It doesn't "mess up" the balance of living standards. Living standards would be unbalanced without it.
It clearly does, and no that is not a fundamental fact. The points you made gloss over the concession I made further into my reponse that changing the status quo would
obviously create a need for balancing elsewhere as rooting out a systemic issue will up-end current balance. Arguing against balancing things better (as there are obvious issues/inconsistencies) because "it would change things" is not very productive to the conversation.
Under Academic Privilege and Stratified Economy, pops with high living standards have the means to participate politically. Hence they generate high unity, through factions. By contrast, under Basic Subsistence, no one but rulers can make their voices heard (even specialists have a malus to political power), so you generate substantially less.
Conveniently Basic Subsistence pops, which according to the fluff are seemingly not allowed to vote at all, is the only "regular" living standard that Full Citizen pops (the only ones that can vote, Residency pops can't) cannot have so
of course that means they can't participate in factions.
This again fails to actually respond to my point that the interaction with political power causes balance issues, as you'll have AP or SE empires "be more united" or whatever (i.e. generate more faction unity out of a void) than a UA or Shared Burdens empire with an equivalent
population size simply because of their political power tying into faction unity gain... even though the former empires, especially SE with it's comparatively low pop consumer goods upkeep, can have a significantly lower share of the empire population part of factions and still generate more faction unity. This is in my opinion an arbitrary justification, rooted in nothing real or reasonable and which results in UA especially being a very unattractive living standard to go for as it's both expensive and low in faction unity (with the happiness boost not being worth it cus happiness is easy enough to get).
"It doesn't add enough to be worth the complexity it adds" is certainly a valid perspective, though I disagree. The system isn't very complex at all, in my opinion.
Not what I meant, either. If complexity causes
issues, is it really worth it to keep around? SE and AP both benefit from the best of both worlds of the living standard mini-game (lots of per-pop faction unity gain AND easier per-pop stability management), whereas UA and SB suffers.
You are quite literally arguing "remove the mechanic where increased political power leads to increased faction unity, so that all living standards produce the same net unity". What do you mean "it definitely does not remove a mechanic from the game"?
We must be playing different games and speaking different languages, because taking away
one interaction that political power has with
other mechanics does not entail removing it as a mechanic. Whether you choose to call a mechanic's
interaction with another mechanic a "mechanic" or some other kind of word is just semantics.
...you can already do this. This is already a thing in game, with exactly the same tradeoffs. Slaves don't join factions and don't produce unity, so you're losing out on faction unity by enslaving them. It's part of why slavery is currently so weak.
That wasn't my point, which is already explained above that slaver empires will already have a good if not great chance of generating
more faction unity than an individualist empire will, simply because of the tie to political power. So that niche doesn't exist in practice, and to justify this with slavery being "weak" (or rather weaker than it
used to be, to be accurate) also doesn't help because why can we not have both things? Improve slavery but remove the tie between faction unity and political power, simultaneously making UA and Shared Burdens better?
If the issue is that UA and SB (the most truly egalitarian living standards) have weaker political power than Social Welfare: agreed. That's nonsense.
That is not my issue, which I already explained. If political power did not tie into faction unity, Shared Burdens would be better than Social Welfare because of the double faction unity gain from the Egalitarian faction (it requires a civic-slot, after all). It would also mean that political power modifiers connected to each living standard will now be much functionally simpler and realistic: Shared Burdens would have equal impact on approval rating across strata, whereas Social Welfare still has some bias toward ruler pops. Only their relative impact on approval rating is now important, removing the arbitrary effects on faction unity gain. My problem is not with how much each strata affects approval rating,
it's just about the faction unity gain, and therefore it makes sense to not tweak political power of individual living standards. Those are fine as they are, given this one simple change.
If the issue is that UA and SB are too weak, then buff UA and SB. If it's also a problem that AP is too strong, then nerf AP. Don't delete the entire mechanic so that UA and SB (which seem to have been just left out) become stronger by default.
This kills two birds in one stone, and does not delete any mechanic, just this particular interaction between two mechanics. Political power will still exist, it's not going to die. Its ties to faction unity are just unnecessary and cause problems for certain living standards. The reason I've focused on comparing UA and SB to SE and AP is because they're all locked behind particular ethics (with SB having a further ethic point cost
and a civic-lock on top), and to me there's just too little given via going Egalitarian and especially Shared Burdens compared to the benefit of saving a civic slot and an ethic point for simply superior living standards in SE and AP.
Egalitarians could do with a niche, and a prime candidate for that is faction unity. Large populations of free and (more or less) equal pops should logically be generating more faction unity than a smaller population of stratified pops.
