Aren't Synthetics a bit too overpowered?

[Pupique]

Well, after I won my first playthrough with an organic Fanatic Xenophile / Egalitarian empire, someone here mentioned synthetics are way easier to play than as organics.

So... I'll just drop the comparison between the two runs here real quick...

Organic Empire Run:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1719955205

Synthetic Run:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1777831553

I even managed to discover a pesky bug in the "relative power between empires", because I got so strong at some point that the modifier looped back and instead of being the normal +100 value, it went to the negative millions lol
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1776819200

So, the real question is: aren't synthetics way too overpowered? I ask this because that run was over since 2380, when I destroyed the (now defunct) Fallen Empire's whole fleet. While I was struggling against them in 2470 on my organic run, I managed to tear them apart a century earlier with synthetics.

The whole playthrough in general was easier, and it became entirely broken on the transition from early to midgame, when I was already handing around with 20k+ strength fleets. The game wasn't easier only on military aspects, but also on every single aspect: economy, technology, etc.

True, I've improved my strategies greatly since that organic run, but still... I think synthetics are too strong.

[Lady Crimson (RIP)]

Postat inițial de Botji:

Postat inițial de Lady Crimson:

For everyone just blatantly saying how one has a better growth rate than another.. or how one is better than another.. I do find it interesting that no one in this discussion has brought up any sort of relevant evidence in mathematical terms by looking at the growth they are actually producing.

You should always look at the numbers first.

Unless im a big dummy this is as maxed out your growth rate can be as a non-hive bio empire.
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/778475877788510121/39F4896DB6AF4D116C05ABE51A62990FE5BD5381/
4.5/month on day 1

This is with some techs, policies/edicts/planetary decision. Afaik its only lacking the cloning tech + building but might be some other bonus as well that im not thinking of(outside of special planet types).
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/778475877788525974/847804B135155F71D77BFDDDE6D0DAC2D9BDED8C/
6.75/month

Now this is a ME with only the assembly speed trait and civic, far less of a investment than what the above had to do to increase their growth speed.
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/778475877788509752/6ECC3A8E2906ADFADB83BADCDF9A8D7035E2D0B5/
5.52/month

Same empire type a bit later with techs + upgraded planet center and the one assembly speed edict which again is a much smaller investment than the above organic had to do to buff their planets.
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/778475877788509268/C783BEC828553BD8CDB554B0D7B498D7C66DB333/
9.2/month

You also have to consider that unless you do run that max pop growth organic empire the ME has almost double the growth rate of a normal organic empire, they get 2 pops per colony ship by default and can colonize any and all planets which further increases their global pop growth speed.

It takes decades for a organic empire to get the required techs to compete with a day 1 ME that just picks a single trait and civic. Each upgrade to the planetary center adds +1(!!!!!!!!!!) assembly speed as well so when a organic empire does finally kinda sorta almost catch up to the starting assembly speed of the ME, the ME has more planets and multiple of them have a base assembly speed of 4-5 which their bonuses work on instead of the static 3 growth that organics have.

MEs grow their pops fast, its the main thing that makes them OP.

You're just repeating similar numbers back at to the ones I listed.. if you read my previous comments.

1) That's comparing a normal empire to a machine intelligence (and completely ignoring the additional robotic population from having a robot building facility).

This of course is completely ignoring the points I made about synthetic ascended empires, and likely isn't listing Biological Ascended empires either.

It also doesn't even list city planets (not that you really need to).

Your fully maximized machine intelligence seems relatively comparable to the fully realized normal empire with robot production. (ignoring city planets).

2) Starting pops doesn't matter in the long run for an empire.. saying it has twice the growth rate for starting with 2 or 3 instead of 1 or 2 (based on your policies).. is really silly.

3) Habitability also doesn't matter in the long run. Eventually an organic empire can easily hit 100% for most of their pops anyways, with proper planning and a few genetic modifications. (mostly I just pick up a few migration treaties, and later on modify species to match their planet type.. eventually the growing ones sort themselves out).

4) ME's growing their pops fast is infact NOT the reason why they are "OP", or even their advantage. (as I demonstrated they don't even do that).

The main advantage of playing a ME is that they more efficiently produce from jobs. They have better energy production, consumer production, and alloy production per pop than any other empire (at least till synthetic ascension).. and can beat out hiveminds on minerals per pop if they focus that.

ME's are not OP, but what is the core of what makes them powerful is that each pop is more important whereas a Hivemind would care more about quantity and having more jobs in the first place.

[Dakota]

Postat inițial de Lady Crimson:

For everyone just blatantly saying how one has a better growth rate than another.. or how one is better than another.. I do find it interesting that no one in this discussion has brought up any sort of relevant evidence in mathematical terms by looking at the growth they are actually producing.

You should always look at the numbers first.

I had looked at many numbers beforehand, I'll link you the thread in which we did all the calculations.

Upon looking for the thread, you were in it already too: https://steamcommunity.com/app/281990/discussions/0/1638661595042878324/?ctp=3

We found that in an empire focusing on maximum organic pop growth they can only just barely beat a machine empire by around 0.09 pops per month on a city planet.

However, we did not take into account the growth rate of a synthetically ascended empire, so I would like to take a look at all the bonuses available for that and figure out what the maximum growth rate is.




Though before we go on, I'd like to mention here, that the long run doesn't matter much at all if a machine empire decides it doesn't want you to make it there. In the mid game before acensions and whatnot, or say just 100 years in, the machine empire is going to have a much higher population than an organic one, say this 16.5 growth from having 12 machine growth and 4.5 (which I am not sure how you are reaching in a synth empire on a non city world without evolutionary ascensions) you'd be competing with someone who has what I'm rounding down to 12 for robotic empire/organic slave pop growth. This gives you 1 extra pop over him per 1.85 years. So if you ascend at year 100, by the time we reach victory at year 2500, you've only gained 108 more pops than he has not, likely not enough to offset his initial advantage in pops in the first 100 years. Which, considering his more efficient pops, much higher pop growth in the first 100 years, and the bonus production/popgrowth before you've reached the point of 100% habitability everywhere, and the lack of requirement to spend ascension perks on ascensions and tech on gene modding, and the far cheaper upkeep for pops, isn't really going to cut it investment wise.

[Greb]

Machines are supposed to be superior, though. That's why there's a whole ascension perk chain about turning an organic race into them. Also why it's supposed to be a bad thing with "dangerous" technology creating AI, since they're vastly superior to organics and would be pretty much unstoppable once unchained.

Generally speaking, any Gestalt Consciousness has always been overpowered since their initial release. That's why they're so damn fun to play, especially as the appropriate devourer / exterminator type

They've only gotten even more powerful with Machine Worlds and the various relics added from the recent DLC. I can't remember off of the top of my head, but the Contingency Core and that one war factory from one of the precursor chains, really kicks them into overdrive mode. At least relics aren't guaranteed, though.

Honestly relics kinda suck. You can't go to war for them unless it's the pseudo-useful Galatron meme thing, and you can't even gather them after wiping another empire out, or even trade / "rent" them on the Galactic Market. If you could though, Machine empires would be even worse better!

[Dakota]

Postat inițial de Greb:

Machines are supposed to be superior, though. That's why there's a whole ascension perk chain about turning an organic race into them. Also why it's supposed to be a bad thing with "dangerous" technology creating AI, since they're vastly superior to organics and would be pretty much unstoppable once unchained.

Generally speaking, any Gestalt Consciousness has always been overpowered since their initial release. That's why they're so damn fun to play, especially as the appropriate devourer / exterminator type

They've only gotten even more powerful with Machine Worlds and the various relics added from the recent DLC. I can't remember off of the top of my head, but the Contingency Core and that one war factory from one of the precursor chains, really kicks them into overdrive mode. At least relics aren't guaranteed, though.

Honestly relics kinda suck. You can't go to war for them unless it's the pseudo-useful Galatron meme thing, and you can't even gather them after wiping another empire out, or even trade / "rent" them on the Galactic Market. If you could though, Machine empires would be even worse better!

Speaking of relics, all you need are minor artifacts for your machine empire to be insane. It costs 2 minor artifacts to enable a 10 year modifier per planet that makes every coordinator job provide +1% menial drone output and +2 stability. You can have 20 coordinators per planet. So this effectively gives you 20% menial drone output and +40 stability, letting you constantly sit at the +30% resource boost that gives you even with a slave pops on the planet.

[Pupique]

Postat inițial de Vyndicu:

Postat inițial de Polanski:

lol you guys optimize stuff quite much, I see. Single population template FTW, I'm too lazy to create specific templates like this and manage it afterwards. This will always demand some micromanagement later on, regardless of how efficient the automatic assignment is. Manual micromanagement would only be gone if robots migrated between planets automatically, which is something they probably won't implement.

Did you calculate how much yield you would be missing out on going down this route? Just curious. Ditto for Pontem Aqua.

I didn't, but I assume it's an overkill. Not worth the time wasted on micromanaging that, at least to me.

[Vyndicu]

Postat inițial de Polanski:

I didn't, but I assume it's an overkill. Not worth the time wasted on micromanaging that, at least to me.

I will try to make this short and concise as much as I can as given that there are so many factors involved.

So I will start with one of the biggest limitation at day 1: Lack of robomod. This limit me to either generalized purpose trait set or specialized "now" at day 1 and micro-manage to split the population accordingly to jobs later on. As you said, it is up to everyone to decide if it is worthwhile to split your templates to different specialization or go with only one uniform template.

Due to how empire creation limits all synthetic gestalt to only , I tend to go for energy first as that is normally your biggest bottleneck for getting a new scientist out and going. Of course there are other way to min-max but I will not go over those right now to keep this short.

I normally go with 25% leader exp bonus, 15% assembly speed mass-produced, 10% energy superconductive, 20% extra cost to build population luxurious (I can afford to ignore mineral for a long time even if I open up with mineral heavy jobs such as research or forge alloy late-game), and 10% extra housing used bulky. I could drop some of those traits and go with efficient processors but that is 3 traits. 10% to energy is better and allow more flexible in picking secondary traits. Efficient Processors take 3 points and superconductive take 2 points so it is impossible to start with both.

I am going to tell you how much energy you will have with 3 different builds and let you decide for yourself if it is good or not. For sake of brevity I am not picking any civics and one trait that let you save energy such as less per-robot upkeep, and constructobot, and delegated functions, and warbots, and finally zero-waste protocols.

Scenario 1 - Superconductive:

11 drones on energy each providing 7.04 positive energy after robot upkeep for total of 77.44 yield.

Scenario 2 - Efficent Processors:

11 drones on energy each providing 6.45 positive energy after robot upkeep for total of 70.95 yield.

Scenario 3 - No productivity trait:

11 drones on energy each providing 6.15 positive energy after robot upkeep for total of 67.65 yield.

Now it gets more complicated once you unlock robomod and can fit both superconductive and efficient processors for energy drones. Your energy income will allow you to snowball which is why I usually priority robomod techs first even if to just at first take out the bulky trait. Then eventually multi-specializing your population and delay efficient processors until you get enough trait point for it.


The primary reason why I go for superconductive is that it allows you to have 10 extra energy per month to afford 5 more science ships exploring or whatever else. I could throw in robot upkeep trait and get 2.9 extra energy in place of the one trait along superconductive. Efficient Processor and robot upkeep but loss on maxing out day 1 energy yield.

While efficient processor is great for all jobs and what not. However it is bit expensive at 3 trait point vs 2 trait for a critical bottleneck resource - energy. I suppose you could also pick up mining civic and constructobot and sell the excess mineral along with efficient processors but once more mineral consumer goes online then you can't sell that mineral for energy. My method comes with the least amount of trade-off if Stellaris were actually capable of doing more automation smartly if that made sense?

Of course energy yield is not the only way to min-max. You can create template for amenities job that only have efficient processor and emotion emulator and pick both 10% less housing and 10% less energy upkeep. Ditto for researcher and mining. Instead of trying to cram every productivity traits in a single template.

There was also someone else who posted that he only used two templates. I don't know the details but I am assuming he went with worker job traits for simple drones and efficient processor and research for complex drones.

[mvffinsandmilk]

by the year 2400-2430 I'm usually unquestionably in the lead with an organic empire, but to be honest I do hear you as since AI (the computer) playing as AI (the civilization) tend to be much weaker than the Organics (us) playing as AI (the civilization), but the AI (the computer) has no problem playing as Organics (the civilization) optimally.

[Pupique]

Postat inițial de Vyndicu:

Postat inițial de Polanski:

I didn't, but I assume it's an overkill. Not worth the time wasted on micromanaging that, at least to me.

I will try to make this short and concise as much as I can as given that there are so many factors involved.

So I will start with one of the biggest limitation at day 1: Lack of robomod. This limit me to either generalized purpose trait set or specialized "now" at day 1 and micro-manage to split the population accordingly to jobs later on. As you said, it is up to everyone to decide if it is worthwhile to split your templates to different specialization or go with only one uniform template.

Due to how empire creation limits all synthetic gestalt to only , I tend to go for energy first as that is normally your biggest bottleneck for getting a new scientist out and going. Of course there are other way to min-max but I will not go over those right now to keep this short.

I normally go with 25% leader exp bonus, 15% assembly speed mass-produced, 10% energy superconductive, 20% extra cost to build population luxurious (I can afford to ignore mineral for a long time even if I open up with mineral heavy jobs such as research or forge alloy late-game), and 10% extra housing used bulky. I could drop some of those traits and go with efficient processors but that is 3 traits. 10% to energy is better and allow more flexible in picking secondary traits. Efficient Processors take 3 points and superconductive take 2 points so it is impossible to start with both.

I am going to tell you how much energy you will have with 3 different builds and let you decide for yourself if it is good or not. For sake of brevity I am not picking any civics and one trait that let you save energy such as less per-robot upkeep, and constructobot, and delegated functions, and warbots, and finally zero-waste protocols.

Scenario 1 - Superconductive:

11 drones on energy each providing 7.04 positive energy after robot upkeep for total of 77.44 yield.

Scenario 2 - Efficent Processors:

11 drones on energy each providing 6.45 positive energy after robot upkeep for total of 70.95 yield.

Scenario 3 - No productivity trait:

11 drones on energy each providing 6.15 positive energy after robot upkeep for total of 67.65 yield.

Now it gets more complicated once you unlock robomod and can fit both superconductive and efficient processors for energy drones. Your energy income will allow you to snowball which is why I usually priority robomod techs first even if to just at first take out the bulky trait. Then eventually multi-specializing your population and delay efficient processors until you get enough trait point for it.


The primary reason why I go for superconductive is that it allows you to have 10 extra energy per month to afford 5 more science ships exploring or whatever else. I could throw in robot upkeep trait and get 2.9 extra energy in place of the one trait along superconductive. Efficient Processor and robot upkeep but loss on maxing out day 1 energy yield.

While efficient processor is great for all jobs and what not. However it is bit expensive at 3 trait point vs 2 trait for a critical bottleneck resource - energy. I suppose you could also pick up mining civic and constructobot and sell the excess mineral along with efficient processors but once more mineral consumer goes online then you can't sell that mineral for energy. My method comes with the least amount of trade-off if Stellaris were actually capable of doing more automation smartly if that made sense?

Of course energy yield is not the only way to min-max. You can create template for amenities job that only have efficient processor and emotion emulator and pick both 10% less housing and 10% less energy upkeep. Ditto for researcher and mining. Instead of trying to cram every productivity traits in a single template.

There was also someone else who posted that he only used two templates. I don't know the details but I am assuming he went with worker job traits for simple drones and efficient processor and research for complex drones.

I know that creating job-specific templates do make a good difference in all times, be it on early, mid or late game. But I was already struggling big time micromanaging my empire during late game with a single template, so I definitely don't want to make this proccess any earlier because it's very, very boring.

Instead of doing specific templates, I go for something more generalist that makes some difference, not as much as those specifics, like (after when I research all trait modification points) decreased housing, increased amenities (to avoid wasting slots with maintenance depots) and efficient proccessors. I went for decreased upkeep on this playthrough of mine but I didn't find it to be that relevant.

[Vyndicu]

Postat inițial de Polanski:

I know that creating job-specific templates do make a good difference in all times, be it on early, mid or late game. But I was already struggling big time micromanaging my empire during late game with a single template, so I definitely don't want to make this proccess any earlier because it's very, very boring.

Instead of doing specific templates, I go for something more generalist that makes some difference, not as much as those specifics, like (after when I research all trait modification points) decreased housing, increased amenities (to avoid wasting slots with maintenance depots) and efficient proccessors. I went for decreased upkeep on this playthrough of mine but I didn't find it to be that relevant.

Yes I would definitely agree that robot upkeep discount is not as powerful it as other bonus.

For instance, I would rank constructobot as one of the highest best civic because the % upkeep discount also impact strategic goods upkeep. IE buildings with X strategy good will cost less each month than otherwise. Unfortunately robot upkeep doesn't scale very well like that.


Also one of the big thing I missed from the old 2.1 tile system is that you could pre-arrange the right template in the right tile and queue them all up. I realize that it is not going to come back like that anymore. But I still miss being able to have discrete control over what template goes to which jobs. Unfortunately sector automation doesn't, at least as far I know, autmoation resettle your population around as that would actually resolve some of my issues with synthetic gestalt micro-management mess.

Another method would be to have a "per-job" assignation for a robot species. If the robot ever changed job then they would also change their template.

I tried going for something more generalist but then I miss out on managing to squeezing out more yield and getting gratification out of that process.

You know what is sad about the whole thing? I point out that this was going to be a problem in one of the pre-2.2 launch dev diary (especially resettling/lack of empire-wide migration) and was ignored and/or not regarded as an important issue. Which is unfortunate since it may be a while before we see any proper patch/expansion to fix this. I guess what I am trying to say is that they had a chance to address it and missed it.

[Pupique]

Postat inițial de Vyndicu:

Yes I would definitely agree that robot upkeep discount is not as powerful it as other bonus.

For instance, I would rank constructobot as one of the highest best civic because the % upkeep discount also impact strategic goods upkeep. IE buildings with X strategy good will cost less each month than otherwise. Unfortunately robot upkeep doesn't scale very well like that.


Also one of the big thing I missed from the old 2.1 tile system is that you could pre-arrange the right template in the right tile and queue them all up. I realize that it is not going to come back like that anymore. But I still miss being able to have discrete control over what template goes to which jobs. Unfortunately sector automation doesn't, at least as far I know, autmoation resettle your population around as that would actually resolve some of my issues with synthetic gestalt micro-management mess.

Another method would be to have a "per-job" assignation for a robot species. If the robot ever changed job then they would also change their template.

I tried going for something more generalist but then I miss out on managing to squeezing out more yield and getting gratification out of that process.

You know what is sad about the whole thing? I point out that this was going to be a problem in one of the pre-2.2 launch dev diary (especially resettling/lack of empire-wide migration) and was ignored and/or not regarded as an important issue. Which is unfortunate since it may be a while before we see any proper patch/expansion to fix this. I guess what I am trying to say is that they had a chance to address it and missed it.

Ah well, I've started playing this game on 2.2 so I don't really know what I've missed. But yeah, pre-arranging a template and a better migration system would fit in perfectly at this moment.