Todays Livestream Had Some Improvements

[NorseGod]

My complaint about this one is that it would make the city and rural districts to similar and thus ruin the differences between them and thus making planets rather uninteresting as a result. Somehow, I don't think this is your problem with city districts.

And my complaint is that by lumping the Urban Districts together, it's removed player choice and options, thus making planets rather tedious and uninteresting as a result. I kinda of feel like once the novelty of the new system wears off, you'll see it's flaws more clearly.

A better analogy would be to combine the rural districts into one and make the city districts 3. But then you run into the question about planets with really good soil for farming or lots of minerals. Or whatever. Still ignoring that, I'd argue that we have a lot more resources that are made in cities than in rural districts so it might even make a kind of sense. It would certainly be interesting to test.

I didn't think I failed to understand the problem, until now.

I thought that the complaint was that the change reduced a level of control that you regularly use. And that makes the game harder to play and enjoy. As I understand it, those of us who don't mind or even enjoy the games either don't use that level of control, or don't use it often. So, its loss is of minimal concern.

I said it in a different post but, I feel like this update is intended to make the average player--role play or just sub-optimal--have as little disruption of their normal play style as possible while giving the devs more tools to play with.

And I don't understand how pushing 3 types of Districts together into 1 button actually achieves those goals. The same way that I prefer to be able to build energy or mineral districts one by one, I want to do the same thing to City, Forge, or Unity districts.

I have no problem with them limiting the amount of custom districts to 2, on top of City Districts, meaning you end up with the exact same amount in total. I'm fine with them splitting up Building Slots and putting them with each of those choices as well. I just don't understand what's been added to my choices or gameplay by forcing me to build 2-3 districts all at once, instead.

Someone told me what this "adds" is forcing you to use buildings to fine tune the number of jobs. But they could already do that, it was one of my choices. Now I have fewer choices, meaning that the choice of building becomes more of a solution, than a choice.

 

[Minervo]

I still hate the new UI. Very confusing to me. The old UI could do everything in the same "tab" (resettle, decisions, building,...) and this new one is all over the place. Also you need to click the construction tab to show what the planet is building. If the point was to reduce micromanagement, i think this new UI failed terribly. At least, we can see the population grow now

 

[Critical Ethics]

The +200 jobs buildings might be ok to keep if they're specifically restricted to the government zone? That prevents you from building one of each district to abuse zone building slots for them.

I'd be fine with that, especially if they were planet unique, but from the looks of the stream they are neither.

 

[Critical Ethics]

And my complaint is that by lumping the Urban Districts together, it's removed player choice and options, thus making planets rather tedious and uninteresting as a result. I kinda of feel like once the novelty of the new system wears off, you'll see it's flaws more clearly.


And I don't understand how pushing 3 types of Districts together into 1 button actually achieves those goals. The same way that I prefer to be able to build energy or mineral districts one by one, I want to do the same thing to City, Forge, or Unity districts.

I have no problem with them limiting the amount of custom districts to 2, on top of City Districts, meaning you end up with the exact same amount in total. I'm fine with them splitting up Building Slots and putting them with each of those choices as well. I just don't understand what's been added to my choices or gameplay by forcing me to build 2-3 districts all at once, instead.

Someone told me what this "adds" is forcing you to use buildings to fine tune the number of jobs. But they could already do that, it was one of my choices. Now I have fewer choices, meaning that the choice of building becomes more of a solution, than a choice.

Sometimes fewer choices leads to a more engaging game. I'll turn your rural district example back on you: if more choice is always better why have planetary features at all? Why not just allow any planet to build as many farm or mineral or energy districts as the player likes? If I get a planet with one mineral district I have fewer choices on that planet. That's bad, right?

 

[NorseGod]

Sometimes fewer choices leads to a more engaging game. I'll turn your rural district example back on you: if more choice is always better why have planetary features at all? Why not just allow any planet to build as many farm or mineral or energy districts as the player likes? If I get a planet with one mineral district I have fewer choices on that planet. That's bad, right?

You're deliberately misquoting me and engaging in a strawman. I never said that "more choice is always better" my words were that while limiting choice can often result in more strategy and more interesting choices, it wasn't a universal truth, and in this case I feel like these limitations are leading to less-interesting choices.

Your argument was that limiting the fine tuning of the economy to only buildings was a feature, and that districts are better being mixed. But it creates a situation where there is generally only one optimal choice in front of you. And then as techs unlock, that choice adjusts so you end up desptrying and rebuilding in order to get to a different optimal. It starts off with +X Jobs, and then moves to 1,x output buildings. This leads to a lot more fiddling with planets than the previous system. In that case, you had to go back and create new buildings over and over. And now it's been replaced with replacing buildings with new ones, over and over.

Which makes it kind of ironic seeing you now complain about the +X Buildings giving "so many" Jobs in this thread. Compared to 10 City Districts giving 1000 Jobs, +200 for a Building isn't that much. It's actually more like the amount that's needed to fine-tune the economy at large scales. So privately you argued that these buildings were neccessary, but in the open you're arguing that they give way too many jobs.

And you have the nerve to misrepresent what I said, after I left that conversation and asked you not to discuss this with me further?

Wow.

 

[Newbee53]

And I don't understand how pushing 3 types of Districts together into 1 button actually achieves those goals. The same way that I prefer to be able to build energy or mineral districts one by one, I want to do the same thing to City, Forge, or Unity districts.

I have no problem with them limiting the amount of custom districts to 2, on top of City Districts, meaning you end up with the exact same amount in total. I'm fine with them splitting up Building Slots and putting them with each of those choices as well. I just don't understand what's been added to my choices or gameplay by forcing me to build 2-3 districts all at once, instead.

Someone told me what this "adds" is forcing you to use buildings to fine tune the number of jobs. But they could already do that, it was one of my choices. Now I have fewer choices, meaning that the choice of building becomes more of a solution, than a choice.

I don't know that it adds anything more than a tool to be used.

But it doesn't seem--to me--to be taking anything away either. It's a rare situation--if it ever happens--that I'd find getting both types of jobs a bad thing. While it could be annoying if all your CG production is on the same planet as research or unity. I don't know why you'd build your empire that way. And at least the last Beta Build was well balanced in that scenario, so you'd still get positive CG.

And it's quite a bit more fun to build planets in the beta. Maybe because each planet is a little different with different resources and jobs. or maybe it's because it's easier to think about what the planet looks like when the part of the UI right there in the middle changes from planet to planet. Don't know, but it works quite well. That's something that the old system never really did, and while there are still huge things to improve it does this well enough right now.

But of course, all that is a personal thing. And I don't know what goals you think aren't meet, but the closest I can get from my post you quoted I seem to have argued they meet that. It's pretty similar to 3.14 if you are not playing 'optimum' builds. and it's a little bit more fun.

and in this case I feel like these limitations are leading to less-interesting choices.

I do understand that the ability to grow a single production on that planet's products has been reduced. But I don't know that it takes away a real choice. At least the way I play, the difference is quite small and has not resulting in me feeling limited or like some path has been taken away. And I don't find 'do I build a city district and get X&Y resources' to be significantly more or less interesting than 'do I build X district or Y district.' Maybe there are fewer over all choices, but I the question of 'what zone/specialization will dominate this planet's development for the coming years' is more interesting than 'do I build x or y district.' So, I think there are more interesting choices.

 

[Critical Ethics]

You're deliberately misquoting me and engaging in a strawman.

I was replying to you bringing up choice limitations here:

And my complaint is that by lumping the Urban Districts together, it's removed player choice and options, thus making planets rather tedious and uninteresting as a result...Now I have fewer choices, meaning that the choice of building becomes more of a solution, than a choice.

And your previous public post where you brought up your rural comparison. I was deliberately not referencing our previous private conversation.

Rural districts have per-planet limitations on how many you can build, and are further limited by total planet size. Seperated research, unity, cg, and alloy districts would only be limited by planet size. Rural districts only being limited by planet size would make for a less fun game. I find T2+ resource districts only being limited by planet size boring, especially since the first three just feed into big empire buckets anyway.

So privately you argued that these buildings were neccessary, but in the open you're arguing that they give way too many jobs.

What? I've been extremely consistent complaining about the spammable +200 buildings. It's the planet unique output and upkeep and automation modifier buildings and such that are worth keeping, and I'd also like a per-district job increaser. That you can spam the +200 buildings and then replace them later is part of why they suck, another part being that they teach you to play they game wrong, and a third being that they distort the district economy. If you misunderstood or I was unclear what buildings I was referring to then fair enough.

E: also I took it to PMs in the first place to avoid derailing the thread so you coming right back to a "talk about the livestream" thread to drop yet another "Why are they doing joined districts???" iron bar on the track was pretty, as you phrase it, "Wow".

 

[NorseGod]

While it could be annoying if all your CG production is on the same planet as research or unity. I don't know why you'd build your empire that way.

Because they've incentivized putting your CGs production on the same planet as research, due to Trade costs.

I do understand that the ability to grow a single production on that planet's products has been reduced. But I don't know that it takes away a real choice. At least the way I play, the difference is quite small and has not resulting in me feeling limited or like some path has been taken away.

And the way I play, it has been a problem at times, while delivering no benefit to players as a result. I find that in order to "get around" the problem of district specializations aka Zones, I'm making more mono-planets than I did before, instead of less.

 

[Thiend]

You're deliberately misquoting me and engaging in a strawman. I never said that "more choice is always better" my words were that while limiting choice can often result in more strategy and more interesting choices, it wasn't a universal truth, and in this case I feel like these limitations are leading to less-interesting choices.

Your argument was that limiting the fine tuning of the economy to only buildings was a feature, and that districts are better being mixed. But it creates a situation where there is generally only one optimal choice in front of you. And then as techs unlock, that choice adjusts so you end up desptrying and rebuilding in order to get to a different optimal. It starts off with +X Jobs, and then moves to 1,x output buildings. This leads to a lot more fiddling with planets than the previous system. In that case, you had to go back and create new buildings over and over. And now it's been replaced with replacing buildings with new ones, over and over.

Which makes it kind of ironic seeing you now complain about the +X Buildings giving "so many" Jobs in this thread. Compared to 10 City Districts giving 1000 Jobs, +200 for a Building isn't that much. It's actually more like the amount that's needed to fine-tune the economy at large scales. So privately you argued that these buildings were neccessary, but in the open you're arguing that they give way too many jobs.

And you have the nerve to misrepresent what I said, after I left that conversation and asked you not to discuss this with me further?

Wow.

It is perhaps worth noting that at no point have the devs said "the intention is to remove player control." To be clear, this is not a rebuttal of anything you've said, but more a point of clarification I think this topic needs.

At no point have the devs indicated that this is a feature of the system, rather than a bug. In fact, as they have told us their intentions for it and that wasn't listed, it can be assumed that it is specifically a bug.

The intention of Zones is to be a framework for effectively district customization, and they also decouple building slots from a flat number and make the amount scale per resource you are producing so that adding more resources does not reduce the effective number of slots available per resource in order to make mixed output planets viable.

Currently, I would say that the customization part is simply not working, and mixed output planets remain mostly nonviable - they are still worse output per job, just by less, so from an optimization perspective they're still not an option at all. Meanwhile, the poor control over customization renders them frustrating to try to use. For all that it isn't good in the final beta version, and I have strong reservations about it being good in 4.0 either (although the fix to storms gave me a morale boost), the parts that are bad - while admittedly a significant percentage of the whole - are also directly contrary to the listed goals given by the devs. Given better control, it's possible that designation bonus vs trade penalty would be an effective choice-based tradeoff to allow either centralization or mixed outputs.

Barring some sort of conspiracy to literally just lie to us about their goals, they will want to fix these problems. That isn’t actually in question unless they have undisclosed goals that are also antithetical to the ones they did disclose.

 

[Xaelyn]

Yeah, so I thought about how they've changed City/Urban Districts and I think my thoughts on it can be summarized as this:

If this is actually "improving" the game by adding limitations and less choices, why don't we do the same thing for the 3 basic resource districts as well? Just drop it down to 2 sets of Districts, and then use "specializations" for the rest:

View attachment 1280452

To be clear, I don't like this idea at all. But maybe for the folks that don't seem to understand why some of us don't like the move to Zones/Specializations, this will illustrate why we don't like it at all.

This is still far too flexible, reduce it to a single district so the player needs to make more meaningful choices about what to use their two zones on instead of being given free rural jobs with no thought or opportunity cost.

Actually that would still be too flexible, better to force the single district to contain one urban and one rural district, in order to maximize the amount of unwanted jobs created every time you expand the district.

 

[GN_Fighter]

Sometimes fewer choices leads to a more engaging game. I'll turn your rural district example back on you: if more choice is always better why have planetary features at all? Why not just allow any planet to build as many farm or mineral or energy districts as the player likes? If I get a planet with one mineral district I have fewer choices on that planet. That's bad, right?

you haven't turned around the argument but once more proven that you either are intellectually dishonest just for argument's sakes or you don't understand nuances.

Your example is the exact opposite of fewer choices. If i can just built as much districts of one type i can on a planet, then i don't need to really make a choice since specialisation of a planet is always the best course of action due to modifieres. Your Counter-example however makes it so that i have a limited ammount of rescources on a planet, forcing me to make a choice of not fully utilizing the plant or what else i want to produce on that planet and if the mining-planet-spec is still the best one i can make.

In other word's your example leads in reality to more choices a player have to/can make rather than less due to players having to plan around a rescource limitation.

And you know what wouldn't be needed if they decoupled the districts again? the +200 Job-Buildings you so hate.

 

[Kataclyszm]

I still hate the new UI. Very confusing to me. The old UI could do everything in the same "tab" (resettle, decisions, building,...) and this new one is all over the place. Also you need to click the construction tab to show what the planet is building. If the point was to reduce micromanagement, i think this new UI failed terribly. At least, we can see the population grow now

Yeah, supposedly they're 'still doing a final UI usability pass' and like... you've done like 10 of those already.

 

[-Marauder-]

It is perhaps worth noting that at no point have the devs said "the intention is to remove player control." To be clear, this is not a rebuttal of anything you've said, but more a point of clarification I think this topic needs.

At no point have the devs indicated that this is a feature of the system, rather than a bug. In fact, as they have told us their intentions for it and that wasn't listed, it can be assumed that it is specifically a bug.

It might not be a feature, but a change they don't see as problematic. Because unless they change it and acknowledge this to be unintentional, it would imply it is or they see it as net positive.

 

[Critical Ethics]

you haven't turned around the argument but once more proven that you either are intellectually dishonest just for argument's sakes or you don't understand nuances.

Your example is the exact opposite of fewer choices. If i can just built as much districts of one type i can on a planet, then i don't need to really make a choice since specialisation of a planet is always the best course of action due to modifieres. Your Counter-example however makes it so that i have a limited ammount of rescources on a planet, forcing me to make a choice of not fully utilizing the plant or what else i want to produce on that planet and if the mining-planet-spec is still the best one i can make.

In other word's your example leads in reality to more choices a player have to/can make rather than less due to players having to plan around a rescource limitation.

I'm having a little trouble following you here. In 3.14 and 3.99 I can end up with a planet with only one mineral district. In theory that means I have "less choices" around what I can do with that planet. But, as you correctly stated, not having the "choice" to place an arbitrary amount of mining districts enhances, rather than detracts from, the game. Where are we not seeing eye to eye?

And you know what wouldn't be needed if they decoupled the districts again? the +200 Job-Buildings you so hate.

They don't need them at all, and they absolutely should not have them as spammable zone districts. Planet unique capital buildings? Sure, no problems here. But as spammable zone buildings they aren't just unneeded for connected districts, they're completely incompatible with them.

 

[GN_Fighter]

I'm having a little trouble following you here. In 3.14 and 3.99 I can end up with a planet with only one mineral district. In theory that means I have "less choices" around what I can do with that planet. But, as you correctly stated, not having the "choice" to place an arbitrary amount of mining districts enhances, rather than detracts from, the game. Where are we not seeing eye to eye?

They don't need them at all, and they absolutely should not have them as spammable zone districts. Planet unique capital buildings? Sure, no problems here. But as spammable zone buildings they aren't just unneeded for connected districts, they're completely incompatible with them.

*sigh* You really make it hard to see you arguing in good faith.

Your argument right now evolves arround that you can't use the planet as a mining-planet due to it having only one mineral-district.. which is, quite frankly an extreme case but let run with it. Your argument is that you have less choice because you have one less outcome you can choose.

My argument is that its not because the choice i ( have to) make remains the same.. what do i want to do with the planet? If the Planet has no mining-district but more energy-district's than size than i am going to make it simply an energy-planet or a factory-planet the amount of choices and the choice i made remained the same.. i just had one less outcome to choose from.

Where the real value of limiting deposit's lies is not this extreme-case you put before me but in the simple fact that deposits are limited and disconnected from the planet-size in the first place. this in turn leads to situations where i can have built all the mining-districts the planet can support but still potential left untapped which then leads to me having to decide if i leave it untapped or what else i do with it, adding another choice to the initial one. which in turn CAN lead to the question if the mining-specialisation of the planet is still the best choice i can make or if another is better. Which in turn leads me to having MORE choices.


From all your argumentation you seem to labour under the assumption that "limiting outcome" alway equals "limiting choices to make". And you are so focued on the outcome that you ignore the process on how we make choices in the first place. which is here the ne zone-problem comes in and why "spammable" building's/district's are a must.

Stellaris at its core is still an RNG-game with diverse play-styles with different situation's and/or empires having different requirements. the ability to fine-tune our economy to those requirements has to be at the core of the game. If we can't we wont be able to meet the challanges the game gives us. A game where you can expand a lot at the beginning has a different early rescource-requirement to a game where you are boxed in at the beginning.. be it through space-monsters or other empires.


But hey.. lets make a thought-game for a moment. Lets go with your approach to argue with an extreme about all or nothing and take up Xaelyns idea of putting ALL Zones together after all.. its the same idea right? put all rescource-production into one district.. so why make a distinction between basic rescources and advanced rescources? surely if you don't need to fine-tune the advanced resources then why should you need to fine-tune basic-rescources.

 

[NorseGod]

And you know what wouldn't be needed if they decoupled the districts again? the +200 Job-Buildings you so hate.

Exactly! The "problem" of buildings creating Jobs like this fixes the emergent problem of a lack of finer control over production.

You can't claim to love a new system and then despise one of the key ways that people can have a functional economy in that system. Plus there isn't really a lot of player choice, when you have only one option to keep your economy floating. That's my biggest criticism, this new system feels much more like I have to min-max things than before.

 

[Newbee53]

Because they've incentivized putting your CGs production on the same planet as research, due to Trade costs.

Sure, but not all your cg production will be on such planets. after all, you have sources of CG consumption that aren't researchers or unity production. Plus, just because you are mixing output doesn't mean you want to always minimize trade costs. Just depends on your situations. Besides, even if you are, there is little difference between +12 cg, and +30. Except the second one is kind of wasteful.

And the way I play, it has been a problem at times, while delivering no benefit to players as a result. I find that in order to "get around" the problem of district specializations aka Zones, I'm making more mono-planets than I did before, instead of less.

Well, I don't think the goal is to encourage everyone to build less mono-planets. just to make it viable to build less mono-planets for those people who want the ability to. Which I think has been successful outside of people who feel the need to optimize everything.

Currently, I would say that the customization part is simply not working, and mixed output planets remain mostly nonviable - they are still worse output per job, just by less, so from an optimization perspective they're still not an option at all.

Do we think the goal is to make optimization of planet building is actually something they are focused on fixing? Cause I'm pretty sure they are focused on making things better for people who don't optimize things. At least that seems to be the group of players who either think it's an improvement or don't see it as a downgrade. Plus, most of the updates made in the beta or spotted--by me--in the stream fall under that line.

 

[GN_Fighter]

Well, I don't think the goal is to encourage everyone to build less mono-planets. just to make it viable to build less mono-planets for those people who want the ability to. Which I think has been successful outside of people who feel the need to optimize everything.

Do we think the goal is to make optimization of planet building is actually something they are focused on fixing? Cause I'm pretty sure they are focused on making things better for people who don't optimize things. At least that seems to be the group of players who either think it's an improvement or don't see it as a downgrade. Plus, most of the updates made in the beta or spotted--by me--in the stream fall under that line.

I am not sure how you can come to that conclusion tbh. Since, in a way, they have just taken away from "optimizing".

Before the rework you could, due to the combination of Districts and Buildings produce almost everything on a planet with only size and deposits being a factor.. factors that still exist.

After the Update and without taking beta-feedback into consideration you would have less different rescources you could have produced on a planet ( which they adressed with "spammable buildings" ) and an economy-crash each time you upgrade your housing-zone ( which they adressed by downscaling to two special-zones and 100 jobs per zone meaning its a 2:2 worker/specialist-conversion it used to be in the old system ). Apart from it they slapped a "trade"-tax on good's you don't produce locally.

so with mixed planets virtually getting nothing new but slapping a trade-tax on specialized planets i would like to question how you come to the conclusion that they wanted to improve on non-specialisation rather than reduce specialization?

but even in that case they failed due to how they changed the buildings.. i find myself in the same boat as Norse here.. with specializing my planets even more since they didn't really take away any reasoning on why we specialized them in the first place but due to the boosting-buildings combined with the building-type-limitations added even more reason to specialize. which in turn is where the band-aid-solution of spamable buildings shifts the balance even more to specializing.

are you sure you are not just blinded by the change how building-slots are unlocked and how we essentially get most/all of them from the beginning while being in the honey-moon-phase of a new update?

 

[Kataclyszm]

i would like to question how you come to the conclusion that they wanted to improve on non-specialisation rather than reduce specialization?

The devs explicitly said they want to do that.

Now, whether or not the current model even remotely comes close to that goal is something else.

 

[GN_Fighter]

The devs explicitly said they want to do that.

Now, whether or not the current model even remotely comes close to that goal is something else.

Let me argue semantics for a bit. Have the Dev specifically said that they wanted to increase the viability of multi-production-planets without taking away from the mono-production-planets or just that they wanted to improve on multip-planets?

From what i have heard so far they only said the latter and as we have both concluded.. they not only failed with it.. they offset it by a margin due to the changes in both districts/zones and buildings.