if you nerf utopian abundance unemployment builds, please do it without actually nerfing utopian abundance

[RingworldUtopia]

i just saw people complaining about unemployed utopian abundance builds. i totally agree that starting the game by disabling all jobs is a degenerate playstyle that needs to go. but these people were arguing you need authoritarian lifestyles to compete with it, or utopian abundance civilians should be nerfed, etc...

i disagree. utopian abundance's entire thing is that it is the best lifestyle in the game by far. it is also the most expensive. that is how it should be. this is like a ferengi complaining that the United Federation of Planets' moneyless society and perfect equality is OP. no, let them be mad.

so how can it be fixed without ruining utopian abundance?

I think it's actually kind of simple. automation. if you close all jobs on your homeworld without planetary automation, you suffer some sort of penalty. maybe a significant happiness penalty? the synergy between stability and civilians is major, so this would actually make starting the game with all unemployed no longer strong. and that is really the only valid complaint, that people do this at the start, and other builds can't catch up with this early advantage by the time they scale up.

tying the strat to automation gatekeeps it behind automation tech, and takes it off the table of the unfun metaspammers who are ruining utopian abundance by playing it not for the roleplay, but to turn the game into a spreadsheet. but it would keep it viable for those who want to roleplay Fully Automated Gay Space Luxury Communism, as intended.

maybe there could even be a policy for utopian abundance, tied to automation and civilians too.

another thing is these people are trading for all resources when they do this, and abusing the internal market for all your needs could also be looked at to make this not viable at least in the early game. though this would be complicated, since it would need to be done in a way that does not ruin megacorp trade strats.

 

[Wolfgang I]

That civilians produce anything was an... interesting design decisions.

I expect it to remain the same to be honest and it is just a playstyle that I will personally avoid.

I mean it is like taxing vassals on higher difficulties. Completely unbalanced and they never bothered to change it so I never tax vassals as a personal decision.

 

[DarkHelmet110985]

The solution is to move the Monument behind Prosperous Unification Tech. Unemployed Pops with UA is one thing. Getting gobs of Unity via Civilians AND Factions via Parliamentary Systems and the Monument is another. Ditto Tech via Crowdsourcing if you opt to go that route. Monument is what kickstarts Civilian strata so moving it behind a Tech would do a lot imo.

 

[RingworldUtopia]

The solution is to move the Monument behind Prosperous Unification Tech. Unemployed Pops with UA is one thing. Getting gobs of Unity via Civilians AND Factions via Parliamentary Systems and the Monument is another. Ditto Tech via Crowdsourcing if you opt to go that route. Monument is what kickstarts Civilian strata so moving it behind a Tech would do a lot imo.

this is another solution, and a simpler one. i was trying to think of a way to gate it behind tech, and yours is probably more elegant.

 

[Metallichydra]

Honestly, I'd rather they simply scale down the ethic outputs and make them something more flavorful. This way empires of different ethics would be more distinct from the very start (and without having to build a monument).
Generally, resources shouldn't be granted by civilians as these can be increased by other modifiers (Just look at spiritualist's unity versus Authoritarian's edict fund. Unity is so much better because many things buff it (as well as unity just being more useful))
The effects also shouldn't affect the planet they're on if it has a cap (pop upkeep reduction and happiness).

 

[Ikael]

I personally think that the whole "civilians producing output according to ethics" is a wonderful template for eventually introducing a culture system. As it is right now, it seems weird to me that it is a viable strategy in the early game.

I would certainly be in favour of having it locked behind a tech, like it has been suggested here, or perhaps an AP. It does seem more befitting for a mid or late stage of the game (you already have tons of excess pops and no need to colonize new worlds, so you might as well make them productive).

 

[Nakkivene]

Well if civilians outperform jobs, either jobs suck or civilians are overtuned.

Maybe UA civ output bonuses could be somewhat locked behind tech? Like a few tiers of research output unlocked by lab tech or smth.

 

[RingworldUtopia]

That civilians produce anything was an... interesting design decisions.

it has been that way from the start and i think it's great that it opens up the possibility of a different playstyle. i just don't think it should be something people do at game start, and it certainly shouldn't be something people do just because, even though they're not trying to build a utopia.

one thing that would be awesome imo is if swapping living standards did not happen instantly but actually spawned a whole situation with choices along the way, that made a story out of the revolutionary changes to your society you are making. then based on your choices, what your utopian pops do could end up being changed, sort of like the quests buff your knights. part of the story could also be the celebration in the streets, like we saw in the lower decks episode where they helped a new member species join the federation and abolish money, money abolition day lol

this would work the other way too, trying to change utopian pops to slavery would come with a story of resistance and you having to crush it.

 

[yarpus]

Just nerf Seasonal Dormancy. It’s what makes these builds degenerate. Most of Civilian bonuses already add some cost to them which is great - but it does get slashes by Seasonal Dormancy.
My proposal: make Seasonal Dormancy add -75% Civilian Efficiency. They are sleeping anyway. Plus you have strategic choice of either utilizing Civilians to get resources out of them or just negating their cost.

 

[Abdulijubjub]

Just nerf Seasonal Dormancy. It’s what makes these builds degenerate. Most of Civilian bonuses already add some cost to them which is great - but it does get slashes by Seasonal Dormancy.
My proposal: make Seasonal Dormancy add -75% Civilian Efficiency. They are sleeping anyway. Plus you have strategic choice of either utilizing Civilians to get resources out of them or just negating their cost.

Seasonal Dormancy saves 0.75 food and 0.75 CG per pop, when they're working the civilian job.

It's comparable or lesser in scope than the boost that every other trait gives to their job.

• Season Dormancy: 2.25 energy equivalent, never scales at all
• Thrifty: ~2.5 energy equivalent at the start, scales with % output to be ~5+ at the end
• Ingenious/Agrarian/Traditional/Intelligent: ~1.1 energy equivalent at the start, scales with base increases and % output to be easily 5+ by the end
  • Also scales with various civics/origins/events which add extra bonuses to those jobs, in addition to the stated scaling from buildings/tech/output boosters

It's only a problem at the start.

And the start is only a problem because of the monument.

---

Just nerf (delay) the monument.

 

[Critical Ethics]

Seasonal Dormancy saves 0.75 food and 0.75 CG per pop, when they're working the civilian job.

It's comparable or lesser in scope than the boost that every other trait gives to their job.

• Season Dormancy: 2.25 energy equivalent, never scales at all
• Thrifty: ~2.5 energy equivalent at the start, scales with % output to be ~5+ at the end
• Ingenious/Agrarian/Traditional/Intelligent: ~1.1 energy equivalent at the start, scales with base increases and % output to be easily 5+ by the end
  • Also scales with various civics/origins/events which add extra bonuses to those jobs, in addition to the stated scaling from buildings/tech/output boosters

It's only a problem at the start.

And the start is only a problem because of the monument.

---

Just nerf (delay) the monument.

It's not quite that straightforward a comparison.

First up, thrifty isn't 2.5 energy equivalent. Thrifty is pop efficiency, not pop output, so an otherwise unboosted trader is getting 2.5 more trade (well, 2 trade and .5 amenities that we'll simplify to 2.5 trade) but losing 0.5 energy equivalent from the extra 0.25 cg they're eating.

Second up, utility. Excess trade doesn't do anything except be used to buy things, whereas energy, cg, and food are often consumed at source or spent on one-time purchases, especially early game. So less food and cg translate into their direct value, while excess trade needs to be funneled through the market. This means +2.5 trade is really only 2.27 energy (using a 10% market fee to stack the deck against my argument) -0.5 = 1.77. Divide by 0.03 energy and we get 59% reduction as an equivalent There's also a minor third up actually this is all penny pinching nonsense and only distracts from the below. Ignore the above.

The keystone issue is your empire's game-start infrastructure and supply chain. You don't start the game with 2,000 Traders so even if we take 2.5 as standard you're not starting the game gaining 50 energy from that trait. trying to push to 2,000 traders would require more buildings and districts and probably an entire second planet, and more cg consumption from more (and high efficiency) traders means even more buildings and even more pops pulled into specialist strata. You just don't have the minerals to actually see the same day 1 return, never mind that pure build time would push this decades into the future.

A much less complex example would be the +15% to basic resource outputs.

+15% Energy gives us 0.9 (literal) energy, scaling pretty quickly to 1.125 with two fairly basic techs, up to 1.485 with another tech and the basic building, 2.22 with the 65% basic techs and +20% +2 from the final building, and then you get into designation boosters and planet modifiers and support districts and so on and so forth. e: so at game start assuming a 50% bonus you're looking at 6*6*1.5*0.15= 8.1 energy from taking the +15% energy trait.

Meanwhile Dormancy saves you 1.125 energy equivalent on decent conditions, 1.5 on social welfare, and 2.25 on Utopian Abundance. So that all works well assuming you're boosting up living standards in lockstep with where another empire would be bumping energy production. But this combo breaks things because the sheer empire-level resource savings allow you to push this jump to day one.

------

Social Welfare and Utopian Abundance are all or nothing. You can't just boost your civilians and leave everything else as-is. So you can't get away with just paying +0.75CG per 100 civilians, you also need to pay +0.75CG per 100 workers and +0.5 per 100 specialists too. This hits a threshold issue: your Egalitarian/Fan Mat empire starts off with 5200 pops on decent conditions, which comes to approximately 2*1 + 12.8*0.5 + 18*0.25 + 37.2*0.25 = 17.7 CG in per-pop upkeep. Jumping straight to Utopian Abundance brings that up to 52.8. You get a bit of a productivity boost from the happiness but, with no relevant modifiers and a bog standard prosperous unification start, you go from about 10CG in the black to 20CG in the red. Assuming a +50% boost to everything and the standard starting spread of minerals and mineral income you're going to have to devote your entire economy to rapid mineral and CG expansion for at least a year to avoid a CG deficit situation, and it will take another year of mineral investment just to get your economy back to game start (800 minerals, two building slots, and 400 pops for the artisans, 600 minerals, two district slots, and 400 pops for the mining districts to feed them). So you've lost 40% of your pops to just sustain the lifestyle jump and tanked your early game space development and all you get in return is about the same science/unity output as having spent that 1,400 minerals on science deposits instead.

Typing it out it's actually way better than I expected, but it's still somewhat impractical, and dropping a monument is another few hundred minerals when you're already scrambling to not hit a deficit spiral in your first year in office.

------

All these problems go away when seasonal dormancy hits the fan.

Your total CG consumption is 37.86 - that's only -4 or -5 a month with no other modifiers. The trade boost from the improved living standards is more than enough to keep you in the black, never mind the 15 food per month you're saving just as an incidental side benefit of SD, which means you can hold off on dealing with it until you finish your early expansion, meaning you've tripled your research for the same points cost someone else spent to get about 5 extra energy per month. And you didn't even need to pull civilians into your main workforce to do it.

e: so after turning on UA, SD is saving you ~45 energy equivalency a month - over five times what you'd get from a +15% energy or food tech - just from civilians. You're also saving 0.45 energy equivalency on every worker, specialist, and elite, which is "only" another 13 or so. That's more as a side bonus than you're getting from an entire +15% rural tech.

Oh, and now you can afford to throw down the monument too, and even with a tech gate this would let you get the gating tech sooner, compounding your advantage. But that's just icing.

------

tl;dr: SD on UA cuts 2.25 energy equivalency of t1 and t2 goods off ~2,000 pops all producing t3 goods at the time when you're most scarce on resources, and with the 15% side benefit that comes to nearly 60 energy equivalency in total. This pulls the cost of jumping to UA down to the level supportable by start-of-game economy and makes sustaining it a tomorrow problem. The two most powerful things in a 4X are getting tomorrow quality benefits today or paying for today's benefits tomorrow, and this combo lets you pay tomorrow to get tomorrow quality benefits today which is... damn.

And again, this is before you stack on a monument.

 

[Abdulijubjub]

It's not quite that straightforward a comparison.

First up, thrifty isn't 2.5 energy equivalent. Thrifty is pop efficiency, not pop output, so an otherwise unboosted trader is getting 2.5 more trade (well, 2 trade and .5 amenities that we'll simplify to 2.5 trade) but losing 0.5 energy equivalent from the extra 0.25 cg they're eating.

Second up, utility. Excess trade doesn't do anything except be used to buy things, whereas energy, cg, and food are often consumed at source or spent on one-time purchases, especially early game. So less food and cg translate into their direct value, while excess trade needs to be funneled through the market. This means +2.5 trade is really only 2.27 energy (using a 10% market fee to stack the deck against my argument) -0.5 = 1.77. Divide by 0.03 energy and we get 59% reduction as an equivalent There's also a minor third up actually this is all penny pinching nonsense and only distracts from the below. Ignore the above.

The keystone issue is your empire's game-start infrastructure and supply chain. You don't start the game with 2,000 Traders so even if we take 2.5 as standard you're not starting the game gaining 50 energy from that trait. trying to push to 2,000 traders would require more buildings and districts and probably an entire second planet, and more cg consumption from more (and high efficiency) traders means even more buildings and even more pops pulled into specialist strata. You just don't have the minerals to actually see the same day 1 return, never mind that pure build time would push this decades into the future.

A much less complex example would be the +15% to basic resource outputs.

+15% Energy gives us 0.9 (literal) energy, scaling pretty quickly to 1.125 with two fairly basic techs, up to 1.485 with another tech and the basic building, 2.22 with the 65% basic techs and +20% +2 from the final building, and then you get into designation boosters and planet modifiers and support districts and so on and so forth. e: so at game start assuming a 50% bonus you're looking at 6*6*1.5*0.15= 8.1 energy from taking the +15% energy trait.

Meanwhile Dormancy saves you 1.125 energy equivalent on decent conditions, 1.5 on social welfare, and 2.25 on Utopian Abundance. So that all works well assuming you're boosting up living standards in lockstep with where another empire would be bumping energy production. But this combo breaks things because the sheer empire-level resource savings allow you to push this jump to day one.

------

Social Welfare and Utopian Abundance are all or nothing. You can't just boost your civilians and leave everything else as-is. So you can't get away with just paying +0.75CG per 100 civilians, you also need to pay +0.75CG per 100 workers and +0.5 per 100 specialists too. This hits a threshold issue: your Egalitarian/Fan Mat empire starts off with 5200 pops on decent conditions, which comes to approximately 2*1 + 12.8*0.5 + 18*0.25 + 37.2*0.25 = 17.7 CG in per-pop upkeep. Jumping straight to Utopian Abundance brings that up to 52.8. You get a bit of a productivity boost from the happiness but, with no relevant modifiers and a bog standard prosperous unification start, you go from about 10CG in the black to 20CG in the red. Assuming a +50% boost to everything and the standard starting spread of minerals and mineral income you're going to have to devote your entire economy to rapid mineral and CG expansion for at least a year to avoid a CG deficit situation, and it will take another year of mineral investment just to get your economy back to game start (800 minerals, two building slots, and 400 pops for the artisans, 600 minerals, two district slots, and 400 pops for the mining districts to feed them). So you've lost 40% of your pops to just sustain the lifestyle jump and tanked your early game space development and all you get in return is about the same science/unity output as having spent that 1,400 minerals on science deposits instead.

Typing it out it's actually way better than I expected, but it's still somewhat impractical, and dropping a monument is another few hundred minerals when you're already scrambling to not hit a deficit spiral in your first year in office.

------

All these problems go away when seasonal dormancy hits the fan.

Your total CG consumption is 37.86 - that's only -4 or -5 a month with no other modifiers. The trade boost from the improved living standards is more than enough to keep you in the black, never mind the 15 food per month you're saving just as an incidental side benefit of SD, which means you can hold off on dealing with it until you finish your early expansion, meaning you've tripled your research for the same points cost someone else spent to get about 5 extra energy per month. And you didn't even need to pull civilians into your main workforce to do it.

e: so after turning on UA, SD is saving you ~45 energy equivalency a month - over five times what you'd get from a +15% energy or food tech - just from civilians. You're also saving 0.45 energy equivalency on every worker, specialist, and elite, which is "only" another 13 or so. That's more as a side bonus than you're getting from an entire +15% rural tech.

Oh, and now you can afford to throw down the monument too, and even with a tech gate this would let you get the gating tech sooner, compounding your advantage. But that's just icing.

------

tl;dr: SD on UA cuts 2.25 energy equivalency of t1 and t2 goods off ~2,000 pops all producing t3 goods at the time when you're most scarce on resources, and with the 15% side benefit that comes to nearly 60 energy equivalency in total. This pulls the cost of jumping to UA down to the level supportable by start-of-game economy and makes sustaining it a tomorrow problem. The two most powerful things in a 4X are getting tomorrow quality benefits today or paying for today's benefits tomorrow, and this combo lets you pay tomorrow to get tomorrow quality benefits today which is... damn.

And again, this is before you stack on a monument.

The 2.5 for Traders and 1.1 for basic resources that I used are accounting for the roughly +20-25% output that the capital has at the start of the game. That makes it more like 10 energy at the start for a technician (though this is minor, I don't disagree with the overall point).

Where I do see a distinction is that, without the monument, you want to get rid of Civilians as quickly as possible, and replace them with useful jobs.

On day 1, there's a huge disparity: Seasonal Dormancy saves you (0.75*19+0.15*29)*(1+2*1)=55 energy-equivalent, while Ingenious is only netting you ~5 on 400 technicians (or similar for e.g. Intelligent). But even if you're saving 0.6 food and 0.6 CG extra for your civilians, and they're making 0.5 p/s/e/u and 1 trade... they're still way worse than a normal job. So you can swap to UA and get a bit of immediate power (+9.5 research of each type and +9.5 unity, around ~10 extra trade, and 10% happiness), but it wears off. And you're still -12 on CG total, while ahead +20 on food, so that part is roughly a wash.

All told it's like starting with an extra lab and admin office built, plus 10 trade. And just like actually starting with extra infrastructure, the benefit goes away once you (and everyone else) would have had a chance to build everything out anyway.

But in return, you've got 2 points locked into just reducing your working pop's upkeep by 15% (0.15 food and 0.15 CG) instead of doing something more useful, like +10% researcher efficiency, or Adaptive (+5% efficiency to all jobs and +5% growth, except on the homeworld, and -10% upkeep/amenity usage on top), if you still want that early game push.

---

It's a different story with the monument being available immediately (instead of ~4 years in, or ~7 if Planetary Unification wasn't in your first tech draw).

Building the monument right away delays building the rest of your infrastructure by one cycle (extending that benefit longer) and lets you get better returns by leaning into it though e.g. closing excess farmers. And, of course, it also gives you the option to just choose not to develop the economy at all (which lets you close miner jobs too, for even more savings/output).

Whereas all those things would be very silly to do if it meant kneecapping the research/production you needed to unlock the monument in the first place.

Mercantile does some of the same, too (it'd be nice if the clerk boost got moved to that second level of traditions, instead of the first, to avoid an early power spike).

 

[Thiend]

We could fix a lot of the problem by just starting with either less pops or more jobs for those pops.

This would also improve some starts currently having massive negatives at the beginning, as well as it currently being usually-optimal to immediately buy 100 minerals to start building a district.

UA isn't excessive long-term and neither are monuments. They're excessive at the start because making your thousand-plus civilians 50% useful instead of 10% useful is really strong. This is less of a problem the more of them are already 100% useful.

 

[snowy801]

This seems like a really dangerous approach. Come endgame I close every job on a planet except one or two.

 

[Abdulijubjub]

We could fix a lot of the problem by just starting with either less pops or more jobs for those pops.

This would also improve some starts currently having massive negatives at the beginning, as well as it currently being usually-optimal to immediately buy 100 minerals to start building a district.

UA isn't excessive long-term and neither are monuments. They're excessive at the start because making your thousand-plus civilians 50% useful instead of 10% useful is really strong. This is less of a problem the more of them are already 100% useful.

The problem is that reducing the pops gives you less growth during the colonization phase: it makes everything go much slower (except for hives and machines who can assembly to their heart's content). So it would slow the early game civilian builds, and slow economic progress in general, but it would require rebalancing between gestalts/non-gestalts again.

And adding more jobs at the start accelerates the game for everyone.

Though you could get around the former by making the homeworld give e.g. +2 bonus assembly (organic or machine) to the species whose homeworld it is: +2 assembly is like starting with ~1000 extra pops worth of growth, except they don't work jobs at the start. You'd essentially get the pops by the time you're actually colonizing, but they wouldn't be sitting around as civilians, before that, so there's no need to add jobs for them.

It could also be a temporary buff ("Starbound Optimism: +2 <human> bonus growth", in the style of Prosperous Unification), and maybe lose it on conquest, as an anti-snowballing feature. There's stuff you could do with it.

 

[Critical Ethics]

The 2.5 for Traders and 1.1 for basic resources that I used are accounting for the roughly +20-25% output that the capital has at the start of the game. That makes it more like 10 energy at the start for a technician (though this is minor, I don't disagree with the overall point).

Where I do see a distinction is that, without the monument, you want to get rid of Civilians as quickly as possible, and replace them with useful jobs.

On day 1, there's a huge disparity: Seasonal Dormancy saves you (0.75*19+0.15*29)*(1+2*1)=55 energy-equivalent, while Ingenious is only netting you ~5 on 400 technicians (or similar for e.g. Intelligent). But even if you're saving 0.6 food and 0.6 CG extra for your civilians, and they're making 0.5 p/s/e/u and 1 trade... they're still way worse than a normal job. So you can swap to UA and get a bit of immediate power (+9.5 research of each type and +9.5 unity, around ~10 extra trade, and 10% happiness), but it wears off. And you're still -12 on CG total, while ahead +20 on food, so that part is roughly a wash.

All told it's like starting with an extra lab and admin office built, plus 10 trade. And just like actually starting with extra infrastructure, the benefit goes away once you (and everyone else) would have had a chance to build everything out anyway.

But in return, you've got 2 points locked into just reducing your working pop's upkeep by 15% (0.15 food and 0.15 CG) instead of doing something more useful, like +10% researcher efficiency, or Adaptive (+5% efficiency to all jobs and +5% growth, except on the homeworld, and -10% upkeep/amenity usage on top), if you still want that early game push.

---

It's a different story with the monument being available immediately (instead of ~4 years in, or ~7 if Planetary Unification wasn't in your first tech draw).

Building the monument right away delays building the rest of your infrastructure by one cycle (extending that benefit longer) and lets you get better returns by leaning into it though e.g. closing excess farmers. And, of course, it also gives you the option to just choose not to develop the economy at all (which lets you close miner jobs too, for even more savings/output).

Whereas all those things would be very silly to do if it meant kneecapping the research/production you needed to unlock the monument in the first place.

Mercantile does some of the same, too (it'd be nice if the clerk boost got moved to that second level of traditions, instead of the first, to avoid an early power spike).

+10% to research is useless on any pop that's not doing research.

I replied in more detail in the other thread, but basically - early game pushes are very, very important, and you're vastly underestimating the magnitude of the push from this combo and overestimating the ability of the sustained benefit of the other 2 point traits to catch up. Yes the 2 pointer is far from broken in isolation, but even if your plan is to just dip in and then drop UA after 10 years you're getting a huge push at the time when huge pushes are the most effective.

 

[Critical Ethics]

We could fix a lot of the problem by just starting with either less pops or more jobs for those pops.

This would also improve some starts currently having massive negatives at the beginning, as well as it currently being usually-optimal to immediately buy 100 minerals to start building a district.

UA isn't excessive long-term and neither are monuments. They're excessive at the start because making your thousand-plus civilians 50% useful instead of 10% useful is really strong. This is less of a problem the more of them are already 100% useful.

I say lean into it. Give all traits an any-job and civilian-only benefit. You guys farmers? +15% efficiency when working a farming job, but also 0.25 food when employed in any job and a bit over 1 food when a civilian, both scaling with living standards. Also you start with two less farms but +1 mineral and energy districts.

 

[Abdulijubjub]

+10% to research is useless on any pop that's not doing research.

Just like Seasonal Dormancy is (basically) useless on any pop that isn't a civilian. -15% upkeep for 2 points is 2 points for something roughly 2x as effective as Conservationist (1 point), and Conservationist is very weak.

I replied in more detail in the other thread, but basically - early game pushes are very, very important, and you're vastly underestimating the magnitude of the push from this combo and overestimating the ability of the sustained benefit of the other 2 point traits to catch up. Yes the 2 pointer is far from broken in isolation, but even if your plan is to just dip in and then drop UA after 10 years you're getting a huge push at the time when huge pushes are the most effective.

Not going to elaborate on this, so that both of us don't have to keep spamming this one with "like I said in the other thread..." type responses.

Suffice to say I still disagree.

 

[yarpus]

Just like Seasonal Dormancy is (basically) useless on any pop that isn't a civilian. -15% upkeep for 2 points is 2 points for something roughly 2x as effective as Conservationist (1 point), and Conservationist is very weak.

Not going to elaborate on this, so that both of us don't have to keep spamming this one with "like I said in the other thread..." type responses.

Suffice to say I still disagree.

Unlike Conservationist, Seasonal Dormancy also applies to Food/Minerals/Energy upkeep. And it's -15% instead of -10%.
Not exciting, but useful.

As for general sentiment - Utopian Abundance should NOT be viable day1. Utopia should be something that you strive for and require something from you. Something more than picking trait that competes with +15% Technician Efficiency.

 

[Abdulijubjub]

Unlike Conservationist, Seasonal Dormancy also applies to Food/Minerals/Energy upkeep. And it's -15% instead of -10%.
Not exciting, but useful.

That's why it's ~2x as effective, rather than 1.5x.

-0.1 CG (0.2 energy) vs. -0.15 CG and -0.15 food (0.45 energy).

As for general sentiment - Utopian Abundance should NOT be viable day1. Utopia should be something that you strive for and require something from you. Something more than picking trait that competes with +15% Technician Efficiency.

Utopian Abundance has always been viable day 1 (at least, with a bit of upkeep reduction).

Environmentalists, in 3.14. were better off turning on UA and then unemploying all their clerks/bureaucrats and excess farmers/technicians: it made your unity and research production go up overall, and kept scaling as your pops increased without building any more. But UA's effect was much stronger in 3.14: it gave 1.5 of each type (instead of 1.5 total) and 1.0 unity instead of 0.5 (though there were no civilian job yields, so in total the benefits for unemployed pops were about the same sans monument).