Stellaris - Pop Political Power has Problematic Minimum and Maximum Values

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Lord of Owls

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Description
Pop Political Power has Problematic Minimum and Maximum Values

Game Version
2.2.2 (6eaf)

What version do you use?

Steam

What expansions do you have installed?
All of the above

Do you have mods enabled?


Please explain your issue is in as much detail as possible.
Political power currently does not work how players and apparently developers expect it to. Currently, there are caps on the maximum and minimum political power pops can have, with different caps depending on if they are above or below 50% happiness. If this is intended, it should be changed immediately as it makes almost all living standards completely worthless. In addition, this limit is why the slave processing facility is currently broken. Slaves are supposed to have 0.25 political power, but the minimum brings this up to 0.5, and thus decreasing it by 25% does nothing as no matter what it comes back to the minimum of 0.5. The values for minimum and maximum pollitical power are as follows (from game files, posted on the forums by asaz989 https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...r-weighting-math.1138232/page-3#post-24987675):

BASE_POLITICAL_POWER = 1 # Base political power
MIN_POLITICAL_POWER_POSITIVE_STABILITY_IMPACT = 0.0
MAX_POLITICAL_POWER_POSITIVE_STABILITY_IMPACT = 2.0
MIN_POLITICAL_POWER_NEGATIVE_STABILITY_IMPACT = 0.5
MAX_POLITICAL_POWER_NEGATIVE_STABILITY_IMPACT = 10

The equation for pop approval directly works like this: SUM [ ( Happiness of pop ) * ( Modified Political Power of Pop ) / ( Total Amount of Political Power on Planet ) ]
The political power per pop is limited depending on the values listed above.

Let's compare an in game example of how the calculations should work, vs how they actually work.

(See attached image)

Here we have: 2 rulers each with a happiness of 87% and 75% of the political power, 2 specialists each with a happiness of 80% and 15% of the political power, and 10 slaves each with a happiness of 0% and 9% of the political power. The living standard is stratified economy. If you do the math, you can see that these political power values displayed are correct. the total political power is 10*2 + 2*2 + 0.25*10 = 26.5
Rulers: 20 / 26.5 = 0.7547
Specialists: 4 / 26.5 = 0.1509
Slaves: 2.5 / 26.5 = 0.9433

Doing the math for what the pop approval rating gets you an approval rating of 77% on the planet. However, this is not what the actual approval value is. The actual value is 51%, which is exactly what you get once you take into account that the maximum happy political power for a pop is 2.0, and the minimum for unhappy pops is 0.5. This means that our rulers have 1/5th the political power they should have, while the slaves have double the political power they should have.

According to the dev diaries (this one to be specific https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...ary-123-planetary-rework-part-3-of-4.1116917/), happy rulers on stratified economy should be able to keep large amounts of unruly workers or slaves from decreasing stability too much. With the limits on positive political power and the minimum on negative political power, this cannot effectively be done. Additionally, all increases in political power beyond +100% for different strata under certain living conditions are purely a bad thing, as when ruler or specialist pops are happy their political power is capped, meaning they can't mitigate unhappy pops any more effectively, and if they're unhappy there is no limit on their political power, and they can massively tank the approval rating of a planet.

These limits on max and minimum political power must either be a bug, an oversight, or a feature that actively makes other features of the game completely worthless and that should be changed immediately. And, even if they are completely 100% intended and are to remain a part of the game, the in game text should be changed to reflect how political power is actually calculated, as currently the game does not adequately communicate to players how the system works, preventing true planning and strategy around pop approval without digging in the game files.

Steps to reproduce the issue.
Should be present in all DLC and any version of the game from 2.2 onwards.

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Small mod that chage this values to:
Code:
MIN_POLITICAL_POWER_POSITIVE_STABILITY_IMPACT        = 0.0
MAX_POLITICAL_POWER_POSITIVE_STABILITY_IMPACT        = 40.0
MIN_POLITICAL_POWER_NEGATIVE_STABILITY_IMPACT        = 0.0
MAX_POLITICAL_POWER_NEGATIVE_STABILITY_IMPACT        = 40.0

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1609187451
If I'm reading this right, this won't fix the nerve stapled/robot issue? IIRC they're being counted as having political power at default weight (50), which drags the average towards that point. It's especially a problem with Rogue Servitor empires, as it invalidates one of their core mechanics (happy bio-trophies making the empire happy as a whole).
 
If I'm reading this right, this won't fix the nerve stapled/robot issue? IIRC they're being counted as having political power at default weight (50), which drags the average towards that point. It's especially a problem with Rogue Servitor empires, as it invalidates one of their core mechanics (happy bio-trophies making the empire happy as a whole).
I have no clue how robots and nerve stapled pops work; they're considered by the game to have 50% happiness so would expect the limits to not apply to them, although what could be happening is that the 0.5 limit is inclusive of 50% happiness and thus they're getting that much political power. However, I do think that at least robot pops in machine intelligence should have some political power so 1. One bio trophy pop can't maximize the approval rating on a planet, making other bio trophies worthless there and 2. Machine intelligence who are using organics to produce energy actually have some way to stabilize their slave planets.
 
I have no clue how robots and nerve stapled pops work; they're considered by the game to have 50% happiness so would expect the limits to not apply to them, although what could be happening is that the 0.5 limit is inclusive of 50% happiness and thus they're getting that much political power. However, I do think that at least robot pops in machine intelligence should have some political power so 1. One bio trophy pop can't maximize the approval rating on a planet, making other bio trophies worthless there and 2. Machine intelligence who are using organics to produce energy actually have some way to stabilize their slave planets.
Hmm... I don't understand code very well, but that 50% could be coming from the minimum negative, which would make the mod effective on the problem. Is that what you're saying?

Synthetics should have political power (unless AI is outlawed, which severely limits what they can do), but not ordinary robots and droids. They're explicitly non-sentient. I haven't played around with Machine intelligence empires, so I can't really comment on that.
 
the problem isn't rly that drones in Gestalt empires have or don't have political power for their happiness ignoring pops. It's that political power doesn't exist for their empires so every pop uses the default political power of 1. In other words: every unit of livestock has the same political impact as your worker drones. The same goes for RS: it wouldn't make sense for only the biotrophies to matter, else every pop past the first bio trophy is a waste but having biotrophies vs drones be a 1-1 value, I don't know needs a lot of biotrophies to balance out the drones (far more than you needed in earlier version for the same amount of boost).
In the end I'd say you need to balance out the numbers for that case, not just pretend it didn't exist and let the gamemechanic use default values...
 
If the devs thought stratified economy is too good and so decided to put caps on political power, then they should show it and explain it in their game tooltip as well. Right now the game is just outright lying to us. It's ridiculous that the player has to dig deep into the forum threads to find out what the REAL game rule is. Like seriously? Also as a sidenote it also makes slave processing facility entirely pointless since slave political power will be 0.5 regardless.