With the new specializations and how districts now work, I find it strange that we still have spammable buildings that add a fixed (flat) amount of jobs. I think most players were expecting the new system to remove these types of buildings, with buildings being relegated to modifying jobs.
The most obvious problem that the current flat-job buildings cause is the fact that the most efficient way to build your planets is to make one of each of the specialized districts (Or sometimes rural) and build the flat-job buildings in the building slots you get.
From a lore and roleplaying perspective building slots are supposed to represent the infrastructure that you have created for the district that the building is placed on. We can see this with many of the buildings that modify jobs. Your mineral purification plant works for all districts, whether you are using ubogleelt or somehow terraformed a deceptive giant with azaryn. It affects the whole planet, because it isn't a single building in a specific location. It is an integrated part of the mineral harvesting infrastructure. Yet the flat-jobs buildings break this narrative. If the planet-spanning network of mineral purification plants is competing for space with the mine for 200 miners, doesn't that mean what I said before cannot be true? Simply put, these are two conflicting systems.
From a gameplay perspective the flat-jobs buildings aren't doing much for us either. The best course of action is to hyper-specialize your planets, which is most evident on ecumenopoli, ringworlds and other special planets. Building one of each specialized district and setting them to the same specialization as the main district to get more building slots is the current meta. This leads to some very unintuitive and illogical gameplay where you can get more jobs by building a singular sepatate district to get up to three or more districts worth of jobs, even if logically there should be no difference between expanding your foundry district or building a new foundry district, while using the same amount of space.
This also clashes with the very idea of specialized districts. When each type of job has a number of modifying buildings that need to be used in order to reach the highest efficiency for the jobs, any new type of job introduced on the planet is going to be a very unequal choice.
As an example, say you have an ecumenopolis on which you have foundry specializations in your main district.
The specialized district slots could be used for either more foundry districts or a factory specialization to alleviate the planetary deficit.
But if you choose factory, you're going to lose out on a lot of jobs. Those three building slots spent on making your artificers could instead hold multiple districts worth of jobs in the form of flat-job spammable buildings. On an ecumenopoli, each time you choose to use a specialized district slot for a non-foundry specialization, you're throwing away upwards of 3 districts worth of jobs. With 3 specialized district slots, that's 9 districts!
Now, I do think that there should be incentives to both specializing and trying to avoid planetary deficits, but there already are.
If you specialize to the point of only having one job type, you're saving on the resource upkeep of the buildings.
If you're making a factory on your foundry world you're saving on planetary import fees.
But if we have spammable buildings, you'll also be losing out on potentially multiple districts worth of jobs.
Comparatively, if all buildings were purely modifier buildings (Like the Mineral Purification Plant) we would not have this problem as there would be little incentive to create one of each specialized district, as no extra jobs would be created.
The most obvious problem that the current flat-job buildings cause is the fact that the most efficient way to build your planets is to make one of each of the specialized districts (Or sometimes rural) and build the flat-job buildings in the building slots you get.
From a lore and roleplaying perspective building slots are supposed to represent the infrastructure that you have created for the district that the building is placed on. We can see this with many of the buildings that modify jobs. Your mineral purification plant works for all districts, whether you are using ubogleelt or somehow terraformed a deceptive giant with azaryn. It affects the whole planet, because it isn't a single building in a specific location. It is an integrated part of the mineral harvesting infrastructure. Yet the flat-jobs buildings break this narrative. If the planet-spanning network of mineral purification plants is competing for space with the mine for 200 miners, doesn't that mean what I said before cannot be true? Simply put, these are two conflicting systems.
From a gameplay perspective the flat-jobs buildings aren't doing much for us either. The best course of action is to hyper-specialize your planets, which is most evident on ecumenopoli, ringworlds and other special planets. Building one of each specialized district and setting them to the same specialization as the main district to get more building slots is the current meta. This leads to some very unintuitive and illogical gameplay where you can get more jobs by building a singular sepatate district to get up to three or more districts worth of jobs, even if logically there should be no difference between expanding your foundry district or building a new foundry district, while using the same amount of space.
This also clashes with the very idea of specialized districts. When each type of job has a number of modifying buildings that need to be used in order to reach the highest efficiency for the jobs, any new type of job introduced on the planet is going to be a very unequal choice.
As an example, say you have an ecumenopolis on which you have foundry specializations in your main district.
The specialized district slots could be used for either more foundry districts or a factory specialization to alleviate the planetary deficit.
But if you choose factory, you're going to lose out on a lot of jobs. Those three building slots spent on making your artificers could instead hold multiple districts worth of jobs in the form of flat-job spammable buildings. On an ecumenopoli, each time you choose to use a specialized district slot for a non-foundry specialization, you're throwing away upwards of 3 districts worth of jobs. With 3 specialized district slots, that's 9 districts!
Now, I do think that there should be incentives to both specializing and trying to avoid planetary deficits, but there already are.
If you specialize to the point of only having one job type, you're saving on the resource upkeep of the buildings.
If you're making a factory on your foundry world you're saving on planetary import fees.
But if we have spammable buildings, you'll also be losing out on potentially multiple districts worth of jobs.
Comparatively, if all buildings were purely modifier buildings (Like the Mineral Purification Plant) we would not have this problem as there would be little incentive to create one of each specialized district, as no extra jobs would be created.
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