Habitat Changes ?

[Morbid Gerbil]

It's been a while since I played Voidborn

And tbh the changes to the habitat system are ... confusing

What on earth am i meant to do with them now?

 

[prismaticmarcus]

Maybe a more specific question would be helpful. What are you not getting about habitats?

 

[Lorenerd11]

Habitats are now limited to 1 per system, and are expanded by building Orbitals.

 

[Jeyops]

What that means is that you take your construction ship, build a habitat complex in a system first. This ain't gonna be big on it's own so you build orbitals on every celestial body in the system. Big Orbitals go on planets and stars, small ones on moons and asteroids.

The Orbitals grant districts to the complex according to the resource output of the celestial body. They also grant more building slots but I am not sure about the numbers. I think 0.5 building slot per small and 1 building slot per big Orbital. Correct me if I am wrong here.

So what you want is systems that got several resources of one type. 4 celestial bodies with energy deposits make for a great energy-hab. But you probably still want orbitals on all bodies for the additional building slots.


That's as far as my understanding on habitats goes. I never use them tho, so I hope I am not too far off track.

 

[klingonadmiral]

If you want to play Voidborn, revert to the last patch before the habitat changes.

 

[hart30]

Habitats have basically become selfmade planets which u can build further up. Orbital by orbital.

 

[Zergor]

So in short :
As it was said before, base habitats are not great but they can be upgraded by adding major and minor orbitals over celestial bodies.
All orbitals will allow you to build up to 3 buildings of all the base ressourses and research that should have been collected. Let's note that it seem that those ressourses are no longer collected by the space station which mean that you should avoid doing so before you can garantee the jobs are used (and also is does not matter if 3 or 15 physics are collected on a celestial body, you will only unlock at most 3 labs by orbital, same for energy and minerals).
Only major orbitals increase your district cap and those will be more efficient at doing so when you upgrade your station (which is now done by upgrading the planetary building and require both the habitat tech and enough people).

It's best not to "pre-build" all orbitals in a system as you will just end with empty districts and you would have been better of making a habitat in an other system, increasing your total pop growth.
Minor orbitals don't increase your district cap so don't build them if you don't need the specific districts they provide. In particular, while possible it's useless to build an orbital on a minor body without ressourses.

And an other specificity : Alloys and very rare resources are directly collected by the habitat if you put a orbital on them. Rare ressourses (gas, motes, cristals) will instead create directly one job to mine them (which will usually be way better than the station that collected them before).

 

[HFY]

What on earth am i meant to do with them now?

They're okay to start with given your +% bonus to production.

But they fall way behind once Orbital Rings and Ecus start to appear, and they never catch up.

So short-term you can start as Void Dwellers and conquer someone, for a ground-based species.

Long-term -- or for non-VD empires -- habitats are still good for rare resource extraction, especially if you get your minerals from space (e.g. Arc Furnace), and they're not terrible for research & trade since those don't get a significant boost from Orbital Ring buildings.

 

[klingonadmiral]

They're okay to start with given your +% bonus to production.

Not really. Space resources are really crappy for the new habitat system, as each resource grants 3 districts while an old habitat granted 8. This means that it's nearly impossible for the new habitats to match the raw resource output of the new habitats.

For example, good luck playing Void Dwellers with your starting cluster having terrible space resources like mine in my current game:

No system pictured, excluding Sol, has more than 2 mineral deposits. Of course as VD you have your guaranteed habitables replaced with deposit-heavy system, but compared to a planet those are still not that good.

So Void Dwellers have to expand a lot to get to systems that are actually good to put base resource habitats on. Except that Void Dwellers can't expand a lot because their colonies cost influence.

 

[HFY]

Not really. Space resources are really crappy for the new habitat system, as each resource grants 3 districts while an old habitat granted 8. This means that it's nearly impossible for the new habitats to match the raw resource output of the new habitats.

For example, good luck playing Void Dwellers with your starting cluster having terrible space resources like mine in my current game:

You misunderstand.

They're okay to start as in their home system and two "guaranteed" juicy systems are sufficient to conquer someone with better habitability.

They're not great to expand with. I almost always want to rush a neighbor.

 

[klingonadmiral]

True, but that has made Void Dwellers an overly narrow playstyle. You either have someone to rush down and snowball from there, or you wither on the vine.

I preferred to play Void Dwellers as pacifists. You could cram a huge empire's worth of pops into a dozen or so systems, so there was not much need to expand.

 

[HFY]

True, but that has made Void Dwellers an overly narrow playstyle. You either have someone to rush down and snowball from there, or you wither on the vine.

Strong agree.

I preferred to play Void Dwellers as pacifists. You could cram a huge empire's worth of pops into a dozen or so systems, so there was not much need to expand.

It'd be cool if they were better for Pacifists, yeah.

IMHO there should be a variety of different Habitat and Void Dweller roles:
- Someone who lives above a habitable planet and doesn't settle it (conqueror, pre-sapient studies, environmental preservation, etc.)
- Someone who lives between planetary empires and facilitates trade
- Someone who wrecks planets and mines the rubble
- etc.

 

[Ohirra]

There are two ways to play Void Dwellers, in my opinion.

Megacorporation Worker Cooperative, which is the easier of the two playstyles, or Nanotech ascsension.

Worker Cooperatives only need Trade habitats with plenty of Habitation districts, and enough Industrial districts to supply demand for Alloys and Consumer Goods.

Nanotech is a little trickier, what I do is only colonize those star systems that have an Energy deposit on their star, build the 3 Reactor districts and an Energy Grid building, and rely on the Nanotech Cauldron for alloys. Your energy districts jobs will be supporting most of your Nanotech buildings. (If you're not a Gestalt, you need to take Mercantile so you can turn Trade Value into Consumer Goods.)

Eventually you should be able to build Nanite Harvesters in all of your owned systems, if you only built a Habitat Central Complex around the star's energy deposit, you'll free up all of the other suitable bodies for nanite deposits to mine. Other than the 3 Reactor Districts, all the other districts should be Habitation districts, and after researching all the relevant technologies, as well as taking the Expansion and Prosperity traditions, you'll unlock all of the building slots. Taking the civic Functional Architecture (or Constructobot for Gestalt) will help.

 

[Beauty Nova]

Habitats have basically become selfmade planets which u can build further up. Orbital by orbital.

They're more like a bonus planet in each system you have to uncover like a scratch-off lottery ticket. Only it's not obscured what they'll be.

I'm really not a fan of the new system, or how you're basically expected to give up actually being voidborne. Why does the origin and mechanic even exist at this point?

 

[Arcvalons]

They're okay to start with given your +% bonus to production.

But they fall way behind once Orbital Rings and Ecus start to appear, and they never catch up.

So short-term you can start as Void Dwellers and conquer someone, for a ground-based species.

Long-term -- or for non-VD empires -- habitats are still good for rare resource extraction, especially if you get your minerals from space (e.g. Arc Furnace), and they're not terrible for research & trade since those don't get a significant boost from Orbital Ring buildings.

Yes, as I feared before that update, habitats were nerfed hard. Now I need to use mods that improve them or revert them for an habitat-only run to be as fun as it was before.

The worst part is that the changes seem like they were made in response to complaints by people who never used them, and just hated that they were inconvenient to conquer.

 

[jedavis]

Habitat-only definitely feels anemic now. Limited / mixed raw resource districts early-game and then no orbital ring / ringworld base output boosters lategame. Maybe 4.0 will save us, with raw resource districts based on deposit size? (or maybe we will discover that this actually makes the energy problems worse, because a typical energy deposit might only give us two reactor districts instead of three...).

Hopefully habitats are done enough for a long enough period of the beta that we can actually give some feedback. I'm kinda worried that the removal of base pop growth will hurt void dwellers even more; massively parallel pop growth is like the one thing we have going for us, but it largely relies on base growth, because small planetary capacity plus small populations = no bonus growth.

The alloy upkeep on orbitals has been brutal in the early-game. Half a district slot for 1 alloy/month? Nah, I'll just build another whole habitat for 5 alloys/mo upkeep, if I have the space for it, and get another source of pop growth in the bargain. And the habitat central command upkeep is reduced by Prosperity and Expansion, while orbital upkeep isn't. So I still spam habitats like I used to (and it's arguably better now, since I get 10 districts with Expansion and Prosperity instead of 4 and then having to upgrade); I just need more systems to do it. So the new system encourages me to play a lot more aggressively for space for habitats, even outside of the need for generator districts. The arcane replicator feature on the capital also supports an alloy rush. And then you start in Militarized Economy and if you try to switch to afford CGs for science, the alloy upkeep gets you. So you're already at a big disadvantage for unity or science rush, so what else are you gonna do?

(And then in the mid/late game, I don't build orbitals because I have too many habitats to be arsed giving construction ships orders to build around particular moons. At least that problem is going away, probably. Hopefully that "fix" doesn't mean that I get hit with uncontrollable alloy upkeep for orbitals that I didn't choose to build)

I'm also still grumpy that upgraded habitat capitals don't give crime suppression jobs. If we can build habitats up towards 20 districts and 70+ pops now, why the heck can't we get some decent capitals? Having to spend an extra building slot (and half an alloy per month for the minor orbital to support it) to suppress crime is yet another source of inefficiency.

Wouldn't mind some mixed-use designations kinda similar to Rural World either, since a lot of the time I'm doing three energy districts plus some other stuff. Leisure Station used to be a nice all-rounder due to the happiness or stability boost or whatever but that's gone now.

I think it's an interesting question whether void dwellers needing to play more aggressively and pure-habitat not being viable was an intentional choice, or an unintended consequence of other changes. Looking back at some of the dev diaries for the habitat changes, it seems like they had grander ambitions for the potential functions of orbitals and then... didn't quite get there.

At this point I wouldn't mind if they locked habitat availability to only Void Dwellers / Voidborne and then balanced them around that level of investment, if that meant we could have nice things and it would appease the haters by greatly limiting AI habitat-spam. When I'm not playing Void Dwellers, I pretty much never want to be bothered building habitats.

 

[HFY]

At this point I wouldn't mind if they locked habitat availability to only Void Dwellers / Voidborne and then balanced them around that level of investment, if that meant we could have nice things and it would appease the haters by greatly limiting AI habitat-spam. When I'm not playing Void Dwellers, I pretty much never want to be bothered building habitats.

I'd like LIMITED habitats for non-VD empires, perhaps something like each one counts as an upgraded starbase for starbase cap & costs.

So if I'm blocked into a corner, I can still build up a bit in order to break out & conquer a neighbor.

That would also let me put one in a resource-dense system (5+ crystals or whatever) and/or as a chokepoint fortress, but wouldn't allow spam for non-VD empires.

Also, perhaps habitat Influence cost should scale with distance from capital, so the first two VD colonies aren't such a slog.

 

[jedavis]

resource-dense system (5+ crystals or whatever)

Interesting, I didn't realize that orbitals over strategic resource deposits still added extractor jobs; I assumed they just passed the production through the orbital and that was the end of it, since extraction jobs were removed from regular planets.

 

[Beauty Nova]

Habitat-only definitely feels anemic now. Limited / mixed raw resource districts early-game and then no orbital ring / ringworld base output boosters lategame. Maybe 4.0 will save us, with raw resource districts based on deposit size? (or maybe we will discover that this actually makes the energy problems worse, because a typical energy deposit might only give us two reactor districts instead of three...).

Hopefully habitats are done enough for a long enough period of the beta that we can actually give some feedback. I'm kinda worried that the removal of base pop growth will hurt void dwellers even more; massively parallel pop growth is like the one thing we have going for us, but it largely relies on base growth, because small planetary capacity plus small populations = no bonus growth.

The alloy upkeep on orbitals has been brutal in the early-game. Half a district slot for 1 alloy/month? Nah, I'll just build another whole habitat for 5 alloys/mo upkeep, if I have the space for it, and get another source of pop growth in the bargain. And the habitat central command upkeep is reduced by Prosperity and Expansion, while orbital upkeep isn't. So I still spam habitats like I used to (and it's arguably better now, since I get 10 districts with Expansion and Prosperity instead of 4 and then having to upgrade); I just need more systems to do it. So the new system encourages me to play a lot more aggressively for space for habitats, even outside of the need for generator districts. The arcane replicator feature on the capital also supports an alloy rush. And then you start in Militarized Economy and if you try to switch to afford CGs for science, the alloy upkeep gets you. So you're already at a big disadvantage for unity or science rush, so what else are you gonna do?

(And then in the mid/late game, I don't build orbitals because I have too many habitats to be arsed giving construction ships orders to build around particular moons. At least that problem is going away, probably. Hopefully that "fix" doesn't mean that I get hit with uncontrollable alloy upkeep for orbitals that I didn't choose to build)

I'm also still grumpy that upgraded habitat capitals don't give crime suppression jobs. If we can build habitats up towards 20 districts and 70+ pops now, why the heck can't we get some decent capitals? Having to spend an extra building slot (and half an alloy per month for the minor orbital to support it) to suppress crime is yet another source of inefficiency.

Wouldn't mind some mixed-use designations kinda similar to Rural World either, since a lot of the time I'm doing three energy districts plus some other stuff. Leisure Station used to be a nice all-rounder due to the happiness or stability boost or whatever but that's gone now.

I think it's an interesting question whether void dwellers needing to play more aggressively and pure-habitat not being viable was an intentional choice, or an unintended consequence of other changes. Looking back at some of the dev diaries for the habitat changes, it seems like they had grander ambitions for the potential functions of orbitals and then... didn't quite get there.

At this point I wouldn't mind if they locked habitat availability to only Void Dwellers / Voidborne and then balanced them around that level of investment, if that meant we could have nice things and it would appease the haters by greatly limiting AI habitat-spam. When I'm not playing Void Dwellers, I pretty much never want to be bothered building habitats.

I wish they'd just done the changes to the AI that they did (relatively) recently instead of gutting the whole mechanic.

But at this point I'm just an old woman yelling at clouds, it'd probably take a whole lot of people griping about it constantly like that one flag occupation thing to have a chance of making it look like it used to and I'm tired of screaming into the void.

 

[XCodes]

Not really. Space resources are really crappy for the new habitat system, as each resource grants 3 districts while an old habitat granted 8. This means that it's nearly impossible for the new habitats to match the raw resource output of the new habitats.

For example, good luck playing Void Dwellers with your starting cluster having terrible space resources like mine in my current game:

No system pictured, excluding Sol, has more than 2 mineral deposits. Of course as VD you have your guaranteed habitables replaced with deposit-heavy system, but compared to a planet those are still not that good.

So Void Dwellers have to expand a lot to get to systems that are actually good to put base resource habitats on. Except that Void Dwellers can't expand a lot because their colonies cost influence.

Space resources are meaningless to habitat productivity unless you build on strategic resource deposits because you should never have been building Generator or Mining habitats to begin with. The only good Habitat designations are Research, Agriculture, and Trade, and while not great the Foundry and Unity designations are good enough to be viable if you want to go completely planet-less.