First of, I am not here to play devil's advocate. I do belive that ME and SA empires have come out worse for wear due to the fundamental economy changes and require a fair bit of help. However, being an avid machine player I've done nothing but spam bots since the patch went out, not going too far into the games themselves, just trying to get a feel for the mechanics. And I believe I'm now starting to see patterns perhaps a little different than what I've read from other people elsewhere. So yes I am aware there is a robots sux thread currently blowing up but that's not the way I wanna go. So without further ado.
2.2 Opened up a lot of possibilities playstyle wise, and bio civs can feel the benefits of the massive overhaul. The key issue with robots I feel, is that their fundamental mechanics have stayed back in 2.1. You have a pop, it's upkeep is energy, it consumes little else, it can do this specific job. You build it to mine a rock so it seemingly offers extremely little in the branched out system of jobs now in place. In my games as mechanist this was really prominent, I could see little benefit to keeping bots over bio workers, the energy cost is substantial, they can't do anything but mine and farm early on, the factories keep endlessly churning out bots where you don't really need them and so on and so forth. Took me a while to find some sort of purpose in all of that mess, but a strategy revolving around mass-ressetling of rob pops to jump start economies was finnaly starting to bear fruit. I could run a world churning out unemployed bots, for no penalty, then just pick them all up and cram them into a new colony. And that's how I eventually came to my conclusion on what is broken about bots in 2.2
2.2 still treats bots the same way. It says they're pops. But they are not. What they are is an advanced resource. You are merely turning minerals into a workforce. The way robots are thought about in the game needs to fundamentally change. Why must I pay 2/3rds of the regular price to move them? I turn them off, toss them in the hold and move them. They're things, they don't a bussiness class. Rather I believe robots and droids should not be treated as pops in any way whatsoever. Rather, the empire should have a joint pool of robotic workers contributed into by your robo-factories that the player can then draw from.
To illustrate how this would work in my mind. You have a robo-factory. You assign this factory, not the world, the actual factory, to construct a robot of specific type. This robot is then put into empire storage, same as a resource, until deployed. To deploy you would simply select a planet and the desired jobs and choose them to be occupied by bots, then select which bots. Then you'd pay a flat fee to transport and deploy your machines and that's that. They then perform the assigned chosen tasks until re-assigned to storage or another place.
The robot in this set up is a simple resource. It is not auto-assigned, it is not auto-upgraded. It is just as you built it and does what you tell it to do. Until you get rid of it. You can always built cheap robots with smaller upkeep to do the most basic jobs, or you can build more expensive droids to fullfill clerk or technical jobs. But they act like a resource and are moved around and utilized as such.
Separate from this is the existence of true AI, ascended synths or ME advanced drones. They would be the only bots able to fullfill specialist or even ruler jobs, and would be burdened with all the advantages or disadvantages of your standard pop.
TL,DR: Bots and droids need to be reworked into a resource type of thing instead of a pop substitute.
