Synthetic rights in a non-materialist egalitarian empire

[Aequinoctis]

I'm playing as a fanatic egalitarian, xenophile empire. Lately, my two latest factions have become upset. The True Democracy faction is upset because I don't have free movement, and the Xeno Tolerance faction is upset because I have Alien Slaves.

Since all of my biological citizens have the above rights, I think they are concerned about synthetics (they were fine before I upgraded from droids). But as a non-materialist empire, I can't grant synths full citizenship.

Is this intentional? Switching to outlaw AI seemed to appease them, ironically, since it inolved purging the 100+ synthetic pops they were concerned about. (Though of course my materialist faction is now up in arms.)

 

[OneHeadedHydra]

I found this out on my United Nations playthrough as well. It seems the only way to make them happy is by temporarily embracing the materialist faction, making synths citizens then switching back. Which isn't quite what I had in mind for my utopian "Everyone Matters, even AI!"-society.

PS: Another way is picking the Synthetic-related Ascensions, but I wasn't planning on that either.

 

[Aequinoctis]

I also noted that my very small authoritarian faction was happy that I had a "stratified society", despite being committed to equal rights for all - I think that was even before I had synths. Which was nice, but didn't really feel earned.

 

[OneHeadedHydra]

In a new twist, it seems that somehow my Synthetics found their own way to declare their independence .. By simply not telling anyone.
I just found out they all lost their slavery modifiers, even though the policy is still set to Servitude.

I'm guessing this happened when I was fiddling around with the default rights.

 

[NoTarget]

I registered an account here solely because I wanted to complain about this. I think it’s an incredibly stupid idea, the whole faction getting upset thing would seem to indicate the devs didn’t even properly think it out when they were implementing it. As said the fact you have to outright ban synths to appease your factions makes them completely worthless to an egalitarian empire. I sincerely hope Paradox rethinks this and changes it in a future update.

 

[Tomn_Peng]

Got this problem myself, albeit in kind of a weird way - I got a few events that granted me a free robot pop, which upgraded to synthetic when I researched the tech, which promptly tanked my freedom and democracy faction's happiness because the synthetics didn't have full citizenship - which I COULDN'T offer them because I wasn't materialist. So one single synthetic pop caused practically my entire empire to take the streets in protest - which, like the OP, I eventually managed to defuse by outlawing AI entirely and dismantling the offending pop.

It's worth noting, by the way, that despite my AI policy being listed as "AI Servitude," which the tooltip claims allows you to dismantle AI pops at will, I wasn't able to purge or dismantle the synthetic pop by any method short changing my policy to AI Outlawed. Which also seems like a related bug? Generally speaking it seems like there's some unexpected coding interactions between the empire-wide AI policies and the new individual species rights.