Endless Legend-style planet colonization

Endless Legend had a really good system that gave the player a real sense of customization and control when it came to city development with how it allowed you to choose how the city spread across the landscape. Endless Space 2 currently follows the same design as Endless Space 1 where the planets population rises but the player has no input into what happens and therefore it doesn't feel like that growth was rewarding in a tangible way. In Endless Legend having that option to add a new 'borough' for every 2 'people' felt like you were rewarded with another way to make a decision that impacted the game. This can be also done with Endless Space 2 using this method.

On the spherical planets, imagine that they are segmented into zones. Since the population cap for any planet appears to be 12 then there would be a maximum of 12 zones. Here is an image to explain what I mean by zones. Click Here.

At the moment the base value of any planet is a fixed value per population increase. What I propose is that this actually displays an average of resources distributed across all 12 zones. For example; if the planet displays a base value of 12 Food then each zone may have between 6 and 18 Food resources. Or it could be more uneven distribution but still produce this average across all zones. This means when a player needs to first colonize a world they need to consider where the first zone to be colonized is as the zone itself and the surrounding ones will influence production of resources. Someone may choose to initially colonize a zone with the highest Food production on the planet even though neighboring zones are below average for the planet. For planets with very limited room for population growth this means you could specialize that world for one type of resource if the zones permit it. What this means is that everytime a planet has a new population increase the player needs to choose what zone to expand to next. Or this could be set to an automatic choice if players don't want to micro-manage colony growth and therefore a neighboring zone is just chosen at random.

Choice on how a player spreads colonies across worlds then becomes a meta-game in itself using this approach and would be more satisfying than it currently is.

(updated title, had the wrong one)