Lithovore home planet

[Ragnaman]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3020852895

I am not getting a bonus to growth from a "Ultra-Rich" home planet for lithovores.

Using 5x + UCP mods.

[Ragnaman]

This is how a freshly colonised Ocean Abundant planet looks like
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3020853477

It gets a much bigger pop growth despite it being 2 tiers lower on richness.

[Sensei]

What you see is still the food mechanic. This is completely unused on lothovore only planets. Instead the game creates a hidden calculation and adds a fixed value each turn (no consumption) and then (same as normal food) if full, more people spawn

[Ragnaman]

Seems like growth for lithovores is taken from the biome quality not the resource richness. And that just seems wrong as silicoids are keen on turning entire galaxy into volcanic planets.

[Sensei]

i think you got tricked by the fact that planets grow fastest, when they are filled 50%

[Ragnaman]

ah, its the "seagrass" lol
so it makes even less sense, why would lithovores get food bonus from seagrass.

[Sensei]

they dont

[dtt.scanner]

The growth bar is lying to you with regard to Lithovores. That threw me off at first too. It is still depressingly slow, even on rich worlds... unless you re-create the Silicoids. I usually take off Lithovore (which to me should be a -20 Disadvantage due to the dependence of EVERYTHING on population, and the inability to effect population growth to the extent that everyone else can.) Since they also get no benefit to pop LIMIT either, even on their preferred world type of Volcanic, I give them -50% consumption instead, so that they will then still be able to populate twice as much on extreme worlds, but gain the advantage of the food bar for population growth. Growth with food far outstrips growth by resource type, and the Silicoids are further knocked back by their -50% growth rate (which pretty much makes them unplayable by midgame.) I can usually expand faster than anyone else, but since you get about 25% the overall growth rate, by mid-game the other factions easily overtake you and you will find yourself on the bottom of every victory tree. Basically, if you don't aggress early and often, and use other faction population to keep your productivity up, you will not succeed. There is a reason why every faction hates Lithovores. They MUST be aggressive to survive.

One thing that would make Lithovores more playable would be to give them Terran pop limit and growth bonuses on EVERY planet, instead of the normal limits, and Gaia limits on Volcanic worlds. They should literally be independent of world type, just as they are independent of food production. Even though they don't benefit from the food bonuses, having a higher POP limit should still help them to grow faster on every world that they settle (if I'm not mistaken). That MIGHT make lithovore playable, and possibly even playable as an actual 10 point advantage.

That's just my opinion. If I do play Lithovore, I use the cheat to give myself another 20-30 points to make up for it. Lithovore is not an advantage. It is, in fact, one of the biggest disadvantages that I have seen.

[Ragnaman]

Originally posted by Sensei:

they dont

they clearly do if you check the tooltip, +4 from resource, that would be seagrass.

[Sensei]

Originally posted by Ragnaman:

Originally posted by Sensei:

they dont

they clearly do if you check the tooltip, +4 from resource, that would be seagrass.

they get +4 of a resource they dont use. they dont get anything from seagrass.

[Ragnaman]

but why does it impact growth of pop then ?

[Sensei]

it does not?

[Ragnaman]

Check the tooltip again.

[Sensei]

i give up.
ok, you are right. in your game something happens, that happens for noone else.
it doesnt make sense that seagrass affects lithovore growth rates, but there is nothing i can do about. enjoy you free grwoth, i guess

[dtt.scanner]

What Sensei is saying is that Lithovore does not change the food bar tooltip to a different algorithm. It is simply not used in the calculation for the actual growth. The Food tooltip will still say what it calculates you would get if you were using food for growth. Lithovores simply do not benefit from it. It is ignored in the final calculation. The actual growth that you get is entirely dependent on the planet Type, Size, and Resource Richness. The growth bar does advance, but it advances according to the alternate Lithovore schedule. Even if it says you have +100 food and will level up in 1 turn, it will not make you grow any faster. The game does not add that to the calculation if you are a Lithovore. It took me a lot of agonizing before I realized that no matter how I tried to push it, you cannot speed growth with food. You can speed it with the few buildings that give direct population growth boosts, like cloning. There are a few others. Some of the "Food Buildings" give a direct population boost, not just a food boost, and I think you do still benefit from all of those. Like I said, I gave up on it and decided it is better to give 50% food consumption (like the Meklar) instead of Lithovore, so that they still benefit from all of the food adds that will eventually boost all of the other races into the lead. What I think is crazy is that Lithovore is considered an advantage instead of a disadvantage. It is absolutely crippling to not get the food bonuses to Pop growth, AND have a negative POP growth modifier to boot. Even if you play well and are leading in the early game, by turn 150 or so everyone will pass you because they have 2x-3x the population.

@Sensei, I didn't believe it at first either, until I realized it wasn't actually giving me the pop that it was saying I would get. Occasionally it would show up by coincidence, but I would be at 1 turn for several, and sometimes many turns before the pop actually got added. It should at least let you sell all of the extra food produced for credits, since other people in the galactic market could surely use it.

Your best bet is early conquest, and populate with another subject race who hopefully have industry, food, or research bonuses. I usually give myself +50% research and creative on my custom build (basically Psilon) no matter who I am playing. -50% food consumption, -25% food production, gives better than the straight +25% food production, for only 1 point. (Better because you get +25% net production for cheaper than that perk costs, and you can fit twice as many people on a toxic/radiated world with the same amount of food--making every world still colonizable for the Silicoid even if they are not Lithovore.)

[Chippoka]

What I have always wonder is if the cloning building helps the Silicoids. As for the food building like sea_grass, I set limits in my mods to keep the Silicoids from wasting production point in building them. Example:

- key: techapp_fungal_farms
requires:
- perk_lithovore_off