Best Premade Xeno?

[Locklave]

1. Which Xeno is your go to?
2. Which Xeno is a never recruit?
3. Which Xeno is a conditional recruit?
4. Which Xeno would you like to use if you were limited to them only?
5. If you did 4 please share the experience.
6. Sanguophage thoughts?
7. Any Xeno tactics you care to share

I'm honestly left feeling like most of them are useless or create huge problems so I'm looking for hidden gems and conditional recruits.

1. Pigskins, Dirtmoles

2. Impid, unless they have Sanguine and only then. It happened once lol.

3.
a) Hussars - As shock troops when the drugs are manageable
b) Neanderthals - If I need melee. x80% hunger rate is a big selling point. Almost a Go To Xeno.
c) Wasters - If I'm doing a pollution friendly run
d) Yttakin - Only if I can't find someone with decent animals
e) Highmates - Only if I have a predetermined partner.

4. Pigskins and Neanderthals interest me greatly for possible runs.

5. I did a Tribal 100% Imp run. I would not recommend it. Mood problems causing breaks more commonly, resulting in violent breaks, resulting in fire, resulting in food shortages. Flames can be absolutely devastating or useless, insanely situational.

Their weakness in melee is much more game breaking then you'd expect. Well armored Impid with 8 melee lost to a maddened rabbit. 1 half dead Neanderthal got past my bows are flames, downed 4 Imps at full health effortlessly.

x50% healing rate. It should be like +6 metabolic rate not a +2, it is the single most crippling problem they have. Everyone is constantly injured and not fully healing before the next raid is extremely common.

Impids are cool, it's a shame they suck so bad.

6. Fun if you want to play a cult.

7. Impids can fire breath without fear of friendly fire (literally), they can fight on a burning tile without catching fire. Devilstand clothing makes it even safer.

[XelNigma]

I disable the imps, pigs and whatever else everytime. Only the toxers can stay. I'm here for scifi not dungeons and dragons or furry-con.

I never receuit the ones I disable.

If the gene system was better, more about research and discovered and didn't replace the entire xenogrem when installing new mutations I would have loved to play a toxers colony that's trying to cure them selves through trial and errer. But they really dropped the ball on implementing genetics imo, so I never bothered. PawnMorpher was way more mad scientist.

The vampire are another letdown. They don't really offer anything besides an immortal pawn and that's meh as far as gameplay goes. I though all the extra buildings in the coffen was going to really amp them up but not even the Vanilla Expanded vampires was anything to write home about. Rim of madness did it better, really caught the essence of being a vampire.

That's about it, despite the dlc being named after genetic the mechanoids where implemented way better. And honestly I kinda feel like the whole genetics system hurt the game. It created a bad frame work that midders have to work within to get stuff done.

Look at the new vanilla expanded androids mod. It's just humans with robot genes.

Thinking about it, the genes system would actually work better as a software system for the mechanoids. It makes no sense your geneticly born with +8 doctoring but as software it does make sense to install that into mechanoids.
Biotech really should have been mechatech.

[The Yeen Queen]

Ah, good. Gatekeeping what's scifi and what's not. As if a scifi world that developed such advanced genetic engineering wouldn't have those who'd mimic fantasy creatures and/or furries.

The genetics stuff is a mix of nanotech and biology. Which is why the genes do stuff that just DNA modifications can't.

Also, the "biotech" name covers the mechs too. Given that it's biotech implants that allow a pawn to control said mechs.

Also, Rim of Madness's vampires....well, weren't good. For the most part a ripoff of White Wolf's vampires in concept. They were an unbalanced mess, really.

[Astasia]

For me the end goal is to make my own xenotype combining the genes found on most of the default ones. To that end I tend to recruit (or imprison) at least one of every xenotype, "gotta catch 'em all," the genes at least. How they perform individually isn't really relevant to me, they all have strengths and weaknesses, and I only really care about extracting their strengths and then negating their weaknesses.

Usually I start with a basic custom xenotype, with just a handful of genes. Any recruits I get are to enhance that xenotype and evolve it into something much stronger, and those recruits of the other xenotypes get converted into that once all their relevant genes have been collected.

I have done a couple all dirtmole starts though, they are really good for the beginning of undergrounder/darkness runs. I did an impid start as well for RP, and probably will again in the future. I don't particularly like the impid loadout, but they are cool thematically and there are some mods that add like demon wings and bigger horns so you can evolve them into something more impressive.

Sanguophages are very "safe" which makes them extremely useful. They make good tanks and caravan mission runners, there's no risk of death and you can just throw them at anything. I don't usually incorporate their genes into my main colony xenotype though, the fairly limited number of slot enhancers and the amount of blood required limits them enough that they tend to remain their own thing with just a few in the colony.

[ShunTheWitch]

Toxers are ok but neanderthals are me and a friend's main recruits from vanilla xenotypes
I much prefer making my own xenomorph bugmen