[Beta] Is it impossible to build tall with the new changes?

[Nirilia]

It seems really hard or almost impossible to build tall with the new changes, my 30 pop world only has 6 building slots and 2 zones with 3 slots each.

Sure I can make a few more in the districts, but I won't be getting more building slots as before when I made more housing districts..

Unless I've missed something?

I've only played MP with from friends where we've played around and when we get past the start... then we've always desynced heavily.
So I might've missed something later in the game which can expand the planetary build slots on bigger planets?

But so far I don't see a diffrence between a size 12 and a size 30 except how many disctricts I can plop down.

I love you all. Have a good day.

/Niri.

 

[Kataclyszm]

Yes, building tall is very noncompetitive in the beta.

... of course, it's also noncompetitive in the current version, but that's not what you were asking ;-)

 

[GrandEurypterid]

Buildings are for fine-tuning; if you want an ultra-tall planet, you should be considering how to get as many resources as possible from scaling means rather than from buildings.

Take, for example, a basic capital planet with Archives and Industries as its two districts, so you have Alloys, Unity, Science, basic resources to feed them, and so on. Ordinarily, your buildings will still need to result in Crime Suppression and Amenities, so ideally you want to find a way to counteract that. (Edit: Just in case it wasn't seen, since it's a little bit opaque- city districts scale with the type of district you add, so Archives add scientists and bureaucrats per City District, Industries add Alloy Workers and Artisans, and so on.)

One option would be to take Spiritualist, so that you have Priests, resulting in your Archives producing Amenities. Having very high faction attraction and happiness (in the live version where it actually works) would significantly reduce how much you need to invest in crime suppression, and activating the anti-crime campaign would let you condense it all into as few enforcers as possible. Or, alternatively, to get your amenities you could turn off Migration and invest in Materialist Monuments to make your Civilians stronger- Materialist Civilians produce amenities and are basically only capped by housing, and the Monuments will also boost your unity output and give your civilians Culture Worker modifiers, too. (Edit 2: Tested, and while stacked monuments should buff planet unity output, they don't stack civilian buffs. So you might want to- say- stack Materialist Monument with Entertainers to buff amenities output, or Spiritualist Monument with Gene Clinics for amenity usage reduction, for example.) Going Militarist/Materialist, I'd imagine you could get quite a lot of naval cap off of Civilians, for example.

I think Tall would definitely benefit from buildings that can feed into that- having building options that alter and boost district scaling, rather than adding a flat number of jobs, such as '+25 alloy jobs per district' or '+25 biology jobs per district'. But the general principle of 'look for buildings that improve non-building scaling' should be sound enough.

 

[Red Death]

If anything, playing tall is less impossible in the beta than currently, because having more colonies does not automatically give you more pop growth, so there is less of a gap with wider empires.

It seems really hard or almost impossible to build tall with the new changes, my 30 pop world only has 6 building slots and 2 zones with 3 slots each.

Sure I can make a few more in the districts, but I won't be getting more building slots as before when I made more housing districts..

Unless I've missed something?

Indeed as said above, building slots are supposed to be used for things like % buffs to the jobs on that planet. Things like research and unity have also been put into districts instead of buildings. So "number of buildings slots in your empire" is not supposed to matter that much anymore.

But so far I don't see a diffrence between a size 12 and a size 30 except how many disctricts I can plop down.

You're kind of missing the point here: "number of districts you can plop down" is the most important thing: that's where all your resources come from! (As long as you also have the pops to provide the workforce)

 

[Critical Ethics]

On top of what else was said, since each zone gets its own buildings you don't take an efficiency hit for producing rural resources where they're consumed, and are in fact rewarded for it due to the trade logistics system. This means you don't need a dedicated farming or mineral or energy planet which cuts down the minimum planet numbers needed for an efficient empire.

 

[jedavis]

you don't take an efficiency hit for producing rural resources where they're consumed

You still lose out on the +25% bonus from designations like Mining World though, if you're using a designation for the end product advanced resource? So it seems like you do lose some efficiency (maybe balanced out by trade costs of deficits though).

 

[Ishyro]

If anything, playing tall is less impossible in the beta than currently, because having more colonies does not automatically give you more pop growth, so there is less of a gap with wider empires.

It depends if there is still a planet capacity or not. In 3.14, a planet stopped growing her pops at 500 pops, even if it's 50000 now it's still the same issue, except now your others planets have no growth at all.

Since the pop growth UI is pretty much inexistant in the beta, I didn't try to find out how the new system for pop growth works.

The tall player might have to chose between pop growth and productivity.

It's only for late game tall though, being stuck with 3-4 planets will probably be less painfull in 4.0 than now in early/mid game.

 

[GrandEurypterid]

You still lose out on the +25% bonus from designations like Mining World though, if you're using a designation for the end product advanced resource? So it seems like you do lose some efficiency (maybe balanced out by trade costs of deficits though).

True, but OTOH there's a variety of single-planet scaling that you might want- for example, a planet with a Lv5 Official on their own homeworld gets some amenities, -5% empire size from pops, and +5% resource output from jobs compared to a sector governor, before traits, as well as buffs from Planetary Ascension (especially on the homeworld). Or you could focus on squeezing out more from that planet with Rich Minerals by making it a mining world, but also adding an Urban District for amenities and to have more room for mining districts, and plopping some Alloy production on top to take advantage of the production chain.

 

[Abdulijubjub]

As others have said, districts are the new building slots. Previously a maxed out research world could have 20 jobs in the early game, 60 in the late game, from 10 building slots (assuming one or two obligatory per-planet buildings for e.g. telepaths). Now, zones effectively add half a building slot worth of jobs in every city district for free, so a size 25 planet with two research zones will give 50 jobs, with 10 building slots which can be filled with (roughly) 1 job each. That peaks at ~60, which is close enough.

However, if you wanted to go really tall (like one or two planets)... yeah, it's much harder.

A full research planet could fit 66, but that left (on a size 25 world) 20 districts empty to be used for anything else. So you could sacrifice two building slots for a forge/ministry and have a forge world making 80% of what a fully dedicated one would (20 districts vs. 25) that's also a research world making 80% of what a fully dedicated one would (8 vs. 10 building slots).

Now, they compete directly for districts (rather than one using building slots and the other districts): there's no more ability to have two worlds in one if you sacrifice specialization. A world is a world, space is space. That means there are fewer ways to trade off other things (like efficiency) for density.

However: the overall pop numbers seem to be lower. And from the stream they have some powerful buildings (like automation) to make up for it that may lower the effective density for others, and let "tall" get its density advantage back by piling up the efficiency boosters instead of other things, and having much closer total pop numbers (instead of wide getting tons of free growth just for having empty planets).

But whether that will make up the difference depends on the specific numbers they use for all that stuff.

 

[-Marauder-]

I love how some people are coping about "less pop growth" and "tall totally isn't dead". Yes it is. Because planets have a MUCH lower carrying capacity, LESS output overall and fill up quicker. You can't keep working on them and improving them as you could in the past. They're done very quickly and that's it. Which means the only choice at that point is to expand.

I'm not a fan of tall, but the changes are absolutely horrible for tall and outright encourage map painting. Pop growth doesn't matter when you have nowhere to put these pops to work.

 

[Abdulijubjub]

I love how some people are coping about "less pop growth" and "tall totally isn't dead". Yes it is. Because planets have a MUCH lower carrying capacity, LESS output overall and fill up quicker. You can't keep working on them and improving them as you could in the past. They're done very quickly and that's it. Which means the only choice at that point is to expand.

I'm not a fan of tall, but the changes are absolutely horrible for tall and outright encourage map painting. Pop growth doesn't matter when you have nowhere to put these pops to work.

If pop growth is 50% slower, and planets have 40% less capacity, planets become fully developed slower, not faster.

That, combined with the way the growth changes hit wide harder than tall, makes it a lot more than "cope".

 

[Red Death]

I love how some people are coping about "less pop growth" and "tall totally isn't dead". Yes it is. Because planets have a MUCH lower carrying capacity, LESS output overall and fill up quicker. You can't keep working on them and improving them as you could in the past. They're done very quickly and that's it. Which means the only choice at that point is to expand.

I'm not a fan of tall, but the changes are absolutely horrible for tall and outright encourage map painting. Pop growth doesn't matter when you have nowhere to put these pops to work.

I don't think that was my experience in the beta. Sure your typical home world starts already mostly full. But if you have 4-5 decent size planets, it took me a long time to actually fill them up.

But even if that's not the case, that's simply a balance question and the numbers can be changed easily.

Meanwhile, empty planets not giving a large amount of free pop growth is a pretty fundamental change against going wide.

 

[Kataclyszm]

Meanwhile, empty planets not giving a large amount of free pop growth is a pretty fundamental change against going wide.

Behold the power of the glorious Pop Assembly master race!

 

[Red Death]

Behold the power of the glorious Pop Assembly master race!

Yes, that is a remaining problem.

Personally, as soon as the next update releases, I am planning to advocate for pop assembly jobs to become something that scales with population or district number. Because at that point flat numbers from planet-unique buildings will make no sense anymore.

 

[Abdulijubjub]

Behold the power of the glorious Pop Assembly master race!

Yes, that is a remaining problem.

Personally, as soon as the next update releases, I am planning to advocate for pop assembly jobs to become something that scales with population or district number. Because at that point flat numbers from planet-unique buildings will make no sense anymore.

Robot assembly continues to have a multi-decade payoff, and will now be even crappier than that with colony spam, since habitability now affects job efficiency. 100 roboticist jobs on a e.g. tomb world with -50% efficiency would actually only produce +1 assembly.

Though it also goes the other way: assembly will be stronger in the late game because your 100 roboticist jobs turn into 150 with generic efficiency bonuses. But that's not a tall vs. wide concern, at least not directly.

 

[Kataclyszm]

Yes, that is a remaining problem.

Personally, as soon as the next update releases, I am planning to advocate for pop assembly jobs to become something that scales with population or district number. Because at that point flat numbers from planet-unique buildings will make no sense anymore.

It's not a problem, it's just a realistic representation of what being able to straight-up build new workers does for a society, as opposed to waiting for people to bump uglies.

 

[Thiend]

There's probably some point more tall than was previously viable that will now (based on the beta) be viable, because growth is no longer solely a function of how many colonies you have. Previously, a tall build was growth-gated and otherwise could function - a few dense planets was viable, but actually getting the pops through internal growth for those dense planets wasn't.

On the other hand, this won't go to an infinitely small empire because of a new factor entirely and an existing-yet-adjusted factor. First, the smaller an empire is the more difficult it becomes to appropriately balance input and output, because we no longer have full control over created jobs when we build districts. With enough planets you can just move pops between planets instead, but a tall build will be more difficult to adjust properly. Secondly, although growing pops to fill planets internally won't be a major issue, the actual capacity of planets in the beta is significantly reduced after accounting for the pop system generally multiplying by 100.

What this effectively combines to mean is that at some point smaller than was generally possible previously, you can fill your planets yourself that you couldn't before. Planets becoming full too fast is a problem (after all, why fix growth if the planets are too small to need the fix), but it also happens at a point of few enough planets that you previously wouldn't have been able to get to the point that they now get full anyway.

There are many issues I have with 3.99, but on tall viability it's probably better if anything.

 

[GrandEurypterid]

I've had a bit more of a play around, and I think any Civic that lets you get advanced resources from basic tiles is pretty good; I've been running Anglers/Efficient Bureaucracy, and being able to convert from an Industrial Zone to a Foundry is very nice, since getting trade and consumer goods from Farming Districts, and using trade or space mining to make up for any differences, means that the ratio of alloys and consumer goods is much more efficient.

 

[Psykhes]

It's not a problem, it's just a realistic representation of what being able to straight-up build new workers does for a society, as opposed to waiting for people to bump uglies.

What exactly is "realistic" that you can only build the same x new workers per planet?
A barely developed colony shouldn't be able to produce new workers as fast as a heavily industrialized homeworld.

Both "bumping uglies" and "building workers" activities should be effected by the available uglies or builders.

 

[Andy_Dandy]

It seems really hard or almost impossible to build tall with the new changes, my 30 pop world only has 6 building slots and 2 zones with 3 slots each.

Sure I can make a few more in the districts, but I won't be getting more building slots as before when I made more housing districts..

Unless I've missed something?

I've only played MP with from friends where we've played around and when we get past the start... then we've always desynced heavily.
So I might've missed something later in the game which can expand the planetary build slots on bigger planets?

But so far I don't see a diffrence between a size 12 and a size 30 except how many disctricts I can plop down.

I love you all. Have a good day.

/Niri.

So Lifeseeded Origin (my favorite) is dead now? This is what I feared the most.