and for me the most important part of that is 'interesting' which the old system really wasn't. Spam researchers, spam industry districts, spam whatever unity buildings.
This system seems--on paper anyway--like it will give you more interesting choices even if its less choices in total. Right now a lot isn't implemented, so its hard to say how it will end. But right now the potential is far better than what we had before.
As I pointed out in another thread, I don't think you could tie buildings to specific districts and successfully communicate that clearly. In my mind it simply wouldn't work well at all.
Yes, you are right—the efficient part is and will be to focus on researchers, cover your unity if needed, and build alloys. But the system in which we did that wasn't that flawed—it was the
goals or
decisions we had to make. The fundamentals of
options were there: we had
limited districts,
planet types, and a few
features to orient our planet specializations around.
But ultimately, we were free to build whatever buildings we desired based on the building slots we had open.
No limitations, and
decisions arose each time we either
unlocked more slots via research or civics, or just built another
city district for more slots to work with.
I think it's a fallacy to assume the
building system led to repetitive building—it’s the
gameplay loop and
game goals that measure success. Namely,
fleet power and the military race to come out on top. After expansion, one of the best ways to scale was through
research, so once alloy production was maxed out for a massive fleet, there wasn’t anything else to scale toward besides conquest, allies, or research.
To
butcher the building system that was overall working well just to solve the problem of
repetitive game goals or progression is
gross overreach.
As the new system is too
wonky for longer games right now, I can’t fully tell what the
mid- to late-game ramifications will be—but I already found myself
bored, as I can’t build any more buildings on my capital when all three zones are done and all possible buildings are built. And I don’t have enough pops on my colonies to justify infrastructure there yet.
Before the changes, I could at least bridge that
growth gap by making
short-term building fixes on my capital—using it as a
jack-of-all-trades world to adjust for temporary economic demands until my colonies developed. Now, I can build three zones and then I’m
cut off from any further decisions until I research new techs to unlock resource zones.
I predict this will be the norm for planet development:
You set up your
three urban zones (the main characteristic of your planet), place the few buildings that match those zones, and then progress based on your
resource surplus, choosing whether to
upgrade city districts or expand basics.
In short, we’ve gone from building multiple copies of buildings on dedicated planets to always building
city districts on
every planet.
And in my book, that’s a
major step back compared to the
freedom we had before—even if it was just perceived. Now we’ve
lost that freedom, even if we didn’t always use it.
But as I said, the issue wasn’t the building system—it was
how the game works overall.
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