Game Advice: How/Why to Robot.

[Ranuth]

Playing a Materialist, Xenophile, Militarist Megacorporation.

When I got to the option to research Robotic Workers I froze. This used to be an automatic choice before, when all robots got a buff to mineral production. But in this case, my base species was already strong and getting a buff to resource output. The only way to make robots worthwhile would be to specialize them, and then, I would need another tech to do it.

Ultimately I grabbed it, just because it was a precursor for the Synthetic Achievement path, but I didn't have a whole bunch of reason to want to get it in the first place. The time investment to make them useful seemed unfortunate, and the only other reason I could think to get them would be to boost my growth, which can be pretty harmful as a Megacorp, especially if they can only take mining.farming jobs (it means I'm gonna have to build a lot more districts faster and it'll run up my administrative cap pretty quick).

What are your thoughts on robots in 2.2? When are they good to build? when are they not?

 

[strangebloke]

Robots are great if your empire has the resources to build/maintain them, but until you get droids they require some micro.

The thing is, they're good for differrnt reasons now. They're not better than bio pops, they're actually pretty much strictly worse.

But they are pops, and they grow without inhibiting bio pop grow.

Your base bio pop growth rate is 3/month. A single roboticist ups that growth to 5/month in total. If that doesn't seem crazy, let me offer some perspective: that's like stacking +67% pop growth.

They require some minerals and energy, and you have to make sure that they have enough farmer/mining jobs to do, which probably requires some intense resource management, but they're still great.

Robots is free pop growth!

 

[Kryndude]

Strictly speaking, it's not exactly a flat 2/month increase to pop growth since robots use a seperate growth counter. The time it takes to acquire an additional pop is longer with 3/month and 2/month growth than a single 5/month growth. But still, much better than any other single pop growth modifier in the game.

Just like you use resettlement policy even with egalitarians, you should use robots even with spiritualists if you want to min-max.

In terms of how to use, start adding robot assembly plants one by one whenever you can afford to make long term investment.