Am I the only person who thinks the Emotionless racial trait is a bit pricey?

[Q]

To answer your initial question Geoschmo: No your are not the only one. I would like to use this racial trait more often, but 3000 points is really to much considering that for this you can get e.g. organic and religious tech together.
I will probably change it to only 1000 points.

[Windborne]

I think it's too pricey but 1000 would be too cheap, the trait is just too useful, with it subject populations never grow unhappy, and your people don't care what you do, you have complete freedom to play in a totally macavellian manner, manipulating the situation in any way you want without worry that going to war or making peace will upset your population or that a recently conquered planet needs a ton of troops to hold down the natives.

[Emperor Zodd]

How many points do you get from lowering happiness down to the minimum? Which you can apply towards the 3000 points needed for emotionless trait.

[geoschmo]

Zodd,

This would be acceptable if I was playing an emotionless race myself, or using an .emp file. But what I am trying to do is setup the racename_ai_general.txt files so that the computer can use these races.

Unfortunatly there is a bug where you can't get points back from reducing the race opt characteristics in this file.

If fact I have done some testing and setting these values below 100 does not seem to work at all, even if you don't have any increased characteristics.

Geo

[Lucanos]

geoschmo wrote:
"below 100 does not seem to work at all"

I heard that too, but then I heard that if you create a *.emp file the "below 100" settings actually work.

BTW, I tried to edit the cultures.txt in the Data directory (really LOWERING all the values) for my "winter mod", but the file didn't load when I executed the game.

[Drake]

I think 1000 points for emotionless would actually be reasonable.

One of the problem with taking emotionless for strategic reasons is that it doesn't act as 'emotionless' but rather makes your happiness state unchangable (I haven't tested this with 1.30, but no mention of a change to this is made in the history).

Another reason against taking it would be that there are better ways to improve your happiness. If you're seriously concerned about it for production reasons, either spend points on increasing happiness, or better yet pick temporal. I'd personally go with a decrease to about 80%, take temporal, and lose 1000 pts while picking up facilities that are twice as effective at increasing happiness, twice as effective at building things, and more options for weapons. Balance that against 3000(!) points for emotionless, and I just don't see the sense in taking emotionless.

[raynor]

Should it be 1000 points *above* the 800 points you get when you set Happiness down to 50%?