So, if you have a large empire, constructing syths is worthless now.

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Mik1984

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Aug 4, 2005
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Unlike bio-pop growth, which grows for free, maintaining robot assembly plant is just not worth the input cost if the synths are growing too slow. The nerf on bio-pops just slows them down, the nerf on synths, means it is just not worth building them at all past a certain point.
 
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Yeah, the entire robot research line is now arguably a trap unless you specifically want to synth ascend (and even then you probably should only build assembly plants on your first handful of planets and then stop). Every robot pop you build slows down all your other pops, so the advantage of having more pop faster quickly disappears.

Synth ascension is probably still good in and of itself because you get a ton of production boosts and you don't need to build any new pops for that. Plus it doesn't matter how many robots you actually have before you ascend. Just don't build any new pops after that and just conquer.
 
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Unlike bio-pop growth, which grows for free, maintaining robot assembly plant is just not worth the input cost if the synths are growing too slow. The nerf on bio-pops just slows them down, the nerf on synths, means it is just not worth building them at all past a certain point.
I assume the 3.0 Synth strategy is to play like a Necrophage and assimilate dumb bio-aliens into smart synth citizens.
 
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Yep, generally agree. Synth ascension still seems good, but only because you can have normal pops grow and then convert them + all conquered pops into +30% production +xx% happiness (due to faction ethics) robots. Just turn off the actual synth production jobs. Whether synth ascension is still the best though is up for debate I think.

As a bonus though, if you aren't actually assembling them then -assembly speed and +assembly cost are free picks.
 
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I'm not seeing how that plays out. Synth pops cost a small amount of alloys to assemble. When pop growth slows to a crawl in late game, you're going to have a huge mallus to bio pop growth from available jobs, which does not affect manufactured pops. Even if it takes 500 points to manufacture a pop, you're still going to there faster with ~8 or ~10 growth per month instead of bio-pop growth of 0.5. The small number of alloys from your monthly budget shouldn't be much of a problem by that point.

Early in the game, robots are still great, because more bodies means more resources. The main issue is that they game now requires a kind of hybrid tall/wide strategy that demands a few core planets and a large amount of unsettled space for automated resource gathering. You just have to be much more careful about what planets you colonize and refrain from colonizing everything you can like you normally would, and/or be willing to convert resource worlds to foundries and factories once you get a Dyson Sphere and Matter Decompressor up and running.
 
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I'm not seeing how that plays out. Synth pops cost a small amount of alloys to assemble. When pop growth slows to a crawl in late game, you're going to have a huge mallus to bio pop growth from available jobs, which does not affect manufactured pops. Even if it takes 500 points to manufacture a pop, you're still going to there faster with ~8 or ~10 growth per month instead of bio-pop growth of 0.5. The small number of alloys from your monthly budget shouldn't be much of a problem by that point.

Early in the game, robots are still great, because more bodies means more resources. The main issue is that they game now requires a kind of hybrid tall/wide strategy that demands a few core planets and a large amount of unsettled space for automated resource gathering. You just have to be much more careful about what planets you colonize and refrain from colonizing everything you can like you normally would, and/or be willing to convert resource worlds to foundries and factories once you get a Dyson Sphere and Matter Decompressor up and running.

The pop malus applies to robot assembly, just not machine assembly. By year 40 in my current game, robots take 80 months to complete compared with 40 months to biologicals on my home world..
 
Gotcha. That's rather odd. The cost is still small, but the benefit is tiny if that's the case. Does that affect feeder planets, small worlds you can use just to build pops and ship them out?

80 months means a robot is currently costing 160 alloy just from keeping the assembly plant open. It doesn't do anything else, after all. Once you hit 1,000 pop (IF you hit 1,000 pop) a robot construction takes 25 years.

Until you have synths with allowed AI, robots won't migrate so they need to be moved manually for 100 energy and player attention. The malus, unfortunately is empire-wide so yes, it also applies to feeder worlds.
 
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80 months means a robot is currently costing 160 alloy just from keeping the assembly plant open. It doesn't do anything else, after all. Once you hit 1,000 pop (IF you hit 1,000 pop) a robot construction takes 25 years.

Until you have synths with allowed AI, robots won't migrate so they need to be moved manually for 100 energy and player attention. The malus, unfortunately is empire-wide so yes, it also applies to feeder worlds.

I mean the planet-specific mallus to pop growth, not the mallus to pop growth cost (Ah, the need for jargon, never thought I'd say that about a game).

So, the alloy cost seems less relevant given the small total cost. If you're producing 1K alloys per month, spending even a few dozen to double your tiny pop growth isn't necessarily a waste. The comments about the total cost are more indicative of the over tuned empire-wide growth mallus than anything else IHMO. Unless you actually need those alloys for something else, of course.

Now the opportunity cost for keeping pops in pop assembly jobs at that point is a different matter, but at some point the curve is going to get so steep that it might as well be a wall.
 
I'm not seeing how that plays out. Synth pops cost a small amount of alloys to assemble. When pop growth slows to a crawl in late game, you're going to have a huge mallus to bio pop growth from available jobs, which does not affect manufactured pops. Even if it takes 500 points to manufacture a pop, you're still going to there faster with ~8 or ~10 growth per month instead of bio-pop growth of 0.5. The small number of alloys from your monthly budget shouldn't be much of a problem by that point.

Early in the game, robots are still great, because more bodies means more resources. The main issue is that they game now requires a kind of hybrid tall/wide strategy that demands a few core planets and a large amount of unsettled space for automated resource gathering. You just have to be much more careful about what planets you colonize and refrain from colonizing everything you can like you normally would, and/or be willing to convert resource worlds to foundries and factories once you get a Dyson Sphere and Matter Decompressor up and running.

A few issues:

1. You will not have max synth growth like before, because you do not have 80+ pop planets with the upgraded capital that gives you max synth growth. At least, you probably won't. Technically you can resettle 80 pops to a planet, build the capital upgrades, then resettle them. But aside from this most of your planets will be fairly small, and have 3-4 synth growth.
2. Natural pop growth doesn't slow to a crawl because of overpopulation. Most planets will be 20-40 pops all the way from 2250 to 2400. This is with their pops growing at 8+ per month. What's slowing them down is the massive empire-wide increase in pop cost, which affects all pops.
3. Even if you fix #1 by resettlement cheese and micro, you then end up spending 4 robot construction jobs for 5-10 years just to construct 1 pop. So the RoI on that pop is awful, if you just remove those pop jobs then you've instantly "grown" 20-40 years of pops worth, because now you have 4 robots that can work real jobs that help you.

The net effect is that you're better off letting organics grow quickly, delete the roboticist jobs, and just convert pops to synth as needed.
 
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I'm not seeing how that plays out. Synth pops cost a small amount of alloys to assemble. When pop growth slows to a crawl in late game, you're going to have a huge mallus to bio pop growth from available jobs, which does not affect manufactured pops. Even if it takes 500 points to manufacture a pop, you're still going to there faster with ~8 or ~10 growth per month instead of bio-pop growth of 0.5. The small number of alloys from your monthly budget shouldn't be much of a problem by that point.

Early in the game, robots are still great, because more bodies means more resources. The main issue is that they game now requires a kind of hybrid tall/wide strategy that demands a few core planets and a large amount of unsettled space for automated resource gathering. You just have to be much more careful about what planets you colonize and refrain from colonizing everything you can like you normally would, and/or be willing to convert resource worlds to foundries and factories once you get a Dyson Sphere and Matter Decompressor up and running.

Its not a "small number of alloys", it also costs 5 energy to maintain the building, a specialist job with upkeep and opportunity cost of not doing a different job and a building slot with the opportunity cost of not being occupied by a different building. If you have too much energy and alloys, you are not building enough ships and if you think you have already enough ships, you are not fighting enough conquest wars, just blob faster >>> you don't need claims if you eliminate. The only situation where you can have "too much alloys" is where you have the wrong energy/alloys mix.
 
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Its not a "small number of alloys", it also costs 5 energy to maintain the building, a specialist job with upkeep and opportunity cost of not doing a different job and a building slot with the opportunity cost of not being occupied by a different building. If you have too much energy and alloys, you are not building enough ships and if you think you have already enough ships, you are not fighting enough conquest wars, just blob faster >>> you don't need claims if you eliminate. The only situation where you can have "too much alloys" is where you have the wrong energy/alloys mix.
For a late game empire? Getting your alloys to 1000+ makes it a bit negligible. The energy cost isn't huge either.

Building slots so far haven't been that rare in late game, but the pop opportunity cost is something.

Not every game is about rolling everything and everyone... and at that point, pop growth doesn't matter anyway. Huge deficit juggling to conquer the galaxy pretty much removes pop growth as a consideration from the game entirely by the point building synths stops being useful.
 
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I the late game, the benefits of investing in a new pop are also increasingly negligible. You better conquer others than grow your own. And your logic is wrong, a job is a job, and a building slot is a building slot and each single one can incrementally be used better. It doesn't matter that you have a huge empire producing 1k alloys per month.
 
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Unlike bio-pop growth, which grows for free, maintaining robot assembly plant is just not worth the input cost if the synths are growing too slow. The nerf on bio-pops just slows them down, the nerf on synths, means it is just not worth building them at all past a certain point.
No. Bio VAT now costs an insane 30 food per turn. Unless you have a full blown specialised ring world food segment (pretty late game) it's not even an option until late late late game on anything but a handful of planets.
 
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No. Bio VAT now costs an insane 30 food per turn. Unless you have a full blown specialised ring world food segment (pretty late game) it's not even an option until late late late game on anything but a handful of planets.

At least you don't build your ships out of food. But the discussion here was about building robots Vs the natural growth of pops.
 
No. Bio VAT now costs an insane 30 food per turn. Unless you have a full blown specialised ring world food segment (pretty late game) it's not even an option until late late late game on anything but a handful of planets.
I am not sure if you are referring to the correct thing. Bio-pops just grow on their own, for free.
 
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