While I understand the Necrophage origin and the "necromancer" civic being mutually exclusive- it's very apparent that doing so makes both of them more flat for it. I think having something to either get more from less "such as making those zombie armies actually have some utility outside of just "free fodder to throw at an enemy".

Even without new civics, origins, or even anything but buildings- the fact that your necromancy is limited to "make crappy armies that are cheap" feels silly when armies aren't even useful compared to bombardment. Surely having your undead boost production of Menial/worker jobs wouldn't be TOO extreme? Just have the amount of them (whether it is additional effects of the armies, or just new mechanics from a different building) in relation to your regular pop count affect the overall happiness of living pops.

引用自 Don't even Try it：

While I understand the Necrophage origin and the "necromancer" civic being mutually exclusive- it's very apparent that doing so makes both of them more flat for it. I think having something to either get more from less "such as making those zombie armies actually have some utility outside of just "free fodder to throw at an enemy".

Even without new civics, origins, or even anything but buildings- the fact that your necromancy is limited to "make crappy armies that are cheap" feels silly when armies aren't even useful compared to bombardment. Surely having your undead boost production of Menial/worker jobs wouldn't be TOO extreme? Just have the amount of them (whether it is additional effects of the armies, or just new mechanics from a different building) in relation to your regular pop count affect the overall happiness of living pops.

I guess to make this less than a paragraph, I'd love buildings for specific parts of the game that change mechanics such as: Necromancer civic, Necrophage origin, the corporate government type, and so on. Beyond this is just throwing out ideas for some of these buildings, feel free to ignore!

-The "worker cooperative" civic for the corporate government could have buildings that really lean into all of your wealth being reinvested practically to benefit your pops, their happiness, and planetary stability.

-A necromancer building that boosts your worker and menial job efficiency based on how many undead armies there are, to justify potentially having a military district on some of your planets- or to focus on a more defensive playstyle and have a building that forces the game to kill your undead armies before killing any pops, but the undead armies are SLIGHTLY harder to kill than normal pops.

-Necrophage having a choice between one of two buildings on each planet.

The first one REALLY increases the upkeep of consumer goods for your non-necrophage pops, but in exchange the worker/menial jobs buff the "higher" jobs (I.E. Menial jobs buff specialists a tiny amount to make up for the near infinite growth they can give. Worker jobs buff Ruler jobs by ALOT to make up for the much greater restriction on their numbers).

The other building would reduce the happiness of your specialist and rulers, but you would receive a tiny empire wide reduction to upkeep for pops that AREN'T ruler or specialists to help balance out the effect from the other building.

-Shroud origin/ascension could allow you build a "host" building on multiple planets. Than with a decision, you can have each host building enter as part of a wider psionic network (Think like the Ethereals from the newer Xcom games or just wifi and ethernet) across your empire. These planets cause immense harm when they are taken from you, but provide massive bonuses if you can protect them consistently.

Really good mod with usefull add-ons for the middle and later game, especially for the new planetary economy model 4.0.
However there is one point that a bit unpleasant. I'm currently in the mid-game and a huge load of your mod items are overcrowding the research rooster so other more basic research patterns are not offered or quite late. Your mod seems to be very prominently occupying the tech grid.
Did you make them to pop-up in first place in the research list? Scrolling through a list of mostly your items to find very basic tech I need to proceed, while I'd rate your tech items to be more as of very usefull add-ons. Would be nice if you would consider to lower the possibility for your tech a little bit. Thx!

Hey @Kepos! So, I made this deliberately because I think this mod "overwrites" the economy so much because of how good the buildings are and shifting production to specialists that I deliberately made them have the same research priority as all the tree-opening techs. I didn't yet run into a situation where all research alternatives were mine. There are 23 techs in the whole mod but 4 are locked to late game and 3 are locked behind others. I'll push an update that locks a few others behind others (like locking the Interstellar Harbour behind the Stellar Wharf) but other than that I suggest you consider using the opening event option to have all techs researched already as there'll be an even playing field for AI and Human regarding these buildings while not crowding up your research tab. Btw each Lyceum you build adds +1 Research alternative. Something I've found very useful myself.

@Don't even Try it Hey! I've read this and your comments on main. I really appreciate these suggestions but they're reasonably hard to code, as the don't have built counters for how many specifically undead armies there are in the planet, etc. I can do something do boost production for necro-slaves based on the amount of Necro-buildings, though. I'll look into it.

I've mentioned in in the main comment feed, but I think Spiritualists being excluded from building the Civil Service building is unfortunate (especially considering they don't have a swap option), so perhaps you could just include the Temple buildings in the list of buildings that the Civil Service checks for?

@jht_89 Will do!

Hi again VF! I am enjoying your mod a lot still. Now that I've had more time with it I do have a few more thoughts, hopefully that are useful.

I noticed the research costs for the buildings is incredibly low. It seems as if it is bugged and not scaling with game duration properly. Around even as early as year 2250, a lot of the buildings show up as needing sub-1000 research, while by that time most techs from the tree need something like 3-8k research.

I do believe at least some of the buildings may be better 'balanced' by having an Empire Limit rather then just a Planet Limit. Maybe even, while keeping Planet Limit to 1, setting some Empire Limits to 2/3/4 or something.

Of all the things the buildings do, of which there are many, to me it feels like nearly all the buildings give +5% Habitability. As for balance, if it were a consideration (I know it's of little, but still) I would consider limiting this to only those buildings where giving Habitability is most thematic. It feels sometimes, with a lot of your buildings and even a small Habitability buff otherwise, I basically never have a good reason to Terraform, and that feels bad as it's a fun game system that loses its importance.

One last thing, similar to Habitability (in that it is a 'narrowing', in a way), is that right now you can build basically any building in any district. I think this is another opportunity to make buildings, again, more thematically focused. Limiting buildings you have in your wiki as 'Standalone Facilities' to the capital district and their respective corresponding specializations would 'force' the player to make interesting decisions when it comes to picking district specializations around these buildings, just for one example.

Thanks!

Hi @eqn! About the tech cost, the tech cost is fixed for all techs, so I cannot make the buildings scale in cost as the game progresses. Because the building techs are dependent only on themselves, they "stand out"; I think it's unfair to put them in a higher category but unfun to mix them in the normal progress tree, as people will simply miss the buildings entirely.

About the Empire Limit, I do see some reason in terms of balancing (even though the AI can also build everything) but how to justify it in terms of narrative? If an Empire figures out space mining is ludicriously lucrative and bountiful, why not do it in all their planets? I personally dislike playing bounded to anything (I don't play with limits on Megastructures, for example) because I think sci-fi makes mind-boggling prosperity obvious. Anyway, I need to evolve my stellaris coding logic to figure out if its possible to make an empire limit something toggable by a menu or something. When I can do that I'll definitely implement an empire limit.

And for the Habitability, you'll be pleased to know that only the Wharfs will give habitability bonuses from now on. Because they're a self-contained environment. People can live in orbit even in barren planets, you know? But otherwise it doesn't make sense, so I removed Hab bonuses for civic plazas and the like. This was bugging me myself. Used to be a band-aid for the previous Engineer job (my Job, not the new Eng. Researcher Job, from my previous mod), which gave a little habitability.

Anyway, to wrap things up, I've been trimming the district lists a lot. I'm still generous with them because I realize a lot of people play with mods that add planet categories which don't have all buildings accessible. I personally play with a few planetary habitats mod and if I haven't as a modder made Wharfs be ploppable pretty much everywhere (like commercial districts) i'd be frustrated as a player. But the next update will be a little less generous with the districts.

Thank you for all this input!

The coming changes sound wonderful, thank you for the thoughtful reply!

You're totally right about narrative. I didn't really think of it from that perspective but it's totally fair that one empire would thematically want or need to build certain buildings on every planet if it matches their 'personality'. I play with unlimited megastructures too, haha.

I guess my mind was focusing too much on "balance", in that I do mindlessly gravitate towards spamming certain buildings like the Civics Plaza, on basically every planet. That said, in general that is totally valid narratively too for most empires. Besides, maybe, for a Gestalt Consciousness or Hive, whom would, depending on how you look at it narratively, potentially have little use for 'Civics'.

No worries on an empire limit if only for my sake of course. It sounds like a headache.

Finding the right research costs for the buildings does sound like a headache too. Personally I see a lot of merit in attaching at least some of the buildings, at least potentially something like the Polar Site buildings, to certain techs. I do play with a lot of mods and I appreciate it when, if necessary at all, the techs from a mod are flavorfully attached to certain existing techs. Even trying my hardest to avoid mods that add a lot of techs (mostly just yours, ESC, Giga, and a few misc. ones that add a small handful each) the tech tree can feel a little bloated at times. ESC and Giga definitely contribute, no doubt.

If you are open to changing the existing tech costs at all for your standalone building techs, realistically I think getting the to around '1200' is a plenty low floor, as that's about the minimum for a vanilla tech early game. Contrary to my criticism of tech tree bloat in general, it is nice on the other hand to occasionally have a super cheap tech to effectively use as a reset button for tech alternatives. Maybe a middle ground could be found eventually for attaching only certain buildings to vanilla techs and keeping individual techs for other buildings. All good, of course, if you were to keep it as is.

Hey @eqN! Regarding the tech costs I think you'll find this update I pushed three hours ago enjoyable. I think I doubled it or tripled it, don't remember correctly, but I did change it from the launch version. And for the empire limit thing, a few people are requesting it besides you. I don't see why not.

How about setting up Refinery Stations to require all three prior strategic resource production tech? I can understand you're trying to not mix your stuff much with the basegame, but in 4.0 context the Refinery Station is basically all three of those buildings merged into one which allows delaying the individual resource production tech if gained prior.

(I haven't yet played with the new update, so sorry if this was covered there.)

Had some time to try the latest patch. It's great!

I will second Graion's suggestion, as it does make sense logically. The strategic resources even in vanilla 4.0 are unfortunately so easy to accumulate at the moment, so putting the 'trifecta' building behind the combined individual techs will help keep those buildings and resources relevant for at least a small while.

I noticed something that isn't a big deal, just a bit of 'UI gore' that may be nice to fix.

When choosing a building for my main City District on a planet, the 'option' to choose Structural Residences shows up. It specifies that it is build-able only on a Habitat, which is understandable, and really it's not a big deal that the option shows up on a planet.

The UI issue is that under the same definition of 'requirements' for the building it is formatted as:

"One must be true:
X - Orbital Habitat
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X"

Which obviously is a little 'unsightly'.

Other than this, Graion's idea, and the hopeful prospect of eventual empire limited buildings as an option, the mod is nearly perfect to me honestly. As always VF, thanks for your hard work!

@eqN This is fixed. Structural Residences will all work for all artificial planets and so don't need to have these statements, which are actually for modded planets I had in the past. I've also implemented the idea you had about planet and empire limits for main buildings. This is customizeable now at game start and through events vfb.2. and vfb.3

引用自 VFacure：

@Don't even Try it Hey! I've read this and your comments on main. I really appreciate these suggestions but they're reasonably hard to code, as the don't have built counters for how many specifically undead armies there are in the planet, etc. I can do something do boost production for necro-slaves based on the amount of Necro-buildings, though. I'll look into it.

Honestly, even just knowing you're just considering bow difficult it might be is more than enough! You've already done great work on the mod so far, any more is just the cherry on top!