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[Stellaris] - Paradox does space strategy - Le Guin, Megacorps - DECEMBER 6th

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  • AbbalahAbbalah Registered User regular
    Foefaller wrote: »
    Abbalah wrote: »
    Abbalah wrote:
    Having played a couple tall games now, it seems like the real bottleneck for tall play is just plain old minerals. All of the options for playing tall do something a little different, but none of them can mine minerals in any significant quantity, and most of what they do is give you more ways to consume minerals for alloys.

    What's your definition of Tall? It seems like that just means living close to your admin cap in 2.2; I haven't had any mineral issues yet; it's pretty consistently my #1 surplus. Though I may under-produce alloys as I tend to be forced into buying those when I need a war surge.

    I think 2.2.2 is supposed to increase Alloy yield from 2 -> 3, which may mitigate that.

    Tall is basically holding a relatively small number of actual systems and getting room for pops via things that increase the population density of space (ecumenopolis, habitats, ringworlds, mastery of nature), as opposed to wide, where you'd be grabbing as much space as possible and getting room for pops by controlling more planets. It doesn't necessarily mean staying under or close to your admin cap, since you can pretty easily outstrip your admin cap if you build a bunch of habitats and/or 50-district ringworld sections.

    There is definitely a phase of the game where minerals will run as a surplus in almost any strategy, but the more people you put in a given amount of space the more minerals you're going to need without your mineral income being able to grow, because minerals basically only come from occupying more space - once you've maxed out the mining districts on your existing planets, you either need mining stations in mineral-heavy systems, or new mining districts on new planets, and both of those things require you to take more space. If you don't want to do that, you're eventually going to be mineral-throttled, because you can get more energy and food by growing 'up' but not more minerals.

    Also I would avoid buying alloys as much as possible unless you're energy-capped and looking for something useful to convert it to. Alloys tend to hover around 20 energy each on the market, and a corvette with anything more than starter gear is generally gonna run 150-200 alloys, which means that when you buy alloys to build your navy you're basically trying to buy a navy with energy at a cost of 3000-4000 energy per corvette. That's a pretty rough exchange rate (especially given that you can get a 5-year contract on an entire mercenary fleet for 9-15k).


    Edit:
    Maybe this will help
    https://youtu.be/xkZQ2HE4Xrw

    This is a heady mix of good and bad advice. Mostly that's not how I'd build a tall race, trait-wise. Communal is a trap choice, for one - housing is easy to get, the penalties for housing shortages are minor, and a 10% reduction in housing usage (which won't even stay a 10% reduction, because you'll have immigrants who aren't Communal) is minor. I wouldn't build any race in this patch without Rapid Breeders, and certainly not a tall race which is going to need those growth bonuses to keep up with other empires that have more planets and thus more base growth. I also, as I mentioned, would strongly recommend that any race intended to be tall be Industrious. This boxes out Intelligent/Natural Engineers, but that's honestly not a big deal, because A)you'll have more people to do science with thanks to the better population growth and B)Intelligent is a smaller bonus than it appears to be, especially since it only applies to a very limited number of jobs. You're better off taking bigger bonuses to more-common outputs and then using that resource advantage to just put more scientists on tech instead of inefficiently trying to maximize your tech per scientist.

    Likewise, Technological Ascendancy is kind of a shitty ascension perk. It's not nearly as big of a bonus as it appears to be, because it's not multiplicative with all the other science bonuses you're going to end up with, and while your first perk choices are somewhat limited, both Voidborne and Mastery of Nature are much better for tall empires - particularly Voidborne if you're planning around trying to get early megastructures, because Voidborne->Master Builders is the only way you're going to get Mega Engineering in a reasonable timeframe without getting very lucky, just because of its low chance to roll as a research option.

    And Imperial Prerogative, while a fine (but not especially amazing) perk in general, is terrible as a second perk because it means you're passing up a huge population growth bonus from either Xenocompatibility or Bio Ascension, and again you need that growth bonus both because pop growth is king in the current patch and because you're already effectively eating a growth penalty by being tall as a result of the fact that the base growth of your empire is a factor of the number of colonies you have.

    Also even with a tall strategy, you want to colonize every planet within your borders ASAP. Being at year 60 with 1 colony and like half a dozen uncolonized planets in your borders is a real bad plan no matter how tall you think it makes you.

    Couple counterpoints to your counterpoints:

    A lot of his choices build off each other. Communal by itself isn't very impressive, especially with Xenophile, but with Agrarian Idyll and Life Seeded it's more than enough to fill out all of his homeworld's building slots and keep nearly all of it as non-city district. He's also going for the classic Stellaris tall of "doesn't matter you have way more stuff than me, I'm building Battleships with Kinetic Artillery and you've only just figured out Cruisers" which gives the "bad" ideas of picking Intelligent, Technological Ascendancy and Imperial Prerogative a much more favoriable context: he's trying to get as much tech and unity as possible, and grow as big as possible while staying under his Admin capacity.

    I actually feel Rapid Breeders is a trap trait, at least for non-Hive Minds that have to deal with the 50% pop growth penalty for new colonies, for the same reason you don't like Technological Ascendancy; too many additional modifiers I can pick up elsewhere. I can day 1 switch my food policy for +10% growth, and then whenever I can, pop the planetary decision for +25%, get Genome Mapping for another 10% as one of my first techs, and pick up the 10% pop growth Expansion tradition in the first 5-6 years. Adding Rapid Breeders to all that only gets me a net 6.5% increase to growth vs. not. Is that really worth two trait points? I personally don't think so.

    Finally, for not picking up Voidborne if his professed goal is megastructures... Not a problem, where he's starting. Why? Well, that comes with a fun, and very important fact:

    What Precursor you get is *not* random, and in fact is entirely dependent on what part of the galaxy you get the first precursor anomaly.

    And South/SW is where you will get Cybrex. He just needs to complete the chain (which is also part of the reason why he dipped into Discovery first thing, to research the precursor anomalies faster), and he will get a broken Ring World spawning nearby that he can claim and use to fish for Mega-Engineering, which with his setup he'll be doing by the time he's getting alerts that marauder mercs are now available.

    On Communal: I understand why he's picking it, but it's a bad choice. Idyll is going to do most of the heavy lifting on that front by itself - it's going to give him +25 housing, which is enough to cover a substantial part of his building jobs, especially since he's gonna have at least 3 building slots used on single-job buildings, and likely several more that are used on 1-job or no-job buildings to fill the planet in the first place (Cloning Vats, Assembly Plants). On top of that, since he's running a rural planet, he's going to want all the rural job buildings (mineral purification plant, food processing center, energy nexus), which is another 3 slots with only 2 jobs each. So we've already filled 9/16 building slots (vats, assembly plant, capital building, 3 special resource extractors, 3 basic resource amps) and only need a net 7 net housing to do it (because the capital will eventually provide 3 net housing on its own). So all he needs to cover is the remaining 7 building slots - and while some of those will be high-job-density buildings like megaplexes or research labs or alloy foundries, each of those things comes with at least 1 low-job-density complement building (stock exchange, research institute, ministry of production respectively) that only takes 1-2 job slots, and if he's trying to run a single colony for that long he's probably going to end up with more than one (or all 3) of those buildings, too, plus anything else he might want like like unity producing buildings (curating vault caps out at 10 jobs, but the upgraded holo theatre caps out at 4 and ministry of culture caps at 3). At the absolute most his remaining 7 slots will need another ~50 housing, but it's likely to be more like 30. Idyll is going to cover almost all of that, and what it doesn't cover won't actually be important because all a housing shortage does is create immigration push (which you'll want by the time your planet is getting full) and create a small stability penalty which won't really matter and basically only translates to an even smaller resource production penalty.

    On top of that, robot pops only take .5 housing each if you don't give them citizen rights/stop before upgrading them to synths, and since he should be building those from as early as possible (and will get them early, because he's going Natural Engineers), he'll get a bunch of housing reduction from those pops already, which will almost certainly cover whatever Idyll doesn't. Every robot he builds will give the same housing bonus as having five Communal pops, while also increasing his pop growth so he can fill his tall planet faster, all without costing any trait points at all.

    By picking Communal he's spending a valuable, limited trait point on something that will have absolutely no effect at all until the mid-late game, and which, when it eventually does have an effect, will have a negligibly small one that isn't even of universally positive value. In the process, he's giving up a point that could be spent on a much larger bonus that would be present from the start of the game, like Industrious or Agrarian or Rapid Breeders. It's a bad plan born of a desire to not have red numbers on the screen even if those numbers don't actually matter. Even if that small different in housing did matter, it'd become relevant so late he'd be able to genemod it on by the time it started to have an impact.

    On Intelligent/Tech Ascendancy/Imp Preregative: I know he's trying to get as much tech and unity as possible. He's doing it wrong! Picking those things doesn't actually give you the most tech, it just looks like it does because the numbers say +tech on them. What gives you the most tech is picking better traits so that you have more resources faster and can spend them on more scientists, which is going to give you a better rate of return than trying to make each scientist individually better. By the time he has ten scientists using Intelligent+Natural Engineers to do the work of twelve scientists, the guy who picked Rapid Breeders+Nomadic instead is just going to have fifteen scientists, and be ahead on tech as a result. That gap is only going to grow as he picks Tech Ascendancy+Imp Prerogative to get a marginal tech bonus and the Rapid Breeders+Nomadic guy takes Voidborne+Bio Ascension and uses them to dramatically increase his pop growth so he can make even more scientists.

    On Precursors: That's interesting, and not something I knew. Still, though, he's rolling the dice - having a repairable megastructure in your borders does substantially increase the odds of rolling mega engineering, but the base odds are so low that it's still a gamble - I routinely have games where I have ruined megastructures in my borders and still don't roll mega engineering until I'm already allocating my fifth or sixth ascension perk. That's a ~30-year delay on your megastructures, which is fine if you're not building around them, but if you are then you want the guaranteed mega engineering so you can reliably start building your first structure on time, ideally as soon as you grab your fourth perk. Like, he's intentionally making all these trait choices for the express purpose of speeding up his access to megastructures, and then also going out of his way to avoid taking the actual fastest, most reliable way of getting megastructures. Taking Tech Ascendancy over Voidborne in order to use Tech Ascendancy to race to megastructures is literally announcing "My plan is to get megastructures as fast as possible" and then intentionally choosing "maybe megastructures later" over "definitely megastructures now". He's giving up the thing he wants in order to take something else because he thinks it will help him get the first thing eventually.
    It's in direct conflict with his own stated goal. (I also, for the record, think that Arcology Project is currently a much better tall play than pushing to early megastructures in the first place, but that's a whole other thing.)

  • Last SonLast Son Registered User regular
    Henroid wrote: »
    Yeah, not only did systems get a massive rework, but the logic you'd apply to the old systems can seriously mess with your game if you try them in the new version.
    How much slower do I have to expand then?

    And how much does "unemployment" hurt because that happened after the first pop showed up and I couldn't construct any buildings because now they're all super expensive.

    Having 1-2 unemployed pops on a planet doesn't do much, the negative is mostly that you're missing out on what those pops could be producing. More than that can start causing crime/stability problems though unless you're running social welfare/utopian standards.

  • FiarynFiaryn Omnicidal Madman Registered User regular
    edited December 2018
    Henroid wrote: »
    Yeah, not only did systems get a massive rework, but the logic you'd apply to the old systems can seriously mess with your game if you try them in the new version.
    How much slower do I have to expand then?

    And how much does "unemployment" hurt because that happened after the first pop showed up and I couldn't construct any buildings because now they're all super expensive.

    A fair bit if it's a lot of pops? But you should mostly be building districts to solve early unemployment, not buildings. Districts should not be outside your ability to afford.

    If you're not aware of what districts are or what they do, that's probably why you're struggling with energy. You should be expanding fairly rapidly, more rapidly than in pre-2.2 if anything. You should look at the left side of the planetary management screen. The yellow, red, and green boxes tell you how many districts of a given category a planet can support. Districts are largely how you perform raw resource extraction (energy, minerals, food). Buildings are more about finished goods (consumer goods, research, alloys, unity).

    An important difference is it's Okay to leave building slots empty nowadays. If you don't have the pops/upkeep to sustain a building, leave it blank. Overbuilding districts and buildings before you have the pops to staff them will tank your energy income to shit for no purpose.

    Fiaryn on
    Soul Silver FC: 1935 3141 6240
    White FC: 0819 3350 1787
  • Undead ScottsmanUndead Scottsman Registered User regular
    New Dev Diary up. It's pretty short. At least one more patch before they all head out to vacation, they'll be back to dev diaries around the 10th or 17th, at which point they'll be focusing on bug fixes and qol improvements.

    https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/stellaris-dev-diary-137-updates-holidays-and-the-future.1140472/

  • Lord_AsmodeusLord_Asmodeus goeticSobriquet: Here is your magical cryptic riddle-tumour: I AM A TIME MACHINERegistered User regular
    So an annoying little bug that doesn't really impact much is that my Citizen Elite Union is mad because I don't have a stratified society. But I do. I explicitly have slaves and stratified economies for the species in my space.

    Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. - Lincoln
  • Last SonLast Son Registered User regular
    So an annoying little bug that doesn't really impact much is that my Citizen Elite Union is mad because I don't have a stratified society. But I do. I explicitly have slaves and stratified economies for the species in my space.

    The beta-patch fixes that. Somehow its caused by having more than one species in your empire.

  • Lord_AsmodeusLord_Asmodeus goeticSobriquet: Here is your magical cryptic riddle-tumour: I AM A TIME MACHINERegistered User regular
    edited December 2018
    Last Son wrote: »
    So an annoying little bug that doesn't really impact much is that my Citizen Elite Union is mad because I don't have a stratified society. But I do. I explicitly have slaves and stratified economies for the species in my space.

    The beta-patch fixes that. Somehow its caused by having more than one species in your empire.

    The 2.2.1 or the Stellaris_test?

    Edit: Well shit. I got a scientist with a psionics specialization, but I had so many stupid society situation log things, he died before I got any actual psionics research out of him.

    Lord_Asmodeus on
    Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. - Lincoln
  • swphreakswphreak Registered User regular
    Saw there was new DLC so I grabbed it. It has been awhile since I read dev diaries so I didn't realize they had made such dramatic changes. Was a nice surprise.

    I'm in holiday mode now, so I'm up for some multiplayer Stellaris if anyone else is.

    Here's a link to the PA Stellaris someone created.

  • Lord_AsmodeusLord_Asmodeus goeticSobriquet: Here is your magical cryptic riddle-tumour: I AM A TIME MACHINERegistered User regular
    So after save scumming dozens of times to try and get psionics theory in an old save before my guy died without it coming up once I just cheated and gave it to myself.

    So there game, nyeh

    Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. - Lincoln
  • FiarynFiaryn Omnicidal Madman Registered User regular
    There is actually a pretty cool anomaly that can give you Psionic Theory for free. Keep an eye out for any spooky oceans~

    Soul Silver FC: 1935 3141 6240
    White FC: 0819 3350 1787
  • Space PickleSpace Pickle Registered User regular
    For the most part I like the new update, although I did really enjoy painting my own sectors.

    I still don't quite understand everything though. I got the Kettlings event...they began expanding and soon declared war on my race of space terminator robots. After exterminating their race and conquering all of their planets my economy is ruined. I'm at -500 energy every month and there seems to be no way to recover.

  • HamHamJHamHamJ Registered User regular
    edited December 2018
    For the most part I like the new update, although I did really enjoy painting my own sectors.

    I still don't quite understand everything though. I got the Kettlings event...they began expanding and soon declared war on my race of space terminator robots. After exterminating their race and conquering all of their planets my economy is ruined. I'm at -500 energy every month and there seems to be no way to recover.

    Sell any buildings you don't need or aren't using. Probably there are a bunch of empty buildings on conquered planets. Maybe abandon some of the conquered worlds if you can? Also starbases. Check the starbases you took and delete if you are over your limit or delete any useless modules. Like trade hubs that you can't use as a gestalt concousness.

    HamHamJ on
    While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
  • MuddBuddMuddBudd Registered User regular
    edited December 2018
    I found a cool anomaly this playthrough, where one of my planets has a portal on it to an alternate reality. It's very much the same, even down to duplicates of my ruler. The main difference is they travel via Warp Drive and we use Hyperlanes. The people from the Warp Drive reality are constantly fighting 'Warp Beasts' though. We've established interdimensional trade with our alternate selves.

    I occasionally get small updates from them about how they are doing, and how the fight against the Warp Beasts goes.

    MuddBudd on
    There's no plan, there's no race to be run
    The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
  • FiarynFiaryn Omnicidal Madman Registered User regular
    For the most part I like the new update, although I did really enjoy painting my own sectors.

    I still don't quite understand everything though. I got the Kettlings event...they began expanding and soon declared war on my race of space terminator robots. After exterminating their race and conquering all of their planets my economy is ruined. I'm at -500 energy every month and there seems to be no way to recover.

    You probably just absorbed a ton of unworked districts and buildings that are doing absolutely nothing. Level the planets, or damn near.

    Soul Silver FC: 1935 3141 6240
    White FC: 0819 3350 1787
  • HenroidHenroid Mexican kicked from Immigration Thread Centrism is Racism :3Registered User regular
    Okay yeah I'm feeling better and taking and honest attempt to learn things. I didn't notice the districts thing could be built upon (to add more). So far my understanding of changes so far is,
    - minerals are now for constructing buildings, or being converted into other resource types
    - energy, minerals, food, consumer goods, and alloys can all be bought or sold - THIS IS AWESOME
    - minerals have to be converted to alloys to build anything on the military end, dunno how to feel about this
    - consumer goods I don't fully understand; I take it they're the new "happiness" but are also needed for research labs

    Is there a way to move citizens to specific districts / buildings, or is that out of my control (but the game will move around to what is needed to prevent negative generation)?

  • MuddBuddMuddBudd Registered User regular
    As far as I can tell, no. They will move up on their own (they like having more important jobs) when they can, and if no high level jobs are around they will eventually move down to basic work. It can take them a while though.

    Your primary lever for controlling fluctuations is employment.
    -If you build say, a forge, while there are no unemployed workers are around, an existing worker will promote themselves from a resource gathering job to fill it, leaving you with a potential loss of resources until new pops grow.
    -If you build the forge when there ARE unemployed workers, a worker will promote themselves from a basic job, and then the unemployed folks should fill in the old jobs. Or perhaps fill in the brand new one. Either way, less interruption in resource production.

    Consumer Goods are not the new happiness, at least, not on their own. I think Amenities have a much stronger impact on happiness/stability. Consumer goods are like, furniture and appliances and lab equipment, that kind of thing. The basics of living and working. Amenities are luxuries that make people content. Unless I am misunderstanding the system entirely.

    TBH I feel like Consumer Goods as a resource is just an extra level of work that is not super fun and I wish they would go away. Hive minds don't use them at all right now and it makes things so much simpler to balance atm.

    There's no plan, there's no race to be run
    The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
  • TofystedethTofystedeth Registered User regular
    Consumer goods are basically a maintenance resource for your pops. Amenities are happiness.

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  • TofystedethTofystedeth Registered User regular
    MuddBudd wrote: »
    As far as I can tell, no. They will move up on their own (they like having more important jobs) when they can, and if no high level jobs are around they will eventually move down to basic work. It can take them a while though.

    Your primary lever for controlling fluctuations is employment.
    -If you build say, a forge, while there are no unemployed workers are around, an existing worker will promote themselves from a resource gathering job to fill it, leaving you with a potential loss of resources until new pops grow.
    -If you build the forge when there ARE unemployed workers, a worker will promote themselves from a basic job, and then the unemployed folks should fill in the old jobs. Or perhaps fill in the brand new one. Either way, less interruption in resource production.

    Consumer Goods are not the new happiness, at least, not on their own. I think Amenities have a much stronger impact on happiness/stability. Consumer goods are like, furniture and appliances and lab equipment, that kind of thing. The basics of living and working. Amenities are luxuries that make people content. Unless I am misunderstanding the system entirely.

    TBH I feel like Consumer Goods as a resource is just an extra level of work that is not super fun and I wish they would go away. Hive minds don't use them at all right now and it makes things so much simpler to balance atm.

    They probably wanted to make them more of a thing just a fraction of your energy the disappears, but I'm not as much a fan either.

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  • FoefallerFoefaller Registered User regular
    edited December 2018
    Abbalah wrote: »
    Foefaller wrote: »
    Abbalah wrote: »
    Abbalah wrote:
    Having played a couple tall games now, it seems like the real bottleneck for tall play is just plain old minerals. All of the options for playing tall do something a little different, but none of them can mine minerals in any significant quantity, and most of what they do is give you more ways to consume minerals for alloys.

    What's your definition of Tall? It seems like that just means living close to your admin cap in 2.2; I haven't had any mineral issues yet; it's pretty consistently my #1 surplus. Though I may under-produce alloys as I tend to be forced into buying those when I need a war surge.

    I think 2.2.2 is supposed to increase Alloy yield from 2 -> 3, which may mitigate that.

    Tall is basically holding a relatively small number of actual systems and getting room for pops via things that increase the population density of space (ecumenopolis, habitats, ringworlds, mastery of nature), as opposed to wide, where you'd be grabbing as much space as possible and getting room for pops by controlling more planets. It doesn't necessarily mean staying under or close to your admin cap, since you can pretty easily outstrip your admin cap if you build a bunch of habitats and/or 50-district ringworld sections.

    There is definitely a phase of the game where minerals will run as a surplus in almost any strategy, but the more people you put in a given amount of space the more minerals you're going to need without your mineral income being able to grow, because minerals basically only come from occupying more space - once you've maxed out the mining districts on your existing planets, you either need mining stations in mineral-heavy systems, or new mining districts on new planets, and both of those things require you to take more space. If you don't want to do that, you're eventually going to be mineral-throttled, because you can get more energy and food by growing 'up' but not more minerals.

    Also I would avoid buying alloys as much as possible unless you're energy-capped and looking for something useful to convert it to. Alloys tend to hover around 20 energy each on the market, and a corvette with anything more than starter gear is generally gonna run 150-200 alloys, which means that when you buy alloys to build your navy you're basically trying to buy a navy with energy at a cost of 3000-4000 energy per corvette. That's a pretty rough exchange rate (especially given that you can get a 5-year contract on an entire mercenary fleet for 9-15k).


    Edit:
    Maybe this will help
    https://youtu.be/xkZQ2HE4Xrw

    This is a heady mix of good and bad advice. Mostly that's not how I'd build a tall race, trait-wise. Communal is a trap choice, for one - housing is easy to get, the penalties for housing shortages are minor, and a 10% reduction in housing usage (which won't even stay a 10% reduction, because you'll have immigrants who aren't Communal) is minor. I wouldn't build any race in this patch without Rapid Breeders, and certainly not a tall race which is going to need those growth bonuses to keep up with other empires that have more planets and thus more base growth. I also, as I mentioned, would strongly recommend that any race intended to be tall be Industrious. This boxes out Intelligent/Natural Engineers, but that's honestly not a big deal, because A)you'll have more people to do science with thanks to the better population growth and B)Intelligent is a smaller bonus than it appears to be, especially since it only applies to a very limited number of jobs. You're better off taking bigger bonuses to more-common outputs and then using that resource advantage to just put more scientists on tech instead of inefficiently trying to maximize your tech per scientist.

    Likewise, Technological Ascendancy is kind of a shitty ascension perk. It's not nearly as big of a bonus as it appears to be, because it's not multiplicative with all the other science bonuses you're going to end up with, and while your first perk choices are somewhat limited, both Voidborne and Mastery of Nature are much better for tall empires - particularly Voidborne if you're planning around trying to get early megastructures, because Voidborne->Master Builders is the only way you're going to get Mega Engineering in a reasonable timeframe without getting very lucky, just because of its low chance to roll as a research option.

    And Imperial Prerogative, while a fine (but not especially amazing) perk in general, is terrible as a second perk because it means you're passing up a huge population growth bonus from either Xenocompatibility or Bio Ascension, and again you need that growth bonus both because pop growth is king in the current patch and because you're already effectively eating a growth penalty by being tall as a result of the fact that the base growth of your empire is a factor of the number of colonies you have.

    Also even with a tall strategy, you want to colonize every planet within your borders ASAP. Being at year 60 with 1 colony and like half a dozen uncolonized planets in your borders is a real bad plan no matter how tall you think it makes you.

    Couple counterpoints to your counterpoints:

    A lot of his choices build off each other. Communal by itself isn't very impressive, especially with Xenophile, but with Agrarian Idyll and Life Seeded it's more than enough to fill out all of his homeworld's building slots and keep nearly all of it as non-city district. He's also going for the classic Stellaris tall of "doesn't matter you have way more stuff than me, I'm building Battleships with Kinetic Artillery and you've only just figured out Cruisers" which gives the "bad" ideas of picking Intelligent, Technological Ascendancy and Imperial Prerogative a much more favoriable context: he's trying to get as much tech and unity as possible, and grow as big as possible while staying under his Admin capacity.

    I actually feel Rapid Breeders is a trap trait, at least for non-Hive Minds that have to deal with the 50% pop growth penalty for new colonies, for the same reason you don't like Technological Ascendancy; too many additional modifiers I can pick up elsewhere. I can day 1 switch my food policy for +10% growth, and then whenever I can, pop the planetary decision for +25%, get Genome Mapping for another 10% as one of my first techs, and pick up the 10% pop growth Expansion tradition in the first 5-6 years. Adding Rapid Breeders to all that only gets me a net 6.5% increase to growth vs. not. Is that really worth two trait points? I personally don't think so.

    Finally, for not picking up Voidborne if his professed goal is megastructures... Not a problem, where he's starting. Why? Well, that comes with a fun, and very important fact:

    What Precursor you get is *not* random, and in fact is entirely dependent on what part of the galaxy you get the first precursor anomaly.

    And South/SW is where you will get Cybrex. He just needs to complete the chain (which is also part of the reason why he dipped into Discovery first thing, to research the precursor anomalies faster), and he will get a broken Ring World spawning nearby that he can claim and use to fish for Mega-Engineering, which with his setup he'll be doing by the time he's getting alerts that marauder mercs are now available.

    On Communal: I understand why he's picking it, but it's a bad choice. Idyll is going to do most of the heavy lifting on that front by itself - it's going to give him +25 housing, which is enough to cover a substantial part of his building jobs, especially since he's gonna have at least 3 building slots used on single-job buildings, and likely several more that are used on 1-job or no-job buildings to fill the planet in the first place (Cloning Vats, Assembly Plants). On top of that, since he's running a rural planet, he's going to want all the rural job buildings (mineral purification plant, food processing center, energy nexus), which is another 3 slots with only 2 jobs each. So we've already filled 9/16 building slots (vats, assembly plant, capital building, 3 special resource extractors, 3 basic resource amps) and only need a net 7 net housing to do it (because the capital will eventually provide 3 net housing on its own). So all he needs to cover is the remaining 7 building slots - and while some of those will be high-job-density buildings like megaplexes or research labs or alloy foundries, each of those things comes with at least 1 low-job-density complement building (stock exchange, research institute, ministry of production respectively) that only takes 1-2 job slots, and if he's trying to run a single colony for that long he's probably going to end up with more than one (or all 3) of those buildings, too, plus anything else he might want like like unity producing buildings (curating vault caps out at 10 jobs, but the upgraded holo theatre caps out at 4 and ministry of culture caps at 3). At the absolute most his remaining 7 slots will need another ~50 housing, but it's likely to be more like 30. Idyll is going to cover almost all of that, and what it doesn't cover won't actually be important because all a housing shortage does is create immigration push (which you'll want by the time your planet is getting full) and create a small stability penalty which won't really matter and basically only translates to an even smaller resource production penalty.

    On top of that, robot pops only take .5 housing each if you don't give them citizen rights/stop before upgrading them to synths, and since he should be building those from as early as possible (and will get them early, because he's going Natural Engineers), he'll get a bunch of housing reduction from those pops already, which will almost certainly cover whatever Idyll doesn't. Every robot he builds will give the same housing bonus as having five Communal pops, while also increasing his pop growth so he can fill his tall planet faster, all without costing any trait points at all.

    By picking Communal he's spending a valuable, limited trait point on something that will have absolutely no effect at all until the mid-late game, and which, when it eventually does have an effect, will have a negligibly small one that isn't even of universally positive value. In the process, he's giving up a point that could be spent on a much larger bonus that would be present from the start of the game, like Industrious or Agrarian or Rapid Breeders. It's a bad plan born of a desire to not have red numbers on the screen even if those numbers don't actually matter. Even if that small different in housing did matter, it'd become relevant so late he'd be able to genemod it on by the time it started to have an impact.

    On Intelligent/Tech Ascendancy/Imp Preregative: I know he's trying to get as much tech and unity as possible. He's doing it wrong! Picking those things doesn't actually give you the most tech, it just looks like it does because the numbers say +tech on them. What gives you the most tech is picking better traits so that you have more resources faster and can spend them on more scientists, which is going to give you a better rate of return than trying to make each scientist individually better. By the time he has ten scientists using Intelligent+Natural Engineers to do the work of twelve scientists, the guy who picked Rapid Breeders+Nomadic instead is just going to have fifteen scientists, and be ahead on tech as a result. That gap is only going to grow as he picks Tech Ascendancy+Imp Prerogative to get a marginal tech bonus and the Rapid Breeders+Nomadic guy takes Voidborne+Bio Ascension and uses them to dramatically increase his pop growth so he can make even more scientists.

    On Precursors: That's interesting, and not something I knew. Still, though, he's rolling the dice - having a repairable megastructure in your borders does substantially increase the odds of rolling mega engineering, but the base odds are so low that it's still a gamble - I routinely have games where I have ruined megastructures in my borders and still don't roll mega engineering until I'm already allocating my fifth or sixth ascension perk. That's a ~30-year delay on your megastructures, which is fine if you're not building around them, but if you are then you want the guaranteed mega engineering so you can reliably start building your first structure on time, ideally as soon as you grab your fourth perk. Like, he's intentionally making all these trait choices for the express purpose of speeding up his access to megastructures, and then also going out of his way to avoid taking the actual fastest, most reliable way of getting megastructures. Taking Tech Ascendancy over Voidborne in order to use Tech Ascendancy to race to megastructures is literally announcing "My plan is to get megastructures as fast as possible" and then intentionally choosing "maybe megastructures later" over "definitely megastructures now". He's giving up the thing he wants in order to take something else because he thinks it will help him get the first thing eventually.
    It's in direct conflict with his own stated goal. (I also, for the record, think that Arcology Project is currently a much better tall play than pushing to early megastructures in the first place, but that's a whole other thing.)

    Again, if you are stacking all the early pop growth modifiers (and with a little foresight there is no reason why you can't, especially with Agrarian Idyll) You are only getting a net 6% increase to overall per-planet pop growth.

    To put that in perspective, that means for every 50 pops, you have 3 extra pops. You also won't lap someone who doesn't until you get your 17th pop. which would take 344 months, or 28 and 2/3rd years. To have 5 more pops on a planet for research than someone who took Intelligent instead, assuming everything else is unchanged, that will not happen until around 2343, one hundred and forty years after the game starts. While it's true you would have ~284 pop-years worth of extra production (or about the equivalent of 13k more minerals, before pop upkeep costs) you can't use that to make more labs until you have the pops to fill them.

    (This is also why Gene Clinics are considered a poor choice unless you build them early on your first colonies, as the Return on Investment, i.e. when you get enough pop-months of production to make it a net gain, is over a hundred years)

    Now, you are probably going to say "but Intelligent suffers from the same diminishing returns!" and the answer is, well, yes and no. While there are bonuses that affect pop research points directly (assist research by science ships being the notable one), the majority of bonuses to your research are things that boost research speed, such as Technological Ascendancy. However, Intelligence does not affect research speed, it effects research points gained. This means that Research Speed bonuses, which are treated as a multiplier to the research progress from points, are a multiplicative bonus to the net research gain from Intelligent and Nat. Engineers, not an additive one that diminishes their returns. Every bonus to research speed makes those traits even better, while every bonus to pop growth makes Rapid Breeders give a smaller and smaller gain over your peers.

    (You know what other effect is multiplicative? The growth penalty for new colonies, meaning you are still only getting a 6% bonus over a normal empire on that planet when both are pumping that food decision, if you even bother)

    This is why I suggested that Rapid Breeders is a trap trait. You are able to stack so many bonuses for pop growth, especially if you go the double-whammy of Xeno Compatibility and Bio Ascension, that the net effect the trait has for your growth is tiny for something that's two trait points, when traits that affect pop production directly, or even affect how many pops you can fit on a planet, tend to fair a lot better over the game's lifespan... especially if they can benefit from the few multiplicative effects the game has.

    Foefaller on
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  • HenroidHenroid Mexican kicked from Immigration Thread Centrism is Racism :3Registered User regular
    Am I supposed to be generating way more resources than are actually needed? I found out about that district thing and now as I've built outposts and mines and colonized, I'm generating way more energy and minerals than I need. Even if I converted into alloys and consumer goods, I'd still be way above what I need on those as well.

    I'm guessing this is an early game symptom only? That later as borders / room in the galaxy gets congested, every point counts.

  • Moridin889Moridin889 Registered User regular
    Henroid wrote: »
    Okay yeah I'm feeling better and taking and honest attempt to learn things. I didn't notice the districts thing could be built upon (to add more). So far my understanding of changes so far is,
    - minerals are now for constructing buildings, or being converted into other resource types
    - energy, minerals, food, consumer goods, and alloys can all be bought or sold - THIS IS AWESOME
    - minerals have to be converted to alloys to build anything on the military end, dunno how to feel about this
    - consumer goods I don't fully understand; I take it they're the new "happiness" but are also needed for research labs

    Is there a way to move citizens to specific districts / buildings, or is that out of my control (but the game will move around to what is needed to prevent negative generation)?

    Minerals are the base resource

    Alloys are for military applications- Ships, Starbases

    Consumer Goods are for civilian applications- convert into amenities, unity, research

    Amenities are the equivalent to "happiness"- It's affected by housing, surplus consumer goods, jobs and is also a resource you can make (entertainment buildings)

    So it allows you to build up a big base resource industry and then convert your economy to wartime or peacetime footing pretty easily, especially with the policies that support this

  • FiarynFiaryn Omnicidal Madman Registered User regular
    Henroid wrote: »
    Am I supposed to be generating way more resources than are actually needed? I found out about that district thing and now as I've built outposts and mines and colonized, I'm generating way more energy and minerals than I need. Even if I converted into alloys and consumer goods, I'd still be way above what I need on those as well.

    I'm guessing this is an early game symptom only? That later as borders / room in the galaxy gets congested, every point counts.

    Don't worry, ship upkeep and building upkeep will tear your energy generation in half in no time. You'd also be surprised how fast the alloys and consumer goods eat up minerals. Each alloy forge consumes about 12 minerals in upkeep a month.

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  • MuddBuddMuddBudd Registered User regular
    edited December 2018
    Fiaryn wrote: »
    Henroid wrote: »
    Am I supposed to be generating way more resources than are actually needed? I found out about that district thing and now as I've built outposts and mines and colonized, I'm generating way more energy and minerals than I need. Even if I converted into alloys and consumer goods, I'd still be way above what I need on those as well.

    I'm guessing this is an early game symptom only? That later as borders / room in the galaxy gets congested, every point counts.

    Don't worry, ship upkeep and building upkeep will tear your energy generation in half in no time. You'd also be surprised how fast the alloys and consumer goods eat up minerals. Each alloy forge consumes about 12 minerals in upkeep a month.

    Even more once you research the upgrades. But I think that's more intended to make it so you need LESS forges to produce Alloys. So you can free up building slots for other stuff. (IE, one upgraded forge instead of two)

    MuddBudd on
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  • HenroidHenroid Mexican kicked from Immigration Thread Centrism is Racism :3Registered User regular
    I mean if anything the new way the game plays has made it so that I don't have it in fastest speed waiting for shit all the time. There's value in slowing the game down now. It's a more intimate sort of experience which is nice.

  • FiarynFiaryn Omnicidal Madman Registered User regular
    It's done a lot to make the midgame not be a big ol' drag, because the actual act of developing your empire is fairly involved now. More than enough so to keep you busy til the L-Gate and the Great Khan start fucking things up in the halftime show before the end game crisis.

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  • NotoriusBENNotoriusBEN Registered User regular
    didn't see the patch notes posted

    you can find the checksum in the bottom left corner of the bootup window before you actually play the game (the checksum is 2.2.2 555a)
    to access it from steam, right click the game in your library. goto properties. click the BETAS tab
    goto the beta you want to opt in on widget:
    click 'stellaris_test - testing and crossplay branch'

    this is the 2.2.2 555a patch for the next couple of weeks until paradox comes back from the holidays.

    spoiler for long, bolded for important stuff related to gestalt and machines since that's my bag.
    #################################################################
    ######################### VERSION 2.2.2 ###########################
    #################################################################

    ######################
    # 2.2 ‘Le Guin’ Free Features
    ######################

    * Ether Drake Shrine/Monument has been converted to a special Planetary Deposit with the same effects as before
    * Improved Nanite Transmutation description for tech/building
    * Art Monument has now been revamped into a planetary Decision
    * Hive minds will once again have unemployed drones rather than a Scavenger drone job
    * Renamed Empire Size to Empire Sprawl, and renamed Administrative Cap to Administrative Capacity (previous wording did not make it clear enough that they are soft caps)

    ###################
    # Balance
    ###################

    * Rescaled the Consecrated World Worship modifier: it now goes higher, with smaller value increments between each step
    * Shared burden Civic and Living standard allow pops to demote in social strata much more rapidly
    * Ruined arcologies take longer to clear and cost more
    * Reduced Gateway cost
    * Increased rate at which admirals and ships get XP from suppressing pirates
    * Science nerd faction is no longer jealous of the Successor Khanate
    * Ship upgrade cost reduced by increasing the refund amount from older components, and upgrade time reduced
    * Mega Art Installation restoration build time increased from 3600 to 4800
    * Strategic Coordination Center restoration build time increased from 3600 to 4800
    *Strategic Coordination Center effect on naval cap reduced from to 50/100/150, effect on starbase cap reduced from to 2/4/6, and effect on platform capacity reduced to 4/8/12
    * Science Nexus effect on research output increased from 75/150/225 to 100/200/300, and increases research speed by 5%/10%/15%
    * Science Nexus build time increased from 2400 to 3600, and alloy cost increased from 12500 to 15000 for all levels
    * Proles know their roles, are less likely to be researchers
    * Synthetic Evolution ascension perk now also reduces modify species cost by -50%
    * Administrative Efficiency (repeatable) tech effect on Admin Cap increased from 10 to 15
    * Mitigated some Machine Uprising issues slightly

    ###################
    # AI
    ###################

    * AI now manages to correctly assess budget for building upgrades on planets
    * Made sure AI is not blocked from building things that decreases budget deficits if deficit is too large, because you gotta have money to make money, champ
    * Scriptable possibility to use parent economic category for AI budgeting. AI now has a single pool for energy upkeep for most things, making it much better at building up its empire
    * AI is now budgeting some exotic resources to planet development, allowing them build upgrades and buildings that require them
    * Made AI a bit less maniacal about stomping out every iota of crime to allow the criminal megacorp playstyle

    ###################
    # Performance
    ###################

    * Fixed performance drop in the resettlement view
    * Fixed one source of lag on daily ticks
    * Reduced needless daily job related calculations

    ###################
    # UI
    ###################

    * Fixed overlapping GUI elements for Science Nexus Megastructure
    * Updated production/upkeep GUI elements in Megastructure view
    * Faction issues now display as red or green depending on if the demand is fulfilled rather than if the effect of the issue is positive, negative or neutral
    * Fixed so that all decimals of amenities and trade value are shown in the UI

    ###################
    # Modding
    ###################

    * Renamed old "can_resettle_pop" game rule to "can_resettle_planet", Add a new "can_resettle_pop" game rule that works on Pop scope
    * Added on_slave_sold_on_market on action

    ###################
    # Bugfixes
    ###################

    * Fixed robot pops being unable to resettle
    * Fixed the Consecrated World Worship modifier disappearing when a certain combination of planets are consecrated
    * Caravaneers should not join a colony before it is fully established
    * Some moon-related events had their triggers improved after the startling realization that Habitats also count as moons. That's no moon...
    * Fixed Aberrant and Vehement lacking starting anchor starbase rendering their portals indestructible
    * Fanatic Materialist Fallen Empire is no longer wrongfully DLC-locked behind Synthetic Dawn
    * Fixed broken text for Dark Matter deposits
    * "Pollen Aphrodisiac" event chain is no longer available to Ecumenopolis worlds
    * Fixed an event option tooltip relating to the Science Nexus reporting incorrect resource amounts
    * Fixed Automated Colonization Units tradition not granting an extra pop on colonization for machine empires
    * Fixed issue with the Artisan troupe dialogue windows not popping up
    * Fixed crash when trying to reroute a trade route
    * Totalitarian faction demands should be satisfied by either having a stratified living standard on everyone, or by purging/enslaving pops
    * Fixed a crash when opening the megastructure build list with a Dyson Sphere you cannot afford at midnight on the Summer Solstice atop Barad-dûr
    * Fixed text grey out function to actually grey out texticons instead of only cheekily putting "_grey" into the text
    * Fixed a crash when tooltipping power in diplomacy view while not observing as a country
    * Fixed duplicate Simplified Chinese ship design names
    * Fixed a possible crash when showing event windows
    * Fixed issue where system ownership change on actions were executed in a unsafe environment potentially causing CTDs and/or OOSs
    * Fixed an OOS at game start when the client is playing in a different language than the host
    * Fixed a crash related to extremely long trade routes
    * Fixed CTD from trying to update invalid planets
    * Fixed the Caravansary Home Station being indestructible after it is re-established, because that which has died once can die again
    * Fixed a missing ship design name for the Caravansary starbase
    * The Numistic pops sold by the Numistic Order will now have the same traits as their original owner but the ideal planet class of their buyer
    * Fixed Vassalization Wars unhelpfully not creating Vassals
    * Subsidiaries can now have branch offices and open branch offices in their overlord's territory. Commercial pact trading is also done automatically just as when in a federation when you're a subsidiary
    * Merchants now properly produce Unity for empires with Merchant Guilds civic
    * Fixed a number of Special Projects occasionally displaying unintended event images in the Situation Log
    * Fixed some Governor traits that were wrongly empire-wide in their effect
    * Hyperplanes are now correctly colored on OSX
    * Drone Megastorage now correctly checks that you are a Machine empire
    * No resettlement policy now actually means no resettlment
    * Fixed Observation Posts producing no science
    * Sector automation now includes hives and nexus
    * Technologies for lvl 2 buildings no longer appear before you have the resources to build them
    * Fixed the Numistic Order fleet having the wrong name
    * Alleviated some issues with Caravaneer fleets getting "stuck", as their jump distance when escaping hostiles is now randomized
    * Fixed an edge case where Consecrating a world would not result in a modifier, making the planet impossible to un-consecrate
    * Fixed literally unplayable typo in Cyto-Revitalization Center tooltip
    * Fixed Solid Liquidity faction issue stating the wrong amount of Energy Credits
    * Private Prospectors civic effect description now shows the correct Administrative Cap increase

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  • AbbalahAbbalah Registered User regular
    Foefaller wrote: »
    Abbalah wrote: »
    Foefaller wrote: »
    Abbalah wrote: »
    Abbalah wrote:
    Having played a couple tall games now, it seems like the real bottleneck for tall play is just plain old minerals. All of the options for playing tall do something a little different, but none of them can mine minerals in any significant quantity, and most of what they do is give you more ways to consume minerals for alloys.

    What's your definition of Tall? It seems like that just means living close to your admin cap in 2.2; I haven't had any mineral issues yet; it's pretty consistently my #1 surplus. Though I may under-produce alloys as I tend to be forced into buying those when I need a war surge.

    I think 2.2.2 is supposed to increase Alloy yield from 2 -> 3, which may mitigate that.

    Tall is basically holding a relatively small number of actual systems and getting room for pops via things that increase the population density of space (ecumenopolis, habitats, ringworlds, mastery of nature), as opposed to wide, where you'd be grabbing as much space as possible and getting room for pops by controlling more planets. It doesn't necessarily mean staying under or close to your admin cap, since you can pretty easily outstrip your admin cap if you build a bunch of habitats and/or 50-district ringworld sections.

    There is definitely a phase of the game where minerals will run as a surplus in almost any strategy, but the more people you put in a given amount of space the more minerals you're going to need without your mineral income being able to grow, because minerals basically only come from occupying more space - once you've maxed out the mining districts on your existing planets, you either need mining stations in mineral-heavy systems, or new mining districts on new planets, and both of those things require you to take more space. If you don't want to do that, you're eventually going to be mineral-throttled, because you can get more energy and food by growing 'up' but not more minerals.

    Also I would avoid buying alloys as much as possible unless you're energy-capped and looking for something useful to convert it to. Alloys tend to hover around 20 energy each on the market, and a corvette with anything more than starter gear is generally gonna run 150-200 alloys, which means that when you buy alloys to build your navy you're basically trying to buy a navy with energy at a cost of 3000-4000 energy per corvette. That's a pretty rough exchange rate (especially given that you can get a 5-year contract on an entire mercenary fleet for 9-15k).


    Edit:
    Maybe this will help
    https://youtu.be/xkZQ2HE4Xrw

    This is a heady mix of good and bad advice. Mostly that's not how I'd build a tall race, trait-wise. Communal is a trap choice, for one - housing is easy to get, the penalties for housing shortages are minor, and a 10% reduction in housing usage (which won't even stay a 10% reduction, because you'll have immigrants who aren't Communal) is minor. I wouldn't build any race in this patch without Rapid Breeders, and certainly not a tall race which is going to need those growth bonuses to keep up with other empires that have more planets and thus more base growth. I also, as I mentioned, would strongly recommend that any race intended to be tall be Industrious. This boxes out Intelligent/Natural Engineers, but that's honestly not a big deal, because A)you'll have more people to do science with thanks to the better population growth and B)Intelligent is a smaller bonus than it appears to be, especially since it only applies to a very limited number of jobs. You're better off taking bigger bonuses to more-common outputs and then using that resource advantage to just put more scientists on tech instead of inefficiently trying to maximize your tech per scientist.

    Likewise, Technological Ascendancy is kind of a shitty ascension perk. It's not nearly as big of a bonus as it appears to be, because it's not multiplicative with all the other science bonuses you're going to end up with, and while your first perk choices are somewhat limited, both Voidborne and Mastery of Nature are much better for tall empires - particularly Voidborne if you're planning around trying to get early megastructures, because Voidborne->Master Builders is the only way you're going to get Mega Engineering in a reasonable timeframe without getting very lucky, just because of its low chance to roll as a research option.

    And Imperial Prerogative, while a fine (but not especially amazing) perk in general, is terrible as a second perk because it means you're passing up a huge population growth bonus from either Xenocompatibility or Bio Ascension, and again you need that growth bonus both because pop growth is king in the current patch and because you're already effectively eating a growth penalty by being tall as a result of the fact that the base growth of your empire is a factor of the number of colonies you have.

    Also even with a tall strategy, you want to colonize every planet within your borders ASAP. Being at year 60 with 1 colony and like half a dozen uncolonized planets in your borders is a real bad plan no matter how tall you think it makes you.

    Couple counterpoints to your counterpoints:

    A lot of his choices build off each other. Communal by itself isn't very impressive, especially with Xenophile, but with Agrarian Idyll and Life Seeded it's more than enough to fill out all of his homeworld's building slots and keep nearly all of it as non-city district. He's also going for the classic Stellaris tall of "doesn't matter you have way more stuff than me, I'm building Battleships with Kinetic Artillery and you've only just figured out Cruisers" which gives the "bad" ideas of picking Intelligent, Technological Ascendancy and Imperial Prerogative a much more favoriable context: he's trying to get as much tech and unity as possible, and grow as big as possible while staying under his Admin capacity.

    I actually feel Rapid Breeders is a trap trait, at least for non-Hive Minds that have to deal with the 50% pop growth penalty for new colonies, for the same reason you don't like Technological Ascendancy; too many additional modifiers I can pick up elsewhere. I can day 1 switch my food policy for +10% growth, and then whenever I can, pop the planetary decision for +25%, get Genome Mapping for another 10% as one of my first techs, and pick up the 10% pop growth Expansion tradition in the first 5-6 years. Adding Rapid Breeders to all that only gets me a net 6.5% increase to growth vs. not. Is that really worth two trait points? I personally don't think so.

    Finally, for not picking up Voidborne if his professed goal is megastructures... Not a problem, where he's starting. Why? Well, that comes with a fun, and very important fact:

    What Precursor you get is *not* random, and in fact is entirely dependent on what part of the galaxy you get the first precursor anomaly.

    And South/SW is where you will get Cybrex. He just needs to complete the chain (which is also part of the reason why he dipped into Discovery first thing, to research the precursor anomalies faster), and he will get a broken Ring World spawning nearby that he can claim and use to fish for Mega-Engineering, which with his setup he'll be doing by the time he's getting alerts that marauder mercs are now available.

    On Communal: I understand why he's picking it, but it's a bad choice. Idyll is going to do most of the heavy lifting on that front by itself - it's going to give him +25 housing, which is enough to cover a substantial part of his building jobs, especially since he's gonna have at least 3 building slots used on single-job buildings, and likely several more that are used on 1-job or no-job buildings to fill the planet in the first place (Cloning Vats, Assembly Plants). On top of that, since he's running a rural planet, he's going to want all the rural job buildings (mineral purification plant, food processing center, energy nexus), which is another 3 slots with only 2 jobs each. So we've already filled 9/16 building slots (vats, assembly plant, capital building, 3 special resource extractors, 3 basic resource amps) and only need a net 7 net housing to do it (because the capital will eventually provide 3 net housing on its own). So all he needs to cover is the remaining 7 building slots - and while some of those will be high-job-density buildings like megaplexes or research labs or alloy foundries, each of those things comes with at least 1 low-job-density complement building (stock exchange, research institute, ministry of production respectively) that only takes 1-2 job slots, and if he's trying to run a single colony for that long he's probably going to end up with more than one (or all 3) of those buildings, too, plus anything else he might want like like unity producing buildings (curating vault caps out at 10 jobs, but the upgraded holo theatre caps out at 4 and ministry of culture caps at 3). At the absolute most his remaining 7 slots will need another ~50 housing, but it's likely to be more like 30. Idyll is going to cover almost all of that, and what it doesn't cover won't actually be important because all a housing shortage does is create immigration push (which you'll want by the time your planet is getting full) and create a small stability penalty which won't really matter and basically only translates to an even smaller resource production penalty.

    On top of that, robot pops only take .5 housing each if you don't give them citizen rights/stop before upgrading them to synths, and since he should be building those from as early as possible (and will get them early, because he's going Natural Engineers), he'll get a bunch of housing reduction from those pops already, which will almost certainly cover whatever Idyll doesn't. Every robot he builds will give the same housing bonus as having five Communal pops, while also increasing his pop growth so he can fill his tall planet faster, all without costing any trait points at all.

    By picking Communal he's spending a valuable, limited trait point on something that will have absolutely no effect at all until the mid-late game, and which, when it eventually does have an effect, will have a negligibly small one that isn't even of universally positive value. In the process, he's giving up a point that could be spent on a much larger bonus that would be present from the start of the game, like Industrious or Agrarian or Rapid Breeders. It's a bad plan born of a desire to not have red numbers on the screen even if those numbers don't actually matter. Even if that small different in housing did matter, it'd become relevant so late he'd be able to genemod it on by the time it started to have an impact.

    On Intelligent/Tech Ascendancy/Imp Preregative: I know he's trying to get as much tech and unity as possible. He's doing it wrong! Picking those things doesn't actually give you the most tech, it just looks like it does because the numbers say +tech on them. What gives you the most tech is picking better traits so that you have more resources faster and can spend them on more scientists, which is going to give you a better rate of return than trying to make each scientist individually better. By the time he has ten scientists using Intelligent+Natural Engineers to do the work of twelve scientists, the guy who picked Rapid Breeders+Nomadic instead is just going to have fifteen scientists, and be ahead on tech as a result. That gap is only going to grow as he picks Tech Ascendancy+Imp Prerogative to get a marginal tech bonus and the Rapid Breeders+Nomadic guy takes Voidborne+Bio Ascension and uses them to dramatically increase his pop growth so he can make even more scientists.

    On Precursors: That's interesting, and not something I knew. Still, though, he's rolling the dice - having a repairable megastructure in your borders does substantially increase the odds of rolling mega engineering, but the base odds are so low that it's still a gamble - I routinely have games where I have ruined megastructures in my borders and still don't roll mega engineering until I'm already allocating my fifth or sixth ascension perk. That's a ~30-year delay on your megastructures, which is fine if you're not building around them, but if you are then you want the guaranteed mega engineering so you can reliably start building your first structure on time, ideally as soon as you grab your fourth perk. Like, he's intentionally making all these trait choices for the express purpose of speeding up his access to megastructures, and then also going out of his way to avoid taking the actual fastest, most reliable way of getting megastructures. Taking Tech Ascendancy over Voidborne in order to use Tech Ascendancy to race to megastructures is literally announcing "My plan is to get megastructures as fast as possible" and then intentionally choosing "maybe megastructures later" over "definitely megastructures now". He's giving up the thing he wants in order to take something else because he thinks it will help him get the first thing eventually.
    It's in direct conflict with his own stated goal. (I also, for the record, think that Arcology Project is currently a much better tall play than pushing to early megastructures in the first place, but that's a whole other thing.)

    Again, if you are stacking all the early pop growth modifiers (and with a little foresight there is no reason why you can't, especially with Agrarian Idyll) You are only getting a net 6% increase to overall per-planet pop growth.

    To put that in perspective, that means for every 50 pops, you have 3 extra pops. You also won't lap someone who doesn't until you get your 17th pop. which would take 344 months, or 28 and 2/3rd years. To have 5 more pops on a planet for research than someone who took Intelligent instead, assuming everything else is unchanged, that will not happen until around 2343, one hundred and forty years after the game starts. While it's true you would have ~284 pop-years worth of extra production (or about the equivalent of 13k more minerals, before pop upkeep costs) you can't use that to make more labs until you have the pops to fill them.

    (This is also why Gene Clinics are considered a poor choice unless you build them early on your first colonies, as the Return on Investment, i.e. when you get enough pop-months of production to make it a net gain, is over a hundred years)

    Now, you are probably going to say "but Intelligent suffers from the same diminishing returns!" and the answer is, well, yes and no. While there are bonuses that affect pop research points directly (assist research by science ships being the notable one), the majority of bonuses to your research are things that boost research speed, such as Technological Ascendancy. However, Intelligence does not affect research speed, it effects research points gained. This means that Research Speed bonuses, which are treated as a multiplier to the research progress from points, are a multiplicative bonus to the net research gain from Intelligent and Nat. Engineers, not an additive one that diminishes their returns. Every bonus to research speed makes those traits even better, while every bonus to pop growth makes Rapid Breeders give a smaller and smaller gain over your peers.

    (You know what other effect is multiplicative? The growth penalty for new colonies, meaning you are still only getting a 6% bonus over a normal empire on that planet when both are pumping that food decision, if you even bother)

    This is why I suggested that Rapid Breeders is a trap trait. You are able to stack so many bonuses for pop growth, especially if you go the double-whammy of Xeno Compatibility and Bio Ascension, that the net effect the trait has for your growth is tiny for something that's two trait points, when traits that affect pop production directly, or even affect how many pops you can fit on a planet, tend to fair a lot better over the game's lifespan... especially if they can benefit from the few multiplicative effects the game has.

    There aren't any traits that affect how many pops you can put on a planet. Communal doesn't actually do that. Housing doesn't actually limit population growth to a significant degree, and doesn't limit it at all until the planet is almost full anyway. Even if you really, really cared about keeping positive housing, most planets will run out of jobs to give pops before they run out of housing for them. Jobs are the limiting factor on planet population, not housing - and there aren't any traits that make more jobs. Even if you were dead-set on including only traits which increase pop production, Industrious/Agrarian/Ingenious and so on would all be better investments of the same two points than Intelligent, because they're going to come into play on more pops faster and those extra basic resources are again going to translate into more science if you want them to, and do so at a better rate than Intelligent does.

    Your breakeven timeline also assumes you're only on one planet, but you're not. It doesn't take 28 years to get an extra pop from Rapid Breeders, it takes 28 years divided by the average number of colonies you occupy during that time, which should be at least 3-5 in the first couple decades even for a tall plan, because Rapid Breeders isn't a planet-specific bonus like Gene Clinics are. Likewise, it doesn't take 140 years to get five more pops, because that number, too, is divided by the number of colonies you have providing base growth, and even for a tall strategy that number should be starting at 3-5 and eventually growing to 15 or more. Moreover, the major reason Gene Clinics have a bad return rate is that they require pops to be working jobs themselves for the bonus, so you basically have to 'pay' for the pops who will be working the clinics (and the people who will be working the buildings that make the consumer goods that the clinics consume, and the people who will be mining the minerals that the consumer goods production consumes) before you start getting 'real' growth over what you'd have without the clinic. This, too, does not apply to Rapid Breeders. You're trying to treat Rapid Breeders and Gene Clinics as equivalent, but they are different in critical ways that fundamentally change the math.

    You are correctly identifying that you can't do anything with buildings until you have pops to work them, but then failing to make the leap that what that means is that every single resource you gather ultimately scales with the number of pops you have (especially in a tall strategy that isn't going to be making a lot of its income with mining stations), and that an increase to your population is therefore more valuable than anything else. You are fundamentally trying to assert that a 5-6% increase in research speed is more valuable than a 5-6% increase to all yields including research from having a larger population. That's trivially not true.

    The patch didn't bump Rapid Breeders from 1 point to 2 because it was a trap trait that isn't actually good. The cost got changed because it was clearly too good at 1 point, and even at 2 it remains one of the strongest traits you can take, if not the strongest.

  • HenroidHenroid Mexican kicked from Immigration Thread Centrism is Racism :3Registered User regular
    Wait I'm confused by something. I went to war with a neighboring empire, had 40 max ship capacity possible (prior to said war). I was gearing up toward that count but then a peace offer came my way, no territory loss. Fine, okay.

    Then all of a sudden my fleet capacity drops to 30 max. Huh?

  • Last SonLast Son Registered User regular
    Henroid wrote: »
    Wait I'm confused by something. I went to war with a neighboring empire, had 40 max ship capacity possible (prior to said war). I was gearing up toward that count but then a peace offer came my way, no territory loss. Fine, okay.

    Then all of a sudden my fleet capacity drops to 30 max. Huh?

    The only thing I can think of is you had some soldiers somewhere that took a different job.

  • HenroidHenroid Mexican kicked from Immigration Thread Centrism is Racism :3Registered User regular
    Last Son wrote: »
    Henroid wrote: »
    Wait I'm confused by something. I went to war with a neighboring empire, had 40 max ship capacity possible (prior to said war). I was gearing up toward that count but then a peace offer came my way, no territory loss. Fine, okay.

    Then all of a sudden my fleet capacity drops to 30 max. Huh?

    The only thing I can think of is you had some soldiers somewhere that took a different job.
    If you're alluding to pirates, why and how the fuck would an Extermination AI have "pirates"?

  • Last SonLast Son Registered User regular
    Henroid wrote: »
    Last Son wrote: »
    Henroid wrote: »
    Wait I'm confused by something. I went to war with a neighboring empire, had 40 max ship capacity possible (prior to said war). I was gearing up toward that count but then a peace offer came my way, no territory loss. Fine, okay.

    Then all of a sudden my fleet capacity drops to 30 max. Huh?

    The only thing I can think of is you had some soldiers somewhere that took a different job.
    If you're alluding to pirates, why and how the fuck would an Extermination AI have "pirates"?

    Soldiers(pops employed in military buildings) provide naval capacity now. Did you have a fort or military academy(or whatever machine empire equivalent) built on a planet somewhere?

    I'm saying that you had pops working there which gave you the 40 fleet capacity but then they switched to an open specialist job and left the military building without workers, making your fleet capacity lower.

  • FoefallerFoefaller Registered User regular
    edited December 2018
    Abbalah wrote: »
    Foefaller wrote: »
    Abbalah wrote: »
    Foefaller wrote: »
    Abbalah wrote: »
    Abbalah wrote:
    Having played a couple tall games now, it seems like the real bottleneck for tall play is just plain old minerals. All of the options for playing tall do something a little different, but none of them can mine minerals in any significant quantity, and most of what they do is give you more ways to consume minerals for alloys.

    What's your definition of Tall? It seems like that just means living close to your admin cap in 2.2; I haven't had any mineral issues yet; it's pretty consistently my #1 surplus. Though I may under-produce alloys as I tend to be forced into buying those when I need a war surge.

    I think 2.2.2 is supposed to increase Alloy yield from 2 -> 3, which may mitigate that.

    Tall is basically holding a relatively small number of actual systems and getting room for pops via things that increase the population density of space (ecumenopolis, habitats, ringworlds, mastery of nature), as opposed to wide, where you'd be grabbing as much space as possible and getting room for pops by controlling more planets. It doesn't necessarily mean staying under or close to your admin cap, since you can pretty easily outstrip your admin cap if you build a bunch of habitats and/or 50-district ringworld sections.

    There is definitely a phase of the game where minerals will run as a surplus in almost any strategy, but the more people you put in a given amount of space the more minerals you're going to need without your mineral income being able to grow, because minerals basically only come from occupying more space - once you've maxed out the mining districts on your existing planets, you either need mining stations in mineral-heavy systems, or new mining districts on new planets, and both of those things require you to take more space. If you don't want to do that, you're eventually going to be mineral-throttled, because you can get more energy and food by growing 'up' but not more minerals.

    Also I would avoid buying alloys as much as possible unless you're energy-capped and looking for something useful to convert it to. Alloys tend to hover around 20 energy each on the market, and a corvette with anything more than starter gear is generally gonna run 150-200 alloys, which means that when you buy alloys to build your navy you're basically trying to buy a navy with energy at a cost of 3000-4000 energy per corvette. That's a pretty rough exchange rate (especially given that you can get a 5-year contract on an entire mercenary fleet for 9-15k).


    Edit:
    Maybe this will help
    https://youtu.be/xkZQ2HE4Xrw

    This is a heady mix of good and bad advice. Mostly that's not how I'd build a tall race, trait-wise. Communal is a trap choice, for one - housing is easy to get, the penalties for housing shortages are minor, and a 10% reduction in housing usage (which won't even stay a 10% reduction, because you'll have immigrants who aren't Communal) is minor. I wouldn't build any race in this patch without Rapid Breeders, and certainly not a tall race which is going to need those growth bonuses to keep up with other empires that have more planets and thus more base growth. I also, as I mentioned, would strongly recommend that any race intended to be tall be Industrious. This boxes out Intelligent/Natural Engineers, but that's honestly not a big deal, because A)you'll have more people to do science with thanks to the better population growth and B)Intelligent is a smaller bonus than it appears to be, especially since it only applies to a very limited number of jobs. You're better off taking bigger bonuses to more-common outputs and then using that resource advantage to just put more scientists on tech instead of inefficiently trying to maximize your tech per scientist.

    Likewise, Technological Ascendancy is kind of a shitty ascension perk. It's not nearly as big of a bonus as it appears to be, because it's not multiplicative with all the other science bonuses you're going to end up with, and while your first perk choices are somewhat limited, both Voidborne and Mastery of Nature are much better for tall empires - particularly Voidborne if you're planning around trying to get early megastructures, because Voidborne->Master Builders is the only way you're going to get Mega Engineering in a reasonable timeframe without getting very lucky, just because of its low chance to roll as a research option.

    And Imperial Prerogative, while a fine (but not especially amazing) perk in general, is terrible as a second perk because it means you're passing up a huge population growth bonus from either Xenocompatibility or Bio Ascension, and again you need that growth bonus both because pop growth is king in the current patch and because you're already effectively eating a growth penalty by being tall as a result of the fact that the base growth of your empire is a factor of the number of colonies you have.

    Also even with a tall strategy, you want to colonize every planet within your borders ASAP. Being at year 60 with 1 colony and like half a dozen uncolonized planets in your borders is a real bad plan no matter how tall you think it makes you.

    Couple counterpoints to your counterpoints:

    A lot of his choices build off each other. Communal by itself isn't very impressive, especially with Xenophile, but with Agrarian Idyll and Life Seeded it's more than enough to fill out all of his homeworld's building slots and keep nearly all of it as non-city district. He's also going for the classic Stellaris tall of "doesn't matter you have way more stuff than me, I'm building Battleships with Kinetic Artillery and you've only just figured out Cruisers" which gives the "bad" ideas of picking Intelligent, Technological Ascendancy and Imperial Prerogative a much more favoriable context: he's trying to get as much tech and unity as possible, and grow as big as possible while staying under his Admin capacity.

    I actually feel Rapid Breeders is a trap trait, at least for non-Hive Minds that have to deal with the 50% pop growth penalty for new colonies, for the same reason you don't like Technological Ascendancy; too many additional modifiers I can pick up elsewhere. I can day 1 switch my food policy for +10% growth, and then whenever I can, pop the planetary decision for +25%, get Genome Mapping for another 10% as one of my first techs, and pick up the 10% pop growth Expansion tradition in the first 5-6 years. Adding Rapid Breeders to all that only gets me a net 6.5% increase to growth vs. not. Is that really worth two trait points? I personally don't think so.

    Finally, for not picking up Voidborne if his professed goal is megastructures... Not a problem, where he's starting. Why? Well, that comes with a fun, and very important fact:

    What Precursor you get is *not* random, and in fact is entirely dependent on what part of the galaxy you get the first precursor anomaly.

    And South/SW is where you will get Cybrex. He just needs to complete the chain (which is also part of the reason why he dipped into Discovery first thing, to research the precursor anomalies faster), and he will get a broken Ring World spawning nearby that he can claim and use to fish for Mega-Engineering, which with his setup he'll be doing by the time he's getting alerts that marauder mercs are now available.

    On Communal: I understand why he's picking it, but it's a bad choice. Idyll is going to do most of the heavy lifting on that front by itself - it's going to give him +25 housing, which is enough to cover a substantial part of his building jobs, especially since he's gonna have at least 3 building slots used on single-job buildings, and likely several more that are used on 1-job or no-job buildings to fill the planet in the first place (Cloning Vats, Assembly Plants). On top of that, since he's running a rural planet, he's going to want all the rural job buildings (mineral purification plant, food processing center, energy nexus), which is another 3 slots with only 2 jobs each. So we've already filled 9/16 building slots (vats, assembly plant, capital building, 3 special resource extractors, 3 basic resource amps) and only need a net 7 net housing to do it (because the capital will eventually provide 3 net housing on its own). So all he needs to cover is the remaining 7 building slots - and while some of those will be high-job-density buildings like megaplexes or research labs or alloy foundries, each of those things comes with at least 1 low-job-density complement building (stock exchange, research institute, ministry of production respectively) that only takes 1-2 job slots, and if he's trying to run a single colony for that long he's probably going to end up with more than one (or all 3) of those buildings, too, plus anything else he might want like like unity producing buildings (curating vault caps out at 10 jobs, but the upgraded holo theatre caps out at 4 and ministry of culture caps at 3). At the absolute most his remaining 7 slots will need another ~50 housing, but it's likely to be more like 30. Idyll is going to cover almost all of that, and what it doesn't cover won't actually be important because all a housing shortage does is create immigration push (which you'll want by the time your planet is getting full) and create a small stability penalty which won't really matter and basically only translates to an even smaller resource production penalty.

    On top of that, robot pops only take .5 housing each if you don't give them citizen rights/stop before upgrading them to synths, and since he should be building those from as early as possible (and will get them early, because he's going Natural Engineers), he'll get a bunch of housing reduction from those pops already, which will almost certainly cover whatever Idyll doesn't. Every robot he builds will give the same housing bonus as having five Communal pops, while also increasing his pop growth so he can fill his tall planet faster, all without costing any trait points at all.

    By picking Communal he's spending a valuable, limited trait point on something that will have absolutely no effect at all until the mid-late game, and which, when it eventually does have an effect, will have a negligibly small one that isn't even of universally positive value. In the process, he's giving up a point that could be spent on a much larger bonus that would be present from the start of the game, like Industrious or Agrarian or Rapid Breeders. It's a bad plan born of a desire to not have red numbers on the screen even if those numbers don't actually matter. Even if that small different in housing did matter, it'd become relevant so late he'd be able to genemod it on by the time it started to have an impact.

    On Intelligent/Tech Ascendancy/Imp Preregative: I know he's trying to get as much tech and unity as possible. He's doing it wrong! Picking those things doesn't actually give you the most tech, it just looks like it does because the numbers say +tech on them. What gives you the most tech is picking better traits so that you have more resources faster and can spend them on more scientists, which is going to give you a better rate of return than trying to make each scientist individually better. By the time he has ten scientists using Intelligent+Natural Engineers to do the work of twelve scientists, the guy who picked Rapid Breeders+Nomadic instead is just going to have fifteen scientists, and be ahead on tech as a result. That gap is only going to grow as he picks Tech Ascendancy+Imp Prerogative to get a marginal tech bonus and the Rapid Breeders+Nomadic guy takes Voidborne+Bio Ascension and uses them to dramatically increase his pop growth so he can make even more scientists.

    On Precursors: That's interesting, and not something I knew. Still, though, he's rolling the dice - having a repairable megastructure in your borders does substantially increase the odds of rolling mega engineering, but the base odds are so low that it's still a gamble - I routinely have games where I have ruined megastructures in my borders and still don't roll mega engineering until I'm already allocating my fifth or sixth ascension perk. That's a ~30-year delay on your megastructures, which is fine if you're not building around them, but if you are then you want the guaranteed mega engineering so you can reliably start building your first structure on time, ideally as soon as you grab your fourth perk. Like, he's intentionally making all these trait choices for the express purpose of speeding up his access to megastructures, and then also going out of his way to avoid taking the actual fastest, most reliable way of getting megastructures. Taking Tech Ascendancy over Voidborne in order to use Tech Ascendancy to race to megastructures is literally announcing "My plan is to get megastructures as fast as possible" and then intentionally choosing "maybe megastructures later" over "definitely megastructures now". He's giving up the thing he wants in order to take something else because he thinks it will help him get the first thing eventually.
    It's in direct conflict with his own stated goal. (I also, for the record, think that Arcology Project is currently a much better tall play than pushing to early megastructures in the first place, but that's a whole other thing.)

    Again, if you are stacking all the early pop growth modifiers (and with a little foresight there is no reason why you can't, especially with Agrarian Idyll) You are only getting a net 6% increase to overall per-planet pop growth.

    To put that in perspective, that means for every 50 pops, you have 3 extra pops. You also won't lap someone who doesn't until you get your 17th pop. which would take 344 months, or 28 and 2/3rd years. To have 5 more pops on a planet for research than someone who took Intelligent instead, assuming everything else is unchanged, that will not happen until around 2343, one hundred and forty years after the game starts. While it's true you would have ~284 pop-years worth of extra production (or about the equivalent of 13k more minerals, before pop upkeep costs) you can't use that to make more labs until you have the pops to fill them.

    (This is also why Gene Clinics are considered a poor choice unless you build them early on your first colonies, as the Return on Investment, i.e. when you get enough pop-months of production to make it a net gain, is over a hundred years)

    Now, you are probably going to say "but Intelligent suffers from the same diminishing returns!" and the answer is, well, yes and no. While there are bonuses that affect pop research points directly (assist research by science ships being the notable one), the majority of bonuses to your research are things that boost research speed, such as Technological Ascendancy. However, Intelligence does not affect research speed, it effects research points gained. This means that Research Speed bonuses, which are treated as a multiplier to the research progress from points, are a multiplicative bonus to the net research gain from Intelligent and Nat. Engineers, not an additive one that diminishes their returns. Every bonus to research speed makes those traits even better, while every bonus to pop growth makes Rapid Breeders give a smaller and smaller gain over your peers.

    (You know what other effect is multiplicative? The growth penalty for new colonies, meaning you are still only getting a 6% bonus over a normal empire on that planet when both are pumping that food decision, if you even bother)

    This is why I suggested that Rapid Breeders is a trap trait. You are able to stack so many bonuses for pop growth, especially if you go the double-whammy of Xeno Compatibility and Bio Ascension, that the net effect the trait has for your growth is tiny for something that's two trait points, when traits that affect pop production directly, or even affect how many pops you can fit on a planet, tend to fair a lot better over the game's lifespan... especially if they can benefit from the few multiplicative effects the game has.

    There aren't any traits that affect how many pops you can put on a planet. Communal doesn't actually do that. Housing doesn't actually limit population growth to a significant degree, and doesn't limit it at all until the planet is almost full anyway. Even if you really, really cared about keeping positive housing, most planets will run out of jobs to give pops before they run out of housing for them. Jobs are the limiting factor on planet population, not housing - and there aren't any traits that make more jobs. Even if you were dead-set on including only traits which increase pop production, Industrious/Agrarian/Ingenious and so on would all be better investments of the same two points than Intelligent, because they're going to come into play on more pops faster and those extra basic resources are again going to translate into more science if you want them to, and do so at a better rate than Intelligent does.

    Your breakeven timeline also assumes you're only on one planet, but you're not. It doesn't take 28 years to get an extra pop from Rapid Breeders, it takes 28 years divided by the average number of colonies you occupy during that time, which should be at least 3-5 in the first couple decades even for a tall plan, because Rapid Breeders isn't a planet-specific bonus like Gene Clinics are. Likewise, it doesn't take 140 years to get five more pops, because that number, too, is divided by the number of colonies you have providing base growth, and even for a tall strategy that number should be starting at 3-5 and eventually growing to 15 or more. Moreover, the major reason Gene Clinics have a bad return rate is that they require pops to be working jobs themselves for the bonus, so you basically have to 'pay' for the pops who will be working the clinics (and the people who will be working the buildings that make the consumer goods that the clinics consume, and the people who will be mining the minerals that the consumer goods production consumes) before you start getting 'real' growth over what you'd have without the clinic. This, too, does not apply to Rapid Breeders. You're trying to treat Rapid Breeders and Gene Clinics as equivalent, but they are different in critical ways that fundamentally change the math.

    You are correctly identifying that you can't do anything with buildings until you have pops to work them, but then failing to make the leap that what that means is that every single resource you gather ultimately scales with the number of pops you have (especially in a tall strategy that isn't going to be making a lot of its income with mining stations), and that an increase to your population is therefore more valuable than anything else. You are fundamentally trying to assert that a 5-6% increase in research speed is more valuable than a 5-6% increase to all yields including research from having a larger population. That's trivially not true.

    The patch didn't bump Rapid Breeders from 1 point to 2 because it was a trap trait that isn't actually good. The cost got changed because it was clearly too good at 1 point, and even at 2 it remains one of the strongest traits you can take, if not the strongest.

    Unless you are Hive Mind or Fanatic Xenophobe, I do not see how you will maintain 5-6% extra growth at all times. At the moment, as soon as one pop from a new species shows up pretty much every planet in your empire starts growing them until they make up an equal% of the empire's makeup, which means that 5-6% suddenly becomes only 2-3%, and drops further with each new non-Rapid Breeders species shows up in it. If you can use that argument to dismiss communal two posts ago...

    That boost from intelligent might be for just a handful of jobs, but you also do not need your whole empire to have that trait to get the boost from it. And before you snark, yes in this one case the job AI is smart enough to make them researchers whenever possible, especially if you are stacking something like Nat. Engineers on top of it.

    And Rapid Breeders became worth 2 points only when planets stopped maxing out at 25 pops or less in 50 years. Recall plenty of debates and strats that called for slow breeders (particularly when paired with Mechanist), because the trait would mean nothing once every planet worth mentioning was at or near full population.

    Anyway, we're really arguing past each other more often than not, so... Agree to Disagree?

    Foefaller on
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  • HenroidHenroid Mexican kicked from Immigration Thread Centrism is Racism :3Registered User regular
    Last Son wrote: »
    Henroid wrote: »
    Last Son wrote: »
    Henroid wrote: »
    Wait I'm confused by something. I went to war with a neighboring empire, had 40 max ship capacity possible (prior to said war). I was gearing up toward that count but then a peace offer came my way, no territory loss. Fine, okay.

    Then all of a sudden my fleet capacity drops to 30 max. Huh?

    The only thing I can think of is you had some soldiers somewhere that took a different job.
    If you're alluding to pirates, why and how the fuck would an Extermination AI have "pirates"?

    Soldiers(pops employed in military buildings) provide naval capacity now. Did you have a fort or military academy(or whatever machine empire equivalent) built on a planet somewhere?

    I'm saying that you had pops working there which gave you the 40 fleet capacity but then they switched to an open specialist job and left the military building without workers, making your fleet capacity lower.
    Nope, I did not.

  • HenroidHenroid Mexican kicked from Immigration Thread Centrism is Racism :3Registered User regular
    I'm kinda worried about trying my Mechanist empire I designed a long time ago. Robots / droids / synths have different output bonuses and penalties, and I don't know if the game is smart enough to assign them where they work best.

  • Undead ScottsmanUndead Scottsman Registered User regular
    I think Robots are broken right at the moment. They were super OP with the new planet and economy systems before launch, but Paradox hit them with the nerf bat a little too hard.

  • DiplominatorDiplominator Hardcore Porg Registered User regular
    Plus I think their faster growth traits are broken.

  • HenroidHenroid Mexican kicked from Immigration Thread Centrism is Racism :3Registered User regular
    What exactly did they do to nerf robots / droids? Also that's butts. Also still worried about how multi-races work out as far as who is best at what kind of job and who allocates where.

  • FoefallerFoefaller Registered User regular
    Henroid wrote: »
    What exactly did they do to nerf robots / droids? Also that's butts. Also still worried about how multi-races work out as far as who is best at what kind of job and who allocates where.

    They are more expensive per bot now, IIRC 300 minerals is what you pay over time now.

    However, a lot of the "bots are terrible" complaints are actually about Machine Empires, not reg. Robots. Having all your pops require energy upkeep is a bit of a pain in an economy when you are hard capped on the number of energy jobs you get and relies quite a bit on a mechanic you don't have access to for the rest.

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  • CampyCampy Registered User regular
    I've not got the robo-dlc, so I'm not sure how they play. Are agriculture districts then basically useless to them?

  • delf4delf4 Registered User regular
    Campy wrote: »
    I've not got the robo-dlc, so I'm not sure how they play. Are agriculture districts then basically useless to them?

    I've been playing robot since the new patch and I build one agriculture district for my whole empire and let food slowly build up. Only because I've had events pop up that use food. That said I'm not sure if I should have more but haven't ran into problems yet.

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