Should unhappy factions cost unity?

[Dinkelman]

I think it's weird how even factions that are against your government ethics still give some positive unity. The cost of diverging ethics should be that it's harder to unify your population. Right now, it seems you get up to 100 unity collectively from all factions if full approval on all, and then there are some modifiers that can increase it. The calculation is dependent on support and approval as factors, but the way it works makes your choices (traits, policies, etc.) quite negligible in terms of the result. Factions deserve an overhaul, but maybe making them have a stronger impact would at least be an improvement.

Just as a side note, the effect factions have on your population is also quite negligible because of all the diminishing steps. If you get a faction to 80%-100% happiness it will only make its pops 10% happier. Let's be generous and say that all the pops on the planet belongs to that faction. The +10% happiness turns into +6 stability, that in turn results in 3.6% extra resources. That is the best case scenario.

I was hoping for more from this unity rework. Hoped that unity would tie more into the happiness and social cohesion of your population, including internal politics. One way of achieving that without reworking it again is to make the unity from factions scale better, and be much more variable. The faction unity could be a more significant portion of the total unity income, and unhappy factions would give negative unity. If faction happiness was a bit less incidental than it is now, and if factions were more dynamic, I think it could work. Factions with ethics opposing your government should generally not be happy in my opinion, which means more political issues are needed, and their effects need to be strong. To top it off, ethics divergence needs to be a thing, at least with distance from the capital. Maybe they will become unhappy enough to try to gain independence.

 

[arosenberger14]

In principle I agree; there should be some sort of unity cost for unhappy pops and especially recently conquered pops. If it's going to be done through factions though I think they should be updated first. Otherwise it may turn the faction unity gain into a wash between happy and unhappy factions. Ethics attraction and switching should be gone over again to make them more balanced (and Xenophile less dominant), and the minimum number of pops required to trigger a fraction should be increased to prevent microfactions from having too big an impact.

If done right this could finally be a good way to put some limits on the stability of wide conquering empires. Maybe conquered pops could have a happiness penalty requiring a unity cost to clear out ("coring pops"), or angry pops could drain unity. Maybe even tie it into sectors and have distant sectors require more unity upkeep, or maybe have sector capitols reduce unity upkeep or sprawl.

 

[Paul93]

I fully agree. In my opinion, factions below 40% should give negative unity, factions between 40% and 50% should give no unity and only factions above 50% should give incrementally more unity. The lower limit could be set to 30%, but you get the idea.

However, speaking of factions and internal politics, I think that a more deeper rework is needed. I am eager to know more about the new "Situations", though I don't expect them to revolutionize the internal politics.

 

[Olterin]

Hmm... I don't know that I would agree that faction income is negligible. It can be, if one does not build for it. But on the other hand, I did run one test game as a parliamentary democracy (fan. egalitarian) and that happy faction unity income was no joke by the midgame, counting for somewhere between one half and one third of my total unity income.

It was very noticeable, the lack of this unity income, in the games I've tried since. So yes, hitting unhappy factions with a unity upkeep? That would be felt. If that's not enough, make this effect cascade out to unity-producing pops - if their happiness sinks below 50%, they cost unity instead of making it.

 

[Pancakelord]

I think avoiding overcomplicating things with factions is best.

Imo make all pops with ethics opposite to your governing ethics (e.g. pacifists if you are a militarist government) cost unity in upkeep. Some social class modifiers could be used to offset this.

• Non-gestalts
  • Residents and indentured servant-slaves would have -25% negative upkeep (e.g. -3 if the base is -4).
  • Chattel/livestock/domestic servants/battlethrall Slaves would cost 50% less negative upkeep (e.g. -2 unity if the base is -4 unity)
  • Pops being purged (undesirables) would cost 100% less negative upkeep (I.e. this doesn't apply to them, they're enemies of the state).
  • Criminals would cost 100% more negative upkeep (e.g. -8 unity if the base is -4 a month, for example).
  • Any pop with the "recently conquered" (but not "recently freed") or "recently enslaved" status flag, irrespective of ethics, could also undergo -unity upkeep.
• Gestalts
  • Deviant pops in gestalt empires would be the only source of unity upkeep. Ethics and happiness wouldn't apply.

The net upkeep could be doubled if the pop opposes a fanatic governing ethic - so having materialists in a fanatic spiritualist society could be very bad, for example.

A Harmony tradition could reduce the effects. Or faction or planetary decisions could burn resources (influence? Lol) to force-convert pops - or atleast mitigate their upkeep, for a time.

Factions, which mostly work off pop happiness, don't really need to factor in to this at all though, it'd feel clumsy with the way their demands currently work and would just serve to average out positives and negatives, unless they're reworked to work quite differently to how they currently do. Just sticking to ethics keeps things cleaner imo.

 

[MK1980]

imo faction approval should have a scalable effect on unity. either % modifiers (with factions below 50% acting as a negative modifier) or perhaps a (small) direct unity gain for every pop in happy factions and direct cost for every pop in unhappy factions. doesn't have to be very elaborate - just number of pops in the faction multiplied by a "per pop" unity yield or cost depending on faction approval.

if you have 1000 pops in your super happy spiritualist faction, it makes sense that they yield more total unity than a much small country with 15 pops in the faction - after all the 1000+ pops empire also pays a lot more unity for most of the game features that now make use of unity

also, if you get lots of unhappy wrong ethics xenos from conquest, a unity cost per unhappy pop would encourage the player to interact with the faction system (like changing some policies) to try and get them to a neutral stance that doesn't drain your unity

 

[John MacWhat]

I'm going to keep beating my drum that colony stability should modify a colony's contribution to sprawl. Why do I bring this up? Because then low faction approval would lead to higher pop unhappiness, which would lower stability, and consequently lead to more sprawl. And higher sprawl would mean that there is higher tradition cost, higher edict cost, and in general it would mean the value of unity declines as a consequence of dissatisfied factions.

 

[Dinkelman]

Hmm... I don't know that I would agree that faction income is negligible.

Well the income is not negligible, but the differences between the levels you get kind of is. Factions can be ignored and you still get almost the same amount