Interested in seeing how the play experience would be - I modified my Materialist race with the Life Seeded civic to see how it played through. It is only 1 game, but I did play all the way through the crisis - here are my observations.
1 - A starting level 25 Gaia world is OK, but not great. Ecumenopolis get a +50% growth bonus for some reason, but your super special Gaia home world does not. Without some sort of growth bonus it will take a very long time to actually use all of those districts. I bee lined for Robots, built an assembly plant immediately, piled on growth modifiers and it still took over 200 years to fill up the planet.
Recommendation - Gaia planets should receive the same +50 growth bonus as Ecumenopolis. This will improve the value of the ascension perk that creates them, as well as making Life Seeded a little more useful as a permanent civic choice.
2 - Habitability is not that important. So in order to actually fight the crisis I knew I was going to need a real empire with normal empire mineral/alloy production to field some 100k doomstacks. To that end, I colonized every planet within my borders, built robots assemblies on them and just planned on running a consumer economy to deal with the penalties. It was significantly easier than I expected. I did run a consumer based trade network the entire game. My first colony was transformed into an industrial world running 5 consumer goods factories. I did build a handful of additional CG factories as needed, but about the same as I would build for my other empires. That was enough to deal with my entire population having a *ZERO* habitability on every one of my colonies. The habitability techs did eventually get my habitability to 20, but really what should have been a particularly challenging experience was not difficult to deal with, at all.
Recommendation - Habitability should effect both growth rate, and pop happiness. The growth rate I would scale from -50 to +50 with Habitability 50 being 0 (so +50 growth at 100% habitability. -50 growth at 0).
For happiness, I would create two scales. A bonus that scales from 80-100, and a penalty that scales from 80-0. Pops (should) expect a habitability of 80, so that is the zero point. Every 5 points above would be +2.5% happiness, so +10% happiness at 100. Likewise, every 5 points below 80 would result in -2.5% happiness, so -40% happiness at 0 habitability. That would then create the low stability revolt style gameplay that should occur when the vast majority of your empire is effectively living on tomb worlds.
This would really encourage you to grow your empire on 'your' planets, and would make all of the habitability modifiers much more impactful. I think I might do a thread just on Habitability.
3 - the special terrain features seem good, but are mostly useless. So the extra motes, crystals and gases are meant to be an extra tool for the LS empire to work with. In order to access though, you need to unlock the corresponding technology and (much more importantly) spend a building slot to access them. In order to utilize those features, you will be unable to buy other buildings that you would like to have in those building slots. (Research institute, Galactic Market, Energy Nexus, Ministry of Production, Psi Corp, Noble Estate etc.)
From a pure economic standpoint - the rare resource buildings are just a bad choice - a trap as it were. A single worker generating 2 motes is very efficient production for that 1 worker - that one pop is generating ~30 energy worth of value. From an empire perspective however, that building is OK at best.
If that building slot was instead used for a Level 2 alloy plant, I would have 5 pops generating 15 alloys. Only those 5 pops generate more than 15 alloys because I have a Ministry of production that gives +15%, so it is 17.25 alloys (3.45 alloy per pop). Stability bonuses and general production bonuses should apply to both alloy and mote production, so that is why I am only using the Ministry for this comparison. (for exact numbers, my homeworld had 16 metallurgists producing 81 alloys, so a bit more than 5 alloy per pop). So an alloy sells for around 12 energy. In order to purchase 2 motes, I should spend around 25-30 energy on the market. So my 1 mote worker is worth about 30 energy. My alloy worker is worth around 41. The mote building can only employ 1 worker, the alloy factory can at top tier employ 8 (was 10). So building an alloy factory is simply worth more than any of the special resource buildings, every time.
Recommendation - ideally allow the special resources to just be harvested without spending building slots to do so. At that point the special bonus of the LS home world is exactly that - a special bonus. Alternatively, create a single building that harvests all 3 special resources simultaneously.
Alternatively, scale the buildings so there are 3 levels of them, and increase the base production from 2 motes per worker to 3. At 3 motes, the building at least gets close to competing with an alloy factory, and will overtake it in some circumstances. Refineries being terrible is probably also worth its own thread.
TLDR
Stellaris game play improves when there are relevant asymmetrical starting options.
Life Seeded should be one of those, it currently is not.
1 - A starting level 25 Gaia world is OK, but not great. Ecumenopolis get a +50% growth bonus for some reason, but your super special Gaia home world does not. Without some sort of growth bonus it will take a very long time to actually use all of those districts. I bee lined for Robots, built an assembly plant immediately, piled on growth modifiers and it still took over 200 years to fill up the planet.
Recommendation - Gaia planets should receive the same +50 growth bonus as Ecumenopolis. This will improve the value of the ascension perk that creates them, as well as making Life Seeded a little more useful as a permanent civic choice.
2 - Habitability is not that important. So in order to actually fight the crisis I knew I was going to need a real empire with normal empire mineral/alloy production to field some 100k doomstacks. To that end, I colonized every planet within my borders, built robots assemblies on them and just planned on running a consumer economy to deal with the penalties. It was significantly easier than I expected. I did run a consumer based trade network the entire game. My first colony was transformed into an industrial world running 5 consumer goods factories. I did build a handful of additional CG factories as needed, but about the same as I would build for my other empires. That was enough to deal with my entire population having a *ZERO* habitability on every one of my colonies. The habitability techs did eventually get my habitability to 20, but really what should have been a particularly challenging experience was not difficult to deal with, at all.
Recommendation - Habitability should effect both growth rate, and pop happiness. The growth rate I would scale from -50 to +50 with Habitability 50 being 0 (so +50 growth at 100% habitability. -50 growth at 0).
For happiness, I would create two scales. A bonus that scales from 80-100, and a penalty that scales from 80-0. Pops (should) expect a habitability of 80, so that is the zero point. Every 5 points above would be +2.5% happiness, so +10% happiness at 100. Likewise, every 5 points below 80 would result in -2.5% happiness, so -40% happiness at 0 habitability. That would then create the low stability revolt style gameplay that should occur when the vast majority of your empire is effectively living on tomb worlds.
This would really encourage you to grow your empire on 'your' planets, and would make all of the habitability modifiers much more impactful. I think I might do a thread just on Habitability.
3 - the special terrain features seem good, but are mostly useless. So the extra motes, crystals and gases are meant to be an extra tool for the LS empire to work with. In order to access though, you need to unlock the corresponding technology and (much more importantly) spend a building slot to access them. In order to utilize those features, you will be unable to buy other buildings that you would like to have in those building slots. (Research institute, Galactic Market, Energy Nexus, Ministry of Production, Psi Corp, Noble Estate etc.)
From a pure economic standpoint - the rare resource buildings are just a bad choice - a trap as it were. A single worker generating 2 motes is very efficient production for that 1 worker - that one pop is generating ~30 energy worth of value. From an empire perspective however, that building is OK at best.
If that building slot was instead used for a Level 2 alloy plant, I would have 5 pops generating 15 alloys. Only those 5 pops generate more than 15 alloys because I have a Ministry of production that gives +15%, so it is 17.25 alloys (3.45 alloy per pop). Stability bonuses and general production bonuses should apply to both alloy and mote production, so that is why I am only using the Ministry for this comparison. (for exact numbers, my homeworld had 16 metallurgists producing 81 alloys, so a bit more than 5 alloy per pop). So an alloy sells for around 12 energy. In order to purchase 2 motes, I should spend around 25-30 energy on the market. So my 1 mote worker is worth about 30 energy. My alloy worker is worth around 41. The mote building can only employ 1 worker, the alloy factory can at top tier employ 8 (was 10). So building an alloy factory is simply worth more than any of the special resource buildings, every time.
Recommendation - ideally allow the special resources to just be harvested without spending building slots to do so. At that point the special bonus of the LS home world is exactly that - a special bonus. Alternatively, create a single building that harvests all 3 special resources simultaneously.
Alternatively, scale the buildings so there are 3 levels of them, and increase the base production from 2 motes per worker to 3. At 3 motes, the building at least gets close to competing with an alloy factory, and will overtake it in some circumstances. Refineries being terrible is probably also worth its own thread.
TLDR
Stellaris game play improves when there are relevant asymmetrical starting options.
Life Seeded should be one of those, it currently is not.
