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there are 4 kinds of machine empires, some are easy, some are not. you pick which one you want by picking the special civic (driven assimilators, rogue servitors, determined exterminators, and no special civic)
normal machine empires are fairly easy
driven assimilators can have issues with other people hating you
rogue servitors have the challenge of managing organic pops that only produce unity
determined exterminators are the purifier type, they cant make friends with organic empires. they are the hardest one
all machine empires have to constantly build pops cause they dont grow manually, but dont have to worry about food (except servitors, but barely)
There are no factions within your empire like there would be in organic empires, so you will miss out on the added influence from keeping those happy.
Each pop costs 100 minerals (base) to build. Towards the mid game this is not a big deal, but when starting out it can really slow down your early game. And building is a sloooow process.
Your pops need energy to sustain themselves, so if you find energy management difficult normally, machine empires will really put pressure on you to learn how to manage it efficiently. Upside is that you don't need food (unless you're a rogue servitor), so you can safely cover up all those tiles with power plants instead.
And that's all I can think of off the top of my head.
This is a big factor for machine empires. Much bigger than most people realize.
In a normal empire you have migration, this means 1 pop of a species will move from a planet to a new planet without having to pay for resettlement. It will also have 1 tile of population growing.
A multi-species empire with multiple species can have many populations grow and migrate at the same time. For example a planets with 2 species can have one of eahc species migrate per planet. Then the new planet is also growing a tile of population for each species.
Now for mahcine empires you are stuck manually populating each tile and can only populate one tile at a time through growth only since there is no migration.
Resettlement is the key for a mahcine empire to grow quickly. Your new planet has zero growth bonuses (ie no Spart Parts Depot yet) while older established planets have a 30% speed bonus from having the Spare Parts Depot upgraded. Now your establish full planets have no use for the Parts Depot themself because the population is full. However if you were to just resettle one population per colony to the new colony then you can speed up the growth of your empire. Your replacement unit are grown with the full growth bonuses. On top of that if you transfer 5-10 instantly to the new planet you can skip right to building the higher tier buildings faster.
Unfortunately this resettlement micomanaging trick is a lot of micromanaging work. The resettlement menu sucks because the planets keep changing order. Then you have to go behind and rebuild all those workers on the various planets, luckily you can use the no worker warning to pick them out easier.
Depends on the machine empire. Assimilators and Exterminators have no good use for influence because they do not make claims, nor can they even have a rivalry with an organic empire. Edicts are the only use for influence.
Servitors and the others do have the +1 influence tech, which to me is a huge disadvantage compared to the bonuses you cna get from Factions.
Speaking of Factions that is the good part of machine empires. Without factions that means you constantly get full production from a pile, where other empires the faction happiness can severely hurt that tile production. You also never have to worry about a faction changing your government on you.
Awesome job on the misquote. Love how you neglected to include I said for Assimilators and Determined Exterminators. You really could not have taken that quote any more out of context.
Then you pick out the lame stuff. Like claiming neutral systems, which after like 20 years 95% of the systems are claimed. On top of that Determined Exterminator gets a huge discount on that cost.
Then you picked out building certain buildings, which you left out they are the empire unique buildings. Which is there three of them (Singularity Core, Research Institute, Benefits (does unity bonus) at like 75 influence each.) Which this is a mid game tech, so it aint going to occur at the same time as claiming neutral systems.
You also picked out reforming government, which happens once when you learn the new statecraft tech that gives you a civic point. I guess you completely forgot the fact that machines have no factions so your government never gets changed against your will. Once again another mid game tech.
When I played both forms my influence was capped out once I recouperated the influence then it stayed that way until renewal time. Unlike other races they do not get much in the way of edicts that cost influence worth using.
On top of that when I ran around blowing planets up and wiping out populations with a colossus I was pretty much capped on minerals and energy the entire time except to replace the occaisonal cruiser casualty. So that made the energy and minerals edicts pretty useless.
I'm sure your points are very relevant for veteran players. For someone like the OP, however, who has rarely / never tried a machine empire before, saying flat out, and I quote an entire sentence word for word, that "edicts are the only use for influence" for a machine empire, even with the prefix that it only applies for two of the four playstyles available, is misleading at best, flat out misinformation at worst. All I did was point this out.
If you then feel the need to defend yourself by nitpicking what I said, well, feel free. I don't mind so long as it's not wrong.
Hey great job leaving out the fact I said it only applied to Exterminators and Assimilators again. I said it in BOTH replies, yet you keep forgetting in order to make an arguement.
The only misinformation going on is the fact you keep making quotes that purposely leaves out key information.
I rest my case.
You never had a case.
You created the case by leaving out the fact I said it only applied to Exterminators and Assimilators.
Wow look how much shorter that quote is. You trimmed off the whole paragraph prior to it in order to create an arguement.
Then you tried applying it to one time expenditures like unique buildings and government reform. One time fees are not a constant consumption and well if you cant save for those one time fees then you probably fail at the game anyways.
The fact that Assimilators and Exterminators can not have a rivalry and do not have factions to create influence is proof enough those two play styles have nearly no use for influence. They do not make claims so they do not spend influence that way either. This leaves those two play styles with an excess amount of influence (which I pointed out and you ignored.)
When you have a resource that sits capped 50% of the time, it becomes a useless resource. That is influence for Assimilators and Exterminators. This is because unless you are spamming
The worst part is you probably have never even played as an exterminator or any other mahcine empire. Simply because if you had you would have made the point influence could be spent on patrol drone edicts for conquered planets to prevent them from revolting right before they are purged. Of course it aint a necessary expenditure because it can be solved with strongholds and an occupying garrision. However it would have been a valid point to bring up in your arguement.
Another valid point that would have made your arguement more tangible would have been habitat spam. Personally I avoided the habitat spam because I wanted to keep my planet number low in order to keep tech and unity costs lower. Yet this is the second influencce expidenditure you failed to bring up.
Face you created an arguement after you took something out of context and purposely left out information to make it look like you have an arguement. Then when caught you made another quote purposely leaving out the SAME information again a second time.
Your whole arguement was trying to justify influence still had a real usage for Assimilators and Exterminators. Yet you failed to bring up influence cost of patrol drones and habitats. Simple game mechanics and player should know. Sure I could have brought it up, but you can get by without either. Also why should I put any tangibility into your strawman fake arguement.
Go find someone else to flame and troll, better yet go play and learn the game mechanics.
I can see that but it still isnt enough of an constant expenditure of influence to be an issue.
For example using the growth at the start, then once you hit like 20 planets, growth is no longer an issue so you swap it something more useful.
I knew there would be people out there that do reform their government multiples times, however it really isnt a necessity to do so.
The point was the OP asked about influence bonus techs for machine empires. I simply pointed out that Exterminators and Assimilators have such a low use of influence that it becomes nearly useless as a resource.
The only thing I did was correct the statement that
Not "one of the only", not "the most important", not "with few exceptions". The only. No other uses. To someone like the OP with limited knowledge of how machine empires play, this sweeping statement is misleading and misinformative. Including assimilators and exterminators, there are other uses for influence. Planetary edicts (though I would personally consider those part of the edicts you first suggested) and habitats, as you mention, are also very good examples of things influence can be spent on. Things, maybe, that a new machine empire player like the OP, whose questions we are trying to answer, should be aware of before they start thinking that as an assimilator or exterminator, he can only use influence for edicts.
So please sit down, chill out, and try not to work yourself up into a frenzy. Because I'm not the one arguing here.
To try to get this back on topic... was there anything else you were wondering about, gmsh1964? I'm not the most experienced machine world player, but I'll help with what I can.