Stellaris Dev Diary #237 - Reworking Unity, Part One

[Uburian]

Bureaucrats, Priests, Managers, Synapse Drones, and Coordinators will be the primary sources of Unity for various empire types. Culture Workers have been removed.

While i overall think that the rework is going in the right direction, this line made me think otherwise, and reading this thread i think that I'm not the only one who thinks that way.

Culture and Art are two of the most defining aspects of civilizations (fictional or otherwise), and play a key role in guaranteeing their stability and progress. If you are removing culture workers, are you planing on expanding culture related game mechanics in another way?

 

[Turnil]

What will happen to the other sources of unity?

1. leader jobs. What will administrators produce? Only amenities or also other things? Will the High Priest still produce unity?
2. trade. Much unity is produced with the marketplace of ideas or the federation trade policy. will this change?
3. unity civics. There are many civics that gives you other means to produce unity (like police state wich gives you +1 unity for enforcers). Will they be able to keep these?
4. traditions. Many tradition trees has a unity production bonus. What will happen to these?

 

[Critical Ethics]

Planets full of bureaucrats maintaining the order of the empire are a common sci-fi trope, but admittedly a little dystopian. Maybe there's still a spot for Culture Workers out there.

If Trantor is your goal then it'd be neat if Bureaucrats had a ribbon ability that made sticking them all in one planet desirable while Culture Workers had a ribbon ability that made spreading them out more beneficial. Like if culture workers generated unity but also increased stability or governing ethics attraction or something then you'd want a few on each planet, but a "planet of culture workers" wouldn't be very useful. Meanwhile bureaucrats could generate unity and, I don't know, trade or something, so you want them all on one planet sitting beside your capital.

 

[Dragatus]

Planets full of bureaucrats maintaining the order of the empire are a common sci-fi trope, but admittedly a little dystopian. Maybe there's still a spot for Culture Workers out there.

Yes, I do think Bureaucrats should still be in the game for precisely that reason. But I always though of Unity as more of an abstract sense of common identity turned into numbers and I don't quite see bureaucrats providing the people with a sense of common identity unless being bureaucratic specifically is part of that identity, which in Stellaris would get modeled by having a relevant civic. Religion and culture on the other hand I can easily see as the foundation of a common identity.

That said, maybe you guys have a different conception of what Unity is supposed to be in the first place.

 

[Brakinger]

Impressive, very nice

Now let's Custodian's dev diary

 

[C0rvus19]

This looks really dang good! Looking forward to hearing more details in the future!

 

[Tannhäuser Cake]

Abandoning colony should be free. It is better to require influence when you try to re-colonize the planet, not for just abandoning it. This will prevent re-colonisation exploits, but will not punish abandoning colonies.

Or, colonizing a planet could cost influence to begin with.

Though my favored solution would be to entirely stop giving free pops to colonies, and use pop migration instead.
That would both put an end to cheesy recolonization and make early colony-spamming a more reasonable affair.

 

[arosenberger14]

Overall I'm very excited for these changes, you've done a great job identifying some key problems with the game and the proposals look like exactly what the game needs to help balance out tech and large empire dominance.

The reduction to sprawl in the empire capitol is very intriguing, could sector capitols and/or high level planetary capitols also give sprawl reductions? This would further promote concentrating pops in highly developed planets while retaining low development resource worlds for pop growth and basic resources, while also encouraging players to not just concentrate their pops in their empire capitol.

Flavor wise it does seem odd to have bureaucrats as the primary method of unity generation; while it makes sense that they'd help with the running of an empire, even a poorly administered state can have a high level of social cohesion through cultural means. I'm also somewhat leery of making a jobless per-planet monument building a significant source of unity generation as that promotes spamming planets or habitats to generate a ton of unity.

I'd like to hear more about how unity interacts with conquest and empire stability; seems to me that unity deficient empires should be at higher risk of having things like civil wars, divergent ethics, breakaway states, etc... Similarly, conquering a bunch of pops should also introduce a significant penalty to empire unity that's not just a simple matter of building a few police stations to raise planetary stability to get rid of. Some sort of mechanic like this would introduce interesting tradeoffs where tech focused empires could have the guns to conquer but have a harder time integrating their conquests, while unity focused empires be better at absorbing conquests but have a harder time developing cutting-edge tech to be militarily dominant.

Also, random idea, it'd be interesting if law changes required unity to pass instead of being basically free as they are now.

Finally, I'm very interested to hear more about the changes to tech; I've been advocating for some sort of tech diffusion mechanic for years now and really hope the new system will make it harder to run away with research. Giving sprawl some teeth again will definitely help prevent empires from rushing through the T3-T5+ techs in mid/late game, but the base tech costs may also help prevent the mid/late game going by too quickly.

 

[Liggi]

It should definitely, definitely be fleet strength, and not fleet size. An empire with a giant, unarmed fleet should not be able to project much power.

 

[Silens]

Abandoning colonies still costs Influence

After reading the DD again and thinking about it, that one doesn't sit right with me.

I understand why it was introduced, as people cheesed the system by abandoning/re-colonizing planets. But it bottlenecks players who take planets from fanatic purifiers or some hive mind in order to eliminate a threat, but ultimately don't want to keep the newly gained territory.

Would it be possible to give newly conquered planets a modifier to reduce the influence cost for abandoning them to 0 for a year or so? That would solve the problem.

Also, one more thing that fits the whole unity-theme: would it be hard to implement a button to re-fit conquered bases/stations to the new owner's shipset style? I can assimilate whole species and turn them to my own species, but not make the whole thing final by changing their starbases' appearance.

With certain 'unification' types uniformity should totally be an option. (be it through edicts, slowly turning conquered stations over time, or by slapping a re-fit cost to a new button, anything. The option to do so would be greatly appreciated)

 

[IntoTheStars]

Obviously it’ll all depend on the numbers how this ends up, but the goals I think are all great. Can’t wait to try the beta.

Also it’s just exciting that the curator program is able to make changes this significant. It makes me even more exciting for the future.

 

[TempestM]

I think having the player almost always to combat penalties for being over cap instead of allowing to increase the cap is a bad idea. People don't like numbers being in negatives. Fighting penalties with no way actual way to remove penalties in the first place would feel unpleasant


UPD:
Here's an idea: have both admin cap and penalties from independent empire sprawl.
With first you would have to actively do something to increase admin cap, just like now. Penalties would be in a similar way to how it's now or not, but as long as you're in the cap, no penalties.

The second would be something like Corruption from R2TW: you would always have some passive penalties that increase slowly with each pop or each settlement, and they can't be contained by staying inside some cap, but won't be as visible until you go wide too much, because they won't be presented as a "penalty for going wide" but as a steady price rise for expanding your empire more and more
Whether should you be able to actively negate this Corruption penalty is up to debate, depending on what penalties the first usual cap would have

 

[ruhrbaron]

i like the idea of implictly buffing spiritual empires, i really dont like the idea of nerving wide empires. More pops = more of everything. Tall empires are unrealistically powerful in stellaris as is imho.

And to those disagreeing i can only say, how should a tiny, few planet containing empire ever compete militariliy, scientifically or economically with a galactic empire??? There's no way and no how unless the bigger empire collapses in on itself for internal reasons... the kardeshev scale exists for a reason....

 

[TempestM]

Leaders now cost Unity to hire rather than Energy. They also have a small amount of Unity Upkeep. We understand that this increases the relative costs of choosing to hire several scientists at the start of the game for exploration purposes, or when “cycling” leader traits, as you are now choosing between Traditions and Leaders

We understand that this increases the relative costs

I was expecting to see "but" at the end. So the purpose of this change was solely to combat that cycling, to forcing player to stick with traits they don't want because they had a bad roll? In a 4x?

Would we ever see a rework of that problem with choosing leaders then? Where we wouldn't NEED to keep cycling leaders if we want to get something useful or specific because the game just gives you 3 options with no ways to influence random

 

[TempestM]

Interesting that this dev diary exists in Russian too, I don't think I've ever seen that for any dev diary! How come this one gets a Russian translation?

They all get one. But only here it's mentioned for some reason

 

[Dlin369]

Any chance technology can “diffuse” passively so empires that are behind in tech can slowly acquire technology or at least have a bonus in research if their neighbors have it?

 

[Panzarotto]

Great changes so far, very curious to see what is coming next!

 

[Farbros]

As a machine empire, I feel being discriminated in that system, because my leaders are immortal and I have to choose the right leaders from the beginning, but with that system it will put me way more behind, when cycling traits than the other empires.

 

[Panzerslothen]

Planets full of bureaucrats maintaining the order of the empire are a common sci-fi trope, but admittedly a little dystopian. Maybe there's still a spot for Culture Workers out there.

I strongly agree with the guy you were replying to, and to your bit here as well. Please do keep Culture Workers in the game in some capacity.

 

[DarkSafire]

The penalties for Sprawl are unavoidable in this system, but numbers have been reduced. One of the things I plan on watching during the Open Beta is whether we'll want some base Admin Capacity to exist. (For example, "Sprawl under 50 is ignored.")

Thanks for answer. I am all about penalties from sprawl being unavoidable, I just dont want situation where it ramps up too fast, especially in early game, forcing players to focus on compensating for it a priority or be slowed to crawl. Some breating room with base cap, with maybe small increases from capital building techs, would be welcome.

P.S. Dont remove culture workers, make them into unity-focused ruler jobs obtained form high level unity buildings etc.