Machine empire focused on Research

[[DE]Th3.Legend.27]

Hey Guys, im pretty new to this game and wanted to ask if a machine empire focused on research is viable.

And how it would be played?

[Heimdall313]

Pretty much every empire is tech focused. Those that aren't tend to become extinct or vassalized. How to play? I dunno, I've only ever played once with a machine empire and it was a long time ago. They are very simple though, no trade, consumer goods, or food to worry about. Just amass Energy and minerals, everything else cascades from there. Oh, and insult the meatbags constantly.

[Kapika96]

Viable? If by that you mean amazing, then yes.

Personally I'd say ringworld origin, logic engines, mass produced & repurposed hardware.

Introspective + rapid replicator for civics.

You want to focus your ringworld on research. Ideally 1 housing district + 4 research districts. You really need to get other planets to produce your energy since moving your ringworld over to solely research will give it a pretty large negative when it comes to energy, but it can generate an absolute tonne of research for you.

[Cryten]

You need build alot more energy then you used to but for machines that not that hard. As long as you have energy you can have more research. But it is preety easy to bankrupt yourself if you build too many at once especially when the research takes pops away from energy producing jobs.

Just keep in mind that admin cap is actually significant for machine empires. So while you need to spread wide to make up for machine empires bad pop growth after the nerf. You will want to get back within admin cap. One tier 1 admin building can reduce tech penalty by 24% (30 admin penalty).

[Dakota]

[This writeup got a bit longer than I expected it would, but talking about how broken the economy can get in stellaris is too fun for me to be brief.]

It's a bit behind organic empire focused on research at the moment, but generally speaking a research focus is required to be competitive, so you'll be fine to focus it.

Currently robots need a whole lot of energy to do research, which is nice at least that almost all the upkeep for robots is just in energy, but it does tend to run into the issue of how to supply all that energy, and more importantly how to get all the pops required in any sort of reasonable time to be able to fill out all the research jobs and all the technician jobs to keep it up, not to mention just the electricity of running your walking energy crysis pops.

This is the reason why I consider machines far less viable at the moment since organic empires can easily hold 50%-100% higher pop growth rates than robots considering they get full organic growth rates, migration treaties, and can build robots of their own whereas robots are stuck with huge debuffs on organic growth rates and get no techs to boost it and have to upgrade their capitals to get production higher.

This isn't limited to machine empires, and infact machine empires are more limited in this than other types, but trade will help out a lot if you can make allies. AI tend to make trade deals with rates such as 4 basic (energy, minerals, food) resources for 1 alloy, or 15 basic for 1 strategic (gas, crystals, motes) resource. So it is possible to build an export economy that more than pays for itself. Robot empires have some advantage in alloy gained per pop since they do 8:16 ratios instead of 6:12 in their alloy plants. With some stability boosts and other stuff you can generally get the ratio down to around a 1:1 ratio or better if you go for manufacturing focus and set the planet to a forge world. From there you can make funny trade deals like this:

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/453061862175539207/704293760049348639/unknown.png

This would, even without the efficient manufacturing, provide twice as many minerals as was required to make the alloy, and with efficient manufacturing setups, provide four times as many minerals as required. Of course you can also trade for energy credits instead, with a trade like this very easily providing for many researcher jobs (I think it was about 5 energy per researcher, so 40 jobs, or two ring world segments worth of researchers).

Without any bonuses at all it takes 12 and a half pops to get 50 alloy a month, they can convert this to 100 minerals to cover their cost and 100 energy to give a profit, resulting in 8 energy per pop generated and no net losses in minerals. This is 2 energy credits more per job than just normal base level technicians.

Throw in manufacturing focus for 20% extra production and forge world for 20% less upkeep and now it is 4.8 alloy per job for 6.4 minerals, meaning it takes 10.41 jobs to produce 50 alloy and a cost of 66.7 minerals. So now you sell that 50 alloy for 67 minerals and 133 energy, meaning with just 10.41 jobs you get 133 energy, or 12.78 energy per job.

We're already looking at near late game levels of energy production per job with this strat and we haven't even considered stability bonuses, the two 10% alloy production techs, the 5% job production tech, the 5% specialist production tradition, the 5% less upkeep on all jobs tradition, efficient processors trait, machine world 10% production bonus, governor level resource production boosts, or anything else I may have forgotten.

In short, its silly.