Egalitarian still the best military snowball ethic?

[GC13]

You can switch the xenos to residence as a xenophobe, and they produce at their normal rates. Good for getting good research out of alien species.

I'm not sure what part of "fanatic xenophobe" was unclear but we're not doing that.

In later playthroughs I'll definitely be more discerning with my decisions, but in this playthrough everyone gets the lash. Though Thrifty and Intelligent species really should be put to better uses, all I want is my dyson sphere.

 

[elitesix]

Happiness effects are miniscule compared to the CG costs. To give a real world example:

+416/+837/+1.3k resource rates on impoverished.
+670/-375/+1.3k after switching to just Social Welfare in my game.

So yeah, I stand by my assertion that CG costs will bankrupt you and especially your sectors

No need to repurpose buildings. -20% happiness penalties are bearable so long as you handle unrest. Slavery is just a nice bonus. The only way to make stuff useless is to let unrest stay high.
....

At a glance, not sure your numbers reflect what we're discussing (are your numbers reflective of a net -30% change in happiness since impoverished to social welfare is net 20% change?)

The non-slaving scenarios seems to be:

(a) utopian abundance + recently conquered for net -5% happiness 10 years, then impoverished conditions forever

(b) impoverished conditions + recently conquered for net -35% for 10 years, then impoverished conditions forever

I'd be interested in seeing a more thorough analysis since the happiness production effects of utopian abundance to impoverished (as you suggest) is a net -30% happiness, whose effect on production varies highly based on what faction the pop is in and how happy that faction is. Especially with the happiness production deadzone of 40 to 60%, which a net 20% happiness as you tested could have totally not shown up much (if most of the pops were in a faction at 50% happiness, social welfare would give them 60%, and impoverished conditions 40%, making no change in production). And a truely thoroughly analysis would consider all the resources - minerals, energy, food, and science, but it'd probably be hard to do.

 

[BurlapNapkin]

When calculating living standard costs, remember that this is something your empire can build around. If you use Utopian a lot, the Environmentalist civic is pretty worth while. The wiki has a full list of modifiers, but for some reductions you will commonly see:

-10/15% Residence/Caste System residence (not full citizens)
-10/20% Egalitarian
-15% Harmony Traditions
-20% Environmentalists
-33% In a Defensive War
-25% Synthetic Pops

It actually ends up regularly hitting 55% reduction without too much hassle, in a maximized situation (or if you're willing to genetically engineer) some crazy reductions are possible. When double the consumer goods cost is 0.1 per pop instead of 1.0 per pop, the increased production from happiness breaks even and then some.

 

[Less2]

I'd be interested in seeing a more thorough analysis since the happiness production effects of utopian abundance to impoverished (as you suggest) is a net -30% happiness, whose effect on production varies highly based on what faction the pop is in and how happy that faction is. Especially when we're talking about using it on conquered pops that have a further -25% happiness penalty.

Probably hard to test this though.

Well, most tiles are going to have a base production of 5 minerals max. The maximum production change from 30% happiness (15%) equals a + 0.75 mineral per tile benefit from upping from impoverished to Utopian. This is the ideal max that probably won't be reached of course. Utopian per-pop costs more than .75 minerals, so it's a bad idea. And we haven't even started talking about how CGs are still charged for tiles that produce nothing (some special buildings) or tiles with weaker buildings (unless you conquered an FE you probably didn't get nice fully developed everything).

When calculating living standard costs, remember that this is something your empire can build around. If you use Utopian a lot, the Environmentalist civic is pretty worth while. The wiki has a full list of modifiers, but for some reductions you will commonly see:

-10/15% Residence/Caste System residence (not full citizens)
-10/20% Egalitarian
-15% Harmony Traditions
-20% Environmentalists
-33% In a Defensive War
-25% Synthetic Pops

It actually ends up regularly hitting 55% reduction without too much hassle, in a maximized situation (or if you're willing to genetically engineer) some crazy reductions are possible. When double the consumer goods cost is 0.1 per pop instead of 1.0 per pop, the increased production from happiness breaks even and then some.

Yeah, getting I've been taking conservation and environmentalist and they help massively even on impoverished. I can't imagine taking the wasteful trait, that thing should be +2.

 

[BurlapNapkin]

I can't imagine taking the wasteful trait, that thing should be +2.

Yeah I've tried to use it for RP reasons and it hurts real bad, could certainly be +2.

 

[elitesix]

Well, most tiles are going to have a base production of 5 minerals max. The maximum production change from 30% happiness (15%) equals a + 0.75 mineral per tile benefit from upping from impoverished to Utopian. This is the ideal max that probably won't be reached of course. Utopian per-pop costs more than .75 minerals, so it's a bad idea. And we haven't even started talking about how CGs are still charged for tiles that produce nothing (some special buildings) or tiles with weaker buildings (unless you conquered an FE you probably didn't get nice fully developed everything).

We actually may be in partial agreement here. You've convinced me that if you only care about minerals and nothing else, you don't use utopian abundance - you use armies instead to lower unrest.

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The more interesting question, for me personally, is how utopian abundance compares for all resource production - including energy and science production - versus impoverished conditions when under the effects of recently conquered malus for non-slave, recently conquered species. Without a discussion/addressing of this question, I still believe in my OP where I said egalitarian/temporary utopian abundance being the easiest way to integrate recently conquered pops.

 

[Dementor4]

There are two ways you can handle it, enslave the xenos so happiness doesn't matter, or you can use social welfare instead, which is cheaper, this is available to everyone and gives half the bonus but only costs 50% more instead of 100% more. If you have the resources and are content to wait it out, you can give them chemical bliss instead, but this would hurt their productivity a lot.

If you have biological ascension, you can just nerve staple them. Gene splicing goes so fast with the bio ascension perks it usually only takes 3-4 months to turn 4-5 planets full of unhappy aliens into obedient bio-bots. Years later you can unstaple them if you want (but why would you?).

EDIT: Just to verify what I remember, I just converted 71 pops to Nerve Staples. It's a 5 month process for my empire (~250 bio research per month). The key to to get rid of all their other traits when you do it; gene mod time is based on the total number of traits the resulting species will have, regardless of if they already had them, or if they're negative or positive. Once you've quickly installed their nerve staples (to quell the uprisings) you can further modify them with things like industrious or agrarian to make them more useful to you. Or don't. Sometimes you really don't care.

 

[Less2]

The more interesting question, for me personally, is how utopian abundance compares for all resource production - including energy and science production - versus impoverished conditions when under the effects of recently conquered malus for non-slave, recently conquered species. Without a discussion/addressing of this question, I still believe in my OP where I said egalitarian/temporary utopian abundance being the easiest way to integrate recently conquered pops.

Well you're still paying the mineral CG cost for other tiles. Its theoretically a way to get less minerals for more energy. But we already know that its more efficient to have lower CGs to get more minerals rather than raising happiness to get more minerals, so if you want more energy you're better off building more power plants at a lower CG cost rather than raising CGs to increase energy production through happiness and then build mining stations to make up the lost minerals.

As you can see from my example, I lost over 1k minerals to gain 250 energy. That's a really bad deal. If I wanted 250 more energy I'd build more energy stations, I wouldn't raise CGs and then try to build back up my mining station.

And again keep in mind we're talking about the idea max-tier buildings. Most tiles are a far worse deal.

 

[TankRush]

When the Nerve Stapled Slaves bug gets fixed everyone is going to want to get their own uplifted Proles. Egalitarianism be damned!

With Prole, Agrarian/Industrious, Chattel Slavery, Share the Burden, and Nerve Stapled the bonuses to food and minerals are +50% and +55% respectively.