This is the third trade with similar thoughts. I think that I refined them enough to we worth another post.
What’s wrong with current planetary management?
The current model uses two very different entities playing by different rules. Districts can be built any time at any number (with caps on rural district number set by planetary features) Building slots are unlocked based on pop count on planet. That, on its own, could be OK. The problem is, the number of building slots is capped at 16, independent on the size of the planet, while maximum number of districts scales with planet size
This means that opportunity cost for building districts and buildings scales differently with planet size. Once 75 pop limit is hit (which is surprisingly easy) the larger planets are much more prone to deficit of amenity and crime enforcement buildings. This problem probably could be refined if we had unlimited number of building slots
Another big problem is represented by five buildings: mineral purification hub, energy grid, food processing facilities research institute, galaxy stock exchange and their upgrades. These buildings provide multiplicative modifiers to planet, while other buildings provide additive modifiers to planet. This means, that relative value of resource boosters and other buildings is different depending on the planet size.
The situation is further complicated by ecumenopolis and habitats. They provide districts offering same capabilities as buildings. It isn’t clear for habitats (details depend heavily on empire build), but ecumenopolis makes production and trade buildings obsolete.
Alltogether those unobvious details make it very hard to estimate relative value of building, building slot and district, and make chances of creating a decent AI slim. But also it makes life of human players annoyingly hard, since they have to careffuly manage their buildings and cannot leave it to AI. They cannot even pre-build since buildings slots are opened with population of the planet.
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What could be done.
First, all buildings could be separated into those that provide multiplicative effect and those that provide additive effect. They would use different slot grid and probably different unlock mechanics, since their relative value scales differently.
Second, district/buidling set should be more unified between colony types to make them easier to compare. It does NOT mean that colony types should lose their individuality, quite the contrary, they need to stay different…
And this is the third part. Since we already have buildings providing multiplicative effects, we can just as well embrace this mechanic and differentiate colonies by the set of multiplicative buildings.
This naturally suggests to make jobs come from multiplicative interaction of buildings and districts. This ensures that building value scales with district number (and planet size). More importantly, it allows player to quickly decide what does he want from the particular planet, pre-build relevant buildings and let the AI to handle building of individual districts.
How could it work. On the start of new colony, player pre-builds buildings representing, say, advanced Mining and basic Agriculture Infrastructure and decides that he is OK with only basic amenities, building basic Service Network. Advanced mining infrastructure creates 2 housing and 2 miner jobs/mining district and basic agriculture infrastructure creates 1 housing 1 farmer job/district. Basic service grid provides 1 amenity/district and 1 additional clerk jobs/city district. He decides to use minimal law enforcement, so he builds deputy network, providing 1 enforcer jobs/city district. After that auto-build ai builds relevant districts when unemployment hist (agrictulture if food stockpile is dangerously low or the food income is negative, city district if there is overcrowding or amenity decit or crime and mininig district otherwise) Than the player researches tech “advanced mineral refineries”. He builds a building representing said advanced refineries, which provides bonus to miner production.
There is no reason to prohibit pre-building infrastructure in this model, since the infrastructure is actually built with districts, and buildings simply represent solution that was made on development of those buildings.
Flavor of ecumenopolis and habitats can perfectly be preserved in this system. Ecumenopolis is simply a planet with entirety of the planet lythosphere and atmosphere under control, so it has limited district set (because control infrastructure needs to cover entirety of the planet), but has bonuses to productivity of the jobs in its districts. Habitat is very similar in that regard to ecumenopolis, but is more crowded, so it has inherent penalty to housing.
I see one problem. What I gathered from the game files and modding guide suggests that while it’s easy to have jobs per district depending on building set, it is not possible (or, at least, not simple) to make cost of a buidling scale with number of districts or the cost of districts to change depending on building set. Same goes for upkeep. This breaks scaling. The solution would require to adjust core game engine.
What’s wrong with current planetary management?
The current model uses two very different entities playing by different rules. Districts can be built any time at any number (with caps on rural district number set by planetary features) Building slots are unlocked based on pop count on planet. That, on its own, could be OK. The problem is, the number of building slots is capped at 16, independent on the size of the planet, while maximum number of districts scales with planet size
This means that opportunity cost for building districts and buildings scales differently with planet size. Once 75 pop limit is hit (which is surprisingly easy) the larger planets are much more prone to deficit of amenity and crime enforcement buildings. This problem probably could be refined if we had unlimited number of building slots
Another big problem is represented by five buildings: mineral purification hub, energy grid, food processing facilities research institute, galaxy stock exchange and their upgrades. These buildings provide multiplicative modifiers to planet, while other buildings provide additive modifiers to planet. This means, that relative value of resource boosters and other buildings is different depending on the planet size.
The situation is further complicated by ecumenopolis and habitats. They provide districts offering same capabilities as buildings. It isn’t clear for habitats (details depend heavily on empire build), but ecumenopolis makes production and trade buildings obsolete.
Alltogether those unobvious details make it very hard to estimate relative value of building, building slot and district, and make chances of creating a decent AI slim. But also it makes life of human players annoyingly hard, since they have to careffuly manage their buildings and cannot leave it to AI. They cannot even pre-build since buildings slots are opened with population of the planet.
=========================================
What could be done.
First, all buildings could be separated into those that provide multiplicative effect and those that provide additive effect. They would use different slot grid and probably different unlock mechanics, since their relative value scales differently.
Second, district/buidling set should be more unified between colony types to make them easier to compare. It does NOT mean that colony types should lose their individuality, quite the contrary, they need to stay different…
And this is the third part. Since we already have buildings providing multiplicative effects, we can just as well embrace this mechanic and differentiate colonies by the set of multiplicative buildings.
This naturally suggests to make jobs come from multiplicative interaction of buildings and districts. This ensures that building value scales with district number (and planet size). More importantly, it allows player to quickly decide what does he want from the particular planet, pre-build relevant buildings and let the AI to handle building of individual districts.
How could it work. On the start of new colony, player pre-builds buildings representing, say, advanced Mining and basic Agriculture Infrastructure and decides that he is OK with only basic amenities, building basic Service Network. Advanced mining infrastructure creates 2 housing and 2 miner jobs/mining district and basic agriculture infrastructure creates 1 housing 1 farmer job/district. Basic service grid provides 1 amenity/district and 1 additional clerk jobs/city district. He decides to use minimal law enforcement, so he builds deputy network, providing 1 enforcer jobs/city district. After that auto-build ai builds relevant districts when unemployment hist (agrictulture if food stockpile is dangerously low or the food income is negative, city district if there is overcrowding or amenity decit or crime and mininig district otherwise) Than the player researches tech “advanced mineral refineries”. He builds a building representing said advanced refineries, which provides bonus to miner production.
There is no reason to prohibit pre-building infrastructure in this model, since the infrastructure is actually built with districts, and buildings simply represent solution that was made on development of those buildings.
Flavor of ecumenopolis and habitats can perfectly be preserved in this system. Ecumenopolis is simply a planet with entirety of the planet lythosphere and atmosphere under control, so it has limited district set (because control infrastructure needs to cover entirety of the planet), but has bonuses to productivity of the jobs in its districts. Habitat is very similar in that regard to ecumenopolis, but is more crowded, so it has inherent penalty to housing.
I see one problem. What I gathered from the game files and modding guide suggests that while it’s easy to have jobs per district depending on building set, it is not possible (or, at least, not simple) to make cost of a buidling scale with number of districts or the cost of districts to change depending on building set. Same goes for upkeep. This breaks scaling. The solution would require to adjust core game engine.