night instead of being -705 from deficits was +705 from deficits, so my economy is propped up by +1410 points of bugged trade value (and making planets self-reliant currently hurts your economy rather than helping it).
One AI was sat at 100% devastation, maxed stored trade, no trade production, only income from bugged -270 energy planet deficit creating +77.85 trade.
Bugged trade is giving beta players lots of extra cash all game to fix economic problems with the zones.
In 4.0 Trade will instead be adding to economic problems and death spirals. Bugs need to be fixed urgently.
Balance changes should not be made while the economic numbers are all buggy.
Also the first 3k-6k pops will probably not have all their amenities provided by a single Luxury housing building and the capital building. I've no idea what they're going to do about amenity management but that also needs to be decided and included before amenity balance discussions can take place.
Every time I look at the 3.99.4 planet UI the more I hate it.
Every single number is extremely silly like +90 motes from one building, or +11278 clerk jobs added in 5 days from one zone.
It's awkward to do anything. Zones are supposed to have restricted build options but my Ecumenopolis has 55 options for what to build in the two Government zone slots... so I have to build an Urban zone if I want more slots, or maybe build the relevant zone... but I can't see what a zone will let me build without first building it (obviously it's currently nearly free and nearly instant but that must also be temporary, and it's silly to swap thousands of jobs around in 5 days when it took 30 years to build those district jobs) and I don't want to add 12k clerk jobs just for some extra generic build slots. And are clerks themselves still just placeholders? "Clerks haven’t been annihilated yet, and many non-”core” jobs have not been fully converted into the new system. Traditions and other things that modify Clerks have not yet been updated."
Trying to compare and decide what to build now that every building upgrade has been split into a new building, each with different effects (and broken tooltips). With oddities like Quantum Drilling plants not being allowed in mining districts or Auto-Curating Vaults being unlimited and providing more max research from Bureaucrats than actual researchers.
I hate having glowing + on empty build slots because there's nothing left to build while also having identical looking but completely different and completely overcrowded build slots, or missing that I could build buildings because I haven't unlocked the zone yet. I hate the new UI!
Zones feel wrong to me in ways I cannot fully articulate. It's hard to know what feels wrong because of all the bugs (30% of the ick), what feels wrong because it's been poorly designed and balanced (20%), and lastly what feels wrong because it's just bad (50%). It seems obvious to me that a completely new system rushed out to meet a deadline will not work half as well as the systems we have tried, tested, balanced and polished already over many years.
I hope 4.0 is a success. I don't want 4.0 to kill Stellaris, or take years to polish. I hope changes over the next few weeks win me over. I'm full of doubts.
Genuinely, thank you for engaging with my actual points.
Yes, this is a major issue that needs to be addressed. This, the godawful state of the UI, and the minimal available zone-specific buildings are making it very hard for people to get a feel for how a lot of the game would play in practice. Of course zones feel opaque and nonsensical - there's absolutely no way for anyone to know what they do other than building one and then retroengineering the mechanics by looking at what changed. The main screen UI is awful and devotes far too much space to the base zones, and that's even compared to the standard crampedness of Stellaris UI.
The inflated trade amounts are more obvious the later you go into the game - but the later you go into the game, and the more self-sufficient you make planets, the less you need to trade. Even Thiend has said that the "can't build just some artisans" complaint is mainly an issue when you have a small number of planets and once your economy properly gets going you have enough options to increase whatever you want. And that's (e: by which I mean the early game) is when trade is most needed - when you're trying to get there (e: "there" being a multi planet empire) in the first place.
And if anyone's curious, my main mechanical issue with the 4.0 game is what happens when you build a bunch of cities and then build a zone. It's not pretty and needs serious work. Ironically I think the answer is to take more control away from the player and have new jobs come onboard in a staged manner.
Yeah, it's a hell of a bug to know about and not fix for weeks (it seems like a tiny -- typo that should be easy to fix since the number is calculated properly).
It is ruinous to any discussion of balance, logistical upkeep or the early game economy. And it frustrates me greatly every time someone says you should just use the internal market to fix things... they can only do that so easily in the beta because of big bug. I've no idea what the balance will be like in 4.0
I'd suggest making a bug report about it. It's so simple it can't be that they didn't have time, but maybe someone just forgot to actually add it to a patch and they proceeded to ignore it because they thought it was fixed.
I, for once, would like to hear at least something from devs on the topic of zones. We all are going in circles in these threads, and one of the bigger question is 'what zones provide that old system didn't', to which I only heard an answer as 'it fixes the building spam' and that wasn't anything official, more on a level of a speculative guess. And I would've even accepted this answer if not for the fact that alloy/CG production also used to be spammed but then we got industry district. So why not give the rest their own districts first? Why such massive change have to come with an absurdly massive change to POPs (that requires it's own balancing, and a lot of it).
I get the devs are not in a habit of responding to every point raised by random Johnny here, but apart from bugs, this seems to be the main topic discussed about beta. At least some reaction would be great
I, for once, would like to hear at least something from devs on the topic of zones. We all are going in circles in these threads, and one of the bigger question is 'what zones provide that old system didn't', to which I only heard an answer as 'it fixes the building spam' and that wasn't anything official, more on a level of a speculative guess. And I would've even accepted this answer if not for the fact that alloy/CG production also used to be spammed but then we got industry district. So why not give the rest their own districts first? Why such massive change have to come with an absurdly massive change to POPs (that requires it's own balancing, and a lot of it).
I get the devs are not in a habit of responding to every point raised by random Johnny here, but apart from bugs, this seems to be the main topic discussed about beta. At least some reaction would be great
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:
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.
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.
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
We do believe that there are some changes that need to be made, but that the additional level allows us to provide more customization to planets and open up some interesting design space in the future.
Well that sounds like something to look into for the update later on this week.
It should refresh and stabilize after the monthly tick recalculates.
Just as a note - we did actually have Urban Zones in the design from the start, they're not a "half measure" reaction to desire for more generic building slots.
I, for once, would like to hear at least something from devs on the topic of zones. We all are going in circles in these threads, and one of the bigger question is 'what zones provide that old system didn't', to which I only heard an answer as 'it fixes the building spam' and that wasn't anything official, more on a level of a speculative guess. And I would've even accepted this answer if not for the fact that alloy/CG production also used to be spammed but then we got industry district. So why not give the rest their own districts first? Why such massive change have to come with an absurdly massive change to POPs (that requires it's own balancing, and a lot of it).
I get the devs are not in a habit of responding to every point raised by random Johnny here, but apart from bugs, this seems to be the main topic discussed about beta. At least some reaction would be great
They actually did, although it's an answer that still leaves Zones in need of a lot of work.
Basically, Zones are intended primarily for future use, where they make for much easier implementation of things like job swaps, output swaps, etc. This will be present in things like a Betharian Zone swapping miners to produce energy (that's dev-confirmed) and probably things like Catalytic Processing or Relentless Industrialists (speculation).
The problem, of course, is that currently they're not "pointless but they'll do something in the future." They're "bad, and they will do something in the future that will inherit that badness."
Depending on how fast they fix some of the more trivial issues and stuff like outlined at the start of this thread, they should be able to reach "pointless" instead of "bad." They may be able to achieve "slight improvement." In either case, as long as it stops being "bad," I don't mind them implementing it now for future ideas. I am presently a little concerned, but not that concerned, and I'd specifically prefer that they not add Zones in the patch that adds more stuff actually using them (probably 4.0?) because it would confuse the conversation about those mechanics ("Added Mechanic is bad" would blend together with "Zones are bad").
I don't remember what diary it was but last I checked it's a placeholder that will ultimately reduce the number of pops needed to fill a job (so 80 or whatever will work as 100, but not overflow to 125% efficiency).
I'd suggest making a bug report about it. It's so simple it can't be that they didn't have time, but maybe someone just forgot to actually add it to a patch and they proceeded to ignore it because they thought it was fixed.
Personally, I do like it because it means you can get energy off miner bonuses, including Subterraneans. It's "different" instead of just "better." But that's a preference thing.
As far as the AI, it certainly isn't right now but I suspect it will either not actually build Betharian zones at all or will be hardcoded to treat miners in Betharian zones as technicians.
As a final note, because it's hilarious, as far as I can tell this means you can keep lithoid livestock and they'll be made of energy for... some reason, as long as you have the Betharian zone. But how that works may have changed, I didn't play xenophobe in the beta.
It absolutely doesn't require zones to do that much, but it may to do more detailed things than the swap itself we aren't aware of yet. I'm waiting to see it to be sure.
I like it personally. Stuff like this has the potential to make worlds that feel quite different. But definitely agreed that we'd need the AI to know what it's doing here. The devs did say somewhere that the district > zone > building taxonomy should make it easier for the AI since there's fewer decisions to be made at each point
Very interesting. So it'll let you transfer your miner output/workforce bonuses to energy production? I'd maybe prefer if it wasn't a 100% swap, perhaps +3 energy / -2 minerals instead?
As a final note, because it's hilarious, as far as I can tell this means you can keep lithoid livestock and they'll be made of energy for... some reason, as long as you have the Betharian zone. But how that works may have changed, I didn't play xenophobe in the beta.
Personally, I do like it because it means you can get energy off miner bonuses, including Subterraneans. It's "different" instead of just "better." But that's a preference thing.
As far as the AI, it certainly isn't right now but I suspect it will either not actually build Betharian zones at all or will be hardcoded to treat miners in Betharian zones as technicians.
As a final note, because it's hilarious, as far as I can tell this means you can keep lithoid livestock and they'll be made of energy for... some reason, as long as you have the Betharian zone. But how that works may have changed, I didn't play xenophobe in the beta.
