Ethics Attraction

[CocoCincinnati]

Might as well get this started as I suspect there will be plenty of discussions on this. So I started as fanatic spiritualist/egalitarian. I am 37 years in and just settled my 3rd colony. I have not run into another AI empire yet which is fine, I picked random for a reason, but now that I have had a long period of peace I all of a sudden have pacifist as the strongest attraction in my empire.

Even on my capital which is supposed to have 100% empire attraction and fanatic spiritualist which is supposed to increase that even further, all of the pops on my capital have something like 42% attraction to pacifist much higher than anything else. I have two factions, the egalitarian one and the pacifist one, nothing form the spiritualist yet even though they should be by far the strongest attraction.

This isn't so much a complaint as an attempt to understand, the pacifist faction isn't causing trouble as the things they want are things I generally try to do anyway so they won't be a problem UNTIL I do have to go to war.....when that time finally comes, I hope I don't have 42% of my empire as pacifist (that's the current attraction). I shouldn't feel like I have to declare war every few decades to keep the pacifists away, spiritualist could just as easily be happy with long periods of peace, so might xenophiles or materialists. I can understand a slight attraction towards that ethic after a few decades of peace but I'm thinking more like 10%, not 42%.

I'll add that I still have more spiritualist pops than any other at this point so how these percentage work behind the scenes may be different than how I'm interpreting them. If that's the case this is premature.....and I'll keep playing to see how things turn out. Still wanted to get the discussion started since I noticed it and it seemed odd. Back to the game for now. (And I'll also add that I'm loving this update overall so far so I hope this post isn't taken too negatively, this game is great)

 

[forfor]

I think you just need to do things that attract other morals. For instance I actually have pacifist as a primary ethic, and after never going to war for 75 years, egalitarian has a higher attraction than pacifist just due to being a democracy.

 

[nindustrial]

I'm in a similar spot. I'm 41 years in, and although I didn't choose random, I also have not yet met a single AI empire and I'm beginning to get suspicious. I'm playing a Fanatic Militarist / Spiritualist and also have a bunch of pacifism brewing now as a result as well.

I'm having trouble understanding the percentages as well. I just posted in the bug forum because I think it may not be working properly. I too have crazy attraction to non-governing ethics on my capital planet, and even after building a Temple (to increase governing ethic attraction) all my Pops have the same attractions as any other run-of-the-mill planet without a Temple. Not only that, but my Pops list their attraction as a higher percentage than the percentages on the Factions page.

 

[BurlapNapkin]

Ethics with a faction are a major cause of attraction, so right at the start of your empire you get a little randomized as your factions come in. For instance, the OP doesn't have a spiritualist faction yet, so attraction to that ethic is low.

This will shake out with a little time, and once it does you have a lot of control now over attraction with promoted factions. If you want a ton of spiritualist pops, try and get and maintain a few spiritualist factions, fulfill their requests and promote them to increase their attraction.

Remember all of your ethics attraction stat applies equally to all governing ethics, so spiritualist helps your secondary ethics as well. This should be a good thing, but I don't know, maybe you picked an ethic that you don't particularly like in hindsight. There's a new feature for that; supress those suckers and embrace some other ethic! (Remember the ethic you lose when embracing a new one is the least popular ruling ethic)

I should note that there's part of this system that I totally don't understand at all yet, and that's attraction from external factors and player actions. Getting bombed increasing pacifist attraction and things like that.

 

[CocoCincinnati]

A quick update to this in the year 2243. The ethics attraction on my capital planet is Spiritualist 31.9%, Pacifist 28.2% and egalitarian in the low 20's. This is on the home planet with ministry of benevolence and reeducation campaigns edict. Counting the bonus for spiritualist and capital building, there should be something like +170% attraction to the empire ethics on this world but pacifist is higher than egalitarian (which also has a faction BTW) and is almost level with spiritualist.....AND to top it off, I am also suppressing the pacifist faction so it should have a -50% attraction....it should certainly not be higher than egalitarian on the capital world.

When the pacifist faction got up to 5 pops, I started suppressing them, they are now up to 10 pops. I also now have a materialist faction with 5 pops, I am suppressing that one too and it has at least stayed at 5 pops. Meanwhile, the egalitarian faction which should have several bonuses has dropped from 7 to 6 members and I have 14 spiritualist pops who still have not started a faction at all (all others seemed to start as soon as I had 3 pops with that ethos). Is this random or is there something I have to do to encourage a spiritualist faction? I have temples on both colonies as well. At this point I'm desperately trying to find another empire for the sole purpose of declaring war and getting rid of the years of peace modifier, I don't care who it is, my sole thought right now is war even though I'm not a militarist. I found a FE and considered declaring on them just for that purpose.

I'd hate to see how bad things would be if I didn't have all these bonuses to empire ethics attraction and wasn't suppressing, I'd be a majority pacifist empire by now less than half a century in. I have to wonder if this is WAD.

 

[razaron]

The idea is, that your playstyle is supposed to affect ethics attraction. War makes you militarist, getting bombed makes you xenophobic etc.
If you mouse over an ethic in the faction screen it shows you what's affecting that ethnic. But some ethics, like spiritualist are harder to play to.

I'm playing fanatic materialist+pacifist+mechanist. I'm getting bonus materialist attraction from robot pops, research agreements, it being my goverment ethic and 1-2 other things that I can't recall. It's reached 80%+. I recently had a 5 day war so I lost my "no war" pacifist bonus dropping it from 25% to something in the 10s.

It just needs some balancing. I think some ethics have more actions that can support them the others. I have no idea what sort of action can give spiritualist attraction other than psionic stuff, probably why it comes with built in ethics attraction.

Note: I'm in bed, hence no exact numbers.

 

[CocoCincinnati]

Another update, a few decades later. I finally got a spiritualist faction, it happened a little while after I researched a psionic tech. I stopped suppressing the materialist faction just to see what would happen and they stayed at 5 members the entire time so suppressing evidently doesn't have as much effect with smaller numbers of pops, makes sense. I did keep suppressing the pacifist faction though and it just kept right on growing, up to 14 members while the egalitarian faction, which should have had a much higher attraction, only got up to 10. I think the only problem is that being at peace gives WAY WAY WAY too much attraction to the pacifist ethos. If that is reduced some, it should be OK IMO.

Overall, this update is outstanding, the most fun I've had playing Stellaris since launch, and I do think the faction system will be a great addition once it is balanced a bit better (or once a mod tweaks it). I don't even mind the core systems limit being lowered to 3.....I had it up to 6 pretty quickly and then up to 8 before I even had 5 colonies. I always want that number to be higher but it's actually better now that it was before IMO. And I absolutely love that science ships will resume their queue after evading a hostile fleet now. Thank you for that.

 

[Carl_Bar]

The idea is, that your playstyle is supposed to affect ethics attraction. War makes you militarist, getting bombed makes you xenophobic etc.
If you mouse over an ethic in the faction screen it shows you what's affecting that ethnic. But some ethics, like spiritualist are harder to play to.

I'm playing fanatic materialist+pacifist+mechanist. I'm getting bonus materialist attraction from robot pops, research agreements, it being my goverment ethic and 1-2 other things that I can't recall. It's reached 80%+. I recently had a 5 day war so I lost my "no war" pacifist bonus dropping it from 25% to something in the 10s.

It just needs some balancing. I think some ethics have more actions that can support them the others. I have no idea what sort of action can give spiritualist attraction other than psionic stuff, probably why it comes with built in ethics attraction.

Note: I'm in bed, hence no exact numbers.

Yes but the reality is you'll spend more time at peace than at war in any empire, and there can be plenty of different reasons not to start a war, and you can not have anyone to fight at first too.

Right now pacifists for me are in just 80 years running roughshod over every other ethic in an empire that like the OP's is built to minimise the effect of other ethics. If that kind of empire is suffering that kind of issue then a non-spiritualist empire is going to be pure pacifist after that long.



@OP: I'm pretty sure the problem is that the factors that influence non-pacifist, (and possibly non-militarist), attraction base values are flat fixed bonuses whilst Pacifists, (and probably militarists), are infinitely scaling base values so sooner or later they'll outcompete everyone else regardless of ethics attraction whilst everyone else that isn't Pacifist/Militarist gets rammed into the ground and made non-existent by said attraction. Personally i have only the existence of the faction and the long peace as attracting factors to pacifism whilst Spiritualism and Authoritisim have multiple factors. Try changing bombardment policy, gonna try that now myself, see if it adds a militarist attraction as an offset. Doubt it will last.

 

[Promethian]

Are you an oligarchy? In my experiments the oligarchy authority is basically a null value in the ethics game. In the example of this thread an oligarchy would cost you some of the egalitarian attraction a democracy would offer. Remember that attraction in one direction removes attraction in another direction and not necessarily from the opposite.

 

[Carl_Bar]

Nope, pure imperial.

 

[Carl_Bar]

Pictures, note i'm coming off the back end of an event that made 100% of my pop spiritualist, and there's an extra 30% attraction per planet not listed here:

Despite similar or greater numbers of attracting factors and pacifist being thoroughly suppressed with a whopping negetive modifier it's still only barely behind my empire ethics, and it's gaining.

 

[forfor]

Idk what I'm doing differently, but I spent forever at peace, and my pacifist faction is barely a blip. Meanwhile I have 66% materialist attraction, and 22% egalitarian. Maybe there are other factors besides being at peace that are also impacting pacifist attraction? Or maybe there are different kinds of pacifist party that affect the level of attraction? Mine is a free trade group, that might sound more egalitarian, but I have another faction that is most definitely egalitarian, aka they care about giving everybody the vote and whatnot.

 

[forfor]

Also whether I'm actually at war Only has about a 5% affect on the free trade groups opinion

 

[Alblaka]

Aka, people are complaining that their pops, after decades of peace, actually take to Pacifism.

Of course, in my Militarist Hegemony run that provded quite annoying at first, but I then promptly took it as a RP element "Wait, what, our proud warriors are losing interest in military arms training? We need a Waaaaagh!", switched my whole infrastructure production (and there was a lot of that pending) to ships and conquered my neighbour.


Needless to say, some values may be prone to 1.5.1 tweaking, but I would argue that, in general, it'S completely feasible for Pacifism to start becoming a big pull if you're not at war.

 

[GAGA Extrem]

Ethic attraction is affected by a lot of different factors, including species traits, governing authority, gamestate (waging / winning / losing wars, staying at peace), species rights and even diplomatic relations with other empires.

Iirc these effects are actually multiplicative, so while fulfilling one condition ("be at peace for a long time") might only have a mild effect, stacking two or more ("weak trait AND at peace for a long time") could easily create a situation where non-governing ethics become very attractive. I have certainly seen that with Materialist in some of my games.

edit:
It is also important to note that effects are not always equal in power. Having two (+) effects here and two (+) there does not necessarily result in similiar pull towards those ethics.

 

[forfor]

If you want to enforce your preferred morality you use can the empire edict that used to reduce ethics divergence. It no longer reduces research

 

[Alblaka]

Iirc these effects are actually multiplicative, so while fulfilling one condition ("be at peace for a long time") might only have a mild effect, stacking two or more ("weak trait AND at peace for a long time") could easily create a situation where non-governing ethics become very attractive. I have certainly seen that with Materialist in some of my games.

edit:
It is also important to note that effects are not always equal in power. Having two (+) effects here and two (+) there does not necessarily result in similiar pull towards those ethics.

I feel like displaying actual values of some form would help a lot here. Can you sneak that onto the 1.6 list of QoL changes?

 

[Mandor]

I'm pretty sure there's something wrong with this mecanic, regardless of the above explanations.

(Although it does explain why pacifist has the highest attraction for me too, even though it's not my governing ethic.
It does feel sort of wrong considering I've got spiritualist, conformist, some civic I forgot the name of AND harmony traditions.
All this together should give me a pretty crazy boost to my governing ethics attraction.)

Anyway--

I have a single species on something like 5 colonies in the game started yesterday in 1.5 (with Utopia) each with varied combinations of temples, reeducation edicts, governors, ministry, etc.
And obviously they're all different distances from the capital.

All of those factors are supposed to play into ethics attraction at the planet level, however all of my pops on every planet show the exact same attraction percentage to the same ethics down to the hundreth, regardless of their current ethic, planet or faction.

This seems obviously wrong. Here's the explanations I can come up with:

1) Planet attraction modifiers are just bugged/disabled and only the empire-wide modifiers (traditions, traits, civics, etc) are taken into account currently.
2) Only the empire-wide percentages are shown in the pop details panel and any pop-specific percentages are kept under the hood.
(which would be a shame because then there'd be no way to know where you stand with a specific colony).
3) I really missed something and/or understood nothing about how this is all supposed to work.

I'm kinda curious to know which it is

Also as far as I can tell, there's nowhere to see the list of attraction modifiers applied to a specific pop?
You can see the result percentage, but as opposed to like everything else in the game, not the detail of how it was calculated? (like, where do I see my temple's effect on a pop?)

Maybe there should be some sort of general "attraction to governing ethics" score on the pop panel that shows and sums up all of the modifiers, kind of like ethics divergence used to be presente, or happiness.

 

[Carl_Bar]

Aka, people are complaining that their pops, after decades of peace, actually take to Pacifism.

Of course, in my Militarist Hegemony run that provded quite annoying at first, but I then promptly took it as a RP element "Wait, what, our proud warriors are losing interest in military arms training? We need a Waaaaagh!", switched my whole infrastructure production (and there was a lot of that pending) to ships and conquered my neighbour.


Needless to say, some values may be prone to 1.5.1 tweaking, but I would argue that, in general, it'S completely feasible for Pacifism to start becoming a big pull if you're not at war.

Sure being at peace for a long time should produce some attraction, just as having a lot of slaves is producing some egalitarian attraction. But the supposed advantage of running an empire with various built in ethics attraction modifiers is that it's supposed to severely reduce the effect they have. Right now i'm having to do that and stack hard and suppress just to keep them as my second biggest ethic and it's only 90 years in. There';s somthing seriously broken there when core advantages of a particular way of building your species are utterly irrelevant.

To be fair as a militarist your completely opposed. So many factors that create militaristic attraction will also reduce pacifist attraction.

Ethic attraction is affected by a lot of different factors, including species traits, governing authority, gamestate (waging / winning / losing wars, staying at peace), species rights and even diplomatic relations with other empires.

Iirc these effects are actually multiplicative, so while fulfilling one condition ("be at peace for a long time") might only have a mild effect, stacking two or more ("weak trait AND at peace for a long time") could easily create a situation where non-governing ethics become very attractive. I have certainly seen that with Materialist in some of my games.

edit:
It is also important to note that effects are not always equal in power. Having two (+) effects here and two (+) there does not necessarily result in similar pull towards those ethics.

Well thats the thing, although oddly my screenshots above don't show having an active political faction as a factor for Authoritarian or Spiritualist, the only factor they should not share is the long peace. But the pacifists are also being suppressed and my empire has huge positive ethics attraction and they're still bucking for the top spots.

I should also note i have unrestricted wars and limited bombardment turned on and there's no attraction/malus for militaristic/pacifist respectively.

I get the feeling that when someone drew up the list of things that create pacifist attraction they couldn't think of much so they made long peace modifier massive which means pacifism just horribly outcompete everything else atm.

Like i said above, i'm fine with some attraction, but right now it's so far out of control it's not funny, and this is on a fanatic spiritualist. For anyone else there is going to be zero way to stop it being the dominant ethic unless you play warmonger. And warmonger isn't somthing anyone should have to do just to keep one faction from being dominant to this degree.

I'm pretty sure there's something wrong with this mechanic, regardless of the above explanations.

(Although it does explain why pacifist has the highest attraction for me too, even though it's not my governing ethic.
It does feel sort of wrong considering I've got spiritualist, conformist, some civic I forgot the name of AND harmony traditions.
All this together should give me a pretty crazy boost to my governing ethics attraction.)

Anyway--

I have a single species on something like 5 colonies in the game started yesterday in 1.5 (with Utopia) each with varied combinations of temples, reeducation edicts, governors, ministry, etc.
And obviously they're all different distances from the capital.

All of those factors are supposed to play into ethics attraction at the planet level, however all of my pops on every planet show the exact same attraction percentage to the same ethics down to the hundreth, regardless of their current ethic, planet or faction.

This seems obviously wrong. Here's the explanations I can come up with:

1) Planet attraction modifiers are just bugged/disabled and only the empire-wide modifiers (traditions, traits, civics, etc) are taken into account currently.
2) Only the empire-wide percentages are shown in the pop details panel and any pop-specific percentages are kept under the hood.
(which would be a shame because then there'd be no way to know where you stand with a specific colony).
3) I really missed something and/or understood nothing about how this is all supposed to work.

I'm kinda curious to know which it is

Also as far as I can tell, there's nowhere to see the list of attraction modifiers applied to a specific pop?
You can see the result percentage, but as opposed to like everything else in the game, not the detail of how it was calculated? (like, where do I see my temple's effect on a pop?)

Maybe there should be some sort of general "attraction to governing ethics" score on the pop panel that shows and sums up all of the modifiers, kind of like ethics divergence used to be presente, or happiness.

Factions tab has specific list of factors, see my screenshots up thread.

 

[Mandor]

Factions tab has specific list of factors, see my screenshots up thread.

It seems to only list some vague empire-wide factors (without numbers), this isn't what I wrote about.

Where do all of the planet modifiers (temple, reeducation edict, etc) show up? And how do they play into the numbers that we see?
Because in my game at least, those don't seem to do anything (or they're completely drowned into some empire-wide aggregate scores, which is functionally the same).