After coming up with a list of goals and priorities that we want to focus on for the sake of improving early-game pacing, the next stage is trying to formulate the best way to go about it.
For many reasons, you’d want the change to make to be as little as possible – it saves work, it reduces the number of bugs it introduces to the system, it reduces the likelihood it will bork the AI beyond recognition, and it reduces the strain of updating the system with every new patch to the base game. Finally, changes where we have to make our own mechanics often become clunky and less transparent to the players, because they are unfamiliar with it or because the UI does not support it fully.
Sometimes compromises have to be made, and the result is indeed a bit outside the player’s and AI’s comfort zone – like our current starport based internal trading system. While feedback has been mostly positive, I realize its not a perfect solution and considering ways it could be improved in the future.
However, when possible, when making a change to an existing system like the vanilla Stellaris economy, you want to find something that already exists in the system and use that as the basis of your new changes. Best yet, you’d want to find something in the system that is already not working very well, or you are unhappy with.
Happily, looking at the current vanilla planetary management screen with a critical eye, a solution presented itself – Districts.
The current iteration of districts in vanilla is rather lackluster, for various reasons.
Supposedly, the difference between planets in vanilla is the maximum number of each of the three main types of districts that can be built there. But that distinction is rather pointless. If you do not need a lot of food, it does not matter to you if your new planet can build a maximum of 4 or 10 agricultural districts. It does not matter if you build some farms on this highly agricultural world and some on another. It does not matter if you fully build the agricultural world farmlands, or not. There is no min/maxing advantage here. You don’t really CARE how many districts are on your planet. The bonus for having the ‘agricultural planet’ is tiny, and the +food production buildings are cheap enough to be built wherever they are needed.
Districts not only fail to really offer unique planet specialization and distinction, but they themselves are also rather boring. Vanilla offers very little variety in districts (something we’ve been working on in STNH). There are already multiple mods out there, all working on making the district system more interesting.
Districts themselves are basically just a subset of buildings, which makes the decision to split them up and grant districts such a large area of UI real-estate puzzling and boring. Yes, districts are needed for basic resource production, but those resources can be obtained in different ways (some of them the AI is well familiar with), so we are not messing with anything AI fundamental. They simply feel like something that has not been fully thought out and meshed into the overall planet management.
On the other hand, a lot of what makes districts boring also make them perfect for a refocus on planet specialization for our economic overhaul.
For example, districts are very prominent visually in the UI. Imagine if they were interesting and indicating the development of your planet – in that case, you could see how well your planet is doing in a glance.
Districts, unlike buildings, also stack – you simply see an X number on how many districts you have. This means you can have a certain district multiple times, having more options for min/maxing. Of course, you CAN build some buildings multiple times, but that’s far less visually clear in the UI, especially since the same buildings might not even be in the same consecutive building slots.
Finally, from a technical point, districts come with a variety of modifiers and restrictions (such as having full control of the maximum districts of each type on every planet), so it simply opens up a lot more possibilities to mess around with.
Simply put, if we put the focus of our economic overhaul on districts, we both make a boring part of the economy better and gain access to a highly flexible and visual part of the UI.
Choosing districts as the core focus of the economic overhaul has been a big stepping stone for me and felt like a significant breakthrough. With a method in mind and a clear set of goals, we can now proceed to talk about what exactly does it mean, and what I am actually planning to go to districts.
Seize the time, Meribor – live now! Make now always the most precious time. Now will never come again. – Captain Jean-Luc Picard, as Kamin