I would like System Improvements to take up population slots.

Why?

Currently there aren't enough tradeoffs to just building every improvement you can in every system. The maintenance cost isn't enough, but you wouldn't want to jack up the maintenance so high that players struggle to have a postive Dust flow either. Making System Improvements take up population slots would make players be pickier about which improvements they make.

Implementation

• Increase population cap of each planet by a few.
• Have each System Improvement use up 0-2 population slots. Player chooses which colony it's built on.
• Improvements can be transferred to a different planet for a Dust fee.
• Need way to handle building Improvements in systems that already have max population. Perhaps excess population can share a slot with said Improvements but also suffer a hefty Happiness penalty until they can move to another system?

Further Thoughts

This also means you could build most of your Improvements on a single colony. How much of this should be allowed? What if the player makes a colony and fill it solely with Improvements? Would this be considered breaking the mechanic, or should it be a valid strategy?

Would this not be similar to a system seen in many other similar games, where you only have X buildable slots available, with more unlocked through technology as the game progress. 

I definitely do not see a problem in this. However! 

We already have system development rating (still not 100% sure what this covers but it is mentioned)

So it should be okay to have a system where each development rating only allow you to build so much. And only technology would allow you to progress further. 

This way you have to first have a colony stage with only basic improvements, followed by more tiers.. until at the end it becomes a... core world. 

Could even see such a system tie into the planetary specializations, so depending on what you pick will restrict what types of structures you can build. 

That would definitely mean you have to think more strategically. 

Aiyen wrote:

Could even see such a system tie into the planetary specializations, so depending on what you pick will restrict what types of structures you can build. 

That would definitely mean you have to think more strategically. 

I think that's a very interesting idea.  Although you'd probably need to make at least a basic specialization more available than they are currently (with better ones available through tech).

An alternative would be to have improvements share a slot with population.  So you can only have as many active improvements in a system as you have pops.  Although this idea might get finicky once pops can migrate.

Personal taste, but I'm never a fan of having the game push you in a certain direction (Tall vs Wide). If someone is spending all their time upgrading a system, they're not spending it building colony ships, or a military, or specializing. Plus population grows slower and slower with time. Add the Dust maintenance on top of that, and I'd say there's already enough negatives to building tall.

Romeo wrote:

Personal taste, but I'm never a fan of having the game push you in a certain direction (Tall vs Wide). If someone is spending all their time upgrading a system, they're not spending it building colony ships, or a military, or specializing. Plus population grows slower and slower with time. Add the Dust maintenance on top of that, and I'd say there's already enough negatives to building tall.

I agree! Endless games were never of the kind to limit the player's ability to build all the improvements, being much closer to GalCiv 1 or the Civ series (with the exception of VI, I suppose, though I haven't touched that yet), rather than Stellaris, GalCiv2/3, or Warlock. I would not like to see that part of the game changed, since I feel that it worked nice in previous iterations.

Romeo wrote:

Personal taste, but I'm never a fan of having the game push you in a certain direction (Tall vs Wide). If someone is spending all their time upgrading a system, they're not spending it building colony ships, or a military, or specializing. Plus population grows slower and slower with time. Add the Dust maintenance on top of that, and I'd say there's already enough negatives to building tall.

Lately on my Normal difficulty games as Lumeris, I'm quickly running out of Improvements to make and my military is twice as large as anyone else's. I'm converting all my Industry to Dust instead and ending up with +1k Dust per turn, which takes care of any maintenance cost I have. I'm using the surplus to insta-build Improvements in all my new colonies. I've upped the difficulty for my next match to see if that makes a difference, but it led to my last match being rather boring & mindless. I felt I didn't have to pay any attention to my colonies because I would just build everything on each of them and be good.

I agree with Romeo and Haxton - I've never had a problem with going tall+wide in the previous Endless games.

The player already makes permanent decisions about how to develop their systems in the form of planetary specialisations and system improvements. I don't see that forcing more constraints on them would really accomplish much.

MikeLemmer wrote:

Romeo wrote:

Personal taste, but I'm never a fan of having the game push you in a certain direction (Tall vs Wide). If someone is spending all their time upgrading a system, they're not spending it building colony ships, or a military, or specializing. Plus population grows slower and slower with time. Add the Dust maintenance on top of that, and I'd say there's already enough negatives to building tall.

Lately on my Normal difficulty games as Lumeris, I'm quickly running out of Improvements to make and my military is twice as large as anyone else's. I'm converting all my Industry to Dust instead and ending up with +1k Dust per turn, which takes care of any maintenance cost I have. I'm using the surplus to insta-build Improvements in all my new colonies. I've upped the difficulty for my next match to see if that makes a difference, but it led to my last match being rather boring & mindless. I felt I didn't have to pay any attention to my colonies because I would just build everything on each of them and be good.

Don't forget, there's quite a few things going your way there:

• The Lumeris are set up for Dust production.
• We don't have anywhere near the total amount of system improvements of the full game.
• The AI don't pose much of a threat on Normal and Easy, so a comparatively large army means little so far.

I would also assume there's balancing coming to fleet upkeep, seeing as how the max fleet size in Endless Space 2 seems significantly smaller than the original Endless Space. Albeit, that is entirely speculative on my part.

MikeLemmer wrote:

Romeo wrote:

Personal taste, but I'm never a fan of having the game push you in a certain direction (Tall vs Wide). If someone is spending all their time upgrading a system, they're not spending it building colony ships, or a military, or specializing. Plus population grows slower and slower with time. Add the Dust maintenance on top of that, and I'd say there's already enough negatives to building tall.

Lately on my Normal difficulty games as Lumeris, I'm quickly running out of Improvements to make and my military is twice as large as anyone else's. I'm converting all my Industry to Dust instead and ending up with +1k Dust per turn, which takes care of any maintenance cost I have. I'm using the surplus to insta-build Improvements in all my new colonies. I've upped the difficulty for my next match to see if that makes a difference, but it led to my last match being rather boring & mindless. I felt I didn't have to pay any attention to my colonies because I would just build everything on each of them and be good.

Talking about maintenance costs, am I the only who thinks they are way too low. Even looking at dreadfully unoptimal improvements like Sustainable Farms (+5, +10 on Monsoon, -4) you're still getting a net FIDS increase. Unless your empire is devoid of Dust at a ridiculous level, there's no reason not to build them all.

I liked it better when improvements were balanced so that you'd get a net FIDS decrease without the special condition (+X on Lava or whatnot), so building and scrapping them in a sub-optimal system was kind of an optimization problem. However, the special condition of most improvements has become much narrower in ES2, so if we just raised the upkeep, it'd be a case of not having a reason to build them at all. They could all be unique improvements and we would not notice it.

I think other ideas circulating on the forum could solve this a bit, such as planets having two 'climate' traits like Cold and Water or Burning and Dry. By aligning bonuses on climates rather than types, they'd reach a much larger spectrum of planets which in turn would justify higher upkeep costs. Improvements targeting one specific planet type could become unique improvements and still give a ridiculously high bonus, but getting the perfect system for them will remain uncommon.

Trentius wrote:

Improvements targeting one specific planet type could become unique improvements and still give a ridiculously high bonus, but getting the perfect system for them will remain uncommon.

Until, of course, we get terraforming (can't not have it, really)! But then it was really a late-game thing in , having the AI convert all your planets to Terran to produce massive amounts of  which then get turned into ...