• We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
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!
 
Planetary designations don't have any kind of cooldown, right?

On live if I want to switch an Industrial world to a Forge world, I have to tear down and build up a bunch of buildings. With the district version I can sort of use the military economy policy to sac CGs for alloys, but then can't change policies again for 10 years. If it was planetary focus-based you could dramatically flip around your CG/alloy production ratio on a monthly basis, if needed.

If people are running a 1:3 CG:Alloy ratio or worse in the lategame and still find too many CGs a concern, then maybe CGs just aren't useful enough in most endgame scenarios or the trade policy makes them too easy to get? Except it's a tricky problem to balance since non-CG empires exist and alloys are super important.
 
  • 2
  • 1Like
Reactions:
Although this may be complicated to implement, can I strongly suggest that the availability of building slots take into account queued districts as well as those presently existing?
I do not think this will be implemented since you can change the building queue in a way you are building the Buildings first and the districts second. You’d need to lock certain orders in order to always have the building slots you’d need.
 
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.

Yeah, I only remember CGs when I realize I'm in the red for a long time. You can get by on CGs with your capital being the only CG producing-planet for a good time.

Meanwhile, with alloys its like ALLOYS FOR THE ALLOY GOD, STEEL FOR THE STEEL THRONE for a good chunk of the game, until your capacity to produce alloys growns to the point that your main economic issue is no longer alloys but energy to pay for your giant death fleets.

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.

The problem is that there is no district that produces two resources. We have farms producing food, mines producing minerals, generator districts producing energy, residential districts doing their thing, etc. With this, we would have a district that produces two resources.

You can turn a car factory into a tank factory and vice-versa, but those things take time and effort. Ask the HOI people about it. Just because your country is good at building weapons, doesn't mean its good at building TVs.

There's also the fact alloys are waaaaay more important than Consumer Goods.

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

Yeah, but there's the issue of how much we want to shift. I want to go full alloys, because let's all be frank here - Alloys are useful, CGs are useless. I always run Militarized Policy early on, until I realize I can no longer produce enough CGs. Then I shift back to normal. There's no reason to go full Civilian Industry ever. You can build ships, defense stations and stations with alloys. The only things we can do with CGs is selling for money, fund buildings like labs, supplying pops and building colony ships. Is all. Nobody cares about CGs.

Feels like early game non-gestals also get underpowered.
 
  • 3
  • 1
Reactions:
Concerning Hydroponics farms:
While not an amazing buff, the Food Processing Center is currently expected to increase the number of jobs it has.

First point: hydroponics farms directly contradict the "doctrine" of districts being primary goods producers and buildings being used for transient ones. It would be more consistent for hydroponics farms to add farmer jobs to city/habitation districts.

Second point: hydroponics farms, as is, never get built except one edge case - Voiddweller start that refuses to settle any planet. Every other empire will just dedicate one planet to being the breadbasket and call it a day for most of the game. Voiddwellers have to spend precious building slots on farms, and while I appreciate the crampedness of habitats, it just doesn't feel great to be forced into picking Voidborne AP every single time because you want, nay, need, building slot freedom on your habitats ASAP.

Concerning Habitats:

I appreciate their crampedness. I really do. I like playing voiddweller starts. However, being limited to 3 (5) building slots early-game will be very painful - right now, I regularly fill out 5-6 slots by 2220, chiefly because of bureaucrat buildings, research labs and ... housing and farms. More specifically, here's how I expect a Raw Resource Gathering (RRG) habitat to look - full resource districts, resource extraction booster building, holotheater, robot assembly, housing, housing. This accounts for 5 building slots. Now, granted, the theater might be possible to cut here since housing does give amenities, and replaced with a farm/bureaucrat building/lab... but uh, that's all slots gone, until research comes in.

An industrial habitat would look very similar in that it would be gorging itself on industry districts, having a factory to boost the job count, using buildings for housing (and the Ministry of Production) and ... slots gone.

A research habitat would be all housing districts and lab spam galore, by the time that labs can have up to 8 jobs, or otherwise lab district spam with some amenity buildings; and a research institute.

I'm not seeing where habitats are supposed to be growing food, unless you expressly build a habitat for that purpose and use all building slots for it in which case ... I guess it can be a unity habitat making use of housing and entertainment districts? This would then look something along the lines of: districts such that housing district covers extra housing needs, rest is filled with entertainment; buildings are farms farms farms and the farm-boosting building (and the obligatory robot assembly because ... pops are power).

You'll note a distinct absence of ANY use of trade districts. There isn't a single use case for habitats to ever build them. Ever. This district needs a lot of love. Maybe a Merchant job instead of one of the clerks..? I honestly don't know. I just know that I never have any reason to build them, because every other district is always better ... and if it somehow isn't then there's no point in having that habitat there in the first place. (This, btw, is what AI gets so, so wrong - it builds habitats where it then proceeds to build these inferior districts, wasting population and alloy production and influence generation)



... Wow, this turned out longer than I intended and took a sidetrack into general thoughts on habitats after the change.
TL;DR: please take a closer look at how habitats are going to work with these changes, especially for Voiddwellers - and also teach AI to utilize them better, please :)
 
  • 11
  • 2
  • 1Like
Reactions:
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.

We'll still be getting an extra 8 jobs per district, so I think Ecumenopolii will be special enough.

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

This feels a bit weird to me. I get they thematically don't fit neatly into either categorization, but then neither do Mining Districts. My perception was that urban = building focused production and rural = district focused production, which would've made the new Indurstrial districts fall into the latter category. But then again, that was just how I saw it. Still feels a bit odd though.
 
I like the general idea, but could you please take a look at planet size? As it is I usually max out districts already without building too much city districts (if at all). Adding just 2 extra planetary space for industrial + an increased need for city doesn't sound enough. City districts weren't that important before, I liked the changed importance.

Anyway that's a district jump from 4 -> 5 (more like 3.5 -> 5) which is a 20% jump. 2 planetary slots is around ~10% jump (depending on planet size).

Side note: I already take mastery of nature every game, maybe increase that as well?
 
Planetary designations don't have any kind of cooldown, right?
Correct.

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.

hydroponics farms directly contradict the "doctrine" of districts being primary goods producers and buildings being used for transient ones.
Yes, it's a dirty, dirty exception.

@Alfray Stryke over there is a vocal habitat dweller and will make sure it's still playable. There's been a proposal internally to adjust some of the traditions that don't function for Void Dwellers to make things work better if they end up on the weaker side. We'll continue gathering information before making final decisions.

extra 8 jobs per district
:shifty_eyes:

As part of all of this there's been a bit of an economic balance pass. Building job counts across the board, Ring Worlds and Ecumenopoleis (guess what I learned yesterday from this thread) have been adjusted a bit. When a grenade like this goes off in the economy, nothing remains untouched, and I set off a few just to make sure I kept QA properly entertained.

We have plans to talk about the rest of that in the near future.
 
Last edited:
  • 19Like
  • 9Haha
  • 8
Reactions:
I can see those changes impacting Rogue Servitors quite a bit.

Will their industrial district produce alloys+consumer goods, purely alloy, or purely consumer goods?
Will the bio-trophy buildings get scrapped in favor of something like leisure districts? If not, will they have something to allow for extra building slots for them?
 
I can see those changes impacting Rogue Servitors quite a bit.

Will their industrial district produce alloys+consumer goods, purely alloy, or purely consumer goods?
Will the bio-trophy buildings get scrapped in favor of something like leisure districts? If not, will they have something to allow for extra building slots for them?
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.
 
  • 15Like
  • 6
  • 3Love
Reactions:
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.

FINALLY! I have been wondering for the longest time why only amenities were included in bio-trophy buildings. I LOVE that change.
 
@Alfray Stryke over there is a vocal habitat dweller and will make sure it's still playable. There's been a proposal internally to adjust some of the traditions that don't function for Void Dwellers to make things work better if they end up on the weaker side. We'll continue gathering information before making final decisions.

That I am.

As part of all of this there's been a bit of an economic balance pass. Building job counts across the board, Ring Worlds and Ecumenopoleis (guess what I learned yesterday from this thread) have been adjusted a bit. When a grenade like this goes off in the economy, nothing remains untouched, and I set off a few just to make sure I kept QA properly entertained.

Yes, a few grenades, don't you mean some high explosives on a surprise timer? ;)
 
  • 19Haha
Reactions:
While we're making big changes to the building system, can we buff gene clinics? Many people have done analyses to show that they take about a century to break even as a net economic gain, which seems far too long.

I know in days long past they used to give Society/Unity. It doesn't need to be that precisely, but I so very much want Gene Clinics to not be bad so that I don't feel like I'm making a big gameplay mistake by giving my people healthcare.

Shield Generators and Military Academies are also almost never worth building. Can we buff them too to fix this? They used to, in some versions long back (maybe 1.9?) give physics/engineering and engineering/society too, respectively. Doesn't have to be that specifically, but tossing it out there.
 
  • 13
Reactions:
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.)
I like that there may be more ways to tweak A/CG output.
But at the same time (my view may be the minority here) I actually feel like CG upkeep isn't punishing enough for pops.

As others point out, CGs are more like an afterthought (or a "hygiene factor") as they don't directly contribute to empire expansion and are just needed to hold your empire together, which is currently not hard (and if you do mess up, you can always buy your way out of a hole with the market with a few clicks).
  • Perhaps the CG upkeep cost for lower habitability worlds should be raised to compensate for increased supply?
    • This could be offset by habitability techs. As it is now.
    • But Also - Gene clinics could be given an extra modifier to (e.g.) halve the +CG Upkeep cost from reduced habitability (making them a great thing to have on colonies/frontier worlds).
  • I also feel like specialist and ruler strata pops don't demand enough CGs for their inherent upkeep(i.e. just the CGs to keep them happy, aside from any job costs).
    • I almost always run social welfare for the happiness bonus and never notice the CG hit,
    • I actually recently tried playing with Utopian Abundance enabled in 2200 for a whole game, and whilst the first 15-25 years are rough, after that I'm usually swimming in CGs, and able to expand as usual, if a little slower.
      • This is because the various (and many) +output, +habitability or -upkeep modifiers you can stack make it trivial to keep CG costs down in midgame until you can get an industrial ecumenopolis + mining world going (Industry goes BRRRR).
  • I feel like all pops should probably demand 1.5x or 2.0x CGs on Utopian abundance.
  • Whilst Ruler and Specialist CG upkeep perhaps ought to be increased by 25%-50% across the board in the other (non-basic subsistence) living standards.
1604654976799.png
A similar argument (over abundance) could probably be made for food, as I regularly see food prices crash in midgame+ from ludicrous supply vs demand (particularly if there is an agrarian idyl around) - though the AI having to split its districts 5 ways with this new industrial district (rather than 4 ways), meaning fewer farms on average, might help with this a little.
  • It'd be interesting if food was more scarce/less-efficient to grow, keeping supply down.
  • Or if food actually rotted (e.g. 10% of your stockpile vanishes every month),
  • You might be able to become an actual bread-basket or food exporter, then.
 
Last edited:
  • 6
  • 1Like
Reactions:
With this, we would have a district that produces two resources.
Thats something I would concede that this is odd.
It would also mean that while pumping up the war economy you'd also have to invest in civilian economy as well