I suppose I just want nonlithoid necrophages to be as competitive as Lithoid Necrophages
They are, you just put lithoid on the prepatent, not the necrophage, and preferably as a Xenophobe and giving them the crystal trait.
A lithoid necrophage can be a specialist anywhere, but a lithoid prepatent can be a worker anywhere, and that's honestly more important for your competitive considerations because the more important shortage in the early game is your number of good-quality worker worlds for your necessary inputs to feed specialists, not your number of specialist worlds. You have 3 guaranteed high-value specialist worlds in your homeworld and guaranteed worlds- what you
don't have is the income stream to maximize their specialist employment.
While the usual growth consideration for necropahge-lithoids is 'the pop growth loss doesn't matter,' the pop growth consideration for lithoids is that the pop growth loss doesn't actually matter that much for them either, in aggregate. -25% pop growth is rush, but +50% habitability means mitigating 25% in growth penalties. On 60-habitability planets, you're at net -5% growth. On 50 habitability, same growth. On 40 habitability, you're at +5% growth. Etc. For the early game when you don't have many species, lithoids are the kind of colonizing everything, as they'll both grow faster on normally bad worlds
and they produce better, as they are mitigating 50% habitability penalties (25% output hit).
Factor in that the necrophage is getting 2 species with 100% habitability on their own homeworld- which is equivalent to a bio-empire with rapid breeder- meaning you wouldn't be growing your prepatent there
anyway, but have a species who may be trait RNG but can be that normal 60% growth, and lithoid necrophages are a pretty useful thing.
What makes them more useful in a competitive since is that you can give them that crystal trait for early scouting advantages, and then convert it into +25% energy weapon damage if you luck into the already-strong Tiyanki energy syphon or mining drone lasers, on top of the cyrstal plating tech. These are major early-game upgrades.
By contrast, lithoid-necrophages have only a few modest advantages, and a significant counter-synergy. As lithoids, they can use the bio-furnace building to convert food to energy... but mechanically it's just better to trade excess food bilaterally, or see it on the market at micro-increments, and even that's not good value. Lithoid necrophages can be raised as specialists on the planets they convert on... but any necrophage can just be migrated back to the core systems for established infrastructure. A lithoid-lithoid pair could have both gas and crystals for maximum early edicts for warfare. This last one, to be clear, is a real gain.
But the counter-synergy is on the psionic and bio-ascension question. Necrophages have a natural synergy for bio-ascension thanks to their slave-economy setup, and the fact that their chamber upgrade is tied to the bio-ascension 2 tech, so they're going there anyway. But lithoids can't get the most value out of bio-ascension, since they can't take the robust trait for the 5% to all jobs. And psionic is very good for snowballing if you build for it... but then you can't get rid of your necrophage's starting traits, such as crystal.
Which isn't an issue if you use a prepatent lithoid with crystal, who you can just necropurge in the future anyway, and for whom the 10% growth bonus of xenophobe in general puts lithoid-prepatents back above the natural growth point of species on the 60 habitability zone worlds.
Also, with Toxoids and Incubators, I beleive you can put incubators on Lithoid prepatents... which just turns lithoids into a growth machine in the early game.
