Please return to the original idea. Zones are horrible. Make jobs using Districts - it is flexible and intuitive. You could add new district types to a planet via [+] button, so only existing Districts are shown in the UI.
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I was brainstorming a way in which Districts and Zones can work while keeping things simple for the player. Districts should provide jobs while the zones provide building slots from which buildings provide mostly bonuses to the job outputs.
Urban Districts
City District (provides housing and government jobs)
Agricultural District (provides farmer other food gathering jobs)
I believe that zones should be static, with the City and Mining Districts having two zones each while the other districts have only one zone. With the zones being static in my proposal, there’s no need to lock zones behind techs. Zones should have five building slots in vanilla (with each zone having five slots, buildings no longer have to compete against each other over building slots). Yes the planetary UI screen will need both vertical and horizontal scrollbars, but with Stellaris being a sandbox game, it’s better to give the player the tools they need to tell the story of their empire as they play the game rather than to just cater to a niche play style at the expense of the rest of the player base.
Urban Districts
City District (provides housing and government jobs)
- Housing Zone (luxury residences, paradise domes and other housing buildings go here)
- Government Zone (capital buildings, administrative offices, temples, unity and other government buildings go here)
- Note: in my proposal, Government Zones buildings will also continue to provide jobs due to the way civics currently work.
- Research and Medical Zone (research, medical and robot assembly buildings go here)
- Commercial Zone (commercial, resource silos and trade buildings go here)
- Industrial Zone (alloy foundries and civilian industrial buildings go here)
- Recreational Zone (holo-theaters and other amenity buildings go here)
- Police and Military Zone (law enforcement, military buildings and civil defense buildings go here)
Agricultural District (provides farmer other food gathering jobs)
- Agricultural Zone (hydroponic farms, food processing facilities and other food gathering buildings go here)
- Mining Zone (mining related buildings go here)
- Refinery Zone (strategic resource related refinery buildings go here)
- Generator Zone (energy buildings go here)
I believe that zones should be static, with the City and Mining Districts having two zones each while the other districts have only one zone. With the zones being static in my proposal, there’s no need to lock zones behind techs. Zones should have five building slots in vanilla (with each zone having five slots, buildings no longer have to compete against each other over building slots). Yes the planetary UI screen will need both vertical and horizontal scrollbars, but with Stellaris being a sandbox game, it’s better to give the player the tools they need to tell the story of their empire as they play the game rather than to just cater to a niche play style at the expense of the rest of the player base.
A good half of the proposals, if not more, revolve around this idea - giving more districts and placing zones inside them. Given how self-evident this idea is and how it wasn't mentioned once by devs I can only assume this is somehow isn't suiting for devs.
I must admit, I have a morbid curiosity for when the 4.0 gets released in a month and the zone system would be largely the same as it right now. Because at this moment there is only a handful of people who actually tried new system and only a small subset of them that actually said what they think about it. When it gets released to the wider public, inviting new players and enticing older players to try it out (because of the much anticipated POP rework) - then we would get a truly majestic trainwreck. I'm not rooting against the devs per se, I don't wish misfortune upon them. But it would be a rare case of cosmic judgement in action - 'we decided to redo two of the fundamental games systems, and one of said systems didn't even needed a rework, just an update, but we did it anyway and now both systems are barely working and players are flooding forums with identical 'why did you break planetary management' posts'. This would be glorious. Kinda like IRL right now, the shitshow gets worse every day and you can either be fascinated by sheer size of this pile of shit or try to find a comfortable corner to sit and cry. I live in a shithole country already, so second option isn't there and I choose the first one.
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Eladrin during his entire tenure as lead dev has not once changed his mind or taken feedback that wasn't anything but positive into account. Unless the new system gets a massive outcry and is universally loathed I would not expect any change to it whatsoever. Just remember how the leader rework initially landed, extremely small numbers of leaders, extreme harsh punishments for going over cap, etc.
It took several patches and being almost universally hated for the numbers to be increased and stuff to be walked back.
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Ouch. This basically ends any interest in this idea. The removal of build competition as it currently stands in the beta is a very bad idea. One of the things I find most attractive to the beta's system is the need to decide which buildings go on which planets. yes I can replace buildings as needed. But replacing a building feels different from just building one, and it give a far more interesting vibe to the system.
My biggest concern after the above, is that static zones or districts would make every planet kind of identical yet again and reduce the apparent impact of decisions made. If building an industrial zone--as now--reduces your ability to build other zones its interesting. If building an industrial district has no impact on future decisions, it would be fairly boring. In 3.14 it matters very little what you build on your planets, because it has little impact on future decisions.
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This is what worries me the most. I get that Developers can't fully listen to the community about everything. The community is not made up of all game developers and often times throw out impractical ideas. It's a fine line to walk between listening to good constructive feedback and ignoring unhelpful noise. My fear is that Zones will be rammed through in it's current state in a way that is technically playable but not very fun.
The other thing that really worries me is what internal testing looks like. Watching the Developer Live Streams is interesting because I've yet to see them actually play the game. They usually go in, open up the console to give themselves cheats and then just show off some things they think are cool. But I've yet to see them really sit down and actually play the game for a long period of time and talk about it while doing so so we can see their thoughts and reactions to some common problems players are bringing up. I don't know if this is deliberate because they do recognize the issues and are afraid of those showing up during a stream or if they are remaining somewhat oblivious to it all. This is in stark contrast to something like the Age of Wonders 4 Developers Live Stream where the two Developers actually play through the game the way a player would to show things off.
This change, more than any other that Stellaris has had, has felt more like it's being implemented on a whim by the Developers because someone wanted to make a change, and not because the game needed it or because it's improving upon a neglected aspect of the game. The idea is very obviously not fully developed considering the state the Beta was released in, but someone in the chain of command seemed intent on getting this in as quickly as possible regardless of how much more time it needed in the oven.
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The reason for zones having five building slots in my proposal is to account for both future DLC content and mods. You may believe that having buildings compete over limited slots encourages impactful decisions, however I believe that in the case of a sandbox game like Stellaris that it’s better to not unnecessarily restrict player choice in terms of how they want to develop their planets. Restricting buildings slots and number of same buildings per planet is yet another symptom of a myopic niche play-style that veers too far in the “playing tall” direction whereas Stellaris ought to retain a neutral approach when it comes to the tall vs wide play styles. The new planetary management mechanics as featured in the beta builds will provoke lots of negative feedback from the player base similar to how the leader rework reintroducing leader caps resulted in a ton of negative feedback from the player base if the various issues arising from zones are not dealt with before the 4.0 patch goes live.
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Were never even fully realized. They were an idea they were floating around but pretty much scraped on their own.
I mean, your fear has basically been confirmed. The beta and testing is almost over. What we currently see is what we get.
As for the second part. That would require them to actually play the game. It was during the leader rework that they pretty much admitted that the current dev team doesn't. They only play early game, and on smaller maps. Which helped explain why the leader change seemed like a good idea/not as horrible as it was to them at the time. There's nothing that indicates this has changed since.
Which means the current system is build around the early game, a tiny number of planets, and tiny galaxies.
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I don't think that is true/fair. They have responded to feedback pretty well as far as I have seen. Just usually after the fact rather than before. Hell the beta alone has seen some significant changes based on player response. I think it's fair to say they don't respond to feedback on their initial vision when it is announced or developed. They tend to wait to let it actually get into our hands before they start iterating. So it can be frustrating to read dev diaries where a big chunk of the playerbase is saying "x won't work" and basically be yes'd and explain'd to death while they charge forward with it. But in my experience once "x won't work" morphs into "x is not working" they are good at listening and working on it until they get it right.
It does feel like in this case that the changes are so big that we may end up spending the better part of the year dealing with balance/fun issues until they arrive at the sweet spot. I just hope it's not something that lingers throughout the rest of lifespan of Stellaris where they are constantly having to tinker with it and they can't scrap it because everything is tied into it now.
It also makes me afraid for the coming ship rework next year. They are 2 for 2 now in terms of going overboard with the initial overhaul and having to spend weeks/months correcting. So I fear we are going to end up with constricted tiny "fleets" of 10-20 ships at end game because it is "balanced" on the tiny map in house MP sessions the dev team loves. Guess we'll have to see...
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If the devs insist on implementing major reworks on game mechanics, they need to at the very minimum balance any changes based on the standard galaxy settings in order to properly stress test the new game mechanics in order to make sure any changes are tall / wide play-style neutral during the beta builds before going live to the players.
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I think this is broadly true, they DO take negative feedback and I've observed that multiple times, plus some of the feedback they've taken was mine.
But even if they take it eventually, there isn't infinite time available and there's also DLC. Again, think of the tile->pop rework. Sure, some of the problems that introduced (lag, growth) are being addressed literally in 4.0.
But they weren't introduced within the last year. Or even two years. Or five. It was actually around six years ago, and just now they're fixing those problems that have been present in the district system from the beginning.
If they keep iterating this after release, I think with enough work it can simply be an improvement with no major issues. Past experience indicates that they won't actually do that though, and I hate to be that negative but if they wanted me to just trust that it will be worked on until it's good they probably should have waited until they had a track record of doing just that, not coming off a year of fire-and-forget DLC with one (Cosmic Storms) so terrible that almost everyone who mentions it at all does so to say they have it disabled. And it's not as if that's the only one, First Contact and Astral Planes have some severe problems too.
Fixing it at all matters, but so does fixing it in a timely manner. When will Cosmic Storms be fixed? Well, they've yet to even say "it has problems but we're thinking of ways to fix them" so... never? What about First Contact and Astral Planes? Well, they've acknowledged some of those problems, but with no mention of actually fixing them, so... also never, probably.
Breakthrough techs and the problems on release for Galactic Paragons being fixed relatively quickly are the exception, not the rule. They said they wanted to ensure better QA this year, and if that's true this should eventually work out. I don't believe it though, because there's no indication of it actually happening yet. This is the first thing they'll have done since acknowledging they needed better QA, and so far it doesn't seem to have that.
I would be a lot more willing to give them the benefit of doubt on 4.0 turning out well if they were continuing the beta until they had a good design and THEN announcing a release date when they just need to polish it. As it is, they're going to ship it as, most likely, a dumpster fire.
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I want to believe that you're wrong, but I have no evidence against your theory.
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I want to be wrong, quite badly actually. Guess we'll find out.
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Of course it could be too restrictive. Yes. However, I feel many games--especially sandbox games--have a tendency to go too far the other way. Robbing choices of their value by providing no restrictions at all. And this is where 3.14 and the general suggestions that are 'restore all those building slots' tend to be for me. Far to open, with no real reason to choose between possibilities.
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I agree with you completely. If they're going to go with this mess (and I hope to god they don't) it should at least promote interesting decision making!
I'm not sure the sand-boxers will ever be happy about that, though. A lot of players just want to have all the things and they're probably going to be sad.
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Yeah I have been thinking should there be a standard model for number of 'slots' in a zone and which buildings can go in which zones depending on ethics and socio-economic model; authoritarian vs egalitarian, materialist vs spiritual / philosophical (I hate 'spiritualist').
Creating zones, moving from 'Pops' to 'economy' and changing how trade is calculated or functions is three changes at the same time; much potential for mis-steps and extended fine tuning. Maybe two changes out of three ?
Put buildings into, or associate them with districts; City (or urban), Mining, Energy, Agriculture, Industry.
Creating zones, moving from 'Pops' to 'economy' and changing how trade is calculated or functions is three changes at the same time; much potential for mis-steps and extended fine tuning. Maybe two changes out of three ?
Put buildings into, or associate them with districts; City (or urban), Mining, Energy, Agriculture, Industry.
I've played several games in new beta and I think zones are so badly designed and thought out that current district+building system would work much better with the new pops system. I have no idea why they decided to change that and I hope they do a full 180 degree reversal on it before 4.0 hits.
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First, I would like to thank Eladrin for writing about the intent behind adding zones. It does help a lot to "get" where developers are coming from, even if I am not 100% sold on the idea. I do think that it will need far more radical changes in its core design rather than balance tweaks or improved implementation.
Now, a bit more of analysis regarding zones:
Pros:
- Helps customizing urban districts so they aren't generic and provide the proportion of jobs your planet needs
- Requires fewer district types
- Possibly adding more planet distinctiveness (in a distant game development future with flying cars and stuff)
- It adds a new layer of planet development, allowing players to specialize planets as the game advances (possibly its most redeeming quality)
- It allows for a neat distinction: Districts for jobs, zones for determining which job districts create, and buildings for modifying job outputs
- Building slots are unlocked differently
Cons:
- Many zones do not present interesting choices at all since they will always be filled with the same kind of buildings (you can only create so many interesting choices for basic resource zones, for example). This is, for me, a major point against it.
- Or worse, there might be even mandatory zones, like the now-defunct amenities zone
- Less granularity and level of control over your colony
- Lower development ceiling. That is, no new building slots unlock once you have plopped down every single zone. This is another major problem that I see with it. A big part of the core game loop revolves around the gradual adding and balancing of buildings. Yeah, that cuts down micromanagement once a planet is "solved", but still.
- They add tons of jobs at once, creating chaos in the process (but it seems that it has been solved in the latest build)
- Lacks flexibility in certain situations
- Too much UI space devoted to basic zones whose resources at a certain point of the game won't matter (that is, basic resources)
- Arbitrary building rules with many exceptions are needed in order to make the system work, losing its simplicity (see also: amenities, capital zones, etc. etc). This brings me to the next point:
- Districts, zones, and building functions do overlap with each other. That kinda defeats its whole purpose
- Building slots are unlocked differently
I think that any solution for making zones work as intended will need:
-> An entirely different "zone & district taxonomy" that allows for interesting choices and non-repetitive decisions
-> A different method of unlocking building slots / pairing them with zones, so we don't need to plow down the same type of buildings whenever we pick a certain zone
Will think about ideas for zones based on those two conclusions.
Now, a bit more of analysis regarding zones:
Pros:
- Helps customizing urban districts so they aren't generic and provide the proportion of jobs your planet needs
- Requires fewer district types
- Possibly adding more planet distinctiveness (in a distant game development future with flying cars and stuff)
- It adds a new layer of planet development, allowing players to specialize planets as the game advances (possibly its most redeeming quality)
- It allows for a neat distinction: Districts for jobs, zones for determining which job districts create, and buildings for modifying job outputs
- Building slots are unlocked differently
Cons:
- Many zones do not present interesting choices at all since they will always be filled with the same kind of buildings (you can only create so many interesting choices for basic resource zones, for example). This is, for me, a major point against it.
- Or worse, there might be even mandatory zones, like the now-defunct amenities zone
- Less granularity and level of control over your colony
- Lower development ceiling. That is, no new building slots unlock once you have plopped down every single zone. This is another major problem that I see with it. A big part of the core game loop revolves around the gradual adding and balancing of buildings. Yeah, that cuts down micromanagement once a planet is "solved", but still.
- They add tons of jobs at once, creating chaos in the process (but it seems that it has been solved in the latest build)
- Lacks flexibility in certain situations
- Too much UI space devoted to basic zones whose resources at a certain point of the game won't matter (that is, basic resources)
- Arbitrary building rules with many exceptions are needed in order to make the system work, losing its simplicity (see also: amenities, capital zones, etc. etc). This brings me to the next point:
- Districts, zones, and building functions do overlap with each other. That kinda defeats its whole purpose
- Building slots are unlocked differently
I think that any solution for making zones work as intended will need:
-> An entirely different "zone & district taxonomy" that allows for interesting choices and non-repetitive decisions
-> A different method of unlocking building slots / pairing them with zones, so we don't need to plow down the same type of buildings whenever we pick a certain zone
Will think about ideas for zones based on those two conclusions.
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I doubt they will, but I wouldn't be disappointed.
Basically, for 4.0, the options are around one day of work to add district types, the UI and make sure it works. Or they can keep working on Zones, which will take exactly as much time once they've developed a concrete plan to finalize, which hasn't happened. The beta system isn't remotely functional, it would NOT require more work to update the district system than to come up with a completely new Zone system that actually works - the red herring here is that Zones currently don't work, it's not throwing away something functional, sticking with it when so much else doesn't even work right now is a workable definition for "sunk cost fallacy."
I actually do see the potential gains of the Zone system over an updated district system, but those gains will not be realized for at least months after release because of how much of the rest of the game will end up being worse, not to mention completely dysfunctional.
The correct decision here is to update districts for 4.0, leaving it much-improved from 3.14 with better growth mechanics and reduced lag. This will be an almost universally enjoyed update to start the year off with, then they can take their time making Zones ACTUALLY a good idea if that's what they want to do. Again, I actually see the potential benefits, I'm not opposed. But it isn't ready. They should do another beta after Biogenesis but before Shadows of the Shroud with Zones, which will be far more focused because the other changes will have been made, not to mention it would have a far longer window before the next DLC release. This update has been feature-crept out of a scope they will have functional for 4.0, and there's still time to fix that.
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