first I'd like to thanks the devs for allowing us to participate in this open beta, I always like to engage in this kinda stuff.
Now that that's said, I'd like to point out a few UI flavor I'd like to see implemented for the planetary UI.
First is the planet summary :
when clicking on the name of the planetary zone, It would be nice to have the panel for the different zones to be shown, because as It stands I did not know about that panel until way later into my game because I thought by clicking on the city district menu I'd only get the menu for city districts and not both for the city districts and the planetary zones. Hence making the UI counter intuitive to me.
Then for population growth indicator. As of now, there doesn't seem to have one implemented into the beta just yet. I don't know if you have thought about it, but having a panel show up when pointing at the population icon to show a brief expected population growth overview and a more general overview in the population page would be nice.
because as we can see, right now, there is no way to determine our expected population growth over time so there is not way for me to determine if my population growth is too big for my economy or not.
then for the population overview page, I think It would be great if by right clicking on a population job, we'd get to the place where it is on the page, which would help reduce the amount of clicks and scrolls necessary to access to the job cap menu.
right click =>
gets to the menu where enforcers are.
for the rest of the menu since there hasn't been any real change to them I won't talk about them. Although I've seen that the automation menu has been changed, but since I don't use that feature and I'm not sure if this menu is to be tested yet since the economy is not finished yet I haven't talked about it.
now for the bugs, I have noticed that populations could sometimes alternate between energy and minerals jobs when my monthly balance isn't quite there yet, maybe you should look into how you calculate each day population jobs assignment to remove those back and forth on population job assignment.
Now that you got baited into reading this post, hear me out on the possible improvement to be made for the economy for planets/habitats/ecumenopolis/economy :
first for planets :
I think the planetary zones was a good idea, but it wasn't implemented well enough.
Instead of having a zone we can chose from, we build up industrial zones from the ground up.
For example, we build a city district, or a city frame that will be given a purpose between alloy, consumer goods, science, unity, amenities, trade.
once we have built enough of a given district type, we can then create a district zone which can build a building associated with the resource produced.
then, once we get farther into the game, we can increase the proficiency of those zones to accommodate more building and/or create larger zones with more city frames.
also, having productivity bonuses on the amount of such zones produced would be nice as it would encourage to increase planetary specialization over time and or try to have nice synergies with different zones to not stack the same zones over and over on the same planet.
then the ecumenopolis:
for the ecumenopolis perk should be changed to an increase in the amount of zones that a planet can hold by a given percentage (not flat) and remove the district limit for minerals at the cost of colatile motes, food district at the cost of rare cristals and energy at the cost of exotic gases. this is a great way to improve the flexibility of the build of your planet, while also allowing you to focus your economy on a given production while not making ecumenopolis perk too broken and easily adjustable for nerfs.
then the economy :
for the economy a slight rework in the way buildings are produced to also include energy would be a nice approach. because currently resources magically traverse the whole galaxy without worrying a tiny single bit about the logistics of transporting megatons of alloys or minerals.
that's why I thought that a simple way to somewhat create a simili of logistics would be to add an energy (and alloy?) cost to buildings.
that way we can represent the presence or not of the capacity to produce or not every resources necessary for a building on a given planet by its energy cost.
for example, we could give an energy cost reduction when building the first mineral extractor of a planet.
then another when building the first alloy factory.
same thing with ships, they should cost a fair amount of energy in order to gather all those resources, and in the same vein, we could have system-wide ship energy cost reduction when building a planetary ring and when building certain habitats, let me explain :
then for the habitats:
for habitats, I had two options in mind, small habitats that could be made on asteroid belts, which would have a very limited amount of city frames that could only be used for mineral extraction, bigger habitats in planets that can mine minerals, produce energy or unity/consumer goods/alloys/science etc. but not food unless we have the ecumenopolis perk unlocked at the cost of rare crystals.
however, habitats require a constant transport of stuff in order to operate correctly, hence they have a huge energy cost in order to link all the habitat together, and we want to link them together if we want to have access to specialised buildings that would increase the production, hence we can after some research create a slingshot, which would be an improvement to habitats that would significantly reduce their upkeep although linearly, meanwhile habitat energy cost per habitat linked would still increase faster so that we can't just link them all together, which would make them too broken compared to planets.
also slingshot would have the nice added effects of reducing ship energy build cost on a given system.
and that's it for my ideas on how the game economy could be reworked, although I haven't touched on voidborn perk or origin, which I don't know really how to balance and what perks to give to it.
Now that that's said, I'd like to point out a few UI flavor I'd like to see implemented for the planetary UI.
First is the planet summary :
when clicking on the name of the planetary zone, It would be nice to have the panel for the different zones to be shown, because as It stands I did not know about that panel until way later into my game because I thought by clicking on the city district menu I'd only get the menu for city districts and not both for the city districts and the planetary zones. Hence making the UI counter intuitive to me.
Then for population growth indicator. As of now, there doesn't seem to have one implemented into the beta just yet. I don't know if you have thought about it, but having a panel show up when pointing at the population icon to show a brief expected population growth overview and a more general overview in the population page would be nice.
because as we can see, right now, there is no way to determine our expected population growth over time so there is not way for me to determine if my population growth is too big for my economy or not.
then for the population overview page, I think It would be great if by right clicking on a population job, we'd get to the place where it is on the page, which would help reduce the amount of clicks and scrolls necessary to access to the job cap menu.
right click =>
gets to the menu where enforcers are.
for the rest of the menu since there hasn't been any real change to them I won't talk about them. Although I've seen that the automation menu has been changed, but since I don't use that feature and I'm not sure if this menu is to be tested yet since the economy is not finished yet I haven't talked about it.
now for the bugs, I have noticed that populations could sometimes alternate between energy and minerals jobs when my monthly balance isn't quite there yet, maybe you should look into how you calculate each day population jobs assignment to remove those back and forth on population job assignment.
Now that you got baited into reading this post, hear me out on the possible improvement to be made for the economy for planets/habitats/ecumenopolis/economy :
first for planets :
I think the planetary zones was a good idea, but it wasn't implemented well enough.
Instead of having a zone we can chose from, we build up industrial zones from the ground up.
For example, we build a city district, or a city frame that will be given a purpose between alloy, consumer goods, science, unity, amenities, trade.
once we have built enough of a given district type, we can then create a district zone which can build a building associated with the resource produced.
then, once we get farther into the game, we can increase the proficiency of those zones to accommodate more building and/or create larger zones with more city frames.
also, having productivity bonuses on the amount of such zones produced would be nice as it would encourage to increase planetary specialization over time and or try to have nice synergies with different zones to not stack the same zones over and over on the same planet.
then the ecumenopolis:
for the ecumenopolis perk should be changed to an increase in the amount of zones that a planet can hold by a given percentage (not flat) and remove the district limit for minerals at the cost of colatile motes, food district at the cost of rare cristals and energy at the cost of exotic gases. this is a great way to improve the flexibility of the build of your planet, while also allowing you to focus your economy on a given production while not making ecumenopolis perk too broken and easily adjustable for nerfs.
then the economy :
for the economy a slight rework in the way buildings are produced to also include energy would be a nice approach. because currently resources magically traverse the whole galaxy without worrying a tiny single bit about the logistics of transporting megatons of alloys or minerals.
that's why I thought that a simple way to somewhat create a simili of logistics would be to add an energy (and alloy?) cost to buildings.
that way we can represent the presence or not of the capacity to produce or not every resources necessary for a building on a given planet by its energy cost.
for example, we could give an energy cost reduction when building the first mineral extractor of a planet.
then another when building the first alloy factory.
same thing with ships, they should cost a fair amount of energy in order to gather all those resources, and in the same vein, we could have system-wide ship energy cost reduction when building a planetary ring and when building certain habitats, let me explain :
then for the habitats:
for habitats, I had two options in mind, small habitats that could be made on asteroid belts, which would have a very limited amount of city frames that could only be used for mineral extraction, bigger habitats in planets that can mine minerals, produce energy or unity/consumer goods/alloys/science etc. but not food unless we have the ecumenopolis perk unlocked at the cost of rare crystals.
however, habitats require a constant transport of stuff in order to operate correctly, hence they have a huge energy cost in order to link all the habitat together, and we want to link them together if we want to have access to specialised buildings that would increase the production, hence we can after some research create a slingshot, which would be an improvement to habitats that would significantly reduce their upkeep although linearly, meanwhile habitat energy cost per habitat linked would still increase faster so that we can't just link them all together, which would make them too broken compared to planets.
also slingshot would have the nice added effects of reducing ship energy build cost on a given system.
and that's it for my ideas on how the game economy could be reworked, although I haven't touched on voidborn perk or origin, which I don't know really how to balance and what perks to give to it.