Hello everyone! I hope you have been enjoying the blog so far, and you find the glimpses into the future of New Horizons entertaining. Things have been a bit slow on our end the past few weeks, with various real-life commitments, and we have worked mostly on polish and bug fixing.
However, I’m still dabbling away with the fundamentals of the new economic overhaul. Today, I want to start laying down some specifics.
The goal of the overhaul is to introduce something of a ‘new layer’, that will sit on top of the existing vanilla economy and allow the player a level of control and customization about how they want to design their planets infrastructure. This will be done via districts, that will give cumulative bonuses to local production. For example, the more industrial districts the player will have on a planet, the bigger the bonus they will give to mineral output.
There are going to be six districts, available on all standard planets. Various technological upgrades will both increase the maximum number of districts you can build, as well as increase their efficacy.
At the start of the game, you can build 3 districts of every type on every planet. Certain technologies will increase this up to a maximum of 15. Certain deposits on the planet may also help you get to 15 quicker.
In order to encourage diversification, and to make the impact of districts more meaningful at early game, the first district will count as three for the purpose of increasing its major output, and the second district will count as two.
What does this mean? Let’s take the commercial district, for example. It increases energy output by 5% per district. This means that if you build 3 districts, you will gain 15+10+5 bonus or 30%. That means at the start of the game you can build 3 districts and reach a bonus of 30% in a major resource, and later you can build up to 15 districts, for a total bonus of 90%.
That’s not all a commercial district will do for you. Once you tech-up, certain technologies will give the commercial district more benefits. You will be able to get techs that give you a small bonus in unity, trade, starport output, amenities and migration pull per district. At the highest level of 15 districts, you can get +15% to unity, trade, starports, amenities and +45% to migration pull.
This also opens more paths for ideological and technological decision making. For example, would you want to focus on environmentalism, and obtain techs that will give all agricultural districts a bonus to habitability and growth, or focus on heavy industry instead, and see a bonus to mining strategic resources such as Dilithium?
The six planned districts are:
- Cities: Will require water-ice and will increase housing by +5 per district. Yes, that means that initially planets will be restricted to about 30 pops. The planned maximum is going to be 105 housing.
- Agricultural district: Will require brizeen nitrate and will increase food output per +5% per district, and later will give bonuses to pop growth and habitability.
- Industrial district: Will increase mineral output per +5% per district, and later also consumer goods and alloys output, as well as Dilithium refining and mining of strategic resources. It’s not sure what resource it will require yet – potentially, duranium.
- Commercial district: Will require deuterium and will increase energy output +5% per district. Later, as discussed, would also increase unity, amenities, trade and starport output, as well as migration pull.
- Research district: Will increase all three research outputs, initially by +2%, and eventually up to +6%. Still not sure what resource it will require yet – potentially, ‘data crystals’, produced by various planetary deposits with life on them.
- Administrative district: Will increase crew output by +5%, and later on could produce bonus to stability, crime reduction, slave output, defense from bombardment, overall bonus to all job output, ethics pull and naval capacity. Its also still not clear what resource it will require – potentially luxuries, produced by trade treaties and unique planetary deposits that currently give consumer goods.
In addition, since multiple players have asked for it, and since it fits with the spirit of Trek and its highly advanced and automatic infrastructure, certain technologies will also make districts produce a small number of resources automatically. Basically, a tech will allow an agricultural district to produce 1 food automatically, even when there are no farms and no farmers on the planet. This will slightly break the clean separation between districts and buildings, but I believe its appropriate.
If you think some of these districts may be over, or under, powered, be aware that the scale of some of the bonuses mentioned above may be smaller than you think. In the end, things may be shuffled around due to feedback, but overall the numbers seem to play out alright.
As always, your feedback would be much appreciated, especially if you have suggestions for unique resources to maintain those districts or want to suggest additional effects for some of the districts.
Next time, I’ll talk about the specific planet specialization we have planned. Should be quite exciting!