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Hi everyone!

Way back in Dev Diary 152, we discussed some planetary changes that we experimented with during summer 2019. At the time, we decided that while we learned a lot from the experiment, they required significant additional refinement before being something we wanted to incorporate into Stellaris.

Summer 2020 gave us the additional time we needed to revive these (and some other) experiments. Our primary objectives were to reduce the mid to late game micromanagement burden and provide quality of life improvements, including generally making the prebuilding of planets more viable, making planetary automation reliable enough to be trusted in the mid to late game, and making dealing with unemployment and pops easier.

We’ll be talking about these subjects in multiple dev diaries over the next couple of months.

Industrial Districts

Planet View Showing Industrial Districts

Azure Chalice is… er, was... a lovely place.

The planet view has shifted things around a bit and now supports the display of up to six district types. Most planets will have five district types available. This extra real estate could also be of special interest to modders.

The new brownish-orange district next to the City District is the revived Industrial District. Industrial Districts are treated as urban districts (and as such are not limited by planetary features), but rather than the Laborers that split their output from the original experiment, we’ve decided to have the districts provide regular empires one Artisan and one Metallurgist job. Gestalts have either two Foundry Drones or Fabricators as appropriate.

Industrial District tooltip (regular empire)

Work, work, work.

Factories and Foundries will still exist but are now planet unique, with the first tier building adding 2 jobs to the planet just like the old versions. The upgraded versions, however, will now add either 1 or 2 jobs of the appropriate type to each Industrial District on the planet.

Ecumenopoli will retain their specialized districts, but can be boosted by the Foundry or Factory buildings. The number of jobs per district on ecumenopoli have been adjusted somewhat as part of an overall economic balance pass. Since Industrial Districts are considered urban, a planet with a mix of City and Industrial Districts can be paved over and turned into an Ecumenopolis using the Arcology Project decision.

Since districts are now much more critical to the development of your civilization, the average size of homeworlds has been increased by 2, and as an additional side effect, the Mastery of Nature Ascension Perk may also become a bit more desirable.

Building Slots

I’m sure you’ve already noticed from the above screenshot, Building Slots no longer list population counts. Instead of relying on population, they're opened up by increasing the infrastructure of the planet. This is generally done by building City Districts (or their equivalent) or by upgrading the colony's Capital building. As a pleasant side effect of this, your buildings will no longer get ruined when a pop gets resettled, ritually killed, or eaten by mutants.
City District tooltip
Planetary Administration tooltip

Build up that infrastructure.

Two new technologies that unlock additional Building Slots have also been added, Ceramo-Metal Infrastructure and Durasteel Infrastructure. They represent the civilian adoption of military technology, and as such require some government techs and the associated armor technologies. The Adaptability tradition tree, for those that have it, still has a tech that grants a Building Slot as well.

As specialized and advanced worlds, Ecumenopoli, Ring Worlds, Hive Worlds, and Machine Worlds start with all of their building slots unlocked.

Habitats are intended to feel a bit cramped, so while Habitation Modules do not open up Building Slots, the Voidborne Ascension Perk will continue to grant two Building Slots to those that choose to embrace living in space.

The MegaCorps out there may ask “but what about our Branch Offices?” - we’ve got you covered.

Locked Branch Office building slot tooltip

Insider Trading. Institutionalized corruption exploited by the upper classes, or just greasing the wheels of trade?

Branch Offices will tie their slots to the level of the colony’s capital building. For example, a Planetary Administration building will grant one Branch Office Building Slot, a Planetary Capital will grant two, and a System Capital-Complex would grant three. If the target empire has the Insider Trading tradition, you’ll have one extra Branch Office Building Slot. (This may grant you a Branch Office building even on newly colonized worlds, if your business plan expects it to be profitable.)

But Why?

By decoupling the building unlocks from population growth, it makes it much easier to “prebuild” a planet to varying degrees. It removes some of the tedium of waiting for that last pop to finish growing before a slot unlocks, as well as the negative experience that occurred when a critical pop moved or died right at the wrong time. This change went through many iterations - in one of them the rural and industrial districts added "fractional" slots, in another the capital buildings gave more slots at each upgrade. The combination of having both City Districts and the Capital Building contributing to the slots, along with the additional techs, finally felt right. It's nice when even a newly founded Colony possesses at least one open building slot since it lets you immediately begin construction of a Spawning Pool or other high value building right away.

Moving the essential secondary resources of Consumer Goods and Alloys to districts frees up the building slots a little bit and creates a greater differentiation between heavily urbanized or industrial planets and resource generating colonies. Qualitatively we also felt that it "feels nice" to be getting more of your physical resources from the district level, leaving the Building Slots for more unique and specialized needs.

Both of these changes also happen to make some planetary automation decisions a little easier - your Tech Worlds should clearly build a mix of City and Industrial districts, for instance, to make room for Research Labs as well as to provide the Consumer Goods needed to pay for them. We do recognize that it may be difficult - or even impossible - to unlock all Building Slots on a planet that has not been urbanized, but those resource generating planets often do not have quite as strong a need for a large number of buildings.

Ideally in the mid to late game you could colonize a planet, set the colony designation you want for the planet, turn on automation, and reasonably expect the planet to be in decent shape - and doing what you told it to - the next time you look at it. (In the early game it's certainly possible, but your empire's economy may not be stable enough to support dedicated worlds and your colonies may be better off with direct caretaking.)

We have a few other experiments that are still ongoing that affect the relationship between urbanized vs. less developed planets that are not entirely conclusive yet. If they prove out we'll discuss them later on in this series of diaries. Our current plan for next week's diary is to talk more about the automated colony management overhaul as well as the automatic and manual resettlement of pops.

As a reminder, we have an ongoing feedback thread related to AI improvements we have in beta on the stellaris_test branch. We'd love to get more people on it and telling us what they think about them. (Please note that 2.8.1 is an optional beta patch. You have to manually opt in to access it. Go to your Steam library, right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> betas tab -> select "stellaris_test" branch.)

Thanks!
 
Or perhaps a type of scientific district? Producing massive amounts of researcher jobs and similar?
Yep, this is my suggestion as well. ;)

Ps. Can we build industrial districts on the habitats too?
It seems that by default, we will be able to build 4 Habitat district types: Habitation, Industrial, Trade, and Leisure. The remaining 3 districts, Reactor, Mining, and Research will depend on deposits.

The exception to this is Reactor districts, which is available to Gestalts at all times and replaces Trade districts.

What's peculiar here is that the suggestion to add Hydroponics districts would bring us to 5 districts by default, with the 6th added by deposits, making Habitats the colony type with the widest available range of district types (and the least ability to utilize them all).
 
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Only the jobs from the Industrial district would be shifted, the jobs added by Factories and Foundries would always be +1 Artisan per district or +1 Metallurgist per district.

Meaning that both Gestalts and regular empires can only get +3 Metallurgist jobs from a single Industrial district.

Regular empires would need to use the Foundry world designation to replace the Artisan job, whereas Gestalts only produce Foundry jobs by default.

Thanks for the clarification on that. But still, with the same amount of districts a non-gestalt can have 6 total jobs (2 from district, 2 from foundry and 2 from industry) and a gestalt only 4 jobs per district (2 from district and 2 from foundry).

In both cases the max for metallurgists is the same (4), but it does not make sense that non-gestalts fit 2 more jobs in the same space. Also, from a lore perspective gestalts should be better cramming more in the same space.
 
A nice suggestion which I don't know if it would be possible with the engine, is to have Ecumenopolises and ring worlds have 16 building slots instead of 12.
 
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Arent't you afraid these changes to industrial district will totally destroy void dwellers / habitats gameplay ?

As previously stated, I'm personally keeping a close eye on Void Dwllers and have made some suggestions for them for both this and future experiments.

Thanks for the clarification on that. But still, with the same amount of districts a non-gestalt can have 6 total jobs (2 from district, 2 from foundry and 2 from industry) and a gestalt only 4 jobs per district (2 from district and 2 from foundry).

In both cases the max for metallurgists is the same (4), but it does not make sense that non-gestalts fit 2 more jobs in the same space. Also, from a lore perspective gestalts should be better cramming more in the same space.

Some gestalts will have the ability to construct consumer goods factories, which will give artisan jobs to industrial districts.
 
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Currently we have them producing alloys with their Industrial Districts, but they have access to the Factory line if they want to add Artisan Drone jobs to them. The Organic Sanctuaries also come with an Artisan Drone job.
On the topic of Rogue Servitors, has there been an evaluation on how this will balance them? Currently one of Rogue Servitor's strengths is the extra building slots they get from bio-trophies, since even an un-upgraded sanctuary eventually provides a net-positive in building slots. With the building slot rework it will now be the reverse, with Rogue Servitors having to sacrifice building slots.
 
Thanks for the clarification on that. But still, with the same amount of districts a non-gestalt can have 6 total jobs (2 from district, 2 from foundry and 2 from industry) and a gestalt only 4 jobs per district (2 from district and 2 from foundry).

In both cases the max for metallurgists is the same (4), but it does not make sense that non-gestalts fit 2 more jobs in the same space. Also, from a lore perspective gestalts should be better cramming more in the same space.
I see no issue with this. The extra jobs come from the Factory building, which most Gestalt empires cannot build nor have any use for, and it works perfectly fine as far as balance is concerned.

Aren't you afraid these changes to industrial district will totally destroy void dwellers / habitats gameplay ?
As previously stated, I'm personally keeping a close eye on Void Dwllers and have made some suggestions for them for both this and future experiments.
This is going going to change Void Dwellers in an interesting way to be sure. You'll need dedicated Industrial habitats, and I presume the empire capital will now start with one or two Industrial districts alongside the Research district.
 
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This is going going to change Void Dwellers in an interesting way to be sure. You'll need dedicated Industrial habitats, and I presume the empire capital will now start with one or two Industrial districts alongside the Research district.

Since regular planet capitals get an increase size by two I am wondering if voice sellers might start with a T3 capital habitat and two t2.


Will hives get 3 jobs from industrial districts like they do from others? Their theme is all about getting more jobs from districts than regular empires.

With the new max district type limit can you take a look at hive and machine world's? They both feel inferior to ecumenopolis, I think hives don't even have the reduced housing bonus that machines enjoy.
 
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Some gestalts will have the ability to construct consumer goods factories, which will give artisan jobs to industrial districts.
I hope I'm not reading too deeply into this, but... o_O Some? The only ones that can are Rogue Servitors. Are we finally getting a new Hivemind type?
 
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2) By building foundries/factories to give +1 artisan or metallurgist to all industrial districts (unlocked by tech currently in the game)

Forgive me, I completely misread what the upgraded Forges do.

Still, you can at best get a 3:1 ratio of Metallurgists to Artisans, while in the lategame you currently run a far greater amount of Metallurgists. And sure, you can fix that with going Ecumenopolis, but they were nerfed because at first any empire gimped itself by not taking the Arcology project perk. And I don't think we should go back there.
 
Just to document it:
I think the idea of this change is the best thing I have seen from the Stellaris team since a looong time. Thank you for sharing this!
 
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I see no issue with this. The extra jobs come from the Factory building, which most Gestalt empires cannot build nor have any use for, and it works perfectly fine as far as balance is concerned.

Mecanically speaking, yes: it's the building that it's creating the extra jobs.

But thematically for me a building that scales with number of districts it's improving the district infraestructure, not making it larger because the district space is the same. My point is that If all the infrastucture is dedicated to alloys there is no consumer goods infrastructure to improve there. I feel that the jobs come from nowhere (thematically speaking).
 
I hate to sound like a broken record, but again, is there an actual reason not to have two different districts, one for alloys and one for CGs? Why combine them at all?
 
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I hate to sound like a broken record, but again, is there an actual reason not to have two different districts, one for alloys and one for CGs? Why combine them at all?

First I saw with good eyes the mixed district "for simplicity", but I'm starting to prefer to have them sepparated: having them mixed makes you move out of the way to control their output instead of deciding the output when you create them (and my other problems commented in other posts... :rolleyes: ).

Devs commented that they want arcology districts to feel unique, but at the end what makes them unique is the large amount of housing. If planet specialization makes all jobs from the districts be the same type then the arcology districts aren't unique in that way anymore.
 
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There should be a way to specialize the planet fully without further clicks. So say if you want to exclusively build alloys, if you set the artisan number to zero, it should stay at zero even when new industrial districts are built.
 
I hate to sound like a broken record, but again, is there an actual reason not to have two different districts, one for alloys and one for CGs? Why combine them at all?
One reason is to prevent district bloat, and another is that it's more fitting thematically. As someone said earlier in this thread:
I love everything about this. The fact that you define the consumer goods vs alloys ratio without having to replace buildings is much more realistic and finally has that "grand strategy" feel. This is exactly how industrialized empires work. You don't build new factories, you just use the existing ones to produce military equipment.
That said, as someone else pointed out, Industrial district icons should be changed to include the alloy icon right beside the consumer goods icon.
 
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This sounds amazing, these quality of life and gameplay changes dev diaries always get me excited for patches on the horizon, as much if not more than the bigger DLC content lol
 
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There should be a way to specialize the planet fully without further clicks. So say if you want to exclusively build alloys, if you set the artisan number to zero, it should stay at zero even when new industrial districts are built.

Currently planet designation can make both jobs from the district to be alloys so no need to manually remove the jobs. It will only add artisan jobs if you construct the factory building.

By the way, I'm currently leaning strongly towards "The Forge World designation shifts one Artisan over to Metallurgist and Factory World does the opposite" (assuming you actually have jobs of both types - most gestalts won't get this job shifting). It gives enough control that you can pick which behavior you want from different planets and is fairly understandable.
 
Will habitats be getting industrial districts as well? Or is the intention for them to be resource collection/research hubs while planets focus more on industrial urbanization?
 
You know, this makes me think back to fallen empires before 2.2 and once again makes me wish Keepers of Knowledge got their Ringworlds back whenever Ancient Caretakers aren't spawned.

Remember the Beacon of Infinity, Stability, and Perpetuity, with the capital Ringworld system consisting of the Palatial District, Trade District, Industrial District, and Agrarian District? Now that Industrial ringworld segments are actually going to be a thing, this would be a perfect fit for them.

I know this would affect the availability of a conquerable fallen empire Ecumenopolis, so I'd also suggest changing Font of Knowledge, now the fallback homeworld, back into a regular Gaia world and make The Core, the Xenophobe fallen empire homeworld, an Ecumenopolis instead.
 
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