Why allow every empire to assimilate?

[Тривиум]

With the latest patch I've noticed that now pretty much every empire is an assimilator. This heavily ruins the lore and strategy of playing Driven Assimilator for RP reasons!
Of course one could chose not to get the ascending tradition, but then he misses on a lot of other bonuses related to his own empire/pops. DA was unique in it's heavy snowball and huge pop accumulation similarly to Hive empires. Now everyone basically is DA with just a single civic. I know what pop you assimilate depends on what tradition you pick, but still the majority of pops is always bio and less robot/hive.

[ScreamCon]

I guess they haven't really clamped down on who can do so yet. Before I think empires that weren't spiritualist could all do machine integration.

[Razorblade]

I think you're confusing Assimilation the citizenship species right with Sublimation, the total war CB that DAs get.

Assimilation just adds Psionic to non-Psionic pops, Cyborg to non-Cyborg pops, turns non-Synths into Synths, and non-Hive Minded pops into Hiveminded pops. I fail to see how this affects an empire's ability to snowball or accumulate pops in a significantly meaningful way.

[Тривиум]

Originally posted by Razorblade:

I think you're confusing Assimilation the citizenship species right with Sublimation, the total war CB that DAs get.

Assimilation just adds Psionic to non-Psionic pops, Cyborg to non-Cyborg pops, turns non-Synths into Synths, and non-Hive Minded pops into Hiveminded pops.

But those same changes are very similar to what DA did earlier. The advantage of making the newly captured pops very efficient is now spread to every empire thus nerfing DA's unique playstyle/advantage IMO. At least from my experience the newly conquered pops after assimilation are quite fine with their new master (no rebellions/crime etc.)

[Gustuv Wynd]

Doesn't the driven assimilator basically turn captured pops into cyborgs with a machine intelligence running things? Basically a rip off of the Star Trek Borg race. I don't think any others are doing that.

Hive minds can integrate, but the rest just sort of live together as far as I can see.

[Razorblade]

Originally posted by Тривиум:

But those same changes are very similar to what DA did earlier. The advantage of making the newly captured pops very efficient is now spread to every empire thus nerfing DA's unique playstyle/advantage IMO. At least from my experience the newly conquered pops after assimilation are quite fine with their new master (no rebellions/crime etc.)

1. Synth assimilation has always been available, and was the most efficient Pop type before Cyborgs started being able to use bio and machine traits this patch. This patch is actually a relative buff for DAs as far as Pop efficiency goes, since Cyborgs are easily the best Pop type now.

2. Conquered pop happiness has never mattered. No one who even slightly understands the mechanics of Stellaris gets rebellions.

3. Pop efficiency doesn't matter when you have more Pops than everyone else. Being able to Total War from day 1 without having to Purge is what makes DAs powerful.

4. DAs can now assemble Cyborgs, which is another significant buff to their power, and now have a special world type just for increasing pop assembly speed.

DAs are easily one of, if not the most, meta empire type, and have even been disproportionately benefited by this patch compared to most other empire types.

[Тривиум]

Originally posted by Razorblade:

2. Conquered pop happiness has never mattered. No one who even slightly understands the mechanics of Stellaris gets rebellions.
I do know them quite well and it's still a problem (not because of rebellions, but because of high upkeep and low efficiency several years after conquering) when you have low habitability of your main species on the conquered planet and you don't enslave them. Also what happens is you get the annoying politicians being unemployed for ages awaiting demotion. Simply moving pops is not very efficient early (especially if you need to move politicians away 500 minerals and 250 unity HELLO?!) if they are politicians. Also there is still a dumb old bug that when you unlock merchant jobs your current politician gets UNEMPLOYED while another pop is becomes a merchant pop - this is obviously flawed mechanic.

3. Pop efficiency doesn't matter when you have more Pops than everyone else. Being able to Total War from day 1 without having to Purge is what makes DAs powerful.
But DA is still hated by everyone else from day 1 since they are slightly friendly DE. More pop more sprawl penalty and you must sacrifice a civic and 2 traditions to get it to -55%. So if your pops are not optimized you get less research and edicts/traditions i.e. being punished for expanding :(. I hate that they ruined the game after 3.2 for multiplayer balance changes when the majority of players are playing offline...

With current options it's just that all other empires become more similar to DA and are able to give cybernetic traits, however my original post was misleading.

[Garatgh Deloi]

Originally posted by Тривиум:

With current options it's just that all other empires become more similar to DA and are able to give cybernetic traits, however my original post was misleading.

Cybernetic traits (other then cyborg itself) wasn't a thing before this change. So DA didn't have them either.

[CrUsHeR]

Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated

[Sero]

How I understand the assimilation other empires get which you complain about only adds a single trait to the assimilated pops unless it's synthetics.
While DA gets to completely convert other pops into their own species and they get to do that from the very beginning.

And now let me blow your mind: Assimilation is also used to refer to the process of itegrating an imigrant into the countries society. No implants, no psychic awakening, no demonic posession.