Can confirm, this is happening for both planets and habitats.
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According to a post in the bug report thread, the third zone fails to provide jobs if the second zone is the same as the first or third zone.
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Pretty sure this is temporary and not worked out yet as the artificial production buildings exist and are unlockable with the techs.
Incidentally, the artificial production needs a rework, current system blows up your mineral usage for ridiculous amounts of motes/gas/crystal that you will never be able to use.
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Zones are going to be a touchy subject, I think partly because there's no consensus on what they SHOULD be doing. They seem to be trying to fix a problem that didn't exist, and so it's kind of hard to pin down the precise point of what the new District/Zone/Building dynamic does compared to the old system. I know they elude to some bigger future use for them, but since it's currently not the future we have to judge them only as is and not some hypothetical "might be".
As for what's good: I think some of the basic idea is good. The idea of "building your own City District" with Zones and Buildings is neat and I like it.
As for what needs to be fixed: I think a lot of it. Not the entire system, as again I think the general idea of it is fine, but how it's implemented leaves a lot to be desired.
One big concern people have is that the new system floods the City District with too many jobs. If we compare the old and new systems we can see how bad that can actually get. In the most current build, 180 seems to be the "default" job number you will see on Zones and Buildings that provide jobs. We can easily compare this to 2 Jobs that was the standard for most Districts and Buildings. With some exceptions, most of the time if you built a new District or Building, you were creating 2 Jobs. Now with three Zones in your City District you are creating 540 Jobs, which would be the equivalent of creating 6 Jobs in the previous version. This creates a huge influx of jobs on any Planet focusing on non-Basic Resources, but a lot of the way the game plays has not been fleshed out enough to fully handle this change.
This leads into a second problem I have brought up multiple times in the Open Beta threads, and in the Survey. Buildings like Holo-Theaters still offer a flat amount of jobs of 180. And unlike the current system, Buildings don't seem to be upgradable now as most of the old upgrades are separate Buildings that do not add even more jobs. Though even if they DID add more jobs it would cause separate issues (Which will be discussed below). So while previously if you needed Amenities you could throw down a Holo-Theater that would give you 2 Jobs that would increase as the game goes on, now that single Planet Limit 1 Holo-Theater has to provide Amenities for your even larger job pools (As talked about above) while still giving the equivalent of 2 Jobs. This is true for any similar Building like Precincts, Gene Clinics, ect. This is more difficult to fix because you either have to drastically increase the number of jobs those Buildings give (Which isn't a great solution), increase the Output (A better but still not ideal solution) or make things like Amenities easier to come by from other sources besides Zones.
A third problem with this new system is that Building Slots are still too precious to limit the way they have. You get two Building Slots on your Capital Zone that are less restrictive, at least for now. You then get three Building Slots on each of your other Zones, which are heavily restrictive except for the Urban Zone, though they said in the Dev Diary that that will change. Every Ascension Path has a required Building. Robot Factories, Augmentation Centers, Cloning Vats, Psi-Corps, ect. So that's one of your two Capital Zone building slots down already. If you're using Organics plus Robots, that's your second Building Slot gone already. If you're playing an Origin or Civic that gives you a special Building (like Gaia Seeders), that's another of your two Building Slots gone. Restricting what you build in the Zones does nothing to help the game, especially when there's so few buildings for the specialized Zones that you don't even really need to make a choice. Picking between having nothing in a Zone, or putting the only option you have in the Building Slot isn't a meaningful decision.
A lot of this makes planets feel like customizable than before. There are just objectively less things you can do with a planet when it's so heavily restricted. As most Buildings are only allowed to be placed in their Zone, the only REAL choice your making is what three Zones to pick. Where as before you had 12 Building Slots to play around with, you now have three Zones and then the Building Slots are limited amount of passive buffs you can slot in.
The easiest solution, while keeping the idea behind District/Zones/Buildings alive is to shrink the number of jobs from Buildings by quite a bit, take away most restrictions (Switching Planet Limit 1 to Zone Limit 1 in most cases), and then have those Building's Jobs scale with Districts like Zones do, maybe even replacing some of the Zone's jobs with the new Building Jobs. This solves most issues, except the first issue of City Districts providing too many jobs. Though I honestly don't think there's a way to fix that issue with the system we're getting. In this scenario though, your jobs will never be outpaced by the amount of jobs the District creates, as it will also scale per District. You won't be fighting for the very limited space you have. You can make actual choices about whether you want to put a Research Lab in your Research Zone to increase Researcher Output, or if you are willing to sacrifice that Output to add in a Holo-Theater to start providing some much needed Amenities to your Planet. If you would rather have a Fortress for some extra Naval Cap (and Unity if you're playing something like Citizen Service) then extra Bureaucrat Output, then why shouldn't this be allowed?
If they don't want to go that indepth, they need to at the very least add more Building Slots to your Capital Zone, maybe unlocked through upgrading your Capital Building as you used to do.
We have about 4 weeks before 4.0, which is not alot of time. There's a lot of UI clean up, number tweaking, ect that they need to do. But none of that will matter if Planet Development is simply not fun for players. Some people in this thread seem to like the change, and that's fine. I want Zones to stay too. It's a good idea with a bad implementation currently, as it takes away player agency in how they want to build their planets. I hope these 4 weeks until 4.0 is enough time for the Developers, because I really want it to be the best it can be, especially since the DLC announcements look amazing. Until then, as much as it will feel like beating a dead horse, I think those of us who have criticisms of the change need to continue to be vocal about it.
As for what's good: I think some of the basic idea is good. The idea of "building your own City District" with Zones and Buildings is neat and I like it.
As for what needs to be fixed: I think a lot of it. Not the entire system, as again I think the general idea of it is fine, but how it's implemented leaves a lot to be desired.
One big concern people have is that the new system floods the City District with too many jobs. If we compare the old and new systems we can see how bad that can actually get. In the most current build, 180 seems to be the "default" job number you will see on Zones and Buildings that provide jobs. We can easily compare this to 2 Jobs that was the standard for most Districts and Buildings. With some exceptions, most of the time if you built a new District or Building, you were creating 2 Jobs. Now with three Zones in your City District you are creating 540 Jobs, which would be the equivalent of creating 6 Jobs in the previous version. This creates a huge influx of jobs on any Planet focusing on non-Basic Resources, but a lot of the way the game plays has not been fleshed out enough to fully handle this change.
This leads into a second problem I have brought up multiple times in the Open Beta threads, and in the Survey. Buildings like Holo-Theaters still offer a flat amount of jobs of 180. And unlike the current system, Buildings don't seem to be upgradable now as most of the old upgrades are separate Buildings that do not add even more jobs. Though even if they DID add more jobs it would cause separate issues (Which will be discussed below). So while previously if you needed Amenities you could throw down a Holo-Theater that would give you 2 Jobs that would increase as the game goes on, now that single Planet Limit 1 Holo-Theater has to provide Amenities for your even larger job pools (As talked about above) while still giving the equivalent of 2 Jobs. This is true for any similar Building like Precincts, Gene Clinics, ect. This is more difficult to fix because you either have to drastically increase the number of jobs those Buildings give (Which isn't a great solution), increase the Output (A better but still not ideal solution) or make things like Amenities easier to come by from other sources besides Zones.
A third problem with this new system is that Building Slots are still too precious to limit the way they have. You get two Building Slots on your Capital Zone that are less restrictive, at least for now. You then get three Building Slots on each of your other Zones, which are heavily restrictive except for the Urban Zone, though they said in the Dev Diary that that will change. Every Ascension Path has a required Building. Robot Factories, Augmentation Centers, Cloning Vats, Psi-Corps, ect. So that's one of your two Capital Zone building slots down already. If you're using Organics plus Robots, that's your second Building Slot gone already. If you're playing an Origin or Civic that gives you a special Building (like Gaia Seeders), that's another of your two Building Slots gone. Restricting what you build in the Zones does nothing to help the game, especially when there's so few buildings for the specialized Zones that you don't even really need to make a choice. Picking between having nothing in a Zone, or putting the only option you have in the Building Slot isn't a meaningful decision.
A lot of this makes planets feel like customizable than before. There are just objectively less things you can do with a planet when it's so heavily restricted. As most Buildings are only allowed to be placed in their Zone, the only REAL choice your making is what three Zones to pick. Where as before you had 12 Building Slots to play around with, you now have three Zones and then the Building Slots are limited amount of passive buffs you can slot in.
The easiest solution, while keeping the idea behind District/Zones/Buildings alive is to shrink the number of jobs from Buildings by quite a bit, take away most restrictions (Switching Planet Limit 1 to Zone Limit 1 in most cases), and then have those Building's Jobs scale with Districts like Zones do, maybe even replacing some of the Zone's jobs with the new Building Jobs. This solves most issues, except the first issue of City Districts providing too many jobs. Though I honestly don't think there's a way to fix that issue with the system we're getting. In this scenario though, your jobs will never be outpaced by the amount of jobs the District creates, as it will also scale per District. You won't be fighting for the very limited space you have. You can make actual choices about whether you want to put a Research Lab in your Research Zone to increase Researcher Output, or if you are willing to sacrifice that Output to add in a Holo-Theater to start providing some much needed Amenities to your Planet. If you would rather have a Fortress for some extra Naval Cap (and Unity if you're playing something like Citizen Service) then extra Bureaucrat Output, then why shouldn't this be allowed?
If they don't want to go that indepth, they need to at the very least add more Building Slots to your Capital Zone, maybe unlocked through upgrading your Capital Building as you used to do.
We have about 4 weeks before 4.0, which is not alot of time. There's a lot of UI clean up, number tweaking, ect that they need to do. But none of that will matter if Planet Development is simply not fun for players. Some people in this thread seem to like the change, and that's fine. I want Zones to stay too. It's a good idea with a bad implementation currently, as it takes away player agency in how they want to build their planets. I hope these 4 weeks until 4.0 is enough time for the Developers, because I really want it to be the best it can be, especially since the DLC announcements look amazing. Until then, as much as it will feel like beating a dead horse, I think those of us who have criticisms of the change need to continue to be vocal about it.
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Keep in mind that a city district in the new version is, effectively, the combination of a city district + a job-providing building. In the old version, a city district might give 2 clerk + 3 farmer jobs, or 2 clerk + 2-6 researcher (depending on how much the building was upgraded), etc.. It doesn't (usually) provide more jobs, it's just providing the jobs all at once instead of in 2-4 construction stages (build district, build building, up to 2 building upgrades).
Yes but that is the problem why its less customizable and less intuitive.. instead of us having the option to choose when to upgrade what, depending on our needs and/or possibilitys its a all in one package.
colonys are even worse in that regard since, before i even got the tech to add a second zone, the colony was already so far advanced that adding a zone would crash the economy due to how much job's it suddenly would provide.
this in turn means that there is no other option than go for hyper-specialized planets that produce only either one advanced rescources or only basic rescources with the urban-district being a given.... well.. or micromanage the hell out of it all.
as far as i understood the dev-diary they want us to choose if we hyper-specialize and pay a hefty upkeep or to put some zones in to make the planet a bit more autark but how the zones work in reality right now clashes with that vision.
at the same time another reason why the system "feels"/is more unintuitive and restricting is to be found in the reason that they essentially toned down our choices on what to do with a planet. in the system that we had before we where limit by planet-size ( district amount ), buildings-lots ( which was tied to our choice how much housing-districts wanted to build ) and the respective amount of basic-rescource-harvesting we could to on the planet ( limit in generator-district amount ect )
now we also have the limit on how many rescources we can produce on a planet due to only 3 zones being allowed apart from the basic rescource ones.
on top of that they essentially made any "growth-ceiling"-consideration obsolete. in the current system we had to decide if we want to build more housing for a higher growth-rate or build more production-districts to use the limited amount of districts we have on a planet more efficiently, something that could help if you aren't lucky enough to find enough planet's in your empire now the jobs come with the housing and there is nothing to decide on.
I am not sure if a "hybrid"-system between the old and the new system would work better where service-zones are disconnected from the production-zones and in direct competition with the city-zone.
i.e. put amenitys-zones, fortress-zones, urbanzones ( for building-slots ) below the housing-zone and have to choose if you want to expand on a service or a buildings-lot at the cost of productivity.
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That's exactly why they are a big mystery. If devs stated openly that there is an issue that cannot be fixed with old system, then it would've been much clearer.
If the devs stated 'there is an issue with players overbuilding research and unity buildings by spamming housing districts, which makes the gameplay less interesting and partially defeats the purpose of housing district', it would've been great. Clearly defined issue. Then we could have a discussion on why exactly it cannot be fixed using current system and how it can be made better.
Or there is some fundamental issue with districts and new job/POP system, so the whole thing have to be remade. This is not a discussion and more of a statement on their part, but this would go a long way in explaining to players why the old system can't be preserved. Doesn't seem like this is the issue though since we still have districts, but it seems there was Kaiju battle that demolished most of them...
But all we have right now is 'this new system would allow us do some stuff in the future'. Which, pardon my french, doesn't explain shit. All they did was to cram everything apart from base resources into a singular district with no way of easily balancing outputs if there are mixed, and the hilariously limited number of zones per city district (=planet) very much gives player the idea that he should.
I would bang the same, already pretty sweaty and scuffed drum - there is no reason not to give us at the very least 3 different districts of our choice per planet (or better yet 6 with zones being the modifiers for said districts). Keep the zones, but for the love of all that is holy don't force everything into singular city district.
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I think it would be easy to make a hybrid between the old and the new system like this:
this planet has 4 City-disticts and the Tec-level allows for 2 Zones per City-district. You now are able to build 8 Zones in the City-district (maximum of 2 different Zones).
For example you can either build 4 research and 4 unity Zones; 2 research and 6 unity Zones; 8 research and 0 unity zones etc.
If you build anoter City-district, you get another 2 "Zonecapacity" to distribute. (so maximum of 10 Zones)
If you research Planetary Unification, you get one more "Zonecapacity" for each City-district (so in the above example the Tec gives you 4 "Zonecapacity" for a maximum of 12 Zones for 4 City-districts) and the ability to add a third Zone.
This way you have more control over how many of each Job you get, while keeping the new Zone System.
this planet has 4 City-disticts and the Tec-level allows for 2 Zones per City-district. You now are able to build 8 Zones in the City-district (maximum of 2 different Zones).
For example you can either build 4 research and 4 unity Zones; 2 research and 6 unity Zones; 8 research and 0 unity zones etc.
If you build anoter City-district, you get another 2 "Zonecapacity" to distribute. (so maximum of 10 Zones)
If you research Planetary Unification, you get one more "Zonecapacity" for each City-district (so in the above example the Tec gives you 4 "Zonecapacity" for a maximum of 12 Zones for 4 City-districts) and the ability to add a third Zone.
This way you have more control over how many of each Job you get, while keeping the new Zone System.
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I just trip in here and ask myself—if zones are now using the "free" slot in the energy district, why couldn’t we just leave out zones and switch out districts instead?
Like, having a Betharian deposit on a planet and the ability to freely choose our districts would allow us to build a Betharian Energy District that does the same as the zone.
Overall, a better step and alternative to the whole zone debacle would be to allow us to replace, upgrade, and modify districts directly. And to be even more simplistic—just make the districts on planets more diverse and give us more district types per planet based on features and empire. We already have numerous district types based on planet type—why couldn’t that be expanded instead of introducing zones that add a whole new layer of issues?
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Respectfully - this is a terrible idea. Nesting zones inside city district and giving them their own levels - why? Why not give them their own districts. This is backwards logic, first we shove everything into singular district and then we replicate the district level system with zones themselves?
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Well my line of thinking was that the Devs seem to want the new Zone-system because it "allows us to do stuff in the future", while most of the Players seem to prefer the current District-system. I thought that my idea would allow the Devs to "have the cake and eat it", meaning they get their Zone-system to "do stuff with" and Players get a system thats functionally not that different to the district-system.
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Very good points, and all issues with the new system are well put together. One thing that’s missing is that implementing it will cost time and work that could be used to improve the game, instead of fixing problems caused by an “improvement” that feels like the opposite.
If they want to keep the zones, they must be completely detached and handled differently—like having a fully open slot system again, where we build zones in their own slots and then allocate free slots to those zones. Each zone would provide its own jobs based on the buildings inside.
So basically, we’d have the old free slots and additional zone slots based on the districts built—same as building slots.
We could choose to build a zone and allocate one or more building lots to it. Then the zone does its thing plus provides jobs via the buildings.
The UI for this might be impossible to make with this game. I'd imagine a drag-and-drop system and a much larger, more interactive planet screen. The AI might also be incapable of handling it—unless it gets a whole new module to interpret zones.
This system would also need more base-output buildings that can be slotted into zones—or we'd end up with fewer zones that rely only on planetary features. Which raises the question: why have zones at all if buildings already interact with features just fine?
A completely different approach would be to have zones keep modifying districts, but shift the focus much more toward job allocation. Like, we keep the massive amount of different jobs generated per city district depending on the zone built, but mostly control the planets via job sliders—and that idea already makes me gag a little.
Nah—overall, scrap it. Feels like just trying to force zones into the old system to make them work.
The goal of freely placing planetary features and modifiers isn’t something that fits this economy loop if we only want basicly 2 outputs from our planets: alloys and science. The cons clearly outweigh the pros.
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It's really funny to me to realise that if they had simply announced research and unity districts for 4.0 there would have been near unanimous applause and that would have been the end of it.
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This'll be fixed in the next beta patch, nice catch.
The original idea for zones actually came up because we felt that we were planning on putting too many districts onto the planet (since we wanted to separate Foundry and Forge, and add Research) and thought that you'd prefer being able to customize/specialize the Urban Zones to provide the jobs you wanted.
Since past the early game, Stellaris players tend to usually super-specialize your planets, we figured you would generally end up applying three identical zones to a planet to get the maximum number of jobs, but still would have reasons to split-specialize at times or have Urban Zones for additional buildings. (Our original design included duplicate zones NOT providing extra building slots.)
Then we also thought about how we could use them to provide unique zones for special planetary features to make planets more unique, and we liked the idea. Yes, they could be buildings, but we were also fairly tied to our "buildings should modify jobs" plan to differentiate buildings and districts more than they are in 3.x.
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I really like the idea of progressively specializing a planet.
But IMHO they already start out pretty much fully specialized.
Why not start with only two Districts (Urban / Rural) to handle high-level / basic resources, with two more choices of District, and then Zones to further specialize the Urban District?
You would be able to split Rural into the current three basic Districts if you want, but to start it would just be all three basic resources from a single District, with only 3 buildings for all 3 resources (so you'd want to split them out, or turn it into just one of Mining / Generator / Agriculture if you cared about efficiency).
Also maybe give a pop growth boost to un-specialized colonies, so the player has some interesting decisions about long-term power (via pop growth) vs. short-term power (via specialized production efficiency).
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Thanks for the insight. I'd like to add that a scroll bar for the districts really is OK. Once a district type exists it can snap to the top of the list and from a usability perspective this means you end up scrolling very rarely, it feels very fluid.
The legendary Corsairmarks has this ready to go this if you fancy giving it a spin.
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The special unique zones, must provide one hell of a benefit that would justify a player to switch to them and break his plan for the colony and current needs.
Also it must be so good, that a player would decline converting to an ecumenopolis - if the special zone is not preserved with ecus, or even not building a ring world? at the system.
Other than that, if it's just some flavour zone with meh jobs, players will just pave over it with whatever is on their build list.
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Getting 9 buildings to hyperfocus jobs seems like it will over-reward specialisation. You could halfway it and provide diminishing returns, so one zone gets you 3 buildings but only +1 per additional duplicate.
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I really appreciate the insight and thought process behind the changes. I think that goes a long way to helping the players understand what the goal is for what we see as a pretty massive change to a system many thought worked fine as is.
As someone who really likes that idea of being able to customize and specialize planets as mentioned, the only thing I still really do not understand is the Building change. I mean I get wanting to differentiate Districts, Buildings and Zones, but if "buildings modify jobs" is their main goal how is this any different than just having passive Tech that does this? Sure there's a small build and upkeep cost to Buildings, but unless 4.0 is also coming with a considerable increase in the number of Building types for the Zones, most Zones don't have enough Buildings to make any of it a meaningful choice. Most of the game it will be a "Build it or you just have an empty slot" until you've unlocked most tech for Buildings, and even then the choice will likely be to choose 3 of 4 Buildings which will be a simple "choice" for most players since most players will choose Output over Upkeep Reduction every single time unless they're in a Consumer Goods crisis.
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I'd feel better about just moving mining district boxes over to generator district -- changing what the red boxes mean seems like it's going to be something I forget to check when I'm rushing to build stuff on 20+ colonies.