Pop motivation: Unhappy pops don't slack off anymore [2.2]

[powerofvoid]

The title pretty much says it all. Unhappy pops are just as productive as happy pops, all that matters now is approval rating.

This seems... odd, especially given that it didn't work this way before.

It made sense that an unhappy pop would be less productive than a happy pop, because they're burned out, less motivated, just going through the motions, and so on, and losing that effect from the game seems like a step backwards.

Stability does not fully replace this system, because there's only one stability rating for the entire planet; it doesn't care if all of the miner pops are at 0% happiness and all of the technician pops are at 100% happiness or if it's the other way around, or if they're both 50%, or whatever.

Was there a good reason for this change, or did it just get lost in the transition?

 

[Riftwalker]

it's to make it so happy leaders keep your people productive for authoritarian nations.

the game doesn't count happy leaders as much as it says so though, so they mostly just mitigate unhappy slaves or workers.

 

[fodazd]

My personal opinion: Because "unhappy pops slacking off" never made much sense. Especially when talking about slaves or stratified workers.

 

[Wolfgang I]

My personal opinion: Because "unhappy pops slacking off" never made much sense. Especially when talking about slaves or stratified workers.

Happiness did not influnce the productivity of slaves though.
Edit: Unhappy slaves can reduce productivity of all pops now though because they have an effect on stability.

 

[powerofvoid]

My personal opinion: Because "unhappy pops slacking off" never made much sense. Especially when talking about slaves or stratified workers.

It's not necessarily blatantly slacking off, but if you're talking realism, motivated, energetic workers are a lot more effective than unmotivated, burned-out workers. It's why regularly working, say, 47 hours a week instead of 40, has effectively negative productivity for the extra seven hours.

 

[Riftwalker]

It's not necessarily blatantly slacking off, but if you're talking realism, motivated, energetic workers are a lot more effective than unmotivated, burned-out workers. It's why regularly working, say, 47 hours a week instead of 40, has effectively negative productivity for the extra seven hours.

sure, but slavery systems where you need to meet quotas or face serious punishment, might motivate people, and even cause people to help each other.

like i said, happy rulers basically only mitigate unhappy slaves, but happy specialists count for just as much.

 

[powerofvoid]

sure, but slavery systems where you need to meet quotas or face serious punishment, might motivate people, and even cause people to help each other.

like i said, happy rulers basically only mitigate unhappy slaves, but happy specialists count for just as much.

"The beatings will continue until productivity increases" is basically just 'crunch time', and in the long run (read: a matter of weeks or months for an extremely high-stamina species like humans), that reduces overall productivity.

The type of control that actually works for improving productivity is telling the workers exactly what to do, when to take a break, when to stop working, and so on.

And, again, none of the things you mentioned justify removing individual pop happiness as a productivity modifier.

 

[Peter Ebbesen]

Since happiness factors into stability as a linear combination, having it also directly impact individual pop efficiency would be doubledipping the value. This would be problematic from a design and balancing perspective. You could certainly make it work (unless you chose to go quadratic, which would be very, very bad), but why open yourself to such pain in the first place, when it would detract from the new focus on stability?

 

[Playwars]

Personally I prefer the new system, I really don't want to have to micro the individual pops because the unhappy 1 xenophile in my entire empire got shoved as the crystal miner, thank you very much.

 

[zukodark]

I'm pretty sure this would end up causing too many problems with the job system, because people would suddenly be irritated that their more unhappy pops work the more important jobs, when the AI would have no idea how to assign them.

 

[fodazd]

Right, happiness did not decrease slave productivity (which makes sense).

It might be the case that not overworking your pops is increasing productivity, but this level of control isn't really modeled in Stellaris. I don't think things like "My political faction is happy/unhappy, therefore I am going to work harder/less hard." or "I get 0.5 consumer good per month instead of 0.25, therefore I am going to work harder." are realisic or good gameplay.

 

[slackerpants]

I like the new system better. Sure, some aspects like individual productivity gets lost since it's a focus on society as a whole. But happiness doesn't really have any reason to be directly connected to productivity. You could get people to be really productive without them being happy about it, and people could also be happy without necessarily producing much. In the new system it's more important to be able to keep society together, so as long as you keep the unhappy people in line and unable to do anything about their situation productivity will be mostly fine. Of course, if everybody is happy the way things are there will be less friction in society, and business will run even better.