Zones; what is good, what needs to be fixed before 4.0

[NorseGod]

An issue with these (the concept rather than the gui mockups I mean) is that there's no difference between, for example, science districts from choosing to make a science planet vs science districts from habitats and their orbital deposit mechanic. If you also restrict planetary science districts based on deposits then you remove a lot of the player's agency in directing their economy. If you only restrict on habitats then you turn what was a habitat plus into a habitat negative. If you restrict neither you've lost a lot of habitat flavour. You could, I suppose, have habitats grant an orbital research district that's restricted but better than the unrestricted planet ones but now you've got a whole extra district type in the mix and can you fill the rest of your habitat slots out with the basic research districts and how would they interact and how would their buildings interact and the more I think about that solution to the habitat problem the more problems I see.

Yeah, this is a potential conflict, and I don't have an exact answer for that at the moment. But the current Zone system is actually makinf it worse.

Because I have an Orbital Platform that doesn't come with Food Districts by default, but with Hydroponic Zones I can have it make about 4x as much Food as your average Agriculture Colony:

And then if you make a dedicated Tech-World, it's giving more Research Points than a Science Nexus:

And right now there's a bug where we're only getting jobs from 2/3 Zones if you duplicate them, so with that bug fixed it would be a Hydroponic Habitat with ~1650 Food, and a Tech-World with ~480-550 research points per type.

So by giving Orbital Habitats Research Districts as a default, they're actually making them much worse at being Tech-Producers, and by making Hydroponics a custmizable Zone, they make them much more abusable. Zones being based of City Districts are the proble,.

 

[ShaTiK]

An issue with these (the concept rather than the gui mockups I mean) is that there's no difference between, for example, science districts from choosing to make a science planet vs science districts from habitats and their orbital deposit mechanic. If you also restrict planetary science districts based on deposits then you remove a lot of the player's agency in directing their economy. If you only restrict on habitats then you turn what was a habitat plus into a habitat negative. If you restrict neither you've lost a lot of habitat flavour. You could, I suppose, have habitats grant an orbital research district that's restricted but better than the unrestricted planet ones but now you've got a whole extra district type in the mix and can you fill the rest of your habitat slots out with the basic research districts and how would they interact and how would their buildings interact and the more I think about that solution to the habitat problem the more problems I see.

Now look at an ecumenopolis - you need an entire set of distinct ecumenopolis zones for every resource. And every other special planet set.

Also this recreates the amenities zone problem.

I would argue that orbital habitats are, and were, pretty niche thing to increase available space when you are limited by planets, given their base maluses to habitability and very limited usage. If we want to give orbital science a boost - I'm fine with that, make their zones better/more efficient to encourage players to actually build them.

Also, I think first and foremost we need to have solid basics with regular planets, they are bread and butter of every game and every empire type. Every other type - orbitals, ecu, rings, gaias, relic, tomb etc should be considered after we have established firm and working core. If we want to immediately come up with a system keeping in mind every type of current planet, we would never get anywhere. We need a system that can be made to work with every planet type.

My personal proposal - 6 fixed districts for every planet (governance, housing, army, research, industry, urban) plus 3 base generation ones. Every planet can have their own variations on districts and zones. Amenities issue is solved by having dedicated housing district that would have accosiated jobs

 

[NorseGod]

I would argue that orbital habitats are, and were, pretty niche thing to increase available space when you are limited by planets, given their base maluses to habitability and very limited usage. If we want to give orbital science a boost - I'm fine with that, make their zones better/more efficient to encourage players to actually build them.

Also, I think first and foremost we need to have solid basics with regular planets, they are bread and butter of every game and every empire type. Every other type - orbitals, ecu, rings, gaias, relic, tomb etc should be considered after we have established firm and working core. If we want to immediately come up with a system keeping in mind every type of current planet, we would never get anywhere. We need a system that can be made to work with every planet type.

My personal proposal - 6 fixed districts for every planet (governance, housing, army, research, industry, urban) plus 3 base generation ones. Every planet can have their own variations on districts and zones. Amenities issue is solved by having dedicated housing district that would have accosiated jobs

That's pretty close to my proposal. The difference is I think having 9+ sets of districts is a lot of clutter for the UI, and you likely aren't going to be building all those districts on each planet. Plus, that doesn't leave any room for unique districts, unless they just hard code them to replace a given district.

If instead, you had 3+ choosable "Zones", each with their own set of districts, you get most of what you're looking for. Remember that one of those Zones could be an "Urban Zone" that provides +60 of three different job types, or an Industrial Zone that gives +90 of CG and Alloy jobs.

The benefit of doing it this way is it allows the Devs to create planet-unique and tech-unique sets of zones/districts that can be worked into unique planets, DLCs, etc. I'm not sure how they'd be able to do that with your system.

 

[tappi]

My personal proposal - 6 fixed districts for every planet (governance, housing, army, research, industry, urban) plus 3 base generation ones. Every planet can have their own variations on districts and zones. Amenities issue is solved by having dedicated housing district that would have accosiated jobs

The amount of available districts per planet aside, it would still be a better idea to have the districts be flexible slots, not fixed. It allows anyone to add new districts to the game, be it devs in later DLC or modders, without having to customize the UI every time it happens.

 

[Critical Ethics]

Yeah, this is a potential conflict, and I don't have an exact answer for that at the moment. But the current Zone system is actually makinf it worse.

Because I have an Orbital Platform that doesn't come with Food Districts by default, but with Hydroponic Zones I can have it make about 4x as much Food as your average Agriculture Colony:

View attachment 1272535

And then if you make a dedicated Tech-World, it's giving more Research Points than a Science Nexus:

View attachment 1272536

And right now there's a bug where we're only getting jobs from 2/3 Zones if you duplicate them, so with that bug fixed it would be a Hydroponic Habitat with ~1650 Food, and a Tech-World with ~480-550 research points per type.

So by giving Orbital Habitats Research Districts as a default, they're actually making them much worse at being Tech-Producers, and by making Hydroponics a custmizable Zone, they make them much more abusable. Zones being based of City Districts are the proble,.

The habitat things is exactly what I'm saying is good.

Almost all habitats are going to have to import their food because producing it locally requires a significant infrastructure investment, however you can also choose to build an orbital garden that can outproduce a planet. You need to work with a planet for food, but a habitat you can build from scratch devoted to maximum sun to food conversion.

A science zone is a big investment for a land-based empire. Deciding a planet is going to be at least 1/3rd Science is a big deal with large opportunity costs - but odds are you're going to drop a CG plant on their too for a significant upkeep reduction. Habitats can just drop a few scientists wherever, whenever, but will probably not be producing their CG locally.

This leads to very different flavours. Habitats have a much higher average logistics costs, but can support as much science as they have CG production. They are the "I just want to build a few scientists" scenario, but running them is expensive, and risky, because all their food is coming from somewhere else - somewhere you might lose in the wrong combat.

The old system did this with buildings and designations (and the new logistics system makes it even more distinct), and zones do it better and more obviously. Switching to an entirely district based model with a very permissive choice of districts kills it entirely.

e: that said, I really do not like duplicate zones giving a full set of buildings. It cuts a lot of design space off at the knees.

e2: also I caught you before your edit. Your original three block planets were not exactly doing well on amenities.

 

[ShaTiK]

That's pretty close to my proposal. The difference is I think having 9+ sets of districts is a lot of clutter for the UI, and you likely aren't going to be building all those districts on each planet. Plus, that doesn't leave any room for unique districts, unless they just hard code them to replace a given district.

If instead, you had 3+ choosable "Zones", each with their own set of districts, you get most of what you're looking for. Remember that one of those Zones could be an "Urban Zone" that provides +60 of three different job types, or an Industrial Zone that gives +90 of CG and Alloy jobs.

The benefit of doing it this way is it allows the Devs to create planet-unique and tech-unique sets of zones/districts that can be worked into unique planets, DLCs, etc. I'm not sure how they'd be able to do that with your system.

UI clutter from 9 districts or from +3 zones each with their own set of districts is pretty similar. Not ideal in both cases but then making good UI for complex systems is an art form in itself, and sometimes making a good mechanical system means making UI not easy to navigate. To which I say - so what, this is 4X grand strategy, not a hero shooter for causal gamer, a certain level of difficulty when it comes to UI is par for the course.

As for unique districts for base planets - don't think there is a need for them. And special planets already have their base generation districts swapped for something else, 1 to 1, so only the bottom raw would be changed. Everything unique would be done with zones that would modify base districts. And this would make the change quite quick - swap zones and then swap buildings (or remove buildings first).

Granted, there would be some rebalancing and changed for zones for special planets, but the same could be said for current beta mechanic as well.

My overall idea is that these 6 districts could be fixed because they represent the entirety of a player want from a planet and what 'realistically' is located there, so there is no need for more. All the changes are done with zones and buildings linked to zones.

As for the argument 'what is I don't need this particular district on this planet' - this is already the case with fully urban planets and base resource generation. Or when you dedicate a planet to a specific base resource. I would agree that my idea might be a bit too broad, but also gives the most choice while not burying player with choice between dozen of different districts. And at least 2 of them are about planet maintenance, you don't choose whether to build them or not, you choose levels, zones and buildings

 

[NorseGod]

As for unique districts for base planets - don't think there is a need for them. And special planets already have their base generation districts swapped for something else, 1 to 1, so only the bottom raw would be changed. Everything unique would be done with zones that would modify base districts. And this would make the change quite quick - swap zones and then swap buildings (or remove buildings first).

I'm pretty sure Eladrin has indicated that is not the case. The need to have customization coming from new Zones.

 

[Newbee53]

I was going to post this elsewhere, but then I remembered the title to this thread.

Last time I checked this thread, it was only 9 pages. So, I'm a bit behind on the discussion. But I'd like to put this out in the wild, just to remind people that there are many of us out here that are quite happy about zones.

Things Zones do good, and that add to my enjoyment of the game.

1. They limit buildings. I never liked being able to build literally everything on every planet--even if it's only in theory--and by locking buildings to zones this is no longer possible.
2. They provide planetary customization. Being able to choose up to three different products on each planet to work with--or more with the more general zones--means that you will not be able to build up a factory world with tones of industry districts, and then just decide to had a decent about of research 'just because.'
3. Changes to the Zones--weather adding new ones, changing ones, or building districts--feels like a larger endeavor making such changes more impactful. yes upgrading a city causes a lot of jobs to show up. but between civilians and some planning, this isn't a huge effect. and really, building a whole city should make impacts after all.
4. Specialized zones--like the already reveled betharian zone--make planets more interesting because you now have the ability to directly alter how your 'normal' planets work. While also giving you the ability to not do so, if that is better for you.
5. It feels more like 'building up planets' rather than 'building up a city' like more building focused systems. Both the old 3.14 system and the many suggested replacements make it seem more like you are building single cities. Mainly because the new zones fill more like they are regions rather than individual structures. that urban zones are tied to the number of cities you have definitely help a lot here.
6. Buildings are more distinct from districts and zones. This is an interesting one. Now, buildings give a lot less jobs and come packaged with a big opportunity cost. Even though some buildings have the ability to be duplicated, most of the time you will not want this. Instead, you will want to use the ones modifying and upgrading zones. And that makes them a lot more interesting in my opinion.
7. All of the above make buildings less important while districts and zones are more important. this feels a lot better, as it remains kind of weird that planets in 3.14 are so dominated by buildings in comparison to districts. This system feels more realistic, and makes the planets feel bigger.

Some acknowledgements: Zones aren't going to be liked by everyone, subjective things are subjective and none of what I've pointed out can't be done in other ways. But they are things I like about the zones system. Especially the more I play with them.

Some improvements to the 'you get a tone of jobs when you build a city' thing would be nice on the whole. But I'd be quite disappointed if the points above are hurt by any such changes.

I'd like a 'discourage job' button to go with the 'promote job' button we have now. If for no other reason in that I'd use it even though I don't mind the glut of jobs. I've seen others that weren't horrible for the same fix, but don't know how good-bad they are in finality.

I think the worst choice would be to go back to a system that allows buildings to dominate the player's interactions with planets or one that removes the opportunity costs of the more limited building spaces.

I do think there is a way to improve the problems people have with the system, I just think most of the suggestions work out to 'make buildings the most important thing' or remove the opportunity costs which I think is a major design goal.

I don't know the solution. But I hope it's not to strip the things I like from the system.

 

[NorseGod]

The habitat things is exactly what I'm saying is good.

Almost all habitats are going to have to import their food because producing it locally requires a significant infrastructure investment, however you can also choose to build an orbital garden that can outproduce a planet. You need to work with a planet for food, but a habitat you can build from scratch devoted to maximum sun to food conversion.

A science zone is a big investment for a land-based empire. Deciding a planet is going to be at least 1/3rd Science is a big deal with large opportunity costs - but odds are you're going to drop a CG plant on their too for a significant upkeep reduction. Habitats can just drop a few scientists wherever, whenever, but will probably not be producing their CG locally.

This leads to very different flavours. Habitats have a much higher average logistics costs, but can support as much science as they have CG production. They are the "I just want to build a few scientists" scenario, but running them is expensive, and risky, because all their food is coming from somewhere else - somewhere you might lose in the wrong combat.

The old system did this with buildings and designations (and the new logistics system makes it even more distinct), and zones do it better and more obviously. Switching to an entirely district based model with a very permissive choice of districts kills it entirely.

e: that said, I really do not like duplicate zones giving a full set of buildings. It cuts a lot of design space off at the knees.

e2: also I caught you before your edit. Your original three block planets were not exactly doing well on amenities.

I'm also trying to consider it from an efficiency standpoint. As it is right now, with the City-Zones system, it makes a lot more sense to fill a world with City-Districts, as those Zones then get the maximum amount of jobs per zone, to justify the cost of the buildings. And then for Rural colonies, you focus on the base resource zones and districts, and leave a single amenities or urban zone on there, to do the bare minimum for the needs of the planet. A Forge World is most efficient with all City Districts, a Mining Planet is all Metal districts. You certainly can make mixed worlds, but it's sort of a trap in that as the game processes it makes more sense to scrap one of focus on the other.

City District * Zones = Jobs
and
Jobs * Buildings = Output
Make it that super-focussed words are still the most efficient. The apparent "problem" in 3.XX was worlds filled with the same building over and over. And now the "Fix" making it so I spam the same Districts and Zones over and over. It's the same issue, just a different element. But If I'm gonna spend the minerals to build and energy to run an Alloy Furnace, why not have that used to support 6500 jobs on one Forge World, instead of building multiples of them on several worlds with a few City Districts with 720 Jobs each?

Because building's no longer create jobs, but modify them, there's way more incentive to make super-custom worlds. The only benefit of a general world is early on when Pops are low. As soon as your population starts taking off mid-game, it's inefficient to have anything but super-focussed colonies.

 

[NorseGod]

I was going to post this elsewhere, but then I remembered the title to this thread.

Last time I checked this thread, it was only 9 pages. So, I'm a bit behind on the discussion. But I'd like to put this out in the wild, just to remind people that there are many of us out here that are quite happy about zones.

Things Zones do good, and that add to my enjoyment of the game.

1. They limit buildings. I never liked being able to build literally everything on every planet--even if it's only in theory--and by locking buildings to zones this is no longer possible.
2. They provide planetary customization. Being able to choose up to three different products on each planet to work with--or more with the more general zones--means that you will not be able to build up a factory world with tones of industry districts, and then just decide to had a decent about of research 'just because.'
3. Changes to the Zones--weather adding new ones, changing ones, or building districts--feels like a larger endeavor making such changes more impactful. yes upgrading a city causes a lot of jobs to show up. but between civilians and some planning, this isn't a huge effect. and really, building a whole city should make impacts after all.
4. Specialized zones--like the already reveled betharian zone--make planets more interesting because you now have the ability to directly alter how your 'normal' planets work. While also giving you the ability to not do so, if that is better for you.
5. It feels more like 'building up planets' rather than 'building up a city' like more building focused systems. Both the old 3.14 system and the many suggested replacements make it seem more like you are building single cities. Mainly because the new zones fill more like they are regions rather than individual structures. that urban zones are tied to the number of cities you have definitely help a lot here.
6. Buildings are more distinct from districts and zones. This is an interesting one. Now, buildings give a lot less jobs and come packaged with a big opportunity cost. Even though some buildings have the ability to be duplicated, most of the time you will not want this. Instead, you will want to use the ones modifying and upgrading zones. And that makes them a lot more interesting in my opinion.
7. All of the above make buildings less important while districts and zones are more important. this feels a lot better, as it remains kind of weird that planets in 3.14 are so dominated by buildings in comparison to districts. This system feels more realistic, and makes the planets feel bigger.

Some acknowledgements: Zones aren't going to be liked by everyone, subjective things are subjective and none of what I've pointed out can't be done in other ways. But they are things I like about the zones system. Especially the more I play with them.

Some improvements to the 'you get a tone of jobs when you build a city' thing would be nice on the whole. But I'd be quite disappointed if the points above are hurt by any such changes.

I'd like a 'discourage job' button to go with the 'promote job' button we have now. If for no other reason in that I'd use it even though I don't mind the glut of jobs. I've seen others that weren't horrible for the same fix, but don't know how good-bad they are in finality.

I think the worst choice would be to go back to a system that allows buildings to dominate the player's interactions with planets or one that removes the opportunity costs of the more limited building spaces.

I do think there is a way to improve the problems people have with the system, I just think most of the suggestions work out to 'make buildings the most important thing' or remove the opportunity costs which I think is a major design goal.

I don't know the solution. But I hope it's not to strip the things I like from the system.

I agree with most of your points. My big issue comes right now from the way the system scales exponentially. The problem is that with Zones adding jobs for every city-district, and building's making those jobs more efficient, you end up with these formulas:

City District * Zones = Jobs

Jobs * Buildings = Output

Which means that for every Zone you create, and every Building make you have one of two objectives:

1) Make the bare minimum needed for this planet, such as Amenities, Housing, Stability, etc. from as few Buildings/Districts as possible to save costs.

2) Maximize the usage of this Zone and Building, to get the most output for the given maintenance costs.

I've been testing with different habitable world amounts, to see how the system works at various scales. When you get to a 30+ planetary empire, and you start getting a lot of Population, you end up with 1 of 2 types of worlds for efficiencies sake:

A) A rural/mining/generator/agriculture world that uses all it's Districts for raw resource production, and the bare minimum needed of Urban and Amenities Zones for the 1 City District to meet the Pops needs. Eventually you might toss a small Unity or Trade Zone on there for a few jobs, as needed.

B) An all City District planet has two identical Factory, Foundry, Tech, Unity, Trade, or Fortress Zones, and an Urban or Amenities Zone to provide the base needs of your hyper-focussed planet.

Instead of having planets where we spam the same buildings over and over to create jobs, it's just been shuffled to spamming the same Districts over and over, focussed by repeated Zones. I mean right now I have a full Tech-World that creates more Reearch Points than a Science Nexus, and an Orbital Habitat that is making more food that my 4 largest Agricultural Colonies.

City Districts * Zones making Jobs is a system rife with ways to abuse it, making it neccessary to abuse to catch up.

 

[Newbee53]

Instead of having planets where we spam the same buildings over and over to create jobs, it's just been shuffled to spamming the same Districts over and over, focussed by the chosen Zones. I mean right now I have a full Tech-World that creates more Reearch Points than a Science Nexus, and an Orbital Habitat that is making more food that my 4 largest Agricultural Colonies. City Districts * Zones making Jobs is a system rife with ways to abuse it, making it neccessary to abuse to catch up.

as far as vibes go, spamming districts (city or not) is less problematic, at least for me.

Balancing job outputs will be a bit weird, given the current set up. But I don't generally play for efficiency and don't know how many people do. SO, it's probably not a huge problem.

A dedicated built agricultural habitat producing more food than a planet makes sense to me. You built it for that purpose, and you don't have to deal with anything making growing food harder in the planet itself. So I get it. Weather that much more makes for a balanced game? Probably not. It should be toned down a little in that regard.

Though, it probably shouldn't be possible to avoid habitability penalties on orbitals without the trait. But it is kind of weird that the equivalent food planet--Gai world food planets--is so far behind. assuming that's what you are talking about.

 

[Tisifoni12]

Dear Paradox

Do less, do it better.

Less complexity, less spreadsheetery, more strategy.

 

[ShaTiK]

I'm pretty sure Eladrin has indicated that is not the case. The need to have customization coming from new Zones.

But that is what I said - customization would be coming from Zones in how they modify districts. And separate districts are here to make balancing outputs an actually easy to accomplish task, instead of job fiddling or making tons of jobs ahead of time and relying on AI to balance things out with job allocation.
And, I repeat myself, if we are getting only 3 zones per city district, then a whole lot of zones would go on being unused. So we would be getting a neat new system that most players won't engage with.

 

[Critical Ethics]

I'm also trying to consider it from an efficiency standpoint. As it is right now, with the City-Zones system, it makes a lot more sense to fill a world with City-Districts, as those Zones then get the maximum amount of jobs per zone, to justify the cost of the buildings. And then for Rural colonies, you focus on the base resource zones and districts, and leave a single amenities or urban zone on there, to do the bare minimum for the needs of the planet. A Forge World is most efficient with all City Districts, a Mining Planet is all Metal districts. You certainly can make mixed worlds, but it's sort of a trap in that as the game processes it makes more sense to scrap one of focus on the other.

City District * Zones = Jobs
and
Jobs * Buildings = Output
Make it that super-focussed words are still the most efficient. The apparent "problem" in 3.XX was worlds filled with the same building over and over. And now the "Fix" making it so I spam the same Districts and Zones over and over. It's the same issue, just a different element. But If I'm gonna spend the minerals to build and energy to run an Alloy Furnace, why not have that used to support 6500 jobs on one Forge World, instead of building multiples of them on several worlds with a few City Districts with 720 Jobs each?

Because building's no longer create jobs, but modify them, there's way more incentive to make super-custom worlds. The only benefit of a general world is early on when Pops are low. As soon as your population starts taking off mid-game, it's inefficient to have anything but super-focussed colonies.

It's only more efficient from a land perspective, and once habitats are in play then land is merely a function of convenience. Your gating is going to be pops for most of the game - so it's convenience vs convenience. And different conveniences are where flavour lives.

Which is why the 6 slot science is a problems - that does mean more efficient pops, which breaks the convenience vs convenience mirror.

 

[NorseGod]

This is what I mean. Out of 36 Colonies in my Empire, the top 4 by Agriculture Districts are 15, 13, 10, 10. So a 10-Agriculture planet is likely gonna be your average Farm planet. It creates about 250 Food.

Meanwhile an Orbital with 10 City Districts and Hydroponics Zones almost doubles that:

And then with techs and voidborne, you can get that single Habitat to make more than 4x the food of a decent Farm planet:

I dunno, I just think that an entire planet focussed on food production shouldn't be outproduced 4x over by a space station doing the same thing.

 

[NorseGod]

It's only more efficient from a land perspective, and once habitats are in play then land is merely a function of convenience. Your gating is going to be pops for most of the game - so it's convenience vs convenience. And different conveniences are where flavour lives.

Which is why the 6 slot science is a problems - that does mean more efficient pops, which breaks the convenience vs convenience mirror.

Sorry, I don't quite understand what you mean. Half of the game is expanding and fighting wars, in order to get more land, as it's a scarce resource. The end game is foten about trying to make more land, so you're no inundated by tons of unemployed Pops.

And it's not just about being efficient from a land perspective, it's also being efficient from an upkeep perspective. Zones and Buildings each take maintenance, and it's the same value regardless of how many Jobs it serves. The jobs have the exact same upkeep, assuming buildings are the same.

So if hyper-specialization is more efficient from land, and from upkeep/resources - what exactly is there for efficiencies in the game to consider? Early on Pops are a limiting factor, yes. But isn't that an argument to very quickly getting your Pops into situations where they are producing the most output, for the least input? I could be missing something.

 

[Imp0815]

View attachment 1272492
Something like this. Given some time even I might be able to come up with something on non-eye bleach level, and PDX have professional UI designers, but the idea goes this direction.
Mind you, I stayed within current window size, this screen can easily be 20% bigger in size , maybe even go as far as double the size to get more information on a single tab

Edit: a modified version with 6 fixed districts for basic planet. Every district have their own set of zones
View attachment 1272521

Yeah, I just came up with somehing similar to that.


View attachment 1272499

These two keep the issue that linked buildings dissolve into paint-by-numbers gameplay, where we just always place the same buildings in the same zones/districts because we seem limited by district type on what building goes into which slot.
And we would still have to explain, "No, you can’t build a lab here — build the lab district first to gain access to the labs!"
And that, I find intransparent and rather railroaded.

How about this:

 

[Newbee53]

This is what I mean. Out of 36 Colonies in my Empire, the top 4 by Agriculture Districts are 15, 13, 10, 10. So a 10-Agriculture planet is likely gonna be your average Farm planet. It creates about 250 Food.

View attachment 1272629

Meanwhile an Orbital with 10 City Districts and Hydroponics Zones almost doubles that:
View attachment 1272631

And then with techs and voidborne, you can get that single Habitat to make more than 4x the food of a decent Farm planet:
View attachment 1272632

I dunno, I just think that an entire planet focussed on food production shouldn't be outproduced 4x over by a space station doing the same thing.

I noticed its a specialized upgraded planet--habitats--verses a vanilla planet. Not the best comparison. I wonder what the difference would be if that argi-planet was turned into a Gai world or something similar. I do wish habitability was harder to max out.

4x seems like a lot. but I do think it makes more sense to have the artificially made purpose-built structure better at food production.

 

[NorseGod]

These two keep the issue that linked buildings dissolve into paint-by-numbers gameplay, where we just always place the same buildings in the same zones/districts because we seem limited by district type on what building goes into which slot.
And we would still have to explain, "No, you can’t build a lab here — build the lab district first to gain access to the labs!"
And that, I find intransparent and rather railroaded.

How about this:

View attachment 1272640

Yeah, this was something I suggested a week ago. People seem to really not like the idea of leaving building slots open like that. So that's why my suggestion was a mix of this, with the "building in zones " situation. But yeah, I agree with the premise that Zones being tied to City Districts is kinda weird and causing a bunch of issues.

 

[Newbee53]

These two keep the issue that linked buildings dissolve into paint-by-numbers gameplay, where we just always place the same buildings in the same zones/districts because we seem limited by district type on what building goes into which slot.
And we would still have to explain, "No, you can’t build a lab here — build the lab district first to gain access to the labs!"
And that, I find intransparent and rather railroaded.

How about this:

View attachment 1272640

are you suggesting we should remove the district-building limits? Because that's some of the best stuff we need. after all, that prevents you from pasting buildings literally everywhere. 1 per planet. still end up with thirty of them! one on every planet! That's a bad part of the 3.14 game design. I'm glade its gone.

If you are keeping similar building-district limits, this seems even less understandable, as people will struggle to know why they can't build a building on that one planet.