"Galactic market" that's something to look forward to.
Agreed. I'm already looking forward to all of the improvements shown so far, but the teased features like trade routes and whatever the final galactic market looks like are making me even more anxious for the update. As others have said on the Paradox forums, it's making it hard to play the game as it is, which might be for the best since I've done little else lately on the days I've had free time.
One small note in the last dev diary was that unity and research costs are now penalized based on the number of districts instead of planets, which I'm very glad to see. I never liked skipping over small planets and was a (perhaps mistaken) believer that even the smallest planets were worth taking, but this makes that definitely correct now. Larger planets are still better since they require equal work to colonize for more space, and it sounds like they'll have a higher infrastructure cap that makes them better suited to specialist work, but you don't have to skip over a small planet completely now. They'll actually be useful for raw resource production, which has the interesting side effect of potentially making players want to redevelop larger planets into research or manufacturing hubs later on, while pushing off mining and farming work to new, smaller colonized planets.
The changes to habitats look really interesting too, but it's kind of early to tell how the changes will feel in game. They
look to be smaller since they have only 6 districts by default, but that may feel like plenty in practice. I'm more curious to see what they end up doing with ringworlds.
This seems actually more like an AI boost that the player gets access to than something truly for the player. The AI had always has trouble with preparing adequate resources, most dramatically when it falls into a starvation spiral. This probably results from an inability to plan ahead, using instead hard-coded guidelines for success. Imagine how much worse this would be with all the new resources. The market will let the AI handily bypass the problem.
That's probably a nice side effect of it, but it at least looks like the
intention was to make most empires at least somewhat dependent on each other to trade resources. Wiz didn't go into any detail at all, probably with the intention of holding that for a later dev diary, but he did specifically mention that machine empires were now designed to be self-sufficient, which implies it's in contrast to other kinds of empires. Of course, since that comment was right after mentioning that machine empires get extra jobs, and thus resource production, that means it's probably not going to be a case of empires being seriously shut out of certain resources.
I imagine that in practice players probably won't have much trouble building self-sufficient empires of any kind, but I guess we'll see.