It'll be interesting to see how that plays out once the ethics divergence bug is fixed. Currently running constant negative ethics divergence is such a huge advantage.
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Beginner's Guide to Ethics, Traits and Governments
- Thread starter GAGA Extrem
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Personally, I think this guide vastly overstates the usefulness of research as a whole. Consider a simple example: All other things held equal, a 20k corvette fleet with UV lasers will always prevail over a 20k corvette fleet with gamma lasers. Why? The 20k UV laser fleet will have the same firepower, rate of fire, and accuracy, but more ships. More ships not only means more hull health, but also fewer raw losses per combat round as the gamma laser fleet will distribute it's damage across all ships in the more numerous enemy corvette layer. By virtue of sheer quantity (not strength on paper), the less advanced fleet will have more endurance and more firepower as combat progresses.
Fewer, more advanced ships are demonstrably inferior to more numerous, less advanced ships. Therefore, an empire that prioritizes minerals/energy > science will always prevail over an empire that emphasizes science > minerals/energy. More minerals/energy means you can support more star bases, a bigger fleet cap, and more ships. The only time science should be prioritized, from a min/max angle (as opposed to an RP angle) is when you have lost all opportunity for reasonable expansion and fleet buildup.
To that end, I think this guide vastly understates the value of spiritual and vastly overstates the value of materialist. Fanatic Spiritualist gives you slaves - which allow you to get hundreds of minerals/month in the early game through conquest of homeworlds. Later, through transcendent mandate your conquered slaves will gain a massive happiness bonus allowing them to easily beat droids/synths for production which is an advantage of fanatic spiritualist over fanatic collectivist. There too is another advantage - the materialist's droids cost 100 energy to purchase and 1 energy per month to maintain. Slaves are free, and breed like rabbits.
Finally, even if we consider late game tech advantages - where materialists will allegedly shine, consider this: the best method of propulsion is the jump drive (well, the psi jump drive because it doesn't summon unbidden, but let's ignore that for now). Materialists have a small chance to draw the jump drive card for each physics tech researched after they've maxed their native propulsion method. In all likelihood, you won't get jump drives until quite late in the game (if you get them at all). Spiritualists need to complete a mere 3 psionic techs before getting to psionic jump drives (all but guaranteed to happen in a fanatic spiritualist play-through). So, you have a huge edge in getting the best possible propulsion method for your ships.
TL; DR: Science is overrated, you can beat the unbidden/fallen empires with nothing more advanced than uv lasers. Minerals/energy > all. By extension, spiritualist and transcendent mandate > materialist.
Fewer, more advanced ships are demonstrably inferior to more numerous, less advanced ships. Therefore, an empire that prioritizes minerals/energy > science will always prevail over an empire that emphasizes science > minerals/energy. More minerals/energy means you can support more star bases, a bigger fleet cap, and more ships. The only time science should be prioritized, from a min/max angle (as opposed to an RP angle) is when you have lost all opportunity for reasonable expansion and fleet buildup.
To that end, I think this guide vastly understates the value of spiritual and vastly overstates the value of materialist. Fanatic Spiritualist gives you slaves - which allow you to get hundreds of minerals/month in the early game through conquest of homeworlds. Later, through transcendent mandate your conquered slaves will gain a massive happiness bonus allowing them to easily beat droids/synths for production which is an advantage of fanatic spiritualist over fanatic collectivist. There too is another advantage - the materialist's droids cost 100 energy to purchase and 1 energy per month to maintain. Slaves are free, and breed like rabbits.
Finally, even if we consider late game tech advantages - where materialists will allegedly shine, consider this: the best method of propulsion is the jump drive (well, the psi jump drive because it doesn't summon unbidden, but let's ignore that for now). Materialists have a small chance to draw the jump drive card for each physics tech researched after they've maxed their native propulsion method. In all likelihood, you won't get jump drives until quite late in the game (if you get them at all). Spiritualists need to complete a mere 3 psionic techs before getting to psionic jump drives (all but guaranteed to happen in a fanatic spiritualist play-through). So, you have a huge edge in getting the best possible propulsion method for your ships.
TL; DR: Science is overrated, you can beat the unbidden/fallen empires with nothing more advanced than uv lasers. Minerals/energy > all. By extension, spiritualist and transcendent mandate > materialist.
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Unless I missed something slaves can't get happiness bonus, wheras synths can; this is what allows synths to be such effective economy boosters. If slaves could get the benefits from high happiness then it would be a significant buff to spiritualism.
One issue I have with this guide is that it values science heavily, and one of the primary reasons the guide writer gave for this bias, is that battleships are the most important tech/powerful military tool.
Without even talking about corvettes when they start to actually break the balance of the game at 80-85%+ evasion, corvettes naturally counter battleships. I don't think that the value of battleships are any more or less important than destroyers, which counter corvettes with brutal efficiency up to that 80% evasion range, or cruisers which brutally counter destroyers the entire game.
If the value of science in this guide is heavily predicated on the belief that battleships are the end all be all and rushing to them is something worth doing, then I feel like the bias towards science has to be heavily questioned.
Then again, this might just be a single player guide where what you do doesn't really matter because the AI will not punish you for making mistakes like rushing to battleships so that a corvette fleet 1/3rd your strength can stack wipe you if you don't run a large destroyer escort.
Without even talking about corvettes when they start to actually break the balance of the game at 80-85%+ evasion, corvettes naturally counter battleships. I don't think that the value of battleships are any more or less important than destroyers, which counter corvettes with brutal efficiency up to that 80% evasion range, or cruisers which brutally counter destroyers the entire game.
If the value of science in this guide is heavily predicated on the belief that battleships are the end all be all and rushing to them is something worth doing, then I feel like the bias towards science has to be heavily questioned.
Then again, this might just be a single player guide where what you do doesn't really matter because the AI will not punish you for making mistakes like rushing to battleships so that a corvette fleet 1/3rd your strength can stack wipe you if you don't run a large destroyer escort.
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After playing a few games and testing it out, I find there are actually only two builds which are "optimal":
1) Slavery build
Ethics: Fanatic Collectivist + Materialist
Government: Despotic Empire -> Despotic Hegemony
Good traits: Conformist, Intelligent, Rapid Breeder
2) Happiness build
Ethics: Spiritualist + Individualist + Pacifist
Government: Moral Democracy / Theocratic Republic
Good traits: Conformist, Intelligent, Communal, Adaptive
All others setups are objectively worse or are too niche. If you care about keeping your ethics (e.g., for a slavery build) then Conformist is pretty much mandatory. Rapid Breeder is also far more powerful then I originally thought, since if you want to keep your ethics, you cannot use robots to supplement your reproductive capacity.
1) Slavery build
Ethics: Fanatic Collectivist + Materialist
Government: Despotic Empire -> Despotic Hegemony
Good traits: Conformist, Intelligent, Rapid Breeder
2) Happiness build
Ethics: Spiritualist + Individualist + Pacifist
Government: Moral Democracy / Theocratic Republic
Good traits: Conformist, Intelligent, Communal, Adaptive
All others setups are objectively worse or are too niche. If you care about keeping your ethics (e.g., for a slavery build) then Conformist is pretty much mandatory. Rapid Breeder is also far more powerful then I originally thought, since if you want to keep your ethics, you cannot use robots to supplement your reproductive capacity.
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Try this build, fanatic collectivist / spiritualist - Divine Mandate. 150% -> 200% slave tolerance for your pops making them even happier when slaved, and a government that makes all foreign pops tolerant of slavery.
Traits, Enduring (this is a whatever pick, I just like it) Fast Breeder, Decadent, Nomadic. Now, the magic happens when you have 3 or 4 colonies that are largely developed. Drop a colony, go to planetary edicts and use Land of opportunity. Watch as your new colony is full in 2 years, and you can build the planetary admin almost instantly. You have runaway colonization and almost instant productivity on new colonies, and anything you can't colonize, you enslave and and they love you for it.
This is, pretty much a total run away snow ball build. Your colonization becomes faster and faster the faster your colonize, your pops explode and you enslave everyone. You turn xenos into energy and mineral sectors, tell them to not respect tiles and allow redevelopment, and you turn your excess primary species planets into research sectors with the same rules, don't respect resources and redevelop.
+1 for rapid breeder. Started a play through with a rapid breeder race yesterday - they completely filled out a 9 pop gaia in a year or two without me building any farms or other improvements.
I think Xenophile is a lot better than the OP gives it credit for. It can be a big source of happiness once you find ways to indulge your species' xeno fetish, and a genetically diverse population lets you get the most out of traits and habitable planets. The diplomacy boost will probably have more impact as the AI gets smarter. The main thing Xenophile empires are lacking at the moment is some form of ethics convergence to turn the aliens you integrate into Xenophiles. They ought to have some sort of unique building as well - not sure what would fit the theme though. (I think the devs got lazy in making so many of the unique buildings give happiness as their main bonus.)
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Ironically, that's a terrible build that's literally worthless. There is zero benefit to slavery tolerance above 100%, because slave pops aren't affected by happiness. You'd get the same effect from the Transcendent Empire government alone, so you waste 2 ethic points for no benefit. It's far better to go fanatic collectivist + despotic empire, since then you get super-slaves and lower build cost.
Absolutely, but this isn't the thread for such a discussion.
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Literally worthless? You missed the entire point.
The build allows you to pretty much ignore ethics divergence the entire game. That is the purpose, I thought it was plain but I guess I will spell it out for you. By carrying 150% slave tolerance, your pops which will lose fanatic collectivism on colonies will remain 100% tolerant (there is a bug right now with divergence where it happens no matter what, even when they have -divergence and getting them to conform to the government ethic is virtually impossible). Later, once you hit the upgraded government, collectivism is redundant, but it is taken to fuel the growth of the empire early, you can't count on the government tech and tech picks are sometimes mandated by need rather than want. You might NEED something when the government tech pops up that is more important. Maintaining 100% slavery tolerance in your pops while halving the tolerance in aliens is still far better than the alternatives.
In addition, Despotic Empire is inferior to Divine Mandate as a slave empire in the mid-game and beyond, because Despotic Empires tank their research development by enslaving and or get side tracked as 90% of every planets population has to be purged to provide happy scientists and energy workers through migration and or forced settlement. With Divine Mandate, once the conquered malus wears off, your conquered pops are super fine, their ethics other than individualist don't matter and you use the happy conquered pops to farm energy and science along side their enslaved buddies.
So, here is my critique of your slavery build.
It's literally worthless. You waste 2 points on conformist. The fact you picked it with the state of the game right now, belies your total lack of understanding of basic game mechanics. Negative Ethics drift doesn't work right now. Your 2 picks in conformist is literally the worst pick you could possibly pick, 2 wasted points. There isn't even justification for it right now since it is broken and not WAD. It might actually be the most worthless 2 point pick in the game right at this point.
Actually, literally, worthless build. Moreover, Despotic Empire relies on purging to control ethics drift and to farm conquered populations, whereas Divine Mandate just makes everyone totally ok with slavery.
Divine Mandate -> Transcendent Empire are the best top to bottom slavery government in the game, miles better than Despotic Empire line.
Your other build, literally worthless, relies on conformist which doesn't work to control rampant population drift.
So, your two min-max uber builds are basically laughably bad right now because you didn't know negative ethics drift isn't working.
Two literally worthless builds, I can't believe you wasted two 2 point picks in the two builds you deemed to be the only good builds in the game. Hilarious.
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OBJECTION!
I have tested negative ethics divergence under conditions that would exaggerate the effects if it worked (making everybody up to and including xenophobic/individualist aliens drift to my fanatic spiritualist/militarist ethics) and likewise if it didn't (making loyal peons lose their ethics), and it most definitely works. See this post where I explain my tests.
I have also tested it under normal conditions in-game stacking negative ethics divergence and observed the same effect over time.
It is certainly true that there's at least one bug with ethics divergence - Doomdark confirmed as much in the same thread - and I'm sure we've all seen shenanigans with ethics loss near the start of the game - but stacking negative ethics divergence works in 1.0.2, and it works well.
Then I stand corrected and I will adapt my build to accommodate this. My build was tailored around the belief that ethics drift right now was pretty much bugged and randomly inevitable. I still stand by the statement that Divine Mandate and it's follow up are better mid game and late game for slaving than Despotic Empire and its follow up due to making your entire empire slave happy versus dealing with purging to farm good pops. Despotic Empire gets purring quickly, but sputters whenever it eats someone and takes time to digest. Divine Mandate takes a bit longer to get purring, but once its rolling there are no hiccups. Conquer, enslave what you need and leave the rest to become your new local elite ;p
Or start Despotic Empire and become Transcendent Empire. Best of both worlds.
I'm confused by negative ethical divergence.
I know that right now there is a bug that causes POPs to lose an ethos but not gain a different one. But what I find confusing is that negative ethical divergence causes POPs to "assimilate" to your ethos over a very long period of time. Am I misreading the amount of time in @Peter Ebbesen 's tests? It might take 300-400 years to get substantial conversion to your ruling ethos. And even then, it's nowhere complete assimilation. If so, the game might be effectively won before you reap the full benefits of convincing people to adopt your ethos.
Or is the point that since the check takes place yearly, you will win the lottery enough times to get some meaningful conversion to your ethos, deflating POP factions that might otherwise be strong enough to force demands. You still have some angry factions, but they lose just enough support over the course of the game due to negative ethical divergence that the sting is taken out.
I guess what I'm really asking is whether I should be looking at negative ethical divergence as a method of assimilating conquered POPs or whether I should be using it as a tool to mollify POPs while I continue my campaign of imperialism.
I know that right now there is a bug that causes POPs to lose an ethos but not gain a different one. But what I find confusing is that negative ethical divergence causes POPs to "assimilate" to your ethos over a very long period of time. Am I misreading the amount of time in @Peter Ebbesen 's tests? It might take 300-400 years to get substantial conversion to your ruling ethos. And even then, it's nowhere complete assimilation. If so, the game might be effectively won before you reap the full benefits of convincing people to adopt your ethos.
Or is the point that since the check takes place yearly, you will win the lottery enough times to get some meaningful conversion to your ethos, deflating POP factions that might otherwise be strong enough to force demands. You still have some angry factions, but they lose just enough support over the course of the game due to negative ethical divergence that the sting is taken out.
I guess what I'm really asking is whether I should be looking at negative ethical divergence as a method of assimilating conquered POPs or whether I should be using it as a tool to mollify POPs while I continue my campaign of imperialism.
If you want them to convert faster, stack more modifiers... or convert people amenable to see your point of view.
For my test I was trying to convert Fanatic Xenophobic/Individualists to Fanatic Spiritualists/Militarists - there are worse combinations, but not many; That pretty much required them to be slaves for it to have a chance, since they'd otherwise be at 0 happiness for a fat +30% ethics divergence (and 5% from individualism), which is hard to overcome. (That -40% happiness for being an alien overlord on top of penalties for policies hits hard when you aren't playing Individualist/Pacifist with their huge happiness buildings).
If you can somehow keep those you want to convert happy and they aren't slaves, that's another -10% ethics divergence, and if joyful, -20%.
There are lots of ethics divergence modifiers around, but for the purpose of the test I used what I had available because I wanted to know whether it worked (in general, as I'd read about ethics divergence bugs) or whether I should abandon that game, and I didn't have the wonder ethics divergence refinery (whatever it is called, the one that gives -10% on the planet and a further -10% galaxywide, doubledipping the planet for -20%), and I wasn't running Collectivist for their nice conversion building, and I didn't have orbital mind control lasers.... And as for giving them the Conformism character trait for another -20% (the genetic approach), why... these Fanatic Xenophobes were an AI wonder: Natural Physicists and Venerable; i.e. they had already used five trait points, so no adding 2 points worth on Conformism on them.
I did learn my lesson, though. Concerting Fanatic Xenophobes takes a LOT of work.
It became rather easier later in the game with better tech (and more of the above options), but it never became easy; Further in the game I abandoned slavery completely and left the remaining Fanatic Xenophobes to grumpily sit on their planet while I used their converted brethren to settle favourable planets with. After that, at best I got something like 2-3% chance per year per POP to change something for the diehard Fanatic Xenophobes but they had served their purpose and could be ignored.
It was much easier with non-Xenophobic aliens.
Given that you conquer POPs wide widely differing ideologies, think of it as a way of weakening some and converting others fully, while maintaining most of your own people's ethics despite their shelter period, at least until you start to stack significant amounts. You are never going to magically flip entire populations in a short period of time - given the probabilities involved, there'll always be holdouts no matter how favourable circumstances if we are not talking very small populations.
I guess that for the ultimate non-slave conversion setup one should run Theocratic Oligarchy Spiritualist/Collectivist/whatever.
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Okay, that makes sense. You were testing a bad case. There will be better situations where assimilating POPs to your ethos will be easier.
I'm still fooling around with happiness as well. It seems to me that playing Stellaris like it's Vic2 in space is a bad move in some specific cases. Conquering uncivs (read: primitive aliens) is sometimes a complete waste of time, unless you are going to enslave them or purge them out and just take the real estate. Even if you get their tech up, they will often be rather unhappy, with all the attendant effects.
The -25% Recently Conquered penalty passes fairly rapidly, and the -10% Stellar Culture Shock penalty after a few decades, but you are right, barring enslavement it certainly isn't the high road to power.
Even if you don't use slavery it can be useful in the very early game simply as a way of staking out your territory and allowing you to mine any resources in their solar system, though you'll want to allocate them to non-food tiles in that case to prevent their population from growing until they are ready for productive work. What's the worst they can do, revolt? That's what defensive armies are for.