Industrial World Designation rework (basically merge it with Refinery World)

[Critical Ethics]

The Industrial World designation (-10% upkeep for artisans and metallurgists) is just flat worse than Forge or Factory designations (shift districts to purely metallurgists/artisans and -20% upkeep to whichever it shifted to). Even in the "best" case scenario (A CG building and an Alloy building and no districts) it only breaks even, and that "best" case scenario is silly.

We cant just give it the same discount as the Forge and Factory designations because then there'd be a huge overlap between Factory and Industrial, since people always need more Alloys but CG requirements are mostly capped by pop demand.

My suggestion is to merge the Industrial designation with the Refinery world designation and replace the Industrial -10% Metallurgist/Artisan upkeep with +15% output.

There's basically two ways to buff the "generic" version of something without interfering with the "narrow" options:

Have the generic version give lower bonuses but have them apply to more jobs, like how Rural worlds stay competitive with the basic resource specialisations.
and/or
Have the bonus do something slightly different to the narrow specialisation.

The above would do both. Industrial Worlds would be most useful for CG & Alloy production when planets and pops are at a premium, while Forge and Factory Worlds would be most useful when minerals are at a premium or Alloy demand is vastly outstripping CG demand. If you do eventually fully transition to Forge and Factory worlds the Industrial designation would still remain useful for the same functions as the current Refinery designation. And finally you'd have some planets that work like the alloy/CG/SR equivalents to Rural worlds - a grab-bag combo of industrial districts, refineries, and natural SR sources all under one heading.

Bonus: Could probably expand the Ministry of Production building to apply to strategic resource refining without breaking the game in half.

 

[Critical Ethics]

Yep, exactly.

Then slowly I rebuild the other districts to Industrial and turn the capital into an Ecu, unless I have a huge Relic World somewhere which can more quickly become an Ecu.

So for me, making the Industrial designation useful late would be better than it being useful never.




-% upkeep on all jobs would be solid for Specialists (research / unity / etc. and industrial).

I'd use that.


EDIT: ... and just to add another thought after playing a heavily-modded game this evening, a general -% job upkeep designation would play VERY nicely with weird new jobs (mod or DLC) which used weird new resources like Astral Threads or Dark Matter.

The more I think about it, the more I like this idea of yours.

Honestly, the more I'm thinking about this the more I realise that my issue is how hard the game pushes you to ultraspecialise every planet hard. If most basic resources just came from rural worlds then the two or three planets in my empire 100% dedicated to sucking the planet dry of all metals would be much more noteable. If the Urban Specialisation provided sufficient bonuses to specialists that there was no real downside to making them mixed bags of researchers and industrial districts and such then the one or two Capital R Research Worlds would be all the more impressive. I like a mining hellworld as much as the next person, but if every planet is a mining hellworld or a pastoral paradise or a glowing ball of energy shoving power out to the galaxy I just start getting hellworld fatigue. To go full Syndrome, if everything is a hellworld, then nothing is.

e: Would probably make it easier for the AI too tbh. You could also make planetary automation much more aggressive about demolishing and rebuilding buildings and districts if labeling something a mining hellworld always meant you 100% wanted every non-mining district or non-support building burnt to the ground.

 

[HFY]

Honestly, the more I'm thinking about this the more I realise that my issue is how hard the game pushes you to ultraspecialise every planet hard. If most basic resources just came from rural worlds then the two or three planets in my empire 100% dedicated to sucking the planet dry of all metals would be much more noteable. If the Urban Specialisation provided sufficient bonuses to specialists that there was no real downside to making them mixed bags of researchers and industrial districts and such then the one or two Capital R Research Worlds would be all the more impressive. I like a mining hellworld as much as the next person, but if every planet is a mining hellworld or a pastoral paradise or a glowing ball of energy shoving power out to the galaxy I just start getting hellworld fatigue. To go full Syndrome, if everything is a hellworld, then nothing is.

e: Would probably make it easier for the AI too tbh. You could also make planetary automation much more aggressive about demolishing and rebuilding buildings and districts if labeling something a mining hellworld always meant you 100% wanted every non-mining district or non-support building burnt to the ground.

Agree to all of this, especially the AI which can't figure out how to plan, and the poor unfortunate planetary automation which needs to guess in advance which specialization I'm going to pick based only on local conditions (not empire-wide conditions) -- so I end up with an automatic "Generator World" with 15 mining districts because it had the potential for 16 generator districts (which never got built because I needed minerals instead), and for some reason the automation can't look at what I built, only what I could have built.

But yeah, the game might be a lot better if it just had:
- Rural World (+% pop growth, medium +% worker jobs)
- Urban World (-% pop growth, +% trade value, small +% throughput for all specialist jobs)
- Industrial World (no pop growth, big +% throughput for industrial districts and refineries)
- Empire Capital (+% pop growth, medium +% all jobs)

... and then special planet designations might be limited in number, or unlocked by Civics, like Mining Guilds might be able to build really great Mining Worlds which have +% minerals from jobs and +% trade value for mixed worker + specialist benefits.


The other neat part is that you'd want to eliminate Rural Worlds for pop efficiency -- and use Vassal taxes or whatever -- but that will tank your pop growth. So then you need to get pops from somewhere else (raiding, conquest, slave market, clone vats), and IMHO that's an interesting cost-benefit equation.