The system improvement screen only gives one option for existing system improvements -- scrap them for a pittance of dust.  That's it.  This indirectly affects other game systems and makes them unintuitive; in particular the system growth and overpopulation system.



My present understanding of food and system growth is that for any given system, there is an equilibirium of population that is reached given the food improvements made on that system.  As the population grows, the consumption grows to the point where the net food output is in the single digits.  The stock slowly grows to 300, the population ticks over, and consumption increases.  This makes the net food output negative in the single digits and the stock slowly goes to zero and the population ticks down which in turn reduces consumption -- equilibrium achieved.  I think this is very clever.


In practice, however, I would claim that players just build all the food improvements.  The population grows as fast as possible and hits the overpopulation cap.  The overpopulation approval penalties may impact food production and curb growth in that manner, but in all likelihood, the average player just leaves all the food improvements intact (for manpower purposes perhaps, or perhaps just laziness) until they reseach the super biofuel factory to convert all that excess food into industry.  I would claim that a minority of players actually experiment with scrapping food improvements to tightly control their population growth.


I believe that a better system would be to allow players to selectively disable their system improvements.  This would remove (or perhaps reduce) the upkeep cost, but leave the improvement intact.  If you really want to be hardcore about it, you can have a dust tax for stopping and/or restarting a system improvement in order to provide a sense of inertia.  In my own games right now, I bust open a spreadsheet to try to predict how scrapping my epigenetic crop seeding, intensive cultivation logistics, etc. and *combinations* of those will affect my net food output.  I then scrap one, find out my math was wrong, then waste turns rebuilding it.  It would make more sense if I could simply disable it instead of having to scrap/rebuild it.


This applies to other system improvements as well.  Let's say your empire is running into budget problems.  It would be nice to selectively mothball your system science improvements to get your upkeep costs down instead of just scrapping them and having to rebuild them later.


In order to track disabled improvements, you could add a red exclamation mark next to the icon or perhaps include an animated swirl on the button to remind players.



I also think that scrapping system improvements should not be instant.  Consider the following.


In my games, I have invaded enemy systems.  System ownership grows at 8% per turn which blocks me from evacuating/vacating the system immediately.  This gives the enemy empire time to counterplay -- this is good game design.  I sometimes use the starport on the system to move the minor population units that I care to acquire off the system.  I can only move three units at a time which gives the enemy empire time to counterplay -- this is good game design.


I'm above the colonization cap, so I don't intend to hold this system which has no resources I care about.  I scrap every single improvement on the system for dust on the same turn the invasion succeeds, then immediately open diplomacy for a truce and I hand the system back to its former owner.  That's absolute garbage.  Sure he gets the system back with 100% or 92% ownership, but everything is gone.  He has zero counterplay options.


A better alternative would be that scrapping a system improvement puts a scrap action into the development queue that takes one turn or takes some scaling amount of industry.  That way, if I can only destroy one improvement per turn, in the twelve turns it would take me to fully own and evacuate/vacate the system, I can at most destroy twelve improvements.  This gives the enemy empire time to counterplay!  A defending empire is now incentivized to mobilize quickly to retake the system in order to minimize system improvement losses.  Let's say the scrap action takes a scaling amount of industry instead.  Then that means in order for me to sabotage the defender retaking the system, I have to spend dust to buyout the improvement destruction (note that this goes hand in hand with my other idea to scale industry output with system ownership https://www.games2gether.com/endless-space-2/ideas/1413-system-ownership-should-penalize-industry-dust-science).  In either case, there should be some inertia to system improvement destruction to allow room for counterplay.


Of the two options, I actually favor making the scrap action take a scaling amount of industry.  This would allow the reward for scrapping to be not only an increased amount of dust, but reclamation of a portion of the strategic material costs as well.  Consider the following.


I'm playing a game with the galaxy set to low resource abundance.  I have a remote frontier system with access to one of the few antimatter nodes in the known galaxy.  I'm stockpiling adamantium and antimatter in order to build the trade clearing bureau.  I have 120 antimatter, but then I lose control of my frontier system.  There's no antimatter on the marketplace and none of the other empires will trade it to me.  It would be a meaningful decision if I had the option to dismantle a wellbeing foundation that I built on one of my systems to reclaim a fraction of the 25 antimatter.  You can even envision early game scenarios where titanium/hyperium are scarce and you have to decide to scrap system improvements in order to get the 5 titanium/hyperium necessary to build hunter and coordinator ships.  Furthermore, you may even have to spend dust to buyout the scrap action in queue for systems with low industry output.  How about attacking enemy systems just to scrap the improvements for strategic resources and then abandoning them -- that's compelling gameplay!


As a final aside, I want to mention that the technology to vacate a system instead of evacuating it means absolutely nothing.  In both cases, you get a colonization ship.  The amount of dust you receive from vacating is almost identical to the amount you get from scrapping all the improvements + evacuating.


-HP