*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.
*smiles beatifically* so we are in agreement that the game would be poorer if you could solve a mineral shortage by just slapping down a mineral district somewhere you arbitrarily decided was going to be your mineral planet. And that how much food or energy you want to build having constraints on a particular planet is a good thing. That the on-planet constraints imposed by planetary features bring something to the game, and do not prevent you from being "able to meet the challanges the game gives us."
But comparable, though very different, constraints on the construction of t2/t3 resource districts renders the game unplayable?
Why so?
Or is it just these constraints? Would you accept any form of constraint? Is there any scenario where you wanted to build a specific amount of CG jobs and it required more thought than slapping "New CG district" a specific number of times that you would accept?
If not, why not?
If so, what specifically about these constraints do you dislike? Because so far you have only described your displeasure in terms of being against the
concept of less simplistic problem solving.
If every planet came with a built in CG district limit, alloy district limit, research district limit, and unity district limit would you be more or less upset with that as a constraint? I think it would be silly, but for very specific reasons I can easily articulate in more detail than "I need to be able to adapt in the very specific way I am used to and I will not adapt to a new way of adapting".
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.
There are choices and there are meaningful choices.
Being low on CG so you build a CG plant isn't a meaningful "choice". It's a reaction. But it's the only "choice" you will acknowledge ass acceptable for an economy model. I want to make actual, impactful choices with lasting effects.
Choosing to load up the Science half of a city with Science output boosters (not the spam buildings, the other buildings) and the CG half with upkeep and pop reducers creates a much more science focused planet than
choosing to do the reverse.
Choosing to load up a Unity planet the other way around is not only a
choice in itself, which will impact every time I upgrade that planet, but if I later react to a need for more CG I now have an
interesting choice - do I boost unity and cg, science and cg, or both? Maybe I want the science more than the unity but the structure I
chose for these planets means that I need to
choose between the cg I want and a lot of science of the amount of cg I want and a little unity. Or maybe I will
choose to build one of both. If I'm a relatively small empire, maybe I'll
choose not to build any additional districts and replace my science cg planet's cg reducer with an output booster. These are
choices. Interesting
choices being tangibly impacted by previous
choices.
If you separate the city districts these
choices become a lot less interesting. If you can react by just building a CG district then the relative output totals you previously
chose between the two buildings don't actually matter - and the optimal "choice" will probably degenerate to just building the output reducers, which would make it a false "choice". There's no
choosing between cg and science vs cg and unity, just which planet do I build the CG district on.
"I have a planet with cg districts and science districts and I built a cg district but no science district and nobody stopped me" - where's the meaningful choices? Where's the game?
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.
By trivialising the solutions to these scenarios you trivialise the scenarios themselves. If you solve every scenario with a hammer every scenario just becomes a different colour of nail.
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.
For the same reason that I think every planet having a distinct alloy district limit based on planet features would be a silly way to implement alloy district limits. t2/t3 resources are manufactured by the player, so the constraints you need to work within being consequences of player
choices makes thematic sense. Your
choices for producing rural resources are constrained by the layout of the planet, and your
choices for producing manufactured resources are constrained by the combined city zone zone layouts [i[chosen[/i] by the player. Split city districts are just a couple of districts that happen to be on the same planet, but if they always advance together then you have a game setup where you, the player, manufacture your own constraints to abide by.
What a powerful choice to have.
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