What are your thoughts on Lem?
- Thread starter Weyird
- Start date
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I’ve played a couple of hours this evening. Pretty normal settings, captain difficulty, trying out the clone origin.
My initial impression is “so far, so good”. I’ve had a few events I’ve not seen in a while and my neighbours are keeping up (though I’m not minmaxing). Clone soldiers is really interesting because at the start you have insane pop growth. I kept getting unemployment because I couldn’t build fast enough! It’s a great early game boost but it’s completely gone a century and a bit later. You hit the cap of clones and need to swap to robots, migration treaties, or conquest.
The galactic council has formed and I’m fourth in line. Primarily because I’m military focused and the first few resolutions increased political power through fleets. On the diplo side I picked the diplomacy tree and there’s one really cool feature: getting occasional favours from empires just for having envoys. I farmed favours from a weary neighbour this way, eventually having enough to persuade them into a commercial pact.
Final thoughts: clone origin plays pretty differently, will take some playing around to figure out good builds. The best change so far is the unity trees. Having more than 7 feels so good to choose now!
My initial impression is “so far, so good”. I’ve had a few events I’ve not seen in a while and my neighbours are keeping up (though I’m not minmaxing). Clone soldiers is really interesting because at the start you have insane pop growth. I kept getting unemployment because I couldn’t build fast enough! It’s a great early game boost but it’s completely gone a century and a bit later. You hit the cap of clones and need to swap to robots, migration treaties, or conquest.
The galactic council has formed and I’m fourth in line. Primarily because I’m military focused and the first few resolutions increased political power through fleets. On the diplo side I picked the diplomacy tree and there’s one really cool feature: getting occasional favours from empires just for having envoys. I farmed favours from a weary neighbour this way, eventually having enough to persuade them into a commercial pact.
Final thoughts: clone origin plays pretty differently, will take some playing around to figure out good builds. The best change so far is the unity trees. Having more than 7 feels so good to choose now!
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Anyone run across major bugs? I want to jump in but I'm always hesitant to start a committed playthrough the day a big patch drops, in case I run into major bugs.
Edit: Hivemind Necrophage has tons of issues. I am extremely dissapointed and Hivemind Necrophages needs changes. I explained it in detail in the link below.
forum.paradoxplaza.com
I was about to make a thread inviting you guys to share your Hivemind Necrophage experiences, so I am looking forward to those in this thread.
So far I have tried only Hivemind Necrophage. What I can say is: The Pop Trait is exactly the same is it is for normal empires, only Necrophage Hiveminds get 5% bonus Complex Drone output and -10% Menial Drone Output. +80 Year Livespan and -50% Upkeep. You also get bonus Ruler output which is useless for Hivemind since Gestalt don't have rulers. Please update this with something useful like removing the Menial Drone output Malus for Hiveminds.
Now here comes the interesting part. Hivemind Necrophages get -75% growth like other Necrophages, this applies to pop assembly. And you can only assemble Hivemind pops. You can not use Budding (the 3 cost trait) together with Necrophage Hivemind.
In practice, your Hivemind Necrophage pops are being assembled at a speed of 2 * 0,25, so only 0,5 speed. However, I noticed that the Spawning Drone job adds 10% pop growth speed, but only if you play Hivemind Necrophage. This 10% pop growth speed applies to your non-Necrophage species, which grows at the usual rate.
The non-Necrophage species can only ever be livestock. They are not happy about it which means you get a huge malus to stability. That feels bad given the fact that Paradox just removed Stability from the Chamber of Elevation. On the other hand, the Necrophyte job adds 5 amenities each. Atleast thats better than a Maintenance Drone job. That job is awful.
In my games, I started the game with 50 extra Amenities. You can immediately unemploy 11 Maintenance Drones out of your 33 starting pops, thats 1/3rd of your economy. The rest of your amenities are covered by Necrophyte jobs, Spawning Drones and building bonuses. So you get to play without having Amenitiy issues as Gestalt for once. That feels nice.
Your Necrophage pops get +5% Ruler pop output which is completely wasted because Gestalts have no rulers. Atleast I didn't see any effect of this. Paradox should change this and add a different kind of bonus. Maybe remove the -10% Menial Drone output bonus. It feels kinda bad to get +5% Complex Drone output but -10% Menial Drone output. Keep in mind your Necrophage pops have to do all the jobs for Hivemind. Unless you get another Hivemind species thats not Necrophage, that one would be better suited for Menial Drone jobs.
You can get a Synchronicity Tradition which grants unity whenever a pop is Necrophaged. How much? How good is it? I have no idea. There is no information on this whatsoever. This is missing, please add more info Paradox.
Remember the fact that Necrophages grow only at 25% speed? That makes the cloning Vats from Biological Ascention completely worthless. You are paying 30 food upkeep for 0,75 growth for Necrophages. Not worth it at all. This feels bad. Necrophages should get something useful out of Biological Ascension as Hivemind, because thats all you can do. Maybe add a different kind of building for Necrophages with the Biological Ascension that improves Necrophage pops? That would be useful.
You end up which an insane amount of food with nothing to spend it on unless you take the civic to turn Food into Alloys, which is probably going to be used by every Hivemind Necrophage player.
Overall impression: Apart from starting with more pops, you have extremely ineffective jobs, you have big stability penalties. Your livestock pops only produce 4 food instead of 6 food and do not scale with research or edicts. Its much worse than any non-Necrophage Hivemind since your growth and pop efficiency are terrible. You get 4 pops per guaranteed Habitable Planet so thats a boost. You get reduced upkeep and you benefit from the increased growth that Hiveminds have. On the other hand you sacrifice a huge part of your pop Assembly growth. Overall the bonuses do not make up the maluses.
What I want from the next patch:
Get rid of the Ruler Output bonus for Necrophage Hivemind pops, replace it with something else or get rid of the -10% Menial Drone output malus for Hivemind Necroid.
Add some info on the Synchronicity Tradition for the amount of unity you get from Necrophaging pops.
Replace the Cloning building unlocked from the first Biological Ascension with a building which improves Necrophage pop output. Because paying 30 food per month for 1,25 monthly Necrophage pop assembly is a terrible deal. Or get rid of the -75% Assembly speed Malus and allow Hiveminds to assemble Necrophage pops.
Necro hives: expected a buff to hives but got a nerf
I was real exited for necro hives but unfortunatly they are are far worst then regular hives cus the secundary species can only be livestock, so for the first 10 year you basicly have no main species pop growth, after that, its minimal at best...
I was about to make a thread inviting you guys to share your Hivemind Necrophage experiences, so I am looking forward to those in this thread.
So far I have tried only Hivemind Necrophage. What I can say is: The Pop Trait is exactly the same is it is for normal empires, only Necrophage Hiveminds get 5% bonus Complex Drone output and -10% Menial Drone Output. +80 Year Livespan and -50% Upkeep. You also get bonus Ruler output which is useless for Hivemind since Gestalt don't have rulers. Please update this with something useful like removing the Menial Drone output Malus for Hiveminds.
Now here comes the interesting part. Hivemind Necrophages get -75% growth like other Necrophages, this applies to pop assembly. And you can only assemble Hivemind pops. You can not use Budding (the 3 cost trait) together with Necrophage Hivemind.
In practice, your Hivemind Necrophage pops are being assembled at a speed of 2 * 0,25, so only 0,5 speed. However, I noticed that the Spawning Drone job adds 10% pop growth speed, but only if you play Hivemind Necrophage. This 10% pop growth speed applies to your non-Necrophage species, which grows at the usual rate.
The non-Necrophage species can only ever be livestock. They are not happy about it which means you get a huge malus to stability. That feels bad given the fact that Paradox just removed Stability from the Chamber of Elevation. On the other hand, the Necrophyte job adds 5 amenities each. Atleast thats better than a Maintenance Drone job. That job is awful.
In my games, I started the game with 50 extra Amenities. You can immediately unemploy 11 Maintenance Drones out of your 33 starting pops, thats 1/3rd of your economy. The rest of your amenities are covered by Necrophyte jobs, Spawning Drones and building bonuses. So you get to play without having Amenitiy issues as Gestalt for once. That feels nice.
Your Necrophage pops get +5% Ruler pop output which is completely wasted because Gestalts have no rulers. Atleast I didn't see any effect of this. Paradox should change this and add a different kind of bonus. Maybe remove the -10% Menial Drone output bonus. It feels kinda bad to get +5% Complex Drone output but -10% Menial Drone output. Keep in mind your Necrophage pops have to do all the jobs for Hivemind. Unless you get another Hivemind species thats not Necrophage, that one would be better suited for Menial Drone jobs.
You can get a Synchronicity Tradition which grants unity whenever a pop is Necrophaged. How much? How good is it? I have no idea. There is no information on this whatsoever. This is missing, please add more info Paradox.
Remember the fact that Necrophages grow only at 25% speed? That makes the cloning Vats from Biological Ascention completely worthless. You are paying 30 food upkeep for 0,75 growth for Necrophages. Not worth it at all. This feels bad. Necrophages should get something useful out of Biological Ascension as Hivemind, because thats all you can do. Maybe add a different kind of building for Necrophages with the Biological Ascension that improves Necrophage pops? That would be useful.
You end up which an insane amount of food with nothing to spend it on unless you take the civic to turn Food into Alloys, which is probably going to be used by every Hivemind Necrophage player.
Overall impression: Apart from starting with more pops, you have extremely ineffective jobs, you have big stability penalties. Your livestock pops only produce 4 food instead of 6 food and do not scale with research or edicts. Its much worse than any non-Necrophage Hivemind since your growth and pop efficiency are terrible. You get 4 pops per guaranteed Habitable Planet so thats a boost. You get reduced upkeep and you benefit from the increased growth that Hiveminds have. On the other hand you sacrifice a huge part of your pop Assembly growth. Overall the bonuses do not make up the maluses.
What I want from the next patch:
Get rid of the Ruler Output bonus for Necrophage Hivemind pops, replace it with something else or get rid of the -10% Menial Drone output malus for Hivemind Necroid.
Add some info on the Synchronicity Tradition for the amount of unity you get from Necrophaging pops.
Replace the Cloning building unlocked from the first Biological Ascension with a building which improves Necrophage pop output. Because paying 30 food per month for 1,25 monthly Necrophage pop assembly is a terrible deal. Or get rid of the -75% Assembly speed Malus and allow Hiveminds to assemble Necrophage pops.
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Iam trying to figgure out what to do with the Clone Origin. One of the choices makes your guys very good at alot of things very early on but you cant geneticly modify them further (making them average at best later into the game).
You cant do robots because you only assemble pop but dont grow it.
And it basicly limits you to 100 pop (20 per Ancient clone vat, and you can only ever have 5).
I tried raiding for pops and enslaving them but i keep running out of leader pops and since you need the Ancient clone vat on the planet to maintain the pops you can only ever have them on 5 Planets max.
I think the only way i can make that origin work is by raiding for pops without enslaving.
Has anyone figgured out what to do with the clones?
You cant do robots because you only assemble pop but dont grow it.
And it basicly limits you to 100 pop (20 per Ancient clone vat, and you can only ever have 5).
I tried raiding for pops and enslaving them but i keep running out of leader pops and since you need the Ancient clone vat on the planet to maintain the pops you can only ever have them on 5 Planets max.
I think the only way i can make that origin work is by raiding for pops without enslaving.
Has anyone figgured out what to do with the clones?
If you think that's bad, try making a Lithoid Necrophage Hive Mind. They actually can't assemble any pops at all, regardless of how much base pop assembly they get.
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I went with clones, fan mil, xenophobe, reanimators, catalytic technicians. Not min-maxed, but interesting.
Just pick 3 worlds, alloys on one, food on another, energy and minerals on the last. 3 vats on your alloy world, 1 on each of the other two. (60/20/20 pops or go 40/40/20). that should be enough for you to overrun at least 1 AI empire. Liberate or Tributise everything you see, spam migration treaties and federate up if you can (either trade league or hegemony, depending on if you can stay leader).
- Early on the clones give you ludicrous Alloy income if done right, to give you a solid war machine.
- Later, I pivoted to egalitarianism, which was easy with a smallish population (dropping xenophobia, as I didnt need starbase cost reduction), and "retired" the clones all on to one world (so machines could be built on other worlds and not conflict with cloning) and basically just used them as admirals/leaders of my hygemony with migrants and robots making up most of my empire.
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Oh wow. Sounds like thats basically unplayable.
Ok so I went back and checked with my old Hivemind savefile. I was getting a combined 15 pop growth thanks to roughly 8.5 Pop growth and 7 pop assembly. 7 pop assembly thanks to 2 Spawning Drone jobs (1 from Hive world) and Cloning Vats. A Necrophage Hivemind empire is going to have less than half than that.
I haven't played into the lategame with Necrophage Hivemind, but I think the pop Assembly debuff needs to get lowered. With a pop Assembly of 0,50 per Spawning Drone job and being able to get 2 maximum, you are going to take forever to grow pops. Granted, for Necrophage the Spawning Drone job seems to add 10% pop growth speed and 5 Amenities. So the job itself is worth it.
I've been giving Tree of Life Hivemind combined with catalytic processing a shot.
So far it's good fun. With the Tree of Life bonuses you can pretty much focus every planet on food districts without having to build Industrial districts as long as you build an alloy foundry on each and every planet you colonize. It also makes mining districts a thing of the past as everything now scales off food...
... except for Brain Drones... They should really fix that one day.
So far my only gripe has been that I cannot open the Tradition screen and plan out which I want to go for next. The information is locked until you have an actual tradition perk you need to select. This bugs the hell out of me, because I don't know all the information, especially with all the changes.
So far it's good fun. With the Tree of Life bonuses you can pretty much focus every planet on food districts without having to build Industrial districts as long as you build an alloy foundry on each and every planet you colonize. It also makes mining districts a thing of the past as everything now scales off food...
... except for Brain Drones... They should really fix that one day.
So far my only gripe has been that I cannot open the Tradition screen and plan out which I want to go for next. The information is locked until you have an actual tradition perk you need to select. This bugs the hell out of me, because I don't know all the information, especially with all the changes.
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I played a tree of life hivemind with budding, idyllic bloom, and catalytic processing. Budding's cost seems to have been reduced to 2 points, which is nice. Catalytic processing is interesting for hiveminds, since their inefficient researchers have been an issue. Since food is easy to come by for alloys, I could use all my minerals for research and found myself quite a bit further ahead than I usually do with a hivemind. Idyllic bloom was pretty interesting, and since you can only use it on planets of your founding species' type, I found myself using generic terraforming much more than I usually do, which made for an interesting change of pace. I'm pretty happy with the update so far, especially since it's all free.
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Played a bit as fanmat-pac pleasure seekers with masterful crafters. Pretty good game so far.
The problem with Idyllic bloom for hive minds is that any world you'd terraform into a Gaia you might as well make into a Hive world instead. There's some overlapping stuff there that makes me think of that civic as a trap for hives.
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Tested a few empires so far, and it doesn't feel toooo different from 3.0.
Being able to choose tradition trees feels great and solves the "All Empires end the same"-problem, but the expected variety isn't quite there yet.
There's a bug with the Diplomacy Tree that allows you to leech LOTS of free resources from the AI.
Overall, it's not a "This is great, I'll totally come back for this cool new thing!"-patch, but it certainly improves the game in many small ways that will hopefully accumulate to a much more polished game overtime.
So my experience was pretty much as I expected from the way it was presented. This is more the start of a long-term project, no radical patch that revolutionizes the game on its own.
Being able to choose tradition trees feels great and solves the "All Empires end the same"-problem, but the expected variety isn't quite there yet.
There's a bug with the Diplomacy Tree that allows you to leech LOTS of free resources from the AI.
Overall, it's not a "This is great, I'll totally come back for this cool new thing!"-patch, but it certainly improves the game in many small ways that will hopefully accumulate to a much more polished game overtime.
So my experience was pretty much as I expected from the way it was presented. This is more the start of a long-term project, no radical patch that revolutionizes the game on its own.
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Yeah, I was missing the hive worlds. It may be a better civic for non hive minds. However, I was able to get several Gaia worlds going ~50 years into the game with pretty casual gameplay. I felt like the fast pop growth speed combined with a bunch of early Gaia worlds was still pretty good. I'll have to play around with it quite a bit more.
EDIT: My apologies. Apparently, I can't read today.
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You're reading it backwards. It's not that only hivemind can be grown; it's that hivemind can only be grown, not budded.
They can grow them, but they don't seem to be able to assemble them.
Brand new Lithoid Necrophage Hive Mind game, Livestock are growing, but the 2 pop assembly from the spawning drone simply can't be used.
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Criminal jobs are still broken, and won't be filled if jobs are prioritized the right way.
sigh I've updated my post to reflect the fact that I can't read things today.
This was in the patch notes as fixed. If you're not using any mods, you know what to do.
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Next idea on the chopping block:
Void dwelling trees with Radiotropic, Merchant Guilds and Masterful crafters. Let's see by how much goods we can actually pump out.
Void dwelling trees with Radiotropic, Merchant Guilds and Masterful crafters. Let's see by how much goods we can actually pump out.