Stellaris Dev Diary #264 - Damn the Consequences

[SeraphAscending]

I think it has more to do with the description. This kind of thinking is indicated by a belief that there's no hope for anything after death, therefore you need to get as much fun and pleasure -NOW-, or you're going to be missing out. This is a very materialistic outlook.

The specific description, maybe. But it is rather atypical for civics to give very specific background for things that could be a lot more open.
With many things the devs usually try to not limit things unecessarily. After all, they stated (in Q&A sessions) that they often shy away from more specifics and details to allow more variety and RP in the sandbox.

 

[Studoku]

Sadness. Oh well, the rest of the build works and I can still aggressively tombiform the galaxy.

Terrorform?

 

[tanny]

I still think relentless industrialists shouldn't require materialism. Simple lack of interest in long-term sustainability is sufficient.
Even the less materialist countries (in terms of the stellaris ethic) are very, very enviromentally destructive often times. The USA has significantly higher religiousity than most industrialised countries, but it is certainly not incentivising them to implement large scale enviromental protections. Especially the main party appealing to the major religious groups (especially the fundamentalists) is the one more opposed to such protections. Similar pattern with German major parties of explicitly religious origin (it's in the name).
This is just to illustrate that those do not need to go together.

I genuinely disagree that opposing spiritualism (in terms of the stellaris ethic) is at all required for a lack of interest in sustaining your enviroment.
Can you be enviromentally destructive and materialist? sure. Can you be that and spiritualist? definitely.
Just take away this limitation, please. I do not think it fits. I do not think any ethic limitation would fit this.

TBH… materialists and spiritualists have become weird. The materialists believe in “science” yet ignore the hard evidence of psionic powers. The spiritualist xenophiles on the other hand are also weird. Yes, robots can’t use psionic abilities, but does that bar them from sentience? Maybe some will believe in that but wouldn’t some contest? Now, this makes it even weirder.

 

[SeraphAscending]

TBH… materialists and spiritualists have become weird. The materialists believe in “science” yet ignore the hard evidence of psionic powers. The spiritualist xenophiles on the other hand are also weird. Yes, robots can’t use psionic abilities, but does that bar them from sentience? Maybe some will believe in that but wouldn’t some contest? Now, this makes it even weirder.

Fair point.
I still think it's kinda sad that i can't really have a robot/cyborg/synth trans-"humanist" cult.
After all, the flesh is indeed weak, is it not?

 

[tanny]

Fair point.
I still think it's kinda sad that i can't really have a robot/cyborg/synth trans-"humanist" cult.
After all, the flesh is indeed weak, is it not?

Or the beliefs in machine spirits.

 

[Echo Candor One]

I was very meh about this pack - playing a villain from Captain Planet is not my personal thing - but I have to admit, these are pretty cool.

Any word on when / whether the changes mentioned in PDXcon will drop? I am absolutely slobbering to try out the combat changes you guys were talking about.

 

[Critical Ethics]

I was very meh about this pack - playing a villain from Captain Planet is not my personal thing - but I have to admit, these are pretty cool.

This is why one of my big things about new civics and stuff is what will this look like from the outside? How will I, the player, feel encountering NPCs with these civics? I'm very excited for the industrialist one because an empire that is slowly tombworlding everything they touch is a very cool enemy on par with a devouring swarm. Compared to 90% of civics which are, from the outside, just a bunch of noise ultimately funnelling into fleetpower.

edit: I'd love if civics with strong external impacts were weighted higher for random empire creation. Or, as always, the ever present "make it a toggle"

 

[Kapi96]

Finally a way to turn your planets into tomb worlds without wormy!

 

[tanny]

If it launches in this state, Mutagenic Spas will probably be dead on arrival, like Idyllic Bloom.

First, the Bath Attendant jobs won't be worth working, just like Medical Workers:

The benefits are quite small, even if you can mitigate them: Spas give -.5% happiness, +.5% upkeep/amenity usage, -.25% resources from jobs, and .75% pop growth per industrial district per attendant. Scale that up to a full-ish industrial planet with 20 districts (assuming you have two Bath Attendants) and you get +30% growth for -10% resources from jobs, 20% upkeep/amenities, 20% happiness, and 2 pops. They're like Medical Workers' even crappier cousins.​

Two Medical Workers give 10% growth/assembly, another 2.5% growth from habitability (and 2.5% resources from jobs and 5% reduced upkeep), plus 10 amenities. They're barely worth it on worlds with 20+ pops, and only then because their habitability bonuses make them worthwhile to keep around despite the lackluster growth bonus.​

With 20 industrial districts, two Bath Attendants give 2.4x as much growth as Medical Workers, but with all their other benefits flipped and doubled (more upkeep, more amenities needed, less output, less happiness instead of more amenities). And Medical Workers were already not worth using except on the largest planets. If you have 200 pops in your empire (150 growth required) and you ignore all the penalties except growth from habitability, a planet with Bath Attendants will take roughly 35-45 years before it has more pop-months of output than one without (assuming both are getting 4.5 growth and have no other modifiers like Rapid Breeders). That is: after 40 years, you'll have grown 4 extra pops (net 2 extra) and those extra pops will have been working long enough to finally catch up with just having the two Bath Attendants working other jobs the entire time. If you have fewer than 20 industrial districts, the time increases proportionally: with only 10 districts, it takes roughly 70 years. And this is ignoring all the other penalties (assuming you can somehow mitigate them with gaia/ecumenopolis habitability cheese, or with some new traits): with the -10% resources from jobs from habitability, you may not catch up in total output for 500 years or more.​

​

Second, and probably more importantly, any effects are going to be for a few worlds of your empire, so the average effect of the civic is going to be tiny.

If 1/6 of your planets are hardcore industrial specialized, the net effect on your empire will be roughly 5% growth per planet. And that is probably a little generous. In my games, it's more like 1/12 planets (though most colonies are actually empty breeder colonies). It will be par with just the +1% pop growth per entertainer from Pleasure Seekers (which basically exists just for the memes). It will be a bonus so small that you'll never notice it.​

Even in late game, if you have a huge size 30 industrial planets and have a larger proportion of your pops working forge jobs (since you need fewer workers), you'll still not get much benefit because of the massive slowdown in growth required. "Pay 2 pops now for 45% extra growth" is a losing proposition if it takes 60 months to grow a pop, by default, instead of 33, and even more so if that 45% growth is on top of 120% because of tech (a ~33% improvement) instead of on top of 90% because of imperfect habitability (a 50% improvement).​

​

You can try to mitigate this by building industrial districts on all your worlds (and just leaving the jobs empty), possibly combining with Masterful Crafters for slots to use them as a city replacement that also boosts growth, but that will cost an enormous amount of minerals. And because you won't be able to pack as many industrial districts in (because of the actual other districts, like worker districts, taking up slots), your Bath Attendants will all be the won't-pay-for-itself-for-70-years-or-never-if-you-actually-look-at-habitability type, not the pay-for-itself-in-40-years type.​

The hive mind version is even worse: -15% habitability (-7.5% growth) for 30% assembly is barely a net positive unless you have Budding or are spamming Splinter Hives and only using this on the capital. -7.5% of 4.5 is -.3375 growth per month, and you get 2*.3=.6 growth per month in return. And you take an enormous penalty to job output/amenity usage.

The machine one might actually be usable, but only because you can cheese it so easily: you probably ought to be running minimum maintenance drones anyway, especially if you're a Rogue Servitor, so the increased amenity requirements might not affect you at all. But if you actually maintain amenities, and you have this on any planet that isn't just 5 Replicators, 2 Lubrication Terminal pops, 20 empty industrial districts, with no other pops: this will be net negative, since it will cost you so many drones. Each extra maintenance drone you need will eat into your extra pops, so that it takes you just as long to pull a profit as an organic empire. Suppose you have 20 industrial districts and you're working all of them: you have ~50 working pops and 13 maintenance drones to give them amenities. The 40% extra amenity usage means your maintenance drones are now only making 3.4 extra amenities (instead of 3.8), so you'll actually need another 2 maintenance drones to support the amenities (and extra 2 pops). So you're starting 4 pops in the hole, instead of 2, and at 150 growth required and 6 base assembly, it will take you 5 years to assemble your first full extra pop, and around 50 before you're actually caught up on pop production.

All these comparisons with growth are also tacitly assuming that resources later are worth the same as resource now, which is demonstrably not true (but it's hard to calculate the difference).

I love the idea of this civic, but it's just too weak. It's barely even useful on the few worlds where you can use it, and you only use it on a tiny portion of your empire, so it's very close to net 0. Even if you can cheese the downside with some other effects (like Nu-Baol for perfect habitability, Subterranean or Noxious for minimum habitability so the penalties don't matter, or empty planets with full industrial districts for growth without working pops impacted by penalties), its effects are so diffuse that you won't really notice that it's there.

A few ideas that would (I hope) make it better without changing the theme, though doing all (or even more than one) may be too much:

• Give the building some base effects: -5% habitability and +7.5% growth, even with the bath attendants absent, would make it actually usable to spam everywhere.
• Give the attendants some base effects: +5% growth and -2% happiness for regular empires, without industrial districts, would make them way more worth it on industrial worlds, and potentially usable on non-industrial worlds for someone really dedicated to the growth-at-all-costs idea that this civic implies. The base could take away some of the scaling negatives (like flat happiness penalties only, with habitability/growth being the only scaling factor).
• Just double or triple all the attendant effects: it doesn't matter that it only affects 1/10 of your planets if it has a massive +80% growth and -40% habitability on the few that it does affect. And even with the negatives amplified, the job becomes way more worth it if you're setting aside 2 pops and crippling your output for an extra pop every 3 years instead of an extra one every 10.

I so badly want this to be usable, even if you have to design an empire around it. But I don't see how it can be, as it currently stands. It's Idyllic Bloom all over again. It takes too long to be useful, and costs to much to be more than marginal benefit, even then.

I think it’s a bit too niche, but it does have some uses. Lithoids, for example, can simply not worry about this reduced habitability since it maxes out at 100%

 

[Orphalesion]

TBH… materialists and spiritualists have become weird. The materialists believe in “science” yet ignore the hard evidence of psionic powers. The spiritualist xenophiles on the other hand are also weird. Yes, robots can’t use psionic abilities, but does that bar them from sentience? Maybe some will believe in that but wouldn’t some contest? Now, this makes it even weirder.

I understand it from the spiritualist POV, since that mindset is something that actually happens in real life. If your spirituality says that all people, and their souls are created by whatever god idea you subscribe to then the idea of man-created beings possibly having souls is difficult to accept and in that world view you cannot be sapient without also having a soul.
So it's easy from that POV to see robots either as mockery of people with souls, or as abominations.

When artificial insemination was first invented some parts of Christianity actually were worried or even convinced that people who were created through that process wouldn't have a soul, since no traditional conception had taken place (and back then that was apparently seen as a requirement, not exactly sure why)

The materialist POV is more difficult to understand in Stellaris since, as you say, you can actually observe psionic powers in Stellaris.

 

[tanny]

I understand it from the spiritualist POV, since that is something that actually happens in real life. If your spirituality says that all people, and their souls are created by whatever god idea you subscribe to then the idea of man-created beings possibly having souls is difficult to accept and in that world view you cannot be sapient without also having a soul.
So it's easy from that POV to see robots either as mockery of people with souls, or as abominations.

When artificial insemination was first invented some parts of Christianity actually were worried or even convinced that people who were created through that process wouldn't have a soul, since no traditional conception had taken place (and back then that was apparently seen as a requirement, not exactly sure why)

Yeah, but that wouldn’t be in all sects of churches, and some would argue that even if they don’t exactly have “souls” qualifying them for something in the afterlife or the shroud, they should still, in their present and limited lives, be treated well. And as said, some cults may believe in machine spirits granting them lives even though they were born from none.

 

[Orphalesion]

Yeah, but that wouldn’t be in all sects of churches, and some would argue that even if they don’t exactly have “souls” qualifying them for something in the afterlife or the shroud, they should still, in their present and limited lives, be treated well. And as said, some cults may believe in machine spirits granting them lives even though they were born from none.

But right now differences like that aren't really reflected in the Stellaris Ethics, so the very broad, general idea is chosen.

 

[Ferrus Animus]

So, the noxious trait tooltip indicates happiness changes of "-0.01" and "+0.02" for each noxious/ non-noxious pop on the planet.
Is that 0.0X% or just a weird way to write -1% and +2%

Because the former means that 100 pops cause a change of 1% which is basically no impact for most planets.

 

[HFY]

I understand it from the spiritualist POV, since that mindset is something that actually happens in real life. If your spirituality says that all people, and their souls are created by whatever god idea you subscribe to then the idea of man-created beings possibly having souls is difficult to accept and in that world view you cannot be sapient without also having a soul.
So it's easy from that POV to see robots either as mockery of people with souls, or as abominations.

There are animist religions which believe that spiritual nature inhabits all things.

- Shinto is a living example of pan-animism.

- There are Buddhists who teach that Buddha-nature is found in the inanimate more easily than the sapient.

IMO it's not reasonable to look at "Spiritualist" as if it always meant one branch of Christianity.

 

[Alfray Stryke]

So, the noxious trait tooltip indicates happiness changes of "-0.01" and "+0.02" for each noxious/ non-noxious pop on the planet.
Is that 0.0X% or just a weird way to write -1% and +2%

Because the former means that 100 pops cause a change of 1% which is basically no impact for most planets.

It's just a formatting/display error, they are -1% and +2% respectively.

 

[WordyBird]

Question I haven't seen asked: if you undergo Synthetic Ascension, can the Mutagenic Spas civic turn into the Hyper Lubrication Basins civic? Or does it just become a dead civic?

I ask because Mutagenic Spas and Relentless Industrialists sound like they'd have serious synergy since the former mitigates the drawbacks of the latter while adding new ones (throw in Masterful Crafters for a full industrial powerhouse), but the latter is gated behind Materialism - and if you've got the Materialist ethic, you have every reason to go Synthetic. Yet this obvious combo dies on arrival if Mutagenic Spas can't ascend with you.

 

[zZander56]

If it launches in this state, Mutagenic Spas will probably be dead on arrival, like Idyllic Bloom.

First, the Bath Attendant jobs won't be worth working, just like Medical Workers:

The benefits are quite small, even if you can mitigate them: Spas give -.5% happiness, +.5% upkeep/amenity usage, -.25% resources from jobs, and .75% pop growth per industrial district per attendant. Scale that up to a full-ish industrial planet with 20 districts (assuming you have two Bath Attendants) and you get +30% growth for -10% resources from jobs, 20% upkeep/amenities, 20% happiness, and 2 pops. They're like Medical Workers' even crappier cousins.​

Two Medical Workers give 10% growth/assembly, another 2.5% growth from habitability (and 2.5% resources from jobs and 5% reduced upkeep), plus 10 amenities. They're barely worth it on worlds with 20+ pops, and only then because their habitability bonuses make them worthwhile to keep around despite the lackluster growth bonus.​

With 20 industrial districts, two Bath Attendants give 2.4x as much growth as Medical Workers, but with all their other benefits flipped and doubled (more upkeep, more amenities needed, less output, less happiness instead of more amenities). And Medical Workers were already not worth using except on the largest planets. If you have 200 pops in your empire (150 growth required) and you ignore all the penalties except growth from habitability, a planet with Bath Attendants will take roughly 35-45 years before it has more pop-months of output than one without (assuming both are getting 4.5 growth and have no other modifiers like Rapid Breeders). That is: after 40 years, you'll have grown 4 extra pops (net 2 extra) and those extra pops will have been working long enough to finally catch up with just having the two Bath Attendants working other jobs the entire time. If you have fewer than 20 industrial districts, the time increases proportionally: with only 10 districts, it takes roughly 70 years. And this is ignoring all the other penalties (assuming you can somehow mitigate them with gaia/ecumenopolis habitability cheese, or with some new traits): with the -10% resources from jobs from habitability, you may not catch up in total output for 500 years or more.​

​

Second, and probably more importantly, any effects are going to be for a few worlds of your empire, so the average effect of the civic is going to be tiny.

If 1/6 of your planets are hardcore industrial specialized, the net effect on your empire will be roughly 5% growth per planet. And that is probably a little generous. In my games, it's more like 1/12 planets (though most colonies are actually empty breeder colonies). It will be par with just the +1% pop growth per entertainer from Pleasure Seekers (which basically exists just for the memes). It will be a bonus so small that you'll never notice it.​

Even in late game, if you have a huge size 30 industrial planets and have a larger proportion of your pops working forge jobs (since you need fewer workers), you'll still not get much benefit because of the massive slowdown in growth required. "Pay 2 pops now for 45% extra growth" is a losing proposition if it takes 60 months to grow a pop, by default, instead of 33, and even more so if that 45% growth is on top of 120% because of tech (a ~33% improvement) instead of on top of 90% because of imperfect habitability (a 50% improvement).​

​

You can try to mitigate this by building industrial districts on all your worlds (and just leaving the jobs empty), possibly combining with Masterful Crafters for slots to use them as a city replacement that also boosts growth, but that will cost an enormous amount of minerals. And because you won't be able to pack as many industrial districts in (because of the actual other districts, like worker districts, taking up slots), your Bath Attendants will all be the won't-pay-for-itself-for-70-years-or-never-if-you-actually-look-at-habitability type, not the pay-for-itself-in-40-years type.​

The hive mind version is even worse: -15% habitability (-7.5% growth) for 30% assembly is barely a net positive unless you have Budding or are spamming Splinter Hives and only using this on the capital. -7.5% of 4.5 is -.3375 growth per month, and you get 2*.3=.6 growth per month in return. And you take an enormous penalty to job output/amenity usage.

The machine one might actually be usable, but only because you can cheese it so easily: you probably ought to be running minimum maintenance drones anyway, especially if you're a Rogue Servitor, so the increased amenity requirements might not affect you at all. But if you actually maintain amenities, and you have this on any planet that isn't just 5 Replicators, 2 Lubrication Terminal pops, 20 empty industrial districts, with no other pops: this will be net negative, since it will cost you so many drones. Each extra maintenance drone you need will eat into your extra pops, so that it takes you just as long to pull a profit as an organic empire. Suppose you have 20 industrial districts and you're working all of them: you have ~50 working pops and 13 maintenance drones to give them amenities. The 40% extra amenity usage means your maintenance drones are now only making 3.4 extra amenities (instead of 3.8), so you'll actually need another 2 maintenance drones to support the amenities (and extra 2 pops). So you're starting 4 pops in the hole, instead of 2, and at 150 growth required and 6 base assembly, it will take you 5 years to assemble your first full extra pop, and around 50 before you're actually caught up on pop production.

All these comparisons with growth are also tacitly assuming that resources later are worth the same as resource now, which is demonstrably not true (but it's hard to calculate the difference).

I love the idea of this civic, but it's just too weak. It's barely even useful on the few worlds where you can use it, and you only use it on a tiny portion of your empire, so it's very close to net 0. Even if you can cheese the downside with some other effects (like Nu-Baol for perfect habitability, Subterranean or Noxious for minimum habitability so the penalties don't matter, or empty planets with full industrial districts for growth without working pops impacted by penalties), its effects are so diffuse that you won't really notice that it's there.

A few ideas that would (I hope) make it better without changing the theme, though doing all (or even more than one) may be too much:

• Give the building some base effects: -5% habitability and +7.5% growth, even with the bath attendants absent, would make it actually usable to spam everywhere.
• Give the attendants some base effects: +5% growth and -2% happiness for regular empires, without industrial districts, would make them way more worth it on industrial worlds, and potentially usable on non-industrial worlds for someone really dedicated to the growth-at-all-costs idea that this civic implies. The base could take away some of the scaling negatives (like flat happiness penalties only, with habitability/growth being the only scaling factor).
• Just double or triple all the attendant effects: it doesn't matter that it only affects 1/10 of your planets if it has a massive +80% growth and -40% habitability on the few that it does affect. And even with the negatives amplified, the job becomes way more worth it if you're setting aside 2 pops and crippling your output for an extra pop every 3 years instead of an extra one every 10.

I so badly want this to be usable, even if you have to design an empire around it. But I don't see how it can be, as it currently stands. It's Idyllic Bloom all over again. It takes too long to be useful, and costs to much to be more than marginal benefit, even then.

My thoughts exactly. (The sentiment not the wall of text.)

 

[kwheeler]

Would love to see Relentless Industrialists grant some sort of environment destroying branch office building or overlord holding. Missed opportunity.

This! Yes! This!

 

[Abdulijubjub]

I think it’s a bit too niche, but it does have some uses. Lithoids, for example, can simply not worry about this reduced habitability since it maxes out at 100%

Lithoids get to ignore the penalties and just take the growth, but it doesn't change the fact that you won't actually have more pop-months than by not working the spa jobs for 30 years.

Imagine a civic that was, in its entirety, "you can build a second robot assembly plant on each planet, but it takes 2 Roboticists to work, and they each only make .045 assembly per industrial district (.9 each with 20) instead of 2.3 each". It's obvious why it's useless, right?

 

[Lorenerd11]

Something I've commented on earlier is that the Overclocked traits won't be very useful unless accompanied by a rework of how genetic modification works. Do we still have to select entire planetary populations to modify, and then have no control over which pops grow afterwards? Species templates as they are make it hard to dedicate individual templates for specific purposes.

And then, no choice about which pops we get leaders from, or even any indication of a leader's species traits.