Machine Empire Early Economy Issues

[Titansfury]

Machine empires need to allocate pops to the replicator job in order to grow pops, however, the starting building on a new colony provides only 1 replicator job, which in turn produces 1 pop growth per month. 100 months to produce your second pop if nothing is done, where organics get 3 growth per month without having to assign pops.

So you have to resettle 4 pops over to the colony so you hit the 5 pop threshold and construct a building that adds another replicator slot. You've now invested 400 more energy credits and 300 more minerals as a startup cost into your new colony...... so that you can have a monthly growth rate of 2. You still have to wait until you reach a population of 10 on the colony before you can upgrade your capital building and unlock another replicator slot, finally bringing your growth in line with what organics get for free. In addition, every point of pop growth costs you 5 minerals, meaning you have to spend 500(!) minerals to obtain one machine pop. Machine pops used to cost 100 minerals to produce, and in the past each pop produced just a little less minerals on average than they do now.

Machine empires don't consume any food, and they don't consume any consumer goods, but this doesn't matter much because they still "eat" 1 energy credit per population. There's another problem here, which is the cost of using research buildings. A machine empire researcher population consumes 6 minerals in order to output 4 of each research. An organic researcher consumes only 2 consumer goods to do the same job, 2.5 if you count the consumer goods cost of the pop, except in their case consumer goods translate 1 / 1 to minerals.Even when you factor in the extra cost of converting the minerals into consumer goods, you are still looking at DOUBLE the amount of minerals that you're paying for every point of research as a machine empire. You could work around this, except that you're inherently gated on mineral production by the number of industrial districts that you can build on your planets.

Machine empires have a far smaller "roster" of jobs to perform, since they DON'T USE THE NEW TRADE MECHANIC and they don't have entertainers. Not using the trade mechanic locks them out from a very important method of getting energy credits, since you are able to produce energy credits at a 1/1 ratio from trade value with the right trade policy. Entertainers are an incredibly strong job right now, since each one consumes only 1 consumer goods resource but outputs 2 unity and 10 amenities. Machine empires have no equivalent job to entertainers, leaving them with fewer sources of unity than other empires. In addition to this, their primary means of producing amenities makes only 4 per population. You have an initial amount of amenities to work with that come from your replicators, but after that you must rely on maintenance drones to produce amenities, and since they consume amenities themselves, you are producing only 3 amenities per drone. This means that you will end up taxing nearly 1/4 of your population on each planet in order to provide maintenance for the remaining 3/4. Fortunately you can get a lot of these maintenance drones per building, up to 5 per building if you take the right tradition. This "amenities tax" is huge, and it really kills your infrastructure, since building pops in a machine empire is REALLY expensive.

You can treat the "amenities tax" as an effective increase in the cost necessary to use your population. Each maintenance drone pop produces 3 surplus amenities and consumes 1 energy credit to work. If we do some math, we can calculate how "efficient" your populations are at working by taking a percentage of their own resource output that is consumed as upkeep. You need one maintenance drone for every 4 population units, which immediately reduces your population's efficiency to 75%. In addition, every pop consumes energy credits, and energy credits are produced at a base rate of 4 per worker producing them, so for every 4 units of population you are using up one of them to produce energy credits to "feed" them (This ratio will improve as your tech and bonuses get better to provide more energy credits). This lowers your pop efficiency again, now going down to 50%, since this pop that is producing the upkeep energy credits is also consuming a unit of amenities. Without counting energy credit costs for building upkeep, a full half of your pops are being used just to handle your upkeep. Since only 1/2 the pops are producing surplus energy credits/minerals for the empire or converting them into research/unity/alloys, the cost to get production out of your planets is enormous. Each pop that you want to have on a planet to produce resources will cost you 1000 minerals up front to produce, factoring in the populations necessary to support them. That's insane!

To compare this to an organic empire, an organic population consumes 1 unit of food, and an amount of consumer goods based on their job. Let's just assume most of your pops are specialists (which consume 0.5 consumer goods by default). A farmer pop produces 6 food before bonuses, which only lowers population efficiency down to about 84%. Consumer goods are converted 1/1 from minerals, but they have to be made by a population. Each pop producing consumer goods will make 6 of them from 6 minerals, before bonuses. Therefore in this example 1 of them can produce for 12 populations, including themselves. This reduces their population efficiency to 77.7%. Entertainers produce 10 amenities in addition to their unity production, and administrators produce 8,clerks also provide amenities, although clerks provide a very small amount. Using entertainers to meet amenity needs is easy, and reduces pop efficiency by only 10%. You can even make up for this cost with the production bonus that high amenities gets you, but let's ignore that for now. Because entertainers also produce unity, You will always get a valuable resource out of using them. They do use 1 unit of consumer goods, but we can ignore the hit on productivity here because of the unity production. This brings the population efficiency of a default, no bonuses organic population down to 67.77%.

So in the end we have:
Machine Empire:
1 functional working unit of machine empire population, after factoring in population work efficiency. Takes 200 effective units of growth to obtain(100 / 0.5) and costs 1000 minerals (500 / 0.5)
50% work efficiency

Organic Empire:
1 functional working unit of organic populationm after factoring in population work efficiency. Takes 147.7 effective units of growth to obtain(100 / 0.677) and costs ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to obtain.
67.7% work efficiency

This is a crippling disadvantage for machine empires. We consume so many minerals just to grow our economies that we take forever just to get off the ground. Our only saving grace is our habitability, but even that's a race against time, since organics eventually can raise their habilitability with tech, terraforming or building machine pops of their own. You have to greedily expand to as many planets as you can in order to get minerals to feed your growth, but it's incredibly hard and expensive to fund new colonies. This expansive tendency leads you into conflict with other empires, but good luck on having enough alloy production to pay for any decent military. When you see a machine empire with 40 pops in the early game, recognize that those 16 pops that they built cost them 8000 minerals to build, and if they could have made them into alloys instead they could build around 25 corvettes.

To end this extremely long tantrum about machine empires, for balancing sake any of them that aren't determined exterminators should have access to the new trade mechanics, in some shape or form. Also, the mineral cost of producing populations is way too high, it costs more than twice as many minerals to make a functioning colony as any other type of empire. Lastly, Machine empires could use access to a better source of amenities, maybe giving them a counterpart to the entertainer?

I love the concept behind this new economic system, and I love the stellaris game too. If any of the developers see this post and think that some of this information is useful, and assuming that they don't alreayd have all of this information at their fingertips, I don't mind doing some number crunching to help round out balancing issues in the new update.

[キールス]

If they are looking at this I think they need to change the pop upkeep for machine pops as 1 energy per pop adds up to more that 1000 in the mid-late game. Even with a ringworld specialized on energy production I am still in danger of crashing my economy if I make stuff that will let me grow such as Forge Worlds.

That or buff the durable trait to reduce pop upkeep to up to 50-40%. Everything else is workable so far with the exeption of energy upkeep which I think is are bit of an extreme penalty for machine empires.

[Titansfury]

Tweaking traits in order to deal with the issues will effectively just force us to take those traits, which takes away our build variety. It's probably better to make changes to economic problems with rebalanced / new buildings.

I do agree that some other options for energy credits are needed. I'm starting to think that my neighbors are looking awful tasty. If organic pops still produce 6 energy credits for being used as bio fuel, I'm going to have a feast!

[Luziferjones]

Ye they need to change lower the energy upkeep. Right now I have close to 2000 pops. In total I produce like +4000 energy credits (without dyson sphere) but im still struggling to keep my energy in a surpluss. It often fluctuates to a negative income. The high energy need means I can put less pops into mineral jobs and therefore have a lower mineral and alloy productin.

When I look at the other empires and my friend I play with... He has like 1600 total energy income compared to my 4000 and he has a surpluss of +200 or so... And I'm struggling with keeping it positiv. They really need to touch machine empires.

[Brakiros]

I spent 730 energy on my pops 1 energy per so yeah its expensive maybe .75 or .5 energy per would be far better

[TwoTonTuna]

I feel you. The fact that ME's don't get trade doubles the pain. I'm currently playing as an ME and all I could do was roll over and submit to the Great Khan because I can't beat back his waves of 16k fleets with my puny 9k fleets. This, despite the fact that I am the most technologically advanced faction with the most powerful fleet in the galaxy *sob*

[Doctor Proteus]

I don't think the developers played the expansion before releasing it. Hmmm...

[Night]

In The patch 2.2.2 Beta it been change to 3 from 5 at the replicator job

[tempest.of.emptiness]

Originally posted by Evil_Lord_Proteus:

I don't think the developers played the expansion before releasing it. Hmmm...

Actually, they did play it in the Dev Clash, and a machine empire dominated the game to such a massive extent that they seem to have overcorrected with the nerf bat. Maybe they didn't play after nerfing...

Originally posted by Titansfury:

Machine Empire Early Economy Issues
<snip>

Thanks for your insightful breakdown. I haven't tried a machine empire in 2.2 yet (still trying to learn an organic economy), but I have seen the AI struggling to play them. Now I understand why most of them never manage to found a second planet. I haven't checked in observer mode, but I wonder if they are deprioritizing their replicator job(s) in favor of energy production and so permanently stagnating due to 0 growth.

[Astasia]

Originally posted by Titansfury:

where organics get 3 growth per month without having to assign pops.

This isn't actually true. Organic planets are hit with a large new colony penalty that drastically slows growth rate for quite a while. They can manually move a few pops over or rely on migration, but the penalty doesn't go away early. So machine empires have the ability to jump start colonies much more easily than organics, especially since they can get pop growth so much higher on their core worlds. Every replicator job adds +1 to base growth, with a solid colony with a fully upgraded capitol they can reach 5-6 base growth per month, which is then multiplied by pop growth bonuses easily reaching like 10 pop growth per month. Which means you can start a new colony and transfer over 8-9 pops to instantly build and upgrade the planet to 3 base growth per turn which is now ahead of an organic planet at the same stage.

I agree with your overall point though, machine empires are most certainly very flawed right now. However, I think it boils down to one very simple issue, the new Stellaris economy is balanced around trade and machine empires have nothing to replace or compensate for it's loss. If you look at hive minds they get 3 jobs per district, that is their replacement for trade, it's not great but it's something. Machine empires get nothing. It's not even the population energy cost that kills them, though it certainly contributes, but if you look at your late game energy upkeep most of your energy is going to buildings and ships, not pops. Reducing pop upkeep isn't going to help significantly, that's not going to fix their issues. What needs to happen is all the places where organic pops get trade jobs/output, machine empires need energy jobs/output, and they need something like the commercial center building they can place in free planet slots that provides a lot of jobs and energy output. The bio reactor doesn't work and was a bad idea, it's not effected by job/pop resource bonuses, and the exhange rate is worse than selling food on the market. Machine empires shouldn't be farming food just to sell though, it's ridiculous.

I don't think there's anything wrong with any of the other resource costs of the empire type, minerals are super easy to get, I haven't had any issues keeping research or alloy production up.

[Titansfury]

Originally posted by Astasia:

Originally posted by Titansfury:

where organics get 3 growth per month without having to assign pops.

This isn't actually true. Organic planets are hit with a large new colony penalty that drastically slows growth rate for quite a while. They can manually move a few pops over or rely on migration, but the penalty doesn't go away early. So machine empires have the ability to jump start colonies much more easily than organics, especially since they can get pop growth so much higher on their core worlds. Every replicator job adds +1 to base growth, with a solid colony with a fully upgraded capitol they can reach 5-6 base growth per month, which is then multiplied by pop growth bonuses easily reaching like 10 pop growth per month. Which means you can start a new colony and transfer over 8-9 pops to instantly build and upgrade the planet to 3 base growth per turn which is now ahead of an organic planet at the same stage.

I agree with your overall point though, machine empires are most certainly very flawed right now. However, I think it boils down to one very simple issue, the new Stellaris economy is balanced around trade and machine empires have nothing to replace or compensate for it's loss. If you look at hive minds they get 3 jobs per district, that is their replacement for trade, it's not great but it's something. Machine empires get nothing. It's not even the population energy cost that kills them, though it certainly contributes, but if you look at your late game energy upkeep most of your energy is going to buildings and ships, not pops. Reducing pop upkeep isn't going to help significantly, that's not going to fix their issues. What needs to happen is all the places where organic pops get trade jobs/output, machine empires need energy jobs/output, and they need something like the commercial center building they can place in free planet slots that provides a lot of jobs and energy output. The bio reactor doesn't work and was a bad idea, it's not effected by job/pop resource bonuses, and the exhange rate is worse than selling food on the market. Machine empires shouldn't be farming food just to sell though, it's ridiculous.

I don't think there's anything wrong with any of the other resource costs of the empire type, minerals are super easy to get, I haven't had any issues keeping research or alloy production up.

Interesting, I didn't make it far enough into my machine empire playthrough last night to see the ability to get more replicator jobs. Eventually the economy seems to round out some for machine empires, but I was more focused on the early game issues that they face. How much does the new colony penalty reduce pop growth to for organic empires? I do know that pop migration now "shifts around" population growth based on migration attraction.

[tempest.of.emptiness]

Originally posted by Titansfury:

How much does the new colony penalty reduce pop growth to for organic empires?

It's a 50% penalty to their non-immigration growth, and lasts until the ship shelter upgrade that unlocks at 10 pops. So if you have 8-9 pops lying around and the energy to pay for it then you can relocate them and immediately upgrade the building to end the penalty.

[Ryika]

tbh, I think the way to go for machine empires is to not settle new planets too quickly and rather expand outwards and focus on stations. Their economy is so much slower at the beginning with the lack of income from trade, that I find settling planets too fast is a much bigger draw on your overall progress than it is for fleshlings.

And because resettling isn't that much of a problem if you delay your expansion a bit, you can actually resettle 4 pops and construct that replicator to give any new colony a headstart.

No idea how effective it really is, but it certainly feels much better to play.

[Izaon]

The problem with resettling those 4 pops to grow your next planet is, unless you have a strong surplus in energy or mins (which you don't for the first 100 years) you cripple your economy moving those jobs off (unless you want to tank your tech/unity)

I've been playing a ME game with a friend, and there are some really painful issues with them. I found that you can't build more or upgrade your robot production plant (even though you get replicators from adminstration) is a bit rough (coupled with all the energy issues)

The lack of building upgrades for ME doesn't make a ton of sense to me. You need about 4 maintance depots per a large planet (since they only produce 5 jobs each) and the Bio-fuel convertor is useless (converts food to energy at a 1:1 ratio, but this sucks because it doesn't scale with any energy +% since all of those effect jobs and the biofuel has no workers. and unless you are focusing on food growth you need 4 agri jobs to work 1 bioful, while one energy pop will produce 4.5-9.5 [late game])

I was also a bit disapointed with the Machine worlds if you compare them to the Arcologies. Yeah being able to have as many mining/energy districts is nice (especially on a perfect world of 31 districts) But the Arcology that organics get, the district that provides 10 alloy jobs is just so damn good in comparison. I feel like the Machine worlds should have an industry district or upgraded "regular" districts (I am aware of the 10% increase in resourse which is why i think they should have an Industry district)

[Astasia]

Originally posted by tempest.of.emptiness:

Originally posted by Titansfury:

How much does the new colony penalty reduce pop growth to for organic empires?

It's a 50% penalty to their non-immigration growth, and lasts until the ship shelter upgrade that unlocks at 10 pops. So if you have 8-9 pops lying around and the energy to pay for it then you can relocate them and immediately upgrade the building to end the penalty.

I didn't notice that it was disappearing when they upgraded the shelter, I guess that makes sense. My bad.