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Some Assembly Required (FORK)

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Introduction:
Who doesn’t love exploiting robot labor? One of the ethics and a civic (Materialist and Mechanist) revolves around it. Near the start of the game, robots provide a fantastic source of additional pops, but that’s the problem: they supplement your workers, not replace them. Robotics tech is useful, but it isn’t a playstyle choice aside from Synthetic Ascension, and not everyone wants to go that route or even research synths when it means usually means giving up a source of cheap and reliable workers.

The Problem:
In the base game, without going down the Synthetic Ascension path, which is locked behind Utopia, you can only build one Robot Assembly Plant per planet. This gives one Roboticist, a specialist who takes 10 minerals and turns it into 2 assembly points every month. This means each planet can have at most one robot pop every 50 months. With the 15% growth bonus from the Mass Produced trait, this goes up to 2.3 points, enough to give one robot pop every 44 months. It’s a great boost to total growth, but seems really lame if your empire is supposed to be focused on robot labor, maybe because you have decadent organic pops. The Robot Assembly Plant is always better than the healthcare clinic, which only adds an un-upgraded 0.3 and an upgraded 0.75 points to total pop growth, and takes many more specialists and resources to run. To make matters short, you cannot have Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism.

What it actually does:
The Robot Assembly Plants building now provides 2 Roboticist jobs and has a planet limit of 2 instead of one.
Roboticists now take 2 alloys and produce 0.5 assembly points every month.
Advanced Robot Manufacturing, a tier 2 tech, has been added with robotic workers as a prerequisite. It allows you to upgrade Robot Assembly Plants to Advanced Assembly Plants once the capital has been upgraded. Advanced Assembly Plants have a build time of 480 days and an initial cost of 750 minerals and 50 motes. It provides 5 Roboticist jobs for an upkeep of 10 energy and one mote per month.

Balance:
With the initial robots tech, you can still get up to 2 points of assembly, but this now requires 2 building slots, 4 specialists, and a total monthly upkeep of 10 energy and 8 alloys. Once you have unlocked the tech, which is usually but not necessarily after droids, you can get up to 5 assembly points per month, at a cost of 2 building slots, 10 specialists, and a total monthly upkeep of 20 energy, 20 alloys, and 2 motes. With the +33% bonus for Synthetic Ascension, the 3 Roboticists that come with it, and the Mass Produced trait, you can get up to 9.94 growth points, but this requires a lot time and effort to build up to and is still less, though not always mutually exclusive from, the highest organic growth points that you can get, often from immigration. It also requires synths, which take much more housing and consumer goods than droids.

If you want to use console commands to get the tech, its id is
tech_robot_assembly_plant_2

Reason:
By having assembly points be more expensive, requiring more jobs, buildings, and resources, Robot Assembly Plants are no longer a must go-to option to get more pops for almost free. This also makes healthcare clinics more competitive. The robots require alloys and motes(to produce in any real quantity) to mirror medical workers, who use consumer goods and gases. Alloys also make more sense than minerals lore-wise, as they are advanced and complex pieces of hardware. It also works from a balance perspective: making robots take alloys, which you’re always strapped for, and motes, which you need to make more alloys, means you are going to need to be seriously dedicated to it in order to focus on robotics. Robot foundry worlds are much more possible, as is a robot-reliant organic playstyle. This is balanced by the need for extensive infrastructure and preparation; robots are no longer a free source of a few more pops.

Compatibility:
This overrides 01_pop_assembly_buildings.txt in Stellaris\common\buildings
This overrides 02_specialist_jobs.txt in Stellaris\common\pop_jobs
That means it will not be compatible with any mod that changes the regular or machine assembly plant building. It will also not work with mods that change the job weights for specialists.

Credit: Scythe7 is the original maker of this mod. I've just fixed it since he was unable to.

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