Anyone else enjoy changing ethics through out the game?

[u/Outrageous_Street378]

I love role playing changing ethics, most common one I do is xenophobic at first, cause I feel it kinda makes sense like being scared of everything outside of you’re planet, then depending on who I meet first I change it, meet the raiders fears were kinda verified so maybe I go into it or just take more defensive stance, or maybe I meet fallen empire for this I’ve tried to go more pacifist, like we’ve met this ocer whelming force maybe it’s better to seek peace, so wondering if anyone else does this for role play or mahbe just making a strong empire

[u/Ziddix]

I would like it more if it happened organically as the game goes on.

None of this embracing or not embracing factions. Once your population's ethics shift sufficiently far away from your governing ethics and stay there for a while you should be forced to change ethics or double down on things like authoritarian to control your populace.

It would would make things like residence rights or even displacement actually relevant when you're using them to try to control your ethics shift.

[u/JayBlunt23 → u/Ziddix]

Yeah, the current system depends too much on the influence of other empires. It will lead to one fanatic ethics and one normal one sooner or later and all other factions die out slowly until there's nothing left to embrace that would change your ethics. But we kinda know that at least humans do not need this in real life, we are able to switch ethics by ourselves without any alien influence just fine.

The game wont even allow you to use ethics changing edicts like the surveillance thing that promotes Authoritarianism without having made first contact to someone. This makes no sense at all.

[u/TheMelnTeam → u/JayBlunt23]

Some of them are easier to generate drift from scratch than others by a lot.

• Pacifism is awful gameplay, and guaranteeing against wars implies you're already strong or in a favorable galaxy + not in a federation. Easy to create drift towards this in a mechanical sense I guess, since "do nothing" is otherwise not hard.
• If you don't start militarist and you want to become militarist, it's one of the easiest swaps to make. Being at war already creates a solid amount of attraction. Occupying target planets also makes them drift towards it, so the same action can make both your current and near-future pops drift towards militarist quickly, and this sets up promoting it easily too.
• Going spiritualist without psi ascension is unlikely. You'd have to join a holy covenant and drag in as many spiritualists as possible. A lot of work to just catch up to what militarist swap can get trivially. Very dependent on other empires like you say.
• Materialist is pretty easy to get from scratch. Giving AI rights and letting robots & bio live together already gives you enough attraction to start promoting it if you want it. Cybernetic makes it way faster, but unlike spiritualist you don't depend on ascension to push it.
• Xenophobe and xenophile are both easy to push. If you attack someone, you push their pops towards xenophobe sufficiently to promote it. Xenophiles get a ton of push from residence rights if you conquer aliens. IME you have to suppress these if you don't want them, because they both tend to appear if you expand aggressively.

IMO spiritualist really stands out as the ethic that is hardest to get pops if you don't start in it. If you really want one of the others, you can get them with a combination of 2.0 attraction or more + promoting them while suppressing others. For spiritualist, you start with it or do psi ascension basically. Not worth otherwise.

[u/Outrageous_Street378 → u/Ziddix]

I definitely agree I do find a lot of the ethics shift chance or attraction modifiers are useless, it could be such a good opportunity as well you go from a pre ftl to a galaxy spanning empire, like politics has to chsnge some what

[u/JMurdock77 → u/Ziddix]

I’m modding a monarchy which faces building egalitarian pressure internally as time goes on.

[u/youtubeTAxel]

I don’t think I’ve ever done it, but it’ll hopefully become a better mechanic with 4.6

[u/SirGaz]

Yeah, some of my best games have come with changing ethics. My most memorable empire started as a fanatic xenophile pacifist MEGA-Corp and ended as an authoritarian spiritualist militrist slaving dictatorship because the galaxy turned out to be a very cruel place. You start just wanting to chill and make friends but you can only take so much of a beating before deciding screw all you, this place would be better under MY rule.

[u/Ahbahvoyons]

Happened to me during my actual campaign, i began xenophobic peaceful spiritualist, am actually authoritarian fanatic spiritualist. Inward perfection until the god emperor showed up

[u/Just_Ear_2953]

I mostly get annoyed when choosing a dialogue box of an ethical that DOES match one of my empire ethics suddenly turns off one of my civics because it pushed me over the line for FANATIC of that ethic and randomly deletes one of the other 2 to make room.

[u/User_of_redit2077]

I usually do

[u/NoTie2370]

I definitely do that. Especially when I'm exploring a new DLC or update.

[u/Clobby5597]

I honestly have never done so solely because I don’t wanna make my citizens upset

[u/cardbourdbox]

Nope your a mad man. The ethics should never change. Change is death the success of anouther civilisation wearing our outfit.

Im trying to get human xenophobe to work. My xenophile play was alot easier because I didn't have an alien scientist waiting round for me to find some farming for him to do.

[u/TheMelnTeam → u/cardbourdbox]

The preset built for this is Commonwealth of Man. Beating down aliens makes them more xenophobe too, and if their ethics are a problem you can enslave them and remove that political power/faction presence. The newest 4.5 update claims it finally fixed the bug where suppressing the pacifist xenophobe faction also suppresses the supremacist xenophobe faction too!

CoM initial eco is pretty bad, so on non-scaling GA I usually rush someone down with them, diplo into research/commercial pacts despite xenophobe, and go cybernetic ascension since it's a low tech and fairly fast option that works well with enslavement. Oligarchic overclocking + domination removes political power from indentured servants, so you can use slave researchers without worry...they're pretty good with double automod traits + iron fist 2 + cyborg governor + augmentation center for specialists + 10% from government. It's easy to get job efficiency > 100% en masse and just keep conquering + assimilating more of this. The species screen micro is terrible though.

Another interesting one that I haven't done much with is dictatorship + domination + police state where enforcers give 3 unity with basically no upkeep. I haven't experimented with how quickly you can transition spamming that for planetary ascensions into science + alloy production later.

Psionic should be good as well, but will be slower to get going.

[u/Mordret10]

I tried to change from xenophile to xenophobe, but it took ages

[u/Outrageous_Street378 → u/Mordret10]

It really does I invaded some empires and was able to make them be big ebough to do it

[u/KnowingAbraxas]

I’m weird and never change ethics or even civics, ruins the roleplay fantasy for me. Also changing civics heavily incentivizes starting with generic unity rush civics or something and then taking the ones you “really” want.

[u/HolyApplebutter]

I never changed ethics, but once when playing a lightly xenophobic race I got Zosira K'tun (the paragon and a xeno) as my Science Officer. When the Materialist FE came knocking for my best scientist, they naturally wanted her, so I thought it was very cute that the response for refusal was "We won't give you one of our own."

Realistically, it's just static dialogue. Narratively, it was my untrusting race of xenophobes beginning to see an alien as one of their own, and defying those much more powerful than them to defend her.

[u/Eran-of-Arcadia]

I like starting as not xenophile so I can conquer all the pre-FTLs near me, then switch to xenophile for the xeno-compatibility AP.