Im fine with effective levels as is. My main issue isnt their effectiveness but just that a lot of destiny traits you never see simply because its borderline impossible to reach the required level.
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I can not even recall what the Official Legendary Traits ARE, the effort required to get Officials to reach any relevant high Levels is simply too absurd.
That should not be if one has used the Leader for its intended purpose their entire existence. It just so happens to be that the sole purpose of Officials is to, well sit on their asses not getting more than passive XP, like they were some sort of aquatic stationary plankton-eating animal. :b
That should not be if one has used the Leader for its intended purpose their entire existence. It just so happens to be that the sole purpose of Officials is to, well sit on their asses not getting more than passive XP, like they were some sort of aquatic stationary plankton-eating animal. :b
Exactly my point, outside of council you never see them. I read all of them from the wiki and some look fun but you never get them.
I have taken to leaving one of my councilor slots open for non-councilors while going through agendas with the statecraft tradition. I cycle though my officials that are lower than level 8, and in my current game I managed to get 3 officials with destiny traits this way.
The officials that I haven't yet put on the council, even those hired very early on in the game, are still no more than level 5.
It's quite bad that the fastest way to level non-councilor officials is to just temporarily have them on the council.
Even worse that Statecraft is so much better at levelling leaders than aptitude. Yes, it is for councilors only, but since there's no cooldown for swapping out councilors, you can easily give your non-councilors 150 x level xp for each agenda.
This also makes statecraft incredibly powerful. You can get destiny traits for your councilors in 2260, probably earlier if you optimize for it, and those destiny traits can easily give you 20-30% research speed, and if you're lucky, the genius armorer trait, but if the traits are reduced in power then it will be incredibly underwhelming for those who do not go with statecraft or a dedicate level 8 speedrun build.
As if most destiny traits aren't incredibly underwhelming.
Shout out to the Peacekeeper trait for being a perfect example of this. A small amount of stability and some crime reduction, when you could instead have a genius armorer buffing all of your fleets?
The officials that I haven't yet put on the council, even those hired very early on in the game, are still no more than level 5.
It's quite bad that the fastest way to level non-councilor officials is to just temporarily have them on the council.
Even worse that Statecraft is so much better at levelling leaders than aptitude. Yes, it is for councilors only, but since there's no cooldown for swapping out councilors, you can easily give your non-councilors 150 x level xp for each agenda.
This also makes statecraft incredibly powerful. You can get destiny traits for your councilors in 2260, probably earlier if you optimize for it, and those destiny traits can easily give you 20-30% research speed, and if you're lucky, the genius armorer trait, but if the traits are reduced in power then it will be incredibly underwhelming for those who do not go with statecraft or a dedicate level 8 speedrun build.
As if most destiny traits aren't incredibly underwhelming.
Shout out to the Peacekeeper trait for being a perfect example of this. A small amount of stability and some crime reduction, when you could instead have a genius armorer buffing all of your fleets?
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Both Leader and Species traits tend to suffer from being either utterly irrelevant or so niche they might as well be irrelevant.
For example: Resilient: Who cares for +50% DEFENSIVE Army DAMAGE on a Species? It is going to be irrelevant literally 99.9% of the time, and I am leaving out one or two 9s from that percentage. So, whenever I randomize into such Species, I consider that Trait as reading "-1 Trait Points and Trait Slots". Because that is what it is.
Adding some general utility to Leader and Species traits that are incredibly specific would go a long way to make things more interesting. Such as Resilient coming with generic +5% habitability as well so it is still weak, but at least it'd always have SOME relevancy to compensate for it.
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Faster completion is a very different benefit over greater bandwidth. A non-Fanatic xenophile can currently complete 50% more FC events in the same time as another empires; for +2 to effective councillor level to be even vaguely comparable you'd need to boost FC speed by 33% per level (level 1 counts so your baseline is actually 1.33 speed so you need +0.66 to get an effective +50%). This cascades to regular empires having no reason to put anything but their highest level councillor on empire FC events because otherwise the other guy is garaunteed to win, which means investing in FC is now a direct drain on your economy... so why bother unless you know it's space fauna? Just let the other guy do it.
Similarly once a standard xenophile meets someone they can assign improve relations using their bonus envoy and continue to FC at the speed of a regular empire. Being friends is free. With a pure councillor approach they're either giving up one of the two councillors they hired for FC work and dropping to 1.5 "effective" envoys or they're hiring in a new friendship councillor (or redirecting them from planet management) so it's costing money to be friends. Also you're limited to the same number of friends as everyone else unless you start some kind of micro heavy councilor juggling.
Fanphiles are even harder to match.
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That's all just what I said except with no names on your assignable widgets and if your councillor retires your entire geopolitical network collapses.
This is because the focus is on variety over impact. People must have a trait per level, so we need dozens of traits, but making and balancing dozens of cool, impactful traits for a single subsystem of a subsystem that also touches half the game isn't realistically possible, so have two garbage traits per actually interesting trait to give the illusion of choice when all 67% of them are is literal screen filler.
"So why not just give fewer, more impactful traits per-" they tried that. People complained that they needed their per level traits back while simultaneously complaining that the garbage traits are garbage and that the amount of garbage traits were why they needed to be able to take so many traits per leader. Because understanding cause and effect is haaard.
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Nah, I was suggesting things for officers to do (namely, replacing envoy functions) in order to be able to gain XP "from the field" like other leader classes, instead of being confined by passive XP gain.
In the absence of that (admittedly, convoluted) option, a far more straightforward way to avoid your issue would be to just tweak a few things:
> Trascendent learning AP, instead of modifying XP gain, would give a fixed amount of monthly XP gain to all your leaders (so non-field, non-council leaders can level up properly if you pick this one up)
> Quick learner species trait now gives +20% XP gain instead
> Buff the entire aptitude tree
The empire needs you: -25% leader recruitment & maintenance costs
--> Since the unity savings are minimal past the early game, perhaps it would be better to consolidate both bonuses inside a single tradition (not to mention that we would have one "spend unity to gain more unity" tradition instead of two, so that's always a win in my book)
Psychological profile: +25% XP gain to all leader types
--> So the "better leaders tree" has no leader XP bonus whatsoever? What the heck, time to solve this
Champions of the empire: +1 leader starting level, +1 leader starting traits
--> A slight buff to this tradition to better improve your fresh recruits
Healthcare program: -1 maximum leader negative traits, leaders have a 3% chance of losing one negative trait each passing year
--> A buff that aims to put this tradition at least on par with other negative trait-reducing ones, while rewarding you for having longer leader lifespans
Finisher: +1 leader capacity for each class, all already recruited leaders gain +1 level upon adoption
--> Giving a bit oomph for the finisher. Strategic adoption timing might optimize level gains!
--> Since the unity savings are minimal past the early game, perhaps it would be better to consolidate both bonuses inside a single tradition (not to mention that we would have one "spend unity to gain more unity" tradition instead of two, so that's always a win in my book)
Psychological profile: +25% XP gain to all leader types
--> So the "better leaders tree" has no leader XP bonus whatsoever? What the heck, time to solve this
Champions of the empire: +1 leader starting level, +1 leader starting traits
--> A slight buff to this tradition to better improve your fresh recruits
Healthcare program: -1 maximum leader negative traits, leaders have a 3% chance of losing one negative trait each passing year
--> A buff that aims to put this tradition at least on par with other negative trait-reducing ones, while rewarding you for having longer leader lifespans
Finisher: +1 leader capacity for each class, all already recruited leaders gain +1 level upon adoption
--> Giving a bit oomph for the finisher. Strategic adoption timing might optimize level gains!
This would solve many of the current problems, I think.
So perhaps a +1 official / +2 officials capacity for xenophile ethics would be a better way to solve this conundrum instead, allowing for more first contacts for Xenophile empires. It would make philes more powerful, but frankly, it is not as if it is an OP ethos right now. In either case, the first contact part of envoys is indeed hard to replace by leaders, as you accurately pointed out. It is a problem "only" in the early game, but... that's a very important part of the game (and one of the most tangible benefits of being xenophiles).
I think that the problem of leader traits is similar to the problems of current species traits. The lack of multiple effect traits makes many of them barely noticeable in way too many situations. You just gotta expand their effects rather than their sheer numbers (say, the "Unyielding" trait providing ship hull points when commanding a fleet, or +3 starbase cap when the leader sits at the council). And the veteran classes themselves are, hum, not great, either, with many of them being far too over-specialized in some cases (or downright useless, like Explorer).
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But that means
If your FC guys cost resources then you're either wasting resources between FC bursts or in micro hell while you swap them all over, assuming you have enough FC jobs for them to fill in downtime anyway.
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Well, they could always change first contact so it is interesting to progress in it even if you're not the one finishing it. If you didn't care about investing in first contact, you're not getting those society research bonuses or whatever.
First contact should go beyond just translating the others language.
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Faster officials and partial rewards for partial success solve one issue, assuming those partial rewards are as mechanically beneficial as having those councillors camping on your worst planet or passively "earning" unity by not existing. But even with just standard official quantities you're still left with the bit of my first post that I quoted in my second post; it's fine for envoys to sit around waiting for something to do since they're free, but once you attach a cost then downtime starts to hurt.
But again:
I'm not expecting or demanding a solution, and the thread doesn't need to come up with one for the idea to have merit. I'm saying that the 10% of envoys that is first contact is 90% of the work of removing envoys so the difficulty of removing them is being underestimated.
(and by extension any solution that retains envoys or an envoy-like entity as a fallback is far less work than trying to fully remove them)
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Yup definitely isnt something thats gonna be easy to fix or change but definitely feel needs to be done.
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