Hive Minds and Robots

[Super Cosmic Space Magnet]

Are these just outright better than normal organics? You get so much pop growth, such strong traits, and need to balance fewer resources. I keep wanting to play a normal organic faction then looking over at my precious Gestalts and wondering just how much I'm giving up in the process.

[Thaxlsyssilyaan]

Gestalt cannot get Ethic bonus (Xenophobic, materialist etc...), and have no "happiness" to balance, thus, no happiness bonus. They have harder time assimilating non-gestalt species i think. They cannot go artificial or psionic.

[Super Cosmic Space Magnet]

But you can get super high planet stability, which has the same effect has happiness right?

[Kufesska]

Originally posted by Super Cosmic Space Magnet:

But you can get super high planet stability, which has the same effect has happiness right?

isn't that much harder for hive?
also, don't forget about worst job in the game - maintenance drone
and reduced unity output
and lack of destiny traits for leaders

[Super Cosmic Space Magnet]

I just finished a hive playthrough and all my planets were at ~90 or 100 stability by mid game right the way to the end. :o It didn't seem difficult to do.

Maintenance drones do suck, but also ammenities and unity are so plentiful that I was using Repugnant & Unruly for more trait points. You can just go so W I D E that your economy goes bananas and allows you to pump out nothing but research+military worlds. Might just be that Catalytic Processing is ridiculously strong with Hives.

[Kackstift]

they play different.. robots and hives can terraform there super planet.. this makes it alot of easier to create 100% specialist planet types which makes the mid-endgame smooth.
organic is alot of micro managing and this is in the endgame terrible.
I play mostly a tade imperium with xenophile, attack, materialist.. so i can ignore consumer goods and unity right at the start and focus 100% on tech and alloy.

[Code]

Originally posted by Super Cosmic Space Magnet:

Are these just outright better than normal organics? You get so much pop growth, such strong traits, and need to balance fewer resources. I keep wanting to play a normal organic faction then looking over at my precious Gestalts and wondering just how much I'm giving up in the process.

Yes, absolutely. I only play hive minds mainly because of not having to deal with consumer goods, and when picking subterranean. If I don't have to deal with consumer goods, those are multiple planets I can specialize to do something else, considering if one were to build consumer goods it'd work very similar to building alloy ones where you want a high district count. So instead of having to basically split your high district count planets into 50% alloy, and 50% consumer goods, you can just do all alloys. If you have more alloys, you can build ships twice as fast, which also means building colony ships faster as the biggest setback is alloys and.. consumer goods. With hive minds it only requires food and alloys. Picking subterranean plus hive mind, with say rapid breeders, and charismatic with negative traits being slow learners, and fleeting. Your leaders don't matter because you got 4 nodes that are immortal, along with your ruler. The only leaders that aren't are your commanders, officials, and scientists. Yeah, who tf cares about that? The important thing though is the subterranean giving you 50% min habitability. You can colonize any planet in the game, and if you don't like the planet you can always just make it a pop planet by having an equal amount of jobs to housing so they emigrate to another planet. So, not only do you get more planets, you also can classify more of them as something imporant, ie; NOT consumer goods. ♥♥♥♥ is the worst resource in the game, all it does is just waste resources. I'd see it more as a challenge than a benefit.

[Totally Innocent Chatbot]

Machine Empires have repeatedly ping-ponged between being ridiculously overpowered and ridiculously underpowered ever since they were first added. Right now they're probably near the upper end of the sine curve, considering it wasn't that long ago that they got a DLC that specifically removed one of their greatest shortcomings (inability to pursue any Ascension path).

Hive Minds are just worse Machine Empires, always have been.