Why are AI's increasingly inefficient, while mutants are increasing efficient?

[Akrasia]

As the title says. AI past the first tier become increasingly inefficient in terms of research per dollar of wages. Meanwhile, as you progress down the mutant/enhancement tech tree, your mutants become MORE efficient in terms of creativity per dollar of wages. As-is, there seems to be no reason to invest in higher-tier AI, aside from the not-all-that-harmful random event that occasionally happens when more than 50% of your workforce by raw number is automated.

[megatrondeathray]

Maybe it's an abstraction of an AI becoming so advanced that it spends more of its time being like, "lol i have ideas and opinions about the taste of soda" rather than building your lunar space mutants

[Akrasia]

If it's spending company time having opinions about the taste of soda, it's getting a pay cut.

[Arcanestomper]

Unless you are a soda company and that is its job.

[Talla]

I'm not sure if AI is affected by inefficiency or hapiness.

I think it's a more efficient (research gain / recruitment time) ratio.
However, as you said, they aren't as good as augmented workers in term of (research gain / upkeep fees) .

Also, I found this in another post :

Admiral Halsey eredeti hozzászólása:

Having lots of AI workers will make them a perportionally higher % of your workforce, which causes negative events. That's one reason to have less better AI's.

[Arcanestomper]

But instead of paying the ridiculous prices for the higher AIs you can just use the extra money to hire a few human employees. For instance the Machine God has an upkeep of 16 and a research of 5.5. For the cost of 16 you can hire 8 simple AIs and 8 human employees for a total of 20 research.

Shoot I just realized that the Machine God is proportionalty worse than bog standard humans, and the humans have no penalties at all, can benefit from worker happiness, and the research bonuses for workers.

The AIs workers are just really underwhelming. The only possible benefit is research ratio to recruitment time. And that's completely worthless. There's never any point where you need to cram as many employees in as possible. Wages are easily the biggest bottleneck not time.

I suppose maybe if you're having problems keeping worker happiness up the AIs might benefit, but honestly my guys were all maxing out happiness all the time so I honestly can't tell when that situation would come up.

[JustMonika]

Hey I wouldn't insult them if I were you, they might be listening....

[Shard]

Also having done an all-ai run, employee happiness seems to impact AIs or at least you still get the events that cause changes in it, and you get the event for too few humans which IIRC impacts happiness. Overall AI are a poor choice outside the first tier, which are superior to humans for quite a while as you need to unlock the tech tree, then you can throw them all away and switch to all human/mutant. Basically the only long-term benefit to AI is that they never leave, which is a minor issue considering mutants never did either for me, and you can just hire normal employees faster than they leave.

I've found my strategy is to unlock the first tier of AI asap, then hire them nonstop until I finish research, then fire all of them and go back to mutants/humans only, and as soon as I unlock a higher level of AI beyond the second tier (for tasks) I instantly fire them because the cost to benefit ratio sucks.

This could potentially be resolved by splitting up the cost into a hire/maintain cost - have humans cheap/free to hire, mutants cost a bit to hire and more to maintain, and AI expensive to hire and very cheap to maintain - this would result in AI being a long-term investment which combined with them not leaving would be quite attractive compared to ongoing costs, while your biological employees would be easier to continually hire nonstop so them leaving wouldn't be as hard to deal with, just maintaining numbers.

[Akrasia]

Mutants will never leave your company, because they're socially ostracized outside of it- unless a particular event happens.

[Arcanestomper]

Kiapha eredeti hozzászólása:

Also having done an all-ai run, employee happiness seems to impact AIs or at least you still get the events that cause changes in it, and you get the event for too few humans which IIRC impacts happiness. Overall AI are a poor choice outside the first tier, which are superior to humans for quite a while as you need to unlock the tech tree, then you can throw them all away and switch to all human/mutant. Basically the only long-term benefit to AI is that they never leave, which is a minor issue considering mutants never did either for me, and you can just hire normal employees faster than they leave.

I've found my strategy is to unlock the first tier of AI asap, then hire them nonstop until I finish research, then fire all of them and go back to mutants/humans only, and as soon as I unlock a higher level of AI beyond the second tier (for tasks) I instantly fire them because the cost to benefit ratio sucks.

This could potentially be resolved by splitting up the cost into a hire/maintain cost - have humans cheap/free to hire, mutants cost a bit to hire and more to maintain, and AI expensive to hire and very cheap to maintain - this would result in AI being a long-term investment which combined with them not leaving would be quite attractive compared to ongoing costs, while your biological employees would be easier to continually hire nonstop so them leaving wouldn't be as hard to deal with, just maintaining numbers.

There is an event where if you have employee happiness high enough all the humans and mutants get a boost. I assume, though I never got low enough to trigger it, that if you go low enough they will take penalties.

So if you're constantly at some very low happiness level AIs might be slightly better in comparison. It's only a 20% bonus though so I don't think it would offset the maintenance of the high level AIs.

As for actually gaining and losing worker happiness that happens at any time. I was losing worker happiness when I had already fired all my workers. It was actually helpful as I could choose the happen to lose worker happiness rather than the one that actually cost money.

Personally I also just hired the first tier of AIs and mutants in roughly equal amounts and got through the entire tree pretty quickly. Then fired them all and spent a much much longer time waiting for the board to give me enough authority to move on.

So in balance terms any advantages that the AIs have in terms of speed aren't worth very much when you're gated by other completely separate resources. There would have to be some ongoing need for research, or possibly a time crunch where you had to get your research done really fast. And while there is the replacement body research line I got that one done in a couple of decades. Well before anything else or it was even close to an issue.

[James Patton]

Hi, dev here, just to let you know I'm fixing the problem where AIs become more expensive per research point. Just some bad maths on my end.

There are loads of events which take worker happiness into account, and I'm not 100% sure which ones can still fire when you only have AI workers. I'm going to look into that soon.

AIs *can* be affected by low worker happiness, the idea being that you still need a few people to run the servers and do maintenance, and those people can strike. However, they only strike for one turn so you don't lose the AI worker. Basically this was a balance thing.

[Fringehunter7719]

The mutants aren't increasingly efficient either. The second mutant is better than the first (where that's not true for AI), but after that they go downhill as well.

The real question is whether high happiness interns aren't better than everything, despite being the fastest to recruit and the first employee you get.

[Arcanestomper]

I was under the impression that interns will quit regardless of your happiness levels.

[Fringehunter7719]

You could be right. I'm not sure whether they quit faster at low happiness levels along with regular employees.

At base though they have a cost-tech ratio of 1.8 though, compared to 1 for employees, 1.5 for simple AI, 1.1 for chatty AI, 1.33 for enhanced employee, 1.5 for contracted ubermensch and 1.33 for monstrous deity.

So, if you're investing the saved cash into tech institute to counter the inefficiency buildup or moving tax sliders it's very possible you're actually ramping up faster. It's probably not sustainable for very long periods, but you can very quickly hire/fire a pretty large pool of interns.

[James Patton]

Fixed the mutants too. They now become less efficient for R&D but more efficient for creativity.

Interns have a -30% modifier to their happiness, so if you're at 100% happiness they behave as though they're at 70%.

Buuuuut, if you could get happiness up to 130%...

Incidentally the idea of a tech company staffed entirely by poorly paid interns is *ahem* an intentional design option.

[Quix0r]

Hi @JamesPatton thank you for fixing all those bugs. :-) Love your game!