Ethics and Ethic Switch in 2.6.3 beta

[Dustman]

Playing a game as F. Autho / Pacifist, where I was boxed with access to only one empire, whom I had non-entangling good relations for almost 100 years, no wars, no allies or federations.

And guess what? Out of 2000 pops, Authoritarians, Pacifists and Materialists (with Synth path) are less than 60% combined.

Paradox, please implement ethic switch, and ethic attraction, as advertised.

 

[PirateJack]

From what I can tell, that is how it's meant to work. You're not meant to have a fully homogenous empire unless you specifically build for it.

 

[Oglesby]

Would help if you indicated what the other 40% looked like?
Also your traits and origin, government and civics.

(Unless you are just here to vent, then I will leave.)

 

[Dustman]

Fanatic Authoritarian Pacifist, Synth ascension, Slaver Guilds, Agrarian Idyll, Functional Architecture, 2994 pops, 2364

Ethics - Supposed (+ attraction) - Current

Authoritarian - 49% (+225%) - 29%
Egalitarian - 7% - 9%
Xenophobe - 2% - 10%
Xenophile - 12% - 13%
Militarist - 4% - 9%
Pacifist - 14% (+225%) - 10%
Spiritualist - 1% - 7% # Got some from integrated FE, around 250 pops
Materialists - 10% - 10%

So, I'm supposed to have 73% Authoritarian, Pacifists and Materialists, but atm it's just 49%. And this is ~15 years in-game after my first post.

 

[GeorgieBest]

For the second set of patch notes in a row they've claimed to have fixed POP ethics attraction/changing, but as far as I can see it's still broken.

Either there is (still) a bug preventing it from working the way the devs want it to, or the current vision for how ethics/faction management works is bad. Possibly a bit of both.

 

[Dustman]

Devs claimed that pops actually flip ethics now, but as far as I can see it doesn't work.

I got some Militarists in first half a century of game due to Horizon, but otherwise it shouldn't be a factor. But they stayed, and stayed, and stayed. Frankly, two wars in all this time, w/ rivals for just a decade or two, shouldn't be so attractive to be a militarist.

Spiritualists were absent in the empire until influx of freshly conquered pops changed it, but, by all gods, how metal heads got such high membership in a faction specifically exclusive to them? Granted, I've got 65 (!) non-robotic pops, who undergo assimilation. How, damn, they managed to create a faction? Even if we discard slaves and non-aligned, 7% of ~1.5k should be like 100+ pops in this faction, more fresh meat than I have...

 

[Olterin]

Fanatic Authoritarian Pacifist, Synth ascension, Slaver Guilds, Agrarian Idyll, Functional Architecture, 2994 pops, 2364

Ethics - Supposed (+ attraction) - Current

Authoritarian - 49% (+225%) - 29%
Egalitarian - 7% - 9%
Xenophobe - 2% - 10%
Xenophile - 12% - 13%
Militarist - 4% - 9%
Pacifist - 14% (+225%) - 10%
Spiritualist - 1% - 7% # Got some from integrated FE, around 250 pops
Materialists - 10% - 10%

So, I'm supposed to have 73% Authoritarian, Pacifists and Materialists, but atm it's just 49%. And this is ~15 years in-game after my first post.

It would help to know the surrounding conditions as well as pop traits and further modifiers present. This is inconsistent with a test I conducted specifically for ethics shifting out of the earlygame random spread on your homeworld (see here for details and savegame), however, should the factors be changing sufficiently rapidly I fully expect to see a spread like that, given enough outside interference. Furthermore, it is worth noting that unhappy slave pops (or former slave pops, to be exact) will have diverging ethics - perhaps them getting freed further messed up your ethic distribution on free pops?

How long has the authoritarian faction been like that? And/or could you possibly let the game run for 20-30 years without any further expansion by conquest to see where it shifts (if at all)?

 

[GeorgieBest]

It would help to know the surrounding conditions as well as pop traits and further modifiers present. This is inconsistent with a test I conducted specifically for ethics shifting out of the earlygame random spread on your homeworld (see here for details and savegame), however, should the factors be changing sufficiently rapidly I fully expect to see a spread like that, given enough outside interference. Furthermore, it is worth noting that unhappy slave pops (or former slave pops, to be exact) will have diverging ethics - perhaps them getting freed further messed up your ethic distribution on free pops?

How long has the authoritarian faction been like that? And/or could you possibly let the game run for 20-30 years without any further expansion by conquest to see where it shifts (if at all)?

So you're saying pops do shift ethics, just not to the distribution the game says is expected?

 

[Olterin]

So you're saying pops do shift ethics, just not to the distribution the game says is expected?

No, I'm saying, they do shift ethics, towards the expected distribution, in my limited but rigorously-tested experience. However, in a dynamic game the expected distribution at any given time will not match the actual pop ethics due to ever-evolving factors. Declared a war? Uh-oh, now you're having militarist attraction (that might feel way too high for a brief border skirmish). Got declared upon by a xeno? You're going to get xenophobes. Have any diplomacy going on? You're getting xenophilia whether you like it or not. Oh, haven't been at war for a long time but you're not a pacifist? Too bad, you're getting pacifists.

Only freezing every possible influence on pop ethics and actually letting pops do their thing (with a sprinkle of +% gov ethics attraction, perhaps) will get the two values to actually match. Conquering enemy populations? Have fun dealing with their ethics for the next fifty or so years (or don't, since it hardly matters).

Honestly, the ethics shifting works. It's the factors that feel like they need tweaking. I'd expect fighting a protracted war above a certain amount of war exhaustion to cause pacifism in my people, not militarism, for a start. I'd expect diplomacy with xenos to have more influence on xenophobia/-philia than anything else in my empire. I'd expect my xenophobe population to not care much for the beliefs of an allied spiritualist just because we're in a defensive alliance of convenience. All currently not the case. I'd definitely not expect to see a pacifist empire suddenly getting militarists with 20% attraction >_<. Ethics opposite to the governing ones should seriously get a debuff to their attractiveness by default, they certainly shouldn't be as represented due to outside factors as issues your society is at large neutral about.

As a wishlist, I'd like to see ethics attraction not being a triggered modifier, but a cumulative one over time. Let's say you start out with 0% pacifism attraction, you have no pacifists, and you stay at peace for 50 years and have no neighboring enemies. Now you're going to start seeing some pull towards pacifism. It'll start out at 1%, and over the course of the next 50 years it'll escalate to what we have now. Another 50 years and it's double what we have now (and caps out there). However, if you enter into a war in that period, and it's not a defensive one, and you're raking in the war exhaustion, it'll start ticking back down. But I hope this'll be addressed in a future "internal politics" update.

 

[GeorgieBest]

No, I'm saying, they do shift ethics, towards the expected distribution, in my limited but rigorously-tested experience. However, in a dynamic game the expected distribution at any given time will not match the actual pop ethics due to ever-evolving factors. Declared a war? Uh-oh, now you're having militarist attraction (that might feel way too high for a brief border skirmish). Got declared upon by a xeno? You're going to get xenophobes. Have any diplomacy going on? You're getting xenophilia whether you like it or not. Oh, haven't been at war for a long time but you're not a pacifist? Too bad, you're getting pacifists.

Only freezing every possible influence on pop ethics and actually letting pops do their thing (with a sprinkle of +% gov ethics attraction, perhaps) will get the two values to actually match. Conquering enemy populations? Have fun dealing with their ethics for the next fifty or so years (or don't, since it hardly matters).

Honestly, the ethics shifting works. It's the factors that feel like they need tweaking. I'd expect fighting a protracted war above a certain amount of war exhaustion to cause pacifism in my people, not militarism, for a start. I'd expect diplomacy with xenos to have more influence on xenophobia/-philia than anything else in my empire. I'd expect my xenophobe population to not care much for the beliefs of an allied spiritualist just because we're in a defensive alliance of convenience. All currently not the case. I'd definitely not expect to see a pacifist empire suddenly getting militarists with 20% attraction >_<. Ethics opposite to the governing ones should seriously get a debuff to their attractiveness by default, they certainly shouldn't be as represented due to outside factors as issues your society is at large neutral about.

As a wishlist, I'd like to see ethics attraction not being a triggered modifier, but a cumulative one over time. Let's say you start out with 0% pacifism attraction, you have no pacifists, and you stay at peace for 50 years and have no neighboring enemies. Now you're going to start seeing some pull towards pacifism. It'll start out at 1%, and over the course of the next 50 years it'll escalate to what we have now. Another 50 years and it's double what we have now (and caps out there). However, if you enter into a war in that period, and it's not a defensive one, and you're raking in the war exhaustion, it'll start ticking back down. But I hope this'll be addressed in a future "internal politics" update.

That's not my experience at all. In the tests I have run I took note of the expected and observed ethic distributions at 10 year intervals for ~150 years. I intentionally did little in game which would shift the expected distributions, and therefore these were stable of the course of my testing.

I found that the only time the observed distribution shifted to the expected ethics distribution was when there were only two factions, and that was at the start of the game, so it's likely this was due to new pops following the expected distribution. In all other scenarios the distribution might move around for some ethics, but they would never merge with the expected number. For example in one test I had 1% expected militarist and 10% observed at year ~2300, and by 2400 the expected was still 1% but the actual had shifted to 11%... That isn't working.

 

[Olterin]

Strange, since I'm currently observing an inward perfection game where in the first 48 years my starting random ethics on the home ringworld shifted perfectly to the expected 50/50 split of xenophobe/pacifist (due to ruler being faction leader). As if on cue, two years later I got war declared upon me, so defensive war against xenos. Xenophobes expected value is now 75%, and I'm looking at the number of xenophobes rising on the homeworld faster than pop growth can account for (I'll edit this post at the end of the war - current xenophobe value empire-wide is 67%, up from 50% 3-4 years ago).

Edit: it occurs to me that the one unifying characteristic of the games where I observed the expected faction drift was having positive government ethics attraction from day 1. The one game where there's a larger spread I do not have that luxury, plus it's been a more ... proactive one, let's say, and less sitting still.

 

[GeorgieBest]

Strange, since I'm currently observing an inward perfection game where in the first 48 years my starting random ethics on the home ringworld shifted perfectly to the expected 50/50 split of xenophobe/pacifist (due to ruler being faction leader). As if on cue, two years later I got war declared upon me, so defensive war against xenos. Xenophobes expected value is now 75%, and I'm looking at the number of xenophobes rising on the homeworld faster than pop growth can account for (I'll edit this post at the end of the war - current xenophobe value empire-wide is 67%, up from 50% 3-4 years ago).

Edit: it occurs to me that the one unifying characteristic of the games where I observed the expected faction drift was having positive government ethics attraction from day 1. The one game where there's a larger spread I do not have that luxury, plus it's been a more ... proactive one, let's say, and less sitting still.

As I mentioned in my previous post, POP ethics seem to move towards the expected distribution at the start of the game. The reason for this seems to be that new POPs from population growth follow the expected distribution determined by ethics attraction. When you have a small total population (start of the game) then each pop contributes a large amount to the ethics distribution. The issue arises later when you have a large number of pops, and population growth doesn't have much impact on the overall distribution. This is why I've done most of my testing from 2300 to 2400. I'm pretty certain you'll find the same problem if you only look at how ethics shift after this year.

 

[Dustman]

I've dropped this game since my old box simply crawls and uses dozen or so seconds on every month save.

As for having two factions perfectly matching your starting ethics... well, doesn't happen often now for me. In my current game, Void Dwellers, pacifist - xenophobe - egalitarian, Intelligent, Natural Sociologists, Talented, Non- Adaptive, during second defensive war with xenos, factions look like this:

Ethics - Expected -Current - Number of pops
Egalitarian - 11% (+75% attraction) - 22% - 24
Xenophobe - 63% (+75%) -39% - 43 # Isolationists, extra attraction due to defensive war
Pacifist - 17% (+75%) - 16% - 18
Materialist - 9% - 21% - 23

Total 109 non-robotic pops of founder species, 2249.09.17, ~2 years into war with 29% war exhaustion. Will see how it change in next decade since I'm not going to grab any Hive pops anyway.

 

[Olterin]

As I mentioned in my previous post, POP ethics seem to move towards the expected distribution at the start of the game. The reason for this seems to be that new POPs from population growth follow the expected distribution determined by ethics attraction. When you have a small total population (start of the game) then each pop contributes a large amount to the ethics distribution. The issue arises later when you have a large number of pops, and population growth doesn't have much impact on the overall distribution. This is why I've done most of my testing from 2300 to 2400. I'm pretty certain you'll find the same problem if you only look at how ethics shift after this year.

I am continuing the inward perfection game, and will keep an eye out for further ethics changes - just thought I'd share my observations thus far. However, I meant to comment on one specific thing: namely, your starting planet's pop ethics. They spawn in as mostly random, which you can verify at game start by looking at the individual pops, or by checking the representation of each ethic in your empire. What I'm saying is that after the 48 years in question have passed, the ethic spread for my homeworld is reduced to having 3 ethics represented (the last remainder of the random spread, one pop, and the expected distribution).

My other comment was with regards to pop ethics shifting due to outside circumstances. At the start of the war, pop ethics were 50/50 split in a 150ish pop empire (I am not writing this down, if you wish I can do so next time). During the war, it's already shifted by more than what I can account for by pop growth. However, I do concede that this is more an anecdotal observation thus far and less a rigorous test since I didn't actually write things down properly.

EDIT: Here's some numbers to back me up here. Pop count on capital at start of observation 82, xenophobe ethics on capital at start of observation 67%, making for 55 pops. Pop count at next point of observation 86, xenophbe ethics on capital at 72%, accounting for 62 pops. Net difference in pops 4, net difference in xenophobe pops 7. Clearly, more than pop growth happened here.

Furthermore, I would like to reinforce the point that this is with an Inward Perfection empire, which has a pretty heavy ethics pressure in favor of xenophobes and pacifists. I'll get back to you with more numbers yet again once I start a "normal" playthrough. With a spreadsheet, if necessary, since I'm quite certain that pop ethics shift does work, though it does, perhaps, not work very intuitively in a realistic game.

Just to be sure, this is on the 2.6.3 version.

 

[GeorgieBest]

I am continuing the inward perfection game, and will keep an eye out for further ethics changes - just thought I'd share my observations thus far. However, I meant to comment on one specific thing: namely, your starting planet's pop ethics. They spawn in as mostly random, which you can verify at game start by looking at the individual pops, or by checking the representation of each ethic in your empire. What I'm saying is that after the 48 years in question have passed, the ethic spread for my homeworld is reduced to having 3 ethics represented (the last remainder of the random spread, one pop, and the expected distribution).

My other comment was with regards to pop ethics shifting due to outside circumstances. At the start of the war, pop ethics were 50/50 split in a 150ish pop empire (I am not writing this down, if you wish I can do so next time). During the war, it's already shifted by more than what I can account for by pop growth. However, I do concede that this is more an anecdotal observation thus far and less a rigorous test since I didn't actually write things down properly.

Furthermore, I would like to reinforce the point that this is with an Inward Perfection empire, which has a pretty heavy ethics pressure in favor of xenophobes and pacifists. I'll get back to you with more numbers yet again once I start a "normal" playthrough. With a spreadsheet, if necessary, since I'm quite certain that pop ethics shift does work, though it does, perhaps, not work very intuitively in a realistic game.

Just to be sure, this is on the 2.6.3 version.

Yes I've been doing my testing on the 2.6.3 beta with all dlc and no mods.

 

[Cat_Fuzz]

Please see my post (11/04/20 @16:10) in this thread:
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/fix-faction-and-ethics-for-new-games.1371341/page-3

 

[Dustman]

Update on IP game:

2261.04.01, peace, 3 pops were created by omnicodex
Ethics - Expected -Current - Number of pops
Egalitarian - 19% - 22% - 31
Xenophobe - 41% - 35% - 49 # Isolationists
Pacifist - 27% - 24% - 35
Materialist - 14% - 17% - 26

Total bio-pops: 145, 142 free.

Well, it's almost perfect match. And pacifists got highest increase, although half of this decade I was at war. Problem is, it's hard to see how many joined faction on birth and how many actually flipped. With 33 new pops it's uncertain.

 

[RoverStorm]

Considering what feels like a full tenth of the posts since 2.6 have been focused on pop ethics, I think they need a full dev diary to address their vision for ethics, all the mechanics surrounding it, and how they INTEND for it to work.

Because at the moment nobody seems to agree on what the devs have said on the matter and what is or isn't broken.

 

[Kayden_II]

I haven't played V2.6.X yet so that the following is from the defines-file from V2.5.1, so how does this stuff actually work ?

POP_ETHOS_LOWER_ETHIC_THRESHOLD = 0.5 # If the % of pops following an ethic is <= this relative to its attraction do not diverge away from it
So correct me if I'm wrong, but this tells me that if ethic X has an attraction of ( for example ) 20% or 90% then it's "fine" for the game if just 10% or 45% of my POPs are actually following X ?

POP_ETHOS_UPPER_ETHIC_THRESHOLD = 2.0 # If the % of pops following an ethic is >= this relative to its attraction do not diverge to it
So correct me if I'm wrong, but this tells me that if ethic X has an attraction of ( for example ) 20% or 90% then it's "fine" for the game if up to 40% or 180% ( no 100% ! ) of my POPs are actually following X ?

Sorry, but that's already random bugalo: If the game tells me about an ethic-attraction of ( for example ) 48% for ethic X then I expect that it's "fine" for the game that something along the line of 47% - 49% ( and NOT 24% - 96% ! ) of my POPs are actually following X. Yes, randomness should be a part of the game, but I play a strategy-game and my very own decisions ( to manipulate the attraction of ethics ) should make the bulk of difference, not such ( ridiculously high ) randomness. And on top of that, I don't even remember that both ranges are actually explained or even displayed anywhere.

POP_MIN_ETHIC_RELATIVE_ATTRACTION = 0.1 # If relative attraction is less than this, do not diverge to this ethic
I'm struggling with "relative" (ethic)-attraction: Does this mean that if ethic Y has ( for example ) a pretty low ethic-attraction of ( for example ) just 8% and ethic X has ( for example ) an uncommonly high ethic-attraction of ( for example ) 90% then that's finally a case in which the game means that it's not "fine" that a POP changes from X to Y since 8% / 90% = round about 0.09 < ( "less than" ) 0.1 ?

POP_ETHOS_DIVERGENCE_INTERVAL = 360 # Number of days until a Pop has a change to diverge from empire ethos
"Fine" ! A POP is forced to change from my empire-ethic(s) every year ?

POP_ETHOS_DIVERGENCE_RATE_MULT = 0.02 # Chance of a pop evaluating its ethics every year
01. "WOW" that there's a chance of 2% per year that a POP will "evaluate" its ethic ? "WOW" that there's a chance of round about 0,006% per day that a POP will "evaluate" its ethic ? "WOW" that 2 POPs will "evaluate" their ethics within 100 years ?
02. This "evaluation", but could it be that this doesn't necessarily mean an actual ethic-change ? In reference to what I've already written, but could it be that this "evaluation" includes also the "fine"-cases that a POP doesn't have to change its ethic ?

Sorry, but that's static bugalo: I expect that EACH POP "evaluates" its ethic way more often: At least once a year ?

 

[Dustman]

Yet another update, for 2271.05.03, yet two another defensive wars. Well, at least AI will try to break you when it 'thinks' you're distracted.

Ethics - Expected -Current - Number of pops
Egalitarian - 12% (+75% attraction) - 20% - 39
Xenophobe - 63% (+100%) -41% - 71 # Isolationists, extra attraction due to defensive war
Pacifist - 17% (+75%) - 20% - 40
Materialist - 9% - 16% - 29

181 bio citizens

Well, I'm now really confused. Looks like peace time ethics is more or less as expected, but considering that I spend half of my time in wars, it's not that easy. Since this is IP, with extra push to government ethics, normal empires that actually do something, could turn into real mess.