3.3 Unity Open Beta Discussion Thread
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Jobs aren't employment. You're still gonna have the jobs, even if you don't have people working them.
No, they don't.
Psionic theory is empire wide. Docile is per planet. So both together, as an example, is actually (1*.9)[planet; docile]*.9[empire; psionic theory] rather than 1*.8
That's why you can't currently achieve more than 85% empire sprawl reduction empire wide (2x traditions, psionic theory, fanatic pacifist, beacon of liberty, and another 10% that I'm forgetting), even though there's docile, governor's and planetary ascension (another 80% per planet max)
To this day, I am amazed that Paradox is not based in Italy, because this is some serious spaghetti code.
Pasta with ketchup is a staple dish for Scandinavian students!
And yeah, not sure how I feel about it. I guess it's good you can't reach -100+% pop sprawl?
The last -10% is a resolution btw, which you'd want to be Egalitarian for I believe.
Maybe I should extend the context of my quote to include the sentence before it. It's not efficient to offload clerk jobs to zombies if instead of a zombie working as a clerk I could just build robots that can work non-clerk jobs without a 25% penalty. Yes, even as spiritualist, despite your claim that spiritualists "simply do not get access to pop assembly." The penalty to having robots is 5% faction happiness, which is completely negligible since in a spiritualist empire your spiritualist faction should be well within the maximum happiness range even with robotic workers allowed.
You also claim earlier that 25% of your jobs are going to be worker jobs due to all the incidental clerks you get from building cities, but you don't need that many worker jobs. The optimal play is to turn off all the jobs you don't need and employ as many specialists as you can, with only just enough workers to support all your specialists and no more.
Both of these replies I think either miss my point, or are being pedantic. Why would I spend the effort to build zombies to fill only clerk jobs if I could just not fill my clerk jobs? That's an investment for very minimal returns, which has an opportunity cost of not being able to build more useful robots.
The only upside to this civic over building robots is that zombies assemble faster and can be stacked with clone vats and budding in a biologically ascended emire to produce pops that aren't zombies. To me this says that it's a civic that would work best when reformed into in the midgame once you bio ascend for even more pop assembly, and not very good by itself. It's further hurt by the fact that megacorps are not in a good state right now.
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Zombie pop assembly always outperforms robot assembly right from the start of the game a budding build starts at 2.5
Gene Clinics (very early tech) increase this via 10%
Death Cult sacrifice adds another +1
At the point you place your robot factory on your home world giving you +2 assembly that same Zombie home world is giving you around +3 output.
1.5 Zombie Clerks beats your 1 Robot
1.5 Zombie slave Miners beat your 1 Robot, even with the -15 production penalty.
comparing 1 zombie vs 1 robot is being disingenuous on your part please stop doing that.
The Clerk is a garbage job, but a clerk giving you 5 energy, 2.5 cg, 2.5 unity, is the corner stone of a trade build now that merchants have been nerfed.
I agree with you, but it was the best fix I could think of that is still simple, i.e., that I could implement with a simple mod. If I was better, I would weigh different systems based on how much each is worth. My desire is that empire size should reflect, in part, the size on the galaxy map.
Another idea I had involved taking into account the number of sectors and frontier planets you have. A colony that is not in the core sector could count more towards empire size. This would reward building taller and making more vassals and indirect control. Of course this could be abused with a lot of resettlement to the core sector, but perhaps that's the point isn't it? Pops are easier to control and unify when they are concentrated in a smaller area.
I don't know how to implement that in a mod, but if anyone knows, I'd like to play test that idea.
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I think a good way to buff non-gesalt empires would be to buff trade. In late game, I find one merchant produces around 25 credits in trade value compared to one technician pumping out around 33 credits. The consumer benefits trade policy helps close the gap, but gesalts get way more technician jobs compared to non-gesalts and merchant jobs. Trade feels underpowered.
Ring worlds and habitats for organics give trade districts, whereas gesalts get generator districts. Pop for pop, technicians will produce more credits, AND generator districts give way more technician jobs compared to the number of merchant jobs gained from trade disricts. A related problem is that clerks are absurdly non-competitive and need a buff in trade value and amenities.
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You're presupposing we take corporate death cult. While you can certainly do this, I'm comparing the new civic in a vacuum. What if the megacorp doesn't want to be spiritualist? Or what if they want free traders or some other civic instead? Half of my thoughts on zombies are based on the fact that they're not nearly as versatile as robots, and are only useful in certain specific builds. You can use robots in 100% of builds. Zombies pigeonholes you into pretty much exactly spiritualist death cult bio ascension megacorp, which isn't very good. Megacorps as a government type are easily the worst right now due to their bigger sprawl penalties for no major benefit (branch offices are great, but not consistently useful, and you won't have them early game. Gestalts, other megacorps, and empires that don't like you are immune.) You also can't integrate vassals as a megacorp which is a major downside.
It's a 25% penalty, not a 15% penalty. Robots can also have mass produced for 2.5 assembly, making that gap narrower. Budding is only going to be providing much benefit once you get above 20 pops, robots can be built on 0 pop colonies. Sure, you can have more zombies than you can have robots, but only on your home world. Any colonies you build won't be able to build zombies for years. And I've already stated my opinion that the civic is best not used as a starting civic because zombies really aren't that great.
Trade laws were nerfed to only give .125 unity. Trade league still having the old value is almost certainly a bug that will be patched in the release version. And a clerk giving you 3 energy, 1.5 CG, and 1.5 Unity (fixed your numbers for 3.2 clerks. They give a max of 6 trade value with thrifty and the tradition, not 10). That is still less efficient than having other pops generate equivalent resources from artisans/bureaucrats/technicians. Even taking other bonuses into account, there simply aren't enough bonuses to trade in the game to scale clerks up to match a late game technician, which even has repeatable techs to increase its output.
The only nerf to merchants was the merchant guilds +2 unity being removed, the job still gives the same amount of trade value as it gave before. And now that you don't actually need merchant guilds to make a trade federation, you can run an entire second civic on a merchant build that you didn't have room for before. Just spitballing but you could take exalted priesthood, which replaces rulers with high priests that give tons of unity to make up for the merchants no longer giving 2 unity. One high priest gives 6 unity, or 3 previous merchants. You do lose out on some trade value but it's still net positive in unity.
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I think the intent was mostly to force players to actually build administrative offices/temples to get unity and by opportunity cost have fewer science labs if you want to make good progress on traditions and have advantages in leader recruitment, exploration, etc. And from my experience, they did succeed in this goal and make spiritualist more attractive as the "unity build" ethic as opposed to materialist. The unity rework in concept I would say is pretty good. It's just some of the specific numbers on the new systems that need tweaking to "be even better" in my opinion.
Spiritualist is only offering a 10% or 20% bonus on something that's not really a core to your strategy. It's harder to get traditions now, but I mean, if you sacrifice science to try to get them, you're only going to be worse off. All they did was push traditions back and nerf unity. People are being told that this is the "unity" update, and you can convince a lot of people by just telling them something like that, especially if it comes from an authority figure like the developers themselves. I think in practice, though, once people are done being told "this is the unity update", they'll be shown by the game that they're getting less out of unity, and that this is the update where you do traditions less and don't do anything interesting with unity because it only comes from temples or administrative buildings.
Also, I've been over this, but Fanatic Spiritualist is still taking robots away for basically zero benefit so it's still a noob-killing ethic.
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Your merchants should be producing at least 30 trade earlier, before you even reach mid game, between stability, mercantile traditions, designation bonuses, and the all important thrifty (no trade build works without thrifty).
Unfortunately, most of those bonuses are early game bonuses and don't scale into the late game, but merchants (and clerks) do three things technicians don't: They can produce consumer goods (without minerals), energy and unity, and they can produce amenities, and they do so at great efficiency very early in the game.
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You are getting more out of unity though, you just have to consciously invest into unity in order to get anything out of it as opposed to playing builds like technocracy/merchant guilds where you could speed through traditions and science at the same time. Now you have to make the choice between one or the other. You can have just as much unity as before, you'll just have less science than before to compensate. And that same amount of unity is used for more things while sprawl is unavoidable, which means you actually need to build more unity than before to get the same tradition speed. But considering you no longer need to build admin cap jobs and the sprawl penalties aren't really that high, it's not that much slower to tech/tradition up than before. No more entire planets devoted to admin cap, now you can have an extra research world or unity world instead.
As I said in a post above, literally the only penalty to building robots as spiritualists (including fanatic ones) is an irrelevant 5% faction happiness penalty. You can't use full AI rights which means no synths unless you're fine with a high chance of a machine uprising, but you can still research and make full use of droids. You're the one who is misinformed on this front.
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See, but you're getting less science, which is bad for you. You want as much science as you can make. You also want to get ascension perks, but I feel like only the first five are really important. There's whatever your starter is, your ascension path (two perks), galactic wonders, and master builders. Arcologies are also nice to have. The galactic wonders stuff is later on anyway, especially now.
Right, so we get less out of it. You're compelled to save it to get traditions, which means you want to have fewer leaders, you want to move pops around less, and so on. The main draw is the traditions. Making us spend it on unrelated stuff is only slowing down traditions.
That's not 100% true since you need to build at least enough science buildings on every world to make sure you're not eating sprawl penalties too hard. If you have to choose between suffering a more significant science drawback versus a significant unity drawback, it's preferable to accept your unity will not grow as fast as your empire expands.
Wait, has it always been like this? For whatever reason I thought the fanatics had it as a hard law: no robots.
There is also stealth drawback that might or might not be a problem for you in that it also increase materalist ethic attraction.
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All you say here is true, but one of the main goals of the update was to slow down science progression. So this is working as designed. Instead of thinking in the terms of hitting all of the previous benchmarks, we need to think in terms of how important traditions/perks and other unity features are compared to tech, and build new empires around that. We're used to going zoom zoom on tech so fast that any step back from that is going to feel bad at first (see: all of the people who complained about the growth required scaling back in 3.1). But just because tech is slower than before doesn't necessarily mean that the game is worse off.
Having robots on the planet increases materialist ethics attraction by the same amount as having the "natural engineers" species trait, and that's not stopping people from plopping it on just about every empire regardless of ethic. Spiritualist has pretty much the highest ethics attraction in the game, it's not something to worry about. Though, ethics attraction is honestly almost never relevant in the first place as the factors that affect it are naturally going to make your governing ethics the most prevalent ones in your empire by far, whatever your ethics may be.
Ethics - Stellaris Wiki
Why don't they have empires below sprawl get a bonus and empires above it a penalty like Buddhism from EU4?
Zombies are used in a Psionic rush actually not a bio ascension.
It's only 15% since you will be using chattel slaves for your production jobs.
a clerk gives you 5 * 1.25 = 6.25 + pop trade of 0.5 = 6.75 base * min 50% trade bonus = 10
stop comparing a zombie to another pop which you haven't created, you are constantly pretending you have somehow grown a magically pop on your non zombie build.
who cares about late game you have already rushed down and conquered the galaxy? Why does it take you so long to win the game????
A colony takes 5 years min to upgrade and start building zombies, You should be moving pops around to get them upgraded.
Merchants consume 2 cg which is a nerf to their consumer goods output since they use 3 cg in total compared to a zombie that consumes 0 cg.
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