Masterful crafters vs Technocracy

[Aviosche]

I made an empire that focused every piece of it's existence to more research output and research speed. which one should I choose for my 2nd civic? Also 2 more small questions. Should I change natural engineers with intelligent? fanatic materialist + egalitarian or materialist and fanatic egalitarian?

[Garatgh Deloi]

For a pure tech empire i usually go with [Masterful Crafters] & [Technocracy] and add [Meritocracy] later.

[ScreamCon]

mastercrafters is stronger than technocracy in pure yield bonus. Mastercrafters can either be to fuel your technocratic empire or to fuel an economy build.

Technocracy will replace your leaders with scientists which will increase your science output... but it also replaces the leaders negating the previous yields rather than adding more yield.

Technocracy does offer increased amount of science picks

By using mastercrafters with relentless industrialist combined with civilian economy you can reach new heights of good production. If you opt to have habitat start you can get good production output even higher for the amount of minerals/pops used.

I'd argue the industrial builds used to fuel science are stronger than the science builds

[Mr.I]

I'd say Exalted Priesthood is better.

Allow me to introduce you the spiritualist tech rush build.

Spiritualist + Egalitarian
Meritocracy + Exalted Priesthood
Oligarchic Gov (unity bonus and the access to Exalted Priesthood)
Prosperous Unification Origin (for more initial pops)

The main points of this build are:

• Unity is tech
  
• Going psionic gives you a 20% base research output boost

Unity is tech

With this build, you start with 2 temples + one high priest. These priests produce a lot of unity at early game, allowing you to get access to technological ascendancy very quickly.

In mid/late game, unity will be used for planetary ascension, specifically, research ring world.
With level 10 ascension on a ring section, you can get +55% researcher output bonus. With spiritualist build, you will produce much more unity than materialists, allowing you to quickly level up your ring world sections.

Psionic

The reason Psionic is much stronger is because of the way the game calculates research points. The research points you get to advance the techs you are currently researching is calculated as:

    MonthlyResearchGain = BaseMonthlyResearchOutput x ResearchModifier

The 10% bonus from fanatic materialist is a modifier, just like those research bonuses you can get from your scientists and science nexus. It will be added into the total amount of modifiers you have and be used as a factor to produce your final monthly gain of research points.

As the game proceeds, you can get a lot of modifiers, normally you can increase that value to around +100% without robbing other empires for science nexuses. Thus, the later the game goes, the weaker the materialist modifier will be.

On the other side, the psionic specie trait gives you +10% base research output. And it also grants you the access to the special psionic building Psi Corps which gives you another 10% base output boost. This 20% boost is the REAL 20% boost, it will not become weaker as you get more and more research modifiers, it will only get stronger because modifiers amplifies base research output.

Drawbacks

With this build, the purity of your species is very important, thus accepting other species into your empire will be troublesome. You will have to either do a lot of micro or completely refuse other species.

Your pop growth will be lower than the materialist counterpart. Because they can either go synthetic and start mass assimilation or go genetic revolution and start cloning pops.

Your early/mid game is weak. Before your psionic research ring world is fully operational, you will not have much advantage in terms of research. And because of the low growth rate, you will have to resettle a lot of pops to do research jobs, thus lowering the production of other resources. But you will be unstoppable at late game.

Outro

So, I usually play this build as a vassal. I will find a strong overlord as early as possible, delete all my research labs to deceive my lord, so they can give me that juicy 45% research subsidy. With the protection and research subsidy from my lord, I can do the things without much interference and become a monster in late game.

And, you can also get Masterful Crafters in this build once you get access to the 3rd civic point. But I usually go for militarist and Distinguished Admiralty for max fleet command limit.

[yuzhonglu]

You get Masterful Crafters to pay for the Technocracy researchers.

[Ashling]

The +1 research alternative is nice on technocracy. But Master Crafter is probably the better one if you want to build megastructures and cool things.

Going more in-depth: you'll need 1 artificer for every 5 normal pops to match the technocrat's engineering research and you'll need 1 artificer for every 2 normal pops if you want to match the technocract's "general" "total" research as they produce more than just engineering. And that's just to match not exceed. (these ratios are taken from how you start with 1 technocrat (producing 6, 6, 6 research) and at 50 pop you gain another, it's also rounded down in crafter's favor)

However, the Crafter perk gives you more building slots and the majority of your research is going to come from your research buildings (and stations) anyways, so idk. It probably doesn't matter too much one way or another. Basically, it's a question of if you want your empire to be better at engineering and building cool things or having nerds in charge.

Oh, also, I'm pretty sure artificers don't take into account pop-based researching bonuses but I could be wrong (I could also be wrong about a lot of things in this so take it all with a salt shake).

[Ryika]

I wonder what your first Civic is, since normally you'd combine the two. Technocracy makes you need a lot of Consumer Goods, which makes ideal use of the Artificers.

If you only pick Technocracy, you'll be running a LOT of comparatively inefficient Artisans, and if you pick only Masterful Crafters, your Artificers will still be an efficient job, but you will not need that many Consumer Goods, so you'll not be running quite as many of them. And both combined bias your empire heavily towards Specialists, so Meritocracy is a very synergistic third pick.

If you definitely want to keep that other Civic that you're using, then on its own, Masterful Crafters is probably a lot stronger. But I don't think there's anything that you can combine with Masterful Crafters that quite lives up to the strength of combining it with Technocracy.

[Aviosche]

Originally posted by Ryika:

I wonder what your first Civic is, since normally you'd combine the two. Technocracy makes you need a lot of Consumer Goods, which makes ideal use of the Artificers.

If you only pick Technocracy, you'll be running a LOT of comparatively inefficient Artisans, and if you pick only Masterful Crafters, your Artificers will still be an efficient job, but you will not need that many Consumer Goods, so you'll not be running quite as many of them. And both combined bias your empire heavily towards Specialists, so Meritocracy is a very synergistic third pick.

If you definitely want to keep that other Civic that you're using, then on its own, Masterful Crafters is probably a lot stronger. But I don't think there's anything that you can combine with Masterful Crafters that quite lives up to the strength of combining it with Technocracy.

oop forgot to write that. Im using meritocracy as my other civic. also my "full tech build" is overtuned origin with -30 year +20% research and +10% research and -10% consumer good as traits.

[yuzhonglu]

Drop the consumer goods reduction trait and replace it with rapid breeders or incubators. More pops = more research. And use masterful crafters instead of meritocracy.

[Ryika]

Originally posted by Redline:

oop forgot to write that. Im using meritocracy as my other civic. also my "full tech build" is overtuned origin with -30 year +20% research and +10% research and -10% consumer good as traits.

Originally posted by Redline:

oop forgot to write that. Im using meritocracy as my other civic. also my "full tech build" is overtuned origin with -30 year +20% research and +10% research and -10% consumer good as traits.

I think Meritocracy as your first pick probably isn't all that useful. It only really starts to shine when the efficiency of your workers starts increasing and you run more and more specialists. That's why it's usually added as the third Civic mid-game.

If you want to keep it, I'd say go with Meritocracy + Technocracy. That way, at least your Researchers and Artisans benefit a lot from Meritocracy. If you combine Meritocracy + Masterful Crafters, you just reduce the need for Artificers, and thus reduce the impact of the Civic.

That's just a guess though, based on the mechanical anti-synergy. Don't know how the math works out in the end.