Disco Stu Doesn't Advertise

I've been hearing good things about Disco Elysium for two years now, and I'm pleased to say that it exceeded my high expectations. It's a really original game that's also very fun to play, taking the elements I love best from RPGs and adventure games and doing things I've never seen done before with them.

 

When describing it to people, I sometimes hesitantly reference Season 1 of True Detective, or Twin Peaks: it's an ostensible murder mystery that explores a colorful community and veers into some mystical-feeling territory. It's a lot more political than those shows, though, and a lot more funny as well. So maybe toss in some of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and, I dunno, maybe China Mieville's The City & the City. I don't have nearly as many video games to compare it to. It's nothing at all like Police Quest, isn't nearly supernatural enough for Gabriel Knight, way more playful and fun than L. A. Noire, plus, y'know, this is an RPG. As I described in my first post, I can't really think of any other RPG that's had a similarly broad yet simple attribute system. I guess maybe the Torment games are the closest analogues, at least in having an amnesiac protagonist and a lot of self-directed character determination, but Disco Elysium has far more varied and reactive possible paths through the game.

 

A few quick gameplay notes before getting into plot:

I'd mentioned before that, while the voice acting is very good, I found myself skipping through most of the lines. Fortunately, there are several options available in the game to modify the use of voiceover. About halfway through the game I switched to "Classic" and I absolutely love it: it works kind of like old-school Baldur's Gate, in that when you start a conversation you'll hear the first few lines spoken by the character, but from then on it's text-only. That works way better for me in a game like this with a ton of text. We're now almost a decade into the isometric RPG renaissance, which has long had an awkward relationship between copious amounts of text and long voice acting, and I really hope that more games offer Disco Elysium's options in the future to switch between different modes of voicing.

 

MINI SPOILERS

I tried to stay spoiler-free while playing this game, but whenever I got a new Thought option I looked it up on the wiki to see if its results would be worth taking. I prioritized Thoughts that granted bonus XP; I didn't exactly min-max, and I'm sure a thorough playthrough would get more levels than me. Anyways, by the end of the game I had enough skill points to raise all of my Intellect and Psyche skills to 8 and to put three pips into each Physique and Motorics skill. Just something to keep in mind for builds. (My initial attribute allocation was 4/6/1/1, but I took a Thought that raised all learning caps to 3.)

 

Similarly, by the end of the game I was able to buy every purchasable item except for a vanity thing that cost 700 Real, even without selling much of value. Money feels tight and scary on Day 1, but after two particular encounters and making it to Day 3 there isn't anything to worry about for the rest of the game.

 

Don't be afraid to fail Red Checks. It's often necessary to proceed in the game.

 

Clothing isn't as critical as I had initially thought. Swapping clothes can make a noticeable difference in passing White and Red checks; but there are an order of magnitude more passive checks than active checks, and you won't typically be notified of failed passive checks. Once you have a stable outfit, it's probably best to spend your Skill Points to fill in gaps and bring as many skills as possible up to the higher levels. Passive checks are usually just fun and for flavor, but they'll also often open up new lines of questioning, and while out in the world they can do things like reveal hidden rooms or items.

MEGA SPOILERS

After my previous post, I continued my hard-core Communist run through the game. This leads through an interesting encounter with a Communist "cell", which you soon realize is just a glorified book club. It seems a bit silly and close to pathetic, but culminates in a surprisingly beautiful moment of wonder and grace.

 

I also recovered from my initial Boring Cop snafu and pivoted into Superstardom, which was fun but I didn't feel as invested in that angle as the Communist one. I had almost no Apocalyptic points in this run, but I think that could be a really fun angle for the future: I can imagine a full-on Crazy Harry approach where you take speed and smoke and mutter about the end of the world.

 

While I took care to become more interesting, I still continued my standard RPG behavior of trying to make everybody like me. Fortunately, that isn't incompatible with being weird. As long as you aren't calling people racist names they'll generally tolerate your eccentricities. (As a rule, people do not like being called racist, but that didn't stop me! I don't need to be friends with those people!)

 

Your relationship with Kim is the most important, and we struck up a good rapport early on. He could see how hard I was trying, even if I kept failing, and I thanked him profusely for his orientation and help.

 

Alongside all the humor, there's also a lot of powerful emotional content here, including an achingly poignant portrayal of the heartbreak and grief that follows the end of a romantic relationship. In this area especially, it's fascinating to think about how all of the various parts of your psyche are acting to protect you, but in the process encouraging maladaptive thought patterns and behaviors. I don't think that this is necessarily a game about psychology, but stuff like that really hits home and feels like a thoughtful and serious treatment of how our minds work.

 

Oh, and the worldbuilding is really impressive too. I mentioned before that it took me a little while to realize that this was a completely original world, and not just a fictional country in our own. By the end of the game, I'm pretty sure that it's a straight-up different universe and not just a dream or purgatory of our own. That sense of familiar things actually being different continues throughout, though. Communism is a great example: upon hearing the name, you naturally assume that it's the same as our world's Communism, with Mazovian Socio-Economics primarily concerned with the ineluctable forces of history devolving power downward and ending in the hands of the workers. In Disco Elysium, it has very similar vibes - pro-proletariat, anti-fascist, egalitarian and communal - but the underlying philosophy seems to be pretty different, deriving from metaphysics more than dialectical materialism. Similarly, the musical genres mentioned in the game exactly match ours: rock, disco, hardcore; but "rock" is sad and slow, a reactionary music of the bourgeoisie.

 

Also! I can't close this post without talking about how I deeply, DEEPLY loved the nightclub plot. I think it's insane that Disco Elysium has a better club than any modern Shadowrun game. It's everything that I ever wanted: doing the work to find a venue, prepare it, upgrading the sound system, collaborating with musicians to make the most HARD CORE music ever. And dancing! Seriously, the high point of this entire game was, without a doubt, the moment that I convinced Kim Kitsuragi to get down and funky on the dance floor. I love this game so, so much.

 

Favorite Attribute: I thought Psyche, but turns out it was Intellect!

Favorite Skill: Shivers. Runner-up: Inland Empire.

 

Favorite Clothing: That jacket.

Favorite Person To Beg Money From: Mega Rich Light-Bending Buy.

Favorite Tool: Your journal.

 

Favorite Voice: Hard to pick one! The narrator, I guess, despite turning him off. Character-wise, perhaps Evrart, who is super-interesting to listen to.

Favorite Ally: Kim Kitsuragi.

 

Favorite Enemy: The Deserter.

Favorite Adversary: Gosh, lots of great choices. Perhaps Ruby, despite her short screentime.

 

Favorite Thought: For concept, Inexplicable Feminist Agenda. For mechanics, Actual Art Degree.

 

Favorite Book: Lots of great choices! A Brief Look At Infra-Materialism was pretty fascinating. I had an especially great time playing Suzerainty (I got two points!), and loved my breathless reactions to The Man From Hjelmdall.

Favorite Music: Maybe the Smallest Church in Saint-Saëns? It has a really cool Tom Waits sound.

 

The Whirling-In-Rags theme is wonderful too.

 

And don't forget the final mix of Hard Core Anodic Disco!

Favorite Minor Character: Arrrrrrrggggghhhh, don't make me choose! (Egghead.)

Favorite Map: Maybe the basement of the Doomed Commercial Arena?

Least Favorite Activity: Walking all the way to visit Evrart and then walking all the way back. I really wish there was a fast travel point near the shipping container.

Favorite Visual: The camera slowly panning out to reveal the high spire of the church. Runner-up: Hypothetical bullet trajectories traces in Klaasje's room.

 

Favorite Animation: Harry's sick dance moves.

 

Saddest Scene: Geez, so many to choose from, but I'll probably pick the recurring dream of Dora.

Coolest Psychological Development: Volition discovering that your instincts have been compromised. Runner-up: Encyclopedia being 100% useless during the examination of Moralism (along with the cross-chatter of your other thoughts seeking to avoid the mention of Dolores Dei).

Favorite Quest: Finding the reckless driver.

Favorite Achievement: Biggest Communism Builder.

 

Favorite Artwork (In-game): "Un Jour Je Serai De Retour Près De Toi". Runner-up: The ruined stained-glass window featuring Dolores Dei and her retinue.

 

Favorite Portrait: Ruud Hoenkloewen's is really affecting. Lilienne's is good. Egghead's is amazing. I just love the huge range from very abstract to stylized.

 

Favorite Drug: I don't use that stuff, man. (But I did buy a pack of cigarettes near the very end for an art project.)

END SPOILERS

Disco Elysium succeeds on pretty much any scale I can think of. It's a great story, with a complex plot that unfolds believably. It's a fun game, with unique but easily grasped mechanics. It's emotionally affecting, somehow managing to meld together horrific crimes and macabre scenes with laugh-out-loud funny dialogue, whimsical flights of fancy and sincere fraternal bonding. It's unafraid to wear its politics on its sleeve, while also recognizing that the world is a big place and too complex to reduce to a slogan. Something beautiful happened here.

Wompty-Dompty Dom Center

Disco Elysium has been on my to-play list for years now, almost from the moment it came out. It's the kind of game that people excitedly talk about at parties, and the kind that spawns screenshots posted from accounts that you didn't realize played video games.

 

It's an RPG, and a particularly precious kind: One that isn't from the fantasy or sci-fi genre. You play a detective, investigating a surprisingly baroque murder mystery. It's a very dialogue-heavy game, but unlike a lot of very dialogue-heavy games, this one has some very crunchy mechanics behind it. You have four main stats, a whopping 24 attributes, ten clothing slots, and a vast array of secondary characteristics that the game tracks. There are two separate health pools, many consumables, XP and money and shops. Oh, and also entire additional systems like Thoughts, where you further develop your character by pondering and eventually accepting specific ideas (which could be moral, political, personal, or whimsical in nature).

 

 

The system is crunchy, but (at least to anyone who's played RPGs) not at all intimidating. Skills all make sense, there are many many paths to success, and the core challenge mechanic is a simple 2D6 roll. Perhaps most importantly, failing skill checks does not mean failing the game. I have gotten to a couple of "Game Over" screens, but only by making catastrophically terrible choices (usually after the game specifically warns you against them). Most skill checks are labeled as "White checks", which means that you can try them again after leveling up the relevant attribute or making some breakthrough in the case. The rarer "Red checks" can only be attempted once, but failing these just puts the story down another path, one that might be at least as good. As one example, there's a spot where you can pitch an investment plan to a businessman. You can try to pitch a good idea or a bad idea. If you succeed in pitching the good idea, you get the funds. If you succeed in pitching the bad idea, he turns you down. But if you fail in pitching the bad idea, then you also end up with the funds. Things like that keep the game nice and snappy. I still find myself reloading after failed checks, but that's just from force of habit and not because the game rewards it.

 

 

I'd originally planned to write up a post after finishing the game, but I'm digging it enough and finding it deep enough that it seems worth a mid-(?)-game check-in. This post will mostly focus on mechanics; I'll try to save the plot and character stuff for a later post.

Somewhat like Planescape Torment, you play a single (initially nameless) PC, who has a predefined backstory but who you can build in pretty much any way you like. My initial skill allocation was 4 Intellect, 6 Psyche, 1 Physique and 1 Motorics. Whenever I have the chance, I like to make RPG characters who are more talky, hence this loadout. It's worked fine - I'm sure all builds are viable - but I am wishing that I'd gone for something more like 3/5/2/2. First of all, starting with a single point of HP means a single point of damage can kill (at least until you pick up healing items). I'm also limited to only investing a single skill point into half of my attributes. As I'm getting further into the game, I'm seeing how this limits me from unlocking quite a few passive dialogue checks.

 

 

More broadly, the attribute breakdowns are a lot more diverse and interesting than my assumption of "INT / CHA / STR / DEX" went. Psyche includes things like Suggestion and Empathy that I use a lot; but it also includes things like Authority that I shy away from, or Esprit de Corps that I don't have a whole lot of use for. I'd assumed that Physique was for more of a dumb, brute-force approach; but really it's more about being in tune with your body. It has some really cool stuff, like "Shivers", which is a kind of sixth-sense that alerts you to what's going on in the city around you. Likewise, Motorics includes things like Interfacing (stealing or picking locks), but also Composure, which is more about how you hold and present yourself. In some situations, Composure might be more helpful for navigating a conversation towards your desired outcome than a more seductive approach would be.

 

 

For a while I was pushing all of my skill points into my preferred Psyche attributes, then into the Intellect ones. From what I've seen, though, the benefits start tapering off around a level of 8 (including your clothing bonuses). Levels beyond that can actually start to sabotage you: an excessively high Empathy might cause you to take the side of a serial killer, or a very high Authority might make you get into fights you cannot win. So now I'm trying to level up my lower skills  as well. 

 

Clothing is a great way to fine-tune your stat loadout for specific checks. Early on most of the items you pick up give balanced bonuses and penalties, like "+1 Electrochemistry, -1 Rhetoric". As you get further into the game you find more items that give net bonuses. I do kind of wish that there was a better UI for this: all of your clothing items are in one big jumbled category, which isn't bad at first but gets unwieldy once you have a couple of dozen things in there. It would be great to sort them by body-part category or by skill type.

 

Leveling is pretty fast in this game: you get little dribs of 5XP while noticing things during your investigation, and larger rewards of 30XP or 70XP for making progress in one of your (many!) tasks. Every 100XP gives you a new skill point to spend. Instead of increasing an attribute, you can also unlock a Thought Cabinet slot, which you can then use to learn a Thought. I'll admit that I cheat and look up the rewards for potential thoughts before researching them; that isn't strictly necessary, but you have limited slots and I'd rather not spend additional levels in forgetting a thought.

 

 

Thoughts present themselves to you in dialogue, or more often monologues, as your character reflects on something they've seen, heard or felt. This usually ends with the choice to "Accept thought" or "Discard thought". From what I can see, you should always choose "Accept thought". Doing this just adds it to the list of available thoughts to internalize; you don't have to learn it, and accepting will keep that option open.

One of the first thoughts I unlocked was the "Sorry" copotype: my inner monologue noticed that I was apologizing for everything, and had decided that that was my primary characteristic. I was initially indignant: How dare you call me that?! I don't want to be a "Sorry Cop"! But on further reflection I realized that I had, in fact, been almost non-stop apologizing. For good reason - there's some rough stuff that apparently went down before the start of the game, and it's in my nature to say "I'm sorry" when someone mentions how bad they're feeling. Anyways, unlocking that Thought was kind of a wake-up call for me. Yes, I had been acting sorry, but I didn't want to be The Sorry Cop, so I made a deliberate choice to stop apologizing for everything and work on being more interesting. And it worked! There are some other really fun copotypes to unlock; I'm currently an Art Cop, but Apocalype Cop sounds really fun too, not to mention the iconic Hobo Cop.

 

 

Hobo Cop is one of the few specific things to have penetrated my consciousness during the last few years of not playing this game. As is often the case, I feel like I've been rewarded for my tardiness, as I am playing the "Final Cut" edition. This has a few minor additions, and also the big change of being fully voice-acted. The voice-over actors are great, but it's just SO MUCH, man. I read quicker than I hear, and from early on I've gotten in the habit of skipping forward during dialogue.

MINI SPOILERS

The game's tone varies a lot. It's often sad, sometimes grim, occasionally macabre. I find that I'm playing this game in shorter chunks than usual, as I need to step away from the mouse for a bit to digest and recover. But it's also really funny, and has some genuine moments of sweetness.

 

 

Early on I thought that the game was set in our world, and went through the first half-hour or more of the game trying to place the "Insula" and figure out where the various countries were located. (I'd pictured it as something like a "The City & the City" situation, with a fictional city set in our real world.) I eventually figured out that the whole world is original, which is cool. I'm on record as disliking having to learn entire new mythologies every time I pick up a new RPG, but this one is so different in setting and tone that I don't mind at all.

 

It is interesting how real world phrases will occasionally slip through, like "Franco-Nigerian". That makes me curious if there is some connection between our worlds after all. It seems plausible that this case is playing out during a dream, with the dream-like quality of being evocative of the real world but different in all the details. The highly impressionistic art style seems like it might support that idea. Or this could be a world we've entered after death, and are processing our life experiences. The title "Elysium" seems to nod to this interpretation, as does a later conversation with the White Pines negotiator Joyce.

 

 

I do really love the alternate "history" shown in this game. Political factions are similar to our own world, and they have familiar cadences but take place in different years and countries and with different people. One of the most obvious example is that communism was invented by Kras Mazov, who seems a clear doppelganger for Karl Marx. In this world, though, Kras actually participated in a revolution. As in our own world, a business-oriented liberal order has become ascendant, while communist and fascist factions try to make up for their smaller numbers with boisterous action.

 

Besides the political stuff, though, the technology itself is intriguing. They have "Radiocomputers", which use tape; when someone explains how they work, though, you realize that their tapes are different from how our own were constructed. They have air travel, but since jet engines can't penetrate the Pale they rely on ballistic airships instead. Nuclear power is well advanced and carries the same hazards as on Earth. Automobiles exist but have very different styling, and you eventually learn that their inner components are different as well. The genre as a whole is kind of uncategorizable: it's too modern to be steampunk, not advanced enough to be science fiction. It might be adjacent to weird fiction, but with a much lower emphasis on eldritch horrors.

 

 

The reactivity in this game is absolutely insane. Having written some reactive RPG dialogue in my time, I'm in absolute awe at all of the variables the game tracks and all of the ways the narrative can change, while still seeming coherent and natural. As one specific example, one of my very first tasks was to perform an autopsy on the corpse. I failed to get the body down, and got sidetracked doing other things for three days. In the meantime, though, I was vigorously chasing down witnesses and interviewing suspects, and had uncovered basically the whole story of what had happened from my conversations with the Hardies and Klaasje. So when I finally did the autopsy, Lt. Kim and I knew what we were looking for, and the dialogue was all about how the evidence fit (or didn't fit) the story. But if I'd done the autopsy first like I was supposed to, I'm sure that all of my later interviews with those witnesses would have referenced the evidence I'd found. Likewise, throughout the autopsy we referred to the victim as "Lely", which was the name Klaasje knew him by. But if I hadn't met Klaasje yet, he would have just been "the hanged man". Shortly after finishing the autopsy, the search for his boots completed and I learned that his real name was Ellis  Kortenaer; if I'd called the station before the autopsy, that name would have been used instead. And, again, this is all voice-acted! Unreal.

END SPOILERS

Disco Elysium is living up to the hype, which is saying a lot. It's ticking all of the boxes that I'd hoped Torment: Tides of Numenara would: an unusual RPG with immense player choice and huge reactivity, grappling with large themes and philosophical ideas. Disco Elysium also feels incredibly grounded, though: despite being fictional, the characters are highly relatable, their struggles are our own struggles, and so those philosophical ideas have a heft that's often missing in RPGs. You can have a blast focusing on solving the murder mystery, but I think pretty much everyone will get caught up in the swirl of ideas and challenges the game has to offer.

Elasticity of Substitution

And now I've wrapped up the fourth book in my current series, tentatively titled "Completely Unrelated Books That I Happen To Be Reading Simultaneously For No Good Reason." This ends us on a strong nonfiction note with The Economics of Inequality, a relatively slim book on economic theory. It was written by Thomas Piketty in the 1990s, and was translated into English after the success of his later works.

Before reading this book, I saw some online reviews along the lines of "A good introduction to Piketty's ideas" and "More approachable than Capital in the Twenty-First Century." I have to disagree with those assessments. It's a good book and well-written, but also much more technical than his later books. It looks less intimidating thanks to being much shorter, but it's primarily written for other economists and doesn't have the easy flowing narration or friendly language of his doorstop books. Which is all to say that I'd recommend this for people who already like Piketty and are interested in the topic, not as a gateway to his other writing.

That said, I do recommend the book. I'd kind of expected it to be an introduction to his works on inequality or a rough early draft. Instead, it goes over different ground: while Cit21C and Capital & Ideology are primarily oriented towards explaining the origins of inequality and documenting how much it has risen, The Economics of Inequality is focused on finding the best tools for reducing inequality: what specific policies governments or society should take to make life more equitable for its citizens.

Reading this book was a little trippy at times: it was written in the 1990s, but pays a lot of attention to ideas that I personally have only more recently become aware of. There's a lot of focus on social justice, which is closely tied to but not synonymous with equality. Later in the book he writes at some length about universal basic income; even at the time the idea was several decades old, but at least here in the states it's only relatively recently that it's come to the forefront of political dialogue.

TEoI starts relatively slow with a chapter that mostly recaps (or, I guess, precaps) the idea of deciles and centiles from Cit21C. Piketty gives a pretty thorough explanation of what these segments mean and how they are calculated; having read over two thousand pages from Piketty this level of explanation felt a bit overlong, but it was probably very important to readers back then, and it may even be a better introduction now for new readers than his more recent books.

Things really start moving in Chapter 2. As we've been discussing since at least Marx, the main problem is that workers tend to receive relatively little from their labor while owners tend to receive large amounts, which results in wealthy people growing even wealthier over time while the working poor tend to remain poor. This is historically called the "labor/capital split", namely, how much of the revenue generated by economic activity should be paid as wages to labor versus how much should be collected as profit to owners. Historically the focus has been on "direct redistribution", where laws or labor action forces the owners to convert some additional profit back into wages. This works if labor and capital aren't very elastic: that is, if you always need X workers per Y machines in order to create Z output, then as long as the owners still earn some profit you can happily increase the workers' wage.

But Piketty finds that in practice labor and capital are elastic, especially as the economy evolves to be more service-oriented. There is a high "elasticity of substitution", which means that to some degree you can replace workers with machines or vice versa. (One periodic, mild point I tend to stumble over is the overloading of the world "capital" in these books. The classical definition of "capital" is "something that is used in production without being consumed", like a hammer or a factory. But its more prevalent modern form is basically a synonym for "wealth", like shares of stock or an interest-bearing loan. In this specific case Piketty is referring to the economic capital, while elsewhere he is referring to financial capital.) What is the implication of a high elasticity of substitution? If the price of labor rises, then owners will try to eliminate jobs and replace them with machines. We're seeing this happen now with self-check-out lanes in supermarkets; those machines are very expensive to install and somewhat expensive to operate, but they don't require health-care benefits or wages. This will reduce the amount of revenue flowing to wages, which automatically increases the share going to the owners.

Piketty argues that instead of direct redistribution tactics, like requiring owners to pay for benefits, we should use fiscal redistribution. This means taxing owners (well, everyone really, but owners pay the most) based on the profits they earn, and then use those revenues to transfer wealth to the lower-income people of the country, in the form of direct payments or social programs or education. This accomplishes the game goals as direct redistribution, as it is taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor, but importantly it decouples the tax burden from the use of labor. An owner who earns $1M a year will owe the exact same tax whether they employ 0 workers, 10 workers or 100 workers. So there is no added incentive for the owner to downsize.

Reading this was a little surprising, mostly because it's probably the clearest contemporary argument I've read for old-school capital-L Liberalism. The idea of collecting lots of taxes to accomplish social goals was dominant in the mid-century, but seems to be universally derided today, with the right obviously hostile towards any redistribution (and often believing that the poor deserve their lot due to inferior work ethics) and the left today much more energized by progressivism, which generally seeks a small but strong state that compels actors to behave well rather than a large state directly facilitating social transfers.

Piketty backs up his arguments with the same sort of comparative analysis he uses in his later books, particularly focusing on France, the United States, United Kingdom and Germany for the last 130 years or so. This allows us to see what aspects remain consistent over time, and how other elements trend one direction or another based on policies. He notes in the foreword and a footnote where some specific statements may not be accurate; in particular, in the book's original text he observed that the labor share is consistently about 2/3 of GDP, but further research since then has shown that this share has declined since the 1980s. That doesn't invalidate his point, but it adds more nuance (which, now that I think about it, is one of the big thrusts of Capital & Ideology.)

As with his other books, Piketty carefully distinguishes between income and wealth. At the time he was writing this book in the 90s, income was the biggest driver of inequality: after a long period where the richest 10% of people in a country would earn about 2.5x the average wage, it had climbed to about 3.8x the average (and of course would continue to rise in later decades). After looking at after-the-fact redistribution, he then focuses on how and why wages have diverged so much. An early topic is education, sometimes called "human capital", which he mentions in his other books but is more of a focus here.

It takes time and money to acquire skills that you hope will increase your income. In an ideal world, everyone would have meaningful access to acquire these skills so they can eventually perform the jobs that they are best suited for. In practice, though, the wealthiest people from high-status backgrounds will be able to complete their educations and get great jobs, continuing their privilege down to the next generation. People from poorer backgrounds may do even better at those jobs, but they don't get those opportunities: they can't afford a four-year degree, or fear going into debt, or are mindful of the risks they will bear without money or connections to backstop potential failure. There's an obvious social-justice component to this problem: it is unfair that people who are already advantaged increase their advantages. But there's also an argument to make on the basis of pure economic efficiency. If the entire labor force de-facto had access to education, then the best people would end up in the right roles, and the economy as a whole would be more productive.

There are some really interesting specific examples Piketty looks at. In Germany, many large employers fund apprenticeship programs and trade schools, free of charge to anyone who enrolls. And there's no requirement that someone completing the free program has to work for the company that paid for their education. Why do employers pay for these programs, then? It's because Germany's strong labor unions have negotiated strict wage schedules across the entire industry, so the same position pays the same wage at every company, so there's no incentive for a worker to take free training from one company and then switch to another for paid employment.

This sort of scheme almost certainly wouldn't work in the United States. Even by the 90s we had seen two decades of wage competition between companies, causing bidding wars that drove up the prices of managers, doctors, lawyers and other high-income people. So, for example, a hospital here wouldn't want to underwrite the cost of a doctor's medical training, because that doctor could and probably would leave to work for a higher-paying clinic.

France was outraged to learn that it was rated the "least egalitarian" country. France prides itself on giving all citizens access to a public education, but in practice the elite (children of managers, politicians, etc.) go to elite schools, and the state spends 10x as much per student in an elite school as it does on a non-elite school. There's a big gap between the ideals of an education system and the reality of who benefits and why. Germany doesn't make the same lofty claims as France, but in practice the German system is more egalitarian.

 As usual, Piketty is good at being precise about what he's talking about. Here he distinguishes between whether a course of action is good for social justice purposes, for economic efficiency, or both. Even though he shows in Chapter 2 that fiscal redistribution is preferable to direct redistribution, he notes that minimum wages are still important in many contexts, in particular in monopsony markets (where a single employer or group of employers artificially hold wages lower than they should be). Similarly, affirmative action policies help unlock the untapped potential of historically disadvantaged groups, which benefits the economy as a whole in addition to being morally just.

The US comes off pretty well in this book. It has its problems with rising inequality, but has done a better job at employing more workers at all levels than France. The Earned Income Tax Credit in particular receives praise for helping to fight the "U curve" of marginal rates (there's a "poverty trap" where someone who was previously unemployed and starts working finds their social benefits dramatically reduced, decreasing their incentive to take a low-paying job in the first place; the EITC compensates for this, and Piketty would like to see other changes like reducing or eliminating payroll taxes at low income levels). Of course, this book was written in the 90s before George W. Bush was "elected" and his tax cuts passed, which strangled the capacity for transfer payments, slashed the taxation of financial capital and places most of the burden on work instead of wealth. It's a bit disenheartening to think about where we might be at now if we hadn't taken that turn; still on a bad trend after Reagan, but the broad-based economic growth of the 90s might have continued longer instead of our rapid return to Gilded Age levels of inequality.

The book ends with this excellent conclusion: "Although it is essential to identify efficient redistribution wherever it exists, it is pointless to denounce every inequality as a sign of gross inefficiency that the right policy can eliminate. To do so is to delegitimize the taxes needed to finance fiscal transfers, which may not eliminate every imagined inequality but nevertheless help to attenuate very real inequalities in standards of living." I think this kind of sentiment is what I love and admire most about Piketty's writing. He isn't a cold realist or a starry-eyed idealist: he's a serious, practical and humble man who recognizes that perfection is impossible but we can certainly make things far better than they are now, and the tools to do so are absolutely within our grasp.

Rising Sun

I've fallen out of the habit of reviewing entries in Charles Stross's "Merchant Princes" series on this blog. I enjoy them a lot, but between being relatively breezy reads and inevitably ending in cliffhangers they're a bit hard to review. That said, I think I've now completed the entire series: "Invisible Sun" just came out, and for once I'm basically caught up to the series.

 

MEGA SPOILERS

This series started in the early 2000s, with the first book set in 2002 and published in 2004. The gap between the in-series year and the real year continued to grow with each subsequent entry, with the sixth book set in 2003 and published in 2010. The recent books, sometimes referred to as the Empire Games trilogy, realigns the timelines, skipping forward about 15 years to come closer to our own time.

But not our own timeline. One of the things I love most about this series is how it gets progressively more bonkers as it goes along. In many ways the 2020 vision of the "Timeline 2" version of the United States of America seems like a only-slightly-pointed critique of our own: a paranoid state, bullying towards the rest of the world, obsessed with spying on its own citizens, pathologically incapable of de-escalation. The specific reasons for that are slightly different, though: in the Merchant Princes state, the 9/11 attacks were shortly followed by the 7/16 attacks, where spies from an alternate universe detonated nuclear bombs inside Washington, D.C., killing George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and much of Congress and the Supreme Court. Donald Rumsfeld became the Commander in Chief, authorized a totally annihilating counterstrike against the "Timeline 1" Gruinmarkt, and doubled-down on the PATRIOT act and other forms of domestic surveillance.

One of my annoyances with the middle books of the series had to do with Miriam's ambitious plan of technological arbitrage, using discoveries from Timeline 2 to speed up innovation in Timeline 3 without falling into a development trap like happened in Timeline 1. I loved the idea of this and wanted to read entire books about Miriam kicking butt and schooling people. Instead, after getting us all excited about it, she got whisked away to an evil Baron's lair, impregnated against her will and spends much of the series as a passive victim.

All that cool stuff eventually happens, but it mostly happens off-scene, in the 17-year gap between books 6 and 7. And really, that's part of the point. Miriam and the surviving members of the Clan want to avoid the mistakes of the past and have the civilization grow up alongside the tech, instead of having it be dropped into their laps. That means, for example, building a generation of computers running on vacuum tubes that they know will be obsolescent; but those more mechanical computers are easier for people to understand, and with some prompting they can then go and invent silicon processors on their own, and actually understand how they work.

The final trilogy focuses on a mix of new and old characters. The old are very old, and often complain about the aches and bodily indignities that come with age. Some of the new characters are related to the old, most notably Rita, who was Miriam Beckstein's illegitimate daughter we heard about way back in Book 1 and is now a young adult. Others are brand new, including Rita's girlfriend Angie, Rita's adopted grandfather Kurt (who we eventually learn is a very-deep-cover sleeper agent from the now-defunct East Germany), and Elizabeth Hanover, the daughter and heir to "King" John Frederick.

The earlier books culminated in a successful democratic revolution in Time Line 3, led by Sir Adam and successfully toppling the British crown-in-exile. In this timeline, the Industrial Revolution didn't start until the 1900s, France is a superpower controlling all of Europe and Africa and most of Asia, and there has not been a large-scale democratic experiment since the ancient Greeks. One intriguing thing we learn early on is the particular structure of the New American Commonwealth. It's a democracy, but as the very concept of democracy is unfamiliar to people, it has unique institutions and processes to defend against a return to autocracy. That system, we eventually learn, is modeled after the Islamic Republic of Iran. Sir Adam becomes the "First Man", essentially equivalent to the Ayatollah: not involved in day-to-day administration or policy, but the ultimate authority who will step in if the democratic ideals are threatened. A Council of Guardians-type body reviews and approves candidates and parties, excluding monarchists and others who seek to end democracy. And then there's the popularly-elected parliament who set the law and the ministers who execute it, under the watchful and generally lenient eye of the First Man.

The main plot of the later books has to do with a series of schemes between France and Britain. Earlier in the series, New Britain seemed doomed, relatively safe between the two oceans but helpless to block a steadily rising France. After 17 years have passed, France still has superior territory and population, but the New American Commonwealth has vastly outstripped it economically and even militarily, thanks to the advances engineered by the Ministry for Temporal Intelligence and the Department of Para-historical Research. The exiled King of New Britain has been forced to claim sanctuary in the court of his erstwhile rival the King of France. The Dauphin is promised to the princess Elizabeth Hanover, setting the stage for the destruction of democracy: France will then use its mighty armies to invade the Americas and restore the British monarchy, albeit as a client state.

Catching wind of this plot, secret intelligence in the Commonwealth comes up with a counter-scheme of their own. Elizabeth does not want to marry the Dauphin, who is much older and openly cavorts with mistresses and, rumor has it, has the pox. World-walkers make contact with her while she's in a finishing school and they come to an agreement: she will defect to the Commonwealth, renounce any claim to the throne, gain citizenship and a large sum of money. At the end of Dark State, this goes slightly wrong: her rescuer is shot, and then American agents from Time Line 2 break up the operation, leaving her stranded in an unfamiliar version of Berlin.

It's a fun, energetic story. I felt like the Elizabeth part was the core, but there's a ton of other stuff going on too: lots of political maneuvering in the Commonwealth when Sir Adam dies of natural causes and they face their first succession crisis; ongoing attempts by black-ops groups from the US to gain leverage over or neutralize the Commonwealth; and, just to keep things exciting, the introduction of an interstellar race of insect/machine hybrids who have also learned how to world-walk and have annihilated all life on millions of alternate versions of Earth.

There's a lot of plot threads all running at the same time, which is really cool, but it also means that the people in each individual storyline don't get a whole lot to do. Elizabeth did most of her exciting stuff in the previous book; here, she learns how to use a phone, goes shopping, flies on a plane, and talks to a camera: that's about it. It's pretty common for us to spend a little time with someone like Adrian Holmes or the green recruits and then never get their POV again. That isn't unique to this book or author: whenever I read, say, GRRM, I'll feel like I'm just getting interested in what one character is doing when the author whisks me away to a different plot line.

I had a few minor annoyances. I'm reading the first edition, and there are a few typos; I didn't see any in the previous books, so I'm sure they'll be corrected in reprints. I was also a bit turned off by some repetitive framing: reading someone talk about what they're going to do, then reading about them doing it, then reading them describe what they did. That would be appropriate for something like a television series where people are dropping in and catching up midway through, but doesn't seem necessary for a novel that you can read in a few days.

But I think most of my (mild) complaints boil down to me wanting more stuff to happen, and that's very petty of me. There's a lot that goes down, and more importantly, it satisfyingly ties up all of the major plot threads of the series. That's no small feat for a long-running speculative fiction series! Wanting more is a strong sign of how much I enjoy it.

Besides the straight-up plot, I also enjoy Stross just nerding out on topic. Unlike his cyberpunk books that have deep and trenchant insight into technology, these books go hard on economic, historic and political topics. I love the attention to, say, the fashion industry: we see how the Commonwealth's garment business is organized, with everything made to order, and thus clothing is much more expensive, but also of significantly higher quality, and not reliant on sweatshop labor or other abuses.

There is some straight tech stuff that's fun, too. One of my favorites is JUGGERNAUT, the enormous space battleship that MITI constructs in secret. It's apparently based on a real project called Orion that uses nuclear bombs to create the propulsion that launches a vehicle into orbit. In our own universe that would be a terrible idea for very obvious reasons, but in this series, you can build that spaceship in an uninhabited version of Earth, nuke it, then switch timelines once you're in orbit. The constant nuclear explosions are terrible for electronic equipment, and so the computers on board JUGGERNAUT are mechanical instead, able to ignore EMP bursts.

The whole approach towards world-walking has evolved throughout the series, and Stross has the most fun with it in these final books, imagining how Newton's laws work. Another great late example is a near-stealth nuclear attack: in one timeline you fire off the ICBM, wait for its booster to eject, wait for the warheads to detach, and then switch it into another dimension, undetectable until immediately before impact. That's one way to make a bang! 

END SPOILERS

Based on the afterword, it sounds like Stross is definitely done with this series, and I'd say that he's more than earned it. I'm grateful that he wrote such a satisfying and enjoyable conclusion.

Corporate Overlords

Stellaris has lately occupied the place for me that Civilization used to hold in the 90s and 2000s: the strategy game I keep coming back to in between other gaming ventures, endlessly replayable, with a long personal list of variations I want to try and new victory conditions to achieve.

 

One of the things that kept Civilization fresh was periodic expansion packs, typically two or three per main entry. Stellaris has far surpassed that, with 18 pieces of DLC and counting, ranging from minor cosmetic additions to major overhauls of systems or new dimensions of play. Thanks to the largess of my brother Andrew, my latest game included two brand-new (to me) big expansions: Megacorp and Nemesis. I'm not quite finished with that game, but I've defeated the Crisis (which arrived in 2420, a new record for me!) so it should be smooth sailing from here on out. This post mostly focuses on the "new" things, with some coverage of said game.

In order to get the most out of the Megacorp expansion, I decided to play as a Megacorp. In future games I won't necessarily do that; I see now that the expansion adds a lot more stuff besides literal Megacorps, so I wouldn't have been missing out if I'd gone with something else. That said, Megacorps are really interesting to play as, particularly for diplomatically-oriented playstyles like mine. Megacorporation is a new government type, roughly equivalent to an Oligarchy but with a unique set of civics to choose from. There are a few minor changes to diplomacy; in particular, you can't vassalize other empires or make protectorates or tributaries, but you can make them Subsidiaries: you agree to defend them, and they pay 25% of their Energy income to you.

The defining feature of a Megacorp, though, is Branch Offices. You can open Branch Offices on planets settled by other civs that you have a commercial pact with. This costs an amount of Energy and Influence scaling with the distance from your borders. Once established, you earn Energy income based on the Trade value of the planet. You also gain the ability to build Megacorp Buildings in your branch office. These are usually symbiotic buildings that give a benefit to both the hosting empire and to yourself. My personal favorites were:

• The Commercial Forum gives them a Merchant job and you 25% more income from the planet.
• Corporate Embassy gives them a few Clerk jobs and boosts your Diplomatic Weight, increasing the Economy part by 5%.
• Mercenary Liason Office gives them a Soldier job and their armies from this planet some extra starting XP, and giving you more Naval Capacity.
• Temple of Prosperity gives Prosperity Preacher Jobs and increases Spiritualist Ethics Attraction (more on this below).
• Xeno-Outreach Agency gives them a boost to Trade Value and increases your empire's Immigration Pull.
  

There are a lot of other building options, but most of them give you a flat amount of resources like some Minerals or Food, which I didn't find very useful; a boxed-in Megacorp that can't expand on its own might find them useful, though. You are limited to constructing a maximum of 4 buildings per planet, though, and less than that based on the level of the capital building. There are some pretty interesting factors to consider when planning the buildings. Some, like the Commercial Forum, provide more value based on the wealth of the planet. Others, though, provide a flat bonus regardless of the Trade. In my game I only opened Branch Offices on high-value planets, but I could definitely see an argument being made for always opening them, and just focusing on the right bonuses for each planet.

My empire was named the Hanar Mercantile Guild, but on further reflection we were basically space Scientologists: a ruthless for-profit religion that collected staggering sums of money from the entire galaxy, and poured the proceeds into real estate and further expansion of our evangelizing. Specifically we followed the "Gospel of the Masses" and "Free Traders" civics, later adding "Mastercraft Inc." as our third one. I took Fanatic Xenophile for the large 20% Trade bonus, but the extra Envoys also came in very useful when buttering up other civs to approve commercial pacts. I opted for Spiritualist mostly to get the Gospel of the Masses civic. This was my first game taking Spiritualist as an ethic, but all of my games so far have included large Spiritualist populations: due to my xenophile playstyle, I sign agreements with Spiritualist empires and inevitably get a crabby Spiritualist minority to placate. Gospel of the Masses gives you bonus Trade for every Spiritualist pop on your planet or on a Branch Office. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that I was the only empire in the entire galaxy to be Spiritualist! I had my work cut out for me. These dianetics weren't going to e-meter themselves.

 

I selected Hegemon as my Origin so I could bootstrap a Trade League. As with my other Federation or Hegemon starts, I was prepared to restart if I had a bad position or allies, but this one was pretty good. The Jesselniks had plenty of room to expand to the west, the Bosh'tun were soft-boxed-in by a xenophobic fallen empire to the south but could still grow a bit, and I had lots of room to grow east. I put all of my starting Envoys into supporting the Hegemony, until my Cohesion got up to 100, at which point I convinced the other two starting civs to reform into a Trade League. There is huge synergy between the Trade League and Megacorp: automatic free commercial pacts with all members, bonuses to trade value, trade route protection, and so on.

 

Another huge advantage of the Trade League is that it unlocks a unique Trade Policy that combines Consumer Benefits with Marketplace of Ideas. So each Trade gives you 0.5 Energy, 0.25 Unity and 0.25 Consumer Goods. I ran that for most of the game, which lets you cruise through Ascension Perks and avoids a common early-game resource bottleneck. Before long I was running a large and consistent surplus in Consumer Goods. Fortunately, Megacorps have discounts when trading on the Galactic Market (and even bigger discounts when they host the Market). In the past I've manually sold large batches of items when I hit my limit and built Resource Silos on starbases to increase my capacity. This time I was good about setting up automatic monthly trades, selling off excess items (consumer goods, food) and buying useful things (alloys). There's a little bit of micro involved there thanks to the fluctuating prices, but overall it let me run a leaner and more efficient economy without huge stockpiles of useless goods. Eventually, though, I was offloading so many consumer goods that their value had cratered to something like 0.1 energy per good, so later in the game I swapped back to pure Wealth Creation. I still had a surplus of Consumer Goods and my income skyrocketed.

Trade is huge for megacorps. In all of my other games of Stellaris, trade has been something you passively acquire as you build city districts: you hope to keep as much of it as you can, but it's a mildly beneficial side-effect. For megacorps, though, it's absolutely worth focusing on trade: you can get a lot of trade multipliers, so clerks will generate more energy than the equivalent technicians would. You also have the flexibility of adjusting your trade policy and directly converting trade into unity and consumer goods (assuming you're in a Trade League, which you should be). You also have easier access to Merchants, giving a further boost to trade generation. But all of this means insane Piracy levels thanks to the extremely lucrative trade routes back to your capital. Fortunately, there are several Federation perks and Galactic laws that can increase your base trade protection, but even so my navy was kept busy for a long time while I desperately hunted the Gateway technology.

The boosted Trade can feel borderline broken at times. One big example was dealing with Fallen Empires: they could have Overwhelming Technology and Fleet Power, and still be ranked as Pathetic relative to me due to the insane strength of my Economy. This let me do some stuff that I would otherwise never get away with, like colonize systems adjacent to the Fanatic Xenophobes.

 

One complaint I'd read online was that if you play as a Megacorp, you inevitably end in a galaxy with multiple other Megacorps, which isn't fun since they'll aggressively open their own Branch Offices and block you from expanding your corporation. I'm not sure if that's changed or if I was just lucky, but I didn't encounter any other megacorps in this game.

 

As I said above, the Megacorp expansion adds a lot of stuff besides the titular Megacorps. The Caravaneers are fun; somewhat like the Curators from Distant Stars, they're a unique Empire with a more story-based Diplomacy interface and some cost/reward choices to make. They remind me of Ferengi from Star Trek, eager traders who love commerce. You do need to keep on your toes, as some of the deals are good but many are objectively bad. There's also a bunch of related events that can trigger when they're around, some of which have very rewarding outcomes. I didn't luck out on any of the mystery boxes I purchased. Very late in the game I was bored and decided to destroy their home base, which ended up being really fun and funny: in addition to some instant loot, you also gain a permanent increase to your Opinion with all other empires, and unlike everything else in the game it does not decay. Furthermore, shortly after you destroy their base, they'll pop back up again in an adjacent system, where you can destroy them again, and collect more loot and a stacking opinion bonus!

 

Megacorp also adds a bunch more Megastructures. These don't require taking an Ascension Perk, which is a nice change from the ones Utopia added. I acquired basically every new structure other than the Mega Art Installation. I conquered a ruined Sentry Array and restored it, built a Strategic Coordination Center (which boosts your naval cap, starbase cap, defense platforms, and sublight speed) and an Interstellar Assembly (boosting diplomatic weight and opinion). I also made the Science Nexus and the Mega Shipyard as usual.

 

One minor gripe I have with the game is that so many big parts of the game only come at the very end of the tech tree. By the time you can start actually building your first megastructure, you're researching future techs. It feels weird to build a Science Nexus after you've already learned all of the unique technologies. And while the Interstellar Assembly is cool, by the time I could build it I had already passed the "I Am The Senate!" threshold of running roughshod over the entire galactic community. Instead of the megastructures requiring a lot of investment and then propelling you forward (as with Civilization Wonders), they're built by empires that are already ahead of everyone else and then ensure that nobody could possibly catch up. I'm not necessarily complaining, since I like being ahead, but I think they would be way more interesting if they were available earlier in the game.

While Megacorp made big obvious changes to my game from the very start, the Nemesis expansion didn't really become a factor until later in the game, but I liked that. The mid-late game tends to be the least exciting, so anything that shakes that experience up is good!

I'd previously played a game with the Espionage system. Somewhat like how Federation unlocks many more options related to Federations, Nemesis unlocks most of the functionality of espionage. I think I like it. It gives you some levers to interfere with other countries without actually going to war with them, which is a good match for the types of games I typically play. The base-game Gather Intelligence is borderline useless, but the Nemesis-only Operations can be pretty cool, especially options to steal technology or to poison relations between two allies. The main downside is that espionage eats up a valuable Envoy; but as a fanatic Xenophile I was swimming in envoys, and would often park them spying on my biggest rivals while I wasn't completing First Contacts or building up Cohesion. Broadly, espionage gives you something different and potentially useful to do.

The Traditions were a bit different this time around; thanks to the extra tree offered by Nemesis, I had to choose which ones to pursue. For the first time ever, I did not choose Discovery: science is incredibly useful, but I tend to take a commanding science lead relatively early in the game, and I (correctly) believed that I would do well even without taking this. I grabbed Expansion early to support my rapid growth out, finished Diplomacy to soften up other empires to join my Trade League or at least sign a Commercial Pact, took Mercantile to further supercharge my Trade, and filled out with all-round strong traditions like Prosperity, Domination and Harmony. 

Likewise, I did not take Technological Ascendancy like I normally do. I explored some brand-new ones I was curious about, like Consecrated Worlds to support my Spiritualist faction, Universal Transactions to supercharge my Megacorp orientation, and Xeno-Compatibility to benefit from the influx of immigrants I was receiving. For the ascension path, I took Psionic Ascension again. I've always enjoyed this one for the writing, but by the end of this game I realized that it would work much better for a xenophobic empire. Psionic is a very powerful trait, but only your founder species gets it, so you'll be much better off if 100% of your pops are Psionic than if only 5% are. Similarly, Psionic Leaders are amazing, but in my game I had to cycle several dozen new leaders before a Psionic one would pop. And unfortunately it looks like Xeno-Compatibility won't pass down the Psionic trait to hybrid species, so that particular combination wasn't nearly as useful as I had hoped. I have yet to try the Synthetic or Bio ascendancy paths, so I'll probably try one of those the next time I play a Xenophile game.

 

MINI SPOILERS

This is my third time opening the L-Cluster and my third time discovering the Drakes. That's a pretty good outcome, but according to the wiki it should only happen about 20% of the time, so that's a little weird. I'd like to experience something different in a future game. Likewise, I got the Unbidden again in this game, maintaining a 100% streak of encountering that particular Crisis. It isn't too surprising since I always ban robits and always discover jump drives. I might shoot for a full synth game in the future to try and trigger the Contingency, or maybe just use my Game Settings to invoke the Scourge. As with my last game, this one (on Captain) was pretty anticlimactic. I had a Federation Fleet, a Galactic Fleet, and a bunch of Battleship Fleets. They all flew to the Unbidden insertion point within a couple of weeks and wiped them all out by the time they'd taken three systems. It's a far cry from my first victory, where I desperately retrofitted all of my surviving ships to properly outfit them to counter the Unbidden's shield-and-laser build.

 

END SPOILERS

Since then I've mostly been amusing myself with Galactic Community shenanigans. I got myself appointed Galactic Custodian (even before the Crisis triggered) and have mostly gotten my way, but not always! A new wrinkle of the latest game version is that when you send an Envoy to Improve Relations and have the appropriate Diplomatic Tradition, there is a small chance each month that the Envoy will earn a Favor from that empire. Now, in the past I've bought up Favors and used them to achieve diplomatic agreements or persuade a federation vote. But they can also be used to add 10% of the other empire's Diplomatic Weight to your own vote in a Galactic Council vote. Which is a long way of saying that, if a total of 10 Favors are called in against you in a vote, then it will completely wipe out your own position: even if you have more Diplomatic Weight than everyone else combined, with enough Favors they can block your votes. Which feels a little frustrating, but also kinda exciting, as it's a rare example of a catch-up mechanic in Stellaris.

 

I can't really blame them for trying to block me, though: everyone was mostly cool, even when I was voting more powers to myself, but my big scheme was to push through the Divinity Of Life series of resolutions that boost Spiritualism and slow down and eventually ban robotics. Again: I was the only Spiritualist empire in the entire galaxy: more than half of the others were Fanatic Materialists, and quite a few had started Synthetic Ascension, so it really was a matter of life-and-death for them. I failed a couple of times on the vote, which always has a 20-year timeout before you can re-propose. I vigorously used my Council and Custodian powers to hustle votes open and closed as soon as I could, trying to burn off opposing favors faster than they could be re-acquired. This late in the game I actually had an Influence surplus, and once it reached the 1k max I re-proposed the Divinity proposal. I cashed in a bunch of opponent Favors, which were much smaller than mine but were able to counteract the 6 or so against me. I kept a close eye on the vote, and as soon as I could gavel the session closed I did so. There was much howling and gnashing of teeth, but that same proposal weakened the diplomacy of the Materialist opposition, so I needn't fear its repeal. Already the winds of change are blowing, as civs are finally joining me in embracing Spiritualism and paying for their audits.

I have a while left to go in this game and am not sure if I'll run out the clock, end it, or try for something big. I was tempted to try and become the Crisis in the 75-80 years I have left; I'd saved my final Ascension Perk just in case I decided to pursue that.  But you can't become the Crisis as a Xenophile, and I'm Fanatic. Doing the ethics shift would be pretty tedious, so I might save that for another time. Although, there are ethics shifts if I decide to become the Galactic Emperor, or if I get a "lucky" roll in the Shroud and get a Chosen One, so... we'll see.

 

I am glad that I was able to more-or-less wind up this game when I did. A new update to Stellaris is imminent, and it looks like it will be pretty disruptive. But potentially really good! The focus is reworking Unity, which sounds amazing to me. In every game that I've played I finish with a ludicrous surplus of Unity: all ascension perks claimed, all Unity Ambitions active, and still millions of Unity points piling up with nowhere to go. And that's without ever building any autochthon monuments or otherwise focusing on Unity: in this game, with the Spiritualist boost and Priests, it was even more ridiculous. Anyways, the change is wide-ranging, but it seems like the gist is that Unity will be used for intra-empire activities that have previously cost Influence: stuff like deciding elections, reforming the government, issuing edicts, managing factions and so on. Influence will continue to be used for extra-empire activities, like making claims, building Outposts, proposing Galactic Community resolutions, and so on. I'm sure it will take some getting used to, but in principle I think it's a fantastic change that makes sense and will keep both resources valuable.