Lithovore balance - what's the point?

[Senf]

It's totally great to start the game and put all dudes in research and stuff, but taking 20-50 turns to grow a new dude on rich or abdundant plants seems kind of insane.

This perk seems like a huge malus in mid game and even in the expansion phase.

[Marbur]

No, it's the best perk at the moment.
Combined with +50% population growth and rich homeworld you can easily have more than 10 colonies before turn 100, even on highest difficulty level.

[Bl4ckSh33p]

I tried the silicoids and it took ages to get new population on rich+ planets. And I researched +pop growth techs but it did not seem to help much.

[Senf]

Originally posted by Marbur:

No, it's the best perk at the moment.
Combined with +50% population growth and rich homeworld you can easily have more than 10 colonies before turn 100, even on highest difficulty level.

Yeah, actually that works.

[Davor]

While it sucks, that is the point though. You have all these great bonuses, you need to have a draw back. The draw back is the slow population growth. What this game does need is what they had in MOO1 and don't remember if it was in MOO2 and 3, the Fetrile planets that give a population boost and more population than normal that would be on that planet. That would help out Lithivore races as well.

[frdnwsm]

Originally posted by Bl4ckSh33p:

I tried the silicoids and it took ages to get new population on rich+ planets. And I researched +pop growth techs but it did not seem to help much.

The Silicoids are a stock race; all stock races have one weakness or another. The point of designing a custom race is that you can create a race with a trait ... in the case under discussion, Lithovore ... that has a drawback, and then significantly offset it.

Also, the Silicoids have a number of other features, which I wouldn't bother taking myself. Specifically Lava breather and tolerant. They aren't listed as having a reduced birth rate under racial traits, but I'm pretty sure that's an oversight and that they do. They need to take a bigger negative than just repulsive in order to get all that other stuff, and the race background blurb does state that they reproduce slowly.

[Bigfish]

Honestly, it's not that big a deal. Sure, population growth is slow, but you know what? No food, not having to build food structures, not having to blow a bunch of turns with a bunch of guys farming to increase population are all huge advantages. The low population thing is honestly more of a pain as a matter of tax income than empire growth.

[Avalanche]

Actually, being cybernetic allows faster population growth than being lithovore....i discovered that personally, i always played one on MoO2, which took some industry for food, which increased population growth since it counted industry as food, but on MoO, that is not the case, cybernetic is the better trait, besides i very rarely find a rich, let alone an Abundant worlds, its always poor.....or Ultra Poor.

[poppydoggy33]

I havent fully tried this yet, but i think lithovores are supposed to focus on expansion kinda. It doesnt matter if its a crappy planet. Size wont limit you because it takes forever to get population, and biome doesnt matter cause of food, so all that really matters are the minerals.

[Senf]

Well, you still need dudes to man those colony ships.

[Bl4ckSh33p]

I try to get popgrowht techs very soon with them. Cloning tiny rocks to colonize new planets.

[frdnwsm]

There are any number of custom race builds which work quite well. Lithovore and cybernetic are two of them; it's the ancillary skills which you pick that make them truly successful. Lithovore + 50% pop growth, for example.