What exactly is the point of some factions showing 2 ethics? (one does nothing)

[Pancakelord]

Here, we have the "First Strike legion", which is the Imperialist faction

The UI (when hovering over the faction icon) claims that Imperialist factions have joint affinity with the Authoritarian & Militarist Ethos - in brown text above.

However, the UI (in the second tooltip over the ethic icons) seems to only report "militarist" as a guiding ethic.

Indeed, I currently have a council with 1 authoritarian and 2 materialists on it. The other two factions (Auth and Materialist affinity) are happily reporting representation on the council.

The Imperialist faction should be fine with this, as they - per tooltips - are happy to be represented by authoritarians... But the Imperialist faction isnt happy.
This is because the Imperialist faction is actually looking for only representation by militarist-ethos leaders.

I dont think this even necessarily counts as a bug... factions have always worked this way (having just 1 keyed guiding ethic - though it didnt do much pre3.8).
It just looks like a UI change that only serves to confuse players.


Separately, has anyone figured out what the visual_ethic is referencing? I've not found the underlying "imperialist_visual_ethic" file, after doing a quick file dive, yet.

Edit: Sneaky PDX, the visual_ethic property is actually just a loc string with extra steps. I guess the good part about this is we can print any loc symbols in to the ethic column we want for mods - though it doesnt resolve the guiding ethic & council acceptance dissonance:

 

[Pancakelord]

Decided to circle back to this, now that im done playing vanilla for the achievements, and yep, the ethos field is able to take any old text

I didn't realise any job icon works in £***£, I thought it was just those in icons/text_icons

Guiding ethic still requires an ethos, but at least it just informs the tooltip over the food icon (in above) - and the council affinity modifier - so it can be ignored if you're going for a non-ethical faction (such as one based on jobs, or something like sector secession - alongside a situation).

Should be possible to easily make some non ethically bound factions and have their wants reflected pictographically.

Factions are also parameterised so, in theory, you could also have a scripted localisation that flicks between icons depending on faction approval, or whatever -- though I have not tested this.

• If it's possible, one use: you could have a spiritualist icon that switches into a machine intelligence icon, for the spiritualist faction, when you embrace cybernetics, indicating it's transformation into a machine cult (alongside triggers for different demands and so on) - without the wholesale replacement of the pop faction (more efficient?)

 

[Me_]

I feel like this is some unfinished feature or maybe an aspect of faction rework that sneaked into release too early.

 

[Rafss]

Internal faction politics update confirmed :3
(waiting for the confirmation in this week's *Paragons is Done, What is Next?* dev diary)

 

[Meneye]

The under one rule origin also has unfinished events in the files, some that addressed the ruler being mechanical or the empire being psionic. The DLC was rushed for undisclosed reasons, so a lot of the mechanics we have just aren't fleshed out.

I feel like the ethics were supposed to work as you said, so any displayed ethic can represent the faction in the council, but it wasn't finished in time and they only added the visual aspect/ripped out a non-working mechanical aspect before release.