Stellaris Dev Diary #260 - Summer Culture

[Tannhäuser Cake]

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.

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?

• I would suggest that excess Amenities are split in four shares for conversion. One share for each ethic tier, and one share for a policy choice between the various outputs. This means that Fanatic + policy could use up to three quarters of excess Amenities for one purpose, while the remainder would be used for something else. (Gestalt Consciousnesses could have the advantage that the policy choice would affect their entire conversion of excess Amenities, allowing them to be more singleminded than the many-minded eldritch horror species they share the galaxy with.)
• Examples of what excess Amenities would be converted to could include Pacifists favouring Trade Value (tourism), Militarists Naval Capacity, Xenophobes Unity, Xenophiles Influence (depending on future development directions for this resource), Materialists Research, Spiritualists Pop Growth, Authoritarians Stability (or Edict Fund), Egalitarians Job Output bonus. (Not necessarily at a straight 1:1 conversion rate for all of these, and other outputs may be better choices.)

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).

 

[TrotBot]

Nice! Thank you very much! I used to spam holotheatres just for the roleplay back when they also had a cultural worker haha, so this definitely is very important to me!

Side note, you mentioned unification planetary designation and other unity/admin job buffs and how cultural workers will be effected, what are the plans for how servitor biotrophies will interact with them?

 

[Starfury]

you are cheating with all your Executive Retreats
But yes, in this specific case it is useful.

As SirBlackAxe pointed out, the +2 amenities from materialist is more useful than the -2.5% from Spiritualist until the very late game.

The spiritualist bonus saves you .025 amenities per pop. You need at least 80 pops on the planet to get the same net benefit as a materialist. Even more, if you have any bonuses to amenity production. And that's only the point where you stop being worse off than the materialist, don't even talk about making up for the disadvantage over the previous decades.

Or to put it in another way: You need at least 40 pops (even more on <100% habitability worlds) on a planet before adding a (non-fanatic) spiritualist culture worker provides a net-improvement in the amenity situation. A materialist culture worker always at least pays for itself, even on a 0% world.

 

[zZander56]

Culture workers would be more interesting if they primarily focused on these modifiers. We already have unity production covered.

 

[CometBliss]

Does the calculations already add the bonus to what it says "Approximate output."
And do gestalts also get a bonus like the other empires types as well, or is the amenities the bonus for gestalts?

 

[Ludaire]

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.

Will rogue servitors also be getting this? On one hand, it wouldn't feel great to miss out on this source of unity. On the other, this adds a pretty significant source of unity from machine jobs when rogue servitors' whole shtick is all their unity coming from bio trophies.

It might be too much time to make happen, but it would really great if rogue servitors got something flavorful and fitting instead of the usual machine bonuses there or nothing at all.

 

[Jamaican Castle]

I'm not sure I get the reasoning behind culture workers generating Society Research. If anything, I would see that as a side benefit of bureaucrats (if there's anything both scientists and bureaucrats love, it's reams and reams of data), while I think culture workers have quite enough going on with their ethic-specific benefits and ethics attraction.

On that note, I wonder if ethics bonuses and attractions should be based on the ethic of the culture worker (partially because not much actually cares about pop-level ethics these days). Combined with edicts that encourage culture workers of a given ethic, that would allow for very targeted shifts that could be more specific than "governing ethics attraction". (Maybe my empire is Spiritualist/Militarist but right now, I would prefer they be more of the latter than the former. Or maybe I'd like to lay the cultural groundwork now, for an ethics shift that I want to make later.) It would also introduce a bit of stickiness to cultures when you take over a planet, rather than the culture workers all instantly adjusting to your way of thinking.

 

[SirBlackAxe]

Will rogue servitors also be getting this? On one hand, it wouldn't feel great to miss out on this source of unity. On the other, this adds a pretty significant source of unity from machine jobs when rogue servitors' whole shtick is all their unity coming from bio trophies.

It might be too much time to make happen, but it would really great if rogue servitors got something flavorful and fitting instead of the usual machine bonuses there or nothing at all.

I think the simple and obvious solution would be to just make Rogue Servitor monuments add some Bio-Trophy jobs instead. That's already unity and an addition effect!

 

[zZander56]

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.

 

[Tamwin5]

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.

 

[Tannhäuser Cake]

Speaking of Culture Workers... it would make more sense if Culture Workers got a bonus from Atmospheric Hallucinogen, rather than Researchers.

 

[zZander56]

I'm not sure I get the reasoning behind culture workers generating Society Research. If anything, I would see that as a side benefit of bureaucrats (if there's anything both scientists and bureaucrats love, it's reams and reams of data), while I think culture workers have quite enough going on with their ethic-specific benefits and ethics attraction.

On that note, I wonder if ethics bonuses and attractions should be based on the ethic of the culture worker (partially because not much actually cares about pop-level ethics these days). Combined with edicts that encourage culture workers of a given ethic, that would allow for very targeted shifts that could be more specific than "governing ethics attraction". (Maybe my empire is Spiritualist/Militarist but right now, I would prefer they be more of the latter than the former. Or maybe I'd like to lay the cultural groundwork now, for an ethics shift that I want to make later.) It would also introduce a bit of stickiness to cultures when you take over a planet, rather than the culture workers all instantly adjusting to your way of thinking.

You could have the bonuses be based on the majority ethic of the planet.

 

[Ludaire]

I think the simple and obvious solution would be to just make Rogue Servitor monuments add some Bio-Trophy jobs instead. That's already unity and an addition effect!

That's definitely one possibility. Not needing an organic sanctuary on every planet to maintain a small breeding population of bio trophies and instead having those be mainly for worlds where you're stacking them would be pretty neat actually.

You could also do something kind of like the bio assistant job that one event adds where you get a small number of unique jobs for organics under mandatory pampering. Something that adds organic pop growth would be neat and fit the role I mentioned above really well.

Regardless, thanks for the quick response and willingness to give rogue servitors that bit of extra attention.

 

[Gabarius]

Good changes.

Are there any plans to add in custom sectors, or at least the ability to individually remove systems from default four-system-range sectors? The community has been asking for this for a while and it would give SO MUCH more freedom and less tediousness to releasing vassals, which of course was the whole point behind 3.3.

 

[BrokenSky]

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?

I have often said (when the topic is discussed on the forum) that I feel like a specific religion/ideology system might work well if it projected bonuses through culture workers (and, for religions, priests), but one other flip-side that might be good is if culture workers allowed you to do some kind of .. cultural export? Basically project ethics attraction for your ethics onto other empires?

 

[zZander56]

Good changes.

Are there any plans to add in custom sectors, or at least the ability to individually remove systems from default four-system-range sectors? The community has been asking for this for a while and it would give SO MUCH more freedom and less tediousness to releasing vassals, which of course was the whole point behind 3.3.

This, just for the sake of releasing sectors as subjects tbh. Right now, I have to strategically not take certain systems/delete outposts if I want to properly release certain segments of my empire into specialized subjects.

 

[Valleo]

As SirBlackAxe pointed out, the +2 amenities from materialist is more useful than the -2.5% from Spiritualist until the very late game.

The spiritualist bonus saves you .025 amenities per pop. You need at least 80 pops on the planet to get the same net benefit as a materialist. Even more, if you have any bonuses to amenity production. And that's only the point where you stop being worse off than the materialist, don't even talk about making up for the disadvantage over the previous decades.

Or to put it in another way: You need at least 40 pops (even more on <100% habitability worlds) on a planet before adding a (non-fanatic) spiritualist culture worker provides a net-improvement in the amenity situation. A materialist culture worker always at least pays for itself, even on a 0% world.

I see your point, and you are right about planets being less populated. When you have a small amount of pops, of course the materialist is better. Even if we could argue that on a world like this, why wanting to build this building ? Another one giving other jobs would be more profitable.

Now, you are saying you need at least 80 pops to gain the same effect than materialist one, but I disagree. You need 40 pops. Let me explain

Counting on a 100% habitability and without bonuses (to simplify calculation), on a planet counting 40 pops you need to provide 40 amenities, the materialist culture worker will grant a net gain of +2. So you need to provide 38 more amenities to reach the balance. With the spiritualist culture worker, you will lowers the amenity needs of 1. So you need to provide 39 more amenities to reach the balance.

Reading this, you think that materialist is still better. But to reach twice the amount of amenities, so you can get the maximum happiness bonus from amenities, you need to reach 80 amenities. With the materialist culture worker, you need to reach 80 amenities and to provide 78 more amenities, while with the spiritualist culture worker, you need to reach only 78, and then to provide 78. The same value.

So yes, even on a planet counting 40 pops, the spiritualist becomes interesting.

Also, the amount of building slots being limited, these buildings are not meant to be built on every planet, but only on unity planets, and on crowded planets, like Ecumenopolis.

 

[Ridixo]

Glad to have them back

 

[klopkr]

YAY my culture workers are back! Gonna make em paint all my blorg friends!

 

[Dragatus]

1. This makes Culture Workers into better Bureaucrats. Which isn't too bad, because it's a 1 per planet building, but still.
2. The bonuses from different ethics are wildly imbalanced.

I'd propose Culture Workers to instead produce only 3 Unity and replace the laundry list of ethic effects with some sensible mix of Government Ethics Attraction and Ethics Shift Chance. Yes, that's less interesting. It's also much better balanced and won't needlessly complicate the game.