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

[#Tukuro]

Having played a few matches now, mechanist just doesn't feel like it's worth it anymore. The major advantage it offered early game (double growth) is crippled by steep resource requirements, which tie up several pops per assembly. Considering it takes both ages to construct the bots and get return on investment, it just doesn't make sense as an early game civic.
Rushing the building on new colonies isn't viable as it bankrupts you, which means you're left with a paltry... 2 extra growth on the capital. In contrast, hive players and other builds get the same advantage for more or less free compared to what it costs you with mechanist...
Low upkeep pops? Slaver Guilds does that too. Double growth? Assimilators offer that, and it's better even without stacking growth bonuses. Extra starting pops, or overall growth? Hive Mind beats mechanist there too.

It's worth pointing out that compared to robots, organic pops are essentially free. As long as you're not running a food deficit, they'll grow. Which is fine, considering it's what you start with. But the growth bonuses you can stack on organics (even healthcare jobs) are cheaper than going with bots.

 

[Baro]

The 3 main problems with robots right now:
-They are extremely slow to build, this is just a lazy balance choice that stems from the current poor economic balance that makes pop growth the kingmaker.
-The job selection system isn't working remotely right and is putting mine-bots in clerk jobs and farm-bots in mine jobs and energy-bots in mines and so on.
-If you are egalitarian you can't pick which robot is being built, so you can't specialize.

 

[Promethian]

Growth rate seems fine once the building is in place and bots have the option to increase it further by expending another building slot if they like. The problem is bots cost too many resources. I'd be wary of making bot builds overpowered since they are snowbally. So I'd start with a small buff, like decreasing the upkeep cost of the builder job.

 

[IconianCat]

Machine empires need some serious buffs/tweaks in 2.2. I play EXCLUSIVELY machine empires/gestalt, and I went through 5 save games tweaking all of my traits to see if I was doing something wrong and I was immediately outclassed and shut down by every single person around me. Machine empires produce robots SO SLOWLY as is and now they start with less pops (slightly) require more jobs to equate to the normal production organic empires have.. because now they need 2 replicator jobs, plus a race bonus trait (rapid replicators) and it still takes an extra 20 months to finish a pop. Not to mention you also need to provide energy for them to run and minerals to actually produce the pops. So that’s now TWICE the number of resources and jobs required and you effectively are locked into a static progression for each planet because of the sheer slow speed of production. To confirm this also I even hopped onto a criminal syndicate empire and a standard empire and instead of starting with only a 3 energy per month gain I started with a 26 energy a month gain because of the trade modifier.

This new update has made machine empires practically useless.

:edit: also before this update came out I have never lost as my machine race. I play on captain difficulty and consistently overshot my neighbors and came out on top after 50 years in game. In my second and third attempts I went to 80 years in game and had barely colonized even 3 planets effectively because of how slow the progression is now.

 

[Baro]

It feels like the stalinist machine empire from the dev clash spooked them into an over-reaction against robots.

 

[Arcvalons]

Wiz already said there's going to be a fix, no need to keep repeating how broken it is, I think.

 

[KonradKurze202]

We're looking into the general state of robots and making some changes, synth ascension especially will get a buff.

I think something as simple as allowing multiple robot assembly plants per world would help. I know Kaiser Johan exploited that in the Dev Clash, but he was exploiting other things as well, so it wasn't necessarily just his super pop build speed that was an issue.

 

[mork77]

It's worth noting that Biotrophies tend to be very happy which increases stability on a planet which boosts output too.

aprt from that, you also get tons of unity thanks to the Biotrophies. And they no longer take space ( tiles) away.

 

[Peter Ebbesen]

aprt from that, you also get tons of unity thanks to the Biotrophies. And they no longer take space ( tiles) away.

I don't see how you can argue the latter.

Biotrophies take building slots away for Organic Sanctuaries that provide housing and employment; that's just as much taking finite space away on each planet they are on as them taking up tiles and producing unity on them was in 2.1 and previous.

They cost finite space in an efficient way, mind you, as you get 10 housing + jobs + 2 maintenance drone jobs per building, but they do cost space.

 

[Monkbel]

It's a game-breaking feature. Hope it gets fixed real soon.

can you specify which one is game-breaking?

 

[NCricket42]

Honestly, my biggest issue right now is how limited they are in modding. With the boost traits gone for robots and droids, and nerfed for synths (yes you can get the 20%, once you get a robot leader in place and pay 3 robo modding points for that last 5%), the lack of mod points you can get playing synth ascension is kinda silly. Adding everything together that I know of, you get 3 mod points from techs for machines (4 with an ascension perk in machine empires) with no advanced traits vs. 8 (9 if you count the point you get a species creation) in gene modding (techs + perk bonuses) advanced traits. Yes, you can take negative traits for more points but you can do that with either at a certain point in gene modding, so while it's a slight advantage for robots early on, end game they're much weaker. The habitability bonus and immortal (sorta but not really) leaders are not anywhere near worth that massive gap. Yes, synth ascension was comparatively too strong vs. the other options, but nerfing it into oblivion thus making synth/machine empires less interesting and much harder to play than everything else was a bit too extreme...

 

[Promethian]

I don't see how you can argue the latter.

Biotrophies take building slots away for Organic Sanctuaries that provide housing and employment; that's just as much taking finite space away on each planet they are on as them taking up tiles and producing unity on them was in 2.1 and previous.

They cost finite space in an efficient way, mind you, as you get 10 housing + jobs + 2 maintenance drone jobs per building, but they do cost space.

A lotta people bring this up because they seem to be assuming you'll be unlocking every building slot on planets. Base city district is 5 housing. So you can get 75 housing for 75 pops on a size 25 planet that gets nothing else. I know, I know, buildings provide some housing, bonus housing from X, etc. That isn't going to turn your average size 16 into a 75 pop powerhouse without some building slots dedicated to housing as well. Which brings us back to Organic Sanctuaries. They are also a building that provides housing and are better at it than everything else. Thanks to the OS Servitors can top 75 housing on even the smallest planets and use all their districts for resource jobs. In the end you'll get to utilize a similar number of building slots as most average urban planets but have all the jobs of a rural planet available. Its kinda crazy and I haven't played Servitors far enough to see if there is an upgrade for Organic Sanctuaries. If there is one then things start to get a little crazy. The only problem Servitors have right now is the same problem robots have in general, too resource intensive to maintain.

Also the squishpets don't have to be put on every planet. Just like with unity buildings assess how many you want and build as you like. They are an absurdly powerful unity source, so its perfectly viable to only import them to the few proper habitability planets you come across. However I am pretty sure the OS give us enough of a housing buffer that we can have some on every planet and still fill every productive job.

 

[ShoGuL]

A lotta people bring this up because they seem to be assuming you'll be unlocking every building slot on planets. Base city district is 5 housing. So you can get 75 housing for 75 pops on a size 25 planet that gets nothing else. I know, I know, buildings provide some housing, bonus housing from X, etc. That isn't going to turn your average size 16 into a 75 pop powerhouse without some building slots dedicated to housing as well. Which brings us back to Organic Sanctuaries. They are also a building that provides housing and are better at it than everything else. Thanks to the OS Servitors can top 75 housing on even the smallest planets and use all their districts for resource jobs. In the end you'll get to utilize a similar number of building slots as most average urban planets but have all the jobs of a rural planet available. Its kinda crazy and I haven't played Servitors far enough to see if there is an upgrade for Organic Sanctuaries. If there is one then things start to get a little crazy. The only problem Servitors have right now is the same problem robots have in general, too resource intensive to maintain.

Also the squishpets don't have to be put on every planet. Just like with unity buildings assess how many you want and build as you like. They are an absurdly powerful unity source, so its perfectly viable to only import them to the few proper habitability planets you come across. However I am pretty sure the OS give us enough of a housing buffer that we can have some on every planet and still fill every productive job.

Just played my first game as a devouring swarm hive mind -- I easily unlocked every building slot on every planet. Most of my worlds ended up with 100+ pop. Even shitty size 10 planets ended up there with mastery of nature + expansion trait.

You get 0.8 housing needs with tradition + trait, I believe there are two techs to provide more housing per district, and I believe domination gives extra. The planetary capital building also gives like 15 housing on its own.

 

[NCricket42]

Your math is off. 5 x 25 = 125 housing. True, you can't fill it up with city districts most of the time, but other districts provide housing as well, and there are civics and techs that increase city district housing, as well as buildings such as luxury apartments that do as well. It's not that difficult to unlock every slot on most planets it just takes forever. That also doesn't really help your argument regardless, because then that building is taking up an even more limited resource in the form of a building slot, so it actually sucks worse if you couldn't get all the slots consistently.

 

[Crush999]

Robots grow at a rate of 2.0/month and take 100 growth, giving you a new pop every 50 months. Meanwhile, in 2.1, Robots needed 30 months to grow. Machine Empires have two techs to reduce Assembly Speed, but Synthetic/normal empires don't have access to them, and they still don't get close to 2.1 speeds (and given how cripplingly slow the early game is, it hardly matters).

In addition, Robots cost about 5x as much as in 2.1, though overall most things cost about 3x as much so it's not as massive a nerf as it sounds (just a mildly crippling one). The more crippling nerf is to the energy upkeep.

Furthermore, producing robots takes full-time dedicated pop jobs.

Machine Empires/Synthetic Ascension are even harder hit — for some reason, the ME replicator job is even twice as slow at producing robots than the normal empire one, though you can have 2 of them. In other words, you can build at the same rate by occupying twice as many of yours pops.

Oh, and colonizing with droids (for Life-seeded starts, for example? Forget it). Droids and Synths are gone, incidentally (though for some reason this was left out of the patch notes); the upgrades just give you a flat bonus and no easy way to see how advanced any given pop is.

Finally, the process by which pops are automatically assigned to the best job for them? Doesn't work for robot pops.

To summarize, 2.2 nerfs upkeep, cost, build time, and utility of robots into the ground, and makes Mechanist, ME, and Synthetic Ascension playstyles essentially unplayable.

iv just played my old Fav robot tall build that starts off smashing mineral and energy on 1 - 2 planets then following it up with massive Tech rush..... but after. so its currently 2267 year im on 4 planets and my energy is +296 and my costs are -290..... my minerals are in the same kinda place and all my research so far has gone into worker tech and i have no special resource buildings also running robot upkeep -20% from trait and civic and + 15% energy from superconductive...this is a joke.

also tech wise im well behind getting voidborn or master structures. so in short the more i expand the more everything costs so whats the point. im gonna go play something else please fix this in a patch.

 

[Tavior]

can you specify which one is game-breaking?

I just tried gestalt machine empire yesterday. It is very expensive to be even economical viable. Other have post number through out the thread and also you can look for yourself in-game.

Mechanist and general non-mechanist using robot labor force strategy is pretty messy. Once you unlock robot mod. Guess what? All those robot you build without a trait? You have to go back and robot mod to one build for each planet. IE you can only robot mod planet X's entire robot to farmer. Then go do miner on second planet Y to miner. Then spend 100 energy each single robot to mix-match to your district layout.

If you still have shortage or excess for any particular trait bonus. You will have to either kill them off and build new ones or just quit at that point because by the time you got your labor force organized; everyone else has ringworlds built and benefiting greatly from biological population passive mechanics where robot has none.

 

[IconianCat]

alright so im just gonna baseline compare a little bit here because i havent had the time to run multiple 5 hour games yet to compare stats not to mention jobs are not entirely comparable across the board. but im gonna generally compare the way machine empires and hive minds function to independent empires and megacorps (IMPORTANT TO NOTE im a gestalt conscioussness specialist specifically intelligent research link machine empires)

anyway. for starting off on average a machine empire will have two replicator jobs adding 2 pop growth at the beginning of the game. my homeworld with rapid replicators on as well gives a total pop growth of 3.4 monthly on my homeworld at the beginning of the game. all in all not that bad

organic pops seems to have one close to 3-5 depending on traits WITHOUT needing replicator jobs. (and later are given gene clinics to increase pop growth with medic jobs)

hive minds have a similar building to organic pops but its slightly more efficient since hive minds dont care about approval rating.

now heres where theres a really weird disparity that im not sure how to fix but i know it DOES need to be fixed. organic ops have a trade system to supplemnent instability late game and give them an economy boom. and now machine empires have massive resistances to damage on their stability because criminal syndicates and overpopoulation dont cause deviancy on their worlds (crime on organics)

but the bonus that organic races get form trade at the start of the game is up in the 20s and machine empires not only dont get this resource bonus but they require miners to get minerals for making more machines. require energy to run their pops and leaders (by default 5 leaders at the start of the game) and require pops to run energy, mining and replicator jobs

so machine empires require three different areas of industry to have pop growth which all stack each other and theres no benefit to their ability to gather materials or energy. considering they already miss out on the trade bonus it seems really short sighted that they also have a massive economy nerf on top of needing 4-5 times the number of jobs just to stabilize their population

 

[Balamut2227]

As a mechanist start:
Robots can be usefull in long terms. They are cheaper for support, if you runnig in utopian living standart for bio pops and dont want to upgrade droids to synths. Also, they are assembling with constant speed, while bio pop have rush in very start and migration problem after that.

Is there a way to disassemble robotic pops now? I have better design now, but i dont want to spend research points for upgrade.

 

[Jibril]

I've played a machine empire till early mid game, I didn't take any maintenance reduction or increased energy traits/civics and it is just unsustainable.
Playing a machine empire right now feels like you're stuck in a catch 22 where multiple factors makes it impossible for you to be competitive against biological empires.

...then you realize your planet is using 4 pop (5 with Processor) to construct other pops with 24 minerals upkeep( would be 20 without luxurious), trait and civic slots and over 1k energy every 10+ years. This is abyssal. Then of course every pop costs 1 base energy to upkeep and still has to worry about Amenities and Deviancy. Your net income is garbage compared to organics. Your new colonies also develop with pathetic speed of base 1 in starting outpost until you get 5 pop to build Machine Assembly Plant that increases it by another 1 (also of course both require machines to work and it eats minerals while not producing any). Of course you can resettle from your capital to speed it up but every pop resettlement costs 100 energy. And because for some reason you can't trade even if you are not Servitor or Exterminator you are always short on energy.

Overall forget playing ME in multiplayer, you stand no chance.

 

[Black_Shade]

If you play as driven assimilators, you basically shouldn't/can't use machine worlds now as they remove all agricultural tiles. Seeing how at least half your pops are going to be consuming food, that's a big problem. Also, it seems all the machine mods had their costs increased (3 points for 5% production? really?!?), but there aren't anymore mod points from tech/ascension/unity. So you get 2-3 traits and that's it.

Overall Le Guin essentially made Synthetic Dawn worthless.