Death Cult + Origin Clone Army = no pips problem
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Please do something with Death Cult civic
- Thread starter Archael90
- Start date
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No. I'm saying you don't know what you're talking about, and thus are either reporting a bug or are fundamentally misunderstanding what the civic does. It is neither an economy civic or a sacrifice-60-pops-for-10%-unity civic.
The formula for benefits from sacrifice edicts is a flat % minimum bonus plus an additional modifier that scales with the ratio of your empire sacrificed. The smaller the ratio, the less of a bonus above your minimum you get.
For an empire of 100 or more pops, the general formula (using the most common RNG variable of 20) for the Sacrifice: Bounty is
Final % buff = +(5 + 30 x 20 x (mortal initiates / total empire population))%
The lowest % buff possible from a successful activation of the edict is 5%, and that would be if you literally sacrified 0 initiates (which, of course, you can't). If you are getting 2%, you either have a mod conflict or are experiencing a bug. Identify which and report accordingly.
For unity and happiness sacrifices, this minimum is 10%.
60 pops, however is only relevant based on how large your empire is. A 60 Bounty pop sacrifice in an empire of 100 is huge- it should be
(5 + 30 x 20 x 60 / 100) = 365%
A 60 pop Bounty sacrifice in an empire of 1000, however, is much more modest-
(5 + 30 x 20 x 60 / 1000) = 41%
Notably, neither of these is a minimum bonus, but the scale that 60 pops is measured against matters. To get the same scale of bonus as a 1000 pop empire, you'd need to be sacrificing around 600 pops.
That's just how ratios work. 60/100 =/= 60/1000.
A 60 pop sacrifice in the early game is a huge % gain, but a terrible idea. Having technicians worth over 3.5 times as much for 5 years is not worth losing 60% of your empire. A 60 pop sacrifice in the 1000 pop empire is much more modest, but a much better trade... if you are a megacorp who gets most of you energy from branch offices, rather than pops.
And if you aren't, you shouldn't be doing this trade. You should be looking at Harmony, which is half the unity cost.
For Harmony (Happiness), similar concept.
(10 + 30 x Multiplier (which is 15-25 x ratio, sticking with 20)
10 + 30 x 20 x 60 / 1000 = 46% happiness
Which means + 46% ethics convergence chance (per point above 50 happiness), +27.6% stability, which is +16.56% to all jobs you own (including trade)
Sacrificing .06% of your empire for a nearly 16% buff to the empire as a whole is not 'nothing', especially when you can be sacrificing other people's pops. Sacrificing 1 initiate for 10% would be better, generally, but this is why you're using the Overlord's buff to the civic and sacrificing vassal pops.
And if you're just going to be sacrificing 1 pop anyway, you might as well look at what the Unity sacrifice does and actually consider the pop effeciency to the temple jobs themselves.
In a 100 pop empire, still sticking with 20 as the RNG variable...
10 + 50 x 20 x 1 / 100 = 11% unity buff
and the +3 unity to all Death Priest jobs, which would functionally be a +100% unity buff on its own except by increasing the base number all unity modifiers are applying to the bigger base number.
Trading 1 pop for an effective doubling of your Death Priest population, without doubling the required upkeep in food/cg/miners/districts and everything, is Really Really good for generating unity. If you did have 60 mortal initiate jobs, but blocked 59 of them to support the matching 60 death priests, you'd functionally have 120 death priests for 5 years in an empire of 100 pops.
And, of course, this isn't unique to the Togetherness edict. The doubling of Death Priests applies to all of them, including bounty, which will be giving you a 50% increase in your base zombie assembly for the MegaCorp variant.
This is the power of the civic. The math behind Death Cults is already good if you understand it. It's fundamentally a unity-generation civic, not through a % but through doubling the base value of the death priests, with side benefits based on what type of sacrifice you did. It's not a energy/mineral civic, or a unity% civic, and expecting it to be is a fundamental misunderstanding of the mechanics.
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The reason to use temples is for when building efficiency is more important than pop efficiency (i.e. when you've built a planet with a load of stacked unity modifiers and need more unity producing jobs more than you need higher vase values to squeeze the most out of each pop). Both temples provide the same +5/10/15% spiritualist attraction.
Addressed by @Alfray Stryke.
Ring comment was incorrect, this does affect initiates (though the tooltip on the job output doesn't list the source, and the tooltip on the ring lists priests, telepaths and managers explicitly which is why I missed this applying to mortal initiates).
I feel like you're missing my point. It's generally a lot better to sacrifice one pop every 5 years for the 10% bonus and +5% growth than sacrifice 5% of your population every 5 years for 40% bonus with +5% growth.
Now obviously this depends on your empire structure - with a lot of planets and one temple per planets, this can work (especially for voidborn where build slots don't increase empire size), but for tall empires (the ones where pop efficiency is most important) it can be an issue.
Yeah harmony seems alright. It's the 5% mineral / energy one I think could maybe do with a little more of a boost. As you say, harmony is 3.6% of everything, whereas bounty is 5% for minerals and energy credits. (The scaling effects also nearly fit this same ratio, though it's 5:3 rather than 2:1).
Agreed, but it feels sad that the best way to use either of these civics is to not use it it with the other.
Also I maintain that having high death priests would just be a cool thing.
Checked this in game and (as mentioned above), you're right. The tooltip only mentions Administrators, Priests and Telepaths explicitly (I feel like the fact that Mortal Initiates and Prosperity Preachers are Administrators isn't obvious? I'd have assumed Priests if I didn't know they're not affected by Exalted Priesthood). On the Job itself, the source of the +1 isn't shown (it just has :+1). This is true for death priests too actually.
It does, but that's also a "any amount of sacrifices ongoing" thing - one dead initiate gives the same bonus as fifty.
I'm more talking about having the pop growth bonus also scale with the number of dead initiates so that you're more incentivized to use 5% of your population (what the code calls for for 'a big bonus') rather than 0.2% (i.e. one initiate on the capital of your 500 pop strong empire).
I guess the main issue is that 5% growth speed bonus scales with the number of planets and likewise the +1 reassigner growth so death cults in general work better with wide empires - which works directly contrary to the primary output being unity, as all unity costs scale linearly with empire size (so the question of output is never "unity output", but always "unity output per empire size increase").
(Edit: broke this into 2 posts because replying to both in the same thread was a wall of text and a half)
You're not really doing Bounty for a job boost, though. You're doing it for an the branch office boost.
Bounty is really, really MegaCorp centric, not just because of the zombie synergy (which is quite significant), but because how MegaCorp builds try to work. MegaCorps try to get around their sprawl penalty by being really efficient in their economic composition- using trade builds to avoid inefficient mineral/CG districts (2 jobs per district), and using branch office resources to get around basic resource districts in general. Especially early game (when that pop assembly boost is worth the most), the most efficient buildings a branch office has are the mining consortium and the fast food joint, just for how they let you better employ your own pops.
While a Harmony is a 3.6% to all jobs, Bounty is a 5% to branch offices as well, which when you consider the basic resource income of MegaCorps becomes worth way, way more than any 1 pop might ever produce. Those basic resources, in turn, allow you to afford to directly employ more specialists. This is an effect of increasing the % of your empire you can afford as specialists, and the rate at which you can afford to buy the next branch office to be boosted as well.
Bounty really isn't for normal empires, nor does it really need to be.
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I'll just chime in here and let you guys know that you can now build sacrificial altars as holdings on your subordinates' planets. If the subordinate is spiritualist they dont even mind it. This makes the death-cult megacorps just wonderful: those primitives you uplift now serve a very important purpose.
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+198% unity gooooo!
Completely worthless, of course, even when your death priests are producing 32 unity a piece in the early game, but still, it's tons of (worthless) unity.
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Death cult is fine if you manage to build around it. By sacrificing pops you make a lot of new free jobs and housing so it works wonders with immigration. Like in this screenshot below. Honestly I really enjoy death cult and it's one of my favourite civics, you just need migration treaties with various AI's (or, even better, make federation and get it to lvl 3 for free migration withing federation space), enough pull (either with xeno outreach agency or freehaven), slap nomadic as well and you reach populatio growth unlike any other.
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Okay then. Death cult is good civic if i manage to min-max it, instead of just playing... okay then, i have no other questions... why i was even bothered to post anything as obvious as this.
But i still gonna to just play this for flavour reason, without abusing it or min-maxing. It will be worse than being spiritualist without ANY civics, but it seems casuals players should never even try to play.
Okay, thead is finished, can be closed.
But i still gonna to just play this for flavour reason, without abusing it or min-maxing. It will be worse than being spiritualist without ANY civics, but it seems casuals players should never even try to play.
Okay, thead is finished, can be closed.
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Well I mean the issue is that Death cults is mechanically strong - it's just not very strong to play death cults the way the game seems to want you to (by killing a significant chunk of your population every 5 years for the big bonus). Which has basically always been the problem - pops just aren't expendable enough that killing them for a five year economy boost can feel anything but bad.
They already gave it one pass to make "never use mortal initiates at all" (the previous usage) no longer correct, but it could still use a little more of a tune up IMO to weaken sacrificing too-few pops while buffing the empire's ability to recover from sacrificing a lot.
Maybe make the pop growth bonus scale with the number of killed pops but only apply to planets which did the sacrifice (so killing 5 pops on one planet gives +25% growth speed to that planet, where-as killing 1 pop on each of 5 gives +5% on each of them? Also a nice little 10% bonus for vassals giving up their pops for the ritual..)
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Holy shit, bro. Dont be pissed because the game doesnt work like you want it to work. Jesus.
Its not the first thread where you consistently persist that the game has to work exactly like you imagine it. Cool down. There are more ways of playing and just because you dont like this particulary playstyle doesnt mean nobody likes this way. Other people like different ways of playing.
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My guess is you have a poor handle on game mechanics, hence your tendency to badly describe mechanics that do exist and misrepresent their purpose or function when calling for changes to game mechanics.
If you want to play game mechanics badly for the sake of role play, that's always your perogative. Some people really, really like maximizing miner employment with mining guilds. Other people really like maximzing the number of roboticists with synthetic ascension, well past the point of the game where they'll ever get a positive return on investment.
The right for people to play sub-optimally should always be protected, but that doesn't mean that complaints of sub-optimal play should be taken seriously if it's reflecting poor analysis.
Nah, there could be good lessons for other people.
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Praise the lord, for we found thruth.
I am just replying here to emphasize the last sentence. I, for example, never played a death cult but learned quite a bit about megacorps and spiritual empires.
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Pretty sure "disable half the jobs from this building" isn't the intended way to use any building in the game. You could maybe make the case for amenities jobs, but even then I'm pretty sure that's more of an issue with high amenities needing to have more value, with a stop-gap solution. It really feels like sacrificing one pop is not the intended way to use death cults when the values in the code appear to be balanced around 5% of your population, based on the comments there (presumably why the pop growth bonus is also +5%?).
If the best way to use the mechanics and the intended way to use the mechanics don't match up, that's a design issue. If you see a design issue, commenting on it is the correct thing to do. So the existence of this thread and the main point it sets out to do seems pretty reasonable?
Frankly I feel like you're being pretty rude about this too - it may not be your intention, but from my perspective it feels like you're ignoring the main criticism out of hand and not really engaging with the main point of the thread (although you've certainly made helpful contributions to the side stuff, don't get me wrong - the fact that the energy credit bonus applied to branch offices was something I hadn't considered before you brought it up, even when using corporate-death cults myself, for example).
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Amenity jobs, clerks, necrophytes, maintenance drones, anglers and pearl divers, and late-game pop assembly are all examples of job management where optimization does not entail maximizing employment. From tradition boosts, the Unyielding boost of .5 unity per defense army doesn't mean fortresses and soldiers are a good unity production measure- the optimal soldier employment for unity builds is still 0. Even beyond them, in the broader scope balancing between science and unity means that even unity-centric civilizations don't want to over-employ unity jobs to the detriment of other roles, both science (using the CG) or alloys (using the minerals that go into CG).
Death Cult is a civic which optimizes for just 1 sacrifice, but allows sub-optimal rewards for fluff and roleplay with better- but not self-justifying- benefits for doing so. The ability of players to recognize the optimization is dependent on their ability to recognize the implication of mechanics therein.
For example, a 5% growth bonus does NOT imply a 5% population cull, because a 5% growth bonus merely means +.15 to +.225 growth per month on all planets (who have 3-4.5 base growth). This would be over 37 years for just 1 extra pop to be grown with no growth scaling. In functional terms, for a modestly sized early empire, that amounts to- maybe- 1 extra pop over 5 years.
This assumes the conclusion that the intended way to use the mechanics is maximize the pops sacrificed.
This conclusion was based on bad analysis of the mechanics at play.
There aren't many good ways to call someone out for willful lying.
Archael has a pattern of criticizing mechanics based on his feelings without understanding what the mechanic actually does, and ignorring what people say in favor of hyperbole. After the second or third misrepresentation of what's already been said to him in favor of continuing to conflate mood with mechanics, the presumption of benign ignorance fades.
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Death Cults was introduced in a game where pop growth was still linear.
Even then it had the issue that when you economic ability is directly proportional to your pops, killing your pops is usually worse than not doing so.
There are a few specific applications where the system can be gamed, but in the end the civic is one that plays very unintuitively, and needs a significant anmount of effort to use well.
It is a civic that needs redesign, because it has by now piled up a number of points at where good use is very different from obvious use and where it's best advantages are hidden behind understanding less than transparent game systems.
The overlord holding does help...but only if you are an overlord, limiting it.
And IMO it could also use a bunch more synergies. Like necrophage deathcult or Here be dragons deathcult or reanimator death cult giving you a bunch of fresh undead assault armies if you need them.
Even then it had the issue that when you economic ability is directly proportional to your pops, killing your pops is usually worse than not doing so.
There are a few specific applications where the system can be gamed, but in the end the civic is one that plays very unintuitively, and needs a significant anmount of effort to use well.
It is a civic that needs redesign, because it has by now piled up a number of points at where good use is very different from obvious use and where it's best advantages are hidden behind understanding less than transparent game systems.
The overlord holding does help...but only if you are an overlord, limiting it.
And IMO it could also use a bunch more synergies. Like necrophage deathcult or Here be dragons deathcult or reanimator death cult giving you a bunch of fresh undead assault armies if you need them.
Fun Story Time!!
Long, long ago, a DLC came out called Necroids.
A few months later there was post that went something like this:
"Necrophages are super dumb cuz when you convert all your pops to the dominant species then all your workers suck and you have zero pop growth. Every time I do this I lose the game."
So we were like "yeah you're not supposed to convert every pop. The origin is designed for having most of your pops be not the Necrophage species."
So they were like "No the origin is built for converting every pop cuz they're superior. That's clearly the entire point. So I want it changed so that when you convert everyone to Necrophage, it doesn't ruin your empire forever."
So we were like "You're choosing to shoot yourself in the foot."
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Mortal initiatives are actualy really decent jobs being worker jobs that even servile's can do them and one of very few worker jobs that grant society research.
you can opt to use 1 sacrifice pop for entire game and since it gives 5% growth everywhere it is huge boost in large empire (you can always disable all other mortal initiatives), and since any amount of sacrifice makes death priest make the double unity you are literaly saving jobs compared to regular temples. Also buy sacrificing pops you are lowering treshold for pop spawning since you got less pops suddenly now it takes less time for new pops to emerge.
I wish there was notification, how many mortal initiatives you need for full power sacrifice. When I play death cult I usualy disable mortal inititatives but 1 and enjoy the huge unity boost to all death priests in empire, eventualy saving 1 job per temple (but 1 that is to be sacrificed) till I have decent population growth/setup. you can basicaly do nothing worse than sacrificing pops on starting colonies since you need to get them to 10 pops ASAP to get 4,5 growth. Death cult is really demanding on micromanagement.
As for sacrifices:
unity sacrifice is the one I usualy go for most of the game - the unity is huge and makes you chew through traidtions at incredible reate, from day 2 sacrifice you can make already smth like ~50 unity per month, possibly the highest in the game at the start
Happiness - if your planets already have high stability (either due to being psionic/authoriatarian etc this one is not to be used since it does basicaly nothing. If you are struggling with happiness on planets use it, but for me it's skip because priests/initiatives already generate solid amenities and if you also run UA for 20% happiness + temples make spiritualist attraction high (so if you keep faction happy) I see no reason why you can't achieve 100% happiness on colonies. Stability is not happiness. You can have 100% happiness and stability can still roll in like 80%. While happiness is 100% this sacrifice does nothing unless you want to reach 100% happy livestock slaves for some unknown purposes.
energy/mineral - this one is for mid/late game in my book (most likely after adopting all traditions), just for sheer amazment that it also affect production of dyson sphere/matter decompressor, all mining stations and (if you have) branch offices, allowing you to build fleets WAY over max capacity since you are literaly drowning in cash and minerals IMO nothing beats this for late game since it's such huge boost to economy. Mind you, if you are +200 energy and you roll for 50% bonus you are not getting 300/month, it's production, those +200 that shows the screen is also what is deduced from upkeep so you might roll even to like +1000 based on your total production making this thing very potent in late game