It's 1.2x output for the Mineral Purification Hub, so your value calculations are all wrong. Basically, until you have at least 5 districts, it is not worth it. Also, conversations about hitting planet cap & potential bonuses from additional techs are not speaking to a relevant part of the game. The mineral cost of district specialization is a year 5 to year 10 problem.
No, the specialization is 1.5x. Each district goes from giving 200 jobs/housing to giving 300 jobs/housing: if you have 3 districts built, the specialization bumps it to the equivalent of 4.5 (and gives a building slot that you can immediately use for your mineral processing). Hence: 500+300*1.5=950 (and unlike a city and 1.5 mining districts, it costs 0 additional energy upkeep or empire size).
I'd call that equal to 1000 minerals.
Why compare the numbers of a normal unity planet designation with the numbers of a capital designation?
I generally want a ton more designations, even if there's only a tiny use-case (like an entertainer designation for the Cyberdome-build). Micromanaging and specializing the economy is part of the fun of the game! But in particular, given how much planetary ascension is supposed to matter for unity builds, it annoys me that they don't get a designation.
I compare the two to establish that the capital isn't
worse for unity. The capital being worse for unity than a specialized planet would be a self evident reason to buff it, or give it some special unity designation. But if there's no perverse incentive to e.g. not do unity on the capital, then there's no
inherent need to buff it for unity.
As for more/less designations: I think we just have a different philosophy there. The game already has tons of complexity; any further complexity added should have a strong reason why it can't be done through something that already exists.
Considering that Mutagenic Spas is already in the game and scales better than Reassigners, why not? Zombie strats are terrible right now. Although, again, they could be like clone vats and just not provide jobs at all.
Mutagenic Spas being a job swap is already (in my opinion) not great.
The building doesn't give jobs, so the only thing that changed is that now you have to build both if you want Spas, instead of only the Spa. Edit: you have to build both if you want the full benefit, but the building does give extra Medical Workers (which makes its combination with e.g. Biogenesis stronger).
If they did the same with Reassigners, they would have to either make it the same pointless "exactly the same, but now you build both buildings" setup and increase the total assembly by giving 2 jobs (then 4, with Biogenesis), or else nerf the assembly and buff other medical worker scaling things even more by adding more medical workers to the planet.
I think the devs went a little overboard with converting unique jobs to others (like with the Telepath job swap they reverted). It makes sense for a lot of jobs, but plenty of unique jobs are better off just staying unique.
But why? The flat society research genomic researchers provide already scales incredibly well into all late-game society techs, this would be essentially a huge nerf to 3/4th of the society tech pool.
400 jobs per planet is definitely
not outscaling the entirety of my empire's other society research, at least in none of the biogenesis empires I've played. I think only with Cosmogenesis's degenerate medical center spam is that anywhere close to happening.
Suppose you've got 400 Genomic Researchers (making 24 base research) for every planet, and ~1/4 of your planets are research worlds with 3000 researchers each (1000 of each type), making 10 each, with additional boosting buildings. 10*1000*1/4*1.3 > 400*6. Even if you kept your research otherwise balanced, you're just boosting your society by ~1.8x (and you're probably not investing as much in Biologists if you've already got Genomic Researchers).
But if it's a % research speed buff, it varies with the number of planets. It's either so tiny that it doesn't matter for smaller empires (ex. 0.3% per genomic researcher, totaling to ~8% for a 6 planet empire), or so huge that it becomes ludicrous for large ones (1% per genomic researcher, totaling to +600% for a huge one). And that's before counting efficiency. Whereas the Genomic Researchers would be around 1.8x society, regardless of size (assuming all else is balanced)
The strategic resource income in the game went up by 100x, so the upkeep costs might as well not exist right now.
Dark Matter isn't as easy to generate. It's the same income standard as pre-4.0 (still an incredibly strong trait, of course).
Sounds like a good reason to nerf that ridiculous strategic resource output (which literally everyone, including the devs, agrees is on the list after the worst balance changes get fixed) before balancing the entire game around those number then.
And it doesn't matter if Dark Matter is hard to generate: you can just buy it. Even at the maximum possible price (paying a whopping 130 trade for every unit of Dark Matter), DME is
still massively profitable to put on every pop. The cost is just tiny compared to the absurdity of +40% efficiency (or output, in past patches).
Ex. a Trader with +60% output from designation/Mercantile/stability gets 8*1.6*0.4=5.12 trade from DME. 0.02 DM, at 130 trade each, is 2.6 trade. You would have to pay
13x its market value (while the max is 6.5) in order for it to not be profitable. And that's from one of the least scaling jobs in the game.
