Sakkra + Cloning Center + Microbiotics = 10% growth cost!!! :)

[Hans Lemurson]

The Sakkra are quickly turning into my favorite OP race with their ridiculously fast growth curve. -50% Population Growth-Cost means that all the other bonuses to growth are massively multiplied.

Cloning Center: -25% Population Growth Cost for normal races means costs go from 100% to 75%, which raises the growth rate to 1.33x. It's not that impressive really, and it takes 3 population-growths before the center even pays for itself.
But for the Sakkra? It takes them from 50% to 25%, which DOUBLES their growth rate. The food savings are technically the same as with normal races, but they arrive so quickly that your payoff doesn't take long at all.

Microbiotics: -15% Pop Growth Cost. For normal races, combined with a cloning center, this will bring the costs from 75% to 60%, a 1.25x speed boost. It's still useful without the cloning center, since it's applied for free to your entire race, but 100% to 85% is only a 1.17x speed boost and you probably won't even notice. What once took 7 turns will now take 6.

But for the Sakkra? Alone, the free -15% cost turns their growth costs from 50% to 35%, a 1.43x growth increase! That's more than twice as good as what other races get out of it. But the real beauty is what happens when you combine it with a Cloning Center. With a Cloning Center, the Microbiotics reduce your growth cost from 25% to 10%, a 2.5x increase. More then Double!

If you found a new colony and immediately rush-buy a Cloning Center, filling up the 11 slots of a Medium Terran world will only cost 4+5+6+7+8+9+10+11+12+13 = 85 Food. That's the amount of food a normal race pays to grow from Size 6 to 7. Only for the Sakkra, you go all the way.

[Hans Lemurson]

Turn 100 of my current Sakkra game:
Population
Sakkra: 116
Mrrshan: 30
Psilons: 28
Klackon: 28
Terrans: 18
Meklar: 6

51% of the Galaxy is Lizards.
I also think I may have forgotten to enable diplomatic victory...

[Dark Fire]

My current run with the Klackons saw the Sakkra surrounded and stalled by the Meklar, who exploded into the inner part of the spiral galaxy as soon as they could. Sakkra is the smallest race by population right now.

[Hans Lemurson]

Well sure, if you can't colonize, of course your pop will be restricted.

But if you don't face too many obstacles to colonization...
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=657633620
"Very Hard" indeed...

[Jhea]

one item necessary to get that in check.... Bio Terminator ;D

[Hans Lemurson]

I'm pretty sure the AI doesn't know how to play the Sakkra properly. The Sakkra change the equation of the relative value of Food versus Production.

What's telling is that on all of these graphs is that the AIs have no 'curve' to their power, it's just a slow steady constant slope of linear growth, but 4X games are ones of exponential growth.

[Avalanche]

Well, looking for challenge in a game is a mistake in my opinion, look for challenge in your real life pursuits, but if you think the Sakkra are OP, make a proper post about it and customize a race and play that and don't rush this time.

[Swat__Raptor]

I customize a race with extra food production, and the slow growth modifier, and I have way more population than I care for.

I never build coloning facilities, and never take microbiotics, I'm still shuttling people to filling up my less populated planets

you can so easily just spec a few Terran or uber world and just crank up food production and you have a extra population every turn, even without the pop growth bonus and building a coloning facilty

I really don't like how food production is the determing factor for population growth, it just makes anyone able to supply or min max their food production able to have on demand population growth, and when they have enough population they can just turn down food production.

really you can just make a custom race with food production bonus, and you have the abilty to have both food and extra pop growth when you want, if you take pop growth you only have extra pop growth.

also the computer has no idea how to keep up with population growth

I really think Moo2 had a much more balanced model for population growth,

[Hans Lemurson]

Originally posted by Lithari:

Well, looking for challenge in a game is a mistake in my opinion, look for challenge in your real life pursuits, but if you think the Sakkra are OP, make a proper post about it and customize a race and play that and don't rush this time.

You're right, it's my fault for trying to win. I shouldn't have been making all these careful moves to maximize my growth and power. The right way to play the game is to just sit quietly in a little corner and tech up until the endgame, without exploring any of the dynamics of growth and expansion. I should never have attempted to explore the limits of the game. This is "Early Access" and things must be accepted just as they are.

Originally posted by Swat__Raptor:

I customize a race with extra food production, and the slow growth modifier, and I have way more population than I care for.

I never build coloning facilities, and never take microbiotics, I'm still shuttling people to filling up my less populated planets

you can so easily just spec a few Terran or uber world and just crank up food production and you have a extra population every turn, even without the pop growth bonus and building a coloning facilty

I really don't like how food production is the determing factor for population growth, it just makes anyone able to supply or min max their food production able to have on demand population growth, and when they have enough population they can just turn down food production.

really you can just make a custom race with food production bonus, and you have the abilty to have both food and extra pop growth when you want, if you take pop growth you only have extra pop growth.

also the computer has no idea how to keep up with population growth

I really think Moo2 had a much more balanced model for population growth,

It's just a matter of calculating the "Return on Investment" for additional population. How much do they cost, and how much do they produce. With -50% food cost, it means that your food surplus is worth 2x as much, and so it pays off really quick to grow your population before focusing on production to get buildings up and running.

Now an interesting discussion can be had over "Extra Food" versus "Cheaper Growth". Cheaper Growth benefits greatly from compounding subtractive bonuses, and so can develop a massive multiplier on the value of food.
On the other hand, "Extra Food" means that when your colony finally fills up, you will have an extra colonist or two who can be put to more productive work like Science.

It's all about whether you get a better advantage by getting your stuff sooner, or having more stuff at the very end. In a game about expansion and snatching up territory, I think that getting the fastest "return on investment" is the superior approach. Then again I've never really reached the endgame. ...But that's because I win long before that point.

[Sabin Stargem]

Originally posted by Hans Lemurson:

Then again I've never really reached the endgame. ...But that's because I win long before that point.

It would be cool if you could do some multi-player with this setup, and jot down your thoughts as you go along. It is my impression that you have an eye for detail, which would be supremely handy for both developers and players.

Thank you for posting. It was a good read. :)

[Hans Lemurson]

Originally posted by Sabin Stargem:

Originally posted by Hans Lemurson:

Then again I've never really reached the endgame. ...But that's because I win long before that point.

It would be cool if you could do some multi-player with this setup, and jot down your thoughts as you go along. It is my impression that you have an eye for detail, which would be supremely handy for both developers and players.

Thank you for posting. It was a good read. :)

I'm not opposed to a multiplayer session, but the catch is that my careful analysis and eye for detail results in some very long turn-times.

Originally posted by Kref:

2Sabin Stargem:
It's a question what is handy for devs. They were warned that colony ships are too cheap and that the AI should get massive bonuses at EA1. They didn't changed that and now we are waiting in darkness what the devs would decide to do in next patch.

I don't think that the problem is necessarily that Colony Ships are too cheap (though I wouldn't object to an increase) but rather that Colonies pay-off far to quickly. Sure, it seems like a long time, but...no wait, it's actually a fairly reasonable time frame. Could be a bit longer, but what they need is to have a much higher COST, so that you cannot and should not send out colony ships willy-nilly. And the way to do that is to make the cost up-front which means raising the price of the colony ship. If a colony ship is expensive, then you HAVE to be careful about where you settle. Although...you don't want it to be so very expensive that losing a single colony is a game-ending disaster. Maybe nerfing the early growth-bonuses is the way to go. This is a very complex subject.

One thing I DO know for sure, is that the Sakkra make colonies pay off REALLY FAST!!! I need to compare them to the Klackons and Meklar though. The Meklar's food efficiency opens up some interesting possibilities....

However, on the subject of changes to the Early Access game, I do tend towards the cynical. They will fix some bugs, tweak a few numbers here and there for their balancing, do nothing of significance for the AI, and then add some new and unbalanced mechanics.

[Hans Lemurson]

MoO2 colonization isn't directly comparable to MoO:CtS colonization, and I object on principle to any argument that presumes MoO2 was properly balanced. But I do agree that it does illustrate that nuMoO colonization is too cheap.

However, what I meant was "a complex subject" was what the best way is to moderate colonial expansion.
Is making colony ships super-expensive the proper way to go about things?
Or would it be enough to just change the dynamics of new colonies so that spamming out colonizers was not inherently better than developing your existing ones?
If you just make colony ships more expensive, the game isn't fundamentally changed, it just slows down the growth curve. But maybe that's ok, and sufficient.

Whatever problems there are with rapid expansion, the Sakkra are going to amplify them.

[Dark Fire]

Originally posted by Hans Lemurson:

MoO2 colonization isn't directly comparable to MoO:CtS colonization, and I object on principle to any argument that presumes MoO2 was properly balanced. But I do agree that it does illustrate that nuMoO colonization is too cheap.

However, what I meant was "a complex subject" was what the best way is to moderate colonial expansion.
Is making colony ships super-expensive the proper way to go about things?
Or would it be enough to just change the dynamics of new colonies so that spamming out colonizers was not inherently better than developing your existing ones?
If you just make colony ships more expensive, the game isn't fundamentally changed, it just slows down the growth curve. But maybe that's ok, and sufficient.

Whatever problems there are with rapid expansion, the Sakkra are going to amplify them.

Increasing the production cost to produce Colony ships is probably right in line with what needs to be done to extend game length, although balancing the research tree a bit more can do that also.

It's a two-pronged problem: on one side raising the colony ship cost decreases expansion early game, and has it pick up mid game instead when the current production progression (say that ten times fast) makes nearly any contruction except late-game ships trivial and within 1-5 turns; on the other side is changing how production increases over the course of the game (lowering production increases and/or spreading them out much farther over the course of the research progression). This second method, without increasing the cost of the colony ship, sees a much more gradual increase the number of ships that can be churned out over the course of the game, which would produce a steady expansion rate over time.

Now, expansion is not the same as population growth. There's two charts in the path to victory that illustrate this. One shows population growth (# of colonists) and the other shows expansion rate (# of colonies). The curves work with each other to give you an idea of what's going on.

If a race is increasing in population steadily throughout the entire game, they are growing at the same rate they are expanding. If at any time population plateaus or begins to, that means that their expansion has halted. If their population decreases, that means they are losing colonies. If the population is growing at an exponential rate (the curve starts shooting up) it's usually an indication that they are focusing on farming, achieving percentage based growth tech, acquiring more population from invasions, and/or expanding rapidly (the last two can be checked in the colonies graph for indications of those activities).

Either way, decreasing production overall will lead to slower expansion rates from all races, whereas increasing colony ship production cost will only slow expansion until production technology trivializes the cost.

[Hans Lemurson]

Originally posted by darkfire2012df:

...
Either way, decreasing production overall will lead to slower expansion rates from all races, whereas increasing colony ship production cost will only slow expansion until production technology trivializes the cost.

Well put.

[Sabin Stargem]

My take on it: Increasing the colony ship production cost would give the non-breeder races a chance to get an industrial base and to acquire a decent navy of ships. Presumably, a sufficiently large navy to seek out and destroy colonizers and their offspring. Provided that the sheer number of colonizers allows some to slip through the net and to make successful colonies, that would be fairly balanced.

Early game without increased costs for colonizers, odds are low for a breeder race to be preyed upon: Not many races would have the position or resources to intercept colony ships, allowing breeders to exponentially snowball. In such a scenario, a glass jaw or a tax on colonies would be needed to check the growth of a colony breeder.


However, there is a game that took a different approach to (population) breeders: Sword of the Stars, with the Hiver race. They had the toughest and heavily armed ships, fast population growth, and the ability to teleport between controlled worlds. However, they had a major weakness: To get between worlds for colonization and conquest, travel had to be conducted with Slower-Than-Light engines. So where it might take 3 or 4 turns for other races, it is closer to 15+ for the Hivers. That meant everyone else expanded their number of colonies much more quickly, and that they could respond to incoming invasions with lax time tables.


TL;DR:

1 - Make colony ships relatively expensive, so that rivals to breeders can grow a navy.
2 - Give weaknesses that would result in few surviving colonies or weaken impact.

[Zaflis]

Originally posted by Hans Lemurson:

Cloning Center: -25% Population Growth Cost for normal races means costs go from 100% to 75%, which raises the growth rate to 1.33x. It's not that impressive really, and it takes 3 population-growths before the center even pays for itself.
But for the Sakkra? It takes them from 50% to 25%, which DOUBLES their growth rate.

Are you sure it's count that way, or that it's multiplicative? If it was multiplicative it goes like this:
-25% pop cost equals x1.25 in growth rate
If normal pop cost is 100 rate, then x1.25 = 125 rate
If doubled growth is 200 rate, then x1.25 = 250 rate, that wouldn't be double from this (25%) bonus

Other bonuses would be also multiplied
100 x 1.25 x 1.15 = 143.75 rate