Angler Banger

[Ludaire]

Some estimates:
About 10%~ more efficient at converting Minerals, less then half as efficient at production of CG.
All things being equal, you would require twice the Pops to use 20%~ less minerals and produce 10%~ less.
At base level before Industrial Worlds it instead requires twice the Pops to use 33% less minerals and produce 10% less.

All of this analysis only considers the consumer goods output, though. There's a lot more factors in the civic's overall performance

• Pearl Divers produce trade value, too.
• Pearl Divers are provided by districts that cost half as much to build and maintain as industrial districts while still being unlimited on ocean worlds.
• Anglers are much, much more powerful than farmers, and you'll have 1 angler for every pearl diver.

The difficulty with this civic is that there's a lot going on. It's easy to zero in on a specific comparison like a single pearl diver vs a single artisan/merchant or comparing food per agriculture district provided by farmers/anglers. It's just not that simple, though. There's too much going on for a single, straight-forward mathematical analysis to spit out a clear comparison of the civic. I think an accurate picture would require comparing 2-3 full colonies.

To be honest, that's why I like this civic. The implications go deep and require re-evaluating how you structure your empire instead of being a simple percentage boost. Regardless of its power level, it's a great addition to the game, and I'm enjoying playing with it quite a lot. Maybe it needs a buff, but from playing it in game, it doesn't seem like it needs to be a huge one.

I think the biggest problem with the trait is that it feels like it pushes you hard to have a pretty close to 1-1 ratio of Pearl Divers to Anglers. Both jobs come from the same district, despite producing different resources, and it seems like the two are balanced to be together, not separate. If the ratio of your needs for consumer goods and food don't match up with what the Angler agriculture district provides, it's a pretty big disadvantage. Since "too many CGs" means you can throw more at science, move your economy in a military direction, etc., an imbalance will usually mean an over-abundance of food. That requires you to swap in artisans instead of pearl divers, so pearl divers make up a smaller portion of your CG income, lessening the impact of the civic (for good or ill). It also means the "unlimited agriculture district" rule means a lot less. I feel like it ends up marrying the civic to Catalytic Converters because excess food isn't much of a problem when you can just convert that food to alloys, since you can never have too many of those. I suppose you could view Pearl Divers as supplementary to artisans rather than replacing them, but it's been fun to be able to turn off all artisan jobs in my empire and switch to a militarized economy while still running excess CGs.

 

[SteelCrow]

3 Farmers produce 18 food. 1 Artisan produces 6 CGs and costs 6 minerals.

Total output of 12 base resources and 6 CGs for 3 pops.

2 Anglers produces 16 food + 4 trade for 14 base resources, 2 pearl divers cost 8 base resources and produce 4 base resources and 6 CGs.

Total output of 10 base resources and 6 CGs for 3 pops.

I cannot fathom your math, my friend. This is how it should read:

3 Farmers produce 18 food. 1 Artisan produces 6 CGs and costs 6 minerals.

Total output of 12 base resources and 6 CGs for 4 pops.

2 Anglers produces 16 food + 4 trade for 20 base resources, 2 pearl divers cost 8 base resources and produce 4 base resources and 6 CGs.

Total output of 16 base resources and 6 CGs for 4 pops.

 

[Less2]

I cannot fathom your math, my friend. This is how it should read:

Hello can I hire you to check all my posts before I make them? I'll pay nothing but you'll get good feelings of fulfillment from the job.

I think it's because I was comparing 1 farmer + 1 artisan at first to 1 angler + 1 pearl diver before realizing that 3/1 vs. 2/2 was a more clear comparison.

 

[evilcat]

You can compare
4 Anglers 4 Divers +2 miners=24f+12cg+16tv (4/10 specialists)
vs
4 Farmers + 3 miners +1 technican + 2arstisan=24f+12cg+6e (2/10 specialists)
Second set is easier to specialize, since your artisan and farmers both have specialization.
You get 1tv on this 10pop squad, (but you also need catalyst and some technicans, researchers and so on) so it is not 1tv on every pop.
Not impressive.

Maybe if diver was 4food maintain, there would be a benefit of no minerals needs.

 

[Millbot]

Really, a at game start locked origin needs to do one of three things.

-Make some pops more efficient at the get go and leave it so that your pop inefficiency use is ahead. Pearl Divers pretty much not only erase the gains you get from your anglers, but drag it down.

-Leave pop efficiency on par with normal builds, but significantly change how you play. I'd argue Anglers really doesn't do this. Again, pearl divers are just too inefficient. If pearl divers didn't use minerals, it probably would be closer to a useful civic because then you're consumer goods production would be different (as in it would rely on food and trade instead of minerals). This is why catalytic concerts beats anglers. Now if you got the pop efficiency right and made pearl divers a good CG production that uses food, it would put the two civics on par with each. Neither being great without the other because you'd need mineral districts, but then they would have really good synergy because it would allow for the setup that makes catalytic process for non-tree of life hiveminds decent. Where you could float you mineral needs solely on space minerals.

-The civic brings in other bonuses that either indirectly buff pop efficiency, functional architecture does this somewhat by making it so you pops have to gather less to build things. Boost pop growth, which can multiple good pop efficiency or make pop inefficiency matter less. A building slot has a few advantages, namely having to spend less on sprawl to get your buildings going. I'm sure I'm missing other things but again anglers doesn't really do any of this.

I'm going to argue the real crux of the civic comes back to the pearl divers. Yes, you could got route three and probably make the civic a solid B tier one that brings in a job that most find annoying. I think it better to do some tweaks to pearl divers to make them less janky. Honestly, really need less jobs like clerks, where the play is often micromanaging them and pearl diver is worse in this regard because it's a specialist and pop demotion is obnoxious to deal with. Sure there is going to always be bottom of the barrel jobs, but they should be solid enough that it's just not worth turning them off unless you really need to ensure that pops work a very specific job to either right your economy or meat some sort of goal (like trying to hit the needed minerals for an ecumenopolis) or I guess if you have something like scrap miners (you always want those jobs filled).

The TL DR is that civic lags because it's pop inefficient and it doesn't give you anything to offset it.

 

[Rakonat]

The more I think about this civic and weight the pros and cons of it, not against other civics but just the default gameplay, it just keeps getting worse and worse.

Pro: You get uncapped farms on Ocean Worlds, and wet worlds give angler + pearl diver per agri district.
Con: Habitats, Ring Worlds and Gaia Worlds don't benefit from this, you know, those late game worlds that pretty much every non-gestalt empire pushes towards acquiring one or more. Sure you can use them, but this civic does nothing for you. Imagine if Inward Perfection or Slaver guilds just didn't give bonuses while you were on Gaia worlds.

Pro: It makes CG and Trade for upkeep given
Con: It takes roughly twice the Pops to achieve standard levels, those <20% gains from upkeep are lost the moment you consider living standards and pop upkeep, and a net negative when you consider what the OTHER half of those pops could be producing instead.

Pro: Anglers produce more food than standard farmers.
Con: Immediately offset by how ineffective Pearl Divers are. So you can either be welcome to micromanagement hell of having to constantly shut off PD jobs, or find yourself producing way more CG than you need, which is not ideal either since the amount of things you can actually do with CGs are limited at best.

And if do keep the PD active, congrats your Angler is IDENTICAL in output to a regular farmer, but you only get one, so the net output of your Agri districts is 50% of the food you'd get normally, and compare that to a regular Agri District + Industrial Distict, you have the same rough ouputs but the non-angler gets the alloys as a bonus.

And another unlisted con here: You Food Processors are 50% as effective since you get half the jobs per agri district.

So we have a perk that ONLY works while on wet classification worlds, to the exclusion of Gaia and Artificial worlds, and the benefits it provides don't even break even with the cons that come up from it.

This is a C tier civic, and the fact that it's starter only makes it borderline D tier.

 

[majikero]

The build really hits its stride once you get terraforming. Fun fact, you can't really feed your entire CG economy with pearl divers alone. Had 1 dedicated factory world most of the time just to keep it a step out of the red. Trade really adds up especially if you keep it at wealth creation. The unlimited agri district is pretty nice actually. Every planet is an agri world except for your dedicated forge world and mining worlds.

So yeah. Not really meta since it needs setup time before it hits the point where the build comes together. Reminds me of old void dweller before they reworked it. It relies entirely on one specific tech to work so better have a New World specialist on research duty till you get terraforming.