Ascension Perk Elimination

[Sheriff Godwin Law]

platonic blank empire.

That's what my defensive pact partner called me when I tried to form an alliance.

 

[y1kdcb5au9rqw]

I fail to see how conquering everything and then sitting around for 100+ years to beat the crisis is inherently better than building a peaceful empire with lots of habitats and megastructures until the crisis pops up and then beat the crisis...

Is it because you (at least theoretically) can beat the crisis faster? That in itself is not part of the criteria so why would that be better?

You are supposed to survive the crisis in the best manner - that could just as well be that the crisis never touches your space to begin with - owning everything would mean that you would loose space to the crisis for a while so that could be argued as a worse outcome than sending your fleet far away from your own safe part of the galaxy to deal with the crisis.

 

[GloatingSwine]

It's your fault for being born with a heart full of neutrality.

 

[Sheriff Godwin Law]

I fail to see how conquering everything and then sitting around for 100+ years to beat the crisis is inherently better than building a peaceful empire with lots of habitats and megastructures until the crisis pops up and then beat the crisis...

Well, the standard isn't 'better' it's 'useful.' So my assumptions on this topic are based on eliminating randomness that could cause potential for failure.

So, a strategy that puts you in control of beating the crisis and enables you to do so is more useful than a strategy that depends on the AI.
A strategy that beats the crisis faster is more useful than beating the crisis slower.

 

[sortulv]

Well, the standard isn't 'better' it's 'useful.' So my assumptions on this topic are based on eliminating randomness that could cause potential for failure.

So, a strategy that puts you in control of beating the crisis and enables you to do so is more useful than a strategy that depends on the AI.
A strategy that beats the crisis faster is more useful than beating the crisis slower.

So, a strategy that does not depend on there being an AI to beat up at all also makes sense then, right?
Or having room to expand without running into marauders/FE?
Or, for that matter that this is a single player game? If all other empires are players, then a lot of this tends to go out the window, right?

 

[Sheriff Godwin Law]

So, a strategy that does not depend on there being an AI to beat up at all also makes sense then, right?
Or having room to expand without running into marauders/FE?

No. A strategy that does not require the AI to make any meaningful contribution to the crisis event at end game. The rest is just ridiculous.

Or, for that matter that this is a single player game? If all other empires are players, then a lot of this tends to go out the window, right?

Oh wow no. Definitely not. All of this stays very much within the window if we talk multiplayer. If anything the problems with tall play usefulness are magnified in a multiplayer setting as you will have active threats to your empire throughout. If we start talking about usefulness in the context of a multiplayer setting, I'm not even going to worry about the end game crisis because I'm not even sure the tall pacifist makes it to the victory screen.

Strategies like building galactic wonders, spamming habitats until you have 40% of inhabited worlds, or even territory spamming in the early game all leave you vulnerable to a player smart enough to plan a response using meta-game knowledge, as opposed to predictable diplomatic calculations.

Half of the minerals it takes you to even build a ringworld can give someone enough of a military edge to take your ringworld from you, along with quite a few of your other planets.

 

[Siri]

Interstellar Dominion: 23 (+1)
Voidborne: 6
Master Builders: 6
Galactic Wonders: 9 (-2)
Synthetic Ascension (The Flesh is Weak + Synthetic Evolution): 16
Psionic Ascension (Mind over Matter + Transcendence): 14

Plussing ID because in my opinion, if influence isn't what is capping your expansion past the very beginning of the game you are either playing wrong, choosing not to expand for some reason, or you're playing a fanatic xenophobe/genocider. Considered giving it to Voidborne, not because it is best but because it really shouldn't be the next one to go out, even if the three megastructure perks should be the next three. Galactic Wonders, while the most fun, is the least impactful of the three and for that reason it gets my minus.

 

[Vynlanesh]

Interstellar Dominion: 23
Voidborne: 6
Master Builders: 6
Galactic Wonders: 9
Synthetic Ascension (The Flesh is Weak + Synthetic Evolution): 15 (-1)
Psionic Ascension (Mind over Matter + Transcendence): 16 (+2)

 

[Jmes Snowscoran]

OP here. While I'm not going to adjudicate any disputes about rule interpretation, I'll offer up my own thoughts.

First, let's dispense with the fantasy that anyone plays with a 'generic', 'blank' or 'random' empire. You can customize everything freely before starting the game. Moreover, even during the game, you have the option to reform government and embracing factions to alter your ethics, civics and authority. Pacifism is particularly easy to escape by using the Worm events to change your citizen ethos and ethics shift from there. Of course, certain empire types like gestalts and genociders have a harder time changing midgame, but that's a choice you make to begin with.

Consequently, perks should be evaluated for a best case scenario- the player can tailor their empire to synergize with their pick of ascension perks. It also means perks that support a strong playstyle are generally better than perks that enhance a weak playstyle.

Second, balance evaluation in Stellaris is complex, because the game is played under different settings. Leaving aside multiplayer for now (where I think you can fairly claim that any strategy that is easily defeated by a human opponent isn't competitive), the singleplayer case is complicated because there are several different ways to adjust difficulty. Beyond the actual difficulty setting, there's also crisis strength, mid/endgame thresholds, advanced AI, fallen empires, habitable planets, etc.

But the underlying assumption has to be that players use settings that challenge themselves- if you're not playing on challenging difficulty settings, you don't need to pick good perks to win. Hence:

Since the conditions of the thread requires us to beat the crisis, you should have the time to build around 4 megastructures before it triggers.

I fail to see how conquering everything and then sitting around for 100+ years to beat the crisis is inherently better than building a peaceful empire with lots of habitats and megastructures until the crisis pops up and then beat the crisis...

If you can do the same thing 100 years faster, it's a better strategy because it will succeed at a higher difficulty setting- in this case one where the mid- and lategame crises occur sooner.

 

[Sheriff Godwin Law]

Interstellar Dominion: 23
Voidborne: 6
Master Builders: 6
Galactic Wonders: 9
Synthetic Ascension (The Flesh is Weak + Synthetic Evolution): 15 (-1)
Psionic Ascension (Mind over Matter + Transcendence): 16 (+2)

You just did that backwards. It's two down, one up. Results should be

Voidborne: 6
Master Builders: 6
Galactic Wonders: 9
Synthetic Ascension (The Flesh is Weak + Synthetic Evolution): 14 (-2)
Psionic Ascension (Mind over Matter + Transcendence): 15 (+1)

 

[y1kdcb5au9rqw]

If you can do the same thing 100 years faster, it's a better strategy because it will succeed at a higher difficulty setting- in this case one where the mid- and lategame crises occur sooner.

Then you should have named the thread "What perks should I give my driven assimilators" or conversely "What perks best emulated DA play with a non-DA empire" and we wouldn't have wasted the last 27 pages on this

 

[Jmes Snowscoran]

Interstellar Dominion: 24 (+1)
Voidborne: 6
Master Builders: 6
Galactic Wonders: 7 (-2)
Synthetic Ascension (The Flesh is Weak + Synthetic Evolution): 14
Psionic Ascension (Mind over Matter + Transcendence): 15

Then you should have named the thread "What perks should I give my driven assimilators" or conversely "What perks best emulated DA play with a non-DA empire" and we wouldn't have wasted the last 27 pages on this

It's not the OP's job to decide what the most powerful playstyle is (even if I agree with you that DA is a very strong pick for the current meta). That doesn't mean players shouldn't take these things into account. If you're playing to win, you do want to pick perks that synergize with a competitive playstyle.

 

[Vynlanesh]

You just did that backwards. It's two down, one up. Results should be

Thank you so much for noticing that Sheriff Godwin Law. I did that when I first woke up, and obviously my brain wasn't fully awake yet. You have my thanks!

 

[AlanC9]

I fail to see how conquering everything and then sitting around for 100+ years to beat the crisis is inherently better than building a peaceful empire with lots of habitats and megastructures until the crisis pops up and then beat the crisis...

Is it because you (at least theoretically) can beat the crisis faster? That in itself is not part of the criteria so why would that be better?

You are supposed to survive the crisis in the best manner - that could just as well be that the crisis never touches your space to begin with - owning everything would mean that you would loose space to the crisis for a while so that could be argued as a worse outcome than sending your fleet far away from your own safe part of the galaxy to deal with the crisis.

Yeah, this is pretty much what I was trying to get at upthread. I suppose the calculation changes with, say, 5x crises; you really do want more of the galaxy under your personal control in that situation since you'll need the power boost from better human resource management. That's why I don't play with that setting on.

 

[AlanC9]

But the underlying assumption has to be that players use settings that challenge themselves- if you're not playing on challenging difficulty settings, you don't need to pick good perks to win.

OK, that's clearer. The problem is that on my preferred settings the challenge is all front-loaded, so the whole debate becomes academic since most perks can't help or even be picked in that timeframe. (Except in the sense that I want to get to the final victory in an efficient fashion even after victory is inevitable, but I don't think that counts as "challenge.") Probably why TA hung on so long; that's a perk everyone can get some use out of while they still need to get use out of stuff.

If you can do the same thing 100 years faster, it's a better strategy because it will succeed at a higher difficulty setting- in this case one where the mid- and lategame crises occur sooner.

I wouldn't use "better" that way myself, since I optimize strategy for the settings I actually use, rather than settings I don't use. But that's just standard language ambiguity. For purposes of this thread, it's clear what "better" means now.

Fortunately, I haven't voted, so there's nothing to retract.

 

[Lord Beyer XVII]

Interstellar Dominion: 24
Voidborne: 6
Master Builders: 4(-2)
Galactic Wonders: 7
Synthetic Ascension (The Flesh is Weak + Synthetic Evolution): 14
Psionic Ascension (Mind over Matter + Transcendence): 16(+1)

 

[Jmes Snowscoran]

I wouldn't use "better" that way myself, since I optimize strategy for the settings I actually use, rather than settings I don't use. But that's just standard language ambiguity. For purposes of this thread, it's clear what "better" means now.

As I mentioned above the varied settings people play in singleplayer with is part of what makes balance evaluations in Stellaris difficult. In multiplayer there's little doubt that a strategy which peaks quickly will wipe the floor with one that's built to slowly amass power by sinking all minerals into internal development until 2400. In singleplayer the closest analogue is to test strategies against more difficult settings- including crises that emerge sooner rather than later. There's a vast amount of strategies that can reach the victory screen and beat a 5x crisis on GA with 2400 as the endgame threshold. That doesn't mean they're all equally viable when subjected to even more demanding settings.

Another thing to keep in mind is that this is an elimination game and not a PhD committee. One reason the rules are kept short and succinct is that deep down we all know a lot of people will just vote for the stuff they like anyway, and I for one have no desire to play thread police against nonconforming arguments.

 

[John Rusher]

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.

Yes, but if you want to be fastest in conquest you pick fanatic Purifiers, in which case, you don't need discount on conquest, because it's free conquest. And early expansion is cheap enough, because you already have discount from being fanatic Xenophobe. So that's redundant. The amount you save is miniscule. And getting tech faster is better in this case, because you want either psionic ascension or synth ascension, which requires techs.

So unless you're playing Fanatic Purifiers, you're not playing optimal.

 

[Ur-Quan Lord 13]

At which point you've wasted all the minerals you now need for ships to defeat it. If you spent all the minerals you wasted on megastructures on warships, you could own the majority of the galaxy, have a much much bigger economy than any four megastructures would have given you, and crush the crisis when it appears.

I know I've had this discussion before, though I don't know whether I've had it with you specifically...

How, exactly, are you playing this game, where you actually need to spend all or even a majority of your minerals on warships in order to conquer something in the mid game?

When I beat the 5x grand admiral contingency and their >20 million combined starting fleet power, I owned over half the galaxy, and had a research nexus and a Dyson sphere and 1.5 - 2.5 ringworlds and habitats... I dunno, I'd have to revert the game version to count them but let's say 20-30. And had a fleet that gave me significant negative income out of port despite having something like 2000 fleet cap.

If you have so little mineral income that you actually need to spend it all on warships to win a war in midgame, you have too little, or you're spending too much of it on upkeep of warships you don't actually need.

In late midgame, I've got 10s of thousands of minerals I need to spend on something. My limiting factor on rebuilding my fleet against the contingency wasn't minerals, but # of shipyards. My positive income was around 8000 after dealing with hub #2 (from a low of about -3000 when the crisis started), since my fleet was down to like 1300 cap and the ghost signal weakened. Since my net income kept swinging back and forth... Well, I had to go back to building habitats and ringworlds when it was high, or I'd cap out my 125k storage or whatever

And early expansion is cheap enough, because you already have discount from being fanatic Xenophobe

Buuut... These are subtractive discounts. When you already have -40% from fanatic xenophobe, -20% is actually -33%.

My favorite game was a spiritualist fanatic xenophobe with parliamentary system, rushing all the outpost discounts. I had 213 systems before I even had to declare war; when an outpost costs 18 influence, no one can cut you off

 

[RedPearlA]

Clearly you're a skilled player then, but you're succeeding in spite of that strategy, not because of it. 3000 naval cap isn't that high for a late-game empire preparing to face a crisis in a normal or larger galaxy.

If you mean the strategy of building lots of habitats then I disagree. If you mean the strategy of not conquering the galaxy then I absolutely agree. The only in game cost to conquering the galaxy would be is the unity to unlock another tradition tree, increased unity cost for ambitions, and the R&D cost of the colossus itself. As I see it Stellaris is a RP strategy space civilization game. Long story short except for one nation on the other side of the galaxy I had friendly relations with every normal nation. The decision to not conquer the galaxy was a RP decision not a strategic decision.