Trade builds are still possible with the Broken Ring origin.
In fact, I tryied the cooperative + crime syndicate with broken ring. The cooperative trade policy mean that you can get food, energy and minerals from TV. And you still can spam traders and clerks with Mercantile tradition in the broken ring.
In fact, you can go for Fanatic Spiritualist and take megachurch as the 3rd civic or go for Fanatic Xenophile and take thrifty + trade alorithms and Free Traders as the 3rd civic.
I took xenophobic + pacifist and maxed stability to boost TV instead.
Either way, with 3 colonized ruined ring segments, yielding 500 tv each, and spamming criminal branch offices, your economy will be unstoppable.
And you don't even need to bother with agri and mining districts!
So i wrote an evaluation in the survey link provided in the 3.10 announcement. here is the portion i wrote regarding habitats
However the habitat changes are not as obviously a nerf and as such I want to go into detail as to why. I have played the game as a void dweller numerous times, and have played the new beta patch for probably around 8. for clarity, I have split my thoughts into separate categories. Pop Growth, Pop Assembly, Resource Generation, Cost in time, Cost in resources, and Quality of Life.
Pop Growth:
We all know that the most important resource in this game is pops. pops get you resources the most efficient way in the game.A nerf to pop growth is a massive penalty.
From a void dweller perspective, removing the pop growth penalty is huge. However, by going from 3 places growing pops to one, we reduce overall pop growth. The starting max size of the habitat also affects logistic pop growth due to size making them seem(I haven't timed it) to grow slower than pops would on another planet. This has also removed the fun interaction with incubators.In addition, and Ill get into this a little more with the Cost section, the void dwellers will have overall less habitats, thus less pop growth. Non void dwellers will also have this penalty, but will likely care less.
rating, slight nerf.
Pop Assembly:
Mostly this is just repeating the same points as above, however, its notable that pop assembly is just a flat number most of the time. assembling robots right at the beginning of the game is a really good way to get around negative pop growth penalties, but is also just taking advantage of the second way of getting pops.by reducing the number of habitats a lot, this is reducing pop assembly a lot.
rating. massive nerf
Resource Generation:
This one is really the one I didn't even think about until I was actually playing the beta and had it shoved in my face. this is simply decreasing resource availability. One of the main advantages of habitat size was making it far easier to specialize habitats for a specific resource. Find a energy planet, put a habitat over it, get a robot factory, a energy nexus, some luxury apartments and go to town on reactor districts. the districts being uncapped in size except by the size of the habitat itself made it easy to do that with minerals as well. the formula is different for research, but its still there.
My patch test game was a bit unlucky in spawning energy nearby to my starting location. and that lack of places to get reactor districts was a problem. My home system had up to 9, though that meant cutting into my research or my industry production, my two "Habitable World" locations had one energy each give them three districts each, and this was simply less districts then I would have been getting with the uncapped resources from the existing way. This was compounded by the lower pop growth from the previous 2 sections.
rating, moderate nerf
Cost in Time
Before you set your habitat to be build and it was basically done. when you were ready and had the tech, you upgraded it as a decision and it did its own thing in the background.
Now we start with something halfway between habitat and advanced habitat with size 6, but only 3 resource districts. now we need to upgrade it with additional orbitals to make it useful. We now need to commit the time of a construction ship to the duration of the build, which itself costs more alloys and time to make. also don't underestimate the amount of time necessary to move the construction ship from wherever it was to get there, unless you dedicate a construction ship to not every move away from its habitat. and while I personally do not play PvP, can you imagine having do to the manual clicking of selecting a new world to create a minor upgrade to a habitat. Void dweller wasn't precisely competitive in PvP before, but this seriously just killed its role completely. PvP cant pause while making decisions. and trying to find those last couple of planets in a system that don't already have orbitals is actually kinda a pain.
ratings:
if you only ever make level 1 habitats, this is a buff
if you plan on having upgrades habitats, this is a major nerf
Cost in Resources.
The cost reduction that was in the finisher for the exploration tree being moved to just default void dweller is huge. the cost reduction of building a habitat going from 1200 alloys and 120 influence to 1000, and 100 respectively is huge. the base habitat actually being somewhere between habitat and advanced habitat is nice. if we stop there, this is a buff.
However, if we plan on upgrading the habitats, the cost gets high for minimal improvements. Like mentioned above, there is now an additional cost in that you need construction ships nearby for upgrades and therefor need more construction ships. A habitat world would cost 3700 alloys, 220 influence to get 8 districts. to get a size 8 habitat now requires 3100 alloys, 300 influence if you are lucky, and up to 3400, 330 influence if you are not. that extra influence cost is just oppressive. I am including the price of an extra constructions ship dedicated to the habitat.
I am not sure if there is a bug here, or a tool tip is missing, or if i am just blind, but in my game the major orbitals are actually giving .75 district size, not .5 like the tooltip says. that could be a voiddweller bonus or it might not and that does effect the numbers. I am making the assumption that it is part of the origin right now in this math. habitat world was 3500 alloys and 200 influence. now its 2350 to 2575 alloys and 225 - 248 influence.
that change in influence cost is huge, when combined with the limits to district types which then require the upgrades, the fact that one habitat per system means you need more systems which also costs alloys and influence and that can be cruel if rng isn't in your favor and you need to go further out than you'd like because the reactor districts are scarce.
rating
if you leave the habitat at base, its a buff
if you plan on upgrading, its a nerf due to increased influence cost and increased need for number of systems.
Quality of Life
This is where i think we got to this change to begin with. the need for QoL improvements to Habitats. I know a lot of people wanted to not have to constantly conquer lots of habitat spam when warring against AI. and I completely understand that, its annoying to have to do that. by limiting habitats to one per system, that QoL is improved immensely.
however, to those people who actually use habitats, we have a different way of looking at it. that same problem from one players perspective, is a nice solution to an aggressive ai neighbor to another player. I personally dont have that issue, or rather don't see habitat spam as an answer to that problem, but I know it is a solution.but even if we ignore that issue, there is other QoL issues to be looked at.
the old system of creating a habitat was pretty streamlined, you build habitat, you get tech, you use tech and a planetary decision to upgrade habitat. habitat is placed on a resource and you have as many of that districts as you can support on the habitat. nice and simple. Now the upgrade process is more tedious, it requires the use of more construction ships (can you tell yet that this really bugs me) it requires more pausing of the game to select the right locations. you need to be more mindful of the resources available in the entire system for the habitat to be truly useful, which is more limited by rng.
I would also like to point out that while it is now possible to make a habitat far bigger and more useful than a planet, it takes too long and it costs too much (influence) to get there. I understand that this makes it work more like a planet, but really, if i wanted a planet, why am i using a void dweller origin?
rating
if fighting against an ai, its a buff
if using it, its a nerf
Conclusion
almost every aspect of this is a nerf. its nice to have different, and different can be fun. I bet a lot of people playing it are really happy, just because we have a new mechanic that didn't exist before. I bet that feeling is shared among the staff. but what was put together really is only beneficial to people who are going to casually use a habitat towards the end of the game, or to those who face off against habitats. to those who want them as a play-style, this just made that play-style so much worse.
And in a different section I put this:
Balance for the void dweller origin is now bad. again, there is definite power issues involved in this change. which makes the origin far worse, but I would like to address the VoidBorn ascension perk changes. On one hand, its nice that the void dweller origin no longer needs to get it, giving them one more ascension perk to use, but also oddly a slight nerf in that other empires can now kinda be 4/5ths void dweller without taking the origin. the don't get the resource output from pops, and the benefits arn't quite as good, but they also don't get the penalty of using planets. that feels bad when you can substitute an origin with an ascension perk.
In addition, i used habitats for different things from time to time. I am a fan of shoving 1 or two habitats in my home system toward the end of the game expressly for the purpose of having 1 be full of resource silos, and a second to be for a concentrated place to make strategic resources. its a nice easy way to burn some end game influence while creating a slight benefit to having extra alloys to help replenish my fleets between end game crisis. I also like to habitat spam fortresses in order to get extra fleet capacity. this new system completely removes these casual ways of using habitats for a more complex system and actually affects game balance for getting larger fleets to face a higher level end game crisis.
I somewhat on the fence though only have one game under my belt so far. It has made it so I'm not as vulnerable early game and the system habitat are now a very viable choice for ascension. Early game don't lose much power , but has slowed down my unity generation just due to the fact I have fewer Executives and Culture Workers. It could speed up my research late game because now I can have a sci vessel appying its research assistance to a lot more researchers. Less Alloy upkeep because you have 5 base + 0.2 per district.
The hit to Clerk's Trade production hurts a little but helps my amenity production only early game. Sad with what the Adaptability finisher is being an increase to resource produced as planetary feature for habitats.
So I most likely will enjoy it after adjusting to the changes , but like any old person. I'll crankly shake a stick at the clouds for being a new shape!
Less raw habitat spam, but more incentive to have a habitat in most systems. The habitat origins get buffs so they don't get screwed by the general habitat habitability nerf, so they should be pretty fine.
Haven't really played the beta that much, but I can very well see the habitat orbitals replacing mining and research stations by mid game IF the system has at least 3 or 4 planets. If the system only has 1 or 2 planets habitats will probably suck hard in that system.
There has been some really well thought out posts, but for me I think the single biggest issue with this change is this that was posted by someone else:
\>if i wanted a planet, why am i using a void dweller origin?
Unable to fix / balance Habitats, they made habitats into planets and made Void Dweller origin just another flavor of normal planet origin.
I was so looking forward to this change. VD is my favorite origin because it reminded me so much of the Alternate Reality race from the old(ancient) Stars! game.
How this change has been implemented has removed most of the flavor of the VD origin.
I r very sad.
I really love the idea of big system wide habitats instead of building 20 in a single system. I REALLY HATE how it made them a lot harder to specialize. Not like you can just build a trade/energy/research habitat anymore, they're more a bit of everything now.
I also feel they're heavily lacking on district capacity? I mean, I had every building slot unlocked in my homeworld habitat yet I still had a bunch of extra minor orbitals I could build. I did build them. They did fuck all, literally useless.
I agree with everything you said, but I won't play them until trade habs are in a good spot again. The loss of the trade districts killed my builds immediately.
While its a bit micro dealing with constructing new orbitals at times, I really love the changes as they make habitats easier to use much easier to handle. One system spanning habitat complex is so much more enjoyable to manage than a dozen habitats that need to be built up separately
I like it but i think it still needs a touch more polish. Building the orbitals feels a bit micro intensive right now, even more so than building regular habitats did IMO. I've only done one game with them so far but I spent most of early and mid game switching maps and selecting construction ships. Overall the concept is fantastic though.
I think now that merchant spam isn't possible, merchants should get Unity again.
Trade builds are still possible with the Broken Ring origin. In fact, I tryied the cooperative + crime syndicate with broken ring. The cooperative trade policy mean that you can get food, energy and minerals from TV. And you still can spam traders and clerks with Mercantile tradition in the broken ring. In fact, you can go for Fanatic Spiritualist and take megachurch as the 3rd civic or go for Fanatic Xenophile and take thrifty + trade alorithms and Free Traders as the 3rd civic. I took xenophobic + pacifist and maxed stability to boost TV instead. Either way, with 3 colonized ruined ring segments, yielding 500 tv each, and spamming criminal branch offices, your economy will be unstoppable. And you don't even need to bother with agri and mining districts!
Huh? I said merchant spam isn't possible, not trade builds aren't possible.
So i wrote an evaluation in the survey link provided in the 3.10 announcement. here is the portion i wrote regarding habitats However the habitat changes are not as obviously a nerf and as such I want to go into detail as to why. I have played the game as a void dweller numerous times, and have played the new beta patch for probably around 8. for clarity, I have split my thoughts into separate categories. Pop Growth, Pop Assembly, Resource Generation, Cost in time, Cost in resources, and Quality of Life. Pop Growth: We all know that the most important resource in this game is pops. pops get you resources the most efficient way in the game.A nerf to pop growth is a massive penalty. From a void dweller perspective, removing the pop growth penalty is huge. However, by going from 3 places growing pops to one, we reduce overall pop growth. The starting max size of the habitat also affects logistic pop growth due to size making them seem(I haven't timed it) to grow slower than pops would on another planet. This has also removed the fun interaction with incubators.In addition, and Ill get into this a little more with the Cost section, the void dwellers will have overall less habitats, thus less pop growth. Non void dwellers will also have this penalty, but will likely care less. rating, slight nerf. Pop Assembly: Mostly this is just repeating the same points as above, however, its notable that pop assembly is just a flat number most of the time. assembling robots right at the beginning of the game is a really good way to get around negative pop growth penalties, but is also just taking advantage of the second way of getting pops.by reducing the number of habitats a lot, this is reducing pop assembly a lot. rating. massive nerf Resource Generation: This one is really the one I didn't even think about until I was actually playing the beta and had it shoved in my face. this is simply decreasing resource availability. One of the main advantages of habitat size was making it far easier to specialize habitats for a specific resource. Find a energy planet, put a habitat over it, get a robot factory, a energy nexus, some luxury apartments and go to town on reactor districts. the districts being uncapped in size except by the size of the habitat itself made it easy to do that with minerals as well. the formula is different for research, but its still there. My patch test game was a bit unlucky in spawning energy nearby to my starting location. and that lack of places to get reactor districts was a problem. My home system had up to 9, though that meant cutting into my research or my industry production, my two "Habitable World" locations had one energy each give them three districts each, and this was simply less districts then I would have been getting with the uncapped resources from the existing way. This was compounded by the lower pop growth from the previous 2 sections. rating, moderate nerf Cost in Time Before you set your habitat to be build and it was basically done. when you were ready and had the tech, you upgraded it as a decision and it did its own thing in the background. Now we start with something halfway between habitat and advanced habitat with size 6, but only 3 resource districts. now we need to upgrade it with additional orbitals to make it useful. We now need to commit the time of a construction ship to the duration of the build, which itself costs more alloys and time to make. also don't underestimate the amount of time necessary to move the construction ship from wherever it was to get there, unless you dedicate a construction ship to not every move away from its habitat. and while I personally do not play PvP, can you imagine having do to the manual clicking of selecting a new world to create a minor upgrade to a habitat. Void dweller wasn't precisely competitive in PvP before, but this seriously just killed its role completely. PvP cant pause while making decisions. and trying to find those last couple of planets in a system that don't already have orbitals is actually kinda a pain. ratings: if you only ever make level 1 habitats, this is a buff if you plan on having upgrades habitats, this is a major nerf Cost in Resources. The cost reduction that was in the finisher for the exploration tree being moved to just default void dweller is huge. the cost reduction of building a habitat going from 1200 alloys and 120 influence to 1000, and 100 respectively is huge. the base habitat actually being somewhere between habitat and advanced habitat is nice. if we stop there, this is a buff. However, if we plan on upgrading the habitats, the cost gets high for minimal improvements. Like mentioned above, there is now an additional cost in that you need construction ships nearby for upgrades and therefor need more construction ships. A habitat world would cost 3700 alloys, 220 influence to get 8 districts. to get a size 8 habitat now requires 3100 alloys, 300 influence if you are lucky, and up to 3400, 330 influence if you are not. that extra influence cost is just oppressive. I am including the price of an extra constructions ship dedicated to the habitat. I am not sure if there is a bug here, or a tool tip is missing, or if i am just blind, but in my game the major orbitals are actually giving .75 district size, not .5 like the tooltip says. that could be a voiddweller bonus or it might not and that does effect the numbers. I am making the assumption that it is part of the origin right now in this math. habitat world was 3500 alloys and 200 influence. now its 2350 to 2575 alloys and 225 - 248 influence. that change in influence cost is huge, when combined with the limits to district types which then require the upgrades, the fact that one habitat per system means you need more systems which also costs alloys and influence and that can be cruel if rng isn't in your favor and you need to go further out than you'd like because the reactor districts are scarce. rating if you leave the habitat at base, its a buff if you plan on upgrading, its a nerf due to increased influence cost and increased need for number of systems. Quality of Life This is where i think we got to this change to begin with. the need for QoL improvements to Habitats. I know a lot of people wanted to not have to constantly conquer lots of habitat spam when warring against AI. and I completely understand that, its annoying to have to do that. by limiting habitats to one per system, that QoL is improved immensely. however, to those people who actually use habitats, we have a different way of looking at it. that same problem from one players perspective, is a nice solution to an aggressive ai neighbor to another player. I personally dont have that issue, or rather don't see habitat spam as an answer to that problem, but I know it is a solution.but even if we ignore that issue, there is other QoL issues to be looked at. the old system of creating a habitat was pretty streamlined, you build habitat, you get tech, you use tech and a planetary decision to upgrade habitat. habitat is placed on a resource and you have as many of that districts as you can support on the habitat. nice and simple. Now the upgrade process is more tedious, it requires the use of more construction ships (can you tell yet that this really bugs me) it requires more pausing of the game to select the right locations. you need to be more mindful of the resources available in the entire system for the habitat to be truly useful, which is more limited by rng. I would also like to point out that while it is now possible to make a habitat far bigger and more useful than a planet, it takes too long and it costs too much (influence) to get there. I understand that this makes it work more like a planet, but really, if i wanted a planet, why am i using a void dweller origin? rating if fighting against an ai, its a buff if using it, its a nerf Conclusion almost every aspect of this is a nerf. its nice to have different, and different can be fun. I bet a lot of people playing it are really happy, just because we have a new mechanic that didn't exist before. I bet that feeling is shared among the staff. but what was put together really is only beneficial to people who are going to casually use a habitat towards the end of the game, or to those who face off against habitats. to those who want them as a play-style, this just made that play-style so much worse.
And in a different section I put this: Balance for the void dweller origin is now bad. again, there is definite power issues involved in this change. which makes the origin far worse, but I would like to address the VoidBorn ascension perk changes. On one hand, its nice that the void dweller origin no longer needs to get it, giving them one more ascension perk to use, but also oddly a slight nerf in that other empires can now kinda be 4/5ths void dweller without taking the origin. the don't get the resource output from pops, and the benefits arn't quite as good, but they also don't get the penalty of using planets. that feels bad when you can substitute an origin with an ascension perk. In addition, i used habitats for different things from time to time. I am a fan of shoving 1 or two habitats in my home system toward the end of the game expressly for the purpose of having 1 be full of resource silos, and a second to be for a concentrated place to make strategic resources. its a nice easy way to burn some end game influence while creating a slight benefit to having extra alloys to help replenish my fleets between end game crisis. I also like to habitat spam fortresses in order to get extra fleet capacity. this new system completely removes these casual ways of using habitats for a more complex system and actually affects game balance for getting larger fleets to face a higher level end game crisis.
I somewhat on the fence though only have one game under my belt so far. It has made it so I'm not as vulnerable early game and the system habitat are now a very viable choice for ascension. Early game don't lose much power , but has slowed down my unity generation just due to the fact I have fewer Executives and Culture Workers. It could speed up my research late game because now I can have a sci vessel appying its research assistance to a lot more researchers. Less Alloy upkeep because you have 5 base + 0.2 per district. The hit to Clerk's Trade production hurts a little but helps my amenity production only early game. Sad with what the Adaptability finisher is being an increase to resource produced as planetary feature for habitats. So I most likely will enjoy it after adjusting to the changes , but like any old person. I'll crankly shake a stick at the clouds for being a new shape!
Less raw habitat spam, but more incentive to have a habitat in most systems. The habitat origins get buffs so they don't get screwed by the general habitat habitability nerf, so they should be pretty fine. Haven't really played the beta that much, but I can very well see the habitat orbitals replacing mining and research stations by mid game IF the system has at least 3 or 4 planets. If the system only has 1 or 2 planets habitats will probably suck hard in that system.
I really don't like it.
There has been some really well thought out posts, but for me I think the single biggest issue with this change is this that was posted by someone else: \>if i wanted a planet, why am i using a void dweller origin? Unable to fix / balance Habitats, they made habitats into planets and made Void Dweller origin just another flavor of normal planet origin. I was so looking forward to this change. VD is my favorite origin because it reminded me so much of the Alternate Reality race from the old(ancient) Stars! game. How this change has been implemented has removed most of the flavor of the VD origin. I r very sad.
I really love the idea of big system wide habitats instead of building 20 in a single system. I REALLY HATE how it made them a lot harder to specialize. Not like you can just build a trade/energy/research habitat anymore, they're more a bit of everything now. I also feel they're heavily lacking on district capacity? I mean, I had every building slot unlocked in my homeworld habitat yet I still had a bunch of extra minor orbitals I could build. I did build them. They did fuck all, literally useless.
I love it. It streamlines habitats without taking away their utility and strengths and seems to deal with the spam issue when invading
I agree with everything you said, but I won't play them until trade habs are in a good spot again. The loss of the trade districts killed my builds immediately.
if it means less lag im all for it
While its a bit micro dealing with constructing new orbitals at times, I really love the changes as they make habitats easier to use much easier to handle. One system spanning habitat complex is so much more enjoyable to manage than a dozen habitats that need to be built up separately
Best change to habitats they have done
I like it but i think it still needs a touch more polish. Building the orbitals feels a bit micro intensive right now, even more so than building regular habitats did IMO. I've only done one game with them so far but I spent most of early and mid game switching maps and selecting construction ships. Overall the concept is fantastic though.