Ascension Perk Elimination
- Thread starter Jmes Snowscoran
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If you own 40% of habitable planets or have conquered everyone, you are inherently no longer tall. Being in a federation with AI is inerently worse than not being because the AI is stupid, and being tall will lock you out of owning the federation fleet because you need 10% of the federation's planets to qualify.
Being tall is bad for the criteria specified in this thread.
By the time of the crisis, you can easily have over 50 habitats, all the different unique megastructures and at least 2 ringworlds if you go all out on it.
At which point you are no longer tall in any meaningful way.
And also still have a worse economy than if you spent all the influence and minerals on conquest.
3 ways to do this playing tall - habitats, vassals and allies.
Winning just requires 40% to be held by your side.
Having others play distraction while you take out the actual crisis threat works.
Fine then, being an empire that does not expand much past the space they were able to colonize peacefully are dependent on megastructures for victory. You keep saying conquesting is the best way of achieving victory but you miss the point. Obviously, wide conquest is the fastest/most efficient way of achieving victory as well as amassing a fleet strong enough to beat the end game crisis, but are we supposed to only consider such empires in this ranking?
But that's the fucking point of this whole thread!
Which ascension perks are most and least useful for acheiving the victory screen and defeating the crisis.
Conquest is the fastest and easiest way of doing that, therefore the perks that are most useful are the ones that enhance conquest. The ones that slow down conquest by wasting influence and minerals on strictly worse alternatives are less useful.
It is you (and many others who have voted down the strictly optimal choices for the criteria of the thread) who have missed the point. This thread was not supposed to be about what you like for your playstyle, it was supposed to be about what is best for meeting a specific set of criteria that were laid out in the opening post.
Or starting tall for the early advantages and then switching to an end game strategy of rapid expansion through conquest of colonized space.
Interstellar Dominion: 24
Voidborne: 5
Master Builders: 6
Galactic Wonders: 11 (-2)
Synthetic Ascension (The Flesh is Weak + Synthetic Evolution): 16 (+1)
Psionic Ascension (Mind over Matter + Transcendence): 14
Which Synthetic Ascension works great for as the under appreciated but very potent ability to forcefully convert alien pops into native robots sidesteps many of the games blocks against rapid expansion.
Galactic Wonders, on the other hand, are a trap designed to steal people's minerals, with the possible exception of an early science nexus. I resist my desire to go partisan and vote down Psionic Ascension because, while it is weaker than most of the options still on the board, it still actually helps more often than it turns.
The thread makes no mention what so ever of the type of empire being played, so we should consider all builds. A fanatic pacifist empire cannot play wide conquest. No where is it stated OR implied that we should not consider such empires, and only consider empires that are built to reach victory as quickly as possible.
That means that perks should be assessed based on how good they are at doing that. The thread doesn't need to specify playstyle because one playstyle is inherently better at achieving the criteria for selection, therefore the perks which synergise with that playstyle are, by the criteria of the thread, more useful.
My take on that problem was to not consider it at all. I'm imagining these perks in the hands of a blank, ethos and civic devoid empire except when those ascension perks come with an ethos requirement.
I disagree, but we're arguing semantics at this point.
We should be judging the perks based on their usefulness at achieving victory for a random empire. This makes it somewhat difficult as you have certain perks that are useless to some empires but vital for others, but I think perks should be judged on how often they are useful, and how much they help when they are useful.
I mean if I was to consider only perks that applied to optimized builds, I'd say bio, synth, and psionic ascension are all useless because imo DA's are the best wide conquest build available.
No - since it is both winning & defeating the crisis, then being quick isn't really that useful.
The crisis doesn't spawn any sooner because you won. And quite frankly - trying to manage a 1000 star system empire for 100 years waiting for the crisis sounds like something that would cause me to quit - thus failing this...
If you rolled a random empire it is more likely to be non-pacifist and therefore benefits more from conquest perks than any other, because conquest is the best playstyle for achieving the criteria of the thread.
Yeah but if you roll pacifist you more or less can't win the game without megastructures. If you roll something like devouring swarm you can still win while never taking a single ascension perk.
Again though, rolling pacifist is less likely than not. Ergo this is not a relevant argument, even if the thread specified a random empire, and it doesn't. It specifies a goal state which conquest is best at achieving.
Interstellar Dominion: 22 (-2)
Voidborne: 6 (+1)
Master Builders: 6
Galactic Wonders: 11
Synthetic Ascension (The Flesh is Weak + Synthetic Evolution): 16
Psionic Ascension (Mind over Matter + Transcendence): 14
Voidborne: 6 (+1)
Master Builders: 6
Galactic Wonders: 11
Synthetic Ascension (The Flesh is Weak + Synthetic Evolution): 16
Psionic Ascension (Mind over Matter + Transcendence): 14
If you're powerful enough to overcome all the other empires and the end game crisis. Put 990 of those stars into sectors and set the game to fastest. If your only enemy left is the clock you don't need ascension perks to defeat it.
Who cares if its less likely than not? It's about balancing the fact that while megastructures are not going to be a great pick for most empires, unlike any other ascension perk they are needed for certain empires to win. The OP may not state a random empire, but no where does it state or imply conquest only like you think.
Again though. The OP sets out a goal condition and no constraints. That means it implies free selection of empires or a platonic blank empire. If you were serious about your suggestion that "some empires need this" then you would have been persistently upvoting bio ascension as it's the only option for hive minds to optimise and machine worlds as it's a necessary catchup for machine empires.