Despite being a spreadsheet-filled management sim from the most PC developers out there, Stellaris longs to leave its desktop orbit. But while the space sim’s transition to console has been relatively smooth, it’s having a tougher time entering the mobile space. Stellaris: Galaxy Command, a mobile spin-off by an external studio, launched into beta on Tuesday but Paradox pulled it from sale only five hours later after players discovered stolen Halo artwork lurking in the game’s menus.
The sci-fi strategy game Stellaris has progressed considerably since it released in 2016, and now occupies positions on our lists of the best space games and best strategy games. It's no surprise, then, that Paradox is making another one, called Stellaris: Galaxy Command. What is surprising is that it's not coming to PC.
From how it's described, Stellaris: Galaxy Command seems to be a free-to-play mobile MMO. You're put in control of a space station in a "persistent, player-driven world" that's been devastated by an alien invasion from another dimension. The attack was ultimately defeated, but "the war was not won alone" and apparently the recovery process won't be a solo endeavor either: "It will be up to the players to make alliances, negotiate and directly impact each others’ recoveries in this unique Stellaris adventure," Paradox says.
Beyond that you'll also need to rebuild and expand your empire, impose taxes and negotiate trade alliances, and reconstruct and rearm your military forces. Your actions will have "real consequences" for other players, as will the ethical underpinnings of your resurgent empire, which will be determined by the choices and actions you make as you retake your place of glory among the stars.
Paradox says that Stellaris: Galaxy Command is "an authentic Stellaris experience," though one that's designed to be played in short sessions rather than 17 hours at a time, like most Paradox games. "You can check on your station, fleet, and alliance throughout the day," it said. "Make sure your station is constantly researching and expanding and your fleet is building up and rearming to deal with new threats."
The Google Play listing goes into a little more depth on what it's all about, and it certainly sounds ambitious, with gameplay built around trading systems, ethics, and political systems. Players will be able to form or join alliances and Trade Networks, recruit elite admirals to head their fleets, customize and upgrade their ships, and take part in deep-space battles that will unfold in real time.
It isn't clear exactly how many players will be lumped together in the same universe, but at least "thousands of players play in a single galaxy with nearly a thousands star systems to explore," the listing says. "Declare 'cold' or conventional war and claim victory through economic strength or brute military force. Convene with allies to form an attack strategy, then wage war on other players across the universe."
It almost sounds like a free-to-play mobile take on EVE Online. Unfortunately, the game is currently offline (such is the way with soft-launched betas), but I sat through the long intro sequence before getting the "offline" message, and it at least looked impressive. Unfortunately, the game may remain offline for awhile, as Paradox explained that it was taken down due to the presence of artwork that was used without permission.
It's interesting to see a company that built its reputation on complex, desktop strategy games like Crusader Kings and Hearts of Iron moving into the mobile realm, where playtimes are typically measured in minutes rather than hours. It's a big step, but I wouldn't be at all surprised to see other Paradox games making the same transition if this one is successful.
The Stellaris: Galaxy Command beta is available now on Android and iOS devices, but for the time being only to players in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Sweden. Registration links and other details are available at galaxycommand.stellaris.com.
We're deploying a small, quick hotfix to address two issues we were able to solve today: inability of the launcher to display incompatible mods, and an economy bug related to artisan jobs and consumer goods.
Given that it's early yet and some may not have seen the original changes in 2.4.0, I'll repost those. Please note that due to a human error, namely this producer managing to transcribe fixes from the wrong dev branch in to the patch notes (!), a few of the listed changes in 2.4.0 are not actually present in the build. In the interest of getting the hotfix to you all with maximum speed, those will come in a future update when they can be properly merged and tested. I'll put them in the notes for reference, but crossed out.
################################################################# ######################### VERSION 2.4.1 ########################## #################################################################
################### # General ###################
* Added Launcher v2 * Updated all factions titans with panning light meshes. Updated vfx for ether drake’s wing attack (muzzle, projectile, hit effect) * Caravaneer ship & station vfx update * Added "/mute <user name>" and "/unmute <user name>" chat commands * Cloud saving support added on GoG and Paradoxplaza versions of the game
################### # Balance ###################
* Hunter-Seeker Drone jobs now have a preference for pops who would actually be good at it * The Pop Growth Reduction for Bio-Trophies now actually reduces their growth rate. Driven Assimilators now apply their organic growth penalty as a multiplier the same way as Rogue Servitors do, and is now also 50% * Defensive Platforms placed on Outposts now provide 2 points of Piracy Suppression for their system. The Great Game tradition from the Supremacy tree now also reduces the cost to build Defensive Platforms by 33%
################### # UI ###################
* Shift+clicking on ship count in the Fleet Manager now adds ships up to the nearest unit of ten, using ctrl fills up to the template max size * Fixed improperly displayed text in the name of Galatron wars * Protection war name list no longer includes machine uprising and war in heaven * Removed unnecessary decimal precision in lacking resources tooltips * Added some tooltips to the planet screen: close button, decisions, tab buttons, garrison and armies, planetary features * Added a notification when one empire guarantees the independence of another * Added a defense army icon to the Stronghold and Fortress buildings to help visually identify their effect, and updated the garrison tooltip * Fixed a cut off display of the clearing cost for ruined arcology blockers * Fixed incorrectly reversed "they get" and "we get" information showed in commercial pacts
################### # AI ###################
* The AI will now look at several Edicts and try to enact one of them, whilst still remembering the one they want the most and save towards enacting that * AI will now wait at least a year before attempting to propose the same diplomacy deal to the same target * Fixed AI not building enough defense platforms * Automated building now checks that upkeep cost is covered by income
* Improved performance by reducing the number of string copies in modifiers * Parallelized some planet functions * Optimized calculations done in frame rendering * Bunch of caching and optimizations to planet job calculations * Fixed a slowdown when viewing the slave market
* Fixed an incorrect scripted trigger which could sometimes result in the deletion of research labs when upgraded * Fixed literally unplayable "the the" typo in ancrel.23.desc * Fixed empires that have outlawed slavery not emancipating slaves on planets they conquer * Fixed a possible crash when a planet has no pops * Fixed an instant repair exploit when you dismantle a starbase module while it's under attack * Fixed a bug that could cause rivalry declarations and closed borders enacted by you to make you instead the target of those things from the other empire * Removed an exploit where when transferring, merging, and transferring ships again while paused, one could cheekily cause them to become invisible and untargetable in combat * Fixed an overflow bug with relative empire power calculations * Removed incorrect ability to completely depopulate primitive planets with raiding bombardment stance * Fixed nonfunctional modifiers to colony ship build cost * Fixed a potential crash in AI when evaluating market values * Odd Factories no longer sometimes block pops from getting purged, because you monsters should be free to purge whatever you want
Please note that save file compatibility between versions is not guaranteed. If you have an important 2.3.3 game going, please roll back to that version before trying to load the save in 2.4.1.
Instructions on how to keep playing on older versions here.
You can also use this method to opt in to the stellaris_test branch on Steam, which is necessary for multiplayer cross play between Steam and the other stores we are available on. If you have a 2.3.3 crossplay game going on, that version is present on Steam on the crossplay_rollback branch.
Thanks for your feedback and issue reports. We'll keep at it but I wanted to get this to you as soon as possible before the weekend. We'll get the MIA fixes in as soon as we can.
If you want to comment on or read this post on our forums, go here.
As we mentioned in our last dev diary, this week we will be talking about some of the cool things you can be expecting to see at PDXCON 2019!
Announcement show What: PDX will be announcing new titles and expansions. Stellaris will be featured. When: Saturday (Oct 19) 10:00 CEST Where: PDXCON main stage or Twitch
Stellaris talk What: I will be holding a talk where I will be talking about future updates to Stellaris. When: Saturday (Oct 19) 18:00 CEST Where: PDXCON main stage or Twitch
Paradox Awards What: Paradox celebrates its community by recognizing outstanding achievements in our community. When: Saturday (Oct 19) 20:00 CEST Where: PDXCON main stage or Twitch
Stellaris booth What: Play new content, meet the devs, talk to other fans When: Saturday (Oct 19) 11:00 - 20:00 CEST Where: At PDXCON
Stellaris meet-and-greet What: Meet the devs! When: Sunday (Oct 20) 12:00 - 13:00 CEST Where: Auditorium
Stellaris LAN What: Play new content, meet the devs, talk to other fans When: Sunday (Oct 20) 10:00 - 14:30 CEST and 16:00 to 20:30 CEST Where: At PDXCON
PDXCON is next week, and we hope we’ll be seeing some of you there! The next dev diary will be in two weeks, after PDXCON. Once our big announcements are out in the open, we will resume the weekly dev diaries.
If you want to give us feedback on our forums, you can also read this schedule here.
Microsoft has confirmed the latest batch of titles coming to Xbox Game Pass on PC - and while a few have been revealed previously, some new names, including sci-fi grand strategy game Stellaris, will also be making the leap to the subscription service before the month is through.
Alongside Stellaris, quirky (and tremendously entertaining) 60-second puzzle adventure Minit joins the Xbox Game Pass line-up on PC, as does F1 2018, a racer that Eurogamer's Martin Robison called "one of the very best F1 games to date" in his Recommended review last year.
There's more racing, albeit of a two-wheeled variety, courtesy of Lonely Mountains Downhill, and also heading to the service at some currently undisclosed point this month is Saints Row 4: Re-Elected, developer Volition's extremely silly superhero-themed open-world jaunt through an alien computer simulation, and "multi-layered" cyberpunk sci-fi thriller State of Mind.
Hi all, Jamor here, with some news for you just before our biggest event of the year, PDXCON.
Today we are releasing version 2.4.0 “Lee”. The primary objective of this version is to get our new Paradox launcher in to Stellaris:
Why are we doing this? There are two main reasons: Firstly, as you know, Stellaris is available on Steam, Paradoxplaza, GOG, and as of today, the Microsoft Store. Currently, there are hoops that someone has to jump through if they want to do a multiplayer game with users on another platform, involving opting in to beta branches. Our long term goal is to unite all Paradox gamers under one universal MP umbrella, so everyone can play with anyone they want at any time, on any release platform, with a minimum of fuss. To do that, a single unified launcher for all our of various platforms is a key prerequisite (just to clarify, this is the end goal, it does not change how you play Stellaris in multiplayer today). The launcher also has its own dedicated personnel which means it is a time saver for each game team at Paradox, letting us focus exclusively on making and improving the game itself. As a producer, I gotta tell ya, anything that lets us focus more on our core mission is most welcome.
The second big reason for the move is that this new launcher will become a much more feature-rich hub for all things related to the game. We plan improved presentation of announcements and dev diaries, mod management with player control over load order, mod support for non-Steam users via PDX Mods, the works. A low key but nice convenience feature that's in right now is the addition of a “resume last save” button right at the top, letting you start up your most recent game with one click. Our ambitions for it are high.
Here’s some more details from my colleague Anders, the Product Manager for Launcher Team:
The launcher has benefitted from user feedback from prior releases on other PDS games, and will be continually developed by the launcher team. In that regard your input is very helpful. It is self patching, which means updates to the launcher can be deployed without the game version needing to change. It is a separate binary that is used by all PDX games employing it, meaning it only installs once per computer.
Without diminishing the effort of the core dev team working on <redacted>, we were also able to incorporate some fixes from the development branch, which are included in 2.4.0:
################################################################# ######################### VERSION 2.4.0 ########################## #################################################################
################### # General ###################
* Added Launcher v2 * Updated all factions titans with panning light meshes. Updated vfx for ether drake’s wing attack (muzzle, projectile, hit effect) * Caravaneer ship & station vfx update * Added "/mute <user name>" and "/unmute <user name>" chat commands * Cloud saving support added on GoG and Paradoxplaza versions of the game
################### # Balance ###################
* Hunter-Seeker Drone jobs now have a preference for pops who would actually be good at it * The Pop Growth Reduction for Bio-Trophies now actually reduces their growth rate. Driven Assimilators now apply their organic growth penalty as a multiplier the same way as Rogue Servitors do, and is now also 50% * Defensive Platforms placed on Outposts now provide 2 points of Piracy Suppression for their system. The Great Game tradition from the Supremacy tree now also reduces the cost to build Defensive Platforms by 33%
################### # UI ###################
* Shift+clicking on ship count in the Fleet Manager now adds ships up to the nearest unit of ten, using ctrl fills up to the template max size * Fixed improperly displayed text in the name of Galatron wars * Protection war name list no longer includes machine uprising and war in heaven * Removed unnecessary decimal precision in lacking resources tooltips * Added some tooltips to the planet screen: close button, decisions, tab buttons, garrison and armies, planetary features * Added a notification when one empire guarantees the independence of another * Added a defense army icon to the Stronghold and Fortress buildings to help visually identify their effect, and updated the garrison tooltip * Fixed a cut off display of the clearing cost for ruined arcology blockers * Fixed incorrectly reversed "they get" and "we get" information showed in commercial pacts
################### # AI ###################
* The AI will now look at several Edicts and try to enact one of them, whilst still remembering the one they want the most and save towards enacting that * AI will now wait at least a year before attempting to propose the same diplomacy deal to the same target * Fixed AI not building enough defense platforms * Automated building now checks that upkeep cost is covered by income
* Improved performance by reducing the number of string copies in modifiers * Parallelized some planet functions * Optimized calculations done in frame rendering * Bunch of caching and optimizations to planet job calculations * Fixed a slowdown when viewing the slave market
* Fixed an incorrect scripted trigger which could sometimes result in the deletion of research labs when upgraded * Fixed literally unplayable "the the" typo in ancrel.23.desc * Fixed empires that have outlawed slavery not emancipating slaves on planets they conquer * Fixed a possible crash when a planet has no pops * Fixed an instant repair exploit when you dismantle a starbase module while it's under attack * Fixed a bug that could cause rivalry declarations and closed borders enacted by you to make you instead the target of those things from the other empire * Removed an exploit where when transferring, merging, and transferring ships again while paused, one could cheekily cause them to become invisible and untargetable in combat * Fixed an overflow bug with relative empire power calculations * Removed incorrect ability to completely depopulate primitive planets with raiding bombardment stance * Fixed nonfunctional modifiers to colony ship build cost * Fixed a potential crash in AI when evaluating market values * Odd Factories no longer sometimes block pops from getting purged, because you monsters should be free to purge whatever you want
Please note that save file compatibility between versions is not guaranteed. If you have an important 2.3.3 game going, please roll back to that version before trying to load the save in 2.4.
Instructions on how to keep playing on older versions here.
You can also use this method to opt in to the stellaris_test branch on Steam, which is necessary for multiplayer cross play between Steam and the other stores we are available on.
To read this Dev Diary on our forums and give us feedback at the source, go here.
Stand by for the big reveal of [REDACTED] October 19th on the big stage at PDXCON, along with more fixes and improvements from the main dev branch as they get tested and merged. In the meantime, happy gaming, and you’ll hear from us again soon.
Hi team! It's time for another Dev Diary and our Game Director Daniel has a cool new feature to share with you today! :)
-----------------------------
Hello everyone!
I have just returned from a belated vacation in Japan, and although I had a great time there it is also fun to be back to work. Today I want to talk about some of the cool things happening with Stellaris this year. As many of you have probably guessed, Stellaris will announce a new expansion at PDXCon this year. This expansion will feature a lot of cool new things, most of which will be revealed at PDXCon. But I do also have something really neat that I want to share with you now!
Good ol’ civics. Gotta love ‘em.
Back in Utopia we introduced a lot of cool new features to improve how you could customize and specialize your empire. Civics were a great addition to the game (in fact I consider them to be one of the best), but they are also awkwardly split between “backgrounds” like Syncretic Evolution and “institutions” like Distinguished Admiralty or Imperial Cult. Civics have added a lot of really cool options to how you can play the game, and that is something I want to expand upon – this is where the Origins come in.
Materialistic, mechanist, mushroom madness? Origins is a new feature that is very similar to Civics, and will now represent your empire’s background. An empire can only select one Origin, and an Origin cannot be changed. We will be adding a bunch of new Origins (some of them are really cool!) and we will also be changing some Civics into being Origins instead. Examples of Civics that will be converted into Origins are Mechanists, Post-Apocalyptic, Life-Seeded and Syncretic Evolution.
Life-Seeded Origin, now open to hive minds.
Certain types of empires were previously unable to access some of these backgrounds since they have their own set of Civics (Gestalts and Megacorps for example). Because some of those Civics have been turned into Origins, those backgrounds will now be available to more types of empires. This means that it should now be possible to have a hive mind with the Life-Seeded origin or a Megacorp with the Mechanists origin. We know this is something people have been asking for for a long time now, and it’s really great to be able to add Origins to the game.
Like I mentioned earlier, we will also be adding a whole lot of new Origins that will add interesting starting positions for your empire. Right now we have 16 in the current version of the game, and we will probably see a few more until it's finished. I think Origins will be a great addition to the game that will surely help to facilitate a lot more player stories and player fantasies.
We won’t be showing all of these yet, but it will probably be immensely hard for us to not tease a few every now and then ;)
Who isn’t curious about Remnants and Scions?
PDXCon is rapidly approaching and Stellaris fans will have a lot of cool things to look forward to! In two weeks we will be back again with another dev diary, where we’ll talk a bit more about PDXCon.
Hello all, this is Hildor Anduv, the UX Designer on Stellaris. I’ve been with the team since December, and have really enjoyed working on such a great game. With my first Dev Diary I’m going to be sharing how I have been approaching UX Design on Stellaris.
Disclaimer: We're not quite ready to announce our plans just yet (we're saving that for the big stage, PDXCon), so this is going to be more process oriented without delving into specifics about any new feature. If that's not your thing, you can safely give it a miss, but if you're interested in the nuts and bolts of how games are designed and made, let us lift the curtain a bit.
Whiteboarding: The UX Corner Whiteboards are a great place for getting your ideas out quickly. When whiteboarding I try to get team members from multiple disciplines and rough out ideas, together. It’s a great way to discover gameplay and player needs, as well as find any potential development pitfalls early on.
We wanted to create a permanent space for this, and thus the UX Corner was born. Here we come together and iterate on ideas in real-time as a group. Having the permanent space has helped facilitate conversion and increased cross-discipline communication within the team,.
Wireframing & Prototyping. From the whiteboard sketches, I then move onto creating more detailed wireframes, the skeletal mockup of a UI design. Keeping your wireframes simple lets you iterate quickly, but more importantly allows you to nail down what content should be displayed, and how best to lay it out visually for the player.
I typically try to nail down one key screen, and from there I build out a User flow of the entire experience.
When Designing the Archeology UI for Ancient Relics, I had some key pillars I wanted to nail.
The stories are linked, and I can revisit past chapters for context. (Also experience the great artwork again!)
When I come back here, I have a sense of the progress my scientist has made.
The challenge of the site feels ‘game-y’.
Once I nailed an overall layout for the Archaeology UI, I then broke it out into a User Flow to capture the full breadth of a player’s journey while excavating a site.
With the User flow complete I then link it up and create an interactive Prototype. The prototype allows team members to experience what we are trying to create before we set out to develop it. It’s a great low cost way to identify issues in the flow, and fix them here before investing in development.
After we agree on the UX design, we then get to finally create it in game. As you can see below, the design mostly held through to release. The text window was increased to accommodate larger story text, and ‘difficulty’ was changed to ‘breakthrough chance’ to help better understand the ‘die roll mechanic’.
User Testing So, even though the design has now gone through many gates, we must test our designs with players and iterate based on player feedback. Luckily Paradox has a great User Research department, and so we were able to run playtests and get vital feedback which we could respond to before launch.
----------
Well, I hope this was an informative window into how UX Design is done here on Stellaris.
Also, I read the forums and look out for your feedback as well. You all have been very helpful, so thank you for that!
If you want to read the Dev Diary on our forums or share your feedback with us directly, go here: http://pdxint.at/DD154_2
We’re back with yet another dev diary to showcase some more fruits of summer experimentation. As with the previous dev diary, this involved a lot of work carried out during the summer and involves something I’ve wanted to explore for a good while now.
Today we’ll be talking about empire sprawl and administrative capacity. Do note that these changes are still fairly young in their development, so numbers and implementation details may not be representative of what it will look like in the end.
As a background, I can mention that I have a grander idea of where I want to take these mechanics, but it will not all happen at once. These changes aim to mimic state bureaucracy or overhead created by managing a large empire. As a minor aspect I also wanted you to be able to experience the funny absurdity of having a planet entirely dedicated to bureaucracy. The movie Brazil is a great source of inspiration here :)
Empire Sprawl We wanted to expand on how empire sprawl is used, so that it becomes a more interesting mechanic. The largest change means that pops now increase empire sprawl. Most things in your empire should be increasing empire sprawl to various degrees, to represent the administrative burden they impose.
Empire Sprawl can now be modified from its different sources, and as an example, the Courier Networks expansion tradition will now reduce empire sprawl caused directly by the number of planets and systems. As another example shows, the Harmony traditions finisher now reduces the total empire sprawl caused by all your pops.
We are also able to modify how much empire sprawl each pop contributes, and we’ve added a couple of new species traits that affect it. There are also machine variants of these traits.
We have also increased the penalty for the amount of empire sprawl that exceeds your administrative capacity. The goal is not to make administrative a hard cap, but we want to make it necessary to invest some of your resources into increasing your administrative capacity. More on that later.
The current plan is for machine empires to be more reliant on keeping their administrative capacity in line with their empire sprawl, so machine empires will suffer a much harsher penalty for exceeding their cap. We want machines to feel “centralized” and to perhaps favor a more “tall” playstyle.
Hive Minds, on the other hand, should be more tolerant of a sprawling empire where unmanaged drones are able to fall back on their instincts whenever they cannot maintain a responsive connection to the hive mind. Therefore, hive minds should be more tolerant of a “wide” playstyle.
Administrative Capacity With all these changes to empire sprawl, what about administrative capacity, I imagine you asking? Well, since empire sprawl is becoming an expanded concept, administrative capacity will naturally be a part of that. Increasing your administrative capacity will now be a part of planning your empire’s economy.
For regular empires, the bureaucrat is a new job that increases your administrative capacity at the cost of consumer goods. This is also a specialist job, and has needs accordingly. Administrators are unchanged, and do not currently affect administrative capacity or bureaucrats.
For machine empires, the coordinators have changed roles from producing unity to now increasing administrative capacity instead, and they are more effective than bureaucrats. A new job called Evaluators now produce unity for machine empires.
Hive Minds currently have the hardest time to produce administrative capacity, but it has been added as a function of the synapse drone job.
Certain sources that previously increased administrative capacity by a static amount now increase is by a percentage amount instead. This doesn’t affect the output of the jobs, but rather increases the total administrative capacity directly.
Summary Personally I’m very excited for these changes and I’m very much looking forward to taking it to its next step in the future. I hope you enjoyed reading about the changes that will come to Stellaris sometime later this year. As always, we’ll be interested to hear your thoughts.
As mentioned in last week’s dev diary, the schedule for dev diaries will now be bi-weekly, so the next dev diary will be in another 2 weeks.
If you want, you can also read this Dev Diary and comment on our forums: Dev Diary #153
Summer vacations are reaching their end and most of the team is back as of last week. Work has started again and we're really excited for what we have in store for the rest of the year.
While most of us have been away during most of the summer, we’ve also had some people who worked during July. July is a very good time to try out different designs and concepts that we might not otherwise have time to do, and today we thought it might be fun for you to see some of the experiments we ran during that period of hiatus.
Although we learned some useful insights, these experiments didn’t end up being good enough to make a reality.
Industrial Districts As I have mentioned earlier, I have wanted to find a better solution for how we handle the production of alloys and consumer goods. I often felt like the experience of developing a planet felt better with an Ecumenopolis rather than with a regular planet. I think a lot of it had to do with their unique districts and that it feels better to get the jobs from constructing districts rather than buildings. Not necessarily as an emotion reaction to the choice, but rather that the choice perhaps feels more “pure” or simple.
An experiment I wanted to run was to see if it was possible to add an industrial district that provided Laborer jobs, instead of having buildings for Metallurgists and Artisans. Laborers would produce both alloys and consumer goods but could be shifted towards producing more of either.
This meant we added a 5th district, the Industrial District. By adding another district we also needed to reduce the number of building slots available. Since there would be no more need for buildings that produced alloys and consumer goods, this should still end up being similar.
A Laborer would consume 8 minerals to produce 2 alloys and 4 consumer goods, and that amount could be modified in either direction by passing a Decision. What I wanted was to have an industry that could have a military and civilian output, and where you could adjust the values between these outputs.
Having a laborer job that generates an “industrial output”, which could be translated into either alloys or consumer goods did feel good, but the specific solution we used didn’t feel quite right.
City Districts & Building slots Another experiment was to see how it felt if city districts unlock building slots instead of pops. This experiment didn’t have a specific problem or issue it was trying to address but rather it was to investigate how that would feel and work. It was interesting but ultimately it felt less fun than the current implementation. It would have needed more time to see if it could be made to work.
This experiment did include increasing the number of jobs you would get for the building, so a research lab would provide 3 jobs instead of 2.
City District Jobs from Buildings At the same time, we also tried a version where buildings applied jobs to city districts instead of providing jobs by themselves. One upside would be that you’d need less micromanagement to get the jobs, but the downside is that it would also be quite a large upswing in new jobs whenever you built a city district. In the end, it felt like you had less control and understanding of what a planet was specializing in.
Summary Although these experiments were interesting, they didn’t end up quite where we wanted to, so they never became more than just experiments. We did learn some interesting things though, which we will keep in mind for the future. The industrial districts are still something I want to keep looking into, but we have to find a better solution.
Dev diaries will now be back on a regular schedule, but we will be looking into changing the format a bit this time around. For now, dev diaries will be coming bi-weekly, which means we will be back again in another 2 weeks with a similar topic.
You can also read today's Dev Diary on our forums here.
