Martial Law / Citizen Service as Empire Playstyle (somewhat) viable?

[Daelnoron]

Hey all, while looking for a few more off the wall Empire Playstyles, I've stumbled across Martial Law, and got an Idea.

However, I don't know all intricacies of the various boni involved, the wiki wasn't too helpful and I'm not used to digging through the code, maybe you can help.

The Idea: Be Citizen Service and have Martial Law active everywhere. Take other steps to stay afloat. Probably focus on Trade Value.

Why? Well, you would have Strongholds/Fortresses which also get better, you lose 33% resources but gain stability which increases output... I believe Trade Value doesn't count as a resource, but may be boosted by stability? More worker jobs would encourage authoritarian, for stratified society, easily kept in check by our high stability.
More Naval Cap via Soldiers would work with less Anchorages, thus more Starbases for Trade Hubs and Hangar Bays...

Can this be at least somewhat functionable? Any additions or variations one could use?

If, by the way, you have other fancy, semi functional ideas, I'm all ears.

 

[InvisibleBison]

Unfortunately, having martial law active all the time is a really bad idea. Each point of stability over 50% gives a +0.3% bonus to production. It takes a huge amount of soldier jobs to counter the production penalty from declaring martial law, and that's assuming that your planet was already at no more than 50% stability. If stability is higher than 50%, which it usually is, it's impossible for the increased stability to outweigh the resource penalty.

Even if you were able to negate the resource penalty, however, it's still not a good idea to keep martial law active all the time. Martial law decreases population growth by 50%. Pop growth is king in 2.2, and that big of a hit is basically suicide in the long term.

 

[Incompetent]

Martial Law is only viable on worlds where the alternative would be anarchy (i.e. newly-conquered worlds, worlds full of pops that are currently being purged, and so on), and even then it's a serious trade-off. On any normal, stable planet, it's a losing proposition.

Soldier spam with Citizen Service is a vaguely interesting idea though for a war-focused empire. In the latest beta it gives +2 unity per soldier, which is a respectable amount (bearing in mind Culture Workers only give 3 unity each). Thing is though, the other benefits are mostly defensive: you make your planets difficult to take, and you free up starbase space for more bastions. (Trade hub spam is ill-advised due to how trade collection works; shipyard spam only makes sense once you have a massive economy.) If you're a warmonger, generally speaking you're not on the defensive all that often, because you spend most of your time beating down weaker neighbours. It could be good in a tough start as a Purifier where you end up in a multi-front war, but in that situation you probably don't have the manpower to spare for soldiers, because you need those pops to be mining and making alloys. I suppose it also pairs reasonably well with martial law on conquered planets (although AFAIK this also hurts unity production).

What could be fun though is to play space vikings with Citizen Service + Barbaric Despoilers (or Nihilistic Acquisition). You build a large navy supported in part by Soldiers, then send them out hunting. Your planets will hold out for a long time, so you can send your fleet quite far away from home without risking too much damage from enemy counterattacks. Your tech progress etc will suffer initially, but it won't matter long term once you've trashed everyone else and built up a huge population of xeno slaves for yourself.

 

[Lord Ruby]

Interesting idea.

It would require a resource that is boosted by stability but not affected by job resource output modifiers. As far as I know this only applies to trade. It might be a good deal on a planet that produces a ton of trade but next to nothing of normal resources, which is a possible scenario.

But it's not like Citizen Service actually helps the strategy that much. It only gives a little more unity for doing it. You're most likely better off using Merchant Guilds for that unity, since getting 10 soldiers for +50 stability allows you to get more than 10 Merchants. If Citizen Service gave more soldier jobs rather than +% naval cap it would be another story though.