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I am in the middle of a playthrough and it appears that the ethics shift is still bugged but I don't know for sure, it's hard to determine it.
I used the Hearts and Minds unity ambition edict, and nothing seemed to have changed in about 100 years, it's a bit odd, all my factions have roughly equal amount of representation, 10-14% each, despite a governing ethics attraction that should be monstruously high.
I know there was an issue where if the attraction is too high it actually doesn't do anything, and that seems to be the case here, but it's hard to confirm it for certain, it could just be from refugees and other stuff that I keep getting pops that don't match the ethics...
UPDATE - Multiple tests have been done throughout the pages, the general consensus is that the system is pretty borked right now.
It doesn't seem so. Had every possible ethics-attraction modifer possible, from the One Mind perk, to Information Quarantine and Deep space black site and they did nothing; the undesirable factions didn't lose a single pop in more than one hundred years.
Annoys me that you always have a diverse attraction on your first planet, instead of just the two ethics you start with. I hope this is changed soon, and the bug you mentioned fixed.
It's definitely been fixed. Initial planetary population doesn't adhere to governing ethics, but the number of POPs in factions moves around MUCH faster and more predictably now.
It's definitely been fixed. Initial planetary population doesn't adhere to governing ethics, but the number of POPs in factions moves around MUCH faster and more predictably now.
I haven't seen any evidence of this so far in a couple of games with 2.6. In my current game I suppressed my spiritualist faction (fanatic materialist here) for three decades and it did absolutely nothing. Then I stopped wasting my influence, and twenty years later the spiritualists were still 25% of my population, and by that time, I'd already implemented Flesh is Weak. Then I got frustrated and used the console to change a bunch of them into materialists, but there's still a significant amount of them and they're not diminishing despite the only thing adding spiritualist attraction being the existence of the faction.
And that was pretty much my experience in my previous game as well, though I didn't resort to console there.
Ethics actually mattered in a recent game of mine: I couldn't figure why my stability was going down on several planets. It turned out that a faction, the xenophile one to be exact had grown to contain about 25% of my pop for some reason.
So I suppressed that faction and promoted the xenophobe one (that I started with), and a few years down the line my stability problem was solved !
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
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
POP_MIN_ETHIC_RELATIVE_ATTRACTION = 0.1 # If relative attraction is less than this, do not diverge to this ethic
POP_ETHOS_DIVERGENCE_INTERVAL = 360 # Number of days until a Pop has a change to diverge from empire ethos
POP_ETHOS_DIVERGENCE_RATE_MULT = 0.02 # Chance of a pop evaluating its ethics every year
Translation:
If the number of pops following an ethic is under half the "expected" number that should follow it based on attraction, a pop cannot swap AWAY from that ethic.
If the number of pops following an ethic is over twice the "expected" number that should follow it based on attraction, a pop cannot swap TO that ethic.
If the pop's individual attraction to an ethic is less than 10%, don't swap to this ethic. This means that after factoring all increases to various ethics, if it has less than a 10% chance to swap to an ethic, that ethic's weight becomes zero and the other ethic swap chances are re-calculated.
I "think" the next two lines means that a pop attempts to randomly roll a new ethic (described below) every 360 days, and it has a 2% chance of succeeding and changing it's ethic.
It could be a 2% of switching to something other than it's current ethic, or a 2% that it "just" rerolls it's ethic and could possibly be the same ethic it already had.
E.G. if it had a 60% authoritarian attraction and a 40% spiritualist attraction, it would have a 60% of switching to authoritarian and a 40% of switching to spiritualist, assuming none of the other rules above are violated. If it was authoritarian with those attractions, I don't know if it rerolls, can it become Authoritarian again or is it FORCED to switch to Spiritualist because that's the only other thing it has a weight for?
What was it before?
From what I gather, in 2.5.1 (and for some time before) it used to be a 0.02% chance due to how it was coded. This meant that each year, roughly one in every FIVE THOUSAND pops would change ethics. Or for one pop, it changed it's ethics on average once every 5000 years. In fact I think it force-capped it somewhere, because the devs described the changes as "a pop can change ethics more than once every 500 years".
The reason ethics weren't 100% stagnate before is because new pops choose an ethic based on attraction, not their parents, so you COULD use pop growth to introduce new ethics.
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
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
POP_MIN_ETHIC_RELATIVE_ATTRACTION = 0.1 # If relative attraction is less than this, do not diverge to this ethic
POP_ETHOS_DIVERGENCE_INTERVAL = 360 # Number of days until a Pop has a change to diverge from empire ethos
POP_ETHOS_DIVERGENCE_RATE_MULT = 0.02 # Chance of a pop evaluating its ethics every year
Translation:
If the number of pops following an ethic is under half the "expected" number that should follow it based on attraction, a pop cannot swap AWAY from that ethic.
If the number of pops following an ethic is over twice the "expected" number that should follow it based on attraction, a pop cannot swap TO that ethic.
If the pop's individual attraction to an ethic is less than 10%, don't swap to this ethic. This means that after factoring all increases to various ethics, if it has less than a 10% chance to swap to an ethic, that ethic's weight becomes zero and the other ethic swap chances are re-calculated.
I "think" the next two lines means that a pop attempts to randomly roll a new ethic (described below) every 360 days, and it has a 2% chance of succeeding and changing it's ethic.
It could be a 2% of switching to something other than it's current ethic, or a 2% that it "just" rerolls it's ethic and could possibly be the same ethic it already had.
E.G. if it had a 60% authoritarian attraction and a 40% spiritualist attraction, it would have a 60% of switching to authoritarian and a 40% of switching to spiritualist, assuming none of the other rules above are violated. If it was authoritarian with those attractions, I don't know if it rerolls, can it become Authoritarian again or is it FORCED to switch to Spiritualist because that's the only other thing it has a weight for?
What was it before?
From what I gather, in 2.5.1 (and for some time before) it used to be a 0.02% chance due to how it was coded. This meant that each year, roughly one in every FIVE THOUSAND pops would change ethics. Or for one pop, it changed it's ethics on average once every 5000 years. In fact I think it force-capped it somewhere, because the devs described the changes as "a pop can change ethics more than once every 500 years".
The reason ethics weren't 100% stagnate before is because new pops choose an ethic based on attraction, not their parents, so you COULD use pop growth to introduce new ethics.
In my case it appears that because every ethos is present, there is a complete lock as none of them wants to go under the minimum thresholds?
My core ethics are pacifist and egalitarian, with 50% governing attraction from One Vision tradition and 100% governing attraction from Hearts and Minds edict. Also notable Hearts and Minds gives +100% to the ethics shift chance.
So here's what the game shows me as the current/desirable percentages:
Note: These percentages have not changed at all in the past 80 years.
According to the numbers stated above:
Egalitarian - It's 14% with a desired of 29% which means it's probably exactly half (14.5%) and no pops will swap away from it, but in theory there should have been new pops swapped to it.
Pacifist - 13% with a desired of 18% which means that pops could swap away from it every now and then.
Xenophobe - 14% with a desired 2% This one is interesting, I had xenophobe for the entirety of the game, playing mostly isolationist for the first half of the game, so at first this made some sense, but in the second half of the game I've gotten a large influx of refugees due to neighbouring wars, and went mostly xenophile in terms of policy. The desired effect seems to reflect this, but there's been no change in the actual percentage of followers. The desired is much much less than half so it should be impossible for pops to get this ethic.
Militarist - 11% with a desired 6% This was a weird one since I played pacifist isolationist in the first half of the game, but after I got attacked by an AI this faction popped up out of the blue and despite being incredibly unhappy in a pacifist empire, it stayed at 11% for the whole game as well. They didn't grow but didn't disappear either.
Authoritarian - 10% with a desired 3% This is under half so again, new ones shouldn't be popping up. This one does seem to be reactive on the long scale at least, it's the only one that I really noticed changing % every now and then.
Xenophile - 13% with a desired 26% This is exactly half so there shouldn't be any pops swapping away from this one and again stagnation is the name of the game here, nothing really changed with them, I even endorsed xenophile for about a year with no changes at all.
Materialist - 11% with a desired 7% This again popped up after I got some robots, only a handful, but they've been here ever since with no real changes.
Spiritualist - 11% with a desired 9% These came up after the half-point when I fought a war and conquered a bit of land from a spiritualist fallen empire. Now, them being a fallen empire, they didn't have a lot of pops, not enough for it to matter in the large scale, and sure enough the numbers while increased initially, seemed to not change at all ever since I acquired them.
So as an experiment, I've endorsed egalitarian ethics and supressed every single other ethic in my empire to get the following attraction rates:
I will let the game go for exactly 25 years and we'll see if anything changes. In theory, every ethic other than egalitarian should not gain any new pops anymore and egalitarian should not lose any pops anymore, and every year I should get 4% of my pops (since ethics shift chance is doubled) to swap ethics. We'll see if it works.
PS - I don't have any migration treaties and won't gain any new pops from wars. I've also restricted refugees so no new pops other than those grown here, should affect the experiment.
I have 2948 pops total at the start of the experiment, I will note exactly how many I have at the end as well.
I will let the game go for exactly 25 years and we'll see if anything changes. In theory, every ethic other than egalitarian should not gain any new pops anymore and egalitarian should not lose any pops anymore, and every year I should get 4% of my pops (since ethics shift chance is doubled) to swap ethics. We'll see if it works.
One minor thing to note: When a pop switches ethics, it looks at your faction screen for things like "how many pops in the empire have this ethic VS how many SHOULD have it".
But when actually deciding which ethic to switch to, it has it's own, personnel, weights that it listens to.
This is how, for example, Slaves at 0% happiness can have a massive Egalitarian leaning even if Egalitarian is supposed to be a very minor part of the empire.
Here, if you select a pop and hover over it's ethic icon, you can actually see the exact attraction that the pop may swap to (or more accurately, all pops in the "stack" may equally be able to swap to).
Take a look at a clerk of my species on my homeworld:
Those percentages are the live feed of what that EXACT pop (stack) will roll when it is selected to change ethics. In this case, about half the time, it'll stay as a xenophile (assuming it doesn't force them to change to an ethic it doesn't already have).
With a pop from an ecumenopolis that has a lot of aliens:
Now take note of this pop:
Now what I'm confused by is where the Pacifist, Materialist, and Xenophobic attraction numbers are. IF I understand how it works, Egalitarian, Militarist, and Authoritarian will never be swapped to because their RELATIVE chance to swap to that ethic is less than 10%. Are the other three just removed from the list entirely because their attraction is below 1%?
The "chances" of the remaining ethics add up to 99.997, which is what we call "perfect 100% ruined by rounding errors".
So perhaps it actually DOES have a 9.771% chance to swap to Egalitarian, and the other three don't show up because they've been removed from the list to being below the 10% threshhold.
Now finally, compare it to my empire's attraction levels:
So the attraction level shown on the empire screen is the AVERAGE it expects, taking into account ALL your pop's preferences. So if you had two pops, one had a 100% attraction to Militarist and the other a 0% attraction, it would show your empire-wide attraction to militarist as 50%. It also is showing you the attraction, not the actual quantity (which I think you knew).
Oh! Faction support is NOT actually "how many of your people have this ethic" by the way! After changing ethics, pops take some time to change faction. And some pops have ethics but are not allowed to join factions, like slaves!
You can see the actual percentage of your population that has an ethic, regardless of faction loyalty (or lack of faction) by hovering over an attraction:
The spiritualists only include 32% of the population, but because robots can't join factions, the faction support is actually slightly higher for Spiritualists since they....probably don't have robots inflating the number of people who follow that ethic but can't join the faction:
Now here's the thing, I don't have slaves, and just a handful robots like 40 out of 3000 pops, and I run utopian abundance so most pops should have roughly equal power (there's some added worker power stuff in effect due to the galactic community)
I will check some individual pops, but I think that in my case it should be fairly straightforward (I mean relative to how bonkers complicated this system is) if the effect is working or not. The faction support and the % of people holding the ethos should match (roughly).
I'll come back with the results in a few hours, the game is pretty slow bc it's the last 50 years of the playthrough.
So after checking about 20 pops at random in my empire everyone has 72%+ Egalitarian attraction, so we should be noticing some pretty hard shift towards Egalitarianism in the coming 25 years if everything is working well.
Now there is a slight problem in that not all strata have equal political power, workers have 1.75 whereas all others have exactly 1.0
But I'll analyze the results in detail after a couple more hours of the game running.
PS - After checking some more pops, all other factions attraction is less than 10%. Since Egalitarian has 72-75% attraction everywhere, all the others have an attraction lower than 10%. So in theory if you're right about 10% being the cut-off, that means they should always swap to egalitarian if a swap occurs.
and I run utopian abundance so most pops should have roughly equal power (there's some added worker power stuff in effect due to the galactic community)
Several hours later and I am just 12.5 years out of the 25 still...the game is running like a potato unfortunately. Maybe this wasn't the best game setup for a test, but it's what I had at hand.
Anyways, here's the half-way results and I think we can extrapolate that the test is unsuccessful from this already:
Egalitarian went up by 2% in 12.5 years.
Bearing in mind I literally have every ethic suppressed and egalitarian promoted, which costs 10 influence per month, I ran it for 12.5 years, I have double ethics shift chance and +150% governing ethics attraction, 72% egalitarian attraction on average, and yet, I only got 2% of my pops changed.
I think the system works to some degree, but it's just abysmally slow. 150 months x 10 influence per month is 1500 influence to gain 2%, it's pretty bad return on your investment.
I'll continue running the experiment, but honestly I don't have a lot of faith in this speeding up.
Now it is notable that I have gone up from 2948 pops to 3229 pops, which is an increase of 281 pops. Which is about a 9.5% growth overall. Which depending on what ethics those pops spawn in with (and I have no idea how new pops get ethics) it could either hinder the shifting of the ethics towards the egalitarian or it could have been most of that 2% increase in egalitarians...
Now for the sake of simplicity I will pretend my total pops didn't grow at all. If 2% of your pops change ethics each year, updated with the +100% ethics shift chance, that's 4% of all pops, then that means that about 118 pops each year would have to roll once to change ethics. Now, since the egalitarian attraction is 70% and all other factions are below the supposed cut-off point of 10% then that would mean 118 pops would have to convert to egalitarian each year which I think would mean 1474 pops would have had to convert to egalitarian. Or if the cut-off point doesn't actually apply then 70% of that which is 1032 pops.
However, what I had was a 2% increase in egalitarians which is only a 59 pop increase.
Of course my pops did grow by 281 and checking the total number of egalitarian pops now vs what I had back when the experiment started I gained 119 egalitarian pops. Which is still only a 10th of what I'd expect to happen.
Just did a MP game until Desync ruined it and my friend reported he was able to change his Faction support from 26% to 54% in about 2 decades, but Like you noted it destroyed his Influence.
I had no way to verify his claims, so take it as an anecdote(Maybe he Confused Approval with Support)
I'm definitely going to keep a closer eye on this because some Interesting empire builds rely quite heavily on Ethics attraction/Shifts.
Just did a MP game until Desync ruined it and my friend reported he was able to change his Faction support from 26% to 54% in about 2 decades, but Like you noted it destroyed his Influence.
I had no way to verify his claims, so take it as an anecdote(Maybe he Confused Approval with Support)
I'm definitely going to keep a closer eye on this because some Interesting empire builds rely quite heavily on Ethics attraction/Shifts.
I'd be interested how many ethics he had in his empire at that time. I am wondering if this turtle pace is as a result of having all possible ethics each competing against one another and creating a sort of deadlock.
But also notably I have +150% governing ethics attraction which in in of itself should have caused the % to be weighted towards those two ethics, but if you check the numbers it's all 10-14% there's barely any difference. So it's also governing ethics attraction that doesn't work.
I think to test this right it should be done with fanatic purifiers, without any megachurches to add spiritual attraction in the galaxy. As this would make sure it's only your pops being tested with fewer outside biases (various diplomatic things affect attractions too - most of which are ignored by FPs).
I had a massive surge in egalitarianism in one of my games and couldn't figure out why.
Then I realised I'd bought 200 slaves (≈1/7 my population) for a ringworld - many of whom came with an egalitarian view.
Refugees may also cause ethic shifts,
after a ton of refugees turned up in my empire my ethics alignment was all over the place, thanks to someone displacing them all.
it was hard to figure out who was a refugee, given my diverse population, but I'm assuming refugees arrive with whatever their old ethics were (even if they don't equal your own)
Also something I noticed is that primitives seem to be much more ethically diverse now. I invaded an early space age empire and every ethic was represented with the largest segment being 20% in the past you'd usually only see 2-4 ethics represented.
If what I think is going on with refugees/purchased slaves (or even annexed planets from other empires) is true, playing a test game with an FP (e.g. fan xenophobic + spiritualist for temples) should lead to a more concentrated ethics distribution.
If this is the case, it would suggest the system is "working as intended"
But that regular empires (non gestalts/non-no-diplomacy) simply have too many variables to deal with currently, which is why they end up with diverse ethics.
But also notably I have +150% governing ethics attraction which in in of itself should have caused the % to be weighted towards those two ethics, but if you check the numbers it's all 10-14% there's barely any difference. So it's also governing ethics attraction that doesn't work.
Governing ethics attraction seems to work because, usually, new colonies ethics distributions match expected distributions.. yet, how much it's works combined with all other possible modifiers is another question .
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