Strategies of managing happiness and ethic divergence

[Technotopia]

I'm not going to argue which way is best, but let's describe possible strategies here.
Any empire intending to grow huge needs a plan about handling big population: happiness and ED are interconnected things and neglecting one of them means you may have troubles with other. Unfortunately, what can you do depends on your pick of ethos, traits and governments. This limits the viable starting options of ethos and traits.
For a relatively noob player like me would be great to know which combinations are playable and which are guaranteed pain in the middle-late game.

My five cents:
Now playing materialists + fanindividualists + communal + direct democracy (subconscious consensus). It is more or less okay, but xenophobic aliens on my planets are big pain, their 'alien overlords' penalty is too big. With all the government bonus and +15 happiness from entertainment forum, and also governor they stay above 50 happiness, but of course their xenophobia is forever, as they still have ED > 0.
Had particularly bad time when after being humiliated in a war, I got a request to give my population to the preserve in xenophilic FE, of course you can't turn down such a request until you have ~50k power, so I got ten years of -20 happiness.
Now I'm trying to get rid of the wrong ethos, especially reeducate xenophobes. Information quarantine and social welfare. Not sure if this will work. Maybe I should delay reeducation untill I have mind control lasers (do individualists allow them, by the way?)
Summary for this:
(+) materialist individualist: can have a subconscious consensus +10 happiness and a good secondary bonus to leader XP
(+) individualist: entertainment forum building. +15 happiness for 6 energy. Probably best happiness building.
(-) fanatic individualist: no slaves or purging for wrong ethos/race
(++) fanatic individualist: reduced impact of ethos mismatch on happiness, you can have dissidents but they aren't terribly unhappy, just grumbling a bit
(+) materialists: They are ok with robots, robot leaders.

Did I forgot something?

 

[nfmarque]

I dont have much problem with xenophobes, under fanatic individualist they give something like a -5 happiness penalty, hardly a problem.
Can u post a ss of the tooltip on those xenophobes? i am very curious.

 

[Technotopia]

I dont have much problem with xenophobes, under fanatic individualist they give something like a -5 happiness penalty, hardly a problem.
Can u post a ss of the tooltip on those xenophobes? i am very curious.

I'll post it later. Just remember they have -12 for alien overlords and on top of that some hatred towards other races living on the same planet. This is for fanatic xenophobes. nonfanatics are better and I think with all the edicts I can make their ED in a green zone to make sure they won't degrade further into fanatics.
I believe plain xenophobes get -10 and fanatics get -30 for alien overlords, this is factored down by fanatic individualism, so instead of -30 I got -12 which is still kinda nasty.

 

[Technotopia]

I'm thinking about taking fanatic materialist with collectivist next time. The ED shouldn't be a problem, once I have the ministry of benevolence, but there is no happiness building and no happiness from government. So, even if everybody has right ethos, I still can get happiness penalties for various things, and happiness below 50 translates into major hit to all output.
So is the fanmaterialist + collectivist combo viable? If yes, how to add some happiness? Of course governors and edicts can help, but it isn't very scalable.

 

[tobias.mb]

So is the fanmaterialist + collectivist combo viable?

Collectivist alone is not enough to (efficiently) convert aliens to your ethos. Mainly because all their ED is locked behind mid-game techs.
The problem with that combo is, that you probably want to use synths at some point which will majorly piss off any non-materialistic pops. Together with not allowing alien leaders, you are looking at 40% happiness on your conquered pops at best.
HOWEVER as collectivist you can enslave them, so happiness is not really a problem.

In general you currently want to either be collectivist to enslave all dissidents, fan. Individualist to ignore them, or fan. spiritualist + collectivist to convert them. Everything else will sooner or later run into problems.

If your goal is to stack happiness:
Apart from the fan individualist + materialist you have mentioned, I also recommend fan individualist + spiritualist. You also get a happiness gov form, but with some ED. Not enough to convert anyone, but it will keep your core loyal to your ethics. Downside is of course that you don't get robots.
You can also try a combination with Xenophobe or pacifist, as these also get happiness buildings.
And try to find an artist enclave. Their 10% empire wide happiness buff is relatively cheap.

 

[EuropaCam]

So is the fanmaterialist + collectivist combo viable? .

In my last game I played my Soviet Space Sloths, who are Mil / Mat / Col, with few problems in an 800-star galaxy. Admittedly due to various circumstances I started conquering my neighbors (err, I mean freed them from their capitalist chains in the name of the Proletariat) a bit later than usual, so those collectivist techs weren't too far off at the time. But even in the early stages I kept the recently "liberated" populations under control with edicts and faction suppression until their re-education was complete. If some world had a significant number of pops below 50% happiness at first, it wasn't that big of a deal since they represented a small % of my empire, and would come around to the proper respectful attitude sooner or later.

Much sooner, in fact, once I did have the Ministry of Benevolence and Frontier Commissars, plus those Mind Control Lasers for any particularly annoying counter-revolutionary types.

If you do incorporate any Spiritual types, their dismay with your Synths will fade as they become assimilated to your way of thinking as above.

And as Tobias pointed out, if you are in touch with an Artists Enclave you can commission a festival to boost morale. Assuming they don't run off with the funds....

 

[Technotopia]

I also thought about collectivist + materialist + militarist or individualist + materialist + militarist.
Materialist because of synth and science institute, and their government too. Militartist gives arena which has modest buff to happiness, but also much needed ethics convergence.
Whats better individualism or collectivism is not clear yet.

 

[zanaikin]

I use Spiritualist for ethic divergence, and while on paper it's not as good as Collectivist, my experience actually note it as better.

Ethic Divergence is more useful in the early/early-mid game than late-mid/late game. Spiritualist ethos starts off with -10% empire-wide ethic divergence (fanatic with -30%) without any special buildings or research. This is huge, because Collectivist's Frontier Commissar and Ministry of Benevolence both require unique, rare techs that, unless you savescum, often don't pop up until many decades into the game. Meanwhile, Spiritualist's -10% will reduce most nearby colonies ethic divergence from the start.

For a non-xenophobic empire, ethic divergence stops being as much of an issue by late game. Even with much more distance penalty, you simply have too many ways of reducing it on a local or empire level. For example:

• Two strategic resources (-10% each) can be either traded for or bought from the enclaves.
• Conformist trait (-20%) can be genemodded to any distant planet.
• Ministry of Culture (-10%) is something you should be courting the artisan enclaves for as soon as you meet them.
• Loop Institute (-5% planetwide, with +10% happiness) is something all your planets should have if you play on single player (since AI doesn't trigger Horizon Signal events)
• There's also a ton of happiness buildings you can construct (after 50 years most of my pop hovers around 80-90% happiness) for more ethnic divergence.

Spiritualist even offers the cheap Symbol of Unity (-10% planet) for those very distant worlds.

Meanwhile, Individualist is extremely good for reducing the unhappiness policies penalties during those many years when you're trying to convert their ethos. Plus, as OP noted, best happiness building.

 

[EuropaCam]

Whats better individualism or collectivism is not clear yet.

Neither is "better," they each just require a different approach:

• With collectivists your goal is to get everyone to share the same viewpoint. Conformity is its own happiness.
  
  
• With fanatical individualists, you thumb your nose at ethics divergence (seriously, take the Deviants trait for an extra point somewhere else) and just focus on making your citizens happy. I'm guessing you'd use a similar approach with regular individualists, although I've only tried that once post-Heinlein and didn't play that game very long.

So you just have to decide if you want your space ducks all in a neat, orderly row, or if you are content to let your citizens cause a happy ruckus.

And of course be prepared for things to change with the next major game update.