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Stellaris Dev Diary #260 - Summer Culture

Hey folks, and I hope everyone is having a fantastic summer/winter break (depending on your hemisphere). I’ve found some time between my other summer experiments and the work we’re doing for 3.5 “Fornax” to dive into the feedback/suggestions lists. Since Eladrin is still away, you’re getting another sneak preview of what I’ve been working on.

One of the frequent requests from the Unity rework that was part of the 3.3 “Libra” patch earlier this year was for us to return Culture Workers to the game. Currently, they exist only as jobs provided by some event buildings, but many in the Community felt we removed some flavor/roleplay aspect when we removed them.

Over summer, I’ve been experimenting with potentially adding them back in. For context, in the current version of the game Culture Workers are a Specialist job that belongs to their own economic category, produce 3 Unity and 3 Society Research with an upkeep of 2 Consumer Goods.

Let’s have a look at an Autochthon Monument constructed by the UNE shortly after the start of the game.

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Showing the Culture Workers with some unusual modifiers

To start with, the monument is retaining the Unity from Jobs modifier and the passive Unity production per Ascension Perk, but additionally provides 2/4/6 Culture Worker jobs per tier of the monument. The same applies to the Corporate version of the monument.

The sharp-eyed might notice that there’s some odd modifiers being given: Worker Happiness? Pop Upkeep Reduction? What, might you ask, has happened?

In this experiment, we’re looking at Culture Workers having an output that depends on the Ethics of your empire. After all, what influences your culture the most if not your ethics?

These are the ethics-based modifiers we’re currently testing and whether their effects are Empire-wide or only affecting the planet that the building has been constructed on:
  • Materialist: +2 Amenities (Planet)
  • Spiritualist: -2.5% Amenity Usage (Planet)
  • Militarist: +1 Naval Capacity (Empire)
  • Pacifist: -2.5% Crime (Planet)
  • Egalitarian: +2.5% Worker Happiness (Planet)
  • Authoritarian: +5 Ruler Political Power (Planet)
  • Xenophobe: +3 Edict Fund (Empire)
  • Xenophile: -2.5% Pop Upkeep (Planet)

These modifiers are provided by both Culture Workers and Death Chroniclers (as their job-swap with the Memorialist civic) and are doubled in the case of Fanatic ethics. They are intended to be a small buff/addition to the job, with the Unity production from both the jobs and the building being the primary draw.

Additionally, Culture Workers/Death Chroniclers now belong in the Administrator category, in the Culture Worker sub-category meaning they’ll benefit from multiplicative bonuses to Administrator output (such as those provided by the Unification or Ecclesiastical planetary designations). They produce a base of 4 Unity and +10% Government Ethics Attraction (+2.5% Stability for Death Chroniclers) with 3 Consumer Goods upkeep.

There’s also been some discussion around having Resort Worlds add Culture Workers, and if I find time I’ll be looking into that as well.

To ensure that hive-minds and machine intelligences don’t feel left out, Sensorium/Simulation Sites now provide 2/4/6 Evaluator jobs per tier of the building. These now provide 4 Unity and 3 Amenities in exchange for an upkeep of 2 Energy.

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A hive-mind sensorium site providing 2 evaluator jobs.

Chronicle Drones provide the same Unity and Amenities output but give an additional +2.5% Stability in exchange for slightly higher upkeep (and that upkeep being based off of the upkeep cost of the pop working the job). Like their individualist equivalents, these jobs both now belong to the Evaluator sub-category of the Administrators jobs.

I’m not sure if we’ll have another surprise dev diary over summer, but our normal schedule should resume once Eladrin’s back and we’ll start delving into 3.5. Regardless I’ll be keeping a close eye on this thread for your thoughts, suggestions and any feedback.
 
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What is good is the building, not the job. As you’ve analyzed the building itself is already quite valuable, with the change I’d probably build it and yeet all the cultural workers out (deprioritize the job) due to their lack of designation bonus.

This does not justify adding culture workers whatsoever.

Remember the people complaining about lack of building slots all the time and ask to district-ize research? Building slot itself is a limited resource as well, especially strategic resource refineries can take up a lot of them. Maybe try tell those people to use slots on more unity.
Yes, I expect to keep building monuments but turn off the culture workers unless they would be efficient, or building slots get tight (at which point the monument's building slot efficiency more than makes up for any inefficiency in pop output).

If you think bureaucrats are worth putting anywhere in your empire, then a building with 15% unity from jobs, +12-24 unity (before bonuses) and 6 bureaucrat-equivalents is better. If you're tight on pops: build it for the flat unity, close the jobs, and fire some bureaucrats elsewhere without losing unity. This gives you 3-6 extra pops. If you're tight on building slots: build it for the jobs and let the flat unity more-than-compensate for the efficiency loss of not having them on a dedicated world. Then demolish the bureaucracy building that you took the pops from. This gets you more unity without costing more slots or more pops, and if you do it twice you can demolish a crystal plant/mine to get one slot back (since the two demolished bureaucrat buildings would have cost 3.6 or 4 crystals).

There's just no situation where a monument (with or without the jobs enabled, as the situation calls for) is worse than having actual bureaucrats somewhere in the empire. With priests or managers, maybe. But with bureaucrats, evaluators, or coordinators, definitely not.

Edit: this all comes with the caveat that it's only true once you get 3-5 ascension perks, and the flat unity starts scaling up. It's obviously worth it at 7 perks but the tipping point comes somewhere before that.
 
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Edit: this all comes with the caveat that it's only true once you get 3-5 ascension perks, and the flat unity starts scaling up. It's obviously worth it at 7 perks but the tipping point comes somewhere before that.

In terms of upkeep, the monument is worthwhile after 1 finished Tradition.

You're trading 1 energy for 1 unity (which is very worth it) and getting +5% more unity from jobs as a free bonus.

In terms of building slot efficiency ... I build it when there's no strong competition.
 
If you're assuming the building slot is free, it's even good without perks, since 2 politicians will get .6 unity from the base building's 5% bonus. But it only becomes better than a bureaucrat building in all situations once you've got a few perks under your belt.
 
I was actually about to suggest something similar so I'm glad I caught this dev blog or I would've looked silly.

That being said, one thing I'd like is for the +% Unity to be dropped from the building. There's already a *lot* of bonus Unity and I feel like the Monument line has invalidated the Auto-Curating Vault. No jobs, less flat unity, and a strategic resource cost is just an unfair comparison. Focusing the Monuments and Culture Workers more on your Empire and less on being Unity Source Number 3 seems more interesting to me. EDIT: Or Auto-Curating Vault could replace the Hypercomms Forum as the capstone on the line, that would also make sense to me.
 
Just going to link a suggestion of mine [here], which was about reintroducing culture workers, because it is relevant for the discussion.

The main idea i presented was simpler than this, but the idea was essentially that culture workers should be the main unity source, but bureaucrats give edict fund bonus. So bureaucrats are great at implementing the government's will, but culture workers would be about developing and progressing as a society. (bureaucrats would be more cost-efficient, but the output would be less flexibly usable)

This would obviously somewhat collide with the model presented here, because these culture worker bonuses would partially not really stack well if you had 20 jobs of them.
I just wanted to mention that concept for potential hybridisation, because i really like the idea of ethic-specific effects on culture workers.
 
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On the topic of Death Chroniclers/Chronicle Drones: as other empires are getting jobs from monuments as well, can the strategic resource upkeep for Pillar of Quietus and Galactic Memorial be removed, or at least moved to the jobs themselves (e.g. Pillar of Quietus could add .33 gas upkeep to Chroniclers, but add +1 unity each to compensate)? Without it granting the unique opportunity to double up on the monument's building slot efficiency for unity jobs and flat unity, the civic doesn't add enough benefit to warrant the hefty upkeep cost.

Right now, it's actually kinda painful to have to forgo the free unity from the monument itself (or suffer costs other empires don't) on planets where you don't need the stability, but you're getting improved building slot efficiency and stability/amenities in return.

Though if the Death Chronicler job is being buffed (4 unity is significantly better than 2 unity, 2 society), it may be a non-issue, as the jobs may be worth working for their own sake, even without other pops to support. "Take this civic so that your culture workers gain 2 amenities and stability, but also pay 2 gas per upgraded monument" still makes the civic of somewhat dubious benefit, in addition to the opportunity cost of taking another civic. One could take Byzantine Bureaucracy instead and get most of the same benefit, but without costing an additional 2 gas per planet.
 
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With the Evaluators making 3 amenities, I wonder if it will be viable for Gestalts later in the game to put monuments everywhere and do away with Maintenance Drones. (I suggest this not because the new Evaluators are especially powerful, but because Maintenance Drone, like Clerk, is a weak job.) You'd be replacing 3n Maintenance Drones + n other drones with 4n Evaluators, which is a good trade if 16 base unity (+unity from the monument) is worth significantly more to you than 8 energy plus a single drone's net output. Even if you wouldn't want to do this on every colony, any opportunity for Gestalts to diversify their options for getting amenities is probably a good thing.
 
They are intended to be a small buff/addition to the job, with the Unity production from both the jobs and the building being the primary draw.

After some thought I suggest reconsidering this and making the ethics based effects the main draw. It would differentiate Culture Workers more from Bureaucrats they currently resemble so much.

They could produce 1 Unity as a base and then for each ethic you get another effect that's intended to be worth about as much as 1 Unity (or 2 Unity in case of fanatic ethics), so they end up being equivalent in value to a 4 Unity job like the Bureaucrat.

I do think though that you're on the right track to avoid the culture effects being research ... or any resource income for that matter.

I'm looking at changing some of the modifiers around - moving edict funds to authoritarians is a far better fit than xenophobes for example. Some other ideas I have in my notebook that I'm considering are: housing usage reduction (egalitarian) and trade value from living standards (pacifist).

I like the change that it's authoritarians who get extra edict funds. But housing usage reduction is something I'd sooner attribute to pacifists than egalitarians. It suggests you're packing more pops into the same amount of space and that requires more conflict management. And extra trade from living standards sounds like something you'd want to pair up with Utopian Abundance, so it would work best for egalitarians.
 
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With the Evaluators making 3 amenities, I wonder if it will be viable for Gestalts later in the game to put monuments everywhere and do away with Maintenance Drones. (I suggest this not because the new Evaluators are especially powerful, but because Maintenance Drone, like Clerk, is a weak job.) You'd be replacing 3n Maintenance Drones + n other drones with 4n Evaluators, which is a good trade if 16 base unity (+unity from the monument) is worth significantly more to you than 8 energy plus a single drone's net output. Even if you wouldn't want to do this on every colony, any opportunity for Gestalts to diversify their options for getting amenities is probably a good thing.

You already shouldn't be using maintenance drones, unless you're a non-progenitor hivemind (or a machine that has yet to find any organics to grid amalgamate for free growth). If you can release vassals, Bulwarks are better than maintenance drones anyway.
 
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One thing that makes me unsure about the ethics effects on culture worker production is quite how many effects one job should have. Four seems like quite a lot, maybe too much for feeble organic brains like mine to process in game.

I think my preference would be a modest amount of unity and a single powerful ethics based effect. There are a few ways this could be done. For instance, rather than reflecting governing ethics, culture workers could have the ethics effect of the most popular ethics on their planet. Alternatively, the effects that culture workers have could be set via a policy, allowing you to select between the effects associated with your governing ethics (perhaps each could be colorfully named as well).
 
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Thinking more on it, I feel like it may be better to focus the benefits of Culture Workers on Amenities and the Ethics Effects instead of just Unity. Unity Production is already the job of Bureaucrats/Priests, it feels redundant to have that also be the primary focus of Culture workers. I'm also not a huge fan of Entertainers as the most efficient way of managing Amenities. I want my people to be invested in its empire, not distracted.

So instead, what I'm proposing is that in addition to providing a decent amount of Amenities, Culture Workers essentially become a Build-A-Specialist for your empire, generating resources and providing planetary benefits for each category equal to roughly 1/4th the value of a normal Specialist job. With the 3 Ethics, that adds up to 3/4ths a regular Specialist job, with the last 1/4th being the Amenities. A few fit better either as Worker variants or as wholly unique effects, but

Base: +3 Amenities
Materialist: +1 Research (All three types) (Science fairs are an important part of your culture)
Spiritualist: +1 Unity (It's a bit boring but I'm not sure what else to give them, maybe a boon for Organic pops somehow?)
Militarist: +1 Naval Capacity, +1 Defensive Army
Pacifist: +3 Trade Value (Trade is usually associated with Xenophile, but I feel like peacetime is the time for trade. Could cause pirate problems for some empire though.)
Egalitarian: -2.5% Pop Upkeep on Planet (Egalitarians have big synergies with Specialists, so they tend to have the highest Pop Upkeeps)
Authoritarian: -5% Crime, +1% Stability (Forcing things to run smoothly)
Xenophobe: +2.5% Happiness for Primary Species (There's a bit of a Happiness overload in the game at the moment but this seemed the best fit, would definitely support an alternative)
Xenophile: +2.5% Habitability (Gotta make the planet nice for your new friends!)

Evaluators are slightly different, given the lack of ethical diversity in Gestalt empires and their limited access to Unity. So to "Simulate" their role as Efficiency multipliers and to have them act as a sort of "Faction Equivalent", they have a unique pair of bonuses:

Evaluator: +3 Amenities, +2.5% Pop Output on Planet, +0.1 Unity per Pop on Planet

As far as Death Chroniclers/Chronicle Drones go, I think that Civic could use a little work to be honest. Having it overwrite Culture workers seems like a bad fit to me. I almost feel like they should be an Entertainer replacement, as crass as that seems, but I dunno.

As for the Autocthon Monument line itself, I'd drop the +% Unity, but keep the Unity per Ascension Perk. I think that's a fine bonus to keep around. I'd also move the +% Governing Ethics Attraction onto the Monument itself: Even if nobody's working it, it should be a reminder of what your Empire aspires to be. And finally, I'd shuffle around the names and roles of some buildings. The line itself should be Site/Monument/Auto-Curating Vault, with the role of Unity Multiplier going to the Hypercomms Forum instead (which should have a Politician Job instead of just a flat Unity gain). Curation is for Art, Museums, Culture. Forums are for debate and governance. This just feels obvious to me.
 
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On the one hand, I'm thinking that culture workers don't really have a place without a mechanically-defined culture (unless traditions are it, in which case culture workers should be tied in with them). On the other, I'm thinking that linking them with state ethics is the wrong idea in terms of flavor - artists are individualistic by nature, so their ethics-based bonuses should be drawn from that specific pop's ethos.
 
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On the one hand, I'm thinking that culture workers don't really have a place without a mechanically-defined culture (unless traditions are it, in which case culture workers should be tied in with them). On the other, I'm thinking that linking them with state ethics is the wrong idea in terms of flavor - artists are individualistic by nature, so their ethics-based bonuses should be drawn from that specific pop's ethos.
The problem with tying their benefits to Traditions is you have a series of jobs that go from having no benefits at the start of the game to seven benefits at the end. That sounds completely impossible to balance. Ethics are Ethics are Ethics. Everyone gets exactly 3 across the whole of the game.
 
The problem with tying their benefits to Traditions is you have a series of jobs that go from having no benefits at the start of the game to seven benefits at the end. That sounds completely impossible to balance. Ethics are Ethics are Ethics. Everyone gets exactly 3 across the whole of the game.
On the other hand, not all tradition trees need to affect Culture Workers. It would be enough to have some tradition trees affect them, when it is appropriate.

For instance, Supremacy, Diplomacy and Discovery are very outward-oriented tradition trees and could do without any Culture Worker effects, while Harmony and Domination could be strong candidates for a bonus because of their more introspective nature.
 
On the other hand, not all tradition trees need to affect Culture Workers. It would be enough to have some tradition trees affect them, when it is appropriate.

For instance, Supremacy, Diplomacy and Discovery are very outward-oriented tradition trees and could do without any Culture Worker effects, while Harmony and Domination could be strong candidates for a bonus because of their more introspective nature.
You seem to be missing my point about a job getting strictly numerically better across your empire as the game progresses in a wide variety of distinct ways being a balancing nightmare. A job improving at the one thing it does is very different than a job doing up to seven of thirteen different things, and just saying "well what about seven of eleven different things instead?" doesn't really address the issue I'm seeing.
 
You seem to be missing my point about a job getting strictly numerically better across your empire as the game progresses in a wide variety of distinct ways being a balancing nightmare. A job improving at the one thing it does is very different than a job doing up to seven of thirteen different things, and just saying "well what about seven of eleven different things instead?" doesn't really address the issue I'm seeing.
You mean like how workers and researchers get a bunch of percentage bonuses to their output? And also get upgraded buildings giving them further increased production?

Most jobs scale throughout the game. Having one that scaled off of traditions rather than science would be and interesting counterpoint.
 
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The problem with tying their benefits to Traditions is you have a series of jobs that go from having no benefits at the start of the game to seven benefits at the end. That sounds completely impossible to balance. Ethics are Ethics are Ethics. Everyone gets exactly 3 across the whole of the game.
A valid point, and I'd not want a culture worker to have a wide spread of bonuses. Wait, I know! Let's have only the first three tradition picks affect the culture worker! That'll suddenly make the order of picks matter just a tiny bit more, while also cutting down on the sheer amount of bonuses, without having to gut the individual ones in the name of balance.
 
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You mean like how workers and researchers get a bunch of percentage bonuses to their output? And also get upgraded buildings giving them further increased production?

Most jobs scale throughout the game. Having one that scaled off of traditions rather than science would be and interesting counterpoint.
Yes, but if culture workers were to scale normally in addition to getting tradition tree bonuses, that would make them scale way stronger.
It should be either or, in that scenario. Because otherwise they are useless early game or overpowered late game.
 
We've made some changes from the modifiers listed in the original dev diary for our current internal testing, due to the feedback provided:
  • Pacifist: +2.5% Trade Value from Lifestyle (Planet)
  • Egalitarian: -2.5% Housing Usage (Planet)
  • Authoritarian: +3 Edict Fund (Empire)
  • Xenophobe: +2.5% Citizen Happiness (Planet)
Current thinking is that the Pacifist and Xenophile modifiers might be the most powerful, but since those ethics often limit your playstyle in other ways, this should make them slightly more interesting. Another goal here is to try and make sure none of the Culture Worker modifiers overlap with modifiers directly given by the ethics.
 
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