Amenity Zones

[Kiwibaum]

Playing around a little, but not much in the beta I have to say Amenity Zones feel bad/weird.

You only have a very limited amount of 3 Zones, which is fine, but it kinda feels like you want to take up one of them with an Amenity Zone, leaving you with only 2 Zones in a way.

I feel like Amenities could better be handled through mostly just buildings (I know there is some buildings for this already, but it doesn't feel like the game is balanced around using just those). Thus making you have to decide which Zone needs to sacrifice a building. Now how to make this scale to district amounts I am not sure. Maybe they would give entertainer jobs per district? Tho that would break the design of buildings usually modifying jobs instead of giving new ones.

Alternatively maybe the government Zone by default gives entertainer jobs?

How do ya'll feel about Amenty Zones?

 

[TranscendentalDragon]

Honestly? I've just been playing Anglers Agrarian Idyll to completely ignore both amenity and CG zones. Sure, it's still a bit wonky, as Anglers appear not to inherit Farmer efficiency boni, but I found that the only way for beta to be playable

EDIT: also, you overproduce food, but not enough to actually switch to Catalytic

 

[Newbee53]

I think the amenities zone is kind of ok, especially if it was designed for full city planets or extremely specialized ones. Like, you are living on a planet with nothing but fields, fertilizer, and cattle producing the fertilizer. it smells exactly as bad as you think, so of course the colony has to do something special to keep everyone happy.

The current implementation however makes amenities required for any decent developed planet.

One solution I've been thinking about is to make luxury apartments buildable every zone and have them reduce the amenities requirements of pops working in said zone. This would allow a smaller number of jobs handle the requirements of a general planet, while also requiring you to build the zone if the planet is big enough or specialized enough. Given that a specialized planet is far more likely to be willing to sacrifice a single city zone anyways it also feels worthwhile there.

alternatively one could make amenities just not a problem until you've develpoed a planet to something like 80% of the districts. scale it with development or something. But then they'd have to be done differently for things like ring worlds and habitats. not a bad thing enterally, but something that would still need to be dealt with.

 

[Ryika]

I think if the zone system is kept "as is", then zones should definitely only be used for things that produce an actual output, not for things that are "planet maintenance" kind of stuff.

It doesn't feel good to use one of your limited slots on Amenities, that's certainly one reason. But in my opinion, the much bigger issue is that it links output jobs with entertainers, which inevitably means having to go to the jobs tab to fine-tune the amount of entertainers you have, potentially each time you add a new city district. Sure, there's automation that will probably be fixed to do that work for you, but I don't think it makes sense to design a system such that the player needs to turn on automation just to make it bearable.

/edit:
This was actually partially addressed in today's stream at around ~25 minutes. Holo Theatres will produce some Entertainer jobs, and together with Luxury Housing they're supposed to make it so you don't need an Amenities Zone on every planet. But I think for bigger planets, the problem remains the same.

 

[-Marauder-]

Honestly? I've just been playing Anglers Agrarian Idyll to completely ignore both amenity and CG zones. Sure, it's still a bit wonky, as Anglers appear not to inherit Farmer efficiency boni, but I found that the only way for beta to be playable

EDIT: also, you overproduce food, but not enough to actually switch to Catalytic

That seems like a bug, have you reported it?