Best and Worst Traits, Civics, Ethics in 2.2 (and subsequent patches)?

[Madzai]

I mean, you could also argue here that given that you are so limited in terms of pops, it is really bad that you increase the upkeep overhead of your existing population. Having to produce +2F because of lower Habitability for 20 pops is still (a bit less than) half a farmer's job, but that pop could do other important stuff.

Basic resources are easier to get and, more importantly, they are shared between planets. So, IMO, amenities cost increase is more important as it's per-planet and require a building slot to produce them. And building slot is depended on number of POPs.

 

[Tavior]

Even in those cases it does still matter - for Life Seeded it reduces the habitability on your homeworld and for the rest it makes the first 10% habitability you gain useless. For the Tomb world its less impactful, although I'd assume that the whole habitability stacking thing is a wee bit unintentional and might change in the future.

If anything, the one scenario where it matters the least is the mass-use of robots with something like Mechanist and particularly as a Driven Assimiliator machine empire.

If you want to colonize other worlds with 10% lower habitability during the early-game phase I won't stop you.

How long does it take you to unlock bio-ascension? Terraform? habitats/ringworld? Depending on the situation but I am having a hard time imaging a player not being able to fix the non-adaptive issue before taking a second world once the early-game-one-world-phase is over.

 

[serpentskirt]

Well, in my tech rushing games where I have 3-4 colonies, all with science labs by year 22-25 it hurts a lot to be a nonadaptive.

 

[Zenopath]

Great traits:
Nonadaptive: It's basically free points. Habitability is basically ignorable now. Before your pops might waste 10% of their productivity on upkeep, with this they'll waste max 11%. Ohnoes, +2 pointoes.
Repugnant: Amenities above 0 are basically not worth pursuing, and it's pretty easy to get 0 amenities even with this. Another great +2 points.

Rest is all fairly balanced IMO, nothing stands out except how much of a freebie these "negatives" are. Eventually you probably want Communal once your planets are reaching capacity, but it can wait.

Civics:
Aristocratic elite is literally a free +5/+10 stability with a building for a further +5 that also provides decent amenities. This is a potential +10% to all production.
Mining Guilds is even better than before. Minerals are king lategame.
Barbaric Despoilers: Just flat out OP. Pops = strength. DoW anyone whenever they are weak and suck away every pop they have.

Ethics:
Anything Authoritarian is a godsend because slavery and Stratified Economy are just so good. Far less CGs wasted, stability stays high because your upper class is happy, slaves use less housing. Combos with Nonadaptive well.

I agree with everything you said here, except the part about repugnant. Extra amenities past 0 actually do give you additional stability as they increase population happiness. Now, given stratified societies have negatives to happiness you might not notice it because your pop on average doesnt get very far past 50% but if you have a fair number of clerks or priests, you will be pretty happy and get some bonus from their amenities.

 

[Less2]

I agree with everything you said here, except the part about repugnant. Extra amenities past 0 actually do give you additional stability as they increase population happiness. Now, given stratified societies have negatives to happiness you might not notice it because your pop on average doesnt get very far past 50% but if you have a fair number of clerks or priests, you will be pretty happy and get some bonus from their amenities.

There's a thread around here where someone did the math, it's far from worth it to push amenities into the positive for the purpose of production bonuses. The amount of excess you need scales with # of pops and the resulting benefit is less than putting the amenity producers on other jobs to begin with.

Gestalts are something of an exception, their base amenity production is much lower to begin with and a production bonus to amenities can cut down on the number of amenity jobs you need enough to be worthwhile.

 

[GAGA Extrem]

If you want to colonize other worlds with 10% lower habitability during the early-game phase I won't stop you.

How long does it take you to unlock bio-ascension? Terraform? habitats/ringworld? Depending on the situation but I am having a hard time imaging a player not being able to fix the non-adaptive issue before taking a second world once the early-game-one-world-phase is over.

I will gladly colonize everything in my borders. As a fanatic pacifist I can buffer the empire size gained by it and the extra growth & pops of those colonies do certainly pay off in the medium to long run.

I usually unlock Bio Ascension rather late (around year 100-140).
Terraforming is rather random - I actually cannot clearly remember the year for my last few games. I'd guess it's around year 60-80?
Habitats are usually unlocked around year 50-60, Ringworlds around 80-90.

I tend to gene-mod Non-Adaptive into my final pop template (Erudite, Fertile, Industrious, Thrifty, Non-Adaptive), but at that point it has literally no drawback outside of rare planets that got stacked with massive negative habitability modifiers. In the early game, I prefer to go with something like Solitary + Slow Learners instead.

 

[Tavior]

I will gladly colonize everything in my borders. As a fanatic pacifist I can buffer the empire size gained by it and the extra growth & pops of those colonies do certainly pay off in the medium to long run.

I usually unlock Bio Ascension rather late (around year 100-140).
Terraforming is rather random - I actually cannot clearly remember the year for my last few games. I'd guess it's around year 60-80?
Habitats are usually unlocked around year 50-60, Ringworlds around 80-90.

I tend to gene-mod Non-Adaptive into my final pop template (Erudite, Fertile, Industrious, Thrifty, Non-Adaptive), but at that point it has literally no drawback outside of rare planets that got stacked with massive negative habitability modifiers. In the early game, I prefer to go with something like Solitary + Slow Learners instead.

I am talking about general *insert your civic/ethos* empire who want to start on and prefer either Gaia worlds or Tomb worlds. As far I am aware picking life-seeded or post-apocalyptic doesn't care what ethos you pick. I don't know why you are trying to defend fanatic pacifism?

I could do the same colonize everywhere mindset by going post-apocalyptic and have non-adaptive and fanatic authoritarian (just an example). But I can't compare that to fanatic pacifism without post-apocalyptic or life-seeded because doing so would be trying to directly compare civic picks (not their requirement but their actual effect) to ethos on an one-by-one basis. Doing so would open a can of worm I don't want to.

 

[GAGA Extrem]

Oh, well, I thought we were back to a more generic statement about "when to colonize with low habitability". I don't really think that Life Seeded or Post Apocalyptic really matter in that regard. You'll still colonize everything right away.

 

[Atreides]

I colonize everywhere in my borders, every time. Even with Life Seeded and 0 Habitability. More production with a consumer/food penalty is vastly better than 0 production.

Habitability is really not that meaningful in 2.2.

Habitability should significantly affected growth and happiness - both positive and negative, but it doesn't.

 

[Jin_Cardassian]

There's a thread around here where someone did the math, it's far from worth it to push amenities into the positive for the purpose of production bonuses. The amount of excess you need scales with # of pops and the resulting benefit is less than putting the amenity producers on other jobs to begin with.

Yeah, that was a major disappointment, as I discovered during my first game.

I tried to make an Authoritarian stratified society that kept the populace in line through excess amenities rather than enforcers. I envisioned kind of a decadent Dark Eldarish society full of Running Man blood sports and domestic servant debauchery. Past a certain pop density, the amenities were never enough.

I hope this gets amended/modded at some point. It makes the whole pop-mangement game for Authoritarians a pretty one-dimensional job of spamming enforcers.

 

[Arcvalons]

I was playing Rogue Servitors, and I grandly miss Servitor Morale. Right now there's absolutely NO reason at all to keep Bio-Trophies, they cost a lot of resources to maintain and the only thing they provide is unity, and the stability bonus they provide is inferior to the bonus a machine world would give, but you can't have a machine world with those squishy meatbags around. Even if the bonus it provides is reduced (40% was a lot) Servitor Morale should most definitely be put back into the game, including the part where you actually get a malus if you don't have enough Bio-Trophies.,

 

[Ariphaos]

Even in those cases it does still matter - for Life Seeded it reduces the habitability on your homeworld and for the rest it makes the first 10% habitability you gain useless. For the Tomb world its less impactful, although I'd assume that the whole habitability stacking thing is a wee bit unintentional and might change in the future.

Nonadaptive doesn't reduce habitability on your homeworld. It's a great choice for Life-seeded.

 

[WhiteKyubey]

I was playing Rogue Servitors, and I grandly miss Servitor Morale. Right now there's absolutely NO reason at all to keep Bio-Trophies, they cost a lot of resources to maintain and the only thing they provide is unity, and the stability bonus they provide is inferior to the bonus a machine world would give, but you can't have a machine world with those squishy meatbags around. Even if the bonus it provides is reduced (40% was a lot) Servitor Morale should most definitely be put back into the game, including the part where you actually get a malus if you don't have enough Bio-Trophies.,

Bio-Trophies are good for 1 thing right now for me in early game - get 8-9, don't allow them to grow more. Then when you build a new colony resettle them to a new world and get main building upgrade and robot factory there. Build 10 robots, move bio-trophies to the next world. Maintaining 8-9 Bio-Trophies is not very hard or expensive - you have enough CG and food production for that much.
Bio-Trophies shine in mid-late game, when you can just leave them 1 or 2 planets and produce much more unity then other ME.

While I agree, that RS were nerfed hard, they also require very different approach now.
Before:
- grow as many Bio-Trophies as possible, resettle them on empty tiles, get your morale bonus from the start
Now:
- first build mineral/energy production, then develop science and alloys, and only now, when your empire have lots of everything grow Bio-Trophies

 

[Tobasco da Gama]

Yeah, Bio-Trophies feel kind of lackluster right now, and I don't see any advantage to having more than a handful around.

It's hard not to look at Rogue Servitors in the current patch as just an inferior version of Determined Exterminators that don't get a bunch of diplomacy maluses.

 

[Arcvalons]

Bio-Trophies are good for 1 thing right now for me in early game - get 8-9, don't allow them to grow more. Then when you build a new colony resettle them to a new world and get main building upgrade and robot factory there. Build 10 robots, move bio-trophies to the next world. Maintaining 8-9 Bio-Trophies is not very hard or expensive - you have enough CG and food production for that much.
Bio-Trophies shine in mid-late game, when you can just leave them 1 or 2 planets and produce much more unity then other ME.

While I agree, that RS were nerfed hard, they also require very different approach now.
Before:
- grow as many Bio-Trophies as possible, resettle them on empty tiles, get your morale bonus from the start
Now:
- first build mineral/energy production, then develop science and alloys, and only now, when your empire have lots of everything grow Bio-Trophies

But even then in the late game, you could just not grow any more Bio-Trophies, because why would you do? Unity is just not that great.

 

[meiam89.]

I colonize everywhere in my borders, every time. Even with Life Seeded and 0 Habitability. More production with a consumer/food penalty is vastly better than 0 production.

Habitability is really not that meaningful in 2.2.

Habitability should significantly affected growth and happiness - both positive and negative, but it doesn't.

Also part of the reason why machine are so weak compare to everything else, one of there main advantage was being able to grab any planet right away, but now it doesn't really matters.

It almost feel like they couldn't figure out how to properly stop pop from moving to planet where they have low habitability so they just decided to make it irrelevant.

 

[GAGA Extrem]

Nonadaptive doesn't reduce habitability on your homeworld. It's a great choice for Life-seeded.

Heh, then homeworld habitability might have been temporarily bugged when I tried it.

 

[Rezca]

Feudal Empire doesn't seem to actually work in allowing subjects to expand, at least not for Protectorates.

Doesn't seem to work no. Not sure about Vassals since I've only had one that wasn't a Protectorate and he didn't do anything beyond twiddling his thumbs for about a century. Could be coincidence, but I find that unlikely. Also the Protectorates I had never bothered to build a navy (I mean, I guess since I have to come to their defense they might figure that I'd do the fighting for them?) and only ever got some ships once a Fallen Empire gifted them a few. I had been sending them Alloys for a fair while so surely they'd be able to make at least a corvette...

 

[yerm]

Doesn't seem to work no. Not sure about Vassals since I've only had one that wasn't a Protectorate and he didn't do anything beyond twiddling his thumbs for about a century. Could be coincidence, but I find that unlikely. Also the Protectorates I had never bothered to build a navy (I mean, I guess since I have to come to their defense they might figure that I'd do the fighting for them?) and only ever got some ships once a Fallen Empire gifted them a few. I had been sending them Alloys for a fair while so surely they'd be able to make at least a corvette...

Unless you are playing on GA difficulty, and honestly maybe even then, the reason your protectorates do not expand or build fleets etc is because the pre-2.2 penalties are absolutely debilitating with the new economic system and simply eating 25% of their gross raw material output is a death sentence.

In the old system upkeep was considerably lower, so taking 25% really didn't tend to amount to over half their net output unless they went overboard on a fleet. In the current economy, it's really not at all normal to see your mineral and energy upkeep under 75% of your gross production. Having say 500 output and 420 upkeep for a net of 80 is going to look fine. The problem is, you will look at that 80 in the top left and not realize that losing 25% will result in it becoming -45 instead of 60.

Feudal is probably quite weak regardless, but I do not think the trait itself is necessarily the cause here.

 

[Rezca]

Unless you are playing on GA difficulty, and honestly maybe even then, the reason your protectorates do not expand or build fleets etc is because the pre-2.2 penalties are absolutely debilitating with the new economic system and simply eating 25% of their gross raw material output is a death sentence.

In the old system upkeep was considerably lower, so taking 25% really didn't tend to amount to over half their net output unless they went overboard on a fleet. In the current economy, it's really not at all normal to see your mineral and energy upkeep under 75% of your gross production. Having say 500 output and 420 upkeep for a net of 80 is going to look fine. The problem is, you will look at that 80 in the top left and not realize that losing 25% will result in it becoming -45 instead of 60.

Feudal is probably quite weak regardless, but I do not think the trait itself is necessarily the cause here.

Maybe the resources I had been gifting (in the thousands, to "start them off" along with fairly large monthly trades) wasn't enough? I was playing on Cadet at the time since I was going out Achievement Hunting if that makes any difference.