Agrarian Idyll: What is its purpose in game styles?

[Pragmatic]

I'm planning on starting an Inner Perfection game tomorrow night. I keep seeing people who recommend Agrarian Idyll as a second civic. What does it bring to IP?

Note that I'm planning on starting new games until I get the Precursors with the ecumenopolis, so the loss of the Arcology perk isn't a problem.

How does Agrarian idyll play with research and manufacturing?

 

[Fjolsvid]

You focus less on building city districts and all your farmers provide as much amenities as clerks, so you have a bit more of those too.
All in all, developing planets for their resource districts becomes a better and easier choice, and you still have all the building slots available.

Research and manufacturing comes from buildings, so no real problems with those.

 

[PAnZuRiEL]

Note that I'm planning on starting new games until I get the Precursors with the ecumenopolis

??? why though?

Agrarian Idyll makes farms into cities and cities into not very good. So expect to have a lot of excess food to sell on the market, not a lot of trade value, and any planets with a low upper limit on farms will have less housing and be worse overall.

 

[Azhcristokos]

Your raw resource districts will provide enough housing and amenities for most of your planets, so you can employ more miners and farmers than other empires usually can without having to sacrifice manufacturing and research. If you have the First League's old capital, you can simply base all of your manufacturing on that world while using every other planet for raw resources to fuel your insane arcology industries, which is amazing considering that you will need many, many metric shittons of food and minerals to keep up. Research and unity can be spread across all of your worlds.

Reducing housing needs via Communal and other things like Byzantine Bureaucracy (adopted later) will let you get the most out of Agrarian Idyll.

One thing you should do early on by the way is replace your starting city district/s with mining or farming districts. Clerk jobs won't be helping you but miners and farmers will.

Agrarian Idyll makes farms into cities and cities into not very good. So expect to have a lot of excess food to sell on the market, not a lot of trade value, and any planets with a low upper limit on farms will have less housing and be worse overall.

I think the housing penalty only applies to normal city districts, not to the arcology districts on ecumenopoli.

 

[Atreides]

So AI is a production based build. Your will have planets with 3 generator, 5 mine and 6 farms, and maybe 2 cities as a general example.

With all those base workers, your production of raw goods will be top notch. You can run an alloy heavy economy much easier than normal empires and use all the excess base goods to buy whatever rare elements you need to keep your upgraded buildings going. I recommend Very Strong to buff all of your workers and gene modify to add Communal when it is convenient to do so.

 

[Hibernus]

One thing you should do early on by the way is replace your starting city district/s with mining or farming districts. Clerk jobs won't be helping you but miners and farmers will.



I think the housing penalty only applies to normal city districts, not to the arcology districts on ecumenopoli.

Makes me think AI should have a custom start to generate different districts on game start.

Also yes, there's no housing malus on the arcology district.

 

[Dalwin]

Makes me think AI should have a custom start to generate different districts on game start.

Also yes, there's no housing malus on the arcology district.

But there are also no resource districts on the ecumenopolis so it is less beneficial to agrarian idyll than it is to other societies.

 

[WhiteKyubey]

Ultimate Agrarian idyll - pacifist + f,authoritarian (or authoritarian+something). Take raid bombardment stance as first ascension. Go for "liberaration" wars and still all their pops!
Now you can make your farms full of slaves, who requires much less housing, so you can totally ignore city districts and still reach full building slots.

Bio ascension, gene modding everything for -housing and taking -housing civic makes that even better.

 

[Fjolsvid]

But there are also no resource districts on the ecumenopolis so it is less beneficial to agrarian idyll than it is to other societies.

Not really, it completely covers a different niche. Yes it won't receive the small bonus from a civic, but it doesn't really need to.

 

[Surimi]

Agrarian idyll pairs well with inward perfection because of the adaptability tree giving a random planetary feature (aka more resource deposits). With agrarian idyll, you're all about resource districts and should generally avoid building cities, so more deposits = more utility out of planets.

Research and manufacturing in the early to mid game works exactly the same as a normal empire, as the bonus housing from resource districts compensates for not building cities and farmers provide the amenities you'd normally get from clerks. Larger planets will still unlock all building slots and you'll have no problem staffing regular buildings.

Later on is when the difference starts to show, as even with the special agrarian idyll tech late game cities still allow for more populated planets than agrarian idyll can manage. For this reason, agrarian idyll synergizes really well with habitats (which have very efficient housing). You can use the planets for raw resources and rare resource production, and the habitats to house super-efficient late game industry buildings.

Getting Fen Habbanis as a agrarian idyll empire is frankly overpowered to the point that I actually wouldn't recommend it, as it basically breaks the game by removing the only real disadvantage. A far more thematic (and IMO interesting) late game goal is to build a ringworld. Agrarian idyll is incredible for ringworlds. You can build nothing but resource districts on an agrarian idyll ringworld and still have enough spare population to staff high level industry/lab buildings.

 

[meiam89.]

Really wish the precursor quest were random, the free acropolis is so insanely good compare to everything else it's hard to justify not restarting to get it. And yes it goes really well with agrarian idyll (and inward expansion too since your force to play tall since you won't be able to expand by grabbing enemy territory, a planet with can house close 1000 pop is pretty nice).

 

[Azhcristokos]

Makes me think AI should have a custom start to generate different districts on game start.

Also yes, there's no housing malus on the arcology district.

I decided to check this out and started games as a bunch of different normal (non-gestalt/corporate) empires. All of them started with 2 city districts but the Agrarian Idyll empire only had 1. But even that 1 is useless and should be replaced. I didn't test gestalts or empires with Mechanist or Syncretic Evolution, which all might change this starting setup.

 

[AlanC9]

Really wish the precursor quest were random, the free acropolis is so insanely good compare to everything else it's hard to justify not restarting to get it. And yes it goes really well with agrarian idyll (and inward expansion too since your force to play tall since you won't be able to expand by grabbing enemy territory, a planet with can house close 1000 pop is pretty nice).

I'd restart to not get it. But yeah, that's still a problem.

 

[Hibernus]

I decided to check this out and started games as a bunch of different normal (non-gestalt/corporate) empires. All of them started with 2 city districts but the Agrarian Idyll empire only had 1. But even that 1 is useless and should be replaced. I didn't test gestalts or empires with Mechanist or Syncretic Evolution, which all might change this starting setup.

I didn't think to actually check it first, but sure enough

if = {
limit = {
owner = { NOT = { has_valid_civic = civic_agrarian_idyll } }
}
add_district = district_city
add_district = district_city
}
else = {
add_district = district_farming

 

[Viljainen]

The penalty of -1 housing for city districts is not that bad. Eventually you will get extra housing via tech and prosperity traditions making the city districts viable. When you run out of deposits you can spare a few city districts to your most developed planets. Thanks to the extra housing from the resource districts, you won't need that many either.

 

[Surimi]

The penalty of -1 housing for city districts is not that bad. Eventually you will get extra housing via tech and prosperity traditions making the city districts viable. When you run out of deposits you can spare a few city districts to your most developed planets. Thanks to the extra housing from the resource districts, you won't need that many either.

I agree, if it's a choice between cities and nothing definitely build cities. The end game difference between agrarian cities and normal cities is 6 housing vs. 8 housing respectively. Considering that endgame farming districts are 4 and 2 respectively, you could look at it that it takes 1 farming district (or two mining/energy districts) to cancel out the amount of efficiency you're losing from each city district, so it's really not hard to build a few cities and still stay in a position where the civic is a net benefit.

I mean, generally I would not worry about planetary population at all, max out on resource districts and use habitats to fill the role of city planets, But you could easily adopt a more moderate playstyle, using a mix of resource and city districts and just taking a small efficiency hit to get more population. There comes a point where it wouldn't be worth it to even be agrarian any more, but you could still strike a balance.

 

[GAGA Extrem]

I'm planning on starting an Inner Perfection game tomorrow night. I keep seeing people who recommend Agrarian Idyll as a second civic. What does it bring to IP?

There are several reasons to get Agrarian Idyll with IP:

(1) It overlaps with the Pacifist requirement of the civic, so you don't have to alter your ethic choice.

(2) It is a very strong perk in general and caters to the typical tall pacifist approach. Your planets have lower max pop counts but significantly higher resource output, so you get the most out of your limited number of planets.

(3) You are incentivised to build Habitats & Ringworlds to create more living space & building slots later in the game, and Agrarian Idyll synergizes extremely well with Ringworlds, allowing you to completely forgo cities on those and just go for a mix of generators & farms.

(4) Inward Perfection has access to the Adaptability tree, which has two significant benefits:
(a) You gain a free building slot unlock, which means you have extra capacity to invest all the extra yields you gain from focusing on resource districts.
(b) You can add a random deposit to each planet once, which is very important since you want to use as much planet size as possible on deposit districts.

(5) The extra amenities from farmers in combination with pacifist's stability bonus allow you to completely forgo amenity buildings. In general you'll have much higher happiness and stability across your empire without any extra investment.

(6) You replace 2 starting cities with 1 farm, giving you a bit of flexibility for early game district choices in your colonies.

- - - - -

In terms of Research & Manufacturing, it plays mostly like regular games, except that you can stick to lower tier buildings (due to the slightly lower pop caps) on planets and use Habitats in the mid game to do your rare material refining & increased allow production.

 

[heliostellar]

Advice on taking Agarian Idyll is obsolete in 2.2.x. It used to be that farms would generate unity on top of having to have them for food anyway. Now, they just make farm districts cushier. I think this civic is a snooze now.

EDIT: You would also be incentivized to build more farms, which was good when excess food production drove pop growth but that is also no longer true.

 

[Pragmatic]

So if I take AI and Inner Perfection, what should be my third civic?

 

[Sequence7]

I like taking life seeded with inwards perfection. Then once I've unlocked the ecumenopolis and got one built, I then pick up agrarian idyll as my 3rd civic. You need to prepare for the change first though, or you'll have loads of homeless people.