Xenophile, pacifist and materialist ethics are largely neglected by Paradox

[Louco doido]

I've been looking at Stellaris's dev diarys and noticed that Paradox heavily favors some ethics while neglecting others. The xenophobic, authoritarian, and spiritualist ethics will be getting a LOT of content lately—while the xenophile, pacifist, and materialist ethics won't get anything of note other than balance and leadership traits.

As a player, this is a situation that worries me greatly, because with each DLC and free patch that comes out, certain ethics become increasingly versatile while others are being left behind, slowly falling into obscurity. I understand that paradox may have favored xenophobic, authoritarian, and spiritualist ethics because they were the most popular (more pops = more lag, so you must purge them, even with the rework they recently received). But you must also understand that the more content you add to certain ethics, the less relevant others become, and at this rate, no one will want to play with them except to build certain niche empires, such as the xenophile ethic, which for me at the moment is only viable for building trade-based empires.

 

[RingworldUtopia]

I've been looking at Stellaris's dev diarys and noticed that Paradox heavily favors some ethics while neglecting others. The xenophobic, authoritarian, and spiritualist ethics will be getting a LOT of content lately—while the xenophile, pacifist, and materialist ethics won't get anything of note other than balance and leadership traits.

As a player, this is a situation that worries me greatly, because with each DLC and free patch that comes out, certain ethics become increasingly versatile while others are being left behind, slowly falling into obscurity. I understand that paradox may have favored xenophobic, authoritarian, and spiritualist ethics because they were the most popular (more pops = more lag, so you must purge them, even with the rework they recently received). But you must also understand that the more content you add to certain ethics, the less relevant others become, and at this rate, no one will want to play with them except to build certain niche empires, such as the xenophile ethic, which for me at the moment is only viable for building trade-based empires.

actually their own stats that they provided showed most players literally prefer to play xenophile. the online xenophobes are just a very loud (and true, large) minority.

that being said, yes I want more for those ethics as well as for egalitarian. in the past they were pretty good at having a "good/bad" ethic balance in dlcs. hopefully they'll get back to that after the last ascension rework related DLC.

i REALLY want ethical federations for example.

 

[Wolfgang I]

I usually have pacifist mixed in and I'm kinda annoyed that a militarist civic is now far superior to Inward Perfection when it comes to tall turtleing.

 

[RingworldUtopia]

I usually have pacifist mixed in and I'm kinda annoyed that a militarist civic is now far superior to Inward Perfection when it comes to tall turtleing.

honestly, i don't see any reason why sovereign guardianship shouldn't have "either militarist OR pacifist" as its requirement.

 

[GhostDanny]

honestly, i don't see any reason why sovereign guardianship shouldn't have "either militarist OR pacifist" as its requirement.

Could it be stacked with Inwards perfection?

 

[Nikolai II]

actually their own stats that they provided showed most players literally prefer to play xenophile

Yea, my feeling/guess has always been that the others get a bunch of bonuses in an attempt to make all ethics equally used which would "show them to be balanced". (Which is kind of silly, since lots of people will no matter what want to play as benevolent overlords or try every ethos in turn, so you can't really judge whether they are balanced just through usage).

 

[RingworldUtopia]

Yea, my feeling/guess has always been that the others get a bunch of bonuses in an attempt to make all ethics equally used which would "show them to be balanced". (Which is kind of silly, since lots of people will no matter what want to play as benevolent overlords or try every ethos in turn, so you can't really judge whether they are balanced just through usage).

i think making an ethics wheel that includes genocide "balanced" is in itself unethical. it should be reasonable, but being a genocidal maniac SHOULD be harder.

 

[jedavis]

The xenophobic, authoritarian, and spiritualist ethics will be getting a LOT of content lately

Got some concrete examples for a clueless gestalt player?

 

[hart30]

Materialist have received massive love in the past with robots and synthetic. As well as a lot of science stuff.
Its good if they are left alone for a bit.

 

[Ikael]

Materialist ethics got tons of new toys and content with Synthetic Dawn and Cosmogenesis. They are fine for now, I think.

Xenophiles are okay if only for how all galaxies tend to converge into massive monoblock federations and/or vassal swarms. They did not get too much new content since Federations and Overlord, true (and sad), but they still hang in there.

Now, pacifists are, indeed, forever and ever shafted. Even some of their ethic bonuses vanish into thin air after a while (that is, you reach maximum stability cap and your nifty pop sprawl reduction gets copied everywhere). The higher development ceiling of this new economic rework is going to indirectly benefit them in the long term, but for now, they are still in a rough spot, since their bonuses and civics haven't adapted yet to the fact that you now need to employ actual resources into developing your planets, instead of coughing up a couple of minerals into buildings and then invest everything you have into fleets, as you did pre 4.0

That being said, the problem lies in the fact that the ratio of "good scify guys" content VS "terrible dystopian nightmare" content is very, very skewed. Well, at least those who like to play utopian got the Educator civic, which is amazing, and civilian builds (which need to be fine-tuned). But if you look at most new content, we got a new way of blowing up the galaxy and plethora of new orwellian nightmare goverments. And I am not particularly optimistic about what the new Shroud expansion will be going (yes, we will probably see more authoritarian, xenophobe and spiritualist content).

 

[Zergor]

Sovereign guardianship was indeed the biggest attack at the pacifist ethos.

Having a reduction to the worst sprawl offender that is better than the fanatic version of pacifist at the cost of increase to ones that are easily manageable makes pacifist tall empire feel useless compared to militarist ones.

And inward perfection feel like it was never updated.
Agrarian Idyll was at least a bit changed because 4.0 mandated it (they are still barred out of orbital rings habitations with no compensation though).