How to play as a hive mind?

[EnemigoDeLaMafia]

I tried in a small galaxyand played them like a regular empire, but was behind than I would normally be in every aspect.

Seems like they require a LOT more of micromanagement. I'm also running on some issues with deviancy. The capital building only has 1 upgrade and it's not enough.

Also building slots.. I am finding I have less than I'd want, because the spawning pools + cloning bats. Have had to use housing on some to keep the population growth optimal.

I didn't expand much and that might have been a problem? Most worlds are overpopulated and I have nowhere to send the population. Barely at 1k research in 2300.

So are there any tips regarding how to play them? Should I be more aggressive Early game? I'm trying to do a regular hive mind, not a devouring swarm.

[Killer of Gems]

From what i've seen, Hive Mind is probably the weakest type of civ to play right now, that said heres a few things I have found playing them that you really need to focus on early game to give you an advantage.

1. Abuse the market for minerals/food, the reason for this is you need to expand AGGRESSIVELY. Hive minds are capable of some really good pop growth early game, use it to your advantage.

2. Spawning Pool, Spawning Pool, Spawning Pool.

3. Early game, hunter seeker drones aren't that important. Unemploy them until you start having deviency issues.

4. Economic Policy to boost Complex Drone output by 20%, Menial Drone output by -20%. It sucks early game but it pays off in the long run since it gives all specialists 20% output.

5. Maintenence Drones are something you need to micro. Generally, you should aim for net 0 amenities on your planets.

Just some things I have found playing recently, hope it helps.

[EnemigoDeLaMafia]

Some impressions so far:

>It's year 2350. I'm waiting for sn Early crisis. Set it to start on 2300 or so. Im woefully unprepared because it should be x10 strength and I'm the weakest I have been.

> About 2k research with a fully upgraded research nexus. I feel 12 building slots for hive mind aren't enough.

> I had to play relatively tall because I had a fallen empire on one border, a devouring swarm on another, and an alliance on the last border. Initially only had 3 worlds, then 2 others with 20% habitability. They were small in size too.

> trying to keep the swarm from attacking was a long cold war. Took hive worlds as a 5th ascension, which seems really pointless because they take forever to come online even with terreforming edict.

> Out of desperation I took voidborne, and colossus project because I been short on influence all game, and desperately need a casus belli. Minerals and resources also have been a pain. Between building multiple habitats to control the insane spending, passing a few resolutions in the Senate, and trying to expand, I simply have no influence, nor really many resources. The habitats are helping but it has taken many long years.

> I still don't have a planet to build as a second science center. Only the capital Is consuming 330 minerals to conduct research, and I still need to expand the industry to at least 1k alloys a month.

> I still do not comprehend why hiveminds do not get a tier 3 capital building. Deviancy is a pretty big issue and it renders the extra capacity hive worlds would have pointless. At 100 population you are already at odds. and you might need to waste a building slot for the crime building because otherwise you only get 2 hunter-seeker jobs. Even then you do not have the planetary decision that allows for better crime fighting in exchange for energy. With 4 jobs I'm still having issues in the capital world.

[HappySack]

With mods because they're really underwhelming and boring otherwise.

However one thing you should always do is expand everywhere because you get loads of influence.

[EnemigoDeLaMafia]

Some more observations:

The economy is heavily skewed towards minerals because you need both the normal industry but your science also runs on them, at 12 minerals a lab.

This however doesn't let other resources off the hook either. Because your version of the bureocrat costs 6 energy a pop and it produces a measly 5 admin cap. Sure, it produces unity too, but you also lack the normal administrator jobs that would produce unity.

Your spawning drone also works with 6 food a pop. Plus 2 energy for the building and 2 energy for the district.

Overall, it's pretty annoying because you need a metric ton of all basic resources, and if you didn't get good planet spawns it's going to be rather difficult.

You also need tons of unity, because you'll want to get the traidition that allows for synapse drones to produce 3 amenities, this is so you can minimize the number of pops that need to work those useless maintenance jobs.

While you're at it you also want to grab the adaptability tradition, for the 10 habitability + extra building slot. At this rate however you haven't taken neither domination nor discovery, and given your very expensive tech requirements and also just very expensive overall economy, it's easy for it to become a mess.

At this point in the game you might want to pick up hive worlds and biological ascencion, but both of those are blocked behind tech, again. I find the tech progress way less than normal empires.

So usually at this point I'll just turn to habitats and don't look back. They are probably the only way you'd be able to fulfill your need for stuff.

Conquering planets.... Well, unless we are talking about an exact match, habitability is going to kind of hurt you. Plus, you still need your full ascencion path completed because the pops are just useless to you. They can be livestock, at 4 food a pop, but they count towards your pop number and they lower your planets happiness and stability, so overall is a pretty bad deal and it's thrown out the window.


Diplomacy? I usually can make due if ond neighbor doesn't hate my guts. Can't make it work with 3+ neighbors.
If there is at least 1 friendly, making trade deals is useful because you probably are going to be lacking something.

[AurumHawke]

Any planet you aren't actively developing is dedicated to pop-generation. Employ the Spawning Drone and nothing else until you have the income to spare for Synapse Drones.
Demolish districts and disable buildings on low-habitability planets you conquer to cut upkeep costs and useless sprawl.
Unemployed drones barely generate a mineral (and research with Natural Neural Network civic), but are ready to go to whatever planet needs them.
Just keep an eye on how amenities affect resource output - an employed Maintenance Drone will often be more important than 1 Mineral.
Leaving the Maintenance jobs open can also be useful for luring unemployed drones to a planet you're actively developing.

Livestock is nearly worthless until you can Nerve-Staple them because their unhappiness minimizes their output.
Of course, by the time you can Nerve-Staple them, you can also Assimilate them.
Meanwhile, you need to have your 50% "happiness" pops on the likely-uninhabitable planet in order to outweigh them to 40%.
Displacement kicks pops you can barely use off of your planets and out of your pop-pool.
Ironically, Devouring Swarms get xenophile's "xenophage" relationship penalty if you Process Livestock other species.
(went back and re-checked a save with that opinion malus)

Hive pops demote instantly and have no unemployment costs.
Hives skip Consumer Goods by going directly from Minerals or substituting Energy and/or Food.
Hives skip the Tier-0 colony building that requires 10 pops to remove while suppressing pop-growth on your main planets (and instantly upgrade it for free when conquering).
Hives have reduced sprawl penalty and every colony is capable of negating its own base sprawl.
Hive worlds are slightly better than Gaia worlds with an extra Spawning job - just be careful not to knock out any unique "Non-Rare" Feature, like the Zroni-chain Zro (not that hives have any use for it beyond selling).

[EnemigoDeLaMafia]

Originally posted by AurumHawke:

Any planet you aren't actively developing is dedicated to pop-generation. Employ the Spawning Drone and nothing else until you have the income to spare for Synapse Drones.
Demolish districts and disable buildings on low-habitability planets you conquer to cut upkeep costs and useless sprawl.
Unemployed drones barely generate a mineral (and research with Natural Neural Network civic), but are ready to go to whatever planet needs them.
Just keep an eye on how amenities affect resource output - an employed Maintenance Drone will often be more important than 1 Mineral.
Leaving the Maintenance jobs open can also be useful for luring unemployed drones to a planet you're actively developing.

Livestock is nearly worthless until you can Nerve-Staple them because their unhappiness minimizes their output.
Of course, by the time you can Nerve-Staple them, you can also Assimilate them.
Meanwhile, you need to have your 50% "happiness" pops on the likely-uninhabitable planet in order to outweigh them to 40%.
Displacement kicks pops you can barely use off of your planets and out of your pop-pool.
Ironically, Devouring Swarms get a xenophile-like relationship penalty with you if you Process other species.

Hive pops demote instantly and have no unemployment costs.
Hives skip Consumer Goods by going directly from Minerals or substituting Energy and/or Food.
Hives skip the Tier-0 colony building that requires 10 pops to remove while suppressing pop-growth on your main planets (and instantly upgrade it for free when conquering).
Hives have reduced sprawl penalty and every colony is capable of negating its own base sprawl.
Hive worlds are slightly better than Gaia worlds with an extra Spawning job - just be careful not to knock out any unique "Non-Rare" Feature, like the Zroni-chain Zro (not that hives have any use for it beyond selling).

I do all of these things, yet I am way behind on alloy production and research, compared to where I would be with a normal empire (a normal one, not a min maxed fanatic materialist one)

By 2300, give or take a couple years, I can usually take on a fallen empire and might have started repeatable tech. With hive mind, I am being lucky to have 1000 tech at this same date. My alloy production is a mere +200 a month. I just don't know where I'm going wrong.

[yuzhonglu]

You can't even rush people down as Hive Mind, LOL.

Ironically, one idea is to drop all mineral production and go 100% energy and spam research nodes everywhere by buying minerals off the market. This way your research will be "free." Play the Tree Hive Mind so your colony ships only cost food, forget about alloys for a while, and hope your neighbors are friendly.

[happyscrub]

expanding to more planets super fast. They crush thru population early. Don't try to get into wars. You don't keep the pops you win. Focus on getting the unclaimed planets.

[happyscrub]

Originally posted by LegateLanius™:

I do all of these things, yet I am way behind on alloy production and research, compared to where I would be with a normal empire (a normal one, not a min maxed fanatic materialist one)

Stop playing them like regular empires. Don't focus on research or alloys. Focus on population. Play the diplomacy game. No one out right hates you so no reason to be ramping up alloy

Once your population explodes, you catch up to everything.

[ScreamCon]

With the prosperity tree completed you get administrators for the hive mind with population size. At first glance this might seem innocent as the hive get low amount of admin cap from them, but you can use bonuses like docile to reduce sprawl per pop. What this allows you to do late game is endlessly cover the sprawl of your population on top of getting the most favourable conditions going over sprawl as a hive.

Due to this self sustaining nature you may be able to get away with only one administrative world or none at all if you get sprawl really low! Which frees up building slots normally took by office for the regular empires.

I recommend playing semi evil semi diplomatic with this as your pushing more the prosperity line.

I also recommend only having a few energy district worlds, with most as food or mining as you only need enough energy for your upkeep.

Hives get increased amount of alloy production to normal empires, but are not quite at fast as producing as machine empires. Alloy production is still very much needed and worth production.

Science will consume lots of minerals, to max minerals set most of your worlds as mining and use organic pops. Set only a couple worlds to food production. This is as both energy and food *will* be consumed at a slower rate than minerals due to all the science and alloy production. The need for mineral increases even further if using a lithoid hive. But those setups let you have food production worlds as mining worlds. Ratio speaking.

The natural neural network civic gives you science from unemployed, but this unemployed do not need goods like utopia run empires. Unemployed pops will convert 1 food to 1 mineral on top of any mineral all the working pops can make. This is for when you run out of space but due to the new 3.0 update you would need to turn pop growth inhibition setting down to make use of this paragraphs setup. This setup gives you more of a potential edge over a rogue servitor if needed/fighting a friend playing as one.

A lithoid hive grows slower but is much stronger as can colonise everything, have their unemployed consume the mineral they produce, and produce a rare resource per 100. Of which you can opt to not select rare resource at start so can have variants of all 3 producers. Tree of life can help offset some of the growth loss by requiring to make a few food, which can be gotten from some livestock if can't spare a district... or bought.

Also make heavy use of the relic artifacts for resource production. The bigger the pop size the more administrators you get. Which each produce 1% more resource per pop. I believe it stacks after the science boosted resource districts, but Ideally you want to get access to the Rubricator to build more artifacts.

I want to finally point that if you run out of jobs, you can use slaves to up the population of a world. Gestalts are able to game amenities with increase in stability. Low amenities mostly just reduces stability up to a cap ish of what seems to be -50. Strongholds + marshal law, or the memorialist civic can offset this.

[Big mean bunny]

I play hive on grand admiral and have no real issues. Make use of space mine tech, hydroponics and mining slots in star bases. Late game hive worlds can give you dedicated mining planets but you do not have to go for the perk it just helps. Tech rush is definitely doable. Check out some u tube hive play through's.

[mss73055]

Hive minds play quite different.
No consumer goods, no factions, no happiness, unity autoscales. Your internal affairs are almost on autopilot. Your focus is on external relations. Hive minds got issues finding allies.