Habitat not worth it in 2.2

[Retry]

- Habitats are great from a cost/benefit perspective for Research -snip-

I don't believe it.
Even with the recent slight nerf to research complexes, one can easily manage ~100 researcher jobs on a single dedicated research planet, and a base research production of >350 per category. Stacking a whole lot of modifiers can get this up to around ~1k research. Precisely how many habitats do you want to make to match that level of research?

 

[westamastaflash]

I don't believe it.
Even with the recent slight nerf to research complexes, one can easily manage ~100 researcher jobs on a single dedicated research planet, and a base research production of >350 per category. Stacking a whole lot of modifiers can get this up to around ~1k research. Precisely how many habitats do you want to make to match that level of research?

Yes, after everything is built and you grow the pops on that one planet to fill the jobs. 5 habitats will grow pops 5x fast to load up the research, have a very small net benefit of minerals for the researcher jobs over advanced research complexes, and also give you a lot more trade value (with the market buidling and numistic order building) to pay for the consumer goods that those specialists use. Yes, they use more empire cap than the dedicated research planet. But once you have the tech, you can get them stood up in systems fairly quickly. Note that having the extra merchants from the caravaneers is absoutely huge with habs since you have a 5 of them instead of 1 planet.

With stacked modifiers you can get up to slightly under ~200 of each research.

They do cost 15000 alloys and a lot of influence. So not that *great*, but not bad. I would buff the districts to 4 or 5 research jobs each and 2 housing.
The extra pop growth and trade value is really helpful though.

 

[Scorpio_Shirica]

Decided to try habitats with my assimilator machine empire and they feel much more worth it with them compared to when i was playing megacorps or regular empires.

 

[Nboaram]

I am currently using Habitats in MP in a tall build. The Extra Pop slots are allowing me to keep up in pop with the Hives and I'm basically turning them into Trade hubs/ resource stores. The science is nice, but it's also incredibly expensive. I am looking forward to using them to push population into my Ring World as soon as it is completed though. I haven't been in a war where I've needed them yet but I am working on creating Fortress Habitats aswell, and with a planetary shield it seems worth it to both seriously slow down my enemy and give me fleet limit that's super hard to remove. But I agree with the general consensus that they could do with a few more science jobs or housing or something, because they really seem like a hell of a resource dump for not much outside of trade. (especially in a Unity build like mine, they are rubbish at Unity.)

 

[T4r4g0n]

i havent used them so far, but since my main species (servitors) got nerfed a Little, by removing their increased pop effientcy, i will try and utilize a mix of machine Worlds and Habitats. Habitats for Unity and strategic resources. i probably won't run into housing problems, since servitor Unity Buildings provide themselves with housing.

 

[spyker92]

Habitats i feel got nerfed pretty hard.
Best thing I've been using them for is Unity / FL builders for Citizen Service Empires.

Fortress's provide housing and jobs and are overall pretty slot efficient , and you can fill the rest of it out with a few unity buildings / mote replicators.


The inability to make any raw resources with them though is a big pain. And it means I have alot of rural planets with big fortress habitats orbiting them

 

[Don_Quigleone]

They work together quite well with livestock pops. Livestock only use 0.25 housing, so housing districts on habitats filled with livestock are more empire size efficient than anything on a planet for producing food (except ecumenopolis) . Not only that, but all those livestock will unlock most of the building slots as well, and enable you to eliminate farm districts from most of your planets.

I could also see them working well with utopian abundance

 

[Evaris]

Habitats I've found two uses for that they're legitimately good at:

Fortress worlds, and capital system trade hubs. In the latter case, you can get a few hundred more trade in your capital system by spamming habitats there, and devoting them to trade districts.

In the former, it's fairly straightforward to just plop down a habitat in a border system, or any inhabited system, and load the thing with fortresses. Fill in some leisure districts to keep everyone on it happy, and you have a viable barrier to invasions, barring colossi, but hey, speedbump still.

 

[spyker92]

Why should they be limited to those 2 things though?
City worlds are so much better in basically every way, and while the investment of resources is larger, the return of 1 city planet is easily 5-6+ habs

 

[Evaris]

Honestly, I'd bump up habitats up to 8/10 districts (without/with MB), add housing equal to the number of jobs provided by the non-residential districts, and let housing / trade and a few more of the normal buildings be built on habitats. Maybe, combine leisure and research districts, or remove research districts entirely in favor of allowing research buildings, and add hydroponics districts to habitats.

Then increase the cost back up to 5k alloys.

They'd be useful, self sufficient, and become "size 10 planets you can build that can't have minerals, but have 100% habitability." Alongside a pop growth fix (where your pops don't grow faster as much just spreading them out versus a highly populated planet) it would be balanced and actually useful in general, instead of what it is now.

 

[Less2]

Decided to try habitats with my assimilator machine empire and they feel much more worth it with them compared to when i was playing megacorps or regular empires.

It's almost like Habitats were designed for Gestalt empires since they don't have the overpowered Ecumenopolis to exploit the exact same niche 10x better.

 

[WhiteKyubey]

Fortresses can be build there and they produce housing!
+264 naval cap from 1 habitat

 

[OwlOfSpace]

I feel they need to be a mid-late tech or be merged with some other Ascension Perk.

 

[Evaris]

rather than merged with another ascension perk, I think voidborn should have habitats buffed to where they're more flexible, and have other, planetary scale megastructures added - like fusion torches on gas giants, bishop rings, planetary rings, core-miners for airless worlds, dyson swarms maybe? There's a long list of megastructures that could be added that wouldn't fall under the theme of galactic wonders, but would make sense being stuffed in with voidborn.

 

[b5fan]

Did anyone notice that voidborne can be taken as the first slot ascension perk? This means it's a first slot choice and not an either habitat or arcology choice. Also habitats look really good at generating population to fill your city world, ring world etc. Also this perk allows you to create a new planet versus transforming an existing one. That is a huge bonus.

 

[Retry]

Did anyone notice that voidborne can be taken as the first slot ascension perk? This means it's a first slot choice and not an either habitat or arcology choice. Also habitats look really good at generating population to fill your city world, ring world etc. Also this perk allows you to create a new planet versus transforming an existing one. That is a huge bonus.

If you're willing to wait several decades to get Star Fortresses instead of using the perk to get something more immediately useful to help snowballing like Interstellar Dominion, sure. But I find stuff like the Raw Resource upgrade techs for jobs are way more important in the early game than starbase upgrades to get your economy to the point where you can even think about spamming habitats, which means you get Star Fortress later-ish unless you ignore those resource/research buff techs or fleet tech/weapon techs to grab the Star Fortress tech early, so rushing Voidborne seems like not a great deal.

 

[Nboaram]

If you're willing to wait several decades to get Star Fortresses instead of using the perk to get something more immediately useful to help snowballing like Interstellar Dominion, sure. But I find stuff like the Raw Resource upgrade techs for jobs are way more important in the early game than starbase upgrades to get your economy to the point where you can even think about spamming habitats, which means you get Star Fortress later-ish unless you ignore those resource/research buff techs or fleet tech/weapon techs to grab the Star Fortress tech early, so rushing Voidborne seems like not a great deal.

I’ve found that even on my unity build, I’m not looking at voidborne until ascension perk 3 or 4 depending on if I see the techs or not. And you’ll still probably want TA and One Vision and maybe the starbases one.

 

[Mike6979]

The other problem I am having with habitats is that I do a good job on my planets keeping unemployment to zero. I have found on my habitats that around 26-27 people I start getting unemployment that I cannot fix.

 

[Deggial]

Very interesting and helpful discussion. Thank you everyone for the shared knowledge.

One thing though I would like to leave out of the discussion - or at least mention it with caveat: the ecumenopolis.
City-worlds are only accessible with ownership of a DLC (which not everybody owns ... me, for example ) and therefore shouldn’t be basis for the evaluation of habitats’ usefulness.
Of course they can be part of this; all free and purchasable content should be balanced against each other. But stating that habitats are useless because city-worlds do exist is a flawed argument imo.

 

[Scorpio_Shirica]

Another funny use I've discovered for habitats as they are, basically as pop creators to birth people to send to my city worlds. After the habitats are major trade/ rare resource builders, then I just keep sending new pops to my forge and industrial city world. But I guess small planets with decent habitability would work just as well for that. At least habitats guarantee places where new pops can be made/ born.