Building

Planets, and stations with certain modules, have a grid of spaces that buildings can be built on. The same sort of grid that one uses to build modules on a ship. These buildings provide bonuses of some form, be it resource generation or special effects of some kind. There are adjacency bonuses for some buildings so smart city planning is important.

Most tiles on a planet have natural resources of some kind. These resources generally don't produce "pips" on their own like in civilization, they simply exist. Buildings put onto that space produce pips and they produce more or less based on the resources present. Resources come in three degrees, sparse, moderate and heavy. And they can be anything from hills to plains to wheat. Most tiles will have a number of different resources and the player will have to decide which resources to exploit and which ones to ignore. I'm still unsure whether more than one building can be built onto a tile. I'm leaning toward each tile supporting one overarching building, but that building may have sub buildings that can be built within it. Similar to civilization's districts. Except the majority of worked tiles are districts rather than vice versa. This also would add in a nice concept of deciding whether you specialize and maximize the pips generated from a few natural resources, or spread out and get a little bit from each of the resources present. Which could play nicely into a pollution and/or resource depletion mechanic.

The above means that there is a massive difference in productivity between a population inside of a building and outside of a building. Further encouraging the player to develop more and more land as population grows. Which again seems to play very well into a pollution or resource depletion mechanic to give the player a bit of a juggling act here. Maybe draw some inspiration from how forests reduce pollution in Pax Nova.