Stellaris Dev Diary #260 - Summer Culture

[SeraphAscending]

You know, just once I'd like the "Culture Workers should care about Traditions!" crowd to bother to suggest the 13 different, distinct effects they want on Culture Workers.

I mean if it's so obvious that it should be Traditions instead of Ethics, then obviously they've thought about this and have some ideas. Come on, don't be shy, lets see what 13 distinct things you'd add up to 7 to for every Culture worker in your empire.

While i do agree that this would be very difficult to implement in a balanced and intuitive manner, i don't think the idea that culture workers being linked to traditions is in any way unreasonable. Thematically, it is a great fit.

I do like this approach to it:

Why not have traditions unlock cultural policies instead, which alter the output of culture workers? You could then have some policies unlocked by ethics (not every ethics would need a cultural policy option) and some unlocked by traditions (again, not every tradition would need an option, only some).

If completing a tradition tree unlocks a new cultural policy that increases culture worker upkeep slightly, but adds new bonuses, we'd have a great solution.

This gives the benefit of linking culture workers to traditions, but doesn't make them grow OP over time by just adding more and more different bonuses at no additional cost.
It would also not "force" an increase in upkeep for a bonus that might not synergize well with your empire build.

 

[currylambchop]

Ministry of Culture is still bugged and you can only build one of it in your entire empire.

Might be intentional? After all you can only have one shroudwalker teacher too.

 

[Maethendias]

It's also the reason why they have the Deviancy mechanic, the orders are not always correctly followed and some "malfunctioning" drone is certainly expected.

However the lack of factions is the main offender for Gestalts bad unity production, it's undeniable. Even though I disagree that they should produce more unity than regular Empires, I think Gestalts should get a similar per pop unity production, a rework for them would be really appreciated.

the deviancy mechanic makes absolutely no sense for machine empires in the first place, because the majority of times where you have to acutally worry about deviancy is when you have organic pops on your worlds
which is dumb, because why would a machine empire that wants to get rid of organics in one way or another, (or even if they would enslave them) even care about their happiness, and why would their unhappiness make rogue drones?

and even the base deviancy per pop is dumb, considering how a machine intelligence would run...
like i said countless times, a machine gestalt is not the same as a hivemind, it is in fact, quite the opposite

a technological singularity, by its nature, doesnt consist of many individual agents.... but one
it cant be anything else

 

[Tannhäuser Cake]

You know, just once I'd like the "Culture Workers should care about Traditions!" crowd to bother to suggest the 13 different, distinct effects they want on Culture Workers.

I mean if it's so obvious that it should be Traditions instead of Ethics, then obviously they've thought about this and have some ideas. Come on, don't be shy, lets see what 13 distinct things you'd add up to 7 to for every Culture worker in your empire.

I just used a timetravel device to post a list of suggestions in this thread a week ago.

 

[Ferrus Animus]

Might be intentional? After all you can only have one shroudwalker teacher too.

It was empire unique some patches ago. It then got redesigned (new building icon, planetary effect instead of empire -wide effect) and made planet unique.
You can also now buy additional ones at the enclave (meaning someone had to program that dialogue option in).

However there is still a flag set when you build it, preventing one from building a second one.

So I am reasonable certain it is not intentional. However either way it is bugged, either by having a wrong tooltip and a superflous enclave buy option, or by being restricted to be only build once, when it should be able to be built more than once.

 

[Lifeas]

Hey, Alfray Stryke. Don't you think Machines was nerfed too harsh on unity rework? I'm having an issue with Coordinator jobs, their upkeep is so high. It makes only Rogue servitors viable. I'm talking from a Competitive Multiplayer point of view so bear in mind, that a peace timer is usually till 2030. You can manage to finish only around 2 traditions while Bios and Hives 2,3. Since for bios you have Trade value for unity and factions and for Hives you have Synapse drones which produce unity and amenities( which is meta making your synapse drone(upkeep 2energy2food) be your amenities production source as well). could be something similar choice for robots since the coordinator jobs(upkeep 4) reduce deviance with tradition which is not useful at all. (all Robot players please upvote my post if possible ^^)

 

[CometBliss]

Hey, Alfray Stryke. Don't you think Machines was nerfed too harsh on unity rework? I'm having an issue with Coordinator jobs, their upkeep is so high. It makes only Rogue servitors viable. I'm talking from a Competitive Multiplayer point of view so bear in mind, that a peace timer is usually till 2030. You can manage to finish only around 2 traditions while Bios and Hives 3+. Since for bios you have Trade value for unity and factions and for Hives you have Synapse drones which produce unity and amenities( which is meta making your synapse drone(upkeep 2energy2food) be your amenities production source as well). could be something similar choice for robots since the coordinator jobs(upkeep 4) reduce deviance with tradition which is not useful at all. (all Robot players please upvote my post if possible ^^)

Hive do not finish 3 trees within 30 years, sorry.

 

[Anger Management]

Hive do not finish 3 trees within 30 years, sorry.

The norm in multiplayer is to finish 2 trees and take 2 points in a third (discovery for research alternative or synchronicity for hive). Machine can barely finish 2 trees by y30.

 

[CometBliss]

The norm in multiplayer is to finish 2 trees and take 2 points in a third (discovery for research alternative or synchronicity for hive). Machine can barely finish 2 trees by y30.

Hives also can barley finish 2 trees as well. They can finish prosperity/sync get two points into the tree and sometimes barley finish supremacy.

 

[Jstanley3]

Please fix unity for machine empires. Rogue Servitor is so strong it feels like a must pick. Other machine empires should be fun to play in multiplayer games, but struggle to be able to keep up with other empires when it comes to traditions/unity.

 

[The5lacker]

While i do agree that this would be very difficult to implement in a balanced and intuitive manner, i don't think the idea that culture workers being linked to traditions is in any way unreasonable. Thematically, it is a great fit.

You can justify literally infinite bad ideas with "but the flavor though." Flavor is always, always, always the absolute easiest part of something, and the most flexible. Flavor doesn't have to interact with any other systems, or be balanced, or even necessarily be consistent. It's fiction. Fiction can be whatever you imagine. That doesn't mean everything you can imagine is equally good.

I just used a timetravel device to post a list of suggestions in this thread a week ago.

Fair enough, I did miss that someone had actually put in the legwork. And you even put in some numbers so that's nice.

Still didn't address the core problem of actually balancing a job whose output goes from "literally nothing" at the start of the game to "potentially a more efficient base output than any other job in the game." Unless you're planning on adding all this ON TOP of the 4 Unity and 10% GEA that is the base output in the main post, in which case you *definitely* have the single highest base output imaginable for any single pop, and given several of your outputs cover your pop upkeeps, potentially one that's turning nothing into something.

I'm still not really seeing the point of this, to be frank. It seems like an alternatively purely for the sake of being an alternative, and a much harder to balance one at that. If the goal is to give Unity rushing empires an edge, by having their culture workers just be numerically insane compared to everyone else's, I feel like there are better ways of buffing Unity-focused Empires (like cleaning up Designations a bit so Planetary Ascension actually lets you speed up advanced resource production, for example.) If the goal is just flavor, like I already said, you can justify any bad idea with flavor. When push comes to shove, flavor always has to bend first, because this is a game system first and foremost. Sacrificing comprehensible design on the altar of flavor isn't going to be good for anybody in the long run. Adding Ethics variations to Culture Workers is already pushing it as far as complexity goes, and that's only picking 3 from a list of 8. 7 from a list of 13 is variance of a higher order of *magnitude.*

 

[Tannhäuser Cake]

Still didn't address the core problem of actually balancing a job whose output goes from "literally nothing" at the start of the game to "potentially a more efficient base output than any other job in the game." Unless you're planning on adding all this ON TOP of the 4 Unity and 10% GEA that is the base output in the main post, in which case you *definitely* have the single highest base output imaginable for any single pop, and given several of your outputs cover your pop upkeeps, potentially one that's turning nothing into something.

This, too, was addressed previously.
One poster pointed out that output growth is normal for most jobs, so this would not stand out that much.
One variant is to limit the bonus to the first three tradition trees (in one combination suggestion I even suggested just the first one tradition tree).
One variant is to have each new output remove one current benefit (-1 Unity or reduced bonus to ethics attraction).
Another variant is to make it a cultural policy, which could include a generic default option and each tradition tree adds another option.

I'm still not really seeing the point of this, to be frank. It seems like an alternatively purely for the sake of being an alternative, and a much harder to balance one at that.

Much easier than the nightmare of balancing bonuses based on ethics, though, for reasons I have already pointed out in previous posts, such as:

• Ethics are options that compete with each other, and block each other, and must be tightly balanced against each other (can only pick 3 of 16 alternatives), whereas tradition trees are more complementary (can freely pick any 7 of 11 alternatives). Tradition trees also do not need to be perfectly balanced in the same way, they just need to be good enough to be worth considering either overall, or in a specific phase of the game (Expansion, Discovery), or for a specific niche (Mercantile, Subterfuge). Tradition trees are additionally easier to balance since they have so many bonuses; if one bonus to Culture Worker would be slightly stronger than another, it could be handled by slightly nerfing one of the many bonuses in the tradition tree.
• Ethics have much more narrow conceptual definitions than tradition trees, greatly limiting which bonuses can be considered appropriate. Tradition trees, on the other hand, each naturally covers many different kinds of bonuses. New bonuses are easy to come up with and justify.
• Ethics offer 2 main bonuses and ethic-unique bonuses. Between them, across all eight ethics, most of the distinct and relevant bonuses have already been taken. Tradition trees, on the other hand, offer so many different bonues that overlaps already happen in several places, without that having any major impact on any tradition tree's identity or relevancy (even if it would be more preferable to have them be completely distinct).

More issues were also listed in those previous posts. Long story short, I do not expect there is any ethic-based set of bonuses that does not have significant drawbacks.

If the goal is to give Unity rushing empires an edge, by having their culture workers just be numerically insane compared to everyone else's, I feel like there are better ways of buffing Unity-focused Empires (like cleaning up Designations a bit so Planetary Ascension actually lets you speed up advanced resource production, for example.) If the goal is just flavor, like I already said, you can justify any bad idea with flavor. When push comes to shove, flavor always has to bend first, because this is a game system first and foremost. Sacrificing comprehensible design on the altar of flavor isn't going to be good for anybody in the long run. Adding Ethics variations to Culture Workers is already pushing it as far as complexity goes, and that's only picking 3 from a list of 8. 7 from a list of 13 is variance of a higher order of *magnitude.*

For me, the primary issue is to avoid significant problems associated with adding Culture Worker effects based on ethics. Hence why I have argued for several other sources of variable bonuses as well, not just tradition trees.

 

[Tannhäuser Cake]

About the monument series of buildings - with the suggested changes, they would boost Unity in three different ways:

• +5% bonus to Unity production, per building level
• +1 Unity per Ascension Perk, per building level
• +2 Unity jobs (Culture Workers), per building level

Perhaps it is just me, but this combination feels a bit like Unity overkill. More so when factoring in that the GEA bonus of the jobs added will mean greater Faction Unity output. This could risk making the (nominally) ordinary Unity jobs an even less common sight, as the monument buildings would reduce the need for them, from no less than four directions at the same time.

Are all the Unity benefits really necessary if Culture Workers are coming back as a primarily Unity-focused job, with a set of three extra variable bonuses? Perhaps Culture Workers and monuments could instead be more like Medical Workers and clinics? They are already similar in that they are added by planet-unique buildings.

• The buildings that add Medical Worker jobs do not add any special bonuses.
• Medical Worker is an Amenities job, but the output is half that of the main Amenities job (Entertainer).
• The "gimmick" of the Medical Worker job is instead the set of 3 extra bonuses.

Applying those design principles from Medical Workers to Culture Workers would mean removing the current monument building bonuses, setting the Culture Worker output of Unity to 2, and having 3 modifier bonuses be the distinguishing benefit of the job.



For instance:

• One bonus could be the suggested bonus to governing ethics attraction, which would always be relevant and useful (though preferably reduced to 5% per Culture Worker, and the baseline GEA bonus could also be reduced for this to be properly balanced and avoid GEA power creep).
• One bonus could be a job-specific output bonus, or job-specific Happiness bonus, determined by the planet designation (which would ensure that it will be a relevant and useful bonus).
• The third bonus could be determined by tradition trees (either the first one picked or an option), or government authority type, or something else.

 

[markeyssc]

I love the idea of re-introducing culture workers, and I hope it can be a nice segue for introducing some kind of new game mechanic centered on culture/religion.

As others have noted, the pacifist ethic bonuses would be unneeded. The only time I have a crime problem with my pacifist play throughs is when a criminal megacorp builds branch offices. So the crime reduction seems like a wasted benefit. Personally, reducing empire sprawl from pops on the planet would be a nice bonus.

However, I am seeing that the culture worker bonuses for each ethic attempt to complement the ethics, but don't give the same bonuses that the ethic already grants. So pacifist empires already sitting on 15%/30% reduction empire sprawl from pops also receiving even more empire sprawl reduction would be a bit unbalanced compared to the other bonuses ethics get from these jobs. From a roleplay perspective, I understand the crime reduction (a pacifist culture would most certainly be anti-crime), but considering pacifist gameplay, crime is already a non-issue in most cases.

Going off what I believe the devs are trying to do (providing bonuses for each ethic but not adding to bonuses that ethic already receives), I think a nice complementary bonus for pacifist culture workers would be an empire-wide reduction in empire sprawl effects. Maybe something like .5% per job (or 1% for fanatics).

 

[Nevars]

• Materialist: +2 Amenities (Planet) :

Do you mean +2% amenities ? Because only +2 is really underwhelming compared to others. Especially for materialists that are enslaving robots until the end of midgame, so they need less amenities, so this +2 is almost useless.

Well when priest, one of the main strength of spiritualist got nerfed to only provide +2 amenities, I think it is a fair game that materialist will get saddle with this useless bonus instead of other worthwhile thing too.

So this is fitting if you just don't look on culture worker in isolate but take into accounted of how every amenities worker that doesn't named entertainer got nerfed.

 

[iTigeR]

I consider it a big omission that in stellaris there is no mechanics of a cultural victory in like in civilization. This mechanic would perfectly intersect with existing ones, could influence the success of espionage, uprisings among neighbors, population migration - why live in an uncultured democracy if there is an attractive dictatorship nearby?

 

[SeraphAscending]

I consider it a big omission that in stellaris there is no mechanics of a cultural victory in like in civilization. This mechanic would perfectly intersect with existing ones, could influence the success of espionage, uprisings among neighbors, population migration - why live in an uncultured democracy if there is an attractive dictatorship nearby?

I think that is intentional, since any victory condition is basically irrelevant to the game.

Also, the "finale" of the game is essentially a global fight for survival.
Civ 6 and others are a lot more "competitive" in nature. The endgame is exclusively about competing with other regular parties and not about a new invasor that is a threat to every party.

The endgame crisis is intended to challenge the galaxy and people can decide whether they cooperate to defeat it, exploit the situation to take over their weakened foes or forcefully unite against it under a galactic emperor.

The endgame crisis is extremely unfair.
It can start directly on your homeworld or it can be at the other end of the galaxy, or even at the center of that determined exterminator that's been giving you a hard time.
A mechanic like this purposefully doesn't exist in games like Civ6, which are more intended to be more competitive and less a gigantic sandbox of randomness and consequences of your own choices. (as PDS games are intended)

I have hundreds of hours in this game and not once have i really cared about the official victory condition, simply because i feel it is very much not essential to the appeal of the game.
Adding more (potentially early) win conditions is not likely to improve the game, but just add on a whole new balancing act for the devs. If they make "culture victory" a thing and then change something in the unity/tradition system this victory might become a lot harder or a lot easier all of the sudden.
So if we were to put up a vote for "additional victory conditions", my vote would be a very hard no. It's not going to make the game better. It's more likely to detract from the game rather than add enjoyment.

 

[Sanvone]

I really like +Edict Fund modifier as it works in tandem with unity production.. Any extra edict fund = more unity while being over the edict fund.
By the same metric while I do love myself some Trade Builds I think +TV from lifestyle is kinda bad as it mostly works in combination with egalitarian.
I propose something that will work with basic Pacifist modifiers more.

• Pacifist: +2.5 Empire Size without penalty limit

Pacifists already have reduced empire size from population, so giving them little extra would also boost that unity output. On top of other bonuses that Pacifist would get from Empire Sprawl penalty reduction which don't seem too controversial given Pacifist gameplay limitation. Also building being limited would not bring back Bureaucrats spam for bypassing whole mechanics.

That said numbers could be crunched as I didn't theorycrafted for everything and Habitats are of some concern (on other hand Hiveminds - the strongest meme when it comes to empire size cost efficiency on habitats won't have access to it so it would be fine?)

 

[Critical Ethics]

• Pacifist: +2.5 Empire Size without penalty limit

We literally just got rid of sprawl limit modifiers!!!

Also I think unity + edict fund should be a bureaucrat thing because they're bureaucrats and upholding edicts is what bureaucrats do. Bureaucrats need more intuitive flavour as is.

 

[SeraphAscending]

We literally just got rid of sprawl limit modifiers!!!

Also I think unity + edict fund should be a bureaucrat thing because they're bureaucrats and upholding edicts is what bureaucrats do. Bureaucrats need more intuitive flavour as is.

I think edict fund makes a lot of sense with bureaucrats. Implementing the governments will is more what they do than unite.
Culture workers fit a lot more with the idea of unity.

Regarding Sprawl Limit modifiers:

• Culture Workers would not be spammable with the current design.
• You can't give a -x% empire size effect on something that you can get more than a very fixed amount of.
• the problem wasn't sprawl limit modifiers existing, but them being just a bureaucrat-tax, which did nothing to help slow down snowballing empires.

Personally, i think getting a local -x% planet empire sprawl as you get with planetary ascensions would be a good fit for pacifists and you wouldn't reintroduce sprawl limit modifiers, which would be a somewhat odd mechanic if this was literally the only time they show up.
This would allow pacifists to keep their planets even less impactful in regards to empire sprawl. So the numbers might actually become rather tiny - which could do a lot to make pacifists viable and less just pushovers, because their unity AND science economy is strong. To counteract their general weakness. (All that energy not spent fighting each other can be used productively after all.)