A key point of lithovore is that population grows based on a planet's mineral richness. It's essential to get as many rich and ultra rich planets as possible, and a bad galaxy seed that doesn't put any such planets near you can make a lithovore start much more difficult. Getting cloning center as soon as possible will help as well. In the mean time since you don't have farmers, you should have enough workers to build a fleet at the beginning strong enough to deter any attacks while you expand. With the increased production capacity, you might also be able to rush out a troop transport or two and rush another race before they get a star base up on their second planet.

Lithovore can be very good if you play it right. You either have the capacity to rush in early and conquer territory, or by colonizing a large swath of planets, you can out-produce other empires in the long run as your planets slowly fill out population capacity.

I tend so say 20 is too much, but that really is not easy to calculate. There are ups and downs, which also have different impact depending on the map. For example, a planet immediately starts producing, while food based races need food production first. So for growth you could say something like "you have about +2 workers, they just are not there" while you also dont get the money for them, of course. all in all i would say they are very good in the early game, but lose value quickly

I think, most likely you also played them not optimal. There are a few game mechanics for growth) that you need to know so that you can use them well.

Thanks for the tips. I probably didn't get clone center early enough and should have attacked sooner. I will try again. Still a bit sceptical that 20 points is right, though. I also think that the complete inability to negotiate is harsh and may be worth more than -5 points. Although this depends on the number of players in the game. With 8 players you miss out on tons of income and research, with 2 players not so much.

A small benefit is that the AI will stop offering some pocket change for getting back a dangerous high level spy and get mad when you refuse. :)

P.S.: I found this old thread about Silicoids, where they were considered overpowered. I guess the race is just a hard to evaluate, because they are so extreme.

https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/discussion/800155077/1291816880501792927/

Playing on Extreme. I am competitive with the computer right up until my finances run out (around battlestations) and then I am in trouble. I cannot afford to put defenses on all planets in order to keep my command points up and the army graph high enough to prevent everyone from turning on me. Couple of people I know have tried this. We all hit the same issue. No trade treaties plus the reduced pop make the income too low. The more planets the larger the issue.

I was able to keep my pop at 60% of the leader thanks to a helpful leader with pop growth.

Am I missing something? It seems like the Silicoid either need more command points or some level of financial perk to be able to maintain the starbases/battlestations required to support the fleet.

Alright, so Silicoids (and especially lithovore custom races) are utterly overpowered if you play them right. The issue is that playing them right requires a little knowledge about the growth formula. The base growth rate of a new colonist is determined by 4 factors, the two you know; food and growth modifiers, and the two you probably don't (which is why you believe silicoids suck); planet capacity and current population. Silicoids remove food from the equation and replace it with mineral richness.

Planets with higher capacity (better biomes, biospheres, inferno uber, advanced city planning, larger, etc) have slightly higher growth. That said, the further your current population is from 50% of the planet's capacity your growth is significantly lowered that it will not only counteract the bonus from the planet being larger, but also make larger planets significantly worse than small ones.

The takeaway from this that you actually need to know is you achieve peak growth at 50% planetary capacity. Notice that unlike a race that needs to farm, you can usually saturate your production cells with only half population. What you should be doing is time colony ships and civilian transports to build once you tip over to 51% planetary population. The rate at which you expand to new planets should be entirely based on the rate at which you are filling existing ones. Civil transport pushing settled planets to 40-50% is extremely important and should take priority over new colonies. As the silicoid, people are far more important than land; always take the route that maximises the amount of people you have.

You should also bump your tax up to 40%, as with half capacity planets the difference between -30% and -40% morale is literally meaningless. You will still have economic troubles from excessive building maintenance not being paid for by your population, but your base production and research should be over double that of your neighbours. I recommend selling old ships and simply building new ones instead of upgrading if it's expensive, especially once you start getting discounts from orbital shipyards, volcanic forges, microlite construction, and space elevators.

Also keep in mind that the only point of pollution that matters is the one which degrades the biome (and even then that might be beneficial once you have access to your uber, since you can only upgrade barren and volcanic). As such you can smash out production projects with ridiculous pollution gains, before cooling off on research once it's done.

You can also go full tryhard once you conquer another race by always building colony ships from them, as this will transform a captured colonist into a Silicoid. Also sending civil transports containing conquered races to non-rich/u-rich planets and civil transporting the silicoids off it so they can settle actually useful rich worlds. This is a level of micromanagement that is completely unnecessary for silicoids to be OP, but it does make them stronger.