I often receive messages detailing plans for production on Vallis that requires engineers and scientists. For these last couple months of being entrusted with the governorship, I have been attempting to grow especially the engineer population, but it has been very difficult.
The first frustration I came across was the unbalanced, and wildly varying costs of different upkeep materials. Costs per need fulfilled should vary somewhat between upkeep materials, if only to make things interesting, but some should not be 5 or more times as expensive as the cheaper option.
I propose that planet Infrastructure upkeep costs be re-examined, and the amount of each upkeep material consumed be adjusted to more closely reflect it’s market cost.
Now on to the second problem.
On a starter planet like Vallis, pioneers and settlers consume the vast majority of all supplied needs, including education and culture, with little benefit (or potentially no benefit?) from the 2 mentioned prior. This makes it excessively difficult and exorbitantly expensive to keep high tier populations happy and growing, on planets with large low tier pop.
To solve this problem, I propose that governors should be able to change the need allocations to different population tiers, in order to better control growth.
This would also have the side effect of allowing me to extricate the 16000 Settlers who are currently not paying taxes!