Early game unity and factions

[ainwood]

Forgive me - I have just started Stellaris again after more than a year off. Trying to get to grips with the leader changes and unity (I guess people will be more focused on the upcoming '4.0') changes.

Anyway - maybe I'm missing something, but it seems that the very early game is too heavily dependent on the RNG. I'm about 4 games in, and have been making early build decisions based on balancing unity -> additional scientists for exploration vs traditions. Interesting choices.

Until a game yesterday. I spawned (Human, Sol) with two additional habitable planets next to me. Sent my science ship to survey the first of them, and then my admiral to explore neighboring systems, and found a marauder clan 4 jumps away.

At around this point, two factions spawned, and my unity / turn skyrocketed. I had enough to make a second science ship a "no brainer", activated the tradition group and got two traditions before I'd even finished surveying the first system.

I've searched for what triggers the factions:

(AI SUMMARY)
In Stellaris, factions form when an empire has encountered alien life (including space fauna) and has at least 5 pops with a faction's guiding or secondary ethic, and that ethic's attraction within the empire is at least 3%.

Here's a more detailed breakdown:

• Requirements:
  Alien Contact: Factions can't form until your empire has made contact with alien life (including space fauna).
• Pops: A faction requires at least 5 pops with its guiding or secondary ethic to form.
  
  
• Ethic Attraction: A faction's guiding or secondary ethic must have an attraction level of at least 3% within the empire.
  
  
• Time: Factions can begin forming after 10 years, or 1 year for empires with the Broken Shackles origin, or within the first 3 months for empires with the Parliamentary System civic.
  
  
• Cooldown: There's a 180-day cooldown between factions forming, though this doesn't apply to the first set of factions.

I assume it was contacting the marauders that triggered the factions, but the thing I find most striking is that it was MUCH quicker than other games - I think the other games took like 10 years to spawn. Seems that immediately on forming, then entire planet population was in one faction or the other.

Anyway - because unity is so important early game (leaders, traditions), and because the relative unity of factions early game is so significant, it seems like a balance tweak should be considered. Perhaps have faction populations rise gradually as people are attracted to them (rather than have the entire planet population jump to one or the other); or make the unity from factions grow over time as they develop a presence, or tweak the faction triggers such that there is not such a binary difference between haves & have nots.

 

[Nyrael]

As the conditions you quoted say, Factions are meant to spawn after 10 years unless you play certain Civics or Origins.
So you either have one of those, or you have a bug (thus not a balance issue).

 

[Ryika]

The AI breakdown is pretty misleading with how it does not properly bundle the conditions.

For factions to form you must EITHER...
...wait 10 years AND have made alien contact
...or wait 30 days AND have the parlamentary system civic
...or wait 350 AND have the broken shackles origin
Alien contact is NOT required if you meet one of the other conditions.

This means that factions spawn very consistently already. In 10 years when factions unlock for most empires, you definitely have made contact unless you've not explored at all.

There's a check towards the end of each month whether factions are valid to form, and as far as I know from experimenting with it, if they ARE valid, they WILL form, no rng involved in the process.

There is randomness involved in the ethics that your starting pops have, and sometimes you may be lucky enough to get more pops of the faction with higher approval, but the overall impact generally isn't that big.

 

[fourteenfour]

About those factions, you do realize that if you go to the Economy tab - the populations indicate factions exist already and when the colony updates by day three or four you can clearly see that happiness is affected by their faction even though on the Government/Factions page no factions exist. Oddly for some starts I actually have no faction tag on each population icon in my Economy tab but I can see different values of happiness. More fun is my workers tend to be all the same while my specialist are the choosy ones

 

[ainwood]

The AI breakdown is pretty misleading with how it does not properly bundle the conditions.

For factions to form you must EITHER...
...wait 10 years AND have made alien contact
...or wait 30 days AND have the parlamentary system civic
...or wait 350 AND have the broken shackles origin
Alien contact is NOT required if you meet one of the other conditions.

This means that factions spawn very consistently already. In 10 years when factions unlock for most empires, you definitely have made contact unless you've not explored at all.

There's a check towards the end of each month whether factions are valid to form, and as far as I know from experimenting with it, if they ARE valid, they WILL form, no rng involved in the process.

There is randomness involved in the ethics that your starting pops have, and sometimes you may be lucky enough to get more pops of the faction with higher approval, but the overall impact generally isn't that big.

Oops - I found that I do indeed have the Parliamentary System civic....