Machine empires

[Jamie]

What type of machine empire is currently the best?

[yuzhonglu]

Servitor or Assimilator.

[CthuluIsSpy]

Assimilator is pretty good. You can build up your military pretty fast because machines don't care about consumer goods and just proceed to borg everyone.
You do have to worry about food though because of the cyborgs, but food is easy to get and cyborgs get a bonus to resource production, iirc.

I'm playing assimilator right now and I conquered about half the galaxy by year 2340.

[MrGrumpsman]

Assimilator with lithoids and resource consolidation is extremely powerful. You can use the organic slurry to get some extra energy early while having cyborgs with 100% habitability on your home planet. For regular organics you can build ringworlds to house them for whatever by midgame if you did good with your tech.

[Jamie]

Thanks for all the responses

[CrUsHeR]

cyborgs get a bonus to resource production

Cyborgs get no production bonuses, just their leaders get the Cyborg trait which makes them better than Machine Leaders, but are also not immortal.

And they have a -50% growth speed penalty due to the machine empire effect. Additionally, the Driven Assimilators get one Replicator job less in their capital buildings. And they cannot properly use Machine Worlds because of the habitability hit making the cyborgs useless there.

So if you take the need for food into account, DAs are always worse in every aspect compared to regular machine empires.

The reason why you'd play them is because you can assimilate all organic, non-hivemind pops. So they can almost immediately start working in actual jobs, where regular Machines can only purge them or put them in amalgamation grid slavery.

[CthuluIsSpy]

Strange, I could have sworn cyborg pops get some sort of bonus to production.
True about the decrease in pop growth, I checked the growth rate for cyborgs and they do indeed get a pretty big hit.

It would indeed seem that the DA's strongest asset is being able to declare total wars and steal populations.

[Tiasmoon]

Bonus to production is for Synths, via tech research/special project. Cyborg Pops just get the +habitability which can indirectly translate into increased production.

You can also give the Cyborg species traits for specialised production on creation, tho I dont recall if Assimilators get access to genetic modification to add more during gameplay.

Originally posted by CrUsHeR:

The reason why you'd play them is because you can assimilate all organic, non-hivemind pops. So they can almost immediately start working in actual jobs, where regular Machines can only purge them or put them in amalgamation grid slavery.

My memory sucks, so ill probably forget (or dont consider) some, so feel free to correct me, but;

Machine Empire benefits:

-100% habitability
-energy research
-no consumer goods
-can produce specialised Pops from the start
-can benefit from minor relics for stability
-3 jobs per energy/mineral district instead of 2


Outdated benefits they lost in 3.0:
-higher energy output per worker (normal empires get more now)
-no growth penalty on new colony (normal empires dont have it either now, but still need upgrade for Rulers)


On top of that they also get:
-Total War
-Can conquer and gain Pops, instead of having to purge or Amalgamation
-Access to biological traits via the above
-Has some access to genemodding(?, forgot how much)
-Can use diplomacy while having access to Total War

I think the game would have to change quite a lot for DA to not be stupidly OP in whatever patch we are in. Having access to Machine Empire benefits AND Total War AND being able to conquer Pops from the start, is just too good.



ps:

For food, you can play them without producing any. That would will nerf bio growth rate into the ground and give happiness penalties, which doesnt effect Machine Empire Cyborgs since they are ''drones''. That is ofcourse, assuming you are getting more bio pops via conquest. I guess with Catalytic Processing it becomes worth building food for the easier Alloy production, especially early on?

[CthuluIsSpy]

Driven Assimilators still get genemodding, they just can't get the ascendancy perks.