The new sector system

[KampfSaU]

Hello everyone,

I would like to voice my displeasure with the new sector system. From what I understand the whole point of having sectors is to get rid of tedious micro-management as your empire becomes larger and larger. In its current state it completely fails at its job and it all boils down to not being able to create sectors yourself.

In my current campaign I have approximately 50 sectors and I would have to spend roughly 30% of my playtime just scrolling trough the list and transferring resources - by tediously clicking once per 1k minerals. This bored me so much, I tried to go back to handling ~150 planets individually but I gave up pretty quickly as well. Right now my minerals are just flowing over and I'm getting spammed by messages of "deviancy due to unemployment" and I just don't care and march my fleets forward to get the last of the Unbidden.

Another side effect is that I no longer bother with hiring governors. Giving a governor to each sector would be a waste of energy and hiring 2 or 3 has too little of an effect, since it affects only 3-6 planets.

All this feels really bad and it would be easy to solve: Please let us assign sectors ourselves again.

 

[defekt]

Le Guin Sectors are an unmitigated disaster.

Sectors are too numerous, by a factor of ten (well, maybe five now). The game rapidly becomes a Governor simulator.
Being unable to define what planets belong to which sector renders the automation balance setting pointless, as there's no uniformity of need.
Hilariously, this system was devised partly to help reduce micro.

This disaster could be turned around by allowing the player to have some control over it. Such as sector shape.

 

[Astelon]

To be honest, I liked the previous system way more. Even though you didn't get all the resources, and the ai wasn't the best, it at least got things done and you could just put planets you didn't care about in sectors and forget about them. Sure, wasn't the best system, but at least you didn't have to worry about everything for a long while. I never used the new sectors, I got no idea how they actually work other than from what I read here, and I'm not really sure how many people use them. I don't mind having to manage 30+ planets, I've got the patience to deal with all of them, but it'd help a lot if we had the old system back so we can only worry about the sector planets when we wanna squeeze some more resources from them. I even wish they'd bring back the insane amounts of food they always made, because at least now you can sell the food to buy other stuff.

 

[Blurb]

By repeating myself, I can keep track of how many times this topic has been brought up.
Please consider searching for other threads with the same topic before you start a new one, you're not the first to complain about sectors.

One problem with sectors is that PDX is trying to both make them an administration tool AND a gameplay hook.
These two functions have contradictory design requirements:
A gameplay hook needs limitations, rules and ingame benefits/drawbacks to make for interesting and non-abusable gameplay.
A pure administration tool should be completely free of rules, so that players can organize things in whatever ways and groups they bloody wish to.
Trying to do both means you need enough rules to prevent ridiculous abuse, while avoiding the rules that makes an admin tool useless.

Sectors will remain an absolute mess until PDX goes for a final solution and decides what a sector is supposed to be.
Until that time comes, sectors will be stuck in development purgatory, going back and forth between various flavours of pain in the ass.

 

[bmt17]

I was honestly fine with the old sector system, it wasn't perfect but you could work with it.

Now I have to jump through hoops using the console to switch ownership of systems around, temporarily steal systems across the galaxy so that it creates a new sector, release vassals and/or force integrate them, and then return those temporary systems back to their owner...all just so that I can have some semblance of control over my sectors and vassals.

 

[Army Pea]

I still don’t understand how the new sector system can be considered equal or better than the old system.

It just seems a bizarre step backwards in which no one , including the devs, can fully explain

 

[Kryndude]

Even if sectors worked ideally somehow, I'm not sure if I'd want to let the AI build stuff on my planets. It's just so awful right now.

 

[maxp779]

I still don’t understand how the new sector system can be considered equal or better than the old system.

It just seems a bizarre step backwards in which no one , including the devs, can fully explain

Yeah. The old system was much better. They could have built on it rather than gut it completely.

New sectors make mid game tedious and late game unplayable for me because it's just a snorefest.

 

[BlackUmbrellas]

I'd be happy if sectors went back to taking a tax on resource production. That's really the only serious problem in my eyes- the automation options would be fine if you didn't need to manually feed the sectors the resources to use them.

 

[Pigeon123]

The current system is nowhere in-depth enough for what we got now... Before it was do i use this world as a mineral dump, energy dump, etc and tell the ai dont build over. Now with all the options we really need a way to say, this is an alloy world build forges, this is a mining world mine it down, etc. Sectors can have also general reach if you dont care and want a generalistic approach.

Also the current system of sector generation is just meh, it be better if tied to admin cap sortive where each planet cost 10, no district cost, and 2 per system for the sector and it be question of how much each sector wants and potentially issues of taxation and other fun things but.... That would require a whole overhaul yet again of internal stuff.

The reason we have this stuff in the first place though is because the old sector system just cant work and they likely ran out of time to fully implement the new sector system and now are focusing on bug fixes before doing major changes to how ai handles sectors and stuff in general. This all reminds me of 1.0 useless sector ai which spammed farms and freed all your slaves.

 

[Urza1234]

I'm ok with them doing w/e you all want to improve sectors, as long as they dont take away my new right to manage all 150+ planets myself.

 

[Eelectrica]

Sectors in 2.1 were in a pretty good place I thought.
All in all I like le guin, but sectors have taken a giant step back.

 

[Dorian Ertymexx]

Could someone please explain the difference for us who have not seen the beta? What are the key differences?

 

[Chthon]

Could someone please explain the difference for us who have not seen the beta? What are the key differences?

The beta is 2.2.5, which is a category of 2.2 "Le Guin." 2.1 is the version prior to Le Guin.

There is no real change to sectors in the beta vs. what is live right now. We are comparing current sectors with the previous version's sectors.

 

[Cheexsta]

I don't mind the overall concept of sectors as they are now. I just don't like the "sectorgore" that results from losing a few systems and then regaining them.

 

[Raider18]

its funny how so many people complained about the sectors before and now that they changed it up and trying a fresh start people are now saying well the old way was sooooo much better.

I believe, they need to make the sectors a little more bigger, cuts back on having so many of them... And im sure they PDX will if it up when they have figured out a few other problems first. Simply put they are not going to be able to fix Sectors and AI running them for you untill they fix the AI problem, give them time. If they start talking about a new DLC before some of these issues are fixed then I would question if they cared or not.

 

[maxp779]

its funny how so many people complained about the sectors before and now that they changed it up and trying a fresh start people are now saying well the old way was sooooo much better.

I believe, they need to make the sectors a little more bigger, cuts back on having so many of them... And im sure they PDX will if it up when they have figured out a few other problems first. Simply put they are not going to be able to fix Sectors and AI running them for you untill they fix the AI problem, give them time. If they start talking about a new DLC before some of these issues are fixed then I would question if they cared or not.

Well personally I liked sectors before so I had nothing to complain about and nothing to say. Silent happy majority.

 

[methegrate]

I don't understand why they don't just switch to a planet AI option.

Sectors worked in theory (if not in practice) before because a mineral/energy/research/general specialization pretty accurately described the economy. I could portion off four planets, say "pump out minerals," and if the system had worked as intended that would probably have done pretty well.

The new system, though, is focused on per-planet specialization. Personally I think it's an enormous improvement over the previous economy. There's still a lot of room to grow, but I think it's immensely more interesting. However you can't tell four planets to all do the same thing, no less assign a "mineral" sector.

Personally, I'd have a planet AI button that lets the player choose from among the various planet specializations. Turn it on, click "Refinery World," or "Forge World" or "Agri World" or whichever you want, and let the computer take it from there (except for direct player intervention of course). For things with multiple options, have the AI try to address needs. I.e. on a Rural World or Refinery World, the AI will prioritize whichever resource you're lowest on.

Maybe keep sectors in for governors? I guess? Although I've never found them all that interesting or useful.

 

[Kryndude]

I don't understand why they don't just switch to a planet AI option.

Sectors worked in theory (if not in practice) before because a mineral/energy/research/general specialization pretty accurately described the economy. I could portion off four planets, say "pump out minerals," and if the system had worked as intended that would probably have done pretty well.

The new system, though, is focused on per-planet specialization. Personally I think it's an enormous improvement over the previous economy. There's still a lot of room to grow, but I think it's immensely more interesting. However you can't tell four planets to all do the same thing, no less assign a "mineral" sector.

Personally, I'd have a planet AI button that lets the player choose from among the various planet specializations. Turn it on, click "Refinery World," or "Forge World" or "Agri World" or whichever you want, and let the computer take it from there (except for direct player intervention of course). For things with multiple options, have the AI try to address needs. I.e. on a Rural World or Refinery World, the AI will prioritize whichever resource you're lowest on.

Maybe keep sectors in for governors? I guess? Although I've never found them all that interesting or useful.

I don't know about that cuz the current economy system requires you to adjust building prioirties according to your needs. Strict planet specialization becomes possible only in the mid-late game when you have enough stockpile of everything, making you immune to economic death spiral due to too much specialization. Before then you often need to build civilian factories in your reasearch focused capital, some farm districts in your generator world, etc.

 

[Cronos988]

In order to work with the current economy, sectors would need to be entirely decoupled from being a literal sector of space and instead be purely an administrative unit. Replace sectors directly with governors, give each governor a planet limit and let the players assign planets to governors.

The current sector system can make a return once we have systems in place to use sectors as gameplay hooks.