Ecumenopolis VS Ringworlds

[VanguardKing]

I find the "ring-worlds make great bread baskets" argument to be terrible as i've never out eaten what my mining worlds could produce on the side, even with the ecumenopoli and habs. While they might be nice for power generation, it just doesn't hold a candle to a dyson, and if you are building wide enough for a dyson to be insufficient, you are building wide enough to just colonize another planet. There is no way the time/material investment into a few planets is going to outweigh the time/material investment into a ring world.

Yes, the conversion is done using the planet build queue and has not prevented my from constructing habitats while ongoing. You can even convert multiple worlds to Ecumenopoli at the same time.

I agree that the ringworld build time should be decreased now that fully housing a world takes more than 25 pops and significantly more time. Master builders + Living Metal edict does a lot for habitat construction time though, to the point where the 200 influence is really the only thing holding you back.

Dyson Spheres and Matter Decompressors are absolutely worth the time and AP though due to their immediate payout period at stage 1 and not requiring pops to run.

Multiple Habitats and gateways can be built simultaneously if you have the materials, they are completely exempt from the "one mega structure at a time" rule. But no, ecumenopoli do not conflict with mega structures.

 

[Novacat]

- Planets stop getting building slots past 70 pops, which is not all that difficult to reach.
- Dyson spheres fill the same energy needs.
- You only need enough food to feed the pops in your empire.

So, overall, you do not even need a ringworld to get peak efficiency from all your planets. I have the same experience as the above poster, they make more than enough energy and food on the side, on top of having enough pops to run structures. Of course, I might have also been abusing communal trait and robots -50% housing needs.

 

[Subcomandante]

- Planets stop getting building slots past 70 pops, which is not all that difficult to reach.
- Dyson spheres fill the same energy needs.
- You only need enough food to feed the pops in your empire.

So, overall, you do not even need a ringworld to get peak efficiency from all your planets. I have the same experience as the above poster, they make more than enough energy and food on the side, on top of having enough pops to run structures. Of course, I might have also been abusing communal trait and robots -50% housing needs.

Planet building slots might stop at 75 pops, but upgrading those building slots provide many more jobs, plus the minerals jobs plus clerk jobs. Getting rid of energy and food districts will get you the housing to fill those jobs.

A dyson sphere will fill much of your energy needs, but it does not have building slots itself, nor does it produce food which you still need.

You actually need a ringworld to get peak efficiency from your planets, and it is also a planet itself. Your impression that the energy and food sections of your planetary production are insignificant and "on the side" is a false impression. Why build a Dyson if energy can be generated just on the side?

Ringworlds don't have to be better than Dyson spheres, just different but as viable. Which they are. The main function of the Dyson is that you free up pops to do something other than energy districts, so if you have a sphere you likely won't need an additional ringworld. But if you have a ringworld you also don't need a Dyson sphere. In many games you only have time to build one or two megastructures. You can choose either way.

 

[Novacat]

Which goes back to my original point. A fully colonized ringworld will take up 210 empire sprawl. A fully constructed dyson sphere? 2. You can say that empire sprawl stops being important after a certain point, but, there are still unity edicts and repeatables.

Planet building slots might stop at 75 pops, but upgrading those building slots provide many more jobs, plus the minerals jobs plus clerk jobs. Getting rid of energy and food districts will get you the housing to fill those jobs.

I kind of... do not need the housing. My current game I am actually having rampant unemployment issues because there are too many pops and not enough jobs for those pops.

 

[Subcomandante]

Which goes back to my original point. A fully colonized ringworld will take up 210 empire sprawl. A fully constructed dyson sphere? 2. You can say that empire sprawl stops being important after a certain point, but, there are still unity edicts and repeatables.



I kind of... do not need the housing. My current game I am actually having rampant unemployment issues because there are too many pops and not enough jobs for those pops.

You have rampant unemployment because you don't upgrade your buildings. You can't upgrade your buildings because you will have overcrowding. You will have overcrowding because you have unnecessary energy and food districts.

Empire sprawl is only a problem if you don't upgrade your buildings.

Build a ringworld, and all your problems go away.

 

[ArmChairAttila]

Sorry I am not buying the empire sprawl argument during the 2400's age of wonders. I would buy it for sure in the 2200's and it would still have weight in the 2300's. You have all the priority techs finished right around the time you finish mega structures tech. Even a moderate unity build will have completed all the perks. The only thing left is some fringe techs, repeatables and ambitions. I never need to run more than 3 ambitions and alloys seem way more important than repeatables at this stage of the game.

 

[roman566]

You have rampant unemployment because you don't upgrade your buildings. You can't upgrade your buildings because you will have overcrowding. You will have overcrowding because you have unnecessary energy and food districts.

Empire sprawl is only a problem if you don't upgrade your buildings.

Build a ringworld, and all your problems go away.

Upgrading buildings require rare resources. Rare resources are made from minerals. Building Ringworld helps you with mineral income how exactly?

 

[Novacat]

You have rampant unemployment because you don't upgrade your buildings. You can't upgrade your buildings because you will have overcrowding. You will have overcrowding because you have unnecessary energy and food districts.

Empire sprawl is only a problem if you don't upgrade your buildings.

Buildings are upgraded on my largest worlds. My smallest worlds are used for rare resource foundaries (which are required to feed the upgraded buildings) and each of those only employs one person, so the unemployment is worst there.

 

[Magil]

If every ringworld section had two size 25 habitable zones instead of one size 50 habitable zone that would already make them a lot better, because they could support twice as many buildings and they'd grow faster, with only a slight increase in empire size (+8 when fully colonized? who cares, minor trade-off for twice as many buildings). They'd still come too late and cost too much to compare to an ecumenopolis, but they'd still be significantly better. I'd throw in, like, XYZ% housing, happiness, and immigration pull on them to represent their idyllic nature and immense size.

 

[Rhatt]

I genuinely think that several events that happen through the construction of ringworlds implies that they could very easily be minable.
The construction teams literally just drop onto the spine of the structure large chunks of broken-up planets. Who is to say you can't mine those? So on the hypothetical scale? It is fully doable.

 

[Secret Master]

I genuinely think that several events that happen through the construction of ringworlds implies that they could very easily be minable.
The construction teams literally just drop onto the spine of the structure large chunks of broken-up planets. Who is to say you can't mine those? So on the hypothetical scale? It is fullyhh doable.

As I pointed out a year ago, it’s insane (to the level of Zaphod Beeblebrox) to mine on a ringworld.

If you put minerals deposits on the ringworld intentionally so people can mine them,then it should cost you tens of thousands of minerals on top of the alloys.

If you want to mine the chunks of planets used to build the ringworld, we must ask the question why in the name of Blorg didn’t you mine those chunks before you used them to make a ringworld? An even better question is why are you using mineral bearing planet chunks to build a ringworld in the first place? Shouldn’t you be using the worthless chunks to help build the parts that don’t require alloys?

 

[Incompetent]

As far as I can tell, what you're supposed to do with Ringworlds is build/restore one (or maybe just part of one), plonk an Agrarian Upbringing governor on that sector, make sure you have Architectural Renaissance edict so you can actually crank out all those districts (also helps with building the ringworld itself), then progressively abandon all of the food/energy districts on your normal planets, turning every planet with few mineral deposits into an Ecumenopolis and leaving the others as heavily urbanized 'mining worlds'. (Even a small/incomplete Ecumenopolis is eventually worth it for the growth bonus, blanket production bonus, and never having to spend strategic resources on alloy/CG factories.) Alternatively, if you're a Gestalt, have a bunch of Hive/Machine worlds where every district is minerals and the rest urban. If you don't do this, you're not really leveraging the sheer number of potential farm/technician jobs on the Ringworld. So basically, Ringworlds only make sense as support for planets that can be dedicated to mining and/or industry, whereas Ecumenopolises justify themselves in almost any empire. Also, your total empire-wide population needs to be large and dense enough to justify such a vast construction: an empire that actually needs 400+ late-game farm/technician jobs is one with several thousand pops total, and at the end of the day you're creating these jobs in addition to the ones you already have, so it's only going to be a big benefit if your existing planets are already filling up and you've run out of new planets to colonize.

I think it's OK that Ringworld construction is a bit niche, because they're just one of many options granted by Galactic Wonders, and if you don't need one, you can build something else instead. They could be a bit more efficient at their job, though: as the rural counterpart to Ecumenopolises, I'd give Ringworlds their own population growth bonus and also a rural production bonus, and maybe change the number of districts to 25 per section but give each one double the normal amount of jobs/housing (so it's efficient in terms of empire sprawl). I'm also not sure about the balance for Agrarian Idyll empires: on the one hand, in theory their Ringworlds are a bit better than normal due to all the extra housing and amenities, but on the other, they're not very efficient at leveraging the benefits by urbanizing their other planets.

 

[Rhatt]

As I pointed out a year ago, it’s insane (to the level of Zaphod Beeblebrox) to mine on a ringworld.

If you put minerals deposits on the ringworld intentionally so people can mine them,then it should cost you tens of thousands of minerals on top of the alloys.

If you want to mine the chunks of planets used to build the ringworld, we must ask the question why in the name of Blorg didn’t you mine those chunks before you used them to make a ringworld? An even better question is why are you using mineral bearing planet chunks to build a ringworld in the first place? Shouldn’t you be using the worthless chunks to help build the parts that don’t require alloys?

Note the event where, during construction, the workers find a large vein of minerals randomly, giving you the option to get like 500 minerals, which, while a pathetic amount at the point you're building one, but is still almost a decade's income from a single mining station around some of the most lucrative areas. This suggests that the chunks are not picked through completely before used in the building process.
That means that you can easily have mineral rich pieces on the ringworld, which would allow for mining ong-term.

However, following your line of thought, building a ringworld should either yield tens of thousands of minerals that you mine out during the process of building the ringworld, or have several dozen small bodies around the ringworld after finishing to allow the mining of those minerals (Which, if you want to remain more or less realistic, would be 10-80% of the used planet's mass, depending on the size of their core.)

Furthermore, a reason to not mine the minerals before they are on the planet would be speed. The sooner you add every bit of planned mass, the sooner you're able to move on to stabilizing the bioshpere.And since a ringworld does have an edge, getting mass off of the ringworld afterwards isn't remotely as big a challenge as with a planet.

EDIT - Most planets we are aware of have, what could be considered minerals, so unless you're using refined spacedust to build your ringworld, you will be using "mineral bearing" planets.

 

[TehJumpingJawa]

What bugs me most, is that 2.2 makes mineral production the 'god resource', while simultaneously making the only source of large scale late game mineral production a DLC-only feature.

Rebalancing is fine, but for that balance to make sense only when the player has bought the latest DLC?
That stinks really *really* bad.

 

[Secret Master]

Note the event where, during construction, the workers find a large vein of minerals randomly, giving you the option to get like 500 minerals, which, while a pathetic amount at the point you're building one, but is still almost a decade's income from a single mining station around some of the most lucrative areas

And that is nothing even close to having a single mining district running for decades on end with tech bonuses generating the output.

(Which, if you want to remain more or less realistic, would be 10-80% of the used planet's mass, depending on the size of their core.)

I don't think so. If that was true, we'd have mining stations for minerals around practically every planet/moon/asteroid that's not a planet. But whatever minerals are, they aren't that common.

EDIT - Most planets we are aware of have, what could be considered minerals, so unless you're using refined spacedust to build your ringworld, you will be using "mineral bearing" planets.

Again, though, the game must have a stricter definition of what counts as "minerals," otherwise we'd have mining stations harvesting minerals around practically every body. And habitable worlds wouldn't have small numbers of mining districts.

However, following your line of thought, building a ringworld should either yield tens of thousands of minerals that you mine out during the process of building the ringworld, or have several dozen small bodies around the ringworld after finishing to allow the mining of those minerals

Or the ringworld needs those minerals as part of its structure.

"We've found a rich vein of iron ore!"

"Great, mine it!"

:Three years later:

"Umm, boss, there's a hole in our ringworld. And parts of the ringworld are breaking off."

"It must be Satan. There is no other logical explanation for structural damage to our ringworld when we have been progressively removing usable minerals from it. I refuse to believe in any other cause besides magic."

 

[Etrutian]

Anyone got time to make the Chad meme?


I personally think the Ecu is optimal and almost required to become very strong in the game. Its a production powerhouse, and without it, the build to power is much slower.

It might be wortwhile to give ringworlds and Ecu-like district for research/unity. That would make them much more interesting.

 

[Kahldris]

I think ringworlds should be the crowning achievement of a civilization. And engineering wonder to eliminate overcrowding.

However I guess overcrowding into that big of a deal right now.

 

[Novacat]

As I pointed out a year ago, it’s insane (to the level of Zaphod Beeblebrox) to mine on a ringworld.

Considering the huge amounts of unrealistic shit that is already in Stellaris, why the need to draw the line at mining ringworlds, in particular?

In other words, unless you are building a hard sci-fi game (and Paradox has repeatedly said they are not), realism is not a very valid argument.

 

[Less2]

As far as I can tell, what you're supposed to do with Ringworlds is build/restore one (or maybe just part of one), plonk an Agrarian Upbringing governor on that sector, make sure you have Architectural Renaissance edict so you can actually crank out all those districts (also helps with building the ringworld itself), then progressively abandon all of the food/energy districts on your normal planets, turning every planet with few mineral deposits into an Ecumenopolis and leaving the others as heavily urbanized 'mining worlds'. (Even a small/incomplete Ecumenopolis is eventually worth it for the growth bonus, blanket production bonus, and never having to spend strategic resources on alloy/CG factories.) Alternatively, if you're a Gestalt, have a bunch of Hive/Machine worlds where every district is minerals and the rest urban. If you don't do this, you're not really leveraging the sheer number of potential farm/technician jobs on the Ringworld. So basically, Ringworlds only make sense as support for planets that can be dedicated to mining and/or industry, whereas Ecumenopolises justify themselves in almost any empire. Also, your total empire-wide population needs to be large and dense enough to justify such a vast construction: an empire that actually needs 400+ late-game farm/technician jobs is one with several thousand pops total, and at the end of the day you're creating these jobs in addition to the ones you already have, so it's only going to be a big benefit if your existing planets are already filling up and you've run out of new planets to colonize.

The problem with this is that normal empires can already pretty much run 100% of their mining districts without ring world. Just starts stacking some -housing bonuses (robots + communal is basically enough, slaves are bonus) and you can abandon most of your city districts to run 100% of available mining + 100% energy + some small amount of food needed to sustain the pops. At that point what are you gaining with the ringworld?

If districts were re-calibrated to something like 3 mining jobs but 2 housing, that'd make off shoring a bunch of those districts worthwhile. Until then basically the only ones who can use Ringworlds decently are Gestalts whose world-transformation actually allows 100% mining district and is theoretically pretty terrifying.

As I pointed out a year ago, it’s insane (to the level of Zaphod Beeblebrox) to mine on a ringworld.

If you put minerals deposits on the ringworld intentionally so people can mine them,then it should cost you tens of thousands of minerals on top of the alloys.

If you want to mine the chunks of planets used to build the ringworld, we must ask the question why in the name of Blorg didn’t you mine those chunks before you used them to make a ringworld? An even better question is why are you using mineral bearing planet chunks to build a ringworld in the first place? Shouldn’t you be using the worthless chunks to help build the parts that don’t require alloys?

It sort of makes sense if you just used some planet-sized thrusters to smash everything into an asteroid belt, then built over the resulting debris. In fact this would be an argument for making them easier to mine (i.e. a +mining bonus), since they are already dug up and just need to be sorted through.

In any case, mining makes no sense to begin with in Stellaris. Mines never run dry, yet they can also never be expanded. Realistically you should be able to put 100 mines on any old asteroid (or ringworld, or w/e) to mine 500 minerals a month till it ran dry.

 

[Secret Master]

Considering the huge amounts of unrealistic shit that is already in Stellaris, why the need to draw the line at mining ringworlds, in particular?

Because it stretches my suspension of disbelief in ways that other mechanics don't?

Heck, I'm even thinking of a ringworld in fiction where people were mining their ringworld... and it was causing the ringworld's components to mess up. So, even in the fiction of ringworlds with which I am familiar, mining ringworlds was a bad idea.