New Hive civics

[WeeBigTerd101]

So recently I've been replaying Halo 1's campaign and watching lore videos about one of the enemies you encounter: The Flood. For those who don't know The flood is a parasite that eventually develops into a hivemind and its only purpose is to grow and consume all sentient life. So the three civics inspired by the flood are Memory assimilation, Spore seeders, and Mind coordinators.

Memory assimilation: This hivemind can probe the minds of sapient organics and learn many things, at the cost of their lives.
Gains research for purging pops

Spore seeders: This hivemind can infect and grow on the planet itself.
This allows the construction of the spore disperser building. The main species is required to be plantoid, or fungoid.
The spore disperser building operates similarly to the Gaia seeders building, but it instead transforms the world into a hive world instead of a Gaia world. It also doesn't need any technologies researched except climate restoration for tomb worlds. Instead of gases and energy to convert the world it needs food and energy to convert the said world.

Mind coordinators: This hivemind can construct synaptic super processers increasing the intelligence and efficiency of drones and the mind itself.
This allows the construction of a planet-unique building called the drone coordinator/ synaptic processor. Similar to the proto gravemind and gravemind in halo the building can be upgraded when more unity and computing technologies are unlocked. It would increase the amout of resources from jobs by a small percentage and increase empire base evasion and firerate by a small percentage. The fleet bonuses are of course very powerful effects so to offset them it would require decent food upkeep and require a lot of food to build and upgrade. But definetly the military bonus should be no more than 1% or 2% and even those might be too high.

 

[tanny]

Mind coordinators might be a bit OP late-game due to how it scales. Let’s say it takes 100 food/month for 5% fire rate and evasion increase, well, a thousand food isn’t difficult to get in the late game. Make a few agricultural planets, put down 10 of these, and get an absolutely insane 50% fire rate. And you can SCALE THEM TO INSANITY.

 

[WeeBigTerd101]

Mind coordinators might be a bit OP late-game due to how it scales. Let’s say it takes 100 food/month for 5% fire rate and evasion increase, well, a thousand food isn’t difficult to get in the late game. Make a few agricultural planets, put down 10 of these, and get an absolutely insane 50% fire rate. And you can SCALE THEM TO INSANITY.

True but in another hive empire those pops working agri-drone jobs could instead work as brain drones or foundry drones. It's a trade off.

 

[tanny]

True but in another hive empire those pops working agri-drone jobs could instead work as brain drones or foundry drones. It's a trade off.

Still quite a massive bonus that simply is too OP for a few planets. You could still allocate many other planets to brain or foundry drones, plus you can conquer more planets.

 

[SirBlackAxe]

Memory assimilation: This hivemind can probe the minds of sapient organics and learn many things, at the cost of their lives.
Gains research for purging pops

Seems reasonable. Exactly how much research is a balance question for devs, so I don't have much else to say.

Spore seeders: This hivemind can infect and grow on the planet itself.

This allows the construction of the spore disperser building. The main species is required to be plantoid, or fungoid.
The spore disperser building operates similarly to the Gaia seeders building, but it instead transforms the world into a hive world instead of a Gaia world. It also doesn't need any technologies researched except climate restoration for tomb worlds. Instead of gases and energy to convert the world it needs food and energy to convert the said world.

So you've taken Idyllic Bloom and made it better in three ways:

1. Hive worlds are better than gaia worlds.
2. Removed (almost) all technology requirements. Why?
3. Changed a strategic resource requirement to a basic resource. Why?

This is pretty clearly too strong, and I'm not sure why you're removing all the limiters on how early in the game you can complete the process.

Mind coordinators: This hivemind can construct synaptic super processers increasing the intelligence and efficiency of drones and the mind itself.
This allows the construction of a planet-unique building called the drone coordinator/ synaptic processor. Similar to the proto gravemind and gravemind in halo the building can be upgraded when more unity and computing technologies are unlocked. It would increase the resource output of menial drones, increase the output of unity workers, and increase empire base evasion and base fire rate by a small percentage. These are powerful effects so to offset them it would require decent food upkeep and require a lot of food to build.

There's a reason that there are no effects in game which make the strength of your individual ships scales directly with the number of colonies and habitats you own. This is a win-more snowball mechanic that encourages you to spam habitats with nothing but a single pop and this building. With the farming subsidies edict, a level 5 agrarian upbringing governor, evolutionary mastery, and no repeatables you can reasonably expect a baseline 25 food per agri-drone on a 63% stability hive world, and you get +0.4 food per agri-drone per repeatable (with 250 agri-drones, that's +100 food). You use your better ships to either subjugate other empires and tax their basic resources or conquer them and make their pops livestock or assimilate them to make agri-drones, which gives you more food, more starbase with hydroponics bays, more colonies to build more drone coordinators on, and therefore more bonuses to your ships, which lets you defeat even larger empires... repeat ad infinitum.

Also you need fewer foundry drones because evasion boosts mean you lose fewer and fewer ships, and you need fewer brain drones because you're getting both offensive and defensive repeatable buffs from society research.

And if you remove the ship buffs you're basically left with something that mechanically looks an awful lot like the Memorialist civic, which gives a building that boosts unity and a job that converts food into pop resource output (by adding stability).

 

[WeeBigTerd101]

Seems reasonable. Exactly how much research is a balance question for devs, so I don't have much else to say.


So you've taken Idyllic Bloom and made it better in three ways:

1. Hive worlds are better than gaia worlds.
2. Removed (almost) all technology requirements. Why?
3. Changed a strategic resource requirement to a basic resource. Why?

This is pretty clearly too strong, and I'm not sure why you're removing all the limiters on how early in the game you can complete the process.


There's a reason that there are no effects in game which make the strength of your individual ships scales directly with the number of colonies and habitats you own. This is a win-more snowball mechanic that encourages you to spam habitats with nothing but a single pop and this building. With the farming subsidies edict, a level 5 agrarian upbringing governor, evolutionary mastery, and no repeatables you can reasonably expect a baseline 25 food per agri-drone on a 63% stability hive world, and you get +0.4 food per agri-drone per repeatable (with 250 agri-drones, that's +100 food). You use your better ships to either subjugate other empires and tax their basic resources or conquer them and make their pops livestock or assimilate them to make agri-drones, which gives you more food, more starbase with hydroponics bays, more colonies to build more drone coordinators on, and therefore more bonuses to your ships, which lets you defeat even larger empires... repeat ad infinitum.

Also you need fewer foundry drones because evasion boosts mean you lose fewer and fewer ships, and you need fewer brain drones because you're getting both offensive and defensive repeatable buffs from society research.

And if you remove the ship buffs you're basically left with something that mechanically looks an awful lot like the Memorialist civic, which gives a building that boosts unity and a job that converts food into pop resource output (by adding stability).

Wow yeah, that's definitely overpowered. Ok so for spore seeders the reason it would cost food instead of gas is that hive worlds are living. Also in retrospect, I see that removing the technology requirements makes it too strong. So for mind coordinators yeah that is way too strong and there might not be a good way to replicate graveminds in Stellaris without it looking like the progenitor hive leaders.

 

[WeeBigTerd101]

Seems reasonable. Exactly how much research is a balance question for devs, so I don't have much else to say.


So you've taken Idyllic Bloom and made it better in three ways:

1. Hive worlds are better than gaia worlds.
2. Removed (almost) all technology requirements. Why?
3. Changed a strategic resource requirement to a basic resource. Why?

This is pretty clearly too strong, and I'm not sure why you're removing all the limiters on how early in the game you can complete the process.


There's a reason that there are no effects in game which make the strength of your individual ships scales directly with the number of colonies and habitats you own. This is a win-more snowball mechanic that encourages you to spam habitats with nothing but a single pop and this building. With the farming subsidies edict, a level 5 agrarian upbringing governor, evolutionary mastery, and no repeatables you can reasonably expect a baseline 25 food per agri-drone on a 63% stability hive world, and you get +0.4 food per agri-drone per repeatable (with 250 agri-drones, that's +100 food). You use your better ships to either subjugate other empires and tax their basic resources or conquer them and make their pops livestock or assimilate them to make agri-drones, which gives you more food, more starbase with hydroponics bays, more colonies to build more drone coordinators on, and therefore more bonuses to your ships, which lets you defeat even larger empires... repeat ad infinitum.

Also you need fewer foundry drones because evasion boosts mean you lose fewer and fewer ships, and you need fewer brain drones because you're getting both offensive and defensive repeatable buffs from society research.

And if you remove the ship buffs you're basically left with something that mechanically looks an awful lot like the Memorialist civic, which gives a building that boosts unity and a job that converts food into pop resource output (by adding stability).

I guess to mimic the flood better with spore seeders and origin might be more accurate. Say it's called something like Hostile ecosystem and the fluff is that the hive creates its own ecosystem blah blah. The homeworld would then be a proto-hive with some benefits and after some tech gets research can be more cheaply turned into a hive world. The catch is that normal worlds are crap until turned into a proto-hive themselves.