I think this is a really good idea, or at least the bones of a really good idea.
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3.3 Unity Open Beta Discussion Thread
- Thread starter MrFreake_PDX
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Actually, since spiritualists get hardly any benefit (just the +10% unity), the actual unity build is probably pacifists, xenophiles or egalitarian, depending on how you want to accomplish it. Sadly, spiritualists got left in the dust. Again. What's worse is that two other unity jobs (Death Priests & Memorialists) are worse than bureaucrats and priests, death priests especially so.
Egalitarian has the +15% unity and -15% empire sprawl, which is great for unity builds! Also lots of faction influence (potentially close to 1 unity per pop in a happy faction, and xenophiles are easy to please!)
Trade builds with trade league are still decent, but will likely be nerfed. Still, because trade builds give you incidental unity, it means you can get consumer goods & unity without spending minerals to make consumer goods.
Imperial has Feudal Society, which is thousands of unity saved early on and lots of unity upkeep saved as well. Pretty much free if you reform your government later (it does lock you out of egalitarian though)
The major issue though is that, at least in my experience, I am better off just settling more worlds and going wider in order to get more unity (of which I'll get plenty), because bureaucrats/priests give so little unity I can't bring myself to purposefully spend consumer goods on them. With zero bureaucrats, I've still unlocked 4 ascension perks after 80 years, and I am not particularly inclined to unlock three more - the opportunity cost of not producing alloys or tech just doesn't pan out, unfortunately. I certainly don't feel like I'm lagging behind in unity, primarily because of the politicians (or merchants, or factions).
That being said, if they took away unity from the ruler jobs, and made politicians the specialist job instead, that would force me to actually build some admin offices/temples, which I'm currently avoiding like the plague. And that would also double the output of bureaucrats, which probably actually needs to be tripled to be on par with researchers in conceptual output, and likely produce a base that's 7x higher to be on par with tech and its benefits.
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Imperial really has no direct boost on unity (aside from byzantine bureaucracy which everyone get access to, unless you happen to be imperial spiritualist then you are fvked lol) which is really infuriated to me who main imperial.
Only thing that imperial has to help with unity is imperial cult (really indirect by savig 100 unity upkeep of edict) and like you said, feudal society both of them are type of civic that you only use early game then reform out...
Also the thing that imperial and authoritarian help is influence which also thing that really good in early game then became kind of useless in late game...
It really sad state for imperial authority right now.
Well they also have saint edict which boost priest and high priest output by 20% which is hardly better but at least it is something.
Imperial has access to feudal society, as I mentioned.
Even if you're not interested in being imperial long term, there's no other civic that will give you a similar early game ROI: Over 240 months, you'll be able to run as many governors, admirals and scientists as you want. 10 early game scientists? Regular cost to hire six more scientists is roughly 1650 unity, so on the low end you've saved 825 unity. And you'll get them quicker and you can keep hiring more to explore even faster. On top of that, it's 2 less unity per scientist/admiral per month, and +x unity from governors, so that's another 25 unity per month roughly for the first 240 months of the game - almost 6000 (edit: not 1000) unity. It's basically the advantage of being a democracy (edit: 3x better actually), but guaranteed and immediate in the part of the game where traditions are unlocking quickly.
Frankly, I usually run with even more leaders, thus creating more of a benefit, allowing me to expand more and faster. And if/when I want to reform, I've already saved more than enough unity to justify it, plus gotten the advantages of early game unity faster.
Most importantly, spiritualists come nowhere near producing that kind of unity early game.
Edit: What I mean to say is, Spiritualists, as an ethic, don't have access to any exclusive civics that make them better at producing unity; they lose access to a civic that would make them better and replace it with exalted priesthood (which is worse than just not being spiritualist +20% priest output doesn't make up for that); other ethics do have exclusive access to civics that make them actually better at unity, including egalitarian (which also boosts unity producers in the ethic), xenophobe/pacifist (excludes fanatic Spiritualists), plus all five government types exceeding the benefits of the ethic (which no other ethic suffers from) - Megacorp and Oligarchy both doing the same as Spiritualists, Democracies having access to two better civics, and Imperials having access to one.
If death cults or exalted priesthood were actually good at producing unity (instead of being worse, with death cults being objectively worse, and exalted priesthood being worse than byzantine bureaucracy), then spiritualists would be better at making unity, but as is they get a measly +10% buff to a job you probably want less than clerks, and which other ethic/civic combos can do better regardless.
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According to the wiki, all spiritualists "Cannot use Full AI Rights policy", but there's nothing about being hard-locked from robots. Spiritualists have a 50% penalty to the draw chance for the tech, but can totally still do robots.
Which, in the 3.3. context, is 5 faction approval, for which the unity 'hit' is more than made up for by the Unity 10%/20% modifier, and which doesn't prevent you from getting the relevant pop happiness tiers from faction approval.
'Spiritualists can't do robots' has been more meme than math for years.
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I'm going to push back on the Imperial Bureaucracy point a bit- I believe people are missing a key point of distinction between it and exalted priesthood, which is the amenity economy and ethics attraction implications.
There's two main roles for Byzantine Bureaucracy- the per-job bonus for its unity, and the planetary bonus implications
The Unity changes to jobs favors the Priesthood. Both civics give their primary base 4 unity job +1, but Priesthood also gives a ruler pop upgrade from Politician to High Priest, who is both +1 unity (with the civic) and +2 amenities, while coming with a day 1 edict - completely under the Edict Fund limit- for a 20% unity output.
The difference comes from the stability implications, which... also favor spiritualist, especially in wide contexts.
Byzantine Bureaucracy has never been a good 'wide' civic in that you want to put it on every planet to boost every planet. Spending 2 pops to raise an entire planet by 2 stability is not even a 1% gain in output- whatever the planet is specializing in could be better off just hiring another pop. You're more likely to have a bigger stability impact with an Entertainer for excess amenities. The few exceptions to this are the end-game mega-worlds, arcologies and ringworlds, which have the pops for that marginal gain to be worthwhile, but otherwise it's a waste of pops.
In contrast, using the building slot for a temple is a superior option even if you don't employ a priest, because the building itself gives a 5% spiritualist ethics attraction modifier. Which means more pops in your state faction, getting happy-faction bonuses and producing faction unity without taking away from the primary focus on the colony, even as that colony has an (admittedly marginal) +1 unity/+2 extra amenities from the High Priest. But what it also means is keeping pops out of unhappy factions. A happy faction can give only +10 pop happiness, but unhappy factions can cause -10 or even -40 happiness. Depending on your living standards, these can be far greater impacts to stability, and a +50 stability swing from unhappy to happy faction is itself a major planetary stability buff far beyond what Bureaucrats could provide, especially when conquests or vassal assimilation is considered.
But what about 'tall' unity-focused planets? Still a strong case for Priesthood superiority.
With the Unity-planet designation, the real role of a Byzantine Bureaucracy is... to stack them on one world, so that the stability bonuses boost stability and get the better overall output. At 100 stability you can get 30% output bonus! Except that this will go down if you focus on the stability instead of amenities, meaning you need to replace at least some of your buildings with Amenity buildings because not only will amenities drop happiness-stability, but negative-amenities will cause ethics divergence, meaning your planet of nothing-but-bureaucrats will decrease your faction unity output if they get too high on their own stability supply.
Priests bring a significant stability with them, without needing entertainers. On top of the spiritualist faction attraction synergy itself giving faction pop-happiness buffs, Priests provide 2 amenity per pop. This isn't enough to be meaningful amenity providers like entertainers, but it is exactly enough to double their own amenity requirements, which is what you need to maximize stability-through-excess amenities. This is 20% happiness, for up to 20% popular approval on the planet, which is itself 12 stability, or 7.2%.
This is lower, but remember we have a High Priest on every planet, and Veneration of the Saints for 25% to all priests (and high priests). That's realistically beating the 30% max stability buff.
OR
We could ignore the edict, and consider the impact of a single building replacement from the building slot economy. There's 12 building slots per planet, 1 of which is the capital. Chances are you're using another building slot for pop assembly. This leaves 10. Dropping a single Admin building for an entertainer center isn't quite a 10% drop in unity output, but it's considerable. Whereas the Exalted Priesthood would replace a Temple with a Citadel of Faith for another high priest, and boost ethics attraction further, etc. etc..
And there's the whole tier 3 building upgrade consideration- I don't believe admin buildings were changed to get it, but temples definitely have it, so a higher-density unity planet which mitigates planet and district sprawl for the same output, thus mitigating tech and unity penalties.
Whether it's wide with a building-on-every-planet, or hyper-concentrated planetary unity production, assimilating conquests or keeping outlier planets stable in a pop-efficient manner, Byzantine Bureaucracy falls behind Exalted Priesthood in several contexts.
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Looks I never dissing exalted priesthood.
My point is, exalted priesthood is restricted to only oligarchy and dictatorial thus imperial spiritualist is left to dry in civic that give +1 unity per jobs front.
So Imperial spiritualist can't use byzantine bureaucracy cuz they are using priest instead of bureaucrat (and cuz now they literally can't use it) and then can't use exalted priesthood, the spiritualist counterpart too cuz imperial authority can't pick it.
Never intended to imply you were, it was just the easiest snippet to quote.
Not really sure why you'd see the government restriction as an issue. This really just gets to what you're trying to do with your Spiritualist build.
Oligarchic is one of the better governments for one of the core Spiritualist synergies, the late-early game Psionic military rush build. Spiritualist can make Psionic extremely reliable to draw relatively early, and Psionic has the strongest military-bloom synergy of the ascensions.
Oligarchic is also good for Habitat creation, which is the best way to expand unity production faster than sprawl.
Well I know that imperial is not-optimal, dictatorial is essentially imperial but better.
But I use them because I like them or you could say this is RP, I also play spiritualist because I like psionic so when this patch is kind of nerfing imperial spiritualist (non access to unity boosting civic, imperial cult got hit with quite a nerf, etc.) that in my opinion they aren't really that great to begin with I kind of want to complain a little.
I'd disagree. Dictatorial gives you a sprawl mitigation, but in most contexts sprawl mitigation is less useful than raising outputs. Imperial's edict funds (irrc) basically let you do this with some of the additional edicts you can afford.
Complain away, my friend. Complain away.
Imperial doesn't get edict fund tho, they got more influence from force projection.
Even if they get edict funs, it would be largely the same problem in that, it's a bonus that good on early game but fall shot the more time pass, comparing to bonus of other authority that will always relevant, especially dictatorial's empire size reduction.
Another reason is also because in dictatorial ruler ruled for life like imperial but you can pick your successor yourself thus can start out with max lvl ruler instead of lvl 2-3 heir succeeding the throne.
Ah, that's right. My error.
Personally haven't played Imperial since a Necrophage run where I got stuck with a Arrested Development emeperor and heir on year 20.
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You're correct, research leaders still can't gain traits on level up. The code preventing research leaders from gaining traits was removed from the
add_random_leader_trait scripted effect but not from leader event id = leader.20 which calls it.
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Lately I think the chance of getting negative trait for ruler and heir have been lower tho, like I never get it since, well I don't really remember but you get the point.
Also if you really don't like the chance there is philosopher king but then again it costs one civic...
Really that's why I said dictatorial is for all intent and purpose an Imperial but better.
Only thing now Imperial has on dictatorial is feudal society (never know there would be a day this civic is actually great lol) is surprisingly good in this patch.
... Huh, finally got around to updating my original feedback post to the new beta. Boy oh boy is tech super-powerful. If anything, it feels even faster now than before for how I usually play, which isn't exactly tall, but it's tall-ish. I don't usually go on conquest sprees, but I do spam habitats and colonize everything in sight, so that by the endgame I'm easily looking at 40+ planets. I'd have thought the changes would hurt the tech rate at least a bit, but nope.
And if this is the Unity update, then I'd like to see a similar Tech update
And if this is the Unity update, then I'd like to see a similar Tech update
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Since they lowered Unity gain, and increased traditions costs, a next logical step would be also to buff Traditions to make it as strong as tech. But for some reason they didn't and it meant that tradition become even less important because you need to invest more compared to previous results to gain the same thing, while tech wasn't affected much.
Truly a change for the sake of a change
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Quick question for people who've played Zombie-Bio Ascension.
Can you confirm whether the Clone Vat lets you assemble non-zombie pops?
(As in- the organic pop assembly stacks, but you don't get the event-driven zombies like you do when budding is used to choose non-zombie pops.)
Can you confirm whether the Clone Vat lets you assemble non-zombie pops?
(As in- the organic pop assembly stacks, but you don't get the event-driven zombies like you do when budding is used to choose non-zombie pops.)
Since I'll make neither job, that doesn't matter, but if I had to make a job:
I'd make an entertainer rather than an exalted priest
I'd make a byzantine bureaucrat on an unspecialized world over an exalted priest
(I'd never make a specialized unity world)
Correct, which is why both are bad choices.
Unity jobs need to be better for either to make sense.
That's completely irrelevant, even considering the bonuses potential. A 5% modifier would result in pretty much 0 spiritualist pops on even very populated planets.
In my experience, everyone inevitably becomes xenophile anyway if you have aliens in your empire.
Well, the first mistake is making a unity designated planet. It's nice flavor, but it's s trap, so we'll ignore that designation.
The other mistake is that an entertainer produces 2 base unity but 10 amenities, so it covers the work of 5 priests with barely a dent in unity production. And you get to avoid being spiritualist!
Its a base 50 -> base 44 drop, with +8 stability per 10 pops. So it's really about boosting forge/factory ecumenopoli worlds.
Exalted priesthood gives you more of something you don't need. Byzantine bureaucracy does too, but at least gives you stability to make up for it.
If you only wanted just enough for unity, that's +2.5 sprawl from the planet, +4.5 sprawl from the districts, and 60 pop sprawl (and you're spiritualist, so your max pop reduction is 70% - 55% if you're fanatic Spiritualist). The pops matter much more than the planet.
But it rises above in one context: It gives you something that isn't unity and that you don't have easy access to otherwise (direct stability vs amenities)