Stellaris Dev Diary #260 - Summer Culture

[currylambchop]

Perhaps the pacifist culture worker could give a percent bonus to trade value instead of reducing crime

 

[currylambchop]

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.

I mean that basically turns them into a clone of a priest

 

[Rafss]

I think culture workers providing bonuses tied to traditions instead of ethics is a really, really good take, has good scaling and is not so hard to balance like ethics bonuses.
It means Culture Workers spread the traditions values instead of just the core ideologies (with +ethics attraction), thus turning a flat tradition bonus into something more deeply connected to the day-to-day of a colony.

 

[DeanTheDull]

• 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.

 

[DeanTheDull]

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.

Sure, but you aren't putting unity workers on a 0% world, you're putting robot slaves. Unity worlds are high-habitability worlds.


What's more important, and what SirBlackAxe's analysis misses, is the other jobs of the unity world: priests. Non-spiritualists need bureacurats, which need amenity support from entertainers. Priests are their own amenity producer, at 2 amenities each. They're already providing an excess, and the culture worker means they provide more of an excess.

The argument of '+2 amenities is better than -2.5% amenities discount' is even more true for priests vs bureacrats, which occur in larger numbers. The difference is that the priests are more capable of covering the amenity requirements of the culture workers when mixed together, while the materialist culture workers provide no meaningful amenity interaction with the rest of the planet amenity economy.

Materialist culture workers are better if you employ the culture workers on every planet... but Spiritualist culture workers are better if you employ your culture workers on unity worlds.

With planetary designation bonuses and pop-efficiency being what they are, you generally will play to the Spiritualist strength, not the materialist.

 

[fusei]

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.

Now I like these little flavour thingies as much as anybody else, but this change doesn't really make for an interesting decision. With these changes a monument is pretty much a one per planet administrative office with benefits and whenever you can, you will build the first instead of the later.

On the other hand the ethics bonuses are too insignificant to change your ethics for them, so no interesting decision here either.

 

[Starfury]

But to reach twice the amount of amenities, so you can get the maximum happiness bonus from amenities, you need to reach 80 amenities.

Overproducing amenities to raise happiness is a bad idea. In your example you'd have to emply an extra 4 out of 40 pops as entertainers to get the extra 20% happiness, 13% stability and 9% resources from jobs. That's another 10% of your population not working productive jobs, all in order to make the maybe 80% who are working productive jobs maybe 5-6% more effective

To put it in your words:

Another one giving other jobs would be more profitable.

 

[Starfury]

Sure, but you aren't putting unity workers on a 0% world, you're putting robot slaves. Unity worlds are high-habitability worlds.


What's more important, and what SirBlackAxe's analysis misses, is the other jobs of the unity world: priests. Non-spiritualists need bureacurats, which need amenity support from entertainers. Priests are their own amenity producer, at 2 amenities each. They're already providing an excess, and the culture worker means they provide more of an excess.

The argument of '+2 amenities is better than -2.5% amenities discount' is even more true for priests vs bureacrats, which occur in larger numbers. The difference is that the priests are more capable of covering the amenity requirements of the culture workers when mixed together, while the materialist culture workers provide no meaningful amenity interaction with the rest of the planet amenity economy.

Materialist culture workers are better if you employ the culture workers on every planet... but Spiritualist culture workers are better if you employ your culture workers on unity worlds.

With planetary designation bonuses and pop-efficiency being what they are, you generally will play to the Spiritualist strength, not the materialist.

I don't quite see how spiritualist culture workers are supposed to help on priest worlds.

Unless I'm completely missing part of your reasoning, the spiritualist unity world is already going to be at (or very near) double amenities from the capital, ruler jobs and priests. What good is the amenity need reduction on that kind of world?

The only exception might be a spiritualist megacorp who replaces half their priests with managers. But then again, a megacorp has more than enough other options to take care of amenities.

 

[Slaughter]

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.

Yeah, after I finished reading this, I went over there a bit and this did make me think about something -

If Culture Workers promote your ethic and give ethic-based bonuses, might this imply the existence of such a thing as a "Counter-Culture Worker"?

Essentially, a culture worker pop that promotes a non-governing ethic and gives the other bonus. Say, Pacifist Counter-Culture Worker promoting Pacifist ethic and giving the pacifist bonuses.

Imagine a Militaristic society getting Pacifistic Counter-Culture Workers who like to use strange chemicals and tell people to make "Peace and Love, maaaan". Or a Pacifistic society getting Militaristic Counter-Culture Workers who promote virtues of strength and fitness while telling the popullace that they're "A bunch of pansies who need to toughen up and shape up. Because booy, its a dark galaxy out there."

Doesn't even need to be a mere opposing ethic, but you get the idea.

Could have lots of interesting implications regarding other systems, too. For example, an Authoritarian society might see fit to censor or even arrest Counter-Culture Workers, while an Egalitarian/Democratic one might just embrace having a variety of Culture Workers giving different and interesting bonuses - AKA valuing Freedom of Thought and Expression. Or not, but because they're egalitarian/democratic, they have to suck it up.

 

[zZander56]

Yeah, after I finished reading this, I went over there a bit and this did make me think about something -

If Culture Workers promote your ethic and give ethic-based bonuses, might this imply the existence of such a thing as a "Counter-Culture Worker"?

Essentially, a culture worker pop that promotes a non-governing ethic and gives the other bonus. Say, Pacifist Counter-Culture Worker promoting Pacifist ethic and giving the pacifist bonuses.

Imagine a Militaristic society getting Pacifistic Counter-Culture Workers who like to use strange chemicals and tell people to make "Peace and Love, maaaan". Or a Pacifistic society getting Militaristic Counter-Culture Workers who promote virtues of strength and fitness while telling the popullace that they're "A bunch of pansies who need to toughen up and shape up. Because booy, its a dark galaxy out there."

Doesn't even need to be a mere opposing ethic, but you get the idea.

Could have lots of interesting implications regarding other systems, too. For example, an Authoritarian society might see fit to censor or even arrest Counter-Culture Workers, while an Egalitarian/Democratic one might just embrace having a variety of Culture Workers giving different and interesting bonuses - AKA valuing Freedom of Thought and Expression. Or not, but because they're egalitarian/democratic, they have to suck it up.

The time of Internal Politics grows nearer.

 

[Sutopia]

The bonus is all over the place. Planet-wide ones feel super bad because you generally don’t build these on non-unity worlds. Almost feel like the change is bringing cultural workers back for the sake of bringing it back without considering larger picture and they don’t have a clear identity.

I honestly don’t get why it’s bureaucrat being the primary unity job when cultural worker thematically do that better. Their roles should exchange.

My personal opinion is that it should abstain the change for now and focus on something that matters more, for example, combat “balance” or internal politics which has not been talked about at all. Currently game economy can’t make a new job distinct enough.

 

[Zoomy]

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.

If you're looking into Resort Worlds, can you maybe also look into making them unlock earlier in a playthrough? They always tend to become available way, way after it's really feasible to use them. Penal Colonies have the same issue, but at least you can retrofit a planet as one rather than needing to start from colonisation.

 

[zZander56]

If you're looking into Resort Worlds, can you maybe also look into making them unlock earlier in a playthrough? They always tend to become available way, way after it's really feasible to use them. Penal Colonies have the same issue, but at least you can retrofit a planet as one rather than needing to start from colonisation.

Adjusting how migration works at the same time could really help Resort worlds. I don't know about others, but in my playthroughs no matter how much immigration pull I have, actual growth from immigration falls off later because of a lack of emigration push on foreign planets.

 

[Jojbat]

=> Chronicle Drones provide the same Unity and Amenities output but give an additional +2.5% Stability in exchange for slightly higher upkeep

Chronicle drones cost a whole civic slot and have higher upkeep for +2.5 stability.
Output could be tuned up a so it becomes an interesting alternative to the culture jobs (+1 unity +3 stability compated to normal culture workers)

 

[Tannhäuser Cake]

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.

Actually, both the Egalitarian and the Pacifist bonuses become worthless - on worlds already at 100% Happiness. And these two ethics have an even easier time than the other ethics to reach 100% Happiness, with their fancy living standards and ethic-specific edicts. Authoritarian's bonus to Ruler political power similarly does not make much of a difference if all pops (that count) are already at 100% Happiness. And then there is the issue that Stellaris already has enough Happiness bonuses to easily get us to 100% Happiness and potentially get us to 300% with dedicated builds, reducing the value of Amenities bonuses as well.

Overall, the suggested bonuses for Pacifist, Egalitarian, Materialist, Spiritualist and Authoritarian all suffer from the possibility of becoming worthless on worlds with sufficient Happiness bonuses, albeit under slightly different conditions. Only the Militarist, Xenophobe and Xenophile bonuses are resilient.

 

[Ferrus Animus]

Others have already said somethings I dislike with the specific bonuses.

But my main issue is the spiritualist culture worker bonus.
Not only do spiritualists have priests which give amenities, making the need for the cost reduction lesser, it feels like a pointless mirror to the materialist bonus.
Given the direction gone in the recent updates, I'd think the xenophobe edict fund bonus would suit them better.
For xenophobes I would suggest something new like a happiness/upkeep bonus for main species and an equal happiness/upkeep penalty for other species.

 

[Tannhäuser Cake]

The thought of having Culture Workers be influenced by tradition trees, rather than ethics, is growing on me. On top of the already mentioned connection between tradition investment (ascension perks) and the monuments' Unity bonuses, this option would also allow Culture Workers to have a clearly unclearly defined role (i.e. the definition is left to our tradition choices) that would set it apart from every other job and give it an undisputable niche of its own, rather than just being "slightly better bureaucrats". Culture Workers would reflect the traditions of their societies.

This would also avoid most the aforementioned issues associated with using ethics as a basis for their bonuses. Additionally, the bonuses would be much easier to balance since they would no longer need to be balanced against other Culture Worker bonuses, but rather be part of whole tradition tree packages that are balanced versus other whole tradition tree packages. Not to mention that many of the tradition trees are very easy to imagine Culture Worker bonuses for.

Some potential bonuses (and job upkeep increases) for Culture Workers from tradition trees:

• Discovery
  • +1 Research
  • Consumer Good upkeep
• Domination
  • +1 Edict Fund
  • Unity upkeep
• Expansion
  • +1 Housing (or +1% Pop Growth Speed, +1% Pop Assembly Speed)
  • Energy upkeep
• Prosperity
  • +1 Consumer Good
  • Energy upkeep
• Supremacy
  • +1 Naval Capacity
  • Alloy upkeep
• Unyielding
  • +1 Defense Army (but this could cause issues during bombardment; perhaps defense army bonus instead, possibly to army health to also slow down the effects of bombardment)
  • Mineral upkeep
• Diplomacy
  • +0.01 Influence (10 worlds with 6 Culture Workers each would add +0.6 Influence)
  • Energy upkeep
• Harmony / Synchronicity
  • +1 Stability
  • Unity upkeep
• Mercantile
  • +2 Trade Value
  • Energy upkeep
• Subterfuge
  • +1% point requirement for hostile agents to advance an infiltration level
  • Energy upkeep
• Adaptability / Versatility
  • +1 Unity
  • Consumer Good upkeep

The types and sizes of the bonuses are just mock suggestions. There are probably better ideas out there.
This could also, admittedly, make it harder to properly match optimal pop traits with Culture Worker jobs.

 

[CometBliss]

The bonus is all over the place. Planet-wide ones feel super bad because you generally don’t build these on non-unity worlds. Almost feel like the change is bringing cultural workers back for the sake of bringing it back without considering larger picture and they don’t have a clear identity.

I honestly don’t get why it’s bureaucrat being the primary unity job when cultural worker thematically do that better. Their roles should exchange.

My personal opinion is that it should abstain the change for now and focus on something that matters more, for example, combat “balance” or internal politics which has not been talked about at all. Currently game economy can’t make a new job distinct enough.

He is attempting to make culture workers and sensorium sights used more often. And we do need more ways to make more unity. Sensorium sights was a bit underwhelming at first but then they offer this and it's really good. It goes up 2, 4, 6 like synapse drones.

 

[Jamaican Castle]

I honestly don’t get why it’s bureaucrat being the primary unity job when cultural worker thematically do that better.

Planets full of government-funded worker drones whose only role is to enact government policies, disseminate new official standards, and develop local infrastructure... in what way are bureaucrats not thematically appropriate to how unity functions?

 

[Sutopia]

He is attempting to make culture workers and sensorium sights used more often. And we do need more ways to make more unity. Sensorium sights was a bit underwhelming at first but then they offer this and it's really good. It goes up 2, 4, 6 like synapse drones.

That’s exactly what I mean by adding it for the sake of adding it. It’s either gonna be too good you spam them on every world like psi corp or so bad they stay where they currently are. There is no new game mechanism for them to stand out.