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[Cruxador]

I kind of want to try inward perfection plus life seeded some time, for the ultimate screensaver experience. But I don't quite hate myself enough, and life seeded is pretty shit in this version of the game anyway.

[Telgin]

I played exactly that in my last 2.2 game.  Life-seeded is definitely more of a drawback than a bonus, but in 2.2 at least you can still colonize everywhere at a huge consumer goods (and food?) upkeep cost.  The bonuses for your homeworld are decent though, even if I'm iffy on wasting building slots to get the rare resources there since the planet is probably better suited to research or industry since it'll have a huge population.  The gaia planet terraforming bug also really sucks, so until that's fixed I don't recommend terraforming to gaia worlds or taking the ascension perk for it.  Habitats also suck and I don't recommend them either, but at least they're not as mandatory for life-seeded now.

Still, life-seeded is an interesting challenge, and I'll probably do it again.

Inward perfection layered on top is an interesting choice, and I almost exclusively play inward perfectionists now since I like to be self sufficient and have an irrational desire to only have my own pops on my planets even if I don't hate aliens (really!).  The bonuses for inward perfection are really nice, and especially since multi-species planets are weird with population growth, not having migrants is almost a good thing.  I only wish I could have combined both civics with technocracy for insane science and unity output.  Even with out it, I unlocked all traditions before 2400 and had repeatables in the 20s with an 800K navy (not counting stations) at the end of the game.

The game was extremely relaxed though.  Nobody declared war on me the whole game, and by the time the crises showed up I stomped it into the dirt.  I suspect that that may be different now in the 2.2.3 beta though, since AI empires supposedly are much better at building navies early on because they buy alloys from the market like it's candy, and if you neglect your navy you might be lucky enough to have a war declaration.  Even in 2.1 I only had one empire declare war on me across like 5 games, and that was because I built almost no ships.  That might return in later bugfix patches in 2.2.

[Rolan7]

Yeah, habitats...  I really want to like them, but ugh.  I built a bunch in this playthrough but as result I've mostly gotten Empire Sprawl and a real-life increase in management-burnout, after the novelty of the first one.

And then the Precursors blessed my first true tall playthrough with an Ecumenopolis.  Keeping in mind I *don't own Megacorp yet, this is really exciting.  So exciting that I initially had awful ideas like making the whole thing leisure districts (that lasted exactly one district).  It's... big, like the art kinda shows.  It's a practically infinite expanse of hyper-dense, but very expensive to develop, industrial architecture.

Lessee, 440 pops, 15 per district...  Luxury housing...  this one world could juuuust fit my entire species without overcrowding, if dedicated to housing.  But half my species would fit easily in, without any dedicated housing, fully devoted to industry!

It's kinda amazing to consider, like a Minecraft world of abandoned buildings.  My friends and I generated something like that, once, and built our projects within and around the husks.

First League more like First Losers amirite...  *looks around nervously at the precursor architecture in case it heard*

[Telgin]

The First League is kind of brokenly good right now, especially compared to the others.  I've been super lucky and gotten it on each of my 2.2 games, and it's a massive boon.  In my second game I colonized another size 25 planet near it and also turned it into an ecumenopolis.  Ecumenopoleis get +20% to most (maybe all) resource production, on top of the insane alloy and consumer goods they can produce from jobs.  I filled most of the building slots up with top tier research labs, and with science ships helping research, they produce around +1K of each type, each.  That's like 35% of my entire empire's research production between them, and probably 70% of the consumer goods and alloy production.

I'm kind of expecting a nerf bat to head their way soon, hopefully with an unnerf bat for habitats.


On the subject of colonies, I wish there were more good colony events.  Seems like the overwhelming majority are bad or are slanted toward bad outcomes.  I lost 15 pops to the Horizon Signal event, and I just got the abandoned terraforming equipment event that killed an entire colony and turned it into a toxic world.  That event in particular has almost no good outcomes, since it usually terraforms the planet into the wrong type for your species if it works, and if it doesn't work it can create monsters that kill your defense armies and take over, or it can apparently ruin the planet.  And if you leave it alone or dismantle the equipment, the planet has a permanent -5-10% habitability and happiness value.

Then there's the time waster that is the psychoactive plants event that requires like 3 trips from a science ship to complete... the plague event, which at least used to give a unity building and maybe still does... the list goes on.  The titanic life event also backfired on me in that game and made the titans mad, who proceeded to eat something like 15 armies before I retook control of the colony.

[Loud Whispers]

I remember when Titanic life gave the planet a +100 food production modifier. It was the most fun thing ever, then they scrapped it

[Rolan7]

The square-cube law demonstrates that life cannot grow that large without being delicious*nutritious.

[BurnedToast]

The First League is kind of brokenly good right now, especially compared to the others.  I've been super lucky and gotten it on each of my 2.2 games, and it's a massive boon.  In my second game I colonized another size 25 planet near it and also turned it into an ecumenopolis.  Ecumenopoleis get +20% to most (maybe all) resource production, on top of the insane alloy and consumer goods they can produce from jobs.  I filled most of the building slots up with top tier research labs, and with science ships helping research, they produce around +1K of each type, each.  That's like 35% of my entire empire's research production between them, and probably 70% of the consumer goods and alloy production.

I'm kind of expecting a nerf bat to head their way soon, hopefully with an unnerf bat for habitats.

While they are at it, they can unnerf ringworlds too. They need double buildings, or double output from buildings, or some unique districts, or something to make them special. Right now they are just "really big worlds with effectively half the buildings that cost a TON of resources" in a game where you rarely actually fill up all your regular worlds.

There's almost never any reason to ever build them. If you rush them mid-game, you've got uncolonized and low pop worlds you could send people to instead without pouring thousands of alloy into a money pit. Late game, they won't ever fill up and become usefully productive before the game is finished. Finally, even if you play past the end date (or set it way back) they can only produce energy and food, and the only use for all that food is selling it for energy... but you're better off making alloy to sell for energy, so you'd be better off spamming habitats filled with alloy forges instead of building a ringworld.

It's a little amusing to me that the only thing that would make them maybe worthwhile - infinite mining districts - was removed. I mean sure, it didn't make any sense thematically but mechanically it would at least have given them some purpose in feeding minerals into your ecumenopolis alloy worlds. It's almost like they purposely nerfed them into the ground to make the new DLC look better... hmm.....

[Telgin]

Yeah, ring worlds seriously need some special districts or buildings, or at least be divided up into 8 segments so they're not worse than size 25 worlds as far as building slots go.  Adding the matter replicator building back for them would be a start, but the dearth of building slots would still make them kind of suck.  I haven't built one in 2.2 yet since there doesn't seem to be much point.

I think they might be decent for agrarian idylls, but not much else.

[Paul]

They just need to uncap building slots and make it scroll. 5 per pop period. So ringworlds could be turned into massive production centers with lots and lots of buildings.

[Telgin]

This is one reason I'm a little disappointed that they got rid of the infrastructure idea.  That would have scaled endlessly with population and made things like ringworlds meaningful and would have reduced the need for things like commerce centers just to keep pops employed.  The latter might be intentional, I guess.

The funny thing about removing infrastructure is that their justification was that the infrastructure jumps meant that suddenly a lot of new jobs opened up that caused pops to promote to them and undermine your resource production economy, but that still happens if you build anything with specialist jobs.  It's not as pronounced as having potentially 15 buildings add a new specialist job at an infrastructure breakpoint, but it does still happen.  I'm pretty sure it could be balanced around.

Actually, adding a promotion delay would help a lot there, and it's a suggestion I've seen floated around that I like.  It stops that problem and also makes sense, since it's unlikely farmers can just jump into research jobs anyway.

[Paul]

With minor changes to the building UI they could just uncap buildings and make larger planets worthwhile. Make it display the slots with a number beside them. So I might have a planet with 10 alloy forges and 5 hydroponics and 15 commercial centers and it would just show 3 icons for those with a number next to each. Upgrading would just upgrade one at a time and have a seperate slot for the upgraded building. Even if you put every single type of building on a planet it wouldn't take up more UI space than the current ugly locked boxes.

[EnigmaticHat]

Once you build a city planet, you'll forget what its like to need building slots.  Of course its a huge investment that won't pay off for a while, but when it does you'll be able to squeeze those 10 alloy forges into a couple districts and call it a day.

Other than that, I think the intent is that if you want to employ a large population you need special resources.  If you're determined about hunting those down you can employ a large amount of people in one planet.

[umiman]

One thing that really bothers me is you can't destroy megastructures.

No blowing up space habitats or ringworlds. No destruction of an empire's energy reserves in their Dyson Sphere, crippling them forever. Etc. etc.

[Telgin]

Which is weird because there are models for ruined megastructures, and I'm pretty sure one of the dev diaries for 2.2 mentioned that they could be destroyed.  Well, colossi can destroy habitats and ringworld segments, right?

I'm sure the actual justification for not allowing the destruction of things like Dyson spheres is because losing one would probably be an economic disaster you couldn't recover from.  That, of course, makes them particularly good targets in a war so I think it would be nice to at least have it as a configurable option.  Balancing the difficulty of destroying one might be hard, and it might end up being one of those things only colossi should be able to destroy.

[EnigmaticHat]

Its a bit of an issue with 2.2 in general; because its about production chains losing one part of the chain in war can snowball into being crippled when the next war comes around.  Of course that might be intentional; as penalty for specialization, or as an incentive to keep your most valuable assets away from the border where they'll be expensive to claim.

I think a good compromise would be allowing you to reduce a megastructure to its damaged state if you own it, perhaps after a certain amount of time spent with an alert to nearby factions (you could get alloys and say you're "salvaging" it).  That would prevent you from destroying megastructures without winning a war, but it would also give you a reward for putting in the effort to conquer a megastructure you don't intend to keep.

I do think you shouldn't be able to destroy a populated ringworld or habitat, you should have to purge it first.  Not for balance or logic, just to be consistent with how planets work.  I can't imagine there's anything easier or less upsetting about destroying a populated ringworld than destroying a populated planet and we seem incapable/unwilling to do that until we get colossus.

(wiki claims you can destroy ringworld sections with a colossus, one at a time and they can't be rebuilt.  Habitats as well but they just vanish)