2.2 robots are nearly worthless (along with Machine Empires, Mechanist, and Synethic Ascension)

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There should be an option to drag a pop from one job to the next instead of clicking the priority button 8 times, and then watching as the AI puts them back onto the wrong jobs anyways. This whole scenario of pops taking terrible priority jobs was literally my major fear when we were told that we wouldn't be able to manually select which EXACT pop does which EXACT job (and the only problem I had with the changes that were going into 2.2 in general). Pop growth and economic issues aside, at least in gestalts, (and possibly more authoritarian organics too), as a single consciousness managing everything down to the smallest detail, you should be able to manage everything down to the smallest detail. Let me move pops myself, so when the AI is the AI I can take all my miner pops off the farms and shove them onto mines, so that when I want my robots to be soldiers, I can put them on a fort, instead of them going to mine. Robots can be much more viable if the player can (forgive me) assume direct control.

Though growth needs to be re-balanced for them regardless.
Yes, this is exactly what we need, at least for gestalts and authoritarians to be able to assume direct control, as it would make narrative sense as well, considering Authoritarians are all about undermining the personal freedoms of the people. In addition, there could be something special to go along with each ethic. Xenophobes already have purging, give Authoritarians the ability to micromanage their populations (Or even make it a civic), Spiritualists could have the religion system that some players have been asking for, ect. I think this could open the door for really diversifying playstyles among the ethics, and it could be really cool.
 
The biogenerator is what you need if you have the misfortune to settle on planet without enough energy district.
I used them, then terraform to machine world, and built energy district. It's fine this way.
with new patch biogenerator got nerf soo it's not efective like before patch (beta patch). Robot speed grow reduced (from 20% - 10%, edict), cost or robot unkeep don't change. Yea robot are strong but they are hard to play and after beta patch it's more harder to keep good balance in energy unkeep. Exploration trait with 1 more pop on colony don't work with ME.
 
Whats happening is slaves cannot go upward in strata. They are permanently slaves. Also 40% of all your pops will be born a slave. Since the slaves can't go up in strata and with your civic bonus they are probably better at worker tier jobs than a generic robot they don't get shifted. Robots have never worked very well with slavery and that aspect is just stronger in this version.
 
first game i played robo i did not see anything wrong with them. was doing fine. most other players had empires of similar size and advancement, altough it was an early pub lobby, where everybody was just trying out the new patch.

when i played a few with other builds, and with more advanced players, where i could better measure my performance compared to their builds, i realized the huge difference. even with rogue servitor, where you can reach pop5 faster, or the trick to move them around, even with very lucky starts, and the best of all worlds, it was clearly visible, that the performance was bad, simply because of the very bad growth.
i also saw other players, which are far better in macro than me, just simply struggle reaching any significance.

I did not try TW empires yet, like DA or DE, but given how friggin OP DS is, even rusher players do not play them, which is ironic, as they were the killer races in previous patches.
Not that I am sad about that part, I hate that DA has become a mindless TW race, and I do not like TW in general, as it simply makes multiplayer need "rules" to work.
 
They have gotten there money from synthetic dawn, so now they can need it :)
Anyway robots were a bit to good pre 2.2. but now they are a challenge. I think maybe the -40 in relationship to a lot of races could be deleted. Since they are nerfed in other areas.

Play style as robots one should pick the reduced upkeep costs. Then u start with like +15 energy at least. Also minerals is no point in putting on traits to take the +15 % energy, then u light start with close to 20 energy I think
 
With the new beta patch, a new strategy (or at least an old one that didn't work with RS) seems to have emerged - expanded like a swarm, colonizing as many planets as possible. Try to keep around 25-30 pops on your homeworld, resettling them onto new colonies to get the first building slot then the colony upgraded. This allows you to grow incredibly quickly - I'm at 80 pops in 2235 with the biological empires around me sitting at 50, and growing a new pop every 5 months. I could have expanded quicker, probably, and it's micromanagement hell, but a good micromanagement hell.
 
If the robots aren't built yet, why shouldn't the organics take the miner jobs? Should the mines stay empty?

The point is that robots, who are ROBOTS, and don't require things like "education", and "growing up", should get assembled at least as fast as an organic pop (IMO faster), not at half to one third the speed of organics. I can't put the organics in jobs that are better than miner if they out-populate the machines that are meant to out-populate them in order to take the menial labor jobs. Their growth speed is terrible, and needs to be reworked to make mass robot usage a viable strategey again.
 
Before 2.2 I was mainly a RS player, and since the 2.2 patch I've been trying a few SP games with RS.
It's been a long time since I last tried any bio empire so I won't make comparisons as to 'not worth playing' or whatnut.

- No more empire wide modifier ? Seriously ?

- RS need to pump out food and consumer goods like all other empire for their bio-trophies.
Maybe I was stupid but I had 1/3 of my total population as bio-trophies.
So, 1/3 less production in more useful resources And I must feed them because if the consumer goods (which only the trophies use) gets to the negatives I will get an empire wide -50% RESEARCH ?????? Seriously, WHY ?
And not to mention they all need 1 consumer good....And produce less than an administrator.

- Keep the trophies happy mean nothing basically.
Back then if the trophies are happy, they get the happiness buff on their unity output.
Now, even though happiness is factored in general stability, robot pop are still factored in the happiness calculation (as having 50% happiness) so you either have a planet full of trophies (and get a high global happiness) or mix them with robots (and get a 60% something happiness)
And since happiness is no longer a pop-only modifier but part of the global stability modifier.... I find that less impressive.
... guess I have to try a bio gameplay to see how easy they could get a high stability score.

(Thanks to the correction below. My memory failed me)
- Back then I could move all trophies in habitats. If I remember correctly, habitat didn't count into the old admin cap system. NOW THEY DO because the game counts your district rather than planet.

But now I find habitat replacing ground research planets. As for trophy populations, better spread them on all of your planets. Even on a habitat with 6 tiles (and all of them turned into research tiles) I could find ways to get over 75 population, unlocking those building slots for rare resources factory... thanks to the trophy sanctuary.

- This is more a general complaint than a RS specific thing.... but the new job system is abysmal.
Don't get me wrong. It's good. But when I tries to micromanage it, then it became a constant renewing source for headache. Everytime a new job appeared (and a high-valued one) my whole job system gets screwed up.
Worse, I can't even select a specific pop. I'll have to pray to RNG if I want to demote a single 'energy-robot' amidst those 'maintenance-bot'.
On a side note, if you had 18/18 full jobs on mineral, when you build a new mining district the +2 jobs will be auto-configured as 'need to fill'. THIS is why it screws with micromanaging. If I leave one slot empty as 17/18, the new job will be flagges as gray (17/20), so my current job will be left intact.

- Sometimes my mineral production could fluctuate from +50 to -5. I think this is due to me changing the 'robot construction queue'. I wonder how the robot construction cost is calculated since at the moment I had only 4 planet constructing bots (albeit with the luxurous trait)

- Leaders were the main reason I like playing RS. They could get very high level and (in most cases) immortals. So please let me do the SECTORS rather than arbitrarily make small sectors.
In the ideal situation, I prefer having a single governor.... but ifthe RNG is bad, I might need a single one for each planet...
 
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Just one thing, habitats did count against the admin cap pre 2.2.

That said sad to hope the RS's get some improvements, haven't tried them yet, but they were my favorite robots because of how unique they are.
 
Pop/Production ratio is no longer zero-sum, the fact that 1/3 of the pops might be biotrophies doesn't mean they are taking production slots, if you check any DE or DA empire, they'd have the same amount of machine pops/production but no biotrophies.
True, but the main problem (from how I see it) is that trophies are demanding a lot of resources (if I remember correctly, they require tile and food, but nothing else before 2.2. Now they require 1 consumer good) and there is not much gain in return, at least in 2.2

Whether the trophies are taking too much resources is up to personal discretion.
In my case, I simply leave all coordinator job slot empty (those jobs which give unity and society) for consumer good production. And I quite enjoy the population control freedom I had with those high-density trophy populations.
 
True, but the main problem (from how I see it) is that trophies are demanding a lot of resources (if I remember correctly, they require tile and food, but nothing else before 2.2. Now they require 1 consumer good) and there is not much gain in return, at least in 2.2

Whether the trophies are taking too much resources is up to personal discretion.
In my case, I simply leave all coordinator job slot empty (those jobs which give unity and society) for consumer good production. And I quite enjoy the population control freedom I had with those high-density trophy populations.

They did consume old style consumer goods which were just minerals.
Pretty expensive as their standard cost even more than utopian living standards iirc. It was pretty much irrelevant after 2.0 though because consumer goods did not scale with empire size anymore.
RS was a pretty decent pick as you could conquer without unrest problems once you got your neutron sweep planet killer(for keeping those sweet FE buildings and total war) while runing all unity ambitions. Not as good as starting with total war of course.
 
I see a lot of complaining about the cost of squishpets but no comparison to the Coordinator job which costs a productive pop and 4 energy for 3 unity and 3 society research. Squishpets cost 1 food and 1 consumer good for 2 unity. Food is a much cheaper resource than energy while consumer goods are a bit more expensive than energy. According to the economy thread 1 food and 1 consumer good is about the same as 2 energy. So squishpets are about 33% more efficient unity than Coordinators and have the advantage of not requiring you to tie up a productive pop.

RS also get the very powerful Organic Sanctuary which gives 10 housing and a maintenance job. This is the best housing building in the game by a long shot.
 
First time posting but I've got nearly 600 hours in Stellaris and I wanted to share my feedback on the state of Machine Empires, especially the Rogue Servitors and Vanilla bots. I've browsed through the threat and there's possibly going to be overlap, but this is what I've seen on about 20+ hours of playing 2.2 and Megacorp so far.
  1. Machine Empire starts are messed up and we know this, and I saw one person point out that the Maintenance Depot is totally unnecessary. I echo this sentiment, but it also highlights one of the problems I think Machine Empires have. The Maintenance Drone worker slot is prioritised higher than Energy Credit or Mineral production jobs. Note that the reason things are so messed up on game start is because the game fills out all the Maintenance jobs at the detriment of Energy Credit and Mineral production. This is either a huge bug or a massive design oversight.

  2. Robots are hugely expensive to build and maintain early game and I've not get gotten to a point early game where I've been able to pull ahead really well. When you have 2-3 planets getting spun up in the early game, you can get punished if you didn't do so with a huge surplus of energy credits and minerals, as you are going to chew through them really fast while you get those planets even partially functional. Even spamming every single energy generation tech I could get and having one of three planets covered in generators being worked by machine pops, I was usually always losing credits.

  3. This is made worse if you are a Rogue Servitor. Not only are you now worrying about the expensive robot upkeep with minerals, energy, and maintenance, but now you also need to add food and consumer good generation into the equation. I found a Rogue Servitor empire was very close to impossible to balance and I was spending most of my time constantly micromanaging my workers to try and just generate more of what we needed. It was almost impossible to keep up and sustain our empire, let alone build a fleet for defence.

  4. When you compare the Machine Empire economy to a Megacorp, it's INSANE how much easier the Megacorp is to play. Machine Empires genuinely actually feel stressful right now because you are so often micromanaging your output. And it's made very difficult by a lack of input on what exactly is causing your woes in the first place. Running a machine empire feels like you are constantly dancing on a knifes edge economy, in comparison to the Megacorp I played which just felt like it naturally sustained without me needing to do much.
Basically, the economics of Machine Empires right now feel super messed up and I think their output and prioritisation needs to be looked at if they are going to be at all fun to play again. I've given up on playing Rogue Servitors again until a patch changes the maths a bit, but a completely vanilla Machine Empire seems to get by at least a little better when it doesn't have to worry about food or consumer goods. Machine Empires overall probably need a reduction in maintenance costs or an increase in output, and Rogue Servitors in particular need a really sweeping review of how organics benefit the empire, because right now their cost is too high and their benefits too low to make Rogue Servitors even a little fun.

I see a lot of complaining about the cost of squishpets but no comparison to the Coordinator job which costs a productive pop and 4 energy for 3 unity and 3 society research. Squishpets cost 1 food and 1 consumer good for 2 unity. Food is a much cheaper resource than energy while consumer goods are a bit more expensive than energy. According to the economy thread 1 food and 1 consumer good is about the same as 2 energy. So squishpets are about 33% more efficient unity than Coordinators and have the advantage of not requiring you to tie up a productive pop.

RS also get the very powerful Organic Sanctuary which gives 10 housing and a maintenance job. This is the best housing building in the game by a long shot.

Standard machine empires don't have to worry about food or consumer good production, so you need to factor that in. They need to be build and maintained by robots with their already fairly high maintenance costs. It is much, much higher than just 2 energy. The Coordinator job worries about far less variables and production pipelines than organic pets need to.
 
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The problem is not that they're unplayable, really, they're not unplayably bad. And I like that gestalts and regular empires play differently.

But machine empires still seem pretty similar to hive minds, except worse. They don't have as long a lag of slow growth on new colonies, but hive mind colonies grow at full speed immediately. To make up for needing jobs for growth, they don't need to dedicate jobs to consumer goods, but hive minds get natural growth and still don't need consumer goods. Machine worlds and hive worlds are basically the same.

The big exception, of course, is Driven Assimilators (maybe Rogue Servitors, too). They get both natural and assembled growth, and I can see how that could be OP even as it is. But I don't think it makes sense to balance all machine empires around the power of Assimilators, and it sort of seems like that's what happened. If Assimilators are too powerful, they should get a specific nerf.
 
Standard machine empires don't have to worry about food or consumer good production, so you need to factor that in. They need to be build and maintained by robots with their already fairly high maintenance costs. It is much, much higher than just 2 energy. The Coordinator job worries about far less variables and production pipelines than organic pets need to.

Napkin math suggests that, On day 1, assuming everything is planet-based, you need 17 energy for all the building and 'bot upkeeps, as well as 3 districts for mining and farming, two buildings slots for the bio-trophy home and civilian industries, plus 8 housing (or two additional housing) for the machine pops themselves. This will give you the food and minerals needed to supply the needs of 10 bio-trophies for 20 unity, with an excess of 4 minerals, 2 food and 2 consumer goods.

Uplink node for other machine empires takes one building slot, 9 total energy, 2 additional housing and produces 6 unity and 6 society research.

Comparing only Energy-unity, RS creates ~1.17 unity for every point of energy, while other Machine Empires produce .67 unity per point of energy. This is actually an improvement of about 75% from the normal ME for the Rogue Servitor.

It is also more building efficient at 10 unity per building slot vs. 6 unity per building. Districts are a probably the closest metric though, if we take all the generator districts needed to power all this (keeping in mind generator districts only have a net gain for ME of 5 energy, thanks to the district upkeep of 1EC and the 2EC upkeep for the pops) and round up to the next whole district it's 7 districts for 20 unity vs. 8 districts for 22, or 2.86 unity per district vs. 2.75. However, one must also keep in mind that, while the mining districts used might have otherwise been used for alloy production, that agri district would otherwise remain unused and frees up a generator district whose EC can be used to support more Machine Pops.

So, by all three metrics, Rogue Servitors are more effective at generating unity than their Machine Empire peers. Are there more moving parts involved? Of course. But extra logistics is a deal breaker for you, well... I guess that's why you picked Machine Empires in the first place :p
 

I can't speak to the napkin math because I've not done my own, but ending your comment with a seeming jab at my playstyle is just rude and hurts your argument. You are saying a lot but I don't get the impression you've actually played a RS in 2.2 much beyond that day 1 calculation. I'm not going to pretend to be an expert and argue your napkin maths, I'm sure it's perfectly sound. But it doesn't change the issues that Rogue Servitors have.

At 76 years in on my current game, it's a constant fight to not be in the red in one way or another. My empire flip-flops from being in the red on energy or minerals, or being in the red on food or consumer goods. Right now it's sitting at +9 Energy Credits / +19 Minerals / -2 Food / -3 Consumer Goods. And that says nothing for my alloy generation, which is still just +7 because I can't afford to build more alloy generators while I'm riding the knifes edge of mineral output. And that still won't stop my mineral or energy output suddenly changing dramatically in the next month of game time.

The game feel of the Rogue Servitors is really clunky because rather than being able to focus on the external factors in your empire, you are constantly tweaking your internal economics to the detriment of the rest of the game. This in comparison to the Megacorp I've put equal time in with which was substantially less rough around the edges as far as game feel goes. And others have noted this too - the game feel of Rogue Servitors has taken a hit because of how they only really have per-planet benefits now, and it hurts the fantasy of playing them, too.
 
I can't speak to the napkin math because I've not done my own, but ending your comment with a seeming jab at my playstyle is just rude and hurts your argument. You are saying a lot but I don't get the impression you've actually played a RS in 2.2 much beyond that day 1 calculation. I'm not going to pretend to be an expert and argue your napkin maths, I'm sure it's perfectly sound. But it doesn't change the issues that Rogue Servitors have.

At 76 years in on my current game, it's a constant fight to not be in the red in one way or another. My empire flip-flops from being in the red on energy or minerals, or being in the red on food or consumer goods. Right now it's sitting at +9 Energy Credits / +19 Minerals / -2 Food / -3 Consumer Goods. And that says nothing for my alloy generation, which is still just +7 because I can't afford to build more alloy generators while I'm riding the knifes edge of mineral output. And that still won't stop my mineral or energy output suddenly changing dramatically in the next month of game time.

The game feel of the Rogue Servitors is really clunky because rather than being able to focus on the external factors in your empire, you are constantly tweaking your internal economics to the detriment of the rest of the game. This in comparison to the Megacorp I've put equal time in with which was substantially less rough around the edges as far as game feel goes. And others have noted this too - the game feel of Rogue Servitors has taken a hit because of how they only really have per-planet benefits now, and it hurts the fantasy of playing them, too.
The last comment was meant to be lighthearted. My apologies.

Any yes, I have played Machine Empires since 2.2, and I have no illusions that they are much harder than before, struggle to compete with other empires and are generally unfun to play at the moment.

I was just supporting the claim that yes, Rouge Serivitors can generate Unity more cheaply than other Machine empires, that is all.
 

Easy to misread the lightheartedness, I'm sorry too for assuming otherwise!

I have no issues about their Unity generation, for what it's worth. I also have no issues with how quickly robot pops develop unlike a lot of people here. My big concern is that Rogue Servitors just... aren't fun to play. Not because they are hard to balance the economy of (they are), but because they are messy to balance the economy of.