Thoughts on the new Habitat system?

[Tayvin]

As a big Void Dweller lover, I've been watching the arrival of 3.9 with some excitement and trepidation. Now that it's here, it's clear that Habitats have been changed almost as much as when the ole' tilesystem was replaced by Districts. What's the general consensus on the new Habitat system so far? I've only just started my new game with them so I'm still learning how it works, but I'm curious as to what others think of the new system.

Yay or nay?

[SaD-82]

In short: Not as bad as some people want to make you believe it would be - not as good as it could be.
It will need some tweaking and balancing in the coming weeks/months. But this is normal development as we know it.

[HappySack]

The 3.9 beta was out for weeks so plenty of people already provided their thoughts both here and the Paradox forum.

It's bad and needs work and the devs ignored most feedback before releasing it in it's current state

[Tayvin]

Originally posted by HappySack:

The 3.9 beta was out for weeks so plenty of people already provided their thoughts both here and the Paradox forum.

It's bad and needs work and the devs ignored most feedback before releasing it in it's current state

I don't hang out in the forums and beta but can you explain why it's bad and what was ignored?

[Warhunter]

i find it pretty bad
the loss of the starting 2nd/3rd habitats really slows down your early game. the guaranteed planets setting is harmful for void dwellers. you get nothing in return for buffing everyone else so you might as well set it to 0
the loss of orbital surveying really hampers resource production
the 1 habitat per system forces you into a much more aggressive playstyle than before
(rip my fanatic pacifist void dweller empire)

the fact that voidborne AP gives most of the benefits of void dwellers to everyone else makes the void dweller origin quite bad
you only get 2 things over non void dwellers. 5 sources of +10% max districts for habitats and the void dwelller trait (through im not sure if other empires get some of those +10% max districts on habitat techs or not)

its just a general downgrade for void dwellers. for normal empires it somewhat ok as it as they arent reliant on habitats and just see them as an extra boost

kind of funny alot of people complained about AI habitat spam but all this new system does is that it makes it so every system in the game is going to have a habitat instead of having a bunch clustered up in the same system

[HappySack]

Originally posted by Tayvin:

I don't hang out in the forums and beta but can you explain why it's bad and what was ignored?

There are better threads that sum up the issues in detail here:
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/3-9-habitat-rework-suggestions.1597061/#post-29111257
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/my-take-on-habitats-in-3-9.1597805/#post-29121176

Basically with one central habitat you can no longer specialize in multiple methods of production in addition to not being able to access multiple habitats worth of pop growth to feed your habitat that has massive space but no pops to work anything, with Void Dwellers in particular being hit really hard from these changes.

Also trade builds are also hit pretty hard since they have to jump through multiple hoops to try and match the TV they would have had under the previous system as both merchants and stacking TV habitats have both been reworked with the former now being traders.

The only good thing about them is that you can max out on research buildings with them at least but that's about it.

[Geoff]

Originally posted by Tayvin:

I don't hang out in the forums and beta but can you explain why it's bad and what was ignored?

There were a number of complaints about the fact that you can't just automate the new orbital construction process. Some folks felt that was tedious and added nothing of merit to the gameplay experience.

Fans of a particular habitat gameplay strategy expressed dismay that it nerfs the power of the "trade build."

There was some generalized concern that some of the uniqueness of void-dwellers has been lost, or that basically any system can now be considered a habitable world.

Can't say whether they were ignored or not or whether they're the ones being referred to. But that's what I noticed, at least.

[⎛⎝Tiùwilo⎠⎞]

I like that you don't have to juggle districts to avoid hitting a major pop growth debuff from low planet capacity anymore, and trade feels more powerful than ever now that clerks buff the output by 1% each. Traders are easy enough to come by, and since they're just specialists, they're easier to turn into a net positive consumer goods producer, especially with indentured servants.

Having less but potentially way larger (You can get size 20+ habitats relatively easily) habitats is also a good thing for megacorps, who get a +50% empire size modifier to colony count. The absence of trade districts isn't so bad when you consider the habitation districts adding 3 clerk jobs each. Combined with the much more easily available building slots, I feel like this is even stronger than before.

Not sure about the Voidborne perk though. It's great that you can save on an ascension perk when starting as Voidborne, at least.

[Warhunter]

eh i had no problems with pop capacity in the old habitat system
the moment you can upgrade your habitats to tier2 was game changing since that allowed you to build housing buildings on habitats
you know those things people never touch since they have 0 use outside of habitats

get domination for +1 housing per housing building
stack some housing usage reduction (communal, adaptability tradition adoption, egalitarian culture workers, fertile)
you'll easily get perfect pop growth on all your habitats, or atleast i didn't have much problem with pop growth for my void dweller runs.

i don't see the extra district slots being that worthwhile atleast compared to losing alot of building slots per system
atleast in old habitats i could easily stack like 9 building slots (compared to max 11 not including government building slot) so you hit almost max on all your habitats

with the limits to space resources you might not even be able to use all those district slots and even then to those 20+ habitats cost insane amount of resources that its not worth it compared to slapping another habitat down elsewhere until you run out of influence generation compared to alloy production

only upside is planetary ascensions work might work better for habitats but the only designation that seems to benefit are factory/foundry stations
the other designations just cant stack enough to be worth more than old habitats even with the increased size

its rare to get enough reactor/mining districts to make them better than old habitats
research mostly relies on research buildings anyway. research districts are nice to save cost but that's about it (not that you can even stack that many now anyway)
unity/hydroponics gets about the same as old since you're still hardcapped by building slots and you cant expand past the normal cap even if your modifiers go above it

only thing i don't know much is about trade. i never liked trade to begin with so im not sure how much the new habitat affects that but from what i know about trade. most of your trade comes from commercial buildings so the extra size habitats dont seem to add much per pop efficiency

i do not have much experience with how orbital destruction works. but from i know. every orbital destroyed in combat gives you 10% devestation to the main habitat (because of course when you expand your habitat you plant bombs that go off when those offshoot stations get destroyed)
and it costs 50% build cost of those orbitals to rebuild them.
so if an enemy fleet ever gets access to your habitats you can say goodbye to all productivity as you hit max 100 devastation in just a few days as all the orbitals pop instantly to enemy fire

so fortress/shield generator are literally useless on habitats with orbitals since the devestation will disable ftl jammers and the shield gen will never get its use out of it since you just bypass its damage reduction

[Androzin]

New change is really bad if you like playing Void Dwellers like me. Habitats are just okay by themselves outside of playing VD, but if you're a normal empire you probably will never use them again outside of niche situations. VD is a bad origin if you're playing Grand Admiral or PVP, you're just unnecessarily putting yourself at a disadvantage by just playing them. You can still win PVP and GA if you're good at the game but its not really worth it.

Your early game is going to be really hard playing VD, you don't have your 3 habitats anymore. They removed the pop growth penalty but that doesn't really help as you still need them to keep up with normal empires. You don't believe me? Try it yourself as a non hivemind VD. Being limited to 1 habitat per system is a terrible change for VD itself, you have to make orbitals and thats limited to 1 system as well, (From what ive seen) Habitats are also more expensive now and you're bleeding for influence at the start already. The extra alloy production is cool but it doesn't offset all the negatives now. They could have just added an option to turn off habitats for AI in the starting menu because this just outright makes an origin unfun to play.

There is also a decent youtuber by the name of Montuplays that played VD in multiplayer today, he was far behind everyone in the game with VD. He managed to barely win an early game war by min/maxing everything during that war, he is also really good at stellaris. His population was at 60 while others were near 100+, it just feels bad to play.

Montu even fruitful partnership is bad but its better than current Void Dweller which is saying something.

[NixBoxDone]

To be honest, it looks terrible right now, at least if you're going voidborne and actually plan to play around habitats.
It feels like even for regular empires they're less good. Previously I often used habitats to make up for specific resource needs. I'd build a habitat over a mineral source to get a mini-planet that produces minerals if none of the naturally generated planets in my empire had decent mining districts, for example.
I'd build one for credits if I was running low, or build a habitat specifically to produce strategic resources in orbit around planets massively consuming same so they'd grow together and balance each other out.

With one habitat per system, this now seems completely unfeasible. Not only do you have a fixed limit of how many habitats you can build in total, but the habitat also greatly differs in just how useful it can become in the first place based on what resources and system objects are present.
I. e. you're limited in how many you can build and some of the ones you can build will be of limited potential where before you could build almost as many as you could possibly need (unless you got heavily hemmed in) and had almost free reign in what the habitat was going to do for your empire.

Actually building and expanding habitats seems to work fine. I didn't run into any trouble sourcing the alloys to build habitats early, which was a pretty big issue with voidborne against aggressive/high difficulty AI when your alloys were also needed for strong starbases and fleets.

I'm going to play some more voidborne to see what it looks like in end game and play around with Toxic Knights to see if the massive increase in potential size of the habitat has potential when coupled with the knight jobs, but right now it seems like habitats lost a lot of what makes them great for regular empires and voidborne lost almost all advantages over just going regular empire.

[Garatgh Deloi]

Originally posted by Tayvin:

...

I would say that the new Habitats system is good.

However i would also say that Void Dweller is likely a weak start now.

I also really miss my trade habitats (One of my favorite empires pre-patch was a Void Dweller Megacorp, it was admittedly a rather strong combo, but now trade districts on habitats aren't a thing anymore).

[Viscount Danku]

It's ♥♥♥♥. I thought the problem of old habs was endless spam by AI, not the basic idea behind them. Why some particularly bright individual decided to break what was working instead of simply fixing the obvious issue is beyond me. And how this atrocious concept slipped through QA department is mystery in and of itself.

[AlexnChaos]

Have not played with habs yet but it does feel amusing seeing other people getting beaten by Paradox like the old Ring World starters got previously lol

[Sedmeister]

Most of it has been said and I've noted this in other posts. I tried VD again today. The tedious orbitals construction (manually having to scour the system and having to fiddle zoom levels when trying to build minor orbitals in systems where labels regularly cover the target) is a degree of busy work when combined with all the other limitations described above and in other places means it's just not fun any more for me.

So, who wants to suggest an origin and/or habitability preference for the Corsairs of Va'ri? (My criminal heritage letters of marque build I've been using on habitats for the last year or so. They need a new home that isn't habitats.)

[Ryika]

One thing I really don't understand is why we have Orbitals AND districts. They could just turn Orbitals into district replacements and implement a way to show Orbitals in the UI (maybe even build them through the UI?), or simply skip the whole Orbitals thing entirely, and just make the potential for Habitat districts depend on what resources are available in the system, with a lot of the other scaling from upgrading your Habitat.

The entire system seems unnecessarily complicated and micro-intensive to me.