I'm absolutely certain that the job is efficient, and good for you early game, even. But I'm only...
mostly sure that the civic as a whole is worth it after you've got reasonably high level councilors. But this is all based on number crunching and I haven't actually played a single game with Warrior Culture (don't tend to play a lot of militarists unless they're FPs). So it comes with that
massive asterisk (that there's zero play experience backing it up).
I mostly agree with your overall conclusion (good to reform into, probably not super useful to start), though I disagree with a few of the arguments you used to reach it.
Apologies in advance: some of quotes got moved around to avoid duplicating counterarguments. It would have been even longer without that. Hopefully I'm not pulling anything too far out of context (tried not to).
I just find this kind of analysis interesting, because there are quite a few variables and various tradeoffs you can make along the way.
So looking at the bonuses it gives compare to the stronghold why on earth would i ever invest in duelists it seems like your just better off getting more strongholds. So how about this taking warrior culture removes Holo-Theatres and simply...
forum.paradoxplaza.com
(Plus some followups in the thread. This was written before 3.8 and WC got its incredibly strong council effect; the early game/late game dynamic flips, as they now get much stronger over time.)
The tl;dr of those posts is that if you have Militarized Economy, your output is 3.75 per metallurgist and 4.5 per artisan, with 1.5 miners supporting each. A duelist makes 1/4 of a bureaucrat in unity (.25 pops, plus .5 CG saved). So 4 duelists, 1.066 metallurgists, and 6.6 miners (6.666 pops) make the same as 4 entertainers, 1 bureaucrat, 1.33 artisans, and 2 miners (8.33 pops), plus two early game soldiers (if you need the capacity).
Militarized Economy makes all the difference.
It's a unity civic for militarists which becomes useful long before CS does (since you don't start wanting soldiers, and you don't start with Unyielding). If you don't want unity as a militarist though (since you probably only need to rush down Supremacy followed by Prosperity and
maybe Subterfuge just for the tracking/evasion if you're doing something weird), it's totally useless. But the numbers are such that if you value each of the jobs it's replacing, each Duelist (and the pops supporting them) are worth ~1.55 pops of the alternative (6.66 vs. 10.33).
And on a pop-efficiency basis, you actually want to spam them (especially on a forge or factory world) until you get to +20% happiness, in the early game. In the late game the councilor effects now means you want to spam them even beyond.
The job is efficient, but:
This is the problem. Like I said, the job is good, but the civic just doesn't have a huge effect on the economy, so it's maybe not worth taking until later. It makes your entertainers
really good, but you only need so many entertainers.
Unless you
really want both the naval capacity and unity (in which case it's quite decent, even at the start, I think). It really needs its council position, though, to give enough overall impact, which comes at around year 15 ish. Which means it's especially weak to start without Oligarchy (or Distinguished Admiralty, which does the same).
- I would argue you only get all your capacity from tech and starbases if you aren't building enough ships, but I'm basing that on mainly FP runs. This is even more common in 3.8, since you can cut ship costs down very low and just start printing them (held back only by your upkeep).
- The upkeep is not double that of an entertainer: with Militarized Economy, it's about 20% higher at the start of the game. That number rises a bit as the game goes on as you get more bonuses, but it never gets all the way to 100%. And, importantly, it's doing the job of a bureaucrat as well. An entertainer and 1/4 of a bureaucrat consume 1.5 CG, which is higher than 1 alloy with Militarized Economy pretty much throughout the game. So it ends up saving you upkeep pops.
- Yes, they compete with ships for alloys, but metallurgists compete with artisans for jobs. Fewer CG needed means more metallurgists, which means more alloys.
- Robots are bad because they burn alloys and take 40 years to pay off. You don't want to conquer in 40 years, you want to conquer now. So the way it puts you in alloy-debt for several decades is bad. Duelists provide their bonuses immediately.
-6 alloys per month is 1.6 militarized metallurgists. But they're displacing 6 entertainers and 1.5 bureaucrats, who would burn -9 CG per month, which is 2 militarized artisans. If you close 2 artisan jobs and have them work as metallurgists instead, you net +1.5 alloys per month, rather than it costing you 6. And if you employ extra on a forge world, you may gain net alloys, even before accounting for the lost need for artisans: 10 metallurgists make 30 base alloys. 7.2% of that is 2.16 alloys, so adding a second Duelist making 13 or so amenities gets you +1.16 alloys from just excess happiness (though you wouldn't want to do that if you didn't also want the unity/capacity, since +1.16 alloys is a pathetic net output for a pop).
All of them, except Citizen Service (which is, in my opinion, just Warrior Culture but economically worse, see below) would probably be stronger to start with. Distinguished Admiralty actually has
nice synergy with Warrior Culture, if you want to take both: Duelists benefit massively from admirals starting at level 3, so your councilor (in a DA Oligarchy) starts by giving them +50% output (starting them at 75% of a bureaucrat/soldier, or 50% of a soldier after Ground Defense Planning, instead of 50%/33%).
The council position does buff the non-resource job output, for what it's worth. And it also gives the job base unity (which is very important). With an (effective) level 10 councilor, a Duelist makes 4 base unity, 4 naval capacity, and 20 amenities. And fractional naval capacity is tracked (even if it doesn't show up in the tooltip).
I'm comparing to Culture Workers because that's what they're competing with if you literally throw all the amenities away. As in, a councilor-buffed duelist is strictly better than a bureaucrat (or Culture Worker, which is a better* bureaucrat), even if you drop all the amenities which are the main output of the job. A Culture Worker creates 4 base unity and 2 naval capacity (plus something else).
If you compare them to entertainers, Duelists are so much better that it's not a contest.
*Culture workers (for non-egalitarians/pacifists/xenophiles) are very efficient jobs, not inefficient ones. They burn 1 extra CG, but their building requires no upkeep (effectively saving 1 energy per job), canceling half of it out. And the additional effects are generally worth much more than 1 energy equivalent (or 1.3ish, if you're running Militarized Economy). I will take 6 culture workers (burning 18 CG) over 6 bureaucrats and 2 soldiers (burning 12 CG, 8 energy, and using an entire 2 extra pops) any day of the weak. The former is using 6 extra CG, but it's saving 8 energy (which would pay for half the CG), and those 2 extra pops can produce
way more than 3 CG if you're past the very start of the game. And they get an extra ethic effect (which may be as good as +2 edict fund or as useless as -2.5% pop upkeep).
The biggest point in WC's favor is that the Citizen Service councilor basically doesn't exist (army damage and upkeep don't matter), and it robs you of the opportunity to appoint another Admiral (sticking you with a General instead). That alone can completely undo the 15% extra naval capacity from the civic, and make it compete on just a job vs. job basis.
As a reform civic:
The unity from armies is nice, but it doesn't benefit from resources from jobs. The end result is that a CS soldier gives 2 unity from the job (maybe 3 or 3.5 after modifiers) plus 6 naval capacity, and the armies give around 2 (monthly unity bonuses apply). Using Duelists (with an effective level 10 councilor) instead of Entertainers gives +3 base unity (going up to 4.5 or 5.25), plus 4 naval capacity per otherwise-entertainer, and
+20% happiness (20% approval rating, for 12% stability, for 7.2% resources from jobs) to the
entire empire, since at that point Duelists make double amenities. And once you start just spamming them for their raw output, they make 4 base (going up to 6.3 or 7.3 after modifiers) unity each. So CS soldiers make 1.5x the naval capacity of a Duelist, but Duelists make 1.5x the unity of a CS soldier.
To pick a point of (rough) equality: 6 duelists and 2 soldiers give 30 fleet capacity and ~45 unity (49, if you take Unyielding). 6 CS soldiers and 2 bureaucrat give 30 fleet capacity and ~45 unity. So if you wanted unity so much you were willing to hire bureaucrats, to make up the difference, Duelists are slightly ahead (and also buff the rest of your empire, to boot).
You can swing this more one way or the other, though. The above comparison is just sorta where the lines cross (with the same number of pops and the same naval capacity), but if you valued unity more, CS has to pay a bunch of bureaucrats to keep up, and if you valued fleet capacity more, Duelists literally can't match the pop efficiency without just employing pure soldiers. I feel like the comparison is reasonably fair to both, though: it's equal on fleet capacity (the thing that CS is best at) and has both working the same number of off-specialization jobs.
Duelists also come with the rather odd benefit of being stackable in an ecumenopolis: if you want, you can have 120 duelists making 480 base fleet capacity (and a bunch of unity) much easier than you can have 80 soldiers making that 480 (and a lot less unity). The Duelists need a single planet with 20 districts to do that, but soldiers need 20 building slots (2 planets at least, but probably 3).
Again, as well: I'm just assuming the additional amenities don't do anything in this. The player would be employing Duelists (in this comparison) purely for the unity/capacity, and all your empire's amenity needs will have been met twice over even before you considered these extra pops.
With late game tech, the upkeep for the 6 duelists in this comparison is .45 metallurgists (and .1ish miner, since you're cranking unity and will have your ecus ascended), and the upkeep for the 2 bureaucrats is .25 artisans (and .06ish miners). So that's a pretty small piece of the pie. But if if you count it (or you're looking at mid game tech): +7.2% resources from jobs across the empire more than cancels out the extra upkeep.
And if you are e.g. an Oligarchy, plus Statecraft (Citizen Service requires you to be either an Oligarchy or Democracy, for comparison), Duelists are even better than this, still. +130% output (instead of +100%) means they make 4.6 base unity and 4.6 base naval capacity. Though it still can't match soldier's pop efficiency for fleets. Duelists even jump up to +150% output (5 naval capacity per pop) every time you do the Statecraft Agenda, though that's inconsistent enough to not be worth counting.
I think the result of that CS comparison is a resounding "meh". They're roughly equal, but I'm inclined to think Duelists is a bit better, if only because:
- I want unity from my militarist unity civic
- I really like "you have functionally infinite amenities on every planet" as an effect
- Admirals on the council are better than Generals
But if you valued absolute naval capacity per pop (and wanted a General councilor for some other purpose), then CS comes out ahead because Duelists just can't reach that level of pop efficiency (just like CS soldiers just can't reach their level of unity pop efficiency with equal naval capacity, even if they mixed in Politicians, somehow, magically).
tl;dr:
I agree that because of the limited number of needed Entertainers, the overall impact on your empire is too small to justify taking the civic... until you get up to effective level 7-13 or so councilors, who make them so efficient that you want to build them to replace your bureaucrats and soldiers regardless of amenities. That makes Warrior Culture a great 3rd civic. Though it won't cripple you if you start with it.
Edit: JFC this is even longer than I thought it was when I was typing it up.
