Machine Empire buff

[𝕊𝔾𝕋 𝕄𝔸𝕁𝕆ℝ]

I'm sure there will be those that disagree but figured I'd put in my opinion based on my experience.

I feel that Machine Empires are at a significant disadvantage compared to other races due to Very low population growth.

Played a game online recently (vanilla) with a shattered ring origin and by the end of it, I still didn't have anywhere close to a fully functioning empire. The whole playthough felt like an absolute slog, managing priorities on various resources going from energy crisis to alloy crisis and everything else it just never seemed to end! And whilst the enemy had several 20/30k fleets, I could manage around 25k and that was pretty much all in!

Now to clarify, I'm a total noob at stellaris, I usually play offline with mods to make machine intelligence races more fun to play so I'm sure there is probably something I can do to help ease the slow population growth but I've watched you tube videos on traits, civics & strategy but nothing seems to bring Machine intelligence more in line with other races.

I like to play technology path rather that slavers/purging etc so not sure if other machine playstyle would be better and if so, that in itself is also a pretty huge flaw, forcing Machine intelligence players to play a specific way and all other formats are so far behind they are rendered obsolete!

I hope for a buff or at least look at balancing the various options around machine races.

[manniepants]

Machine empires have slightly lower base growth at the beginning of the game but higher base growth at the end of the game. Non driven assimilators can easily get to 12 pop growth per month which is pretty close to what bio and synth ascended empires can get.

The real advantage is the %100 habitability. More planets means more pops growing at once. This can be used to really explode your growth, even in the early game

[𝕊𝔾𝕋 𝕄𝔸𝕁𝕆ℝ]

So you're saying for a machine empire I have to spam colonies? That would have negative effects on empire sprawl and upkeep costs and still having the issues of manning industries. I would have to establish several colonies to a point I can use them as a seed for suppling pops to a main colony. But that would take to at least mid game to setup correctly.. Meanwhile bio races have steam rolled tech/fleet power and economy leaving me waaay behind.

It's good that machine pops get better late game but what use is that if I'm already behind in every category.. It would be too little too late as a 100k+ fleet invades my space

As I said, I'm not hugely experienced with stellaris, but I think Machine races got nerfed back to dial up days!

[manniepants]

Dont worry too much about admin cap. One uplink node (or whatever its called) per planet should be enough to stay under the cap.

Pops are power in stellaris the more pops you have the more resources you can generate. In my recent Rogue Servitors game I was #1 in every category by about 2300, right around when mid game stars. I also used the shattered ring origin, which is very good for generating science.

The earlier you get those other colonies running the better. If you start early enough you should b able snowball your economy pretty quickly. I will admit, however, that I have next to no experience playing against other humans. All my experience comes from facing the AI on grand admiral difficulty and Im sure that fight against humans would be much more difficult, so I might not be able to help much there!

[manniepants]

Oh also, for a tech focus run It is very helpful if you learn the tech tree. It seems random but there are actually hidden trees that you can figure out (or look up). If you know which techs lead to what you can kinda game the system to some high level techs much earlier than you normally would.

The main trick to this is NOT research certain techs in order to keep the pool you draw new options from as small as you can. It can make a really big difference, for example ignoring the railgun type weapons in the engineering tree could lead to getting something like megastructures as early as ~2275. Or do the same in the physics tree, with lasers, to get the jump drive super early