Greetings to the void-dwellers and planet-bound alike!

This week we’ll be talking about some changes we’re planning on making to the engineering marvels that are Orbital Habitats. These are currently slated for the May update that grekulf mentioned two weeks ago.

Introduced in Utopia, Orbital Habitats provide a way to continue some form of limited expansion after colonizing all of the habitable planets within your empire. In the 2.3 “Wolfe” update, we added some specialized districts to them based on the celestial body they orbited, opening up the possibility for things like building dedicated astro-mining facilities, and recently in Federations, we added a Void Dwellers origin which let you start your empire among the stars in three habitats.

This May, we’ll be introducing multiple tiers of habitats. These will be accessible to anyone with the Utopia expansion or using the Void Dwellers origin from Federations.

The first tier of Orbital Habitats now comes a bit earlier in the tech tree and require fewer alloys to build. The basic Orbital Habitat is smaller than the old version, starting with 4 district slots. They also have a simpler appearance than the ones currently in the game, a core of a station to build upon later.

Fungoid Orbital Habitat

The Habitat Expansion engineering technology is placed around where the Habitat technology used to be in the tech tree, and will allow you to upgrade an Orbital Habitat that has filled all of its districts to an Advanced Habitat using a planetary decision that costs some time and alloys.

Upgrading to an Advanced Habitat provides 2 additional district slots and allows basic housing buildings to be built even for normal empires.

The Advanced Habitat upgrade adds a ring of modules around the central core.

Avian Advanced Habitat

A third technology permits upgrading a fully developed Advanced Habitat that has a Habitat Central Control into a Habitat World.

Habitat Worlds have 8 districts, shown as another ring of modules around the habitat.

Humanoid Habitat World

The Voidborne Ascension Perk has undergone a few changes as well.

The perk now gives each of your habitats 2 additional building slots and automatically grants access to the Habitat upgrade technologies. Regular empires with the perk can also build advanced housing buildings on their Advanced Habitats and Habitat Worlds instead of being limited to only basic structures.

Void Dwellers will automatically start with the Habitat Expansion tech option available for them to research, and their primary habitat will begin as an Advanced Habitat while the other two will begin as somewhat cramped regular Orbital Habitats. In our internal playtests, we’ve found that Voidborne is exceptionally valuable for them to pick up early for the extra building slots, and the reduced alloy cost of building new habitats should relieve some of the additional pressure caused by the smaller starting size of their secondary habitats.

During this pass we’ve taken care of a handful of other habitat related issues, such as those built above nanite deposits now retain the nanite production, and habitats built above Zro, Dark Matter, Living Metal, or Nanite deposits are now treated as research habitats. As a quality of life improvement, you no longer need to remove orbital mining or research stations to build a habitat, the construction process will automatically disassemble them upon habitat completion.

Here are the full tiers of a few of the habitat types:

Humanoid Habitats

Plantoid Habitats

Lithoid Habitats

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Next week we’ll have another sneak peek at the May update, see you then!

 

[majikero]

Voidborne without extra 2 districts seems so useless. 2 extra building slots dont do much, basicly that means you build one housing building and one researchlab on tech habitat and each of them still cost rare resource to maintain. Maybe this makes refinery habitats betters, i suppose that was aim of this "upgrade".
Ignore voidborne and take any other perk. Almost all of them except maybe mastery over nature is better if you are void dweller.

Why would you ever build research labs on a tech habitat? Just make research districts and put housing on both slots. No rare resource necessary till you fill up all the districts. The housing means you don't even need entertainers for amenities. If you need more building slots, just add more habitats.

 

[Baqar79]

A bit of a disclaimer; I don't have the Federations, Lithoids or Mega Corp expansions, so my opinion is through the eyes of those without the void dweller origin or the additional benefits of the Mega Corp megastructures like the matter fabricator, which is partly why I'm so fond of mineral habitats and make extensive use of them in my games.

Now back on topic....

I'm a huge fan of habitats and ring-worlds (I noticed ring-worlds look much better now that they have skies!). In my current game I have many more habitats than planets, so Void Dweller would probably fit me quite well if I had the expansion.

However I'm wondering though what is meant by "2 Additional Building Slots"?

It sounds like increasing the 16 building tiles to 18, or does it mean that you start a newly colonized habitat with 2 building slots already open; though 16 in total?

If it is the latter, then that seems like a nice buff for Voidborne and habitats in general, as building dedicated refinery/food habitats is a bit round-about since I need a whole lot of other job buildings (eg Commerce Megaplexes) to give people something to do while opening slots to place refineries.

I had a few thoughts on habitat districts themselves, but typed it all out and then scrapped it as it was too long. In summary I feel that the Trade & Leisure districts need some buffing, as I've found myself using the equivalent buildings instead (Hyper-Entertainment forums or Commerce Megaplexes) with Habitation housing. I think upping the housing and number of jobs would help there.

On a related note it would be neat to have some sort of buff to habitats with only the 3 default districts (Housing/Trade/Leisure). For example +2 housing for each district to represent the additional space saved by the removal of those special mineral/research/energy districts.

 

[Devanor]

However I'm wondering though what is meant by "2 Additional Building Slots"?

It sounds like increasing the 16 building tiles to 18, or does it mean that you start a newly colonized habitat with 2 building slots already open; though 16 in total?

You start with 2 building slots open.

 

[Spyre2k]

The reason why pops is power is because of building slots. Resources is really easy to come by but getting more building slots needs more pops and more pops is more drain on resources. If my 10 pop habitat already makes more alloys than your 20 pop world, I'm in a stronger position than you.

I'm gonna have to disagree with you on building slots being what makes pops have power. The reason pops are power is because they are your primary source for everything in the economy. Once you grab space resources their production only increases slightly with a few limited techs. After that if you want more of anything, be it resources, unity, science, and etc. then you need pops to get it for you.

Building slots are rather limited in the start but having more of them can easily lead into a trap. You talk about a low pop Habitat making more than a higher pop planet and I'll assume that's cause you have more Alloy factories. Well that's nice and all but you need raw resources to run those factories as it requires energy to upkeep and minerals to process.

In my experiance starting out as VD it's minerals more than Alloys that is a major limiting factor. You need minerals to grab up all those space resources, you need minerals to build districts which are more expensive on habitat, you need minerals to build those extra buildings, and of course you need minerals to run those alloy factories. I often find myself buying some extra minerals so that I can build districts so my pops have jobs.

As the game progresses building slots become even less important as 2 Alloy factories Mk2 and 1 Motes Fabricator gives you 11 jobs vs the 6 jobs you would get from having just 3 Alloy Mk1 buildings. This is even less of an issue if you got with City Worlds as you have Alloy and CG districts which let you focus more on just having strategic resources fill up your building slots. And Ring worlds let you do the same with R&D.

I usually end up having to make several worlds are pure extraction worlds (aka energy/minerals/food) and use specialized worlds with Alloys/CG/R&D which consume so much they can take multiple worlds to supply them. Once you get mega engineering you can get Matter Decompressor and Dyson Sphere which lets me just more large groups of people in mass to the city worlds or ring worlds.

But ultimately late game I often find myself with unused building slots because nothing there would help my economy. The pops need to stay in the mines/fields to get me the raw resources I need and if I need more people in Factories I just move them over to a specialized world. I often have so many extra strategic refineries that I got like +10 or more per month in all 3.