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Stellaris Dev Diary #62: Government, Civics and Hive Minds

Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today's dev diary is going to be about the Government Rework, the last of the major feature reworks coming in 1.5 'Banks' and some related features in the 'Utopia' expansion.

Government Rework (Free Feature)
With the focus of Banks and Utopia being ethics, internal politics and empire customization, we felt it would be remiss of us not to put in some work in regards to governments. While the old government grid worked alright to give you a broad range of governments to pick from, they were a bit lackluster, not very well balanced and I rarely felt that the government I picked truly corresponded to my own idea of what my empire's society was like. To address all of these issues at once we decided to go back to the drawing board and redo the way governments are constructed completely. In Banks, instead of picking from a preconfigured government, you build your own from Authority and Civics.

The Authority determines how power is transfered in your government. The different Authorities are:
Democratic: A ruler is democratically elected every 10 years.
Oligarchic: A ruler is elected every 40 to 50 years.
Dictatorial: Rulers are elected but rule for life.
Imperial: Rulers rule for life and are succeeded by appointed heirs on death.

In all systems that involve elections, leaders will be elected from the different Factions in your country, and electing a ruler of a particular Faction will significantly strengthen the political clout of that faction and the attraction of their related ethics, so be careful about letting a Xenophile take charge of your Supremacist Empire!
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The Civics represent the political and social traditions of your government, and come in a wide variety of types, primarily limited by your authority and ethics. In addition to providing modifiers, they can also change how your empire is governed. For example, the Citizen Service Civic ties citizenship to military service, so that only species with Full Military Service are afforded the right to vote and become leaders. On empire creation, you can choose two Civics, with a third able to be unlocked later through research.
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With a few exceptions (more on that below), Civics and Authorities are not necessarily permanent. Where previously you could change your government type for 250 influence, you now have the option to effectively rebuild your government at the same cost. By using the 'Reform Government' button in the government screen, you can add and remove Civics and change Authority from among the picks available to your ethics. As your Ethics and Authority change, you may end up with Civics that are no longer valid for you country - for example a 'Beacon of Liberty' that has lost its Egalitarian ethics. When this happens, the Civic in question will remain, but will become 'inactive' and stop providing you with any sort of bonus, effectively a wasted Civic slot until you reform your government and replace it.
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From the Authority, Civics and Ethics you pick, a Government Name is finally generated. The Government Name is purely there to roughly summarize the government you have built, as well as provide flavor, and has no actual impact on gameplay.
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Advanced Civics (Paid Feature)
In addition to the normal Civics available to everyone, there are also a few special Civics that are only available to those with the Utopia expansion. These Civics are meant to simulate very specific kinds of societies and generally have more of an impact on your game than the normal Civics do. They are as follows:
  • Syncretic Evolution: Your species evolved along with another, subservient species. A second species is randomly generated on your homeworld replacing some of your primary species' Pops. They always have the Proles (rebalanced in Banks) and Strong traits, making them excellent soldiers and workers but less ideal for intellectual pursuits. This Civic provides no additional benefits and cannot be removed once picked.
  • Mechanist: Your species is obsessed with the pursuit of robotics. This Civic requires you to be Materialist and has you start with the Robotic Workers and Powered Exoskeletons technologies and a population of worker robots to do the farming and mining for you, replacing some of your primary species' Pops. This Civic provides no additional benefits and cannot be removed once picked.
  • Fanatic Purifiers: Your empire will not tolerate the existance of any other sentient life. This Civic requires you to be Fanatic Xenophobe/Militarist and gives very large boosts to the effectiveness of your military and gives you Unity from purging Xeno Pops, but disables all diplomacy with other species and forces all Xeno Pops in your empire to be purged (though you get to choose the method of extermination). All other regular empires will also have a massive relations malus with you, the one and only exception being Fanatic Purifiers from the same species.
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Hive Minds (Paid Feature)
In addition to the Advanced Civics, those with the Utopia expansion also get access to a unique Authority with a highly unique playstyle: the Hive Mind. Hive Minds are species where the individuals are all part of the same, vast, psionically linked consciousness. The Immortal Hive Mind rules absolutely over the population of non-sentient worker drones, using sentient 'Autonomous Drones' (Leaders) to extend the reach of its will. Picking the Hive Mind Authority requires the Hive Mind Ethic and each can only be picked together with the other: With only one, vast and linked consciousness, the guiding values of a Hive Mind is whatever the Hive Mind player wants it to be. They have their own set of Civics that can only be used by Hive Minds, and cannot use any non-Hive Mind Civics.
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All Pops from the founder species of a Hive Mind will have the Hive-Minded trait. Hive-Minded Pops are not affected by Happiness and will never form Factions, allowing Hive Minds to completely ignore internal politics... though this comes as a cost, as they also cannot benefit from the Influence boost and other benefits provided by happy Factions in a regular empire. As Hive Minds rely completely on their ability to communicate psionically with the drone population, they are also unable to rule over non Hive-Minded Pops, and any such Pops in your empire will automatically be killed over time and processed into food to feed the Hive. Similarly, Hive-Minded pops that end up in non Hive Mind empires will be cut off from the Hive and will perish over time. The only way to integrate Pops between Hive Minds and non-Hive Minds is to use the Biological Ascension Path to unlock advanced gene modding and modify them by adding or removing Hive-Minded (more on this in the next dev diary). However, Hive Minds can still coexist with other species: They have full access to diplomacy and can have non-Hive Mind subjects (and can be ruled over as subjects in turn), though non-Hive Mind empires tend to be somewhat distrustful of Hive Minds on first contact.
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While Hive Minds are psionic by nature, the way they function and their connection to the Shroud is radically different from that of regular psychics, making them unable to follow the Psionic Ascension Path. Furthermore, Hive Minds are deeply biological entities, and fundamentally incompatible with the Synthetic Ascension Path. They are however perfectly suited for the Biological Ascension Path, and can make use of it to assimilate other, non-Hive Mind species into the Hive as described above.

That's all for today! Next week we'll be talking about the Biological and Synthetic Ascension Paths. See you then!
 
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No lottery as an authority, please! the very own concpet sounds ridiculous.
 
Primarch Victus said:
I still think that is think of lottery/sortition as a civic is a dumb idea.
Click to expand...
Not sure why.

Something like vetting the best suited few thousand candidates and then selecting one at random among them seems like it could be a decent enough selection process. It's got a bit of technocracy over it.

Odds are the selected candidate won't be worse than the democratically elected one.
 
Belaaron said:
Firstly..."authority" is the component that determines what demographic rules, and the process used to establish that rule. Civics are, as you said, the quirks of how they actually administer the government during their rule. At which point, a lottery is as much a valid selection process of a valid demographic as democracy or any form of authoritarianism. Really, government should be broken into three parts. The method of establishment (democracy, heredity, appointment...and lottery), the source of power (shared "congress/council", checked absolutism "idealized US", and full absolutism), and then the civics which are really pretty fine as-is. As such, you could have democratic absolutism, or hereditary congressional positions...or whatever other combination.
Click to expand...

and on this, I still think "No De jure Leader" is an option. There's no fast and hard dates for changes of leaders and they simply occur on death(in which case a new leader leads the same faction) or when another faction becomes more powerful in your nation. This could be like a Corporatocracy where the leader is the CEO of the leading company of the time, this can change, on a dime, even very quickly. A warlike culture might gain enough warriors to simply become the new guy calling the shots, or might have killed off the last guy, who knows.

The point is not every society agrees on a leader or has a specific path to determine a leader, the leader simply IS, the people aren't a nation so much as a civilization or culture that's roughly banded together. and I don't think that's easily captured in this game, where there's always an election or an inheritance.

How the mechanics would work is in the government page where it shows the next election or heir, it'll instead show the current most popular faction and 2nd most. if the 2nd goes above the first then a change of power occurs. The bonus to this is what ever faction is in charge gives a little bonus to their ethic's empire effects. probably about the effect of half for a single ethic faction and a quarter to a multi ethic faction.
 
Okay, so the reason you're getting so much backlash over the hivemind thing is because of how forced the purging is. I understand you want hiveminds to play differently and it makes sense in my mind that hiveminds would have a hard time dealing with people outside of the collective, but creating a situation where the game purges outside pops with no input from the player rips away agency.

I would recommend instead creating a situation that pushes a player to behave in that way with a few alternative options.

So if you want players to get rid of their non-hivemind pops make them garbage. Base -100% to mineral, food, science, and energy production for not having the hivemind trait while in a hivemind empire. While that doesn't guarantee the pop will produce nothing, what little it could possibly produce will be so much less than that of a proper hivemind pop that it will probably make overly efficient players purge them all. For flavor, a hivemind pop should get a -20% penalty to all production for every neighboring non-hivemind pop because not only are they useless but their meddling disrupts the collective's efforts even if they don't mean to.

So how should a player be able to handle these useless pops?

The easiest way would be the purging or ejecting them from your system as the game forcibly is set to do for you. They aren't useful so why keep them?

Second option should be slavery. Give hiveminds a slavery efficiency +100% to negate their own penalty but disallow them the ability to make slaves of anyone with the hivemind trait within a hivemind empire and we create a situation where using them as cattle, either for hard labor or as food livestock, is the only way to get value out of them. Sci-fi is flush with hiveminds that enslave other races to integrate them into the collective when they don't have the means to technological means to properly integrate them.

Third option would be releasing them as vassal states. I imagine this will probably actually be possible in game but a great way to deal with useless pops would be to round all of them all up to one planet and have them run themselves and pay tribute. I think a good way to help facilitate that would be if relocation costs for hiveminds were super cheap. Although that may not at all be necessary since presumably when you come into possession of such pops they'll all be on one planet. But it opens the door for some of the brutal efficiency a hivemind empire would theoretically be able to employ for situations where you conquer a planet and there were less pops on the planet than it had slots so you move all the non-hivemind pops to a small planet to be released as a vassal and keep the bigger planet for yourself.

The fourth option for dealing with non-hivemind pops would be catering them. Now bare with me, this last one is admittedly a stretch. While a hivemind doesn't have to worry about its own happiness or internal politics for garnering influence there's no reason it couldn't keep non-hivemind pops separated and cared for as a means of garnering influence. Where influence from factions normally comes from getting the faction to play nice with the government, in the hivemind's case they are broadcasting out to the world how they're keeping the people they have in their care happy thus garnering influence from abroad instead. Once a hivemind has enough non-hivemind pops in their empire those pops could start and join factions. While these pops would be a burden on the empire requiring food and providing basically nothing in return this would enable sentimental players to express their agency while rewarding them at least somewhat for their efforts with influence.

I imagine it's more complicated than that. Many of the revolt events would probably need to be rekeyed or excluded from hivemind empires to accommodate for the fact that hivemind citizens don't have happiness or ethics beyond being a hivemind. And from what I've seen of factions they seem to be specifically keyed to government type and require a leader to head them which would need they'd need an exception if within a hivemind thus requiring their own factions specific to pops living in hiveminds and their own events because the normal faction events seem to name the faction leader.

Even still, I think it's very doable and worth it to give back that agency and give those options. Perhaps not before Utopia comes out since the release is so close but it's something to think about and consider moving forward.
 
Donelloth said:
Okay, so the reason you're getting so much backlash over the hivemind thing is because of how forced the purging is. I understand you want hiveminds to play differently and it makes sense in my mind that hiveminds would have a hard time dealing with people outside of the collective, but creating a situation where the game purges outside pops with no input from the player rips away agency.
Click to expand...

Unfortunately Vassal and Tributary are too limited to handle this idea of a Hive keeping a non-hive population under their control.

Might be an interesting compromise to allow hives to establish "xeno sectors." A special designation of sector that the hive's own population will never migrate too. They'd effectively pay their taxes to the hive, abide by the Hive's rules in all diplomatic affairs, and never build their own ships. Might even create a limit to how much the main hive can even tax, owing to the inevitable administrative inefficiency that arises from a race that's never had to administer individual populations.
 
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