Ah here we go, from the .0 dev diary:
Not abandoned (officially anyway), just not prioritised functionality for the beta.
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But that's even worse! They had an idea for a system, they gave us beta that doesn't even feature this system and we are asked to provide feedback? Pardon my french, but what the heck? It seems like this interaction was planned as pretty central feature of zones/city districts.
For the description alone I already have a pre-formed notion that this is indeed a bad system - but I can't say anything really since the system isn't implemented. If the idea was that civilian is some form of a backbone of your empire - most numerous POP type by far and having less then a specific amount of them on a planet is detrimental, then I absolutely cannot see how this system can be incorporated into Stellaris as a game as it is right now, or even with tweaks, on a fundamental level. This is such a monumental changed that it is basically Stellaris 2 at this point.
But then again, I'm guessing here. Honestly, at this point I'm just waiting for release with morbid curiosity. Trainwrecks are spectacular in their own ways.
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I'm absolutely with you on the base (assuming you mean the +X status job) buildings needing to be pushed to the general slots. But one of the reasons the extra build slots are attached to zones is because in the 3.1 system the more you generalise a planet the more resource boosters you need, and the more resource boosters you need the fewer spare building slots you have left over. This heavily incentivises specialising planets and a bunch of the economy changes are based around boosting generalised planets to be on about on par with (not better than) specialised ones. So unless giving single resource planets bonus build slots is the reason you want this combination of changes, just pushing the base buildings to general gets you what you want - building a zone unlocks the ability to build cool resources boosters, and you even get free slots to put them in instead of having to sacrifice a general slot.
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About districts and housing: Is housing not meant to be a factor anymore? Way back when it was slots per X pops, you could have more jobs than housing. That became less likely when cities gave you slots cuz a building was usually paired with a city. But now with districts causing cities to give jobs themselves (other than clerks) in proportion to how many you build, it doesn't seem like you'd ever have a housing issue. Am I wrong?
That would mean other effects on housing like species traits/living standards would be irrelevant.
That would mean other effects on housing like species traits/living standards would be irrelevant.
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I know I read in some notes that the beta is a lot of temporary ui stuff, and i hope something better is coming.
I still just wanna say it's not well done, I'm talking about where the info is placed. For example I need to go to the management tab to find the size of the planet. Just look at the original and don't bury info away from it, we don't need to click around more.
The original was to hard to see the population for example.
Please think hard about the planet ui please, don't overcomplicate.
I still just wanna say it's not well done, I'm talking about where the info is placed. For example I need to go to the management tab to find the size of the planet. Just look at the original and don't bury info away from it, we don't need to click around more.
The original was to hard to see the population for example.
Please think hard about the planet ui please, don't overcomplicate.
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The thing is, in the 3.14 the "problem" was that there were only 2 main builds for planets: The hyper-focussed mono-planet to stack as many building and planetary designation bonuses as you could; or the semi-focussed rural planets that maxxed out one base resource, and filled in the rest as space provides. Occasionally you'd get a really good planet feature, and make a hyper-focussed generator/mining/agriculture world.
And now in 3.99, we have a solution where there are 2 main builds for planets: The city-focussed planet with 1 of each rural district and zones filled with +X Jobs buildings and maxxed out city Districts with Zones focussed on one resource to stack as many building and planetary designation bonuses as you can, or a mix of Zones to focus on a single chain of resources like Factory > Researcher; and semi-focussed rural planets that max out one resource and fills in the others as space provides, but without the Rural Planetary Designation (WHY?) with the bare minimum Amenities from Buildings and/or doubled up Urban Zones. And occasionally you get a really good planet feature, and make a hyper-focussed generator/minin/agriculture world. Except now the economy is way less granular and is more fiddly to control. And for some reason, it's super cheap and quick to swap a City-Planet from producing Unity and Research in peace time, to all Alloys a few weeks later for war, without the use of Edicts or Decisions, but just some minerals. Because making a building takes more than a year to accomplish, but retooling entire cities are super easy, bearely an inconvenience.
I like the idea of Zones in theory, but in practice I find them to be a worse system for this game. I know we disagree on this point, and I'm not looking to start a fight at all. It just seems like these same situations are popping up in practice, and I don't know what problems this new system actually solves. It feels like we shuffled the chairs around, broke a whole bunch of Civis, Origins and DLC content, and we're still building 1 of 2 planets, just with a different definition of how much the Min is in the Min/Max strategy.
What other planet builds are you seeing be efficient?
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dont make the main branch into a massive pre-alpha, calling this a beta is using Midas touched glasses
push this back, even if it takes the DLC with it as its no where near playable especially with may fast approaching
push this back, even if it takes the DLC with it as its no where near playable especially with may fast approaching
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I'm just going to underline this a few times, bold it, maybe crochet it on some nice linen. And notice that I typed status instead of static, god dammit.
If you remove, or in my case just ignore, the repeatable +X static job zone buildings the meta you're describing basically vanishes and planet bonsai is more fun than it's ever been, and that's with more than half the zone buildings missing. That's why this is the, what, sixth time? I've posted some variation of "They need to get rid of the repeatable +X static job zone buildings".
In my opinion the big misstep of the beta was including so few functional zone buildings, and then turning one of them into the antithesis of the entire concept. Even some placeholders that were just half and half of the other boosters would have made "this is what zones do" much easier for people to intuit.
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Yes, housing is not a factor. It cannot be factor as long as housing is tied to singular city district for you cannot control it at all.
As for what devs are going to do with it - I would very much like to give you an answer. I would like to, but cannot, for nobody knows. It isn't even clear if devs actually realized it themselves. If they did, they might've said something along the lines 'housing isn't a good fit for current system, we are working on it'. It is weak, but better than nothing, and nothing is exactly what we have.
It is one of these things that makes me (and a few others here) pessimistic about the whole planetary rework. It doesn't have balancing issues that you find out as you play the game. It doesn't have some unexpected interaction with other game system. It is entirely new system, but its issues jump at you the second you look at them with fresh eyes. How do you balance things, what do you do with housing, how can you play tall - these things you notice after the first 5 minutes of playing. I totally understand the issues with tunnel vision, as well as how tedious it is to explain some deeper system to a layperson (I work in tech support) when it is just easier to do something. But that's not a ticket in a service desk manager. And I'm gonna be honest - I read DDs but I haven't even thought about how zones would look in-game when I read them first. Granted, last time I played Stellaris was around a year ago, but still it goes to show how important it is to prototype. But we are not at prototype stage now - we are in the final stretch, less then a month from release of both 4.0 and DLC.
This is the big reason for frustration I think. Update feels like it is still at prototype stage, not beta test for bugs and balance and general feel.
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I disagree with you there though: I find those +X Jobs buildings are neccesary to make this new system function. It's just a very bland, spammy solution to a few issues created with the Zones system, but it's kinda the only one that works in practice. Especially the ones for City Zones, so you can have some kind of small control over total Jobs created, especially in the early game.
Maybe they should limit those +X Jobs buildings to only the Govt Zone spaces, and not within the Zones themselves, almost like "mini-districts"? But then that begs the question, what building's do you put in all these Zones, especially early on? "Here's a bunch of Building Slots, but don't use them for 50-years or you'll tank your economy" is just bad game design, you should give players options about when they have the capacity to use them, and ideally give them interesting choices when you do so. Right now they're doing both badly.
I agree with that sentiment completely. But I'm not sure exactly what buildings they should be using instead, especially for the rural zones. The options we have right now are some combination of:
- +X Jobs
- * 0.x Upkeep
- * 1.x Output, +X Input/advanced resource Upkeep
- +X advanced resource Output, +X basic resource Upkeep
- Store more resources
The core economic gameplay loop is basically:
(apologies if I missed something)
So what is it that we can actually change or tweak to this loop? We've already done adjusting outputs and upkeeps, and added more inputs or upkeeps. And we let Civics and Origins handle modifying jobs so they swap some inputs, outputs, and upkeep details. What else is there to modify here that makes sense as a building?
Do we get somewhat esoteric: Do we work the benefits or availability of Edicts into a building somehow? Do we make choosing Planetary Designations into a Building that goes into the chosen Zone? (Which is just another "add output/reduce upkeep" building.) I don't know what else we can actually do to make these buildings interesting that isn't already been tried.
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Alternate idea:
Planets have space for 1-5 City Zones, and 1-3 Rural Zones (Additional Zones unlock with colony development and/or techs), each with their own Districts. Each Zone starts out with 1 building slot, gets a second at 3 Districts, a third at 6 Districts, a fourth at 10 Districts. a fifth at 15 Districts (+1, +2, +3, +4, +5); so that you earn more bulding slots as you commit to expanding the Zone through additional Districts. Then even the +X Jobs buildings are a viable option, since you are chosing to "specialize" the Zone by adding job density, instead of upgrading efficiency. But you can't just "spam the +X Jobs buildings" as you only have 1 Building to go in Zones with a single District.
Allow most Amenities/Housing Buildings to use the slots within City Zones, as well as the default Govt Zone, so you have the choice of improving Jobs OR using that space for Pop support. Example: Minerals > CGs > Research planet, where you have just enough minerals and CGs to support the Research Zone, so you use the building slot in the Factory Zone for Amenities. You use the Research Zone building slots for Research Efficiency Buildings, and the Govt Zone for +X Reasearcer Jobs. At least then you'd be able to do more variety than we have now.
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Yes, from the moment uncapped devastation was announced in the DD as a consequence of having a storm people said it was not a good idea. Devastation impacts a lot of things on the planet, such as housing, amenities, and job output, and the storms already have built-in modifiers like "X job's upkeep is increased" so it was double-dipping on the penalties.
Cosmic Storms is by far the worst-rated Stellaris DLC released and the only one where people actively recommend those with the expansion pass or subscription disable it. You can argue that people don't understand the mechanics properly, or they undervalue burning limited building slots on storm buildings to negate the storms, or they don't appreciate the ability to bully an AI that can't cope with them, but if you're a company that makes a product and wants to sell more of that product, it's not a bad idea to try and make a poorly-perceived product more appealing. The Custodians have done that with other DLC too.
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It was discussed by them in one of the streams, the most recent one IIRC. They have discussed internally if housing still serves a purpose and briefly considered removing it entirely but chose not to.
If housing could not be impacted by the player at all then it would still be a mechanic - housing limits your civilian population. Solitary means fewer supportable happy civilians, communal means more. Even if zone jobs eating civilian jobs doesn't come back they will still effectively eat civilian jobs by the government workers eating the housing your civilians need to live in.
Similarly more rural districts mean less housing total.
Moving past what's available in the beta, one of the possible future building types mentioned was one that increased a zone's jobs per district. Housing adds to the opportunity cost for taking that one, and adds to the benefits of taking the automation building.
Moving into wild speculation, anything from civics to planetary features to zone buildings could impact housing consumption or capacity.
All of which seems more interesting to me if the total impact isn't as straightforward as "build more or fewer total city districts until the red goes away then ".
Also even if we ignore all that and say you do need to be able to manipulate housing quantities directly for housing to have meaning, and the manipulation of rural vs district buildings isn't enough for you, the luxury housing district already exists in the beta, never mind what other housing manipulation options might be added later.
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Housing and to a degree Amenities only really existed as a way to limit building spam from distorting the economy too much with certain extreme world builds, like the Full-City with Tech-Only Buildings build. But with them limiting Building slots so much, and seperating them into limited boxes using Zones, and adding Housing to all Districts they kinda aren't needed anymore.
I'm not going to reply to this bit because it's in reply to a summary of a summary and we'll just go around in circles forever. I have a decent post on page 2 of the thread and a reply to a reply a bit later that are decent expansions to my thoughts on the matter.
E: I'm not trying to give you the brush off I just think this particular chain of replies will get weird and confusing fast and those other posts are a much better starting off point.
According to a previous dev reply:
+X jobs /per district/, a very different thing to +X jobs full stop.
0.x the pops needed to work a job (that's what the automation building is supposed to do).
Something I think you're glossing over:
+X to another resource covers a heck of a lot of ground. Even just adding a +X trade option would drastically change the feel of a zone.
Something I think could be neat:
An "on-site amenities" building for rural zones that reduces pop upkeep, including amenity and housing usage. Very much a hindsight one given the amenity changes that went through the beta, but I think it would be neat.
They don't need to unlock that early in the final game, but for the beta there needed to be four or more distinct buildings with tradeoffs unlocked early enough that testers were forced to think about which one was good for the planet they were building on before they went "ugh I'm just unlocking a zone and then filling the zone what was the point of that" and giving up on the concept. The point of having multiple slots in a zone is customising the zone to best suit the planet it's on and the other decisions already made and deciding which combo of options is the most useful. If there's no need to make that decision because you've got 3 slots and <4 options... yeah of course it seems pointless. And in the final game it might make more sense to push half of them an hour or two further into the game but that's different to a "give us your impressions and feedback on this new mechanic" exercise.
If you're saying it would have been difficult coming up with 4+ sample buildings per zone in time for the beta that would not have themselves generated weird complaints if they weren't perfectly balanced then yeah I'm obviously not going to argue with that, but I don't see how it could have gone worse.
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Plus it's annoying as hell! I ended up uninstalling it, because it made the game just worse. I'm sad that I paid for it
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I'm more saying: I don't think there actually are that many interesting buildings to add, given the Zones system. Most buildings made sense as adding +X Jobs, and with Zones doing that it means there's less for them to do. I'd love to be wring about this, maybe they'll have a bunch of brilliant ideas for 4.0.
But given their original design included Amenities being provided in their own Zone, I'm pessimistic that this economy redesign was modeled even just on a whiteboard that much before the plowed ahead. Aeminites coming from their own Zone and nowhere else is just so obviously flawed, I don't know how that idea lasted the first meeting, let alone the first week+ of the "beta". (But then again, I'm autistic and my pattern-recognition makes systems analysis and failure so clear, it's now a big part of my job, so maybe it wasn't that obvious a point to most, I dunno.)
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Discussing the housing stuff, I could see Housing basically act as 'total possible jobs before unemployment'. Basically, housing minus other jobs equal civilian jobs, which would give a hard number of civilians to manage (so you can e.g set the limit to X civilians and then prioritise them, if you need amenities or something).
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To elaborate on the couple issues I pointed about lower science, general resources, growth, factions etc:
I took the very same empire, on the very same settings and did went on the same building spread on both the actual game and the beta to compare. First thing one notices is science output.
180 new pops make +1.X science on a single lab.
2 old pops make +6.X per building.
You can see the difference in the pictures, beta barely outputs 200 science by year 30 and old system one can get comfortably over 300 and even brute-force a quite rare tech (arc furnace) by year 18.
Beta x0.75 unity/science settings
Non-beta x0.75 unity/science settings almost a decade earlier
Another thing you may notice is unity output. This empire was a parliamentary one, in the beta, the empire is struggling doing +31 unity even with a couple of administrative buildings. Non beta was over +100 just by factions. You can also see how on beta there were just over 400 pops (!) in factions, taking opposite ethics and declining in numbers.
Also, this issue tanks council legitimacy by default, and when faction forms one drags a malus to agenda speed forever.
Almost y30 and just a handful of pops are in factions despite starting parliamentary
This handful of pops going opposite ethics destroys the council for ever.
Job output and buildings/districts needs tweaking if the intent is to keep roughly the same economic behaviour before the beta. Economy is very unstable and as show the output is generally abysmal. Also there's another pain point you may want to look: When a district is built it opens the new jobs even if the job was restricted. This translates in having to open the economy tab every time one builds something and re-adjust every time.
I hope the feedback is intented as such and helps improve the beta.
Cheers!
I took the very same empire, on the very same settings and did went on the same building spread on both the actual game and the beta to compare. First thing one notices is science output.
180 new pops make +1.X science on a single lab.
2 old pops make +6.X per building.
You can see the difference in the pictures, beta barely outputs 200 science by year 30 and old system one can get comfortably over 300 and even brute-force a quite rare tech (arc furnace) by year 18.
Beta x0.75 unity/science settings
Non-beta x0.75 unity/science settings almost a decade earlier
Another thing you may notice is unity output. This empire was a parliamentary one, in the beta, the empire is struggling doing +31 unity even with a couple of administrative buildings. Non beta was over +100 just by factions. You can also see how on beta there were just over 400 pops (!) in factions, taking opposite ethics and declining in numbers.
Also, this issue tanks council legitimacy by default, and when faction forms one drags a malus to agenda speed forever.
Almost y30 and just a handful of pops are in factions despite starting parliamentary
This handful of pops going opposite ethics destroys the council for ever.
Job output and buildings/districts needs tweaking if the intent is to keep roughly the same economic behaviour before the beta. Economy is very unstable and as show the output is generally abysmal. Also there's another pain point you may want to look: When a district is built it opens the new jobs even if the job was restricted. This translates in having to open the economy tab every time one builds something and re-adjust every time.
I hope the feedback is intented as such and helps improve the beta.
Cheers!
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I mean, as long have battleships and titans by the time the crisis invades the science output works as intended
I wouldn't worry too much about the first few decades, in the old system your growth starts strong and then slows down the more you progress, in the new system your growth starts slow but speeds up the more worlds you develop and fill to the brim
Also stuff like automatization is yet to be implemented
I wouldn't worry too much about the first few decades, in the old system your growth starts strong and then slows down the more you progress, in the new system your growth starts slow but speeds up the more worlds you develop and fill to the brim
Also stuff like automatization is yet to be implemented
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