Just finished my first 2.2 game. My thoughts and suggestions (long rants ahead)

[AlanC9]

The way I like to play the game is a rather tall empire that eventually moves onto ringworlds and habitats, and whatever few planets I have could never make enough minerals to keep up with those. And since gestalt consciousness empires have access to nearly limitless mineral districts, why not extend the same to non gestalt empires. Plus I really like to make my empires self sufficient, and not reliant on the price of a certain resource to keep my entire economy afloat.

Buying the minerals doesn't work for you? (Haven't played your style, so I can't see the numbers for myself.)

 

[Pragmatic]

This! Make the second the default, and create a policy option so people can switch to the first policy if they prefer it.

We gave a delayed "drop a tier" mechanism, why can't we have a delayed "raise a tier " mechanism?

This probably crashes the AI economy as much as it does the player's.

 

[Cahokia]

To reiterate their design goal, ringworlds should never be built to solve a mineral problem. Rather a housing and job problem. If you are building every mining district available on your worlds you should have no problem. With roughly 7 planets you can build pretty much anything you want and buy the rest off the market. And once you get the matter decompressor minerals become a non issue. Unless of course you want to play wide but then you have access to a lot more planets and its a non issue again. I like to play tall in this patch and I haven't found minerals to be a problem. My current game I am at 16 systems with 7 planets after terraforming and I am able to drown in alloys without the matter decompressor. And then you have access to the market to sell off surplus materials, be sure to refine a surplus of exotic materials they are worth so much selling them on the market. The only time minerals have been an issue in this patch is when I was in multiple constant wars losing ships. Be sure to opt into the beta since it balances the economy better(mainly mineral to alloy ratio).

Also if people are having issues with specialist jobs, wait until the unemployment pops on the overview. That's when I go to a planet and build more buildings as needed. If you are seeing a hit to a certain resource just resettle clerk pops from other worlds to that planet and boom problem solved. Also if you specialize worlds to urban or rural you don't have as big of an issue since there won't be a lot of specialists jobs your building to begin with on rural worlds.

 

[SpectralShade]

I don't think the metaphore is well suited in this case. Forming a hill is, although simplified, piling dirt together. Scale up the process, use more dirt, and here you made a planet. As I said in my previous message, I don't think this is the case for ringworlds. I think you need to be well aware of the mineral composition, the nutrients and the density of the terrain you use to cover the frame. The final water and landmass can't be just something that happen after you mash together three or four planets and say a magic word. You can't risk tectonic collapse, random sinkholes or earthquakes and you need to account for distribution, composition, mountains range for climate control and dozens of other factors we can't even imagine. Food and energy are renewable resources (and ultimately the same thing), but including extractable-non renewable resource in the soil of a ringworld has to be a deliberate choice, or an irresponsible design oversight.

And you seriously think that any ringworld will ever get finished if you have to sort all the material in an entire system before distributing it over the frame?
You never noticed that you already have mines extracting minerals in space and doing exactly what you are proposing should happen (extracting the minerals from the deposits) and inpite of doing this through an entire game never empties the deposit? So if a single mineral station can keep digging and extracting from a single deposit over several hundred years without any risk of ever getting to the bottom of the deposit, how long do you think it would take to create a ringworld where you take and extract all the mines in a system fir their resources before distributing the leftovers on the frame?

I can answer you that already: Not in your games time.
The only way to be able to create ringworlds in the short timeframe it takes to create them is to NOT try and filter the materials. If you tried to extract the resources from the material, you are back to the task that mining stations have been doing for 200 hundred years in your game already without being anywhere near of 'finishing' with even a single deposit.

 

[Objulen]

The job assinment UI could use some improvrments, such as:

1) Job priority! Set which jobs you want a planet to focus on, or at least what resources. This is something that exists for sectors, so it should be possible for jobs.

It would be extra awesome if we could set ratios.

2) Amenity AI. Set a threshold of the minimum amenities before a pop is moved over to amenity production. Amenities don't do much except act as a second resource tax, at least for MS's, so there's not much benefit to maximizing them - the stability bonus for high amenities is too small.

3) Allow for click-dragging pops between jobs, instead of having to close off multiple job types until they move. That alone would make it much less annoying.

Habitats do seem weak for the cost. Their small size and lack of really unique buildings means that they're basically a planet full of building slots and little else, which makes them great for alloys, consumer goods, and refining, but little else.

If they want Habitats to be energy/research platforms, then they should have fewer building slots - like 5 to 10 total - and truly unique buildings that provide large boosts to energy production or research. As it is, there's just the Energy Nexus and Super Computer, so even if you use building slots structures to house all your pops, there are still tons of empty building slots.

 

[Cahokia]

All of the mineral material would be manufactured into some kind of alloy (like scrith) that would be the support/strength of the ringworld since it is subjected to incredible forces. The ringworld would only be about 100 feet thick at ANY section including hills/mountains (which would be hollow on the inside) and all the minerals would be used in the construction of the structural support. There is no way the system would have enough raw material if you built real hills and mountains. I think people forget the scale of this project, every last scrap of metal would be used in to produce the load bearing sections.

Also they cannot realistically model the time it would take or else no one would be able to build them in time. You can't say they don't filter out materials because if they didn't, there wouldn't be an atmosphere/agriculture/life. Which there is in game which means they do filter through all the material. You can't create a utopian world (100% habitability) by just dumping material. Whether that's realistic is another matter.

 

[Jazzbanana]

And you seriously think that any ringworld will ever get finished if you have to sort all the material in an entire system before distributing it over the frame?
You never noticed that you already have mines extracting minerals in space and doing exactly what you are proposing should happen (extracting the minerals from the deposits) and inpite of doing this through an entire game never empties the deposit? So if a single mineral station can keep digging and extracting from a single deposit over several hundred years...

I believe you're misrepresenting the argument. You can't use an aspect of game mechanics (i.e mining stations) to invalide a point about the credibility of material sorting in the event of a ringworld construction. As you imagine, the valuable materials obtainable from a real star system are not limited to a +2 mega-stash inside some rock in the outer belt. That is a design choice, to represent the fact that the area, in this case the belt, is abundant in resources and worth investing in long-term mining operations (on a side note, I'd love to see a depletion mechanic implemented). A mining station is operative for in-game centuries because building a new one every time a rock is processed would be bananas design. Not because there are gargantuan, inexhaustible mineral bodies of which you can only chip a little part every month. It is my personal belief that a civilization capable of undertaking the costruction of a ringworld is also capable of sorting out materials, even more so when they are a cardinal pillar of their economy. My point was about the credibility of such a civilization re-burying these goodies all over again in a structure they made from scratch, that's it. It's not like you take planets and mash them in play-dough to spread over the frame. You need to weigh those rocks, sort them, distribute them properly. Ringworlds not having mining districts is a design choice. I never said it's better, or more fun, and I feel you if you dislike it. But I stand by my point that it's represented in a logical and credible way. One to which my inner scientist nods in approvation.

 

[AlanC9]

What would a ringworld having a mining district actually represent, anyway? I'm having a tough time wrapping my mind around the concept.