Opinion on emotionless

[PvK]

Emotionless is extremely valuable if and when disaster strikes. If you lose many ships and/or planets at once, all of your planets can go to rioting, which paralyzes your production. If you just lost your main fleet, this will greatly impede you from rebuilding it, unless you have masses of space-based construction capacity and lots of resource reserves and/or trade. I've seen this be a major factor in several PBW games.

What I am wondering now after capnq's post, is what happens if an emotionless race gets hit with an Anarchy Groups intelligence attack? Does it suffer permanent damage, or no damage? If permanent, I'd call it a bug that really messes up Emotionless races. If no damage, then it's another good advantage of Emotionless.

All told, and assuming my fear of the political parties bug is unfounded, I think Emotionless is somewhat undervalued... but only until you get smashed, at which point it could definitely save your skin.

As for capnq's point about captured planets, it's not correct (it should be based on the population on the planet, or at least even captured planets should normalize happiness). Can't it be fixed though by removing the population and re-populating (though, that's silly, and impractical in Proportions mod).

PvK