Angler Banger

[evilcat]

Wha do you think about Angler civic?

There is whale in the tank that catalytic procesing is overbalanced in the way that it cost 9f for 3a wheras metalurgist produce for 6m to 3a.
However. You can only get 6f +2 from procesing from farmers, but whole 4m +2 from building from miners.
So with minerals you can get 3a from 1metalurgist and 1miner. With catalytic you are always 8/9 efficiency.
Miners guild exists and is not overbalanced.
There are ways to extract extra food from xenos. So that is a bonus. So catalytic and anglers could be an option for literally loan shark empire.

Back to anglers. 8f is nice, the same as upgraded farmers. TV is minimal and isnt exacly selling point.
There are pearl divers, but artisan give 6cg from 6m, but pearl divers only 3cg +2TV. You can trade 2tv into 1e 1cg.
And i am not even taking about master crafters or consumer benefit trade policy.
There are many problems with Pearl Divers, as it is specialist job so using slaves or robots is harder. Also for some reason it uses minerals, and the civic was trying to avoid that. Maybe if it was worker job and using 3f just it will be better. The total output is marginal so at least it could be efficient.

That specialist on Pearl Divers, after Clone Army PDX really playied it safe.

Overall Anglers isnt that great, unless you are literally eating xenos, the reason is catalytic procesing cost 9 not 8food, and pearl divers is rock bottom of jobs.

At least you can use Agralian Idyll and Nihilistic Acqusition and go whale hunt over galaxy.

Some suggestions:
+ Make Diver cost 4food, we are going full organic without minerals. Minerals are worth a little more than food.
+ Make Diver workers class, so we can do tricks with slavery. CG from workers is some bonus to compansate lower output.
The divers are the problem of the civic. Angler isnt that special comparing to farmer with subsidies and procesing, but it is something.

 

[Ryika]

A big oof to be honest.

The angler portion is pretty unspectacular. 8 base food is nice, but that's already compared to 12 from 2 jobs per district. You save one job which is good, but then with the food building the ratio per district goes up to 10 vs 16. That's a lot for each district slot. Even with the bonuses for districts tied to Aquatic planets, this seems like a pretty minor benefit.

Pearl Divers I just don't understand, they're so very underwhelming. I kind of like that they have anti-synergy with normal trade builds (since those don't need the consumer good production), but they're just not nearly good enough to carry their weight and serve as the basis for an alternative build.

Overall it's a very thematic Civic, and I like the flavor a lot, but I just don't understand what they're going for gameplay-wise.

 

[Dragatus]

I think I see what they were going for. 1 Angler + 1 Pearl Diver together are better than 2 Farmers and more versatile too, but that's all thanks to the superb Angler job while Pearl Divers are pretty meh and whoever designed the jobs apparently did not consider that you can simply disable all Pearl Diver jobs. So effectively the civic gives you 1 superior farmer instead of 2 normal ones.

Early game it's not the greatest of civics, but it gets much better if you take it as your 3rd pick. By then the pop growth will already be slowed down and pop efficiency becomes more important than district efficiency.

 

[TrotBot]

i'm trying pleasure seeker utopian abundant anglers. i started the game with +25 consumer goods per month before even unpausing, meaning switching to utopian abundance right from day 0 was effortless. my utopia will be very consumer goods hungry. i wonder if i should combine with something else crazy like catalytic processing. have not decided what my third will be yet.

 

[Incompetent]

i'm trying pleasure seeker utopian abundant anglers. i started the game with +25 consumer goods per month before even unpausing, meaning switching to utopian abundance right from day 0 was effortless. my utopia will be very consumer goods hungry. i wonder if i should combine with something else crazy like catalytic processing. have not decided what my third will be yet.

If you're going for a crazy CG-guzzling build though, Masterful Crafters is almost certainly going to be more beneficial in the long run.

 

[Tobasco da Gama]

Early game it's not the greatest of civics, but it gets much better if you take it as your 3rd pick.

Can't, it's locked in at empire creation and can't be added later.

 

[Rakonat]

Anglers has a lot of room for improvement. It's clearly meant to go with the new Aquatic Trait and Ocean Paradise Origin to maximize your food production, though I still don't think it's going to be an A tier civic once people have had time to play with it. Pearl Divers are lack luster and the mineral upkeep is counterintuitive, as well as your basic resource district now requiring minerals and specialist jobs (displacing workers if you build too many too quickly.) Making it a Specialist pop was bad enough, but the mineral upkeep for me is the real kicker, particularly when giving a .5 or 1 alloy upkeep would have made a lot more sense and synergized with CataProc much better.

Not being able to take Agrarian Idyll + Anglers is also a huge blow to this civic since the two in tandem would actually be pretty good, as well as it being a non-removeable civic when things like Warrior Culture can be dropped and picked up at will. And you're basically softlocking yourself out of Gaia Worlds and Ecumenopolis unless there is something I missed that gives aquatic versions of these world types. Sure you can still pursue those ascension perks but you're not getting the full benefit.

I expect we'll see several tweaks to this civ over the next few months but I doubt we are giving a hotfix before Christmas that changes anything about it.

 

[Pancakelord]

There are many problems with Pearl Divers, as it is specialist job so using slaves or robots is harder

I feel like the biggest issue is forgetting to turn the diver jobs off, then having to wait for demotion. Weird they made it a specialist job when it comes from farms + is so numerous.

It can't satisfyingly be buffed(or have upkeep slashed) with the +1 per district setup they've given it. Any buffs would scale way too quickly with how easily you can spam farms, and reducing upkeep is immaterial, it's the cost of a pop that hurts more (both early on when you have few, and later if scaling is killing how many more you can get).

IMO pearl divers should just be a fallback job for pops on wet worlds. i.e. a job unemployed pops do until literally anything else comes along or until they emigrate. (Long ago hives had a scavenger job that was like this, generating a few food passively).

 

[Millbot]

Unemployed drones generate minerals IIRC. Honestly, if they changed the civic to be you get two anglers with the 8 food and 2 trade good production, while having unlimited agricultural districts and pearl divers we're an uncapped job that your unemployed pops did as a last result. Even if pearl diver output had to be changed to be like a fraction of a CG, it would probably be a decent civic. Heck, make pearl diver an oddball job that exists worker, specialist and ruler job (later two would still be demoting while working it). With that maybe, it wouldn't need anything else. Granted, you'd probably always want to pair it with catalytic converter and would still need a dedicated source of GCs, but it would fit the theme better than what we have now.

 

[Ferrus Animus]

Anglers like Catalytic Processing suffers from being a replacement civic.
As a 1 on 1 replacement it kinda works.
However, it costs a civic slot, can't be removed and ignores the way jobs scale and as a result loses out a lot compared to alternatives.
You can use the civic slot to power up instead of jsust sidegrading and that's IMO where both civics fail hard.
Warrior culture changes thigns up AND is an upgrade, Angler needs the same.

If at game start you could select normal farmers or anglers & pearl divers for the rest of the game, it would be a roughly functional choice, but the cost makes it bad.

 

[DeanTheDull]

Wha do you think about Angler civic?

There is whale in the tank that catalytic procesing is overbalanced in the way that it cost 9f for 3a wheras metalurgist produce for 6m to 3a.
However. You can only get 6f +2 from procesing from farmers, but whole 4m +2 from building from miners.
So with minerals you can get 3a from 1metalurgist and 1miner. With catalytic you are always 8/9 efficiency.
Miners guild exists and is not overbalanced.
There are ways to extract extra food from xenos. So that is a bonus. So catalytic and anglers could be an option for literally loan shark empire.

This mis-reads the main advantage of Catalytic Processing- it's the impact to the early science game, and the ability to increasingly ramp up alloy production at the end of your colonization ship phase once you're done needing heavy food stockpiling and your hydroponic bay starbases come online.

By moving your alloy-economy off of your mineral economy, you can use the same limited early-game minerals for science upkeep instead, and not slowing down your rate of construction as much per early-game industrial district. As each industrial district will in turn feed the building of your first starbases, each of whom will add 1 hydroponics bay that will cover the cost of another alloy worker, you can get guaranteed alloy worker upkeep covered by non-pop sources in a way that minerals can only do by RNG... and would detract from your ability to spend those same minerals on scientists instead.

Come your break-out point, you can then convert out of it in two main ways in your mid-game: either reform out of it after you complete a major conquest, where you rely on your established food infrastructure to cover your new empire and put it's infrastructure to work re-balancing into a mineral economy, or you can do it with bio-ascension clone vats, where you let your established food infrastructure cover the cost of the clone vats.

It's all about making better use of the resource flow than the conversion rate.

Back to anglers. 8f is nice, the same as upgraded farmers. TV is minimal and isnt exacly selling point.
There are pearl divers, but artisan give 6cg from 6m, but pearl divers only 3cg +2TV. You can trade 2tv into 1e 1cg.
And i am not even taking about master crafters or consumer benefit trade policy.
There are many problems with Pearl Divers, as it is specialist job so using slaves or robots is harder. Also for some reason it uses minerals, and the civic was trying to avoid that. Maybe if it was worker job and using 3f just it will be better. The total output is marginal so at least it could be efficient.

You should be comparing pearl divers to technicians, not artisans. Early game TV is interchangeable with energy production, and Pearl Divers make more sense when you realize that their food upkeep is mitigating the Angler food advantage on your early game homeworld farms.


If you compare a basic 2 resource district/4 pops comparison, 2-Angler-farm districts vs 1 normal farm and 1 technician looks like


16 food (Angler) - 4 food (Pearl) + 6 CG (Pearl) -4 mineral (Pearl) + 8 Energy (Trade)
or
12 Food + 8 Energy and -4 mineral +6 CG

Compare that with a 2 district farmer/miner combo-

12 food (2 6base farmers) + 12 energy (2 6base technicians)


With the food upkeep of the pearl divers canceling the relative advantage of Anglers vs farmers, the difference in a pop-efficiency calculus when framed against technicians becomes an output of

-4 energy, -4 minerals, +6 CG
(+8 CG with the Civilian goods policy)



Now, whether that conversion is good is another question... but minerals and energy are the easiest resources to increase thru space deposits, and having 6-8 more CG per four worker pops I'd normally already have working as workers is an interesting shift, not least because the game starts you with 11 workers on your homeworld, who now start with an excess of CG.


More importantly, it's a shift that offers early-game implications beyond a conversion rate, because CG is used in the early game- both for colony ships, but also to up-tool your specialist economy and have more scientists. With civilian goods economy, you can basically afford the CG output of another four scientists immediately- that's very significant for getting your early game science up and running faster than if you had to do it thru industrial districts on the homeworld.

That specialist on Pearl Divers, after Clone Army PDX really playied it safe.

Overall Anglers isnt that great, unless you are literally eating xenos, the reason is catalytic procesing cost 9 not 8food, and pearl divers is rock bottom of jobs.

At least you can use Agralian Idyll and Nihilistic Acqusition and go whale hunt over galaxy.

Not unless you do an ethics-change scheme to get into Pacifism after taking Nihilistic Acquisition.

But on playing it safe- I'd disagree, and say Anglers is a high risk civic strategy: it's basically set for a science/trade build, but with much less ability to go heavy on alloys early.

 

[DeanTheDull]

If you're going for a crazy CG-guzzling build though, Masterful Crafters is almost certainly going to be more beneficial in the long run.

By the long run it's already too late: stellaris is a snowballing game, and this is where the principle of investing early come. An asset early is better than a more effecient asset later.

Think of it in terms of Meritocracy for specialist output. That's a 10% buff. That's great, right? We like 10%. 10% of a base 3 alloy job is .3 extra alloys a month. That's 3.6 extra alloys a year, and that adds up.

But that 10% only adds up when it's adding at all- it gives nothing until the job is provided, and if a base-3 job could be added one year earlier, it would be producing 36 alloys in that year. It'd take meritocracy at least 10 years to catch up from being delayed just one year. If you were delayed 5 years you'd be catching up for 50 years- well into the mid-game when people are actually starting to use Cruisers or even Battleships to force their neighbors into vassalization.

Ergo, any civic that let's you build an alloy job sooner will- in general- out-match a civic that let's you have a better one later. Especially if you can later add-on that civic.





Turning back to CG-guzzling strategies, this means science rush. The time and minerals it takes to build industrial districts is a 0-sum competition with building your science economy. The 1000 minerals and 960 days (2.66 years) it takes to build two industrial districts on your homeworld to provide the CG for future scientists is 1000 minerals and almost 3 years not building 2 science labs. Even if you RNG-luck into 1000 extra minerals (lucky asteroid impact you stop) and don't need to worry about lowering mineral income by 12, just the time gap delay alone would mean that a 10% science boost would take nearly 3 decades to catch up. Masterful Crafters, as good as it is- and it is good- isn't that good.

But, as we all know, science-rushing isn't particularly meta.





Taking a step back- Pearl Divers is a CG-producing job, but Anglers isn't a civic based around producing CG. It's built around enabling the employment of scientists, not by replacing Artisans but by replacing early technicians. Catalytic Converter is a thing it can do, and arguably should do if it's not going bio-ascension, but at the end of the day it should be viewed as a science-rush civic.

 

[SirBlackAxe]

Hmm. Has anyone tried Anglers + Technocracy yet?

 

[Millbot]

Meritocracy is probably a good comparison here. It's a civic that would be doomed in the way that Anglers is, if you had to take it at game start. Luckily, you don't, so that means it ends up being a fairly solid civic because you can pick it up when it really matters, while being able to use a civic that is stronger in the early game.

This is probably the real flaw with the pop system though because it pretty much means any system that touches jobs and does it in a manner that makes pop use inefficient. Is a civic that is going to lose a ton of value and I'm not really sold on it becoming good in the way that meritocracy is because pearl divers never catch up and anglers aren't nearly good enough to cover for them.

 

[BrokenSky]

But on playing it safe- I'd disagree, and say Anglers is a high risk civic strategy: it's basically set for a science/trade build, but with much less ability to go heavy on alloys early.

I think he meant that paradox were playing it safe, game design-wise, because they didn't want to make it too strong after the backlash some of the origins / civics in Lem got.

 

[Rakonat]

Meritocracy is probably a good comparison here. It's a civic that would be doomed in the way that Anglers is, if you had to take it at game start. Luckily, you don't, so that means it ends up being a fairly solid civic because you can pick it up when it really matters, while being able to use a civic that is stronger in the early game.

This is probably the real flaw with the pop system though because it pretty much means any system that touches jobs and does it in a manner that makes pop use inefficient. Is a civic that is going to lose a ton of value and I'm not really sold on it becoming good in the way that meritocracy is because pearl divers never catch up and anglers aren't nearly good enough to cover for them.

I compared to Warrior Culture since that does replace one job with another, though those are both the same tier. IF Pearl Divers replaced Artisans (and thus incompatible with Master Crafters, though MC would still be better since they get +2x the CG for +50% resources) and Farm districts got 2 anglers, this wouldn't be an awful civic, if it was compatible with Agrarian Idyll, this would good, if it wasn't a starter civic only that could be dropped or picked up later in the game, it would be decent.

But yeah, I'm with the rest of the bandwagon in this civic has too many restriction and counter-intuitive mechanics, with other civics doing what Anglers does but better. Also if I'm not mistaken, Farming Subsidies doesn't even affect Anglers, which is a net negative in my book too.

 

[SirBlackAxe]

Also if I'm not mistaken, Farming Subsidies doesn't even affect Anglers, which is a net negative in my book too.

Anglers do count as Farmers for bonuses and modifiers (and Pearl Divers count as Artisans).

 

[Incompetent]

Meritocracy is probably a good comparison here. It's a civic that would be doomed in the way that Anglers is, if you had to take it at game start. Luckily, you don't, so that means it ends up being a fairly solid civic because you can pick it up when it really matters, while being able to use a civic that is stronger in the early game.

This is probably the real flaw with the pop system though because it pretty much means any system that touches jobs and does it in a manner that makes pop use inefficient. Is a civic that is going to lose a ton of value and I'm not really sold on it becoming good in the way that meritocracy is because pearl divers never catch up and anglers aren't nearly good enough to cover for them.

Meritocracy is just a passive buff with broad effect, it's not really comparable. The game needs some of these "generic" civics for when you don't want to commit to a particular direction with your build, but Anglers is meant to be one of the "speciality" civics that shape how you play, and it's ok for the latter kind of civic to be locked (especially if it changes jobs in a way that isn't just a simple same-stratum swap like Entertainer -> Duelist or Administrator -> High Priest). You could make Anglers "Masterful Crafters, but for farms" by just scrapping the Pearl Diver and giving two Anglers per farm (and maybe nerf the job a bit to keep it balanced), but that would be boring compared to what it could be.

I don't think it's a flaw with the pop system per se. It's pretty much a fundamental principle of the game at this point that pops are the most precious economic resource, and menial jobs like Clerk are to be treated as a kind of underemployment. In this context, *Specialist* jobs especially absolutely need to carry their weight, so anything that creates weak Specialist jobs is running contrary to general principle, inflicting a pop management nightmare on the player and outright punishing the AI. (Another example of the problem is when your capital building grants an excessive number of Enforcer jobs, which become virtually useless once crime is kept to a safe level.)

 

[Rakonat]

Anglers do count as Farmers for bonuses and modifiers (and Pearl Divers count as Artisans).

After further testing this is only half true. Anglers do benefit from Farming Subsidies and Ag world specializations, but Pearl Divers DO NOT count as artificers or receive the bonuses from Factory or Industrial world, and far as I can tell they don't benefit from Civilian replicators Or Civilian Repli-Complexes. The only bonuses that can receive are flat bonuses to CG and those that improve. PDX seems to consider them Clerks/Trade Value pops, NOT Artisans/Consumer Goods pops.

 

[DeanTheDull]

After further testing this is only half true. Anglers do benefit from Farming Subsidies and Ag world specializations, but Pearl Divers DO NOT count as artificers or receive the bonuses from Factory or Industrial world, a

Pearl Divers get better-than Factory World benefits innately.

Industrial world designations decrease the minerals required for CG by 20%. That lowers a 6 mineral input to 4.8 per base 6 CG produced. Pearl Divers use 2 minerals per 3 CG. They're already at better mineral-conversion levels than artificers on factory-worlds.

This is relevant because it lets their worlds focus on food instead- getting a 25% boost the base 8 Angler job- without any mineral-efficiency incentive to dedicate a factory world early on. The minerals efficiency rate is already top-class.

and far as I can tell they don't benefit from Civilian replicators Or Civilian Repli-Complexes. The only bonuses that can receive are flat bonuses to CG and those that improve. PDX seems to consider them Clerks/Trade Value pops, NOT Artisans/Consumer Goods pops.

Can you clarify/confirm the replicator bit?

Civilian Replicators chains are flat bonuses- it raises the base job production level directly, which % modifiers then impact. But the tool tip if you click on actual jobs doens't indicate the +1/+2; you can only see it if you disable the building.