Name on the tin. While on-planet political weighting is clear to me, how does something like residency work? Incorporating non-citizen pops does affect the factions, so is the -25% political power a -25% to the unity that faction would be producing were those pops full citizens?
Seeking Clarity: How does Residency/reduced political weight factor into Factions for faction strength purposes?
- Thread starter DeanTheDull
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My impression is that political power only affects the approval rating (weighted Happiness).
The wiki mentions nothing about the political weight of pops affecting unity from factions.
But I have not verified this in-game.
It should be easy to do with the Syncretic origin (and Parliamentary System civic, to speed up the appearance of factions). Since each pop is supposed to normally produce 0.5 Faction Unity, any significant reduction for non-citizens should be visible from one month to the next by swapping the Serviles citizenship status.
(while observing a faction that does not care about their citizenship status, such as imperialists/militarists or spiritualists/traditionalists)
Specifically, what confuses me is the Citizenship description for Residence:
This seems wrong to me since factions obviously grow with non-citizen pops when you conquer even as a slaver, but the power of the faction seems to change based on political weight, hence why freeing slaves can cause significant faction size changes. On the other hand, nerve-stapled iirc removes pops from factions, and I'd assumed that was the case for serviles as well. I've assumed that was a political weight factor, but I admit I'm not sure.
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So I did do this. The result was that I did see a difference between full citizenship and the non-citizenship, but did NOT see a difference between slaves and residents on the faction unity level.
This has me confused, because I could swear I've seen slaves power factions before, even before released from slavery.
Disclaimer: The reason I've been asking is I've been considering the implications of residency as a status for aliens. It currently has the political weighting impact, a -10% happiness, and apparently the faction unity consideration. If it weren't for the faction unity, I'd honestly consider residency a much stronger citizenship status than it seems- -25% amenities alone makes gene clinics surprisingly viable for the early game 25 pop growth target for tier 3 colonies.
This has some interesting implications for Egalitarian-Xenophobes, given that resident aliens have egalitarian pulls of their own, which could be used to balance out the xenophile pull of most builds.
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I also ran a test, but used Necrophages and Authoritarian to get a "plain" species that I could reload-test with each of the three statuses, slavery being the default set by the game. In my case, the Unity output checks out cleanly proportional whether keeping the slaves enslaved or making them full citizens, but residents give differing results (less Unity than full citizens). Weirdly, the difference in Unity is not proportional to the difference in Size.
Did a second test, using the PS civic and starting from everyone being a full citizen. Upon switching, the militarist faction is unaffected despite having a big chunk of residents, while the spiritualist faction loses some Unity.
Returning to the first test, I had the luck of having one resident switching away from the Spiritualist faction, letting me confirm that the spiritualist faction's unity output matched a 50% reduction for residents. But the militarist faction's output did not match a 50% reduction for non-residents at the reported faction membership numbers (but curiously matching the output that should have been the case if 1 of the 2 resident members was a full citizen instead).
Applying the model to the second test, the numbers did not match up for either faction.
Returning to the first test, I confirm that all slaves except three have specialist jobs, and one of those belongs to the militarist faction while none belong to the spiritualist faction. After removing the Necrophyte jobs prior to turning the slaves into residents (i.e. making them all workers), the resulting unity output of the militarist faction matches the spreadsheet "prediction". Re-enabling the Necrophyte jobs, I end up getting a Spiritualist resident specialist instead, and the spiritualist faction increases its unity output equivalent to 1 resident worker's value (incidentally, Decent Conditions has +100% political power for specialists). Switching the former slaves to stratified economy also reduces faction unity.
Switching my main species' living standard from stratified economy to social welfare does not seem to affect faction unity output.
Switching my former slaves to stratified economy AFTER making them full citizens (all workers) does NOT seem to reduce their faction unity output.
After switching my former slaves to full citizenship with stratified economy, the act of re-enabling the Necrophyte jobs and getting a Spiritualist among the three new specialists does NOT seem to increase the spiritualist faction's unity output.
Conclusion:
Resident pops, and ONLY resident pops, have their faction unity affected by political power from living standards / stratum level.
Potential exploit uncovered and tested:
Resident pops with Academic Privilege (+400% Specialist political power) make Materialist faction unity go brrr.
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I suspect it is not intentional that the full political power value is being used, as 1) I can easily see it being an accident where the original intent was to use Residency's -50% political power to make residents give half faction Influence/Unity, and 2) it feels unlikely that the intent was to allow the faction Influence/Unity multiplier (in the tooltip for faction Unity) to be greater than the size of the faction, and 3) it feels unlikely that the intent was to let Materialist empires potentially become faction Unity/Influence powerhouses.
I have made a bug report of this issue:
Residency counts ALL political power when calculating Unity from factions
I have made a bug report of this issue:
Residency counts ALL political power when calculating Unity from factions
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This is interesting. If I'm reading right, Residents on Social Welfare produce strictly more faction unity compared to Full Citizens (workers being net 0, everything else being at least +50%), which is good news for specialist economies that are running it anyway.
It is possible to get resident species into Ruler jobs, correct? A trade build employing resident merchants could make use of the easily accessible +700% and +900% ruler political power from Decent Conditions or Stratified Economy, which isn't jumping through too many hoops.
Is this likely to be practical in any way? Stratified is incompatible with other faction unity bonuses and likely isn't worth it, but a Decent Conditions Resident ruler is producing 6.5x the normal faction unity - in parlimentary system that's anywhere from 4.55 unity per pop to 6.5 unity per pop, depending on how egalitarian you are.
The Xenophile faction doesn't explicitly care about species in residence, so you may not need to bother avoiding their massive ethics attraction, but I vaguely remember an event that fires where the faction demands you give the aliens full citizenship, and they get upset if you refuse (it also had a bunch of lengthy bonuses for doing so, and figuring out if that can be abused is on my bucketlist).
It is possible to get resident species into Ruler jobs, correct? A trade build employing resident merchants could make use of the easily accessible +700% and +900% ruler political power from Decent Conditions or Stratified Economy, which isn't jumping through too many hoops.
Is this likely to be practical in any way? Stratified is incompatible with other faction unity bonuses and likely isn't worth it, but a Decent Conditions Resident ruler is producing 6.5x the normal faction unity - in parlimentary system that's anywhere from 4.55 unity per pop to 6.5 unity per pop, depending on how egalitarian you are.
The Xenophile faction doesn't explicitly care about species in residence, so you may not need to bother avoiding their massive ethics attraction, but I vaguely remember an event that fires where the faction demands you give the aliens full citizenship, and they get upset if you refuse (it also had a bunch of lengthy bonuses for doing so, and figuring out if that can be abused is on my bucketlist).
Technocracy was the Unity powerhouse in 2.x
Now you don't even need the civic.
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Yes, even without the exploit territory.
Faction Unity builds are actually surprisingly useful in the early game, when most players are getting most of their unity from rulers and dedicating their pops to workers, science, and alloys to get their initial defenses up. Being able to get a substantial amount of unity that doesn't require a job commitment- easily 2000+ in the first decade via early factions with Parliamentary Democracy + Fanatic Egalitarian, and is easily 1.6-1.9 times the faction unity from citizen pops. This is not just more traditions, but earlier traditions, which is good for getting key parts of your build set up sooner. Functionally, this can easily allow both a starting econ tradition and Supremacy within the first two decades or so without a major sacrifice of your early military tech game. This is very useful for egalitarian war builds for year 20-ish wars, which- if successful- give yet more unity-producing pops, even as Egalitarians have an edict very good for converting them to your dominant ethic spread, and thus pressing them to both your worker economy and unity economy.
Separately, Residency as a citizenship status is actually stronger than many appreciate.
Residents have a -10% happiness, -50% political weight, but most importantly a -25% amenity upkeep requirement. While the happiness penalty is a stability debuff, the amenity requirement is a stability buff via making it easier to have excess amenities that increase happiness. (1.5x amenities required is +10% happiness.) You can also offset the 10% with the benefits of living standards. While this is always 10% less happiness than a citizen, the most important impact of pop happiness is the impact on state ethics cohesion. As long as happiness is above 50%, and amenities are positive, you're generally having higher pull to your state ethics than divergence.
A reason -25% amenity reduction is really useful, though, is that it can easily make gene clinics as viable for first 25 pop amenities as entertainers are for pure citizens. Basic coloniy buildings/2 rulers provide 11 amenities. At 80% habitability, 25 citizens need 30 amenities, or 19 from amenity jobs, the usual basis of 2 entertainers rather than 2 gene clinic healthcare workers and 1 entertainer. 25 residents need a bit under 24 amenities, or 13 from amenity jobs. 1 luxury housing (1000 minerals, 4 energy upkeep) covers the gap, letting 2 gene clinic workers- with their growth rate buff and job output buff- be as effective as 2 entertainers for citizens.
The main drawbacks of Residency is faction considerations. Residents cause a significant bias towards the Xenophile and Egalitarian factions, which isn't always desirable, and the decrease in faction unity per pop. Between less unity per pop, and a less stable ethics attraction situation (lower happiness, xenophile pull), it can be harder to keep your faction plan stable.
Unless, of course, what we've uncovered here.
The exploit for both of best worlds will be Fanatic Egalitarian-Materialist, where the bonuses come from the official ethics, but the benefits come from xenophile-ethics attraction and materialist living standards.
The goal here will be that you use your full citizen pops (and robots) as your worker base, where their full citizenship/no-citizenship faction unity is unchanged, while setting up your alien pops as resident researchers under Academic Privilage. Academic Privilage is +10 happiness for specialists (negating the happiness penalty), +10% research (equivalent to Intelligent for any RNG species), and +400% political weight (the exploit enhancing faction unity). If you set up a trade build and Merchant Spam, you can even spam 900% Merchants who, even if not thrifty, will produce substantial unity based on the exploit.
The fact that Xenophile will almost certainly be an overwhelming faction attraction is a feature, not a bug. It's not a state ethic, so pop unhappiness can go there, especially with the extremely high Xenophile ethic attraction of free xenos. However, as Egalitarian and Materialist you have no core disputes with the Xenophile faction, and it's trivial to keep them at 100% faction approval.
The core of the build will probably be using an aggressive early-war build (focusing techs on military, bypassing robots early on), using your first decade extra unity to race through Supremacy as well as an econ tradition to help afford the corvette fleets to conquer. Then you use your Egalitarian Encourage Political Thought edict to convert the captured homeworld of residents into unity-producing specialists/scientists to catch up on the econ science you bypassed for the war rush, and put your war-infrastructure towards CG and bloom with robots from a stronger position.
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I get this event--I play with More Events Mod, Extra Events Mod, and Expanded Events Mod (I like my game vanilla but with a lot more story content). The event is pretty poorly thought out, as the iteration right now imposes empire-wide penalties that renders residency non-viable for more than a few years as a citizenship status.
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