Entertainers are perhaps a bit too strong? Also, the redundancy of the leisure arcology.

[Bezborg]

Hi yall.

It seems to me that entertainers are a bit too strong in producing amenities?

On my ecumenopolis, I find I rarely need to build more than 1 or 2 leisure districts and I have hundreds of amenities excess (especially if you pair it with stuff like resort world, art monument, executive retreats etc...)...

So considering, it seems like it barely warrants its own arcology.

Of course, you don;t have to build it in that case, but seeing as the UI only has space for 5 arcologies, perhaps we can put something else there? And not keep an entire arcology slot for something that arguably isn't really necessary on that scale?

One could argue that you could have built some sort of "cultural" ecumenopolis before (though I always found that wonky, since they - regrettably - made the ecumenopolis some sort of industrial installation: I always thought this would be a better fit for ringworlds)... but since the cultural worker is going extinct... what's the point of the leisure arcology anymore? I'd much rather have a commercial arcology, as it makes sense for a large concentration of population in an urban context.

So I suggest several options:
- either put entertainers on city districts, and migrate clerks over to anew commercial arcology
- or nerf entertainers so a much larger number of them is needed to achieve a substantial surplus of amenities
- remove the leisure arcology completely, and add some more upgrade tiers to entertainer buildings

Of these 3, I find the second one the worse option, and infinitely more annoying. The first or third would be just fine by me.

As always, share your thoughts.

 

[John MacWhat]

I don't know if it was there before, but in 3.3 there's an ecclesiastical arcology if you're spiritualist which provides priest jobs; this is in addition to the existence of leisure arcology. I assume there are equivalents for administrators

 

[Bezborg]

I don't know if it was there before, but in 3.3 there's an ecclesiastical arcology if you're spiritualist which provides priest jobs; this is in addition to the existence of leisure arcology. I assume there are equivalents for administrators

It wasn't there before.

Actually, the new arcologies are "administrative", and exist as a bureaucratic element to arcologies.


But see, if this is being added together with the leisure arcology, I feel it makes the leisure one even more redundant, since the priests serve as a spiritualist society's bureaucrat, but will most likely provide amenities as well.

Priests are what managers are to a Megacorp, or what bureaucrats are to a "regular" empire with no specific ethical angles..

So priests provide amenities, no? In addition to unity?

Bureaucrats also produce unity now... Clerks provide amenities...

So what does an entertainer do then? It's identical to priests?


I think the leisure arcology is beyond redundant now.

I guess the decadent lifestyle can use a leisure arcology spam (which is a bit OP and not great tbh), but even then it's extremely niche to occupy 20% of the arcology UI

 

[PAnZuRiEL]

So what does an entertainer do then? It's identical to priests?

Entertainers provide a lot more amenities and a lot less unity than priests.

 

[Bezborg]

Entertainers provide a lot more amenities and a lot less unity than priests.

Sure. But we need 2 out of 5 arcologies now for different ratios of the same thing?

 

[PAnZuRiEL]

Sure. But we need 2 out of 5 arcologies now for different ratios of the same thing?

No, I also think that's dumb and would love to see a research arcology or something. I mean honestly there's no reason ecumenopoli should be unable to have deep crust mining or hydroponics for agriculture or solar panels or whatever, so why can't they just produce everything? Since buildings are capped to 10 now, maybe ecumenopoli should have more different types of districts available than other planets.

 

[Bezborg]

No, I also think that's dumb and would love to see a research arcology or something. I mean honestly there's no reason ecumenopoli should be unable to have deep crust mining or hydroponics for agriculture or solar panels or whatever, so why can't they just produce everything? Since buildings are capped to 10 now, maybe ecumenopoli should have more different types of districts available than other planets.

Absolutely agree, and I suggested this many times over the years.

I always thought an ecumenopolis should be a sort of galactic wonder, truly unique as an unprecedented concentration of population. Not a factory.

In some of those suggestions, I held the idea that an ecumenopolis should have free district slots, limited, but open for you to choose between an assortment of districts. Yu select and it either becomes locked in, or there's a price to change to another, a severe price if you will. That part is irrelevant to me, I just want the options to make an ecumenopolis into whatever I want it to be.


If you want mate, I can send you the code of how to add a research arcology to your game, it's quite easy to add. Of course we would all love for the devs to do these things and include it in vanilla, but yeah....

 

[TrotBot]

I like leisure arcologies. I actually think that entertainers need a buff now, not to amenities but to unity production for those of us who want to have cultural unity instead of bureaucracy.

 

[HFY]

Leisure Arcology exists for the benefit of Warrior Culture.

 

[Bezborg]

Leisure Arcology exists for the benefit of Warrior Culture.

Yep, you might be right. Still way too niche to occupy 20% of available arcologies. I mean, they're precious and so so limited.

They should just give some sort of "Arena" building to warrior culture

 

[Incompetent]

Entertainers could be toned down slightly but I wouldn't nerf them too far, since they are ultimately the most dedicated specialists in amenity production, who consume CGs to do so. The name is a bit weird to be honest, for what they actually do; the idea that all the non-importable services on a planet could be provided by "entertainers" is pretty strange. (Amenities in Stellaris are not luxuries, they are an abstraction of the services needed to keep any colony functional, like waste disposal, transport, healthcare, education and so on. Luxury consumption is modelled via living standards and CGs.)

What I do think is a mistake is making entertainers virtually the only source of amenities, like they're doing in the beta (other jobs have mostly been reduced to 2 amenities). That would just make amenities a boring tax like they are for Gestalts, instead of something you can handle in a variety of ways.

 

[Bezborg]

Entertainers could be toned down slightly but I wouldn't nerf them too far, since they are ultimately the most dedicated specialists in amenity production, who consume CGs to do so. The name is a bit weird to be honest, for what they actually do; the idea that all the non-importable services on a planet could be provided by "entertainers" is pretty strange. (Amenities in Stellaris are not luxuries, they are an abstraction of the services needed to keep any colony functional, like waste disposal, transport, healthcare, education and so on. Luxury consumption is modelled via living standards and CGs.)

What I do think is a mistake is making entertainers virtually the only source of amenities, like they're doing in the beta (other jobs have mostly been reduced to 2 amenities). That would just make amenities a boring tax like they are for Gestalts, instead of something you can handle in a variety of ways.

Agreed, I actually had many comments about it many years ago... why are "amenities" and "entertainers" conflated. If anything, they should just give happiness or stability.

But even on their best day, they're still unduly hogging an arcology

 

[blahmaster6k]

Leisure Arcology is good for when you have hundreds of pops on an ecumenopolis and you want to use your precious 12 building slots for things like science labs, research institute, ministry of production, etc. to ensure that you get the most out of them.

 

[Bezborg]

Leisure Arcology is good for when you have hundreds of pops on an ecumenopolis and you want to use your precious 12 building slots for things like science labs, research institute, ministry of production, etc. to ensure that you get the most out of them.

Ah but you see, even with hundreds of pops, you don't really need a lot of enetertainers, especially paired with all the other amenity-boosting things and jobs (of which there are many). There's techs, etc etc...

With an art monument and 6-ish entertainers, you're covered.

So, yes, let's agree that building slots are precious, but so are arcology slots. Of which there are only 5, 4 if you deduct the housing - which is a given.

So if you can achieve a sufficient amenity coverage with, like... only 2 leisure arcologies, and combine it wih all the other stuff you have for amenities.. what's the point?


Let's take it a bit further - if "amenitites" are a fact of life, why isn't it just under the urban arcology? If housing + amenities is a basic buidling block of life on an ecumenopolis... can we then combine these things, and have the remaining 4 arcologies actually do something useful?

 

[blahmaster6k]

Ah but you see, even with hundreds of pops, you don't really need a lot of enetertainers, especially paired with all the other amenity-boosting things and jobs (of which there are many). There's techs, etc etc...

With an art monument and 6-ish entertainers, you're covered.

So, yes, let's agree that building slots are precious, but so are arcology slots. Of which there are only 5, 4 if you deduct the housing - which is a given.

So if you can achieve a sufficient amenity coverage with, like... only 2 leisure arcologies, and combine it wih all the other stuff you have for amenities.. what's the point?


Let's take it a bit further - if "amenitites" are a fact of life, why isn't it just under the urban arcology? If housing + amenities is a basic buidling block of life on an ecumenopolis... can we then combine these things, and have the remaining 4 arcologies actually do something useful?

I don't see your point. If you want to replace leisure arcologies with another district type, what else would you rather have? Ecus will never do basic resources, they already have consumer goods and alloys, unity is a thing like research that comes mostly from buildings and has never had a district associated with it. Research arcologies? That would make ecumenopoli clash with ring worlds, which are the intended super-planet for research. Unless you add entertainer jobs to the residential arcologies, you're going to need some kind of arcology providing them and it might as well be leisure as it exists currently.

Leisure arcologies are fine and fill a niche the way they're intended to. And honestly, if you didn't have leisure arcologies, you would need to devote too many building slots to entertainers once your ecu gets enough pops on it, but then you would have to take down research labs, which is counter to the idea of making an ecumenopolis as productive as possible.

 

[Bezborg]

I don't see your point. If you want to replace leisure arcologies with another district type, what else would you rather have? Ecus will never do basic resources, they already have consumer goods and alloys, unity is a thing like research that comes mostly from buildings and has never had a district associated with it. Research arcologies? That would make ecumenopoli clash with ring worlds, which are the intended super-planet for research. Unless you add entertainer jobs to the residential arcologies, you're going to need some kind of arcology providing them and it might as well be leisure as it exists currently.

Leisure arcologies are fine and fill a niche the way they're intended to. And honestly, if you didn't have leisure arcologies, you would need to devote too many building slots to entertainers once your ecu gets enough pops on it, but then you would have to take down research labs, which is counter to the idea of making an ecumenopolis as productive as possible.

I think a research or a commercial arcology would be a better fit, and that amenity jobs should be tied to housing arcologies, as they are a natural fit (literally "urban" arcologies).

Call amenity producers as you like, entertainers, civil servants, janitors or mickey mouse.

Leisure arcology is fundamentally a bad concept, especially since there's only 5 of them. Before the beta, there's only 4 of them. And one is static, urban.

So that's my point.

Whether it clashes with ringworld or not, doesn't really concern me, as that too can be changed. And it should. Because a city-world, an urbanized concentration of population is a bad fit for simply a factory. A ring-world would be a much better fit for an actual factory, not least because of the ready availability of energy on one side, and logistical ease of docking, storage and production facilities on the other side. The thing is literally a space station built to maximize access to energy. As opposed to an urban centre with an atmosphere and trillions of inhabitants that are not necessarily all factory workers. In fact, a minority of them are.

SO why Paradox confused an urban city-world with a factory concept, I'll never know.

I try not to be too static and dependent on Megacorp's design choices, and see it as immutable forever. I think Megacorp's design choices were mostly poor, and still hold hope it will be improved some time in the future.

 

[TrotBot]

No. I like knowing my ecu has entire city blocks dedicated to holotheatres. Don't like it? Don't build them.

 

[Cat_Fuzz]

Entertainers could be toned down slightly but I wouldn't nerf them too far, since they are ultimately the most dedicated specialists in amenity production, who consume CGs to do so. The name is a bit weird to be honest, for what they actually do; the idea that all the non-importable services on a planet could be provided by "entertainers" is pretty strange. (Amenities in Stellaris are not luxuries, they are an abstraction of the services needed to keep any colony functional, like waste disposal, transport, healthcare, education and so on. Luxury consumption is modelled via living standards and CGs.)

What I do think is a mistake is making entertainers virtually the only source of amenities, like they're doing in the beta (other jobs have mostly been reduced to 2 amenities). That would just make amenities a boring tax like they are for Gestalts, instead of something you can handle in a variety of ways.

I’d argue that entertainment is a vital amenity for most species.

Obviously for humans, life would a lesser experience without it. Think of those whose work/life balance is heavily skewed towards work, or imagine if we didn’t have gaming, tv or films to rationalise or reflect societal commentary back to its audience?

Even animals need play to alleviate boredom and to practice skills. Life without entertainer would probably very quickly lead to a deterioration of well-being and come with wider ramifications.

 

[TrotBot]

I’d argue that entertainment is a vital amenity for most species.

Obviously for humans, life would a lesser experience without it. Think of those whose work/life balance is heavily skewed towards work, or imagine if we didn’t have gaming, tv or films to rationalise or reflect societal commentary back to its audience?

Even animals need play to alleviate boredom and to practice skills. Life without entertainer would probably very quickly lead to a deterioration of well-being and come with wider ramifications.

Yeah, I keep seeing the argument that amenities is not entertainment, and it 100% is if you're not gestalt. Like yes, some amenities are "when you poop, is there plumbing", but this is the future and your holotheatre is producing amenities through entertainment, not plumbing.

 

[Bezborg]

The original point of the post was actually that entertainers are so powerful in producing amenities, that you don't actually need a lot of them to go into amenity surplus.

So, considering that, either nerf them, or do something with the leisure arcology, because having only one or two of them is a waste of precious arcology slots, of which there are barely any, and these amenity mega-producers get their own for no reason at all, apart from TrotBot's head-canon pleasure