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Stellaris Dev Diary #260 - Summer Culture

Hey folks, and I hope everyone is having a fantastic summer/winter break (depending on your hemisphere). I’ve found some time between my other summer experiments and the work we’re doing for 3.5 “Fornax” to dive into the feedback/suggestions lists. Since Eladrin is still away, you’re getting another sneak preview of what I’ve been working on.

One of the frequent requests from the Unity rework that was part of the 3.3 “Libra” patch earlier this year was for us to return Culture Workers to the game. Currently, they exist only as jobs provided by some event buildings, but many in the Community felt we removed some flavor/roleplay aspect when we removed them.

Over summer, I’ve been experimenting with potentially adding them back in. For context, in the current version of the game Culture Workers are a Specialist job that belongs to their own economic category, produce 3 Unity and 3 Society Research with an upkeep of 2 Consumer Goods.

Let’s have a look at an Autochthon Monument constructed by the UNE shortly after the start of the game.

1658126587496.png

Showing the Culture Workers with some unusual modifiers

To start with, the monument is retaining the Unity from Jobs modifier and the passive Unity production per Ascension Perk, but additionally provides 2/4/6 Culture Worker jobs per tier of the monument. The same applies to the Corporate version of the monument.

The sharp-eyed might notice that there’s some odd modifiers being given: Worker Happiness? Pop Upkeep Reduction? What, might you ask, has happened?

In this experiment, we’re looking at Culture Workers having an output that depends on the Ethics of your empire. After all, what influences your culture the most if not your ethics?

These are the ethics-based modifiers we’re currently testing and whether their effects are Empire-wide or only affecting the planet that the building has been constructed on:
  • Materialist: +2 Amenities (Planet)
  • Spiritualist: -2.5% Amenity Usage (Planet)
  • Militarist: +1 Naval Capacity (Empire)
  • Pacifist: -2.5% Crime (Planet)
  • Egalitarian: +2.5% Worker Happiness (Planet)
  • Authoritarian: +5 Ruler Political Power (Planet)
  • Xenophobe: +3 Edict Fund (Empire)
  • Xenophile: -2.5% Pop Upkeep (Planet)

These modifiers are provided by both Culture Workers and Death Chroniclers (as their job-swap with the Memorialist civic) and are doubled in the case of Fanatic ethics. They are intended to be a small buff/addition to the job, with the Unity production from both the jobs and the building being the primary draw.

Additionally, Culture Workers/Death Chroniclers now belong in the Administrator category, in the Culture Worker sub-category meaning they’ll benefit from multiplicative bonuses to Administrator output (such as those provided by the Unification or Ecclesiastical planetary designations). They produce a base of 4 Unity and +10% Government Ethics Attraction (+2.5% Stability for Death Chroniclers) with 3 Consumer Goods upkeep.

There’s also been some discussion around having Resort Worlds add Culture Workers, and if I find time I’ll be looking into that as well.

To ensure that hive-minds and machine intelligences don’t feel left out, Sensorium/Simulation Sites now provide 2/4/6 Evaluator jobs per tier of the building. These now provide 4 Unity and 3 Amenities in exchange for an upkeep of 2 Energy.

1658126626613.png

A hive-mind sensorium site providing 2 evaluator jobs.

Chronicle Drones provide the same Unity and Amenities output but give an additional +2.5% Stability in exchange for slightly higher upkeep (and that upkeep being based off of the upkeep cost of the pop working the job). Like their individualist equivalents, these jobs both now belong to the Evaluator sub-category of the Administrators jobs.

I’m not sure if we’ll have another surprise dev diary over summer, but our normal schedule should resume once Eladrin’s back and we’ll start delving into 3.5. Regardless I’ll be keeping a close eye on this thread for your thoughts, suggestions and any feedback.
 
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Well there's a lot of feedback, so I won't be able to answer every point individually, but I do appreciate the discussions that have happened since yesterday.

I'm looking at changing some of the modifiers around - moving edict funds to authoritarians is a far better fit than xenophobes for example. Some other ideas I have in my notebook that I'm considering are: housing usage reduction (egalitarian) and trade value from living standards (pacifist).
 
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I like the idea of returning the culture workers. Good thing you are working on it. Two comments:

1. I play Pacifists a lot, and -2.5% crime is not exactly a good modifier. Pacifists, especially Fanatic Pacifists already have very low crime from the get go. Pacifist planets average at 0% crime in my games, without even taking specific anti-crime measures. As such, -2.5% crime would be a waste, especially compared to the additional naval capacity offered to Militarists. A better modifier for Pacifists would be additional resources or further sprawl reduction.

2. It would be interesting to see culture as a broader concept, influencing the gameplay. My suggestion is to make culture an aspect of species, instead of aspect of state. This way you could make culture a non-political way of life integral to the specific species. It would be different from ethics and civics integral to the specific state. That way species would be able to share culture regardless of where they live, offering a lot of possibilities both for Xenophiles and Xenophobes.
 
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Appreciate the feedback. As stated, we're not wanting the ethics-based modifiers to be the main draw of the job (that's the unity production), but I'll look at changing up the modifiers for some of these. To answer a few queries:
  • Research on these jobs is something we want to avoid.
  • The crime reduction functions in the same way as enforcers, as a direct reduction to the value, not a multiplier.
 
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Actually, I have only just realised that culture workers no longer produce society research. This could be an option for one of the ethics effects that could be made to fit better. It could make sense for xenophiles (investigating alien cultures in novel ways), and maybe for materialists (taking a research based approach to culture).
 
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I love the possible return of Culture Workers and the fact that they provide different bonuses depending on your Ethics is a really nice addition. However I don't really like the fact that Spiritualists and Materialists have such a similar bonus, especially for Materialists it seems a bit out of flavour imo. Maybe Materialists Culture Workers could provide Society Research like they originally did.
Giving Materialists even more tech when they're already the best at it might be a bad idea. On the contrary, giving the Society Research to Spiritualists might be a better one, giving them a leg up on working towards the Psionic techs they want.
 
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We've made some changes from the modifiers listed in the original dev diary for our current internal testing, due to the feedback provided:
  • Pacifist: +2.5% Trade Value from Lifestyle (Planet)
  • Egalitarian: -2.5% Housing Usage (Planet)
  • Authoritarian: +3 Edict Fund (Empire)
  • Xenophobe: +2.5% Citizen Happiness (Planet)
Current thinking is that the Pacifist and Xenophile modifiers might be the most powerful, but since those ethics often limit your playstyle in other ways, this should make them slightly more interesting. Another goal here is to try and make sure none of the Culture Worker modifiers overlap with modifiers directly given by the ethics.
 
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Hooray! Am very glad to see that culture workers might make a comeback.

I like having the effects linked to governing ethics - not only does this add to the variety between empires, it makes good sense, as the kind of culture that is funded (either via patronage or the state) varies greatly based on the society. I think most make a lot of sense. However, it seems less than ideal that materialist and spiritualist both affect amenities. And I don't quite see the logic of xenophile reducing pop upkeep - unless this was for non-primary species only. In general, having some sort of bonus/benefit for xenos would be in keeping.

An interesting question is whether culture workers should reinforce governing ethics attraction - this is certainly true for certain parts of history, though in others I they have also been a crucial source of dissent. One approach could be to have their effect on governing ethics tied to their own happiness, or to planetary happiness in general. Another is to use them in the 'encourage political thought' edict, so they switch to promoting an ethics shift.
 
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While I love culture workers finding their way back into the game, The ethic based bonuses are a little hit and miss IMO. I'd love for them to work well, but I'm not sure they will. But the summer is for wild experimenting as I understand it, and I'm glad you showed us the things you were working on. Regardless of how it pans out, getting to see more of the development process is always wonderful.

On a unity related note, the Planetary Ascension system could also use a lot of love. And by love I mostly mean increasing the power level. Planetary Ascension should be strong enough for focusing unity to be viable (past getting an ascension path or becoming the crisis). There are two main ideas I have for how to do this, although both could be combined for a massive bonus if that's what is needed. These ideas were originally posted in a suggestion thread.

The first is to simply add +5% planetary production output per ascension level. This bonus should be applied multiplicitivly after all other bonuses, so it's just as good for high bonus jobs like scientists and miners as it is for low bonus jobs like metallurgists and refiners.

The second is to add a bonus from each completed tradition tree per ascension level (somewhat similar to the ethic bonuses proposed here):
  • Expansion: +1% pop growth (assembly for synth ascention and MEs)
  • Domination: +0.5 stability
  • Prosperity: -2% building upkeep
  • Harmony: +25% governing ethics attraction
  • Supremacy: +10 naval cap
  • Diplomacy: +20% diplo weight from pops
  • Discovery: +10 research (all types)
  • Adaptability: +5 amenties
  • Subterfuge: +0.05 influence
  • Mercantile: +0.1 trade value per pop
  • Unyielding: +25% defense army health
  • Versatility: -5% pop amenity usage
  • Synchronicity: -2% pop resource upkeep
I think this would be a very flavorful way to encourage ascending planets and quickly grabbing all the tradition trees, as well as being a buff for small/tall empires in a way that's not just a nerf to wide. Anyway, I hope @Eladrin has a favorable opinion of your attempts to reintegrate culture workers. I'd love to see them again.
 
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So...I gotta be this guy but...what's the point in crime reduction bonuses when Crime is barely ever a thing in game to begin with? Crime and Criminal Enterprises/Activities like Piracy are so neutered and pointless right now that there is no reason for these things to even exist. Like, Penal Colony is a planet type that no one uses, because Crime is never an actual problem unless a Criminal Megacorp has Branch offices on your planets.

Personally, unless you guys plan on actually overhauling Piracy and Crime to be more robust features in the future, don't even bother with Crime Reduction bonuses, because It's FAR too easy to keep crime at Zero, even as a Slaving Despot Empire.
 
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  • Materialist: +2 Amenities (Planet)
  • Spiritualist: -2.5% Amenity Usage (Planet)
  • Militarist: +1 Naval Capacity (Empire)
  • Pacifist: -2.5% Crime (Planet)
  • Egalitarian: +2.5% Worker Happiness (Planet)
  • Authoritarian: +5 Ruler Political Power (Planet)
  • Xenophobe: +3 Edict Fund (Empire)
  • Xenophile: -2.5% Pop Upkeep (Planet)

I'm really not getting what the intent with Egalitarian is. The rest at least arguably help the planets they're on, but Egalitarian getting a worker bonus is the only job that seems to counter it's own ethic's good play practices.


Egalitarians main early-game weakness is their lackluster worker economy, and their best advantage is using specialist outputs to subsidize/trade for basic resources so they don't have to work the worker roles, which renders the entire bonus obsolete. Further, they're not exactly lacking in happiness already- Egalitarian living standards are already 5+ happiness, be it shared burdens (5%), social welfare (10%), or Utopian abundance (20%). This isn't considering the Egalitarian-only Idealistic Foundation (10%), or the edict Encourage Political Thought which is ideal for mitigating massive opinion penalties of up to -40% post-conquest. Notably, these all apply to specialists as well as workers- but the primary weakness is the higher egalitarian upkeep. Which you are maximizing the more 'value' you get from the unity worker.

It's also weird in that it's the only bonus of the ethics that, strictly speaking, can provide 0 benefit to the planet it's employed on. Pacifist comes close, but pops at least produce some crime. But a 100% specialist world- like a unity world- will get 0 bonus to stability or happiness or anything. Since the culture worker jobs will be getting planet designation focus, and the unity focus is for a specialist-centric job category, culture workers aren't boosting the output of the designated culture worker jobs.

It's not even a boon of the 'best' Egalitarian working worlds, because those are low-habitability robot worlds where 100% habitability robots provide the upkeep resources to feed the specialists on high-habitability worlds. Those robots don't use happiness, and you don't waste pops on 50% job production of a tomb world.

Worst of all, it's a bonus efficient players will almost certainly never see, because employing the culture worker on a worker world will be a generally bad idea for pop efficiency metrics. The game's mechanics prioritize keeping jobs dedicated to the planet's focus- and worker planets will be prioritizing worker jobs, not unity jobs that give a bit a worker happiness. It's the classic healthcare worker argument, except that the marginal worker happiness of a culture worker is worth even less. Unity jobs will be employed on unity planets... which won't be employing workers, and thus getting no bonus from the ethic-unique feature.

(Not as bad but funny, it's actually a mechanical anti-synergy for the Egalitarian build that wants worker happiness the most- Xenophobe-Egalitarians. Xenophobe-Egalitarians want to use slavery unhappiness modifiers to push the slaves towards Egalitarianism. Ironically, +worker happiness is working against that.)

Boosting an ethic's worst job strata that they want the least of, while doing absolutely nothing for what they do best, countering the ethic-synergy of the build variant that wants to focus on workers, and giving no benefit to the planet that would actually employ the job for it's own outputs...

Again, I don't understand the intent.


Honestly, the xenophile bonus- upkeep reduction- would actually mean the most to Egalitarians, who have the highest upkeeps on average, and thus the highest scaling penalties with habitability.
(It's also weird that having more species of divergent biologies makes a planet's amenity economy more and not less efficiency





Overall, though, there's a pretty visible divide against things that are actually useful versus things that are technically good but generally impactless. Getting more fleet capacity for a job that combats the unity inflation for your successful conquests achieved by fleets while stabilizing the conquered populace to fleet-building citizenry is a useful, potentially even strong, synergy. An empire that gets 10 planets can get 20 more fleet capacity relatively easily and early in the game when that number of ships can be decisive. 10 planets with 2.5 crime reduction each don't save a single pop.


The implicit role of ethics attraction is also kind of devoid of a purpose. It's good, strictly speaking, but it's primarily good for consolidating conquests, and so is stepping on the unique asset of, say, temples (5% spiritualist vs 20% state ethics). But you can also just support factions for free, unless that's changing, and there's yet to be a need for high-ethics cohesion. Unhappy pops are just less-valuable a good thing, but they're still a boon in and of themselves.

Now, if there were mid-game empire-shaking issues from ethics, that'd be something... but if that's the case, then spamming monuments probably trivializes that to a large extent.
 
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I'm calling it, the new meta is Fanatic Militarist + Materialist; Byzantine Bureaucracy now solid S tier auto pick
You pay: 3 consumer goods
You get: 2 naval capacity (worth 0.33 pop), 2 amenity (worth 0.2 pop), 4+1 unity and 1 stability
It's really just 50% better Bureaucrat that's worth spamming on every planet for these two ethics.

Nice, no more admin worlds, not worth a dime.

Unfortunately, the bonuses from Byzantine Bureaucracy won't apply to Culture Workers.
 
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that everyone else already gets 10% worker happiness, more unity

They don't. Worker happiness was present as the Egalitarian-ethics bonus (but I've since swapped it to housing usage reduction.

All four jobs (culture workers, death chroniclers, evalutaors and chronicle drones) have a base unity output of 4 before any other modifiers. The differences in the screenshots in the DD are due to technologies and other such bonuses.


  • Materialist: +2 Amenities (Planet) => I really don't think that extra amenities fit materialism at all
  • Spiritualist: -2.5% Amenity Usage (Planet) => Temathic & powerful at the same time. I like it!
  • Militarist: +1 Naval Capacity (Empire) => A bit weak. Perhaps +2 would be better?
  • Pacifist: +2.5% Trade Value from Lifestyle (Planet) => I love how this combines with Utopian builds, and it is powerful to boot
  • Egalitarian: -2.5% Housing Usage (Planet) => Cool & thematically appropriate
  • Authoritarian: +3 Edict Fund (Empire) => Edict funds bonuses are a much better fit for authoritarians than xenophobes, yep
  • Xenophobe: +2.5% Citizen Happiness (Planet) => Wow, that's... quite powerful. Also not entirely sure about its relationship with the xenophobe ethic
  • Xenophile: -2.5% Pop Upkeep (Planet) => A bit like the previous one, I don't understand what it has to do with xenophiles, but it is quite powerful nonetheless

The exact numbers (and modifiers) are still being looked at and reconsidered, so there might be more changes to these in the final version. Thanks for the feedback!
 
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"to make sure gestalts arent being left out, we give them even more useless amenities because we have no idea what to do with them anymore"
It’s quite the opposite. Maintenance drones is the worst job you keep around just to keep your amenity above 0, you deprioritize it after the point you’re in the positives. With the change machine empire can get quite a lot of amenity AND unity at little cost, it’s effectively 75% better coordinator since it also provides amenity 75% of a maintenance drone. With 6 of these on your every world you can save on average of 4 pops that can now work in real jobs. It’s huge. It’s now also super easy to run maintenance drone free economy playing hivemind spamming these everywhere pairing with the synchronicity tradition. In fact, aren’t these really just better synapse drones? A synapse drone takes a tradition AND an orbital ring to reach the same level of amenity output while taking 100% additional upkeep. Wow, I don’t need to think, I should just spam these monuments everywhere whenever possible. Comparatively a huge nerf to Rogue Servitor as they don’t really need these additional unities.
 
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I love the possible return of Culture Workers and the fact that they provide different bonuses depending on your Ethics is a really nice addition. However I don't really like the fact that Spiritualists and Materialists have such a similar bonus, especially for Materialists it seems a bit out of flavour imo. Maybe Materialists Culture Workers could provide Society Research like they originally did.
 
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Oh, this is nice to see!

View attachment 861579
Showing the Culture Workers with some unusual modifiers
Curious that culture workers have an expected unity production of 7.5 each in this tooltip, instead of the expected 4. Is the unity from the building being included in the job production?

Are culture workers going to be balanced around only being able to get a limited number of them from monument buildings, or will they be returning to districts and alien zoos?

These are the ethics-based modifiers we’re currently testing and whether their effects are Empire-wide or only affecting the planet that the building has been constructed on:
  • Materialist: +2 Amenities (Planet)
  • Spiritualist: -2.5% Amenity Usage (Planet)
With these rates, spiritualist culture workers have worse amenities value than materialist ones until they break even at 80 total base amenities usage (EDIT: assuming the materialists have absolutely no +% amenities bonuses), after which they start to become better. I'm not sure you want multiple ethics impacting the same modifier like this, since it seems like on most colonies for most of the game the spiritualist effect is just worse than the materialist one. Maybe give spiritualist culture workers the society research output that priests lost in the unity rework?

  • Xenophile: -2.5% Pop Upkeep (Planet)
All the other ethic-related bonuses make sense to me, but I'm having trouble seeing how this one is related.

There’s also been some discussion around having Resort Worlds add Culture Workers, and if I find time I’ll be looking into that as well.
:)

Chronicle Drones provide the same Unity and Amenities output but give an additional +2.5% Stability in exchange for slightly higher upkeep (and that upkeep being based off of the upkeep cost of the pop working the job). Like their individualist equivalents, these jobs both now belong to the Evaluator sub-category of the Administrators jobs.
Is the Evaluator job category being moved to a sub-category of Administrator jobs too, then? Currently they aren't, they're a sub-category of Resource-Producing jobs and don't benefit from administrator modifiers.

I’ll be keeping a close eye on this thread for your thoughts, suggestions and any feedback.
Here are the notes I had for a potential culture worker restoration/rework suggestion that I hadn't finished developing:
(EDIT: This is copy/pasted unaltered and predates this dev diary, so it includes research output that is no longer desired.)



Sources
  • Embassy building
  • Alien Zoo building
  • Living standards
  • Leisure districts → Cultural districts
  • Civic swapping admin buildings for culture worker buildings?
Base output
  • current: 2 CG → 3 unity, 3 society research
  • reworked: 4 CG (8 unity) → 3 unity, 3 society research, 3 amenities, 6 trade value (3+1+1+3=8)
  • Value calculation
    • 0.5 CG → 1 unity = 1 each research = 10 amenities = 2 TV
    • 2 CG = 4 unity (Bureaucrat) = 4 each research (Researcher) = 2 unity + 20 amenities (Entertainer)
    • 3 amenities + 12 TV (Merchant) = 3 amenities + 6 unity (Politician) => 1 unity = 2 TV
    • Midway between clerk and merchant is a 1 CG → 2.5 amenities + 8 TV specialist
Output swaps based on civics
Can trade up to 1/3rd of base output/upkeep for different resources or effects to make job more related to your empire's culture
  • Functional Architecture: –1 amenities, +1 engineering research
  • Masterful Crafters/Mastercraft Inc.: –1 society research, +1 engineering research
  • Diplomatic Corps/Public Relations Specialists (debate): –2 trade value & –1 amenities, +1 unity & +1 society research
  • Beacon of Liberty: –2 trade value, +1 unity
  • Shared Burdens: –2 trade value, +unity/amenities?
  • Idealistic Foundation: –?, +1 unity
  • Agrarian Idyll: upkeep –1 CG & +4 food
  • Mining Guilds: upkeep –1 CG & +3 minerals
  • Nationalistic Zeal: –?, +naval cap
  • Pleasure Seekers/Corporate Hedonism: –amenities, +trade value
Boost output, happiness, and/or political power of civic-related jobs?
  • Cutthroat Politics, Feudal Society, Parliamentary System, Philosopher King, Shadow Council = Rulers
  • Meritocracy = Specialists
  • Shared Burdens = Workers
  • Efficient Bureaucracy = Administrators
  • Byzantine Bureaucracy = Bureaucrat
  • Exalted Priesthood, Imperial Cult = Priests
  • Death Cult = Priests, Mortal Initiate
  • Technocracy = Researchers
  • Police State = Enforcers
  • Pleasure Seekers = Entertainers
  • Mining Guilds = Miners
  • Agrarian Idyll = Farmers
  • Catalytic Processing = Catalytic Technician
  • Masterful Crafters = Artificer
  • Memorialists = Death Chronicler
  • Anglers = Angler, Pearl Diver
  • Aristocratic Elite = Noble (Rulers?)
  • Citizen Service, Warrior Culture, Fanatic Purifiers, Barbaric Despoilers = Soldier
  • Corporate Dominion, Merchant Guilds = Clerk, Merchant
  • ?: Environmentalist, Functional Architecture, Beacon of Liberty, Corvée System, Distinguished Admiralty, Free Haven, Idealistic Foundation, Inward Perfection, Slaver Guilds, Idyllic Bloom, Pompous Purists, Reanimators
Culture Worker boosts from traditions?
 
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I think I would prefer increased governing ethics attraction over ethic-specific bonuses. It would still be a relatively unique job effect, and it would avoid problematic issues with ethic-based bonuses. However, there is the issue that there are rather many sources of bonuses to governing ethics attraction at this point (i.e. adding another governing ethics attraction would risk further power creep in that area, as has especially happened with Happiness and is also happening to Stability).



In a previous suggestion for conversion of excess amenities (beyond the cap for +20% Happiness for citizens), I tried coming up with suitable converted outputs based on empire ethics but I ultimately gave up on that. It seemed (close to) impossible to find qualitatively distinct outputs that also made good sense for each respective ethic and were easy to make balanced. Not to mention the issue of the unspoken questions lingering over it all:
If this output is connected to this ethic, why is the ethic not boosting it already? Does this ethic need this bonus to better fulfill its gameplay role? If empires with this ethic desire this bonus, why would they use this source (in my case amenities conversion) rather than just producing it directly in a more efficient manner? And if empires with this ethic desire this output, can't they be expected to already pursue the accumulation of it, meaning that this extra source at best does not add much flavour, and add worst adds imbalances to the economy? And how would this ethic-based source of the output impact the "broad strokes" conceptual design of ethics?

The issues I faced I now see repeat with the suggestion of Culture Workers having outputs that vary depending on ethics. I think it will be a design nightmare to make all of the bonuses avoid/solve all the issues mentioned above, and even if that were possible to achieve it would most likely require a ton of effort on the part of the designer, for ultimately rather small gain when compared to all the wondrous other things that the designer could instead have achieved in other areas.

@Alfray Stryke
If it is considered very desirable to have outputs from Culture Workers differ between different empires, how about bonuses from civics or edicts? These two options would face much less potential problematic issues than ethic-based bonuses, while also allowing much greater design freedom - and presenting an opportunity to give a small buff to some currently underpowered civics and edicts.
Tradition trees could also offer interesting possibilities in this regard (for instance, Subterfuge could promote a "culture of silence", i.e. "loose lips sink ships" or "en svensk tiger", which makes each Culture Worker increase the time requirements for hostile infiltration). Since monuments are already tied to the number of ascension perks, monuments are also implicitly tied to traditions (not to mention that tradition is a core aspect of culture), and it would not be a far stretch to have Culture Workers provide different effects depending on which tradition trees have been picked. This would also mean that the value of Culture Workers (and thereby monuments) grows over the course of the game.


One more possibility for Culture Workers:
  • Move the Amenities bonuses from the capital buildings to the Culture Worker jobs. Since the monuments are colony-unique there is no risk of enabling unintended overproduction, and since this just shifts Amenities from one source to another the other Amenities jobs should not have any grounds for complaints to their unions and political representatives (although it would increase the value of the monument buildings even more, but this could arguably be a good thing).
  • In the case of Reassembled Ship Shelters, the bonus could be moved to the Colonist jobs instead (which also should be a Worker job to resolve the issue of Specialist unemployment upon capital upgrading).
Improving some weaker civics with culture worker tweaks could be interesting. Media Conglomerate, which has been terrible since it was released, would be a very good candidate for something like this. The civic could apply its happiness bonus via Culture Workers instead, which would allow it to scale. The civic could also maybe unlock a Branch Building that provides a culture worker job?

Edit: The example effects for Media Conglomerate aren't great, but you get the sentiment.
 
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Aren't culture workers too overlapped with bureaucrats now? Both jobs generate mostly Unity. Wouldn't it be better to have Culture workers generate less Unity, but have the ethic bonus be an even big part of their output?
 
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As someone who always builds the monument on every planet for roleplay purposes, this pleases me greatly.
 
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