Agrarian Idyll: What is its purpose in game styles?

[WhiteKyubey]

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

Byzantine Bureaucracy (mostly for housing discount) to get enough pops to work in your buildings, without building a single city.
Mining Guilds - as you'll have lots of mines so you'll get the maximum boost.
Cutthroat Politics - you don't use influence for claims, so you can use it all for edicts
Exalted Priesthood if you are IP spiritualist, as flat unity boosts (and high priests with best unity production job) work very well with % unity boosts from being IP

 

[Delthor]

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

In my last AI/IP game, I went with Technocracy. I actually started out with Technocracy first and added Agrarian Idyll as the third perk, which worked really well. Technocracy early means your early expansion hardly slows your tech at all. It also means that mid and late game, you don't really need many unity buildings if you go really heavy on research. Agrarian Idyll is quite nice as a third perk because the point where you get the third civic is around the time you'd be advancing your colonies past rural worlds anyway, so you get a huge boost in housing when you need it.

This setup allowed me to rush habitats, which house the entirety of my alloy and consumer goods production plus some of the rare resources needed by the upgraded buildings. Once I got my first ringworld segment, I reduced every other planet down to a mining colony so that all my food, energy, and research came from the ringworld. All my other colonies had stop growth, so their growth was directed to the new ringworld segments as I expanded it.

The ecumenopolis will do better than the habitats because they're still totally broken compared to anything else that does alloys/consumer goods/trade. But habitats are pretty solid, so you don't really need to restart over and over to get the ecumenopolis, unless you want to steamroll the AI even more...

 

[GAGA Extrem]

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

Depends on the circumstances, really.

Mining Guilds is fantastic if one cannot secure an infinite Mineral source or if the game has rolled poorly for planetary deposits.

Efficient Bureaucracy can be a decent midgame filler if the empire is doing well in terms of resources.

Merchant Guilds is a pretty decent late game pick once planetary main buildings are at T2+

Byzantine Bureaucracy can be useful when average planet size is low or resources are abundant.

 

[wingren013]

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.

Farms are currently strictly better than energy districts at providing energy.

 

[Tyro]

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.



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

Clerks give trade value, which gives either straight energy, energy + CG, or energy + Unity. Commercial districts give 5 jobs for a single building slot. Clerks are Workers, not Specialists, so they benefit from the Rural World specialization. (Edit: I was wrong, amenities & trade value don't count as resources in that way.) City districts aren't worth it with AI because they provide less housing, not because they provide Clerk jobs.

 

[The Boz]

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

Byzantine Bureaucracy works nicely, making sure you never ever need a housing district or an amenities building.