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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.

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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.

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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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Very cool news, primarily since Libra, I am focusing on playing unity and culture empires (instead of trying to wipe the galaxy). But with your permission, I would like to mention some unrelated improvements we would like to see in the game.

I've been talking about this first one for a long time: a megastructure outliner where we can keep track of all the locations, types, and outcomes of our megastructures. This would help players greatly who like to play with many megastructures.

The second one would be adding the manual selection feature on the trade screen. In the late game, when I'm playing with a friend, I really hate to spam my "ctrl+lett mouse" just to send 250000 alloys to him. Can we add a manual selection option so that we may just type the amount we want to send?

Thanks for the great work as always <3
 
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A small silly thing that you probably already know; the T2/T3 Death Chronicler buildings require gas, while the normal Autocthon monuments don't. I'd love it if this was changed to no gas, it feels bad to have this difference between the two.
 
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  • Pacifist: +2.5% Trade Value from Lifestyle (Planet)
  • Egalitarian: -2.5% Housing Usage (Planet)
Authoritarian+Pacifist has barely any TV from living standard - egalitarians do have significant TV from living standard.
Maybe that should be swapped.

I don't particularly mind the -2.5% housing usage on egalitarian and it doesn't fit pacifist as well as it does egalitarian, but the +2.5%TV from living standard synergises most with egalitarians - which makes it odd to be put on pacifists.
 
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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.

The pacifist and egalitarian bonuses would work better if you switched them. Extra trade from living standard would synergize beautifully with Utopian Abundance and reduced housing usage would synergize with the pacifist's reduced sprawl from pops. It also makes thematic sense for pacifist to be the ones that can cramp more people into less space without an outbreak of violence. :D
 
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Wait, I know! Let's have only the first three tradition picks affect the culture worker! That'll suddenly make the order of picks matter just a tiny bit more, while also cutting down on the sheer amount of bonuses, without having to gut the individual ones in the name of balance.
That is an interesting idea. It could even be used to add a little extra incentive to tradition trees that are rarely picked among the first three (and, as a bonus, give a boost to AI empires that pick tradition trees in a different order than human players). It would give players a new way to spice things up, by picking tradition trees in an otherwise unorthodox order.

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.
Militarist: +1 Naval Capacity (Empire)
Why not a percentage bonus to planetary Naval Capacity production? Would seem more in line with the other bonuses. Would also reward Militarist empires that actually use Soldiers and Duelists, rather than adding another non-Soldier source of Naval Capacity (which instead further reduces the need for Soldier jobs).



Also, how about the possibility of having Ruler jobs produce some Edict Fund (and any Edict Fund bonuses from Culture Workers being percentage modifiers rather than direct bonuses)?
  • It would add a new way of differentiating Ruler jobs from each other.
  • Presuming that each Edict Fund point would replace a Unity point, this change would also
    • reduce the issue of the tradition trees being finished early even without dedicated Unity production.
    • shift Unity production away from the Ruler stratum, making Monuments and Specialist jobs more important for Unity production.
In that case, the Edict Fund output should probably also be treated as a resource (just like Unity) and be affected by general job output bonuses, such as the Capital designation, Ruler Pop Resource Output bonuses, or Stability.
Edict Fund output should also be affected by the Unity bonus, since the Edict Fund output would essentially be a specialised Unity output - similar to how Research bonuses affect three different output resources (Physics, Society and Engineering Research).
 
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Materialist: +2 Amenities (Planet)

So we also have a unity producing job, that happens to produce no society science, exactly the same amount of amendity, and slightly more unity. Guess who got this job now? Definitely not the unity main ethics that is the Spiritualists?

oh and meanwhile we still have people complaining about +2 being too weak and want +2% instead. wtf? You need to have 100 pop on a planet to have a net profit.

--

To be clear, this +2 is really just where it should. You can't really make it anyway worse. It's the spiritualist counterpart that needs revisiting.
 
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Wouldn't this be the perfect fit for egalitarians as they have the highest living standards and thus offering a great synergy?
Additionally, there are several living conditions that increase TV output.
There is the 'Decadent Lifestyle' which is the 'equivalent' of 'Utopian Abundance'.
Fanatics Egalitarian also have access to the civic “Shared Burdens”, there, so it could have a real counter synergy.
 
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Additionally, there are several living conditions that increase TV output.
There is the 'Decadent Lifestyle' which is the 'equivalent' of 'Utopian Abundance'.
'Decadent Lifestyle' requires an additional civic to unlock, while 'Utopian Abundance' is unlocked by just being egalitarian.

Egalitarian fanatics also have access to the civic “Shared Burdens”, there, so it could have a real counter synergy.
Egalitarians also have access to basic subsistence, but that doesn't mean they have to take it.
 
Yes and?
Social Welfare, Academic Privilege and Chemical Bliss also boost TV globally.
“Shared Burden” also for workers, but diminishes others and directly competes with “Utopian Abundance”.

"Shared Burdens" requires being an Egalitarian fanatic, only they can use this living standards.
 
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You mean like how workers and researchers get a bunch of percentage bonuses to their output? And also get upgraded buildings giving them further increased production?

Most jobs scale throughout the game. Having one that scaled off of traditions rather than science would be and interesting counterpoint.
You mean like how I literally explicitly said "A job improving at the one thing it does is very different than a job doing up to seven of thirteen different things"?
 
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  • 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.
I'm not sure that Pacifist is anywhere close to the most powerful. Suppose it's around 2250 and you have 15 planets and ~400 pops, with Utopian Abundance, and level 2 monuments on every planet. You're getting an extra 2.5/100*4*400*.5 TV=20 energy or 10/5/2.5 EC/CG/unity if you're in a trade league. 40, if it's multiplicative with other TV bonuses. Authoritarian will be getting 180 edict fund (unity). Xenophobe will have an extra 2.4% TV and resources from jobs on all planets from 4% stability (from 6% happiness).

Trade value from lifestyle is just so small that it doesn't really matter. A 15% increase for a huge, 4000 pop empire is only 300 TV. That's 25 merchants. Whereas if you're a xenophobe, you're getting 3.6% of all base resource production (which, assuming a technician as the average value per pop, is 8*.036*4000=1152 energy credits).
 
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So we also have a unity producing job, that happens to produce no society science, exactly the same amount of amendity, and slightly more unity. Guess who got this job now? Definitely not the unity main ethics that is the Spiritualists?

oh and meanwhile we still have people complaining about +2 being too weak and want +2% instead. wtf? You need to have 100 pop on a planet to have a net profit.

--

To be clear, this +2 is really just where it should. You can't really make it anyway worse. It's the spiritualist counterpart that needs revisiting.
Amenities usage modifiers are much more powerful than +amenities percent modifiers. If you have enough amenities usage modifiers you can reduce the usage to basically zero, effectively giving you maximum happiness on every planet.
 
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Speaking of ethics, I’m making a mod about definitions, naming of such things. Slapping “fanatic” over all intense versions of those ethics didn’t felt right or I should say felt like more thought should be put into names that defines such values. So yeah as I said I’m making a mod that for instance changes the same dull “Fanatic Militarist” definition into “Iron-Willed Militarist” with a cool mandalorian quote about honor as description. In this mod I’ll be focusing on just names and descriptions as these are in a way just as if not even more important than balance values. Our sense of balance is affected by names, definitions, it effects the whole feel and “culture” of the game.
 
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Amenities usage modifiers are much more powerful than +amenities percent modifiers. If you have enough amenities usage modifiers you can reduce the usage to basically zero, effectively giving you maximum happiness on every planet.
There aren't enough reductions in existence to get it anywhere near that low. If you're on a perfect habitability world, with One Vision, Vultaum, all residents, and with Ecological Protection resolutions, you're at -50%.

More importantly, though, the same reductions affect flat amenities. If you're at -50% already and you have 100 pops, you can provide for your pops with 38 amenities from other sources and either -12% amenity usage from culture workers or 12 amenities from culture workers. 100*(.50-.12)=38, just like 100*.5-12=38. The break-even is at 100 pops, either way. Below that, the flat amenities are better. Above that, the % amenities are better. Granted, they behave very differently on either side of the breakpoint, but the fact that the breakpoint is at 100 doesn't change.

Materialist is just better until you get to 100 pops per planet, which won't happen for most of the game. Plus, since you'll be on planets with less-than-perfect habitability for most of the game, you'll actually have increased amenity usage, and the performance of the -2% reduced usage will be even worse (for populations less than 100).

Edit: I wrote this thinking that the spiritualist effect was -2%, not -2.5%. Change all the -2s to -2.5s, all the -12s to -15s, and the 100s to 80s, and it should still apply. It does make the breakpoint come earlier, though, which is a point in favor of the upkeep reduction.
 
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So what is the point of even including the gestalt version, if it is clearly just an afterthought?
A whole building slot for some better maintenanc drones and no ME/Hive specific boni? Wow, so interesting.
 
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More importantly, though, the same reductions affect flat amenities. If you're at -50% already and you have 100 pops, you can provide for your pops with 38 amenities from other sources and either -12% amenity usage from culture workers or 12 amenities from culture workers. 100*(.50-.12)=38, just like 100*.5-12=38. The break-even is at 100 pops, either way. Below that, the flat amenities are better. Above that, the % amenities are better. Granted, they behave very differently on either side of the breakpoint, but the fact that the breakpoint is at 100 doesn't change.
With fanatic spiritualist you can get -80% amenities usage and that would mean you don’t even need entertainers, this is Much more useful on ringworld and ecumenopolis since there is way more than 100 pops on the world. early game materialist is stronger, sure, I agree. Late game though, it effectively becomes double the most powerful hive mind civic for free on spiritualists.

also, what pop count you have on the planet depends on the game settings, and afaik most people tune down the pop growth scaling so there’s more pops.