Stellaris 3.99.6 'Phoenix' Open Beta Release Notes

[ShaTiK]

City Districts provide housing, Zones provide some jobs of a certain type or types

Yes and no. City district provides both - housing and jobs. Zones modify what job district provides. But if you have no zones then city district by itself provides no jobs.

That's my main issue, you can't balance housing at all and you can't balance mixed outputs from 2 different zones since they both get their number of jobs from city district level. This rigid link is the most strange design decision to me. Leaving 3 most boring base resources as separate districts (that are not even being used when you have 100% urban planet) and putting every other resource generation into singular city district.

 

[Blackened30]

Yes and no. City district provides both - housing and jobs. Zones modify what job district provides. But if you have no zones then city district by itself provides no jobs.

That's my main issue, you can't balance housing at all and you can't balance mixed outputs from 2 different zones since they both get their number of jobs from city district level. This rigid link is the most strange design decision to me. Leaving 3 most boring base resources as separate districts (that are not even being used when you have 100% urban planet) and putting every other resource generation into singular city district.

If it were up to me I'd probably remove the per-city district job increase from Zones and simply add another upgrade arrow to increase the level of your Zones for a nominal fee. Give it some kind of max cap, maybe related to planet size in some way. But its very important to them for whatever reason to drive home that Zones are just part of City Districts therefore they're linked awkwardly. I've done a lot of early to mid game testing, but I imagine late game housing numbers get nuts. That sounds like it'll be looked at in balancing, housing should feel like a tension point as it does in the live game, albeit a fairly easy dilemma to deal with.

 

[Troyen]

165.9K pops. Yeah, it shows on the empire size. Doesn't sound wrong - most of the worlds are capped at around 10K-12K pops, and ecus at 20K (admittedly, these were small ecus)

That would've been 16,590 on the old system. So it does seem late-game population numbers can grow bigger, especially since the whole empire growth penalty looks to be gone.

It kind of seems like the exponential growth curve has grown steeper. A bit of a slower start but potentially way more output and power in the late game.