Pleasure Seekers based on Amenities instead of Consumer goods

[Kiwibaum]

Suggestion 1:
Pleasure Seekers could increase on the bonuses of excess amenities instead of giving a living standard.

This would solve a lot of the conflicts people see in it with other living standards like utopian abundance and make it more compatiple with those. It would no longer be a better version of that basicly.
Also it would solve the problem some people discuss with unequal consumer good cost at equal happiness bonus.
Finally and maybe most importantly it would incentivise to have a society of excess and entertainment. Making entertainers and servants much more interesting jobs to build and make empires with this civic try to gain more of those instead of less due to the increased aminity gain.

The big problem I can't judge is how easy this would be for you to implement, since it messes around with the amenity gain.
Also I specifically didn't mention what the bonuses would be since there is different ways to go about this and I think your design and balancing team would be better at judging if this should be just increased happiness or something else.

Suggestion 2:
Lift the limitation on not being able to use slaver guilds. This seems like an obvious and fun combination, that fits thematically and doesn't seem broken gameplay wise.

The synergy would be at most 0.5 additional amenities from servants and 0.1% pop growth from entertainers. Nothing really extreme here.
A decadent society that uses slaves doesn't seem that far fatched to me and one that doesn't differentiate from which species those slaves come neither.
Also Xenophiles can pick the civic but would never be able to use the additional amenities of servants as it currently is. Same for anyone else that isn't authoritarian or xenophobe. This just seems weird design wise to me.

Maybe I am also biased on the second one tho, since I already have an empire in which pleasure seekers would fit perfectly lore wise, but they can't pick it mechanics wise since they use slaver guilds.

Edit: Suggestion 1 might be improved by instead of increasing the amenity boni, to instead increase amenity upkeep and give a flat happiness bonus. See 4th reply to reasons why.

 

[GOLANX]

I am conflicted because I do want consumer goods to be a part of pleasure seekers but with buffed entertainers and Servants amenities is a much more applicable bonus, and I do hate that the living standard basically mixes a stratified society with Utopian Abundance modifiers. Perhaps entertainers and Servants would cost more CGs for the amenities they are producing.

I'd rather Servants be added some other way by the civic as non slaves, Perhaps through Luxury Residences, Perhaps some other method.

 

[Kiwibaum]

I am conflicted because I do want consumer goods to be a part of pleasure seekers but with buffed entertainers and Servants amenities is a much more applicable bonus, and I do hate that the living standard basically mixes a stratified society with Utopian Abundance modifiers. Perhaps entertainers and Servants would cost more CGs for the amenities they are producing.

I'd rather Servants be added some other way by the civic as non slaves, Perhaps through Luxury Residences, Perhaps some other method.

If the entertainers would cost more cg then they probably would need a stronger bonus than 1% pop growth, except if the other bonus the civic gives is high enough to make that balanced imo.

Other ways of adding servants might be ok, but they'd need to be strong enough to be worth it. Also servants would directly compete with the entertainers and you would probably only ever build one of the two. So I am not sure this is the right way to go, except if the civic changes servants and entertainers to a degree, that makes them fill different roles.

 

[Bezborg]

Excellent suggestion

 

[Kiwibaum]

@HFY suggested an I think probably a bit more elegant way to get similar results in another threat and I wanted to add it here:

The idea was to instead of increasing the amenity boni, to increasesing the amenity upkeep while providing a flat happiness bonus.
This does two things as far as I can see:

a) Force you to interact with the civic more and thus making you build more amenity buildings. This makes it harder to overlook the boni of the civic accidentally and reflects better that your pops demand more entertainment.

b) It might be easier to implement, since there's no fiddling needed with the amenity boni, but just the pop upkeep modifiers. Not sure about if that's true but it might be.

 

[HFY]

I'll post a suggestion, it does seem a bit different from what you've got here.

EDIT: link here: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/pleasure-seekers-improvement.1490939/

Pleasure Seekers could increase on the bonuses of excess amenities instead of giving a living standard.

This does seem to be one of the things we have in common -- the mechanic I have would be a way to implement this easily.

 

[Kiwibaum]

So I managed to ask about the second part of the suggestion in the Q&A and it seems to be kinda good news. The good thing is that it seems slaver guilds and pleasure seekers seem to only be mutually exclusive due to a technical thing. I assume it has to do with the living standard isn't intended to have slaves.
So the first part of the suggestion would actually also fix that.

I've also been thinking a bit if there's anything else you could do with the civic and The only things I've come up so far is to also give a pop growth bonus going with the happiness (obviously with lower numbers then) and giving the option to make a decision on a planet, that makes it something like a party planet with boni and mali according to that. But I haven't gotten that far with those 2 ideas and don't know if I like them or not yet.