I’ve been discussing the rationale behind the upcoming gameplay and economy changes for a while now, trying to show my thought process, starting with identifying the problem, breaking it down, defining the goals to correct it and identifying the best methods to do so. Now its time to deal with the proposed nuts and bolts of the changes. This is going to be a rather meaty post, but I’ll try to find a good point to stop and continue in another time.
Districts are going to be the core of a new way to manage and specialize your planets. If you have been following the blog, then districts are going to be the ‘layer’ on top of the existing vanilla economy, the layer that will give you access to various bonuses and additional flexibility, as well as flavor and individuality.
Buildings, as I’ve explained in the previous post, will remain mostly the same as they do now. Buildings will provide jobs and resources and will fuel your economy. While buildings are for production, districts are for specialization.
How will this work? Let me start with an analogy from role-playing games. You have a pool of skill points, that you divide among several skills. This is similar to what I want to do with districts. The planet size (or the total number of maximum districts) is your skill point pool, and you divide them among your “skills” (or districts). The higher your ‘skill’, the more bonuses you get.
So, let’s imagine you have an ‘industry’ district. For every industry district you build, you get, say, +5% to miners’ mineral output. Build 10 industry districts, and you get a +50% bonus (again, remember all names and numbers are still under development).
Technology and planetary deposits will both increase the overall maximum number of districts you can build on a planet, as well as the maximum number of districts of each type you can build. Instead of researching better ‘power plant grid’ buildings that give you an ever-bigger bonus to energy production, research will grant you an increase in the maximum number of energy districts you can build. This means that as you increase in technology, you will both have more options to invest your ‘points’, and more flexibility in how many ‘points’ you can allocate into a district.
To make the distinction between buildings and districts clear, districts will never grant jobs or produce resources by themselves. Buildings, on the other hand, will never (with a few very rare exceptions) give you modifiers or bonuses. Districts by themselves will not produce anything, and buildings by themselves will not grant you any increasing efficiency or output-per-pop. In fact, there will be almost no techs that give you a global bonus to outputs – instead, new technologies will be focused almost exclusively on granting you an even higher potential maximum of bonuses, via the district’s infrastructure.
Districts will also be completely separate from pops. How many districts you can build, and support will depend entirely on your planet quality, size, deposits, and techs. You can fully develop and specialize even the youngest and least populated of your colonies. This means you have a wide range of interesting decisions and thinks you can do on your planet right from the start of the game, which should, hopefully, solve the big problem we are having – making the early game more meaningful and interesting.
In addition, if you recall from our list of goals, the intention is that districts will not be expensive to build, either (although the idea is probably that they are going to require a decent amount of time to build). Instead, we’re going to add another interesting aspect to the economy by tying district upkeeps into strategic resources.
What does this mean? Instead of you needing brizeen nitrate to support a ‘farm’ building that gives you a bonus to food output, every agricultural district you build will increase your food output and will require 1 unit of brizeen nitrate to support. This has the added advantage of removing the energy upkeep cost from districts, which should make energy generation easier.
This system has multiple advantages, and you can see why I choose to retool districts. It means that when you see a planet, you can know at a glance exactly how its specialized. Seeing a planet has 6 agriculture districts and 4 industry districts will be as meaningful and clear as seeing a character sheet in an RPG that has 6 wisdom and 4 charisma. Since districts, unlike buildings, stack, they clearly fit the ‘skill’ method, and since they are visually distinct and front and center in the UI, it would be easy to read.
Making districts about specialization but keeping them influenced by deposits also makes planets more interesting again. In vanilla, when a planet has +1 maximum mine deposit it means nothing if you don’t need to build mines, or if you already built mines elsewhere. In the new system, a planet with a +1 maximum mine deposit means a larger potential maximum, it means you can put even more industry districts on the planet and gain an even larger maximum bonus. It means you may very well choose to specialize in mining and industry on that planet, just because of that deposit. Deposits should now matter.
It also means that technology in New Horizons will be tied directly to unlocking better infrastructure, creating this gap between the ‘paradise’ of Earth and the less developed fringes of the galaxy. Vanilla indeed limits some production bonuses behind advanced buildings that need a lot of pops, but most production bonuses are global.
Finally, connecting districts to strategic resources adds another layer of interesting decision making. You will need to not only decide how to specialize your planets, but how to specialize your empire. But this also means that if you lack a special resource you are not ‘gimped’. You will never be in a situation where you can’t produce more energy, minerals or food. It simply will limit your ability to specialize.
Also, every district (and there will be six districts types on every planet, up from the current four) will be tied to a specific resource, that won’t be used for anything else. Those should make things easier to understand and also easier for the AI.
There is more, of course, including detailing how planet specialization will work in the new system, explaining advanced districts and listing the planned base six districts, but those will wait for the next posts.
Improve a mechanical device and you may double productivity. But improve man, you gain a thousandfold. — Khan Noonien Singh