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so now Augmentation Bazaars got changed and lost one of their interesting things (boni getting higher the more cyborg traits you have).
But apart from that, isn't their council position super weak?
1% Trader Output per level, while most other output boosting positions give 5% per level.
without modifiers 1% would mean 0.08 trade value and 0.02 amenities. But as far as I know this effect applies after modifiers.
So after the +2 amenities and +10% trader output from mercantile.
After Thrifty and the Robot equivelent.
After egalitarian and onther specialists output bonuses.
I don't know if you can really make it more then 1% without blowing everything else out of the water.
The real trouble is the civic losing its identity. It locks you into cybernetic, but really has very little to do with cybernetics. The previous council bonus, plus resources from cyborgs, was both strong and flavorful. Now its just a mid trade civic that also locks you into cybernetics.
The real trouble is the civic losing its identity. It locks you into cybernetic, but really has very little to do with cybernetics. The previous council bonus, plus resources from cyborgs, was both strong and flavorful. Now its just a mid trade civic that also locks you into cybernetics.
I'm sorry, but it looks to me like you are deliberately trying to mislead. If you have that wiki page open and are using a "find" function on Trade there's no way you ignored the literal FIRST result:
Which translates to approximately +5% trade per level of the councilor from Traders. Not +1%. Yes, "Trader Production Output" and flat output to Trader's output do stack. But I legitimately cannot think of another flat source of Trade from Traders, EDIT: "Free Traders" gives +2 Trade from Traders! That isn't even across 10 councilor levels. This means Free Traders is passively two and a half times stronger than Augment Bazaar's level 10 councilor, and Augment Bazaar has loads of other downsides, including being a locked civic and locks your ascension paths. And Free Traders has two more generically useful modifiers! Branch Office +10% is universally useful, and +2-20% commercial pact effectiveness is I'm pretty sure more trade from commercial pacts, which is hit or miss but never bad.
Most other Trade modifiers are to the planet, empire, or are species' "job efficiency", so they are all multiplicative with BOTH "Trader Production Output" and flat output. Mercantile tradition also has "+10% trade from jobs", which I'm pretty sure is going to be additive with "Trader Production Output" and multiplicative with flat output. Yes it's not available to Megacorps outside one exception. Doesn't matter: this is about comparing modifiers in the same weight class. Civic are civics. Councilor Jobs are Councilor Jobs.
Basically, a vanilla councilor is literally five times stronger than this councilor.
If you are not being sarcastic, are you seriously telling me to look at this:
And believe that +1% Trader Output, the same level as +100% trade from jobs, is somehow remotely comparable?
(also the wiki I think is utterly wrong, this is the ingame tooltip:
)
This:
is extremely weak when compared to the previous job output/efficiency from cyborgs, which helped ALL jobs INCLUDING traders! As you so helpfully point out, a lot of builds get loads of trade from other jobs, particularly megacorps.
Augmentation Bazaar also does absolutely NOTHING with Traders. Their branch office building doesn't even put traders on their Capital, so you get fewer traders than taking most other megacorp civics, because every building slot on their unique buildings are buildings slots not giving you traders.
And there are loads of sources of +10% trade.
Here are some examples of +10% trade or +10% all specialist job output:
(Clerks don't exist anymore, but I checked and it IS still in the code, so I guess everyone forgot Trade Leagues exist).
+10% Trade "from one specific job" does multiply with some of these modifiers. But it on it's own it's a pretty WEAK modifier when compared to MOST Trade Modifiers.
Not to mention it's only on Traders, while Megacorps get trade from lots of jobs.
In fact, you give OTHER empires more trade than you can get from yourself:
And hey, that's cool because branch offices profit from other empires, but why the hell did we lose +10% job output from cyborgs (now job efficiency from cyborgs) out of the blue? We had this building before they decided to randomly gut the hell out of Augmentation Bazaar.
Alright, but is +10% really that bad when compared to a flat modifier?
Well this is 0.08 trade per trader. For this to be comparable to Merchant Guilds for "normal" empires, you would need a very minor +400% trade modifier all of which being multiplicative with "Trade Production Output". By the way, most of that would be multiplicative with Merchant Guilds anyways, so it has to be +400% exclusively available to Megacorps.
It does improve if the base trade from Traders is somehow improved, true!
That means I can merge Augmentation Bazaar with Merchant Guilds if I get this:
Have fun!
Does it get multiplied from job efficiency via pop traits? Oh yeah, sure. So does flat modifiers, so again this is irrelevant.
Side note:
The building is AWFUL now.
I now have to sacrifice my extremely limited building space for a building that adds just 100 augmentation jobs and 6 trade to Elites on the planet (who lose 2 unity as well). Most of the time, there are a whopping 400 Executives on a level4capital planet, and when factoring in the civic plus the 100 augmentor jobs, this means I am getting 28 trade from this building. Just a reminder that a normal Commercial Zone with the mercantile tradition is 300 Traders which is 24 base trade, plus +10% with the council poistion, is 26.4.
At capital level 4, the building gives us +1.6 trade, -8 Unity, and -200 manpower needed compared to a Commercial Zone. That is horrifically bad.
If you don't take mercantile, then it's much better at +9.6 trade. Except then you are not taking mercantile on a Megacorp.
It doesn't even give extra elite jobs like it used to which helped with planetary stability.
It just gives the benefits of exactly 100 Augmentation Jobs, which is to say slightly faster auto-modding.
Which this civic does not inherently start with.
The only saving grace is the "Offworld Implant Hub"
This is basically the only thing in this civic that matters now. That +10% trade from jobs scales with Branch Office Value, on top of 0.5% trade per 100 specialists, which is a very broad category and goes extremely well with matching office buildings on things like Research, Trade, Bureaucratic/Temple, and of course Factory/Foundry worlds. I have seen this thing give something like +20% trade from jobs and +20% trade from planet even just a few years into the game.
***
I seriously cannot wrap my head around how badly screwed up this civic is. Locked civic. Locks your ascension paths. Actual pure RNG on if you get a useful trait as a permanent free species trait. There is no longer any ties to Cyborg traits, I could literally replace my species entirely with a new one that isn't Cyborgs and nothing would change. A councilor position that has literal anti-synergy with the kit and is one of the weakest modifiers I've seen on a councilor, and isn't even a universally available position to boot. You get a building that is almost a downgrade compared to a universally available building.
All for 16 extra trade per planet you build an augmentation center on and a powerful Branch Office Building.
I love the theme of this civic, probably one of my favorites in the game, so the fact they consider this an improvement to the civic hurts my soul.
I seriously cannot wrap my head around the pure unadulterated hatred Paradox seems to hold for this civic. Locked civic. Locks your ascension paths. Actual pure RNG on if you get a useful trait as a permanent free species trait. There is no longer any ties to Cyborg traits, I could literally replace my species entirely with a new one that isn't Cyborgs and nothing would change. A councilor position that has literal anti-synergy with the kit and is one of the weakest modifiers I've seen on a councilor, and isn't even a universally available position to boot. You get a building that is almost a downgrade compared to a universally available building.
All for 16 extra trade per planet you build an augmentation center on and a powerful Branch Office Building.
I love the theme of this civic, probably one of my favorites in the game, so the fact they consider this an improvement to the civic hurts my soul.
Given how rocky the launch was, I think it's almost certainly a mistake to assume that the severe weakening was intentional.
It was collateral damage (hurriedly ported, removing the things that broke with job swaps and pop output modifiers), rather than a deliberate nerf:
Merchants no longer existed, so they couldn't be buffed by traits
Pops no longer directly worked jobs, so you couldn't scale Merchant output based on the count of traits anyway.
You can't buff a job based on traits of the pop group (beyond efficiency), so the council position was changed, and it got hurriedly swapped from one 1% output bonus to another without accounting for the fact that the former was universal, while the latter only affected a tiny portion of the population.
Job efficiency works, and was used for other ports, though. I've got no idea why this one got uniquely bad treatment.
I agree with the rest, though.
It's in a very bad spot. And I'm baffled by the "omg, they can't buff this 0.08 modifier even one bit or else it might be stronger than this 0.4 modifier" in the post you're responding to. It's like they missed the fact that it was 0.08 instead of 0.8 (thought it was 10x the size it actually was?).
Given how rocky the launch was, I think it's almost certainly a mistake to assume that the severe weakening was intentional.
It was collateral damage (hurriedly ported, removing the things that broke with job swaps and pop output modifiers), rather than a deliberate nerf:
Merchants no longer existed, so they couldn't be buffed by traits
Pops no longer directly worked jobs, so you couldn't scale Merchant output based on the count of traits anyway.
You can't buff a job based on traits of the pop group (beyond efficiency), so the council position was changed, and it got hurriedly swapped from one 1% output bonus to another without accounting for the fact that the former was universal, while the latter only affected a tiny portion of the population.
Job efficiency works, and was used for other ports, though. I've got no idea why this one got uniquely bad treatment.
I agree with the rest, though.
It's in a very bad spot. And I'm baffled by the "omg, they can't buff this 0.08 modifier even one bit or else it might be stronger than this 0.4 modifier". It's like they missed the fact that it was 0.08 instead of 0.8 (thought it was 10x the size it actually was?).
To be honest I do agree that I think overall the civic is a bad case of oversight, but I struggle to say the councilor position change was completely accidental.
Purity has shown is you absolutely "can" have some sort of "Count positive traits and give a modifier accordingly" mechanic. Purity only looks at the primary species of course, but you also wanted old Augmentation Bazaars to only use your primary species as the Merchants because unlike any other cybernetic species your original species got an extra free cybernetic trait.
On top of this, there is anti-synergy with traders as an inherent part of the building not giving Traders and the office building doesn't even do the funky thing of "Trader Jobs on Capital" either.
But yes, Hamlin's razor is in fact usually correct. Usually I'm careful to avoid it too, which is my bad. I'll edit my post.
Purity has shown is you absolutely "can" have some sort of "Count positive traits and give a modifier accordingly" mechanic. Purity only looks at the primary species of course, but you also wanted old Augmentation Bazaars to only use your primary species as the Merchants because unlike any other cybernetic species your original species got an extra free cybernetic trait.
Those are pop yields, not job yields. You can make a pop produce resources based on its traits (ex. Volatile Excretions), but you can't carry that over to the jobs.
The system is simply not capable of it anymore. You have to use efficiency.
On top of this, there is anti-synergy with traders as an inherent part of the building not giving Traders and the office building doesn't even do the funky thing of "Trader Jobs on Capital" either.
Those are pop yields, not job yields. You can make a pop produce resources based on its traits (ex. Volatile Excretions), but you can't carry that over to the jobs.
The system is simply not capable of it anymore. You have to use efficiency.
This formula could be the basis for how you would make a version for Augment Bazaar. I'm not saying "return old job output from traits", I'm saying turn it into Job Efficiency. Purity here only looks at the primary species, and Augment Bazaar could too since you wanted to only have your primary species as merchants anyways.
Let me be specific: View attachment 1300437
This formula could be the basis for how you would make a version for Augment Bazaar. I'm not saying "return old job output from traits", I'm saying turn it into Job Efficiency. Purity here only looks at the primary species, and Augment Bazaar could too since you wanted to only have your primary species as merchants anyways.
Every Purity authority directly acts based on the species of the pop or leader in question. Having the entire empire benefit from the cybernetic traits of the main species would be wonky: you'd get an incentive to have a "primary" species that's jacked to the gills with as many cybernetic traits as possible, regardless of usefulness, and then actually optimize the rest of the empire normally.
And, more importantly... Merchants don't exist (or, at least, they exist only as a job swap). They could generalize it to all rulers (which would be nice), but they'd have to rescale things.
But this is all assuming they want to slavishly follow the original formula (1% trade and 0.5% growth, per trait per Merchant, to the whole planet).
You could get something extremely similar by swapping +4 TV per Augmentor with +5% trade output (planet modifier) per Augmentor, then changing the civic to be "+10% Augmentor and Ruler efficiency per cybernetic trait". Efficiency is something that can be done per pop with the new system.
Augmentors give +10% organic growth (after ascension, at least). +10% efficiency is then +1% growth. Same goes for trade output (+10% efficiency is +0.5% trade).
Augmentors start with 100 in the Bazaar, and upgrade to 300 per planet with the Augmentation Center
Merchants previously started with 1, then got a second with the Stock Exchange.
No longer spammable with Cosmogenesis. Oh noooooooo...... /s
Ruler efficiency is just for funzies, so that the executive/whatever it's called that you get from the Bazaar is still affected.
All told: planets get 3% growth per cybernetic trait instead of 1%, and they get 1.5% trade per cybernetic trait (instead of 2%). More growth, less trade. But it's fine.
I didn't realize this civic was so bad in 4.0. Disappointing, made my FoxCorp into a Cyberpunk theme with this Civic as soon as I could.
I also find it mildly annoying that you can't just upgrade the Augmentation Bazaars into the Augmentation Center, with all the bonuses of the former added on.
Edit: Also, Augmentor job description is currently a placeholder!
I also find it mildly annoying that you can't just upgrade the Augmentation Bazaars into the Augmentation Center, with all the bonuses of the former added on.
Before this update I'd be sad if they did this because I quite liked the appearance and description of the Augmentation Bazaars when compared to the normal augmentation center. Plus they were distinctly different buildings. Augment bazaar gave a merchant job and modified other merchant jobs. Augmentation center was the dedicated auto-trait modification building.
Now the bazaars are just sad. I don't even really consider the "merchant swap" to be tied to the building because Merchant Guilds gets that for free, even if you don't want it to do so because it comes at a unity cost.
You all are correct in what you are writing, however at least the Councilor position does actually something, even if it is super duper weak.
Let's have a look at Galactic Curators (not Antiquarian Expertise). This job does basically nothing because Culture Workers doesn't exist anymore*.
*Except in very edgy specific circumstances (probably an overlook), for example the artisan enclave gives you their empire wide unique building with 3 culture workers....
By the way I dislike those randomness. Instead of giving the species a random cyborg basic resource trait, just give a custom one with like +5% or +10% to technicans, miners, farmers instead of a random one forcing you to reload...
I'm sorry, but it looks to me like you are deliberately trying to mislead. If you have that wiki page open and are using a "find" function on Trade there's no way you ignored the literal FIRST result: View attachment 1300336
No deception, Just only looked at the other council positions Megacorporations have access to.
If you're looking at Director of trade from regular empires then you're not really comparing on an equal basis in my opinion. I don't know if it holds up if you math out the difference between all the boosts megacorps get to trade and a regular empire. So I didn't really want to go into that bag of worms.
Yes it's not available to Megacorps outside one exception. Doesn't matter: this is about comparing modifiers in the same weight class. Civic are civics. Councilor Jobs are Councilor Jobs.
Augmentation Bazaar also does absolutely NOTHING with Traders. Their branch office building doesn't even put traders on their Capital, so you get fewer traders than taking most other megacorp civics, because every building slot on their unique buildings are buildings slots not giving you traders.
This is not a bad thing
What it does after the branch office rework makes it one of the best branch office buildings out there. Most if not all branch office buildings currently give you trade for jobs on someone else their planet. Most of these are locked to 1 job specifically. Metalurgists, Artisans, Researchers. The augmentation bazaar doesn't do that, it works off all specialists on the target planet. Even at a rate of 0.5% trade per 100 specialist it is consistently the highest trade modifier in the list of all the available branch offices.
It not giving trader jobs on your capital is a good thing. It doesn't cost you workforce, it doesn't cost you upkeep.
----------------
I agree with most of the stuff about the civic needing love and getting hit with the nerf hammer for no reason. I just challenge that 5% per level job output number, as anything you can find (Within Megacorp civics) isn't remotely close to the 5% being claimed.
It's in a very bad spot. And I'm baffled by the "omg, they can't buff this 0.08 modifier even one bit or else it might be stronger than this 0.4 modifier" in the post you're responding to. It's like they missed the fact that it was 0.08 instead of 0.8 (thought it was 10x the size it actually was?).
My point was poorly made.
The other buffs are all static numbers on the baseline, where this is one of the few ones that does a % instead of just a value. If you;d had to put it on par with like a pearl diver you'd have to make it 20% per level, but if you did that you'd have 200% output on traders. Where pearl divers would get 4 bonus trade at level 10 the traders would give 16 bonus trade.
You could equalize it by just making it anything between 0.2 and 0.4 per 100 traders.
I feel like that is a lame solution though. Make the council job do something fun, something unique.
I agree with most of the stuff about the civic needing love and getting hit with the nerf hammer for no reason. I just challenge that 5% per level job output number, as anything you can find (Within Megacorp civics) isn't remotely close to the 5% being claimed.
1% to traders adds 8*0.01=0.08 trade to Trader jobs, which scales only with efficiency, not other outputs modifiers.
+0.4 trade to Pearl Divers adds 0.4 trade to Pearl divers, which scales with both efficiency and other output modifiers.
0.08*5=0.4
Thus, a 5% buff for Trader jobs would be strictly weaker than the Pearl Diver councilor.
I'm baffled by the repeated assertion that nothing is close to 5%. You included an image showing something exactly 5x the size of 1% (aka, 5%) in the post.
Are you saying it's bugged? Is the tooltip wrong?
Edit: yes, the tooltip is wrong. It's actually a 2% trade output mult for Anglers, and 4% for Pearl Divers. Aka, it got nerfed into the ground too, for seemingly no reason.
4% of Pearl Divers' 2 trade is equal to 1% of trader's 8.
My point was poorly made.
The other buffs are all static numbers on the baseline, where this is one of the few ones that does a % instead of just a value. If you;d had to put it on par with like a pearl diver you'd have to make it 20% per level, but if you did that you'd have 200% output on traders. Where pearl divers would get 4 bonus trade at level 10 the traders would give 16 bonus trade.
You could equalize it by just making it anything between 0.2 and 0.4 per 100 traders.
I feel like that is a lame solution though. Make the council job do something fun, something unique.
The purpose of the councilor is to make the job worth working in a way that scales with leader builds, and rewards you for investment.
The fun and unique thing that the civic does is give you Angler and Pearl Diver jobs, so that you can fuel your trade just by farming or making CG. It's ok for it to just buff it.
I'm not sure why you jumped to "1% is too weak, but 20% would be too strong, so I guess there's nothing that can be done", before admitting that the are some numbers between 1 and 20 that would work.
Edit: yes, the tooltip is wrong. It's actually a 2% trade output mult for Anglers, and 4% for Pearl Divers. Aka, it got nerfed into the ground too, for seemingly no reason.
4% of Pearl Divers' 2 trade is equal to 1% of trader's 8.
The Angler Megacorp councilor doesn't even apply 2% to Anglers and 4% to Pearl Divers, it's 2% to all farmers and 4% to all artisans. Extremely easy to spot by taking master crafters and settings up artificers on a new planet.
There's absolutely no way it's intentional.
EDIT: ALSO The Megacorp Machine Angler councilor does literally nothing. The normal Machine Anglers also gives double the CG from Pearl Divers.
What it does after the branch office rework makes it one of the best branch office buildings out there. Most if not all branch office buildings currently give you trade for jobs on someone else their planet. Most of these are locked to 1 job specifically. Metalurgists, Artisans, Researchers. The augmentation bazaar doesn't do that, it works off all specialists on the target planet. Even at a rate of 0.5% trade per 100 specialist it is consistently the highest trade modifier in the list of all the available branch offices.
No deception, Just only looked at the other council positions Megacorporations have access to.
If you're looking at Director of trade from regular empires then you're not really comparing on an equal basis in my opinion.
The OP just said they were comparing councilor positions. Based on the Merchant's Guild literally fitting what they were discussing, I drew the conclusion the OP was referring to all councilor positions. Narrowing the scope without mentioning you are doing so and then stating OP is now wrong under the new comparisons felt very deceptive to me.
But it's partly on me. You probably just assumed they were only looking at megacorp civics. It's my fault for reading you as acting in bad faith, which I shouldn't have done without better evidence, and to that I apologies.
Despite this, I do think you are wrong about 1% trader output being "standard".
Trawling Operations (Anglers), if/when the bug is fixed, should grant 0.2 trade per Angler. Anglers grant 2 trade to begin with, so that is 10% per level. For Pearl Divers, they have a base of 2 trade as well, so at 0.4 per level it's actually 20% per level.
Shared Burdens I think is 1 amenity and 1 trade per 100 Stewards. So it's +25% to trade and Amenities.
These examples you provide contradict your point that 1% is "standard" for megacorp councilors.
And in both these cases these aren't the "primary" resources for their jobs. Anglers main job is food, Pearl Divers is Consumer Goods, and Steward is Unity.
Why would the "main output" for a job be weaker than the "secondary" output?
Corporate Hedonism, Criminal Syndicate, and Shadow Corp are adding resources to jobs that don't have that resource production already, so it's not helpful in this discussion.
Then there's Dimensional Enterprise.
Priests in a Megacorp are called "Prosperity Preachers" and give 2 trade among other things.
So once again, +10%. On top of this, there's another civic that provides flat unity from priests: Gospel of the Masses.
In addition, they also give science on top, which is difficult to measure since priests normally don't have science.
Antiquarian Expertise is both wrong on the wiki and also gives culture to a non-existent job.
It looked like you seemed to think "+1% from traders per level" is somehow similar to "+100% trade from all jobs", and that changing the 1% to 5% would be too strong.
Yes, the wiki is wrong, but you posted it as a legitimate example.
So all of the examples you list either contradict your argument that 5% would be too strong since they are twice as strong a modifier, or don't really apply since it's adding output to something that doesn't have it.
But in general, I wouldn't say any particular number is "standard" for job output from Councilors.
Relentless Industrialists is only 2% per level from miners, which is famous for being "never equip this position". But the civic has been described before as "SSS++ Tier" so it's justified.
Corporate Hedonism gets enough trade to legally qualify as a superior Trader.
Some councilor positions don't give job output, but the civic does. "Free Traders" give +2 trade to traders. Which is +25%, or +2.5% if it was a hypothetical councilor position with 10 levels.
The real trouble is the civic losing its identity. It locks you into cybernetic, but really has very little to do with cybernetics. The previous council bonus, plus resources from cyborgs, was both strong and flavorful. Now its just a mid trade civic that also locks you into cybernetics.
I admit, I saw the change, loaded up the civic and spent a good 30 minutes trying to figure out what it did and how it related to Cybernetics at all. Hopefully this changes. I am a fan of @Abdulijubjub 's suggestion personally, however I'm sure the devs have something even better in mind.
Instead of giving the species a random cyborg basic resource trait, just give a custom one with like +5% or +10% to technicans, miners, farmers instead of a random one forcing you to reload...
This is just something players have complained about Augmentation Bazaars doing since release. Myself included. It's never been addressed and at this point I suspect there is an element of the code that prevents it or at some time prevented it. Personally? I'd be 100% down with it giving Universal Augmentations (the Cybernetic automod trait) and that just being the reward of taking a locked in civic with a locked in ascension path and being forced to play specifically only the Megacorp Cyborg authorities without losing the greater benefits of this particular civic.
Regardless, I agree with Abdulijubjub and this is probably just a rushed fix job and it'll be buffed into a more appropriate form either soon or when they rework and update cybernetics again lol
