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

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.

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.

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.

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!

 

[Sledjer]

Just realized Consumer Goods and Alloys will be produced in the same district. That's bizarre, no other resource is produced like that.

Personally I would rather have Alloys and Consumer Goods in separate districts. Say, Heavy Industrial District and Light Industrial District or something like that.

I think it would also should be more important to produce more consumer goods. Consumer Goods and Food both share the same problem right now - as long as you don't have a deficit, it is not necessary to care. Alloys are a BIG bottle-neck, nobody really cares about CGs.

Also, just because you have one type of industry, doesn't mean you have the other. I think a good case here is the Soviet Union - they had strong Heavy Industry, but their Light Industry was inferior and smaller.

Way I see it, Industry producing Alloys with minerals would represent turning raw material minerals into more complex materials - like turning iron into steel, or tin and copper into bronze, or titanium into armor plating. Which goes into things like spaceships and such.

Meanwhile, CGs represent things people use every day. Civilian stuff. Chairs, cigarretes, holodecks, ladders, flying cars, the works.

I think it would make sense to take a cue from HOI and have separate districts for Alloys and CGs. Like how Hearts of Iron IV has a division between Civilian Factories and Industrial Factories. However, you can convert one into the other - so your car factory can, with some retooling, start producing jeeps for the war effort.}

I also think that it would make it easier to specialize a world for producing either alloys or CGs.

That's a fair point. Probably what will happen as a result of this if unchanged is that people will basically forget about consumer goods entirely, because they will produce more than enough just trying to pump out alloys. It also constitutes a pretty sizeable buff for gestalt empires.

 

[Tamwin5]

There is still a major obstacle to prebuilding: maintenance.
With the old tile system a building without a pop using it didn't have maintenance. I don't get why this isn't a thing anymore with the current system. If all of the jobs/housing/whatever a district/building provides are currently unused, no maintenance should be charged.

When I play a genocoidal race I find myself often destroying the infrastructure of conquered planets to save on the ruinous maintenance, only having to rebuild everything gradually when my own pops slowly repopulate the planet.

You can just disable buildings, in which case they take no upkeep and give no jobs/bonuses, but that's a fair bit of micro. Still better than destroying things on conquest though.

 

[DrFranknfurter]

Me gusta el rol, y como son liga comerial los mantengo con el comercio y el mercado galatico en la 1.8 (siempre estaba en abundancia asi que el comercio lo usaba para materiales raros( estrategicos ) . Si eso cambia seria mas de lo mismo, impliando mas comercio y dependencia del mercado, igual la raza es totalmente comerial( ahorradores, poco adaptables, larga esperanza de vida, reproduccion lenta y habitantes del espacio), civitas ( comerciantes libre y franquicias).

Google Translate:
I like the role [roleplay], and since they are a commercial league, I keep them with commerce and the galactic market in 1.8 (it was always in abundance so commerce used it for rare materials (strategic). If that changes it would be more of the same, implying more trade and dependence on the market, even the race is totally commercial (savers [Thrifty], little adaptable, long life expectancy, slow reproduction and inhabitants of space), civitas [civics] (free traders and franchises).

I do like Voidborn Megacorps. Voidborn because I like to imagine living permanently in space, a dream captured by books like "The Expanse" (written by James S. A. Corey - please no spoilers I haven't read them all yet) and I like Megacorps for staying small and relying on trade to survive and to grow and control the galaxy from my small little corner of it.

Until we know more details of the changes it's hard to work out how gameplay will be impacted by the changes. Hopefully the QA team will thoroughly test Voidborn Megacorps to make sure they aren't significantly left behind with the changes to districts and buildings.

 

[salvation33]

I hate the planet view. You get the galaxy and system views which are awe inspiring and then you switch to the planet view which has tiny pictures of planetary buildings and districts that are supposed to be massive. Everything looks so dead and lifeless.

 

[BrokenSky]

And yet people play Go – one of the most starkly minimalist tabletop games – more than once.

Even when they only have a computer to play against.

I feel like you're missing the point of what I'm saying (which tends to happen when you ignore >80% of my post).

I'm not saying games like that aren't good or can't be good. What I'm saying is that they give you exactly one experience, very clearly. Now you can make a game which just does that, but not every game should be like that and it's a good thing that many games aren't. Stellaris clearly falls well outside of that category, so it's clearly a bad idea to apply a standard designed to optimize games within that category as though it were a universal paradigm.

Or to put it another way, not everyone enjoys playing Go.

 

[grommile]

Stellaris needs more things than Go, naturally.

But to think that there are things in it which could be removed without replacement, and the game would be better for doing so, is perfectly reasonable.

 

[brantodb01]

My No1 concern with the game is performance.
I don't want to play a game I can't play 1/3 of.
Could making the AI do mindless planetary templates increase performance as they don't assess their situation?

 

[klingonadmiral]

So how do the Industrial Districts scale into the lategame? By then an empire should have hundreds of metallurgists.

And if there's one thing Stellaris doesn't need, it's an even more cluttered tech tree.

 

[James Fire]

So how do the Industrial Districts scale into the lategame? By then an empire should have hundreds of metallurgists.

And if there's one thing Stellaris doesn't need, it's an even more cluttered tech tree.

Uh... I don't see why this would add more techs?

 

[-Marauder-]

And if there's one thing Stellaris doesn't need, it's an even more cluttered tech tree.

I for one want more techs. So many interesting things we could do! >:|

 

[Tamwin5]

So how do the Industrial Districts scale into the lategame? By then an empire should have hundreds of metallurgists.

And if there's one thing Stellaris doesn't need, it's an even more cluttered tech tree.

1) By just building more districts
2) By building foundries/factories to give +1 artisan or metallurgist to all industrial districts (unlocked by tech currently in the game)
3) By building ecumenopoli/ringworlds which give tons of jobs

 

[Dragatus]

Research Labs are unaffected by this change. As Research is an intangible resource it'll be generated the same way as before. (Primarily through buildings.) The big change here is that the tier 2 physical resources (Consumer Goods and Alloys) will be coming mostly from Industrial Districts.

How about Holo-Theaters?

Have you considered adding planetary decisions (or planetary specialisations) that let us bias job distributions further for those that want to?
E.g.

• If you have 5 industrial districts (5 metallurgists and 5 artisans)
• Setting a planet to Foundry world (Alloy focus) would edit the jobs to give you, say, 3 artisans & 7 Metallurgists from 5 districts
• Whilst setting the planet to Industrial world (CG focus) would edit the jobs to give you, say, 7 Artisans & 3 Mettalurgists from 5 districts

This would further diversify how worlds feel based on specialisation type.

The thing that bugs me about this idea is that 7 and 3 are not divisible by 5 and I'm a bit OCD about the number of jobs per district being neat little integers.

Alternatively A planetary decision like

• "Support Heavy Industry" replaces the 50/50 split with 100% metallurgist jobs but reduces habitability by (e.g.) 10% on the world due to environmental damage.
• "Support Light Industries" replaces the 50/50 split with 100% Artisan jobs but reduces habitability by (e.g.) 10% on the world due to environmental damage.
• Edit: could even tie these into the environmental GC policies,
  • making the environmental damage worse (but increasing jobs) if certain pro-industrial resolutions are passed,
  • or putting you in breach if you take them and ravage your world's bio-systems with anti-industrial resolutions in force.

I don't see how having two jobs of the same type would be worse for a planet's enviroment than having one of each. It also feels a bit of for light industry to be as harmful as heavy. But that's largely a naming issue.

It would make more sense to me to call the decisions "Support Military Industry" and "Support Civilian Industry" and they added an extra job of the appropriate type and a habitability penalty per district. That way the penalty would also scale with then umber of districts. Let's say the penalty is -2%. So then if you have 10 industrial districts and enact the Support Military Industry decision you'd have 10 Artisan jobs, 20 Metallurgist jobs, and -20% habitability on the planet.

I would love to see more "strategic" planetary decisions in general (by strategic I mean situational or with downsides as well as positives), they feel like an under-utilised feature that could go some way to enhancing planet diversity. Could even have stuff like

• "Engineering/Physics/Society Research Hub" decisions that let us fine-tune science output, increasing it for one discipline, at the expense of the other two for researchers on a world.
• "Cathedral world" - replace housing districts with 'Temple districts' - instead of clerks, cities on a world provide priests (req. spiritualism)
• "Militarised world" - replace housing districts with 'Military districts' - instead of clerks, cities on a world provide soldiers/defence armies (req. militarism and/or a military academy on the world)
• "Feudal World" - spawn an additional noble job every N city districts, angers all egalitarian pops on the world (req. Noble estates [Aristocratic Elite] to be built on the world to activate).
• "Lithoid Birthing World" - Replace mining districts (or even the new industrial district) with "Lithoid Nursery Districts"
  • "Stone Whisperer" Job = +Lithoid Growth, consumes TONS of minerals. (req. Lithoids [duh], lithoid primary species)

I fully agree with having more strategic decisions and the general concept of specialized worlds. I'd just tweak the Feudal World to have reduced housing from cities rather than an Egalitarian happiness penalty. If you have Aristocratic Elite you're not Egalitarian so you wouldn't have many Egalitarian pops and the penalty would be cosmetic. I think cities providing reduced housing would be more appropriate (because land has been set aside for the nobles' estates).

 

[Wintermist]

I would definately prefer to NOT have one district that produces both. I want to decide where my mineral is spent, and I might not need more of one or the other.

On another note, I feel a bit like consumer goods and amenities are about the same thing, so perhaps one could look at streamlining that bit somewhat too?

 

[Gong55]

So, will the Machine Empire get 2 metallurgists from the industrial zone? Because artisans are useless to them.

 

[devilmaycry616]

Great changes! But there are two points. Firstly, I hope for a new Economic Policy.
Something like: +30% Monthly Alloys/ -50% Monthly Consumer Goods.
Perhaps even more: +45% Monthly Alloys/ -75% Monthly Consumer Goods.
This is literally necessary if the economy has not undergone major changes.
Secondly, I hope Foundry Drones and Fabricators will produce fewer Alloys. If the Metallurgist produces 3 Alloys each, then Foundry Drones and Fabricators should produce 2 Alloys each.

 

[TTJ]

The thing that bugs me about this idea is that 7 and 3 are not divisible by 5 and I'm a bit OCD about the number of jobs per district being neat little integers

Just imagine that one pop represents 840 real life workers (=2*3*4*5*7). Problem solved!

 

[NilsFabian]

Personally I would rather have Alloys and Consumer Goods in separate districts. Say, Heavy Industrial District and Light Industrial District or something like that.

I have to disagree here. Both use the same base ressource so one can imagine that there are common steps.
Being a modern colony world it would make sense to place the industrial parts of the economy far away from the urban districts. It might even be that those districts also represent low orbital space industry.

 

[cblue22]

Will Agrarian Idyll get its own kind of infrastructure and will things like habitat and ring worlds be changing?

 

[Eladrin]

Hold up.

You're saying you don't want people "slogging through every planet" to click an option to set their production preference, but you do want people to slog through every planet to manually turn off individual jobs? How is that not much worse than simply having a planetary decision that turns Alloy jobs into Consumer jobs?

I don't actually expect people to turn off Artisan jobs manually. In my testing, I've never felt that I was being flooded with Consumer Goods - between having a 1:3 ratio of Artisans to Metallurgists if I wanted, the Militarized Economic policy, and other economic changes, it's not once been a major issue for me. The ecumenopolis is also a thing if you really want super specialized production.

Enough people seem to believe that they'll drown in Consumer Goods that I'm going to look at possible ways to avoid it. (Whether that's empire policies, planetary designations, or something else I can't say yet.)

Well maybe if you provided your people with social welfare that wouldn't be a problem, authoritarian tyrant!

Utopian Abundance for all!

It would be nice if the production of the industrial district could be tied to planetary designation.

On any other world the industrial district produces 1 Artisan and 1 Metallurgist jobs

On Foundry worlds, the industrial district produces 2 Alloy Jobs instead, but the consumer goods building would still add Artisan jobs per district.

On Industrial worlds, the industrial district produces 2 Artisan Jobs instead, but the alloy building would still add Metallurgist jobs per district.

Something similar to this is one of the things I'm considering. I'm not totally sold on it since I wanted to keep the specialized districts of the ecumenopolis as something special, but it seems like the most intuitive solution.

Will the habitat industrial district get more workers then the base two (like the mining/energy/science districts)? Or will it be slightly inferior at only 2?

They are slightly inferior at only two. (But do give 3 housing like the other habitat districts.)

Will the percentage bonus still be in place, or will it just give more jobs?

The percentage bonus currently still exists on the Energy Nexus/etc. I only added the jobs to them yesterday, so the bonuses might not stick through testing.

Will the artisans currently given by the commercial segment be changed at all?

There have been changes to Ring World segments (like this one that you correctly guessed - it's now all Clerks and Merchants), as well as some changes to Shattered Ring.

How do these Changes interact with the Agrarian Idyll Civic?

Agrarian Idyll still functions as described. Industrial Districts are neither City nor Rural districts, so they are unmodified.

Like the Void Dwellers, you'll be able to unlock a number of Building Slots by upgrading your capital building and gaining technologies. Unlike them, you'll have the option to despoil your pristine wilderness with City Districts if you want more.

Have you considered that 2 foundry drones or fabricators could be too strong in comparism to bio empires who need addionally consumer goods and get by that less alloys per district.

It's possible. We'll keep an eye on it.

 

[Eladrin]

Will the AI be able to use these new districts?

I hope so.

Pheraps a revamp of hydroponic farms would be in order? Like making them worth the space?

While not an amazing buff, the Food Processing Center is currently expected to increase the number of jobs it has.

I think it would make sense to take a cue from HOI and have separate districts for Alloys and CGs. Like how Hearts of Iron IV has a division between Civilian Factories and Industrial Factories. However, you can convert one into the other - so your car factory can, with some retooling, start producing jeeps for the war effort.}

That's sort of what we imagine the Empire's Economic Policy doing - shifting your overall industrial base from one side to the other.