One possible implementation could look like this...
(The goal of the suggestions are that instead of citizenship depending only on species, it would also be influenced by stratum, faction, world, and history - i.e. old and integrated communities, who have proven themselves as members of the society, would be a different entity than those new arrivals. A human could be a citizen of the UNE without being recognised as a full citizen by the CoM, and vice versa. By letting different pop groups of the same species have different citizenship levels,
the game will become much more flexible, logical and nuanced, and
take a big step towards the development of internal politics. At the same time,
micromanagement could be greatly reduced in xeno-diverse empires, by moving current Species Rights to either policies or a limited number of Citizenship Rights.)
BASIC MECHANICS
- Citizenship Type is no longer predefined per species. Instead, pop groups now each have a defined Citizenship Type, similar to how they have one species, one stratum and one faction/ethic.
- Instead of "Species Rights", there are now "Citizenship Rights". Each Citizenship Type, or "citizenship level", has its own set of Citizenship Rights settings. The Citizenship Rights of one Citizenship Type can normally not be "better" than those of the level above it. The following settings are moved over from the old Species Rights:
- Living Standards
- Military Service
- Migration Controls
- Colonization Rights (should probably be merged into Migration Controls)
- Population Controls
- "Indentured Servitude" is added as a new citizenship level, between Free Residence and Servitude.
- Pops can ascend the citizenship ladder, at a rate that depends on their current Political Power and the difference in Political Power between the two citizenship levels. This means that the Political Power of the pop's stratum matters a lot, especially when considering how stratum and citizenship level may intersect (see the section below on slavery and job competition). Very hierarchic societies may be very difficult, perhaps even impossible, to achieve citizenship in.
- Xenophobe / Nativist ethics increase the Political Power of Full Citizenship, making it less attainable from lower levels, rather than directly blocking xenos from achieving Full Citizenship.
- Xenophile / Cosmopolitan ethics take over the Encourage Political Thought edict, which now gives a bonus to the Political Power of the Free Residence citizenship level, thereby enabling faster integration of free non-citizens.
- (Egalitarian deserves Land of Opportunity more, in part because the Egalitarian ethic opposes Forced Resettlement and therefore should be better at encouraging voluntary migration, but in part also because the Egalitarian ethics usually can make more credible promises of good living standards for Workers, rather than enslaving them.)
- Nationalistic Zeal, "the NaZes", gives a Political Power bonus to pops from the founder species, and reduces the Political Power of Free Residence, making it more difficult for other species to advance to Full Citizenship (and making such pops easier to exploit even if they are nominally free, and ensuring that even if they make it to Full Citizenship they will still only be second-rate citizens). This also makes it easier for the founder species to ascend from the lower citizenship levels.
- Selective Kinship gives a Political Power bonus to pops from the founder species class, and reduces the Political Power of Free Residence, making it more difficult for other species classes to advance to Full Citizenship (and making such pops easier to exploit even if they are nominally free, and ensuring that even if they make it to Full Citizenship they will still only be second-rate citizens). This also makes it easier for the founder species class to ascend from the lower citizenship levels.
- Slaver Guilds reduces the Political Power of Servitude (Slavery), making it more difficult for them to advance to Indentured Servitude.
- Indentured Assets reduces the Political Power of Indentured Servitude, making it more difficult for them to advance to Free Residence.
- Citizen Service could restrict the possibility of advancement to pops in military jobs, but also greatly speed it up for them. It should also make military service a right for all Free Residence pops.
- Alternatively, Citizen Service could swap Civilian jobs to a "Military Service" job for all Civilians with the Free Residence citizenship level.
- New buildings, policies, planetary decisions or edicts could facilitate citizenship level ascension.
- Pops could also descend the citizenship ladder, under certain circumstances. Descension rate would also be based on the difference in Political Power between the two levels concerned, as well as the Political Power of the pop. Pops in the higher strata would therefore be less likely to lose their current Citizenship Rights than other pops.
- (An implication is that Social Welfare, and more egalitarian Living Standards, would give Worker pops greater protection against Indentured Servitude.)
- Fear Campaign could enable citizenship level descension for all pops, and slow down the ascension rate.
- Faction Suppression could enable citizenship level descension for all pop groups belonging to the affected faction.
- New buildings, policies, planetary decisions or edicts could facilitate citizenship level descension.
- Frontier sector worlds, i.e. worlds without a sector, could have no ongoing citizenship level ascension or descension, regardless of what is going on in the parts of the empire that have a stronger interstellar governmental presence, bringing some of that sweet sweet Firefly "lawless frontier energy" to Stellaris (and potentially causing problems when the interstellar government eventually decides to impose its order on the frontier world).
- Some pop groups are automatically put in the lowest available citizenship level and can never advance out of it:
- Serviles
- Nerve Stapled
- Zombie
- Docile Livestock
- Robots without advanced AI
- Robots with advanced AI but without AI rights
- et cetera...
- Newly grown pops inherit the citizenship level of their parent pop group.
- Citizen Service limits newly grown pops to Residence at best; Full Citizenship has to be earned via military service.
- Citizenship inheritance could be regulated via a policy, where one option could be that newly grown (free) pops get Full Citizenship. This could work especially well if population turnover is added.
- Newly assembled pops normally start with the lowest available citizenship level.
- Blade Runner. The upper strata that pay for their production do not desire competition, but rather cheap and obedient workers that yield a profitable return on investment. In hierarchic societies, they are slaves; in more equal societies, they still have to pay off their production costs.
- Clone Army pops start with the highest available citizenship level (i.e. Full Citizenship unless they use Citizen Service).
- This baseline similarly gives (democratic) Cloning authorities an easy and obvious way to stand apart from other society types - by treating manufactured biological pops as equals, rather than products or a servant caste.
- Newly arrived pops are assigned a citizenship level depending on the circumstances.
- Internal migrants keep their old citizenship level.
- International immigrants, via Migration Treaty / Access, start in Free Residence.
- Refugees start in Indentured Servitude; they are impoverished and unprepared for their new society.
- Free Haven gives Refugee arrivals Free Residence instead, regardless of their origin.
- Nationalistic Zeal gives Refugee arrivals Free Residence instead, if they belong to the founder species.
- The Commonwealth of Man would (still) not give automatic citizenship to Human refugees from the United Nations of Earth. They may recognise the survivors of Europa VII as their own kind, but that does not mean they will instantly give the ideologically deviant earthers Full Citizenship rights.
- Selective Kinship gives Refugee arrivals Free Residence instead, if they belong to the founder species class.
- (If illegal immigration is added, it could similarly make pops start in Indentured Servitude. Refugees and illegal immigration could also alternatively be handled via a new stratum or two.)
- Raiding makes the raided pops start in Servitude, if Slavery is set to Allowed; otherwise, Indentured Servitude.
- Indentured Assets also applies Intentured Servitude, rather than Servitude.
- This can be considered their repayment for the costs involved in transporting them offworld and finding productive employment for them. These services were not provided free of charge.
- Slaver Guilds unlocks the Raiding bombardment stance.
- This is partially to compensate for the greater availability of Servitude, and partially to give it a comparable but different gimmick to Indentured Asset's new sources of Indentured Servitude.
- Slave market purchasing makes the new pops start in Servitude.
- Penal Colony could assign formerly Criminal pops the Servitude citizenship level.
- The most CPU-efficient way of implementing this could be that Crime-busting events, which remove modifiers that added Criminal jobs, deport the affected pops to the Penal Colony - if the empire has one.
- Other implementations are also possible (but it feels wrong to have law-abiding citizens from zero-crime worlds migrate here and then become convicts).
- Conquest demotes all Full Citizens to Free Residents.
- Slaver Guilds increases the Servitude ratio of the population to 30%, if not already higher.
- Indentured Assets increases the Indentured Servitude ratio of the population to 30%, if not already higher (liberation services are not free of charge).
- Subject integration keeps all preexisting citizenship levels.
- Ascension empires could additionally require the correct ascension trait for Full Citizenship. It would arguably be very difficult for a non-telepath to participate as an equal in a telepathic society, or for a biological sapient to participate in a society where the citizenry communicate instantly via built-in technological means. Cybernetic societies could have a special compatibility with mechanical pops, however.
SLAVERY AND JOB COMPETITION MECHANICS
- Slavery Allowed can be used in the absence of Egalitarian ethics, rather than requiring either Authoritarian or Xenophobe/Nativist.
- (i.e. Xenophobe/Nativist loses the ability to unlock slavery, now that it is no longer handled on a per species level, but the relaxed requirement for allowing slavery means that Servitude remains an option for them anyway - as long as they do not start getting Egalitarian ideas about slavery. And even if they do, they could still exploit nominally free xenos to a greater degree than other Egalitarian empires, by making it difficult to achieve Full Citizenship.)
- Alternatively, the Authoritarian
- Slavery Prohibited exceptions:
- Slaver Guilds and Indentured Assets no longer force a specific share of the population into slavery. Instead, as suggested above and below, they could have other effects that make them better at obtaining, using, and keeping pops in Servitude, relative to other empires - while also differentiating them from each other, to make their respective gameplay a similar yet substantially different experience.
- (Indentured Assets summary: reduces the Political Power of the Indentured Servitude citizenship level and therefore their ability to advance out of servitude, makes both internal and international migrants to worlds begin in Indentured Servitude, makes any raided pops begin in Indentured Servitude rather than Servitude, and puts 30% of conquered pops into Indentured Servitude.)
- (Slaver Guilds summary: reduces the Political Power of the Servitude citizenship level and therefore their ability to advance out of servitude, makes Enforcer a job primarily for Servitude pops, unlocks the Raiding bombardment stance, and enslaves 30% of conquered pops.)
- Thrall-World could perhaps become exclusive to Slaver Guilds, or at least available without the normal source. Though a better solution might be to just make the Domination tradition tree unlock either Thrall-World or Penal Colony, depending on whether slavery is allowed, which would simultaneously 1) eliminate the frustrating randomness for those who really want them, and 2) help make Domination a more viable first pick for empires.
- Other empires may colonise new worlds with replicants or robots, but Slaver Guilds empires already have a caste of cheap labour that can be commanded to go forth and multiply.
- Slavery Type is removed.
- Indentured Servitude is represented via the new citizenship level with the same name.
- Since players normally match job-specific Slavery Type with specific traits that are good for that job, we can achieve similar or better results by just having the traits influence which available jobs the pops take (and giving the player the means to add these jobs).
- For instance, Battle Thrall jobs would prefer pops with combat-friendly traits. However, unlike before, these jobs could now also be taken by pops with "wimpy" traits, if there are no better pops available for the openings.
- Servant should not be a slavery-exclusive job to begin with.
- Battle Thrall jobs could be added via the Slave Processing Facility, perhaps as a job swap for Stronghold.
- Livestock and Grid Amalgamated could be available via resource districts (and buildings), if the pop is viable for Purging, or if the empire is Barbaric Despoilers, or if the pop is Delicious or Felsic. This could require special buildings or job swaps.
- Sapient xenophagia is barbaric, but high societies know that pragmatism is the civilized centre between the undesirable extremes of barbarism and fanaticism. If an enslaved sapient xeno is Delicious, eating it is clearly the best way to help it self-actualize while also serving the greater good of the empire, and this must therefore be the ethically superior choice.
- Machine empires that loathe biological pops could still use them as batteries.
- Anti-machine empires should similarly be able to use inferior or excess robots (a.k.a. "batteries with legs") in Grid Amalgamated jobs.
- Elite and Specialist jobs prefer pops with higher citizenship level over those with lower, while Worker jobs prefer pops with lower citizenship level. The job weights system is used when pops with equal standing are competing for the same job.
- The net effect is that pops with lower citizenship level get pulled into "undesirable" jobs, while pops with higher citizenship levels hog the "good" jobs.
- Pleasure Seekers / Corporate Hedonism makes the Entertainer job prefer lower citizenship levels.
- Slaver Guilds makes the Enforcers job prefer lower citizenship levels.
- Citizen Service makes the Soldier job prefer higher citizenship levels.
- (Full Citizen pops will tend to promote to higher strata, until those jobs are full.)
- Meritocracy and Ruthless Competition make job competition ignore citizenship levels, and look only at job weights. The most qualified pop gets the job, regardless of their current social standing, and blast the consequences for high-stratum unemployment and social Stability.
- Frontier sector worlds, i.e. worlds without a sector, could similarly ignore citizenship levels for job competition, bringing some of that sweet sweet Firefly "lawless frontier energy" to Stellaris (and potentially causing problems when the interstellar government eventually decides to impose its order on the frontier world).
- A simpler version of this system could be to restrict access to higher stratum jobs. Elite jobs could be limited to Full Citizenship, while Specialist jobs are blocked for Servitude and None. However, the long-term difference may be minimal, as the suggested citizenship level advancement would make Elites and Specialists advance faster to Full Citizenship if they are not already there.
ASSIMILATION AND PURGING
With the changes above,
Assimilation and
Purge Type are the main remaining Species Rights issues. If they can be handled another way, Species Rights could be completely gone and the current interface buttons would no longer be needed (and the UI real estate could be recycled for a Citizen Rights button).
Assimilation could be part of the Citizenship Rights, and/or could be handled via a new Ascension policy (other options for dealing with the muggles could include servitude and purging).
Purge Type could be selected at the time of initiating a purge, but there would still need to exist a way to initiate a purge without the current Species Rights interface.
CITIZENSHIP TYPES
* Allows
Protected Fauna and
Gladiatorial Xeno jobs, if available.
** Free Residence should lose the Amenities Usage reduction; the intent may have been to represent that they get less Amenities, but the reality is that they are instead more easily satisfied, and there are potential cases where the resulting Happiness gain from the greater excess of Amenities is greater than their default Happiness penalty. It should be a sufficient "bonus" that their Happiness/Approval contribution matters less, and they therefore make better picks for low-Happiness jobs.
POPULATION TURNOVER?
There are at least two basic ways to achieve
population turnover in Stellaris, which both utilise a "pop retirement rate" that depends on the Lifespan of the species. In either case, Stellaris would now simulate the passing of many generations of pops over the course of the game, and the generational shifts would have an impact on how the game unfolds.
- Non-Civilian pops "retire" and are "replaced" by otherwise identical pops in the Civilian stratum, at the calculated rate.
- Technically, it is still the same pop - it just got demoted.
- This solution has no direct implications for pop growth.
- The rest of the game can basically keep working the same way.
- All pops "die", at the calculated rate.
- This solution requires that the pop nativity rate is increased from the current pop growth rate, to compensate for the now-added pop mortality rate.
- Pop growth additionally needs to be adjusted to account for the greater longevity of pops.
- Every source of increased Lifespan needs to be rebalanced, taking the pop growth implications into account.
- (Technically, a third variant would be that pop groups track their internal agre distribution, which would allow a population growth simulation that would be even more accurate - and substantially more taxing on the CPU, I presume. Unless someone can argue why that would not be the case, and that there would be some significant gain from this third model, I will consider this idea a dead end.)
Population turnover mechanics could help make lifespan, experience gain and skill modifiers matter for planetary economies. This would consequentially also make more species traits matter economically, rather than remaining a waste of (or free) trait points whenever a species does not produce leaders. These traits could then, potentially, also be allowed in combinations with leadership-blocking traits like Serviles and Nerve Stapled.
- Lifespan could modify how long pops remain in the upper strata before replacements need to be trained.
- Indirectly, this would make long-lived species be overrepresented in the upper strata, while short-lived species are underrepresented. Species lifespan would have a visible impact on the socioeconomic demographic structure of the empire.
- Consequentially, in a xeno-diverse society, long-lived species could align better with governing ethics, due to the governing ethics attraction bonuses from higher Happiness due to higher Living Standards, while short-lived species have less reason to be satisfied with the status quo.
- Experience gain could modify the rate at which pops promote to higher strata, or complete an education "job" that is required to promote to that level.
- The simplest implementation could be to use the total experience gain modifier to determine the "starting age" of pops. (The total experience gain modifier could also reduce the starting age of leaders.)
- A further possibility could be to compare the starting and retiring ages of pop groups, and then use the experience gain rate to calculate an average "skill level" that modifies the outputs of the job. Additionally, the Talented trait could provide a bonus to that skill level. However, this would make it necessary to also factor experience gain and skill traits into job weights.
- Nascent Stage would also still matter after population growth ceases from overcrowding, because "new" pops would still be "born".
Population turnover could also be used to enable some really flavourful secondary mechanics/outcomes. Some examples:
- Nativity Citizenship: there could be a citizenship policy or civic that grants Full Citizenship to all native-born pops, regardless of their parent pop group's citizenship level. It might not be possible for Free Residence pops to gain Full Citizenship, but their children would gain it automatically, and eventually the pop turnover would have replaced the original Free Residence pops with Full Citizenship pops.
- If Xenophobe was rebranded as Nativist (and Xenophile as Cosmopolitan), this could be a tolerable albeit slow path to citizenship in Nativist empires.
- Aristocratic Elite could protect the Elite stratum from the pop turnover effect, insulating it completely from competition (and changes in species composition, until new positions appear).
- This would make Aristocratic Elite the polar opposite of Meritocracy that it should be, if the Meritocracy suggestion above is also implemented (or something like it). This would also mean that a Meritocracy conquering an Aristocratic Elite world could end up "disemploying" the entire Elite stratum at the same time, which might be very bad for local stability.
- Citizen Service could really shine like never before, flavour-wise.
- All pops could start with "Residence" citizenship by default and only gain "Full Citizenship" through holding a Soldier job, after which they would be more competitive for jobs in the higher strata (as per the job competition suggestion above).
- Service guarantees citizenship - now more literally than ever before.
- When inspecting demographics / pop groups, the player would know that all Full Citizenship pops have actually earned their Full Citizenship by completing a tour of military service in the Soldier job at some point in the game.
- If Citizen Service changes the Soldier job to prefer pops with a higher citizenship level, the citizens it produces would only keep moving on to higher strata until they are filled up, at which point the citizens would remain in the Soldier job and block more pops from becoming citizens. This would essentially recreate the Citizen-Civilian divide of Starship Troopers.
- "A citizen accepts personal responsibility for the safety of the body politic, defending it with his life. A civilian does not."
- Alternatively, Citizen Service could swap the Civilian job to a "Citizen" job for all pop groups that have Full Citizenship.
- The player would effectively be encouraged to keep a number of Soldier jobs on every world, at least in order to produce sufficient Full Citizenship pops to cover all Elite and Specialist jobs.
- From a coding-technical perspective, gaining citizenship from the Soldier job could perhaps work a bit like being a Necrophyte, except with less death and more explosions. Or just utilise the regular citizenship level advancement system as per above, except at a greatly accelerated speed.
- In some societal systems, pops being promoted to a higher stratum (presumably via education) could also gain "Indentured Servitude" until their student loans / bribe loans / franchise fees are paid off. This could perhaps even be a feature of most living standards. Or at least, Indentured Assets. (As per the citizenship level advancement system described above, their higher strata should make it a realistic prospect for them to pay off their debts within their lifetimes. At least as long as they keep their jobs.)
- Neutering purges could work "realistically".
- Slaver empires could sell non-reproducing (neutered) slaves, whose eventual expiry date ensures a steady future demand for this "export" (at least until a biologically skilled empire figures out how to fix the issue, or assemble such pops on their own). A similar "planned obsolescence" feature could also be available for machine pops sold at local retail stores.
CPU PERFORMANCE CONSIDERATIONS
Handling Citizenship Type per pop group, i.e. separating pop groups by Citizenship Type in addition to Species, Stratum and Faction, means that there could be more pop groups for the game to handle. This would increase the CPU burden.
- The size of this impact depends on how stratum and citizenship would intersect in the game.
- A point of having citizenship level affect job competition is that it helps pull lower citizenship levels into the Worker stratum, and higher citizenship levels into the higher strata, thereby making the game gravitate towards citizenship level homogeneity within strata. The end result may not be as burdensome as on
However, the CPU burden should also be reduced by the game no longer needing to track slavery status separately of Species Rights (Slavery Guilds and Indentured Assets can currently give slavery status to pops while their species rights is something completely different). Depending on how slavery status is currently handled by the game, this could remove a potentially (relatively) significant CPU burden.
The CPU burden should also be reduced by the (nearly) complete removal of Species Rights. Rather than keeping track of each unique configuration for each species, the game would only need to manage five unique Citizenship Rights (and not all empires would use all of them to begin with).
Edit 1:
- Restructured the layout and the order of the basic mechanic points, and moved the parts about slavery and job competition mechanics to a new, second header.
- Removed the suggestion of spending Unity to directly modify pop group citizenship levels.
- Citizenship level ascension:
- Clarified the Xenophobe/Nativist impact on citizenship.
- Added Nationalistic Zeal and Selective Kinship suggestions.
- Descension moved to a separate point block.
- New arrivals:
- Internal migrants to a world now normally keep their citizenship level unchanged, rather than dropping to Free Residence.
- Clarified that the suggestion for Indentured Assets makes both internal and international migrants start in Indentured Servitude.
- Free Haven lets Refugees begin with Free Residence rather than Indentured Servitude.
- Added a point about slave market purchases.
- Elaborated on penal planet potential.
- Assembled pops:
- Added more rationale for them being treated differently than grown pops.
- Added a Clone Army exception.
- Added notes on conquest and subject integration.
- Slavery:
- Elaborated on the change to "Allowed" only requiring that the empire is not Egalitarian.
- Elaborated and cleaned up the text on the special slavery jobs, and removed the suggestion of having jobs add secondary jobs.
- Added "None" as a citizenship level.
- Added a brief section on assimilation and purging, the main remaining issues.
- Elaborated a bit more on population turnover.
- Added a segment on CPU considerations.
- A number of minor text improvements.
Edit 2:
- Frontier sector world suggestions, to bring some of that sweet sweet Firefly "lawless frontier energy" to Stellaris:
- Frontier sector worlds have no ongoing citizenship level ascension or descension, regardless of what is going on in the parts of the empire that have a stronger interstellar governmental presence.
- Frontier sector worlds ignore citizenship levels for job competition, and look only at job weights, similar to Meritocracy and Ruthless Competition.
- (Potentially causing problems when the interstellar government eventually decides to impose its order on the frontier world.)
- Added textual elaborations of the exceptions to the Slavery Prohibited policy, including a reference to prisoners with jobs.
- A number of minor text improvements.
Edit 3:
- Changed the Nationalistic Zeal and Selective Kinship citizenship ascension suggestions to instead give a Political Power bonus to pops from the founder species and the founder species class, respectively, while reducing the Political Power of Free Residence (thereby making it more difficult for other species classes to advance to Full Citizenship, and making such pops easier to exploit even if they are nominally free, and ensuring that even if they make it to Full Citizenship they will still only be second-rate citizens). This also makes it easier for the founder species (class) to ascend from the lower citizenship levels.
- Added a suggestion that Nationalistic Zeal gives Refugee arrivals Free Residence (rather than Indentured Servitude) if they belong to the founder species, and a suggestion that Selective Kinship does the same for the founder species class.
- (Essentially, those two civics represent the speciesism that the Xenophobe ethic is associated with.)
- Added suggestions that new buildings, policies, planetary decisions or edicts could facilitate citizenship level ascension/descension.
- Added suggestion that under Citizen Service, military service should be a right for all Free Residence pops (i.e. they should never be exempt from military service).
- Hopefully clearer wording in the first two points.
- Minor text improvements.
Edit 4 (started):
- Added that Raiding puts captured pops into Intendured Servitude if Slavery is not set to Allowed.
- Added summaries on Slaver Guilds and Indentured Assets in the slavery and job competition section, collecting suggestions already made elsewhere for a simpler overview.
- Also new suggestions regarding the availability Thrall-World.
- Also new suggestion that Indentured Assets makes raided pops begin in Indentured Servitude, rather than Servitude.
- Also new suggestion that Slaver Guilds unlocks the Raiding bombardment stance.
- Added suggestion that Necrophage empires also can use pops as Livestock (this should also help them get the Xenophage diplomatic relations modifier).
- Added much elaboration on pop turnover, mostly from the original post but also including an observation about how the Nascent Stage trait could be affected.
- Minor apocalyptic reference additions.
- Minor text improvements.
