Beginner's Guide to Ethics, Traits and Governments

[CrabHelmet]

It would be nice if genetic engineering worked so I could take more useful traits early on and then genetically engineer Venerable in when I would need it.

Agreed. As it stands, though, I think the best government/ethics combinations look like this:

• Spiritualist / Individualist / Pacifist, with Moral Democracy
  Aims to maximize Happiness directly through happiness modifiers; strongest opening build and better than any of the others at least until you would reach Synths or have POPs you can't converge through Happiness and Edicts alone, which is probably the mid-game. From day 1 you have +10% from Moral Democracy, +5% from Spiritualist, +2% from Governor; all you need is your Governor to hit level 3 or to research Void Clouds or elect a Champion of the People, and you have Joyful. Alternatively, you can take Communal as a trait.
  
• Spiritualist / Individualist / Pacifist, with Theocratic Republic
  A version of the above that pays off less quickly because you don't hit Joyful so immediately, but last betters into the late-game thanks to the extra convergence. Because you lost the +10% from Moral Democracy, you can't hit Joyful reliably unless you take Communal; then you just need Void Cloud and a decent governor. Otherwise you have to gamble on getting a Champion of the People.
  
• Spiritualist / Collectivist / Pacifist, with Theocratic Oligarchy
  A version of the above with even longer staying power. Will struggle to hit Joyful at all, but can hit Happy immediately so you are pulling level with Materialist's tech boost. No point in taking Communal because you can't hit Joyful from the start unless you get Void Cloud and Champion of the People and a decent Governor, and that still only covers your starting planet which makes it more of a waste compared to Theocratic Republic where you can hit Joyful on any same-habitat with Communal and a little luck.
  
• Materialist / Individualist / Pacifist, with Science Directorate.
  Risky, aims to maximize opportunities to hit the best techs. Not even convinced this is as good as the others, but it's sort of like Spain in Civ 5 - if it goes well, it goes well.
• Materialist / Collectivist / Pacifist, with Despotic Hegemony.
  Aims to maximize Happiness indirectly through convergence and techs, focuses on late-game output yields through Synths and goes with the tech advantage.
  
• Fanatic Collectivist / Pacifist, with Despotic Empire.
  Slaves slaves slaves.

You can swap Pacifist for Xenophile on any of those except the first where Pacifist is need to access the government form; Xenophile being more risky than Pacifist but probably offering higher rewards on average, depends how risk averse you are.

As far as traits go:

• Quick Learner / Enduring / Weak / (filler)
  Works for then Moral Democracy and Theocratic Republic build. You don't need Venerable as much because being Democracies, they bring in a lot of influence and Quick Learner gets you the fast start for Joyful you'll be wanting. The filler will probably be Communal if you went Theocratic Republic and Rapid Breeder if you didn't.
  
• Venerable / Weak / (negative filler)
  All of the non-democracies because of the reduced Influence opportunities and the fact you'll get more stable leaders once you get a good trait. The filler is probably going to be Sedentary, unless you went Despotic Empire - then it'll be Decadent.

I don't think there's anything I've missed? I'm inclined to think that the best two will be the Moral Democracy and the Collectivist Despotic Hegemony builds; but I don't think there are any builds I missed that you could argue are better than anything I've left on the list.

 

[CrabHelmet]

Assuming you can get the gas for the Atmosphere Manipulator. The OMCL is, as you've said, somewhat luck based so it can't be reliably depended on. Would it be better to keep it simple and just roll with fanatical spiritualist and collectivist with Theocratic Oligarchy just for the passive ethics divergence? A nice side effect is that the ability turn on encourage free thought or information quarantine as necessary. Social welfare programs (15%) with fanatical spiritualist (10% + 5% for void clouds) is enough to bring it up to to 90% from the base happiness for that 20% bonus. Irenic Democracy is definitely stronger early game, but I can't help but wonder if the better ethics divergence options for collectivists would be better in the long run, especially for wide empires.

Going Fanatic is inadvisable; you miss out the chance to get an extra building for some fairly meagre returns - Fanatic Spiritualist is only an extra +5% Happiness. The only Fanatic worth going for is Collective so you can pursue Slavery properly. Theocratic Oligarchy is workable - the only real downside to it I think is that you need to go Communal to get Joyful reliably, which means you can't go Venerable, and non-Democracies do much better with Venerable. I feel like if you're aiming for convergence/happiness balance, Theocratic Republic does better - the period of time inbetween rapid-start Happiness Empires and deep-strength Convergence Empires for which Theocratic Oligarchy is best is quite-small.

On traits, I'm curious as to why you wrote out extremely adaptive so soon. On the larger maps, having two additional world-types you can comfortably colonize and still get the joyful bonus is not insignificant. Especially considering it's down to luck as to whether your neighbors are any good at colonizing the worlds you can't. Venerable is another option I'm looking at, but I'm loathe to give up the additional worlds.

If you're using Extremely Adaptive you're not conquering fast enough IMO. I often start wars for the express purpose of just getting a planet with a POP of the right habitability. If you do that, Extremely Adaptive is redundant. You're right it's a little luck-based, but not hugely. Your clonization pace is naturally limited by mineral and energy availability, the odds you run out of all planets that you don't have at least one species at 80% for before you encounter a species that has 80% you could war for are quite low.

 

[arcticpulse]

Fanatics in general are terrible choices because the perks of fanaticism are not worth the opportunity cost of passing up a third ethos, if you want high happiness, Spiritualist/Collectivist/Xenophile or Spiritualist/Collectivist/Pacifist would provide you better results. On top of this, normal Spiritualists would get less pissy about robots/selected lineages than fanatics.

While this is true and pacifists in particular have some nice benefits, as you mentioned in your post, choosing either xenophile or pacifist would block me out of taking a primitive world. It would hurt even more if they have different planet preferences. The main reason I went fanatic spiritualist is to reach the magic 90% with minimal effort. I would be lacking 5% happiness if I went spiritualist to reach the 90% threshold and building a paradise dome, even with the habitability bonus, which doesn't really help if you're using extremely adaptive, is a bit of an overkill when that tile could be used for something else. Although if I swap out extremely adaptive for communal, which I should probably do, pacifist seems a lot more attractive. I need to test it out on my next playthough.

 

[CrabHelmet]

While this is true and pacifists in particular have some nice benefits, as you mentioned in your post, choosing either xenophile or pacifist would block me out of taking a primitive world. It would hurt even more if they have different planet preferences. The main reason I went fanatic spiritualist is to reach the magic 90% with minimal effort. I would be lacking 5% happiness if I went spiritualist to reach the 90% threshold and building a paradise dome, even with the habitability bonus, which doesn't really help if you're using extremely adaptive, is a bit of an overkill when that tile could be used for something else.

Do you find taking primitive worlds immediately that useful? I've never seen a primitive with more than 8 pop; on average I'd say they have 4. You have to rebuild all their buildings before they actually contribute much. They're also just not that frequent. I agree a very early one is a useful way to bulk out your capabilities and even to get an extra habitability, but you go Extremely Adaptive, so you don't even need it... It just seems to be like you're relying on a lucky draw. Even by late early-game (when you've got 10 planets or so), just Enlightening and Integrating doesn't seem that much worse to warrant going Fanatic anything, which cuts off some really useful buildings.

 

[arcticpulse]

Going Fanatic is inadvisable; you miss out the chance to get an extra building for some fairly meagre returns - Fanatic Spiritualist is only an extra +5% Happiness. The only Fanatic worth going for is Collective so you can pursue Slavery properly. Theocratic Oligarchy is workable - the only real downside to it I think is that you need to go Communal to get Joyful reliably, which means you can't go Venerable, and non-Democracies do much better with Venerable. I feel like if you're aiming for convergence/happiness balance, Theocratic Republic does better - the period of time inbetween rapid-start Happiness Empires and deep-strength Convergence Empires for which Theocratic Oligarchy is best is quite-small.



If you're using Extremely Adaptive you're not conquering fast enough IMO. I often start wars for the express purpose of just getting a planet with a POP of the right habitability. If you do that, Extremely Adaptive is redundant. You're right it's a little luck-based, but not hugely. Your clonization pace is naturally limited by mineral and energy availability, the odds you run out of all planets that you don't have at least one species at 80% for before you encounter a species that has 80% you could war for are quite low.

Thanks for the tips! Ultimately I'm concerned that Irenic Democracy, while being the stronger choice, can't handle larger empires. I've managed to get up to 30% ethics divergence for my pops and I can see it becoming a serious problem for longer games. I'll definitely have to do a comparison between your build and one focused on more ethics divergence reduction.

 

[arcticpulse]

Do you find taking primitive worlds immediately that useful? I've never seen a primitive with more than 8 pop; on average I'd say they have 4. You have to rebuild all their buildings before they actually contribute much. They're also just not that frequent. I agree a very early one is a useful way to bulk out your capabilities and even to get an extra habitability, but you go Extremely Adaptive, so you don't even need it... It just seems to be like you're relying on a lucky draw. Even by late early-game (when you've got 10 planets or so), just Enlightening and Integrating doesn't seem that much worse to warrant going Fanatic anything, which cuts off some really useful buildings.

It's helped me once or twice but you're right that fanatic spiritualist has a high opportunity cost for questionable gains. I'm going to try out pacifism instead, though it's personally weird for me to have a 'pacifistic' ethos and still be trigger happy when I see targets of opportunity. Here's hoping terror bombing and war unhappiness doesn't stack!

 

[CrabHelmet]

yeah, it does weird me a bit pacifist is great for militaristic empires. Paradox needs to work on that a bit, methinks.

 

[jju_57]

I enjoyed reading the posts over the last few pages. Thanks. Very informative.

 

[type81]

Agreed. As it stands, though, I think the best government/ethics combinations look like this:

• Spiritualist / Individualist / Pacifist, with Moral Democracy
  Aims to maximize Happiness directly through happiness modifiers; strongest opening build and better than any of the others at least until you would reach Synths or have POPs you can't converge through Happiness and Edicts alone, which is probably the mid-game. From day 1 you have +10% from Moral Democracy, +5% from Spiritualist, +2% from Governor; all you need is your Governor to hit level 3 or to research Void Clouds or elect a Champion of the People, and you have Joyful. Alternatively, you can take Communal as a trait.
  
• Spiritualist / Individualist / Pacifist, with Theocratic Republic
  A version of the above that pays off less quickly because you don't hit Joyful so immediately, but last betters into the late-game thanks to the extra convergence. Because you lost the +10% from Moral Democracy, you can't hit Joyful reliably unless you take Communal; then you just need Void Cloud and a decent governor. Otherwise you have to gamble on getting a Champion of the People.
  
• Spiritualist / Collectivist / Pacifist, with Theocratic Oligarchy
  A version of the above with even longer staying power. Will struggle to hit Joyful at all, but can hit Happy immediately so you are pulling level with Materialist's tech boost. No point in taking Communal because you can't hit Joyful from the start unless you get Void Cloud and Champion of the People and a decent Governor, and that still only covers your starting planet which makes it more of a waste compared to Theocratic Republic where you can hit Joyful on any same-habitat with Communal and a little luck.
  
• Materialist / Individualist / Pacifist, with Science Directorate.
  Risky, aims to maximize opportunities to hit the best techs. Not even convinced this is as good as the others, but it's sort of like Spain in Civ 5 - if it goes well, it goes well.
• Materialist / Individualist / Pacifist, with Despotic Hegemony
  A little more reliable than the above - the key will be the end-game where you will have a good tech and output advantage, but Individualist's energy tech help keeps you in the early game.
  
• Materialist / Collectivist / Pacifist, with Despotic Hegemony.
  Aims to maximize Happiness indirectly through convergence and techs, focuses on late-game output yields through Synths and goes with the tech advantage.
  
• Fanatic Collectivist / Pacifist, with Despotic Empire.
  Slaves slaves slaves.

You can swap Pacifist for Xenophile on any of those except the first where Pacifist is need to access the government form; Xenophile being more risky than Pacifist but probably offering higher rewards on average, depends how risk averse you are.

As far as traits go:

• Quick Learner / Enduring / Weak / (filler)
  Works for then Moral Democracy and Theocratic Republic build. You don't need Venerable as much because being Democracies, they bring in a lot of influence and Quick Learner gets you the fast start for Joyful you'll be wanting. The filler will probably be Communal if you went Theocratic Republic and Rapid Breeder if you didn't.
  
• Venerable / Weak
  All of the non-democracies because of the reduced Influence opportunities and the fact you'll get more stable leaders once you get a good trait.

I don't think there's anything I've missed? I'm inclined to think that the best two will be the Moral Democracy and the Collectivist Despotic Hegemony builds; but I don't think there are any builds I missed that you could argue are better than anything I've left on the list.

The nice thing about the first two individualist/pacifist/spiritualist builds is that you can start off with moral democracy in the early game when the happiness bonuses are limited and fast expansion is mandatory (at least on insane) and then switch to theocratic republic mid-game when you have a large empire and ethics divergence becomes a problem. That's why this build is arguably one of the best in the game.

Do you feel that pacifist is better than spiritualist for the slavery build? Spiritualist provides more/faster happiness boosts and allows for a transition to divine mandate later in the game. On the other hand, pacifist gives you access to Irenic monarchy and (almost) free edicts in the late game and gives you a couple of other nice bonuses.

 

[CrabHelmet]

The nice thing about the first two individualist/pacifist/spiritualist builds is that you can start off with moral democracy in the early game when the happiness bonuses are limited and fast expansion is mandatory (at least on insane) and then switch to theocratic republic mid-game when you have a large empire and ethics divergence becomes a problem. That's why this build is arguably one of the best in the game

Good point, actually. I always forget about government shifts off the top of my head because I find that the Moral democracy build is so powerful by the time I would care, I don't care. But yes, that's very true.

Do you feel that pacifist is better than spiritualist for the slavery build? Spiritualist provides more/faster happiness boosts and allows for a transition to divine mandate later in the game. On the other hand, pacifist gives you access to Irenic monarchy and (almost) free edicts in the late game and gives you a couple of other nice bonuses.

I don't feel like Spiritualist by itself does enough, you know? +5% happiness from Spiritualist and +5% from Void Cloud research is only +10%, and Spiritualist isn't offering anything else. The reason it works with Moral Democracy is because you're stacking. Pacifist as a one-shot does more for you. You might well be right about Divine Mandate, but I'm not sure. The thing about Divine Mandate is that it gives you the +50% tolerance that means you don't have to take Fanatic Collectivist, so you can go Spiritualist / Collectivist and have a spare ethics slot left. The downside is that you miss the advantages of other governments, by which I mean Despotic Empire. Given Despotic Empire is an eventual 20% increase to all production, which is equal to Joyous (excepting Science techs). You're not going Xenophobe or Militarist because they suck, you can't go Materialist or Individualist because we need to go Collectivist and Spiritualist, so you're essentially swapping +20% to energy and mineral output in return for access to Pacifist or Xenophile. That doesn't seem like an intuitive trade-off to me? Pacifist and Xenophile are both happiness ethics, and happiness is valuable for... a 20% increase in production, so you're just producing a delayed version of what you would have had if you had gone Fanatic Collectivist from the start.

You're welcoming to correct me on this, Slavery runs are what I've done the least, but intuitively I don't see the appeal in Spiritualist / Collectivist / Pacifist Divine Mandate builds.

 

[Novacat]

yeah, it does weird me a bit pacifist is great for militaristic empires. Paradox needs to work on that a bit, methinks.

I think what happened is that Paradox feared that Militarist would be the go-to choice since, even if one is a peacenik, having a strong military is beneficial, so they went out of their way to throw bonuses and buffs on Pacifists while keeping Militarist's bonuses as minimal as possible. Just that, in this case, Paradox went too far.

Still... Militarist is salvagable. If they bumped the 5% bonuses on the unique building to 10%, and replaced the Damage to space Monster bonuses with useful, military-oriented perks (Say, buffs to Naval Capacity, or even economic/research bonuses like energy income and happiness), Militarist would be in good enough shape.

Mostly. There is still the issue in that militarist governments are worse than pacifistic governments.

Materialist / Individualist / Pacifist, with Despotic Hegemony
A little more reliable than the above - the key will be the end-game where you will have a good tech and output advantage, but Individualist's energy tech help keeps you in the early game.

Despotic Hegemony is an autocratic government, not usable with Individualist. In this case, I would likely go for Moral Democracy or Science Directorate. Science Directorate is actually a risk-mitigating government, as the more tech cards you draw, the more likely you get the card you want. This is especially useful for Engineering as you have to sift through a lot of useless tech lines for the robots and spaceport technologies.

Though, Moral Democracy is probably better due to the increased control of rulers, and with Moral Democracy + Champion of the People, you can have huge happiness with Materialists.

 

[Peter Ebbesen]

Do you find taking primitive worlds immediately that useful? I've never seen a primitive with more than 8 pop; on average I'd say they have 4. You have to rebuild all their buildings before they actually contribute much. They're also just not that frequent. I agree a very early one is a useful way to bulk out your capabilities and even to get an extra habitability, but you go Extremely Adaptive, so you don't even need it... It just seems to be like you're relying on a lucky draw. Even by late early-game (when you've got 10 planets or so), just Enlightening and Integrating doesn't seem that much worse to warrant going Fanatic anything, which cuts off some really useful buildings.

Finding primitives really early and invading them is a great source of early-game growth due to giving you immediate access to a system you can survey and build mines in post invasion. The POPs on the planet won't contribute much, in some cases nothing for several years, but when you are at the stage where you have very limited opportunities for building mines every system matters. It can also help hedging out other factions - the more of the map you paint swiftly, the more you'll probably end up holding without having to fight for it, something that is especially important if you play on insane difficulty where early game wars can be prohibitively expensive to carry off.

OTOH, I can't help feeling that this min/max discussion has gone rather off topic considering that this is a beginner's guide thread ; Perhaps time to start a separate discussion thread for optimizing builds?

 

[CrabHelmet]

I think what happened is that Paradox feared that Militarist would be the go-to choice since, even if one is a peacenik, having a strong military is beneficial, so they went out of their way to throw bonuses and buffs on Pacifists while keeping Militarist's bonuses as minimal as possible. Just that, in this case, Paradox went too far.

Still... Militarist is salvagable. If they bumped the 5% bonuses on the unique building to 10%, and replaced the Damage to space Monster bonuses with useful, military-oriented perks, Militarist would be in good enough shape.

Moving the bonus from armies to fleets would be a good start.

Despotic Hegemony is an autocratic government, not usable with Individualist. In this case, I would likely go for Moral Democracy or Science Directorate. Science Directorate is actually a risk-mitigating government, as the more tech cards you draw, the more likely you get the card you want. This is especially useful for Engineering as you have to sift through a lot of useless tech lines for the robots and spaceport technologies.

Though, Moral Democracy is probably better due to the increased control of rulers, and with Moral Democracy + Champion of the People, you can have huge happiness with Materialists.

You're quite right, I was careless when copying down the viable combinations and missed that one. I still feel Science Directorate is quite risky. I mean, it's less risky than relying on tech in and of it itself, but by choosing a Science Directorate build that matches techs, you're still choosing to go with something unreliable. All the other builds have guaranteed boni, Science Directorate builds just give you a better chance at random boni of varying strengths.

 

[PotatoOverdose]

There are a few thing missing from the comparisons between fanatic spiritualist and going something else like spiritualist+individualist.

1) Fanatic spiritualist lets you hit maximum effective happiness (90%) on your home world for a solid 20% production/energy bonus on day 1. Can't do that with spiritual/individualist unless you also pick up communal which is an option, but I'd rather have enduring/industrialist with fanatic spiritualist for +35% production, +20% energy on day 1.

2) Happiness buildings in general have a few disadvantages. First - sectors don't build them, so they only apply to your 5 core worlds (with the exception of stock exchange and the academy the bonuses for which are empire wide). Second, and most important, you actually lose all tile yields for the tile you used for the building. Building 2 happiness buildings (e.g. paradise dome and entertainment complex) means you lose anywhere between 10% and 20% of a world's tile yields. Consider a simple example - a 20 pop world. You need say 3 tiles for farms and 1 for a capitol. That leaves 16 tiles for energy or science. Building two happiness buildings busts that down to 14 tiles, a loss of 12.5%. So building a second happiness building to advance from 80% happiness to 90% happiness for a gain of 10% isn't actually a good idea unless your at 23-24 pops. This is why Fanatic spiritual is excellent - if that extra 5% happiness pushes you over a threshold, you gain a significant advantage over someone that uses an additional tile just for happiness. Same argument can be made for moral/irenic democracy.

3) Fanatic Spiritualist are 60x more likely to generate the first psi tech option and 6x more likely for each subsequent psi tech. Regular spiritualists are 40x more likely to generate the first psi tech 4x for subsequent psi techs. So fanatic spiritualist is useful if you're aiming for psi jump drives or precog computers early.

 

[CrabHelmet]

Finding primitives really early and invading them is a great source of early-game growth due to giving you immediate access to a system you can survey and build mines in post invasion. The POPs on the planet won't contribute much, in some cases nothing for several years, but when you are at the stage where you have very limited opportunities for building mines every system matters. It can also help hedging out other factions - the more of the map you paint swiftly, the more you'll probably end up holding without having to fight for it, something that is especially important if you play on insane difficulty where early game wars can be prohibitively expensive to carry off.

I agree to an extent. My concern is that it's not worth giving Pacifist or Xenophile up, as that gives up significant happiness, when you can just build a Frontier Outpost and then Enlighten by means of Observation Post. It costs more influence and is a teeny bit slower, but as many of the listed Pacifist builds are Democracies, influence is very much not a problem, and while it is slower to actually annex the POPs themselves we're all agreed they're not that valuable and the main bonus is the extra territory (at least initially), a Frontier Outpost does that just as well. I mean, it is a genuine downside to Pacifist and Xenophile you can't annex primitives, but it's just pretty low concern to me given all the gains in other areas.

 

[CrabHelmet]

There are a few thing missing from the comparisons between fanatic spiritualist and going something else like spiritualist+individualist.

1) Fanatic spiritualist lets you hit maximum effective happiness (90%) on your home world for a solid 20% production/energy bonus on day 1. Can't do that with spiritual/individualist unless you also pick up communal which is an option, but I'd rather have enduring/industrialist with fanatic spiritualist for +35% production, +20% energy on day 1.

You can't do it Day 1, quite, but very close to - Spiritual / Individualist hits 87% at start, and you hit 90% as soon as you can get a level 3 governor or a Void Cloud, neither of which will take long. Because you went Individualist, and you will at least reach Happy if not Joyful immediately, you hit +20% energy regardless. I am very unconvinced by Industrious. Immediate early-game (until I have 5 or so stable planets and have built them up a little), the majority of my mineral income is from Mining Stations, which Industrious doesn't affect. In that spot, which remember, costs 2, you could have had Quick Learner and Communal. Communal lets you hit Joyful immediately if that's what you wanted, which shuts the gap even more, and Quick Learner is huge - reliably getting anomalies, quicker searches, quicker research, cheaper buildings, you name it. Alternatively, you can drop Communal for Rapid Breeder, which means you get pops 10% faster, which means you get minerals from your home planet 10% faster. Industrious might have an advantage from D1, but it has an advantage from the end of D1 to maybe the end of Year 5, before other options overtake it. I am a strong believer in the best bonuses in Stellaris being ones that are upfront, but in both these cases, I think you're going slightly too upfront.

2) Happiness buildings in general have a few disadvantages. First - sectors don't build them, so they only apply to your 5 core worlds (with the exception of stock exchange and the academy the bonuses for which are empire wide). Second, and most important, you actually lose all tile yields for the tile you used for the building. Building 2 happiness buildings (e.g. paradise dome and entertainment complex) means you lose anywhere between 10% and 20% of a world's tile yields. Consider a simple example - a 20 pop world. You need say 3 tiles for farms and 1 for a capitol. That leaves 16 tiles for energy or science. Building two happiness buildings busts that down to 14 tiles, a loss of 12.5%. So building a second happiness building to advance from 80% happiness to 90% happiness for a gain of 10% isn't actually a good idea unless your at 23-24 pops. This is why Fanatic spiritual is excellent - if that extra 5% happiness pushes you over a threshold, you gain a significant advantage over someone that uses an additional tile just for happiness. Same argument can be made for moral/irenic democracy.

I don't build the Entertainment Forum, it's not worth it. I agree that Happiness Buildings have heavy disadvantages, but remember: we don't actually need Happiness Buildings. Once a POP has Converged to our Ethics, it will have 60% base Happiness, +20% from Irene Democracy, +5% from Spiritualist, +5% from Void Cloud research. That's already 90%, before we've even touched upon Champion of the People or having a decent Governor or having Xenophile boosts. Happiness Buildings are an emergency building for conquered POPs who are too angry to Converge - which is the big advantage of Happiness Buildings; they apply to all POPs. Fanatic Spiritualist only affects your own POPs or Converged POPs, who don't need the extra +5% anyway.

3) Fanatic Spiritualist is 60x more likely to generate the first psi tech option and 6x more likely for each subsequent psi tech. Regular spiritualists are 40x more likely to generate the first psi tech 4x for subsequent psi techs. So fanatic spiritualist is useful if you're aiming for psi jump drives or precog computers early.

This is true. I don't think it's a heavy enough weighting to discount the advantages elsewhere.

 

[PotatoOverdose]

I am very unconvinced by Industrious. Immediate early-game (until I have 5 or so stable planets and have built them up a little), the majority of my mineral income is from Mining Stations, which Industrious doesn't affect. In that spot, which remember, costs 2, you could have had Quick Learner and Communal.

Here's the problem: You are by no means guaranteed to get good production worlds for mining stations in your starter system. And you are likewise not guaranteed any decent production planets in your initial zone of influence. In order to build mining stations you need 2 things: to have the actual worlds with mining yields present in your starting territory (not guaranteed at all) and you need to survey all of your starting systems (which takes time).

With industrious/fanatic spirtual/moral democracy, my pops get +35% production immediately. So the first thing I do is build 2 mining networks (which are 60 minerals each as opposed to 90 for a mining station). This alone, will put me around 20 production, year 1. With a third mining network, and depending on planetary yields, i can get to 25-30 production in the first half of year 2. This gives me the production to build a new mining or research station every 3 months. This is all completely independent of what actual off-world production yields the map gen decided to give me.

With society research grants, I can get colony ships tech by end of year 4. At that point, I should have 30-45 production. I can now crank out a new colony ship every year for 5 years while having enough leftover production to build additional mining or research stations, or I can start building a proper fleet/invasion army. By year 10, I can easily have 5 colonies, 2 starports, a dozen mining/research stations, and the beginnings of a decent fleet.

Such a strong start is imperative on insane, and extremely useful on all lower difficulties. And a beginner, on normal, that builds a couple of mining networks on his homeworld will see immense pay offs from the early boost in production no matter what they choose to do, whether it be colonization, spamming stations, or early conquest. Having those early mining networks produce +35% production is an enormous boon.

 

[type81]

Here's the problem: You are by no means guaranteed to get good production worlds for mining stations in your starter system. And you are likewise not guaranteed any decent production planets in your initial zone of influence. In order to build mining stations you need 2 things: to have the actual worlds with mining yields present in your starting territory (not guaranteed at all) and you need to survey all of your starting systems (which takes time).

With industrious/fanatic spirtual/moral democracy, my pops get +35% production immediately. So the first thing I do is build 2 mining networks (which are 60 minerals each as opposed to 90 for a mining station). This alone, will put me around 20 production, year 1. With a third mining network, and depending on planetary yields, i can get to 25-30 production in the first half of year 2. This gives me the production to build a new mining or research station every 3 months. This is all completely independent of what actual off-world production yields the map gen decided to give me.

With society research grants, I can get colony ships tech by end of year 4. At that point, I should have 30-45 production. I can now crank out a new colony ship every year for 5 years while having enough leftover production to build additional mining or research stations, or I can start building a proper fleet/invasion army. By year 10, I can easily have 5 colonies, 2 starports, a dozen mining/research stations, and the beginnings of a decent fleet.

Such a strong start is imperative on insane, and extremely useful on all lower difficulties. And a beginner, on normal, that builds a couple of mining networks on his homeworld will see immense pay offs from the early boost in production no matter what they choose to do, whether it be colonization, spamming stations, or early conquest. Having those early mining networks produce +35% production is an enormous boon.

Yeah, I definitely agree that this type of fast expand strategy is the best one against AI on insane and probably in MP as well. My main priority is to colonize 5 planets, build 5 spaceports and a corvette fleet up to the fleet cap within ~20 years. Obviously, this requires a lot of minerals. Then you can take on one of the neighboring AIs (or players) and vassalize/annex them. Repeat this process with the other AIs and you'll quickly snowball to take the lead in the galaxy. See Marco Antonio's YouTube LP for an example of this strategy. I must say, however, that this type of rushing strategy can become a little boring/repetitive. Hopefully the non-conquest aspects of the game get fleshed out in the future so that expansion isn't the only interesting part.

 

[Peter Ebbesen]

Here's the problem: You are by no means guaranteed to get good production worlds for mining stations in your starter system. And you are likewise not guaranteed any decent production planets in your initial zone of influence. In order to build mining stations you need 2 things: to have the actual worlds with mining yields present in your starting territory (not guaranteed at all) and you need to survey all of your starting systems (which takes time).

With industrious/fanatic spirtual/moral democracy, my pops get +35% production immediately. So the first thing I do is build 2 mining networks (which are 60 minerals each as opposed to 90 for a mining station). This alone, will put me around 20 production, year 1. With a third mining network, and depending on planetary yields, i can get to 25-30 production in the first half of year 2. This gives me the production to build a new mining or research station every 3 months. This is all completely independent of what actual off-world production yields the map gen decided to give me.

but it is not independent of what actual on-world mineral deposits the map gen decided to give you.

To get around 20 production with 2 extra mining networks with +35% production requires a base 15 production (20/1.35 ~ 14.8). Your capital world is guaranteed to have 8 minerals on start from administration centre and +1 mineral deposit with mining network next to your administration building , no more, no less; Any mineral deposits beyond that depends on the blessings of the RNG, just like the case for mining stations off planet. To reach base 15 with 2 extra mining networks requires that those 2 give you 7 extra base minerals, i.e. that they are placed on a +1 and a +2 deposit respectively. This is not the typical scenario. This is being really lucky in homeworld map generation.

Assuming you are really unlucky and just get what you are guaranteed, that means that your first two mining networks will bring you from a base of 8 to a base of 12, for a total of 16.2 production, which is 81% of your proposed scenario. To reach 25+ production in this scenario in the first half of year 2 would require base 19 production (25/1.35 ~ 18.5), which means employing another 4 POPs in mining (giving you 4+4+6*2 = 20 base, 27 with bonuses). However, this is not going to happen as that requires a total of 8 POPs assigned to mineral production (one of them in the Planetary administration), leaving no POPs to farm food or generate energy.

I find it likely that we'll agree that leaving a POP to farm food (4) and two to gather energy (12) in the original buildings is worth it, leaving you with 5 POPs for mineral production, two of which are in the original buildings that give 8 production, which means that all one is guaranteed with the POP mineral production strategy is 1.35*(8+3*2) = 18.9 production until the planet's population grows in year 3 or 4. With a mining station cost of 90, this means you can afford one every 4.7 months.

Now, you might well argue that this is a special case; that usually you aren't unlucky like that, and it is true. It is more common to get homeworlds with a 9-11 minerals than 8, and you might even get one with 12.

But since your argument in favour of using the homeworlds production relies on the unreliability of the other options and worst case scenarios where they are concerned, it has to be considered. Starting with 8 or 9 minerals total from homeworld is not unusual.

None of this makes your argument that the original planet's production is the only mineral production one can truly rely on false; it is obviously true regardless of whether one has an 8 or 12 mineral start. The main issue with that argument is that just like one can usually rely on one's home planet having better mineral deposits allowing for more on-planet production, one can also usually rely on one's homeworld or other systems within one's sensor borders having mineral deposits.

So it comes down to whether one wants to guard against the worst case (in which case the industrious planet-based approach is clearly superior) or the typical case (in which case the situation is much more complex).

Couple that with many people in singleplayer being willing to start over rather than playing to the bitter end should they get a bad start, and many people in multiplayer being more focused on a setup they think will make them win in the early, mid, or end-game, and much less on making a build that is guaranteed to survive the early game in decent shape but without a clear edge to win in mid- or end-game, and the value of preparing for a worst-case starting scenario dwindles.

 

[PotatoOverdose]

Couple that with many people in singleplayer being willing to start over rather than playing to the bitter end should they get a bad start, and many people in multiplayer being more focused on a setup they think will make them win in the early, mid, or end-game, and much less on making a build that is guaranteed to survive the early game in decent shape but without a clear edge to win in mid- or end-game, and the value of preparing for a worst-case starting scenario dwindles.

None of the traits give you an edge to win mid or end game - none of them. Let's say I went Enduring/Industrious. Which traits would you take in place of industrious which would give you a winning edge in the mid or late game?

I think the problem here is that you're arguing yourself into a false dichotomy. Several in fact. The first, that industrious is only useful in a worst-case scennario. This isn't true. Let's say you get a fabulous start with 10 production available from mining stations in your home system. It'll still take your science ship ~6 months months (depending on how many planetary bodies you need to scan) to actually survey those worlds, and you're construction ship will take even longer to get all of those stations online. And building those stations costs production. Building 2-3 mining networks on your planet has no opportunity cost. You can queue a science ship (for exploration) at your star port, and queue a mining network on the planet with production to spare on day 1. When you get your planets surveyed, you now have more minerals with which to build mining or research stations. There's no situation where the extra minerals from 3-4 properly bonussed mining networks isn't useful in the early game. Having 40 production instead of 32 is a good thing, any way you cut it.

The second dichotomy is that getting early production somehow doesn't translate into a mid or late game advantage. In every 4x ever made, an early game advantage is a mid and late game advantage. If you have more production, and you get that production sooner, you will build labs sooner. You will build colony stations sooner. You will build research stations sooner. You will snowball sooner. Thats why in other 4x games (e.g. Civ) early game unique units and unique buildings are valued far higher than late game uu's and ub's. An early game advantage is a late game advantage.

What would you even take to get an advantage in the mid game? Rapid breeder? As soon as your planets fill up, this is useless. Rapid Learner? Your scientists will hit level 3 three weeks before mine do and hit level 5 six months before I do. Congrats, enjoy that 2% edge in science for those 6 months, I guess. Thrifty? Sure, great trait for the mid-late game when I have planets full of power plants. Trouble is, the moment I actually want to leverage this, I can just gene mod it onto my energy world. Same goes for all of the science traits.

To be clear: I'm not saying other traits are bad. They aren't. There's more than one way to have a good build. I'm just pointing out that industrious gives you a production boost when you need it most, in the most critical phase of the game. That's rock solid.