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Stellaris Dev Diary #152 - Summer Experimentation

Hello everyone!

Summer vacations are reaching their end and most of the team is back as of last week. Work has started again and we're really excited for what we have in store for the rest of the year.

While most of us have been away during most of the summer, we’ve also had some people who worked during July. July is a very good time to try out different designs and concepts that we might not otherwise have time to do, and today we thought it might be fun for you to see some of the experiments we ran during that period of hiatus.

Although we learned some useful insights, these experiments didn’t end up being good enough to make a reality.

Industrial Districts
As I have mentioned earlier, I have wanted to find a better solution for how we handle the production of alloys and consumer goods. I often felt like the experience of developing a planet felt better with an Ecumenopolis rather than with a regular planet. I think a lot of it had to do with their unique districts and that it feels better to get the jobs from constructing districts rather than buildings. Not necessarily as an emotion reaction to the choice, but rather that the choice perhaps feels more “pure” or simple.

An experiment I wanted to run was to see if it was possible to add an industrial district that provided Laborer jobs, instead of having buildings for Metallurgists and Artisans. Laborers would produce both alloys and consumer goods but could be shifted towards producing more of either.

This meant we added a 5th district, the Industrial District. By adding another district we also needed to reduce the number of building slots available. Since there would be no more need for buildings that produced alloys and consumer goods, this should still end up being similar.

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A Laborer would consume 8 minerals to produce 2 alloys and 4 consumer goods, and that amount could be modified in either direction by passing a Decision. What I wanted was to have an industry that could have a military and civilian output, and where you could adjust the values between these outputs.

Having a laborer job that generates an “industrial output”, which could be translated into either alloys or consumer goods did feel good, but the specific solution we used didn’t feel quite right.

City Districts & Building slots
Another experiment was to see how it felt if city districts unlock building slots instead of pops. This experiment didn’t have a specific problem or issue it was trying to address but rather it was to investigate how that would feel and work. It was interesting but ultimately it felt less fun than the current implementation. It would have needed more time to see if it could be made to work.
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This experiment did include increasing the number of jobs you would get for the building, so a research lab would provide 3 jobs instead of 2.

City District Jobs from Buildings
At the same time, we also tried a version where buildings applied jobs to city districts instead of providing jobs by themselves. One upside would be that you’d need less micromanagement to get the jobs, but the downside is that it would also be quite a large upswing in new jobs whenever you built a city district. In the end, it felt like you had less control and understanding of what a planet was specializing in.

Summary
Although these experiments were interesting, they didn’t end up quite where we wanted to, so they never became more than just experiments. We did learn some interesting things though, which we will keep in mind for the future. The industrial districts are still something I want to keep looking into, but we have to find a better solution.

Dev diaries will now be back on a regular schedule, but we will be looking into changing the format a bit this time around. For now, dev diaries will be coming bi-weekly, which means we will be back again in another 2 weeks with a similar topic.
 
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Why are building slots locked in the first place? Unlocking then would make micromanagement less tidious If you could just plan all building from the very beginning like before title update.
 
Love the Industrial District experiment. It'd make Machine Worlds feel a lot better too since currently you can only fill up a Machine World with Mineral, City or Energy Districts. Same for Hive Worlds except they also have Food districts.

However, the balance of production when you pass the decision to nudge production seems a bit off to me.

If you have a Forge World producing alloys, passing a decision to then immediately start producing consumer goods for just 25 influence doesn't really make sense to me. I would suggest splitting them up.
There are already decision that take some time to come into effect (Ecu, the one which gives extra districts). Could this with a hypthetical industrial district decision

Industrial Districts produce Consumer Goods but need a Planetary Administration (10 Pops) to build.

Metalworking/Metallurgical Districts produce alloys, but require a Planetary Administration (10 pops on planet) to build.

For every level of Capital Building you upgrade on Planet you can build 2 Industrial Districts or 2 Metalworking Districts (or 1 of each). They do not count towards Planet Size and don't use up district slots so on a Size 10 planet you could still build 10 city districts along with 2 of say Industrial Districts.

Once you turn the world into an Ecumenopolis, much like the number of city districts get halved, the number of industrial and Metallurgical Districts get halved too and start counting towards Planet Size and take up District Slots.
Not making a district count towards the district cap is kind of odd. Also for every level of capital building 2 industrial districs is really really low as this would result in 6 for regular empires and 2 for hive minds.

In general I'm a huge fan of the industrial district idea. As other already wrote it would be nice to have those build which are usually spammed for jobs (foundry, commercial zones, the CG one, holo theaters (or similar buildings)) replaced with districts and only keep the unique buildings (or not only unique but limited buildings).
 
Why are building slots locked in the first place? Unlocking then would make micromanagement less tidious If you could just plan all building from the very beginning like before title update.
If you do that, then you'll end up with planets having to fill dozens of Specialist jobs before getting any workers.
 
I like having building slots based on something other than population, and using city districts on standard planets would make a lot of sense. It is a lot better than opening it via livestock as we do today.
 
I still see issues, the decision would only work per planet but you don't have that much planets at the beginning. (and it costs influence, deciding between a forge or civil industry does not)
you can upgrade the basic builing quite effective, resulting in up to 8jobs per slot, if limited by planet size and only 2 jobs per district mass producing CG could become difficult.
My main question is: how to upgrade districts?
also I fill most of my building slots with reseach-labs as soon as I can upgrade buildings, there won't be much space left.
And don't forget these bulky refineries you always need.
Oh and don't forget the already screwed admin cap.
just add 1 more job per base building and let refineries be upgraded and it could be enough.
 
In the late game, where you already have more basic resources than you know what to do with, this is probably what you want anyway.
Most people never reach the lategame, so that hardly matters. Plus you're hardly going to be colonizing new planets in the lategame, rather than Ringworlds which already give all the Research, Trade and Energy you need via Districts.
 
Moving types of production from buildings to districts and restricting building unlocks to districts instead of population would have made planet size matter a lot more, like it did in the old days. Maybe there's an elegant way to handle this, but I wasn't a fan of how small planets had such limited potential under the tile system.
 
Most people never reach the lategame, so that hardly matters. Plus you're hardly going to be colonizing new planets in the lategame, rather than Ringworlds which already give all the Research, Trade and Energy you need via Districts.

A few things:
-> "Most people never reach the late game" is sort of a problem on its own, and the correct approach would be to fix it, not using it as an excuse for why the late game doesn't matter.
-> If I am building habitats/ringworlds, then I *am* colonizing in the late game.
-> There is no such thing as "all the research I need". More research is always better.
 
If you do that, then you'll end up with planets having to fill dozens of Specialist jobs before getting any workers.

If done poorly you're correct but there MIGHT be a way to have at least some of our cake and eat it too.

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IF there would be UI room I'd like to see tons of districts of various types:
  • Rural -- Generator, Mining, Agriculture
  • Urban -- City, Forge, Industrial, Research, Entertainment, Trade
  • Government(?) -- "Unity", Enforcement, Fortress, Medical

I imagine the above covers the basics. I could see the icons just having "numbers" instead of the current block system we have now.

I would still like some special buildings BUT have them unlocked not necessarily by POPs BUT by NUMBER of districts or some combination:
  • You build a few research districts .... you can then build a Research Center
  • Build several specific rural buildings and you unlock the "+15% / +25%" buildings to enhance those
  • Build some combination of Forge & Industrial then you get access to Ministry of Production
Maybe you could be limited on the number of special building slots?? Perhaps you unlock those building slots depending what type of "Capital" building you have on the planet? This allows for some tech & pop gating if appropriate.

IF the UI issues could be worked out I could see this working.
 
Fiddling with things is cool and all, and this was a somewhat interesting DD. I liked the idea of industrial districts, how come at the end it wasn't a good experience? This should have been explained better, I am not a fan of the "I'm not going into details" overall tone of this DD.

TBH however I can't shake the feeling that the dev team doesn't really know where to take the game from here on. With quite a few major expansion areas having been pleaded to death by the community, like performance, diplo, internal affairs etc., so there shouldn't be a lack of directions to go. This new DD kinda gives me the idea that there is no true roadmap from now on, and the biweekly new DDs only confirms that suggestion.

Recently someone made a "would you recommend this game to a friend" thread. I'm just saying....
 
what feels wrong on my early game is running your empire without energy being much more efficient than running it with energy.
a technician produces 4ec a farmer -30% market fee 4.2ec I think a technican should produce more than 4.2ec
 
Same old boring stuff that no one care but I should tell the back story that I have stopped playing since release of 2.3 because building moving around after upgrade trigger my OCD. I'm still tinkering in my head how to design standard build order so my planets don't look different too much, at least on the first or second row. Now with Industrial District I will have less resources buildings to build, and even better less building slots to manage. I actually loved to manage building slot before, but I love to manage it so it is almost the same on every planets. Planet with most function move to district and left with few special building on few slots just to specialise planet it is very ideal to me!
 
Using districts instead of spamming the same buildings over and over feels so much more intuitive and sensible tbh. I think that's why ecumenopolis are funner to play. Would be nice if all buildings are all a bit more unique, strategic choices, rather than the clickspam that they are now.
 
So, civil or military production focus should become important at last. Nice idea. Feels like research production should be changed in same way. Also, regular buildings may produce effects depends on count of districts named type. For example: Ministry of production provides one additional Admin job for every industrial district.
 
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