This was done inconsistently. I thought it was pretty clear that you were supposed to gene mod the rest of your species to have stuff like brainslugs. Theres no other way you have to spread it to your entire species otherwise.
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Herbert change to Species Modification on special traits.
- Thread starter DemonHunter457
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Perhaps some of the unmodifiable traits, particularly ones that aren't supposed to be spread to your entire species, could be changed into permanent modifiers instead. That way they won't generate new entries on the species tab.
tbh I'm generally in favor of this fix, but it does expose some other inconvenient bugs.
tbh I'm generally in favor of this fix, but it does expose some other inconvenient bugs.
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I’m so frustrated by this ‘working as intended’ change (that I consider a bug not a feature) that I’m considering quitting my game 15-hours in. Two of my colonies began with main species pops that unfortunately didn’t have the social pheromones trait. Now, I can neither apply the primary template to them nor control their population growth! (This is unrealistic because the primary template would certainly be more fit and win out in the end.)
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NO, special traits should not be accessible or changeable in genemodding.
If they were they would no longer be "special".
You get and want an affect from the Orbital Speed Demon event, you wait to unbox it.
YOU control when that trait is applied to your main species.
It's entirely your fault if you neglected to check for "Is there any colony building in progress?"
Having unaffected pops is entirely preventable.
Brain Slug's are a rare RP event, the flavour text states 'volunteers ONLY'.
That means the intent is clearly "only PART of your species gets the trait".
If you want more Brain Slugs only use Slug affected pops for colonising, and set your main race to undesirable.
Instant Brain Slug only population, congratulations.
Gaia World preference isn't an issue, there's an ascension perk that lets you make lots of them.
Don't want to take that perk because it's 'not optimal' don't choose an Origin that locks it in.
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You can't purge your founding species, gene modding is literally changing the DNA so if one Scyo had regeneration all can have it gue to gene splicing and CRISPR, a new event makes Gaia Preference happen to a whole planet and you can't remove it and with Brain Slugs have you heard of Authoritarianism and paying people?
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Yes, I know that Gaia world preference can occur from a new event.
And it's another avoidable event.
Terraform the planet before you colonise it.
Problem solved as it never arises that way.
World Shaper can be a #2 perk choice as it has a 1 perk pre-req.
With a 'New Worlds' scientist and the Expansion Tree completed you can unlock it during the Early Game.
Terraforming an already occupied world isn't optimal in the first place.
Authoritarianism relates to your own populace.
The Slugs are obviously Egalitarian and with no economy they have no use for your energy credits.
Being Authoritarian and telling someone they are a willing volunteer does not make them such.
And what if there just aren't enough Slugs for all your pops?
The same applies to the 'New Breed' event.
It only occurs if you colonise, or allow free migration for your pops to move to a planet with low habitability.
It's again, easily avoidable.
Don't colonise low habitability worlds, terraform them first.
Disallow free migration if you have multiple world types &/or pops with differing world preferences within your empire.
The pops are stupid if you allow Free Migration, if unemployed they look for available housing & unfilled jobs and then move, they disregard habitability.
That's what needs to be addressed.
A pops 1st check should be 'Will I be happy living there?" (ie. <60% Habitability)
Only if that check passes should that pop be asking "Is there a job there for me to do?"
And it's another avoidable event.
Terraform the planet before you colonise it.
Problem solved as it never arises that way.
World Shaper can be a #2 perk choice as it has a 1 perk pre-req.
With a 'New Worlds' scientist and the Expansion Tree completed you can unlock it during the Early Game.
Terraforming an already occupied world isn't optimal in the first place.
Authoritarianism relates to your own populace.
The Slugs are obviously Egalitarian and with no economy they have no use for your energy credits.
Being Authoritarian and telling someone they are a willing volunteer does not make them such.
And what if there just aren't enough Slugs for all your pops?
The same applies to the 'New Breed' event.
It only occurs if you colonise, or allow free migration for your pops to move to a planet with low habitability.
It's again, easily avoidable.
Don't colonise low habitability worlds, terraform them first.
Disallow free migration if you have multiple world types &/or pops with differing world preferences within your empire.
The pops are stupid if you allow Free Migration, if unemployed they look for available housing & unfilled jobs and then move, they disregard habitability.
That's what needs to be addressed.
A pops 1st check should be 'Will I be happy living there?" (ie. <60% Habitability)
Only if that check passes should that pop be asking "Is there a job there for me to do?"
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Perhaps the cost for modding these can be vastly higher, or something, so that it's inefficient but still possible? I understand why they made the change and don't really disagree in principle, but in practice being stuck forever with a second species in your empire is a huge hassle that's not worth the benefit. At a minimum let us get rid of the sub-species somehow.
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Blanket habitability checks don’t work because they’re not scalable. It results in a ton of redundant infrastructure because you now need to triple (or more) on planet types in order to build out your various worlds. This results in say a mid game value of needing to manage say 15 planets closely with another 50 or so functioning as breeder worlds for more pops, to instead needing to be far more aggressive with planets and micro managing 45+ and doing away with any sort of purely pop growth related planets entirely.
This doesn’t even go into the absolute mess it makes of the species window which is well, not fun. Synthetics beyond being the strongest are the most pleasant to play because species modding is simple and clean. Biological is quite a bit worse, between the micro of managing all the variants you end up with, the extra costs paid to run the projects for each variant, and so on, but even then it’s bad enough that long term Necrophage is the only way to play non synthetics cleanly, which basically means that unless you’re synthetic only one origin is realistically open to you (unless you’re genocidal).
Finally, it reduces fun because when people get an event like the RGB boxes, or brain slugs, or whatever, they want it to feel impactful. When it’s potentially modifying 2000 or 5000 pops with say +10% output that’s impactful but just one more bonus among many by a late game and honestly isn’t all that impactful, though it feels that way. But then when it’s only modifying 100 out of those 5000 people, it’s even less than impactful and becomes nothing more than some trinket text.
For both psionic and biological (non necrophage) at the moment there’s basically no point to anything in the species window, because it requires far too much effort for the payoff to to try and budge your pops to improve in any way since it’s so costly to move them from above the average. When you start getting to the point where it’s a full month of research for 1 pop to be modded and you have to do this for 40 different pops, you’re talking over 3 years of research to change 1% of the species in your empire.
I feel like a solution might be to add a third category of traits to the gene modding window. Those would be traits which could be added via project and don’t cost any points to mod in, but don’t allow for them to be removed. This could include special world preferences, event given traits, and so on. So when you for example take Limited Regeneration, you also gain a tech that lets you add that in as a 0 point trait. But, you don’t get the ability to remove it. This would go a long way towards solving the issue, except for in the cases where you’re gaining pops that were modded beyond what your point values allow for (such as when you’re psionic and gain some biological ascended pops). But it would still mitigate it heavily.
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Special is not a useful qualifier. Right now the implementation is "especially annoying" when it should "especially awesome".
Specifically the lore text in many of these events explicitely allows later applications, that the game mechanics don't.
In addition what is biological ascension for? In general you can consider 3 things:
- Genetic perfect species
- Gene-enforced caste system
- Transhumanistic flux
The game at least allowed the first up to now (and while the Xenophobe faction had the "genetic purity" issue even pushed it). But no more
Righ now genemodding is a massive amount of fiddling (made worse with this change) with very little reward and clone vats.
This change is bad for many reason and there's not even a coherent design thought identifyable from outside to justify it.
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Reminds me of then devs made the Limbo event useless, by giving us a bunch of special Robots with no way to increase their numbers after fixing the colonization bug.
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War is avoidable, build up battleships at year 10
First contact is avoidable, don't send any ships out of your system
Pops are avoidable, use the
Code:
kill pop
Not having to deal with 50 different species in my empire when not purging is the main reason I like Synthetic Ascension so much. Managing many different species is a pain in the game
Bit of a tangent here, but say you produce 1000 research per month, and ypu need 300 to genemod one pop. Does the extra 700 go to waste, or is it stored in the Stored Research value l, to be slowly consumed over the next few months?
Nowadays you get normal robots (synthetics) that aren't in any way special, that clutte rup your species list and that the automation loves to build, adding extra species modification overhead for the grand reward of like 4 pops.
At least the special Awoken were interesting...
I'm hoping that the devs will take another look at gene modding and do some major tweaks to it.
Heck, they should that along with a rework of the whole leader system. We have a number of traits for species that aren't that great because they impact leaders and well, I'd argue after a certain point leaders become more tedious than compelling.
So I really wouldn't mind seeing changes that cut down how annoying gene modding is, while either cutting a number of useless traits or somehow making them compelling choices. Heck, I'd like to see more traits like aquatic, where in addition to the benefits, you also have demerits. I suspect the tier lists could be made more diverse for high ranked stuff, if not every B, A and S trait was useful in every possible build. Plus, the system really doesn't work with how the game is intended to be played. It's clear we aren't suppose to be doing constant gene modding, but there are a ton of things that really prevent a player from doing one round of modding and being done.
Heck, they should that along with a rework of the whole leader system. We have a number of traits for species that aren't that great because they impact leaders and well, I'd argue after a certain point leaders become more tedious than compelling.
So I really wouldn't mind seeing changes that cut down how annoying gene modding is, while either cutting a number of useless traits or somehow making them compelling choices. Heck, I'd like to see more traits like aquatic, where in addition to the benefits, you also have demerits. I suspect the tier lists could be made more diverse for high ranked stuff, if not every B, A and S trait was useful in every possible build. Plus, the system really doesn't work with how the game is intended to be played. It's clear we aren't suppose to be doing constant gene modding, but there are a ton of things that really prevent a player from doing one round of modding and being done.
Currently they don't even have the option to volunteer.
The event gives the trait to a handful of your main species pops. There is now no way to apply it to more pops, be they born or migrated, Neiter voluntary not forced.
In addition leaders of that subspecies have a chance to then have the brainslug trait (implying that not all individuals contained in that abstract pop are slugged).
There is no way for any leader to later volunteer for a slug.
Haven't read the entire thread, just spotted it now and noticed the question: 'why'.
Maybe someone suggested it before, but my understanding of the 'why' is this:
(a) in-game: those modifications are not gene-based, and therefor not subject to geneteic engineering. E.g. the brain slugs are not some part in your DNA, they are separate organisms! While you could argue that such organisms might be cloned, that still doesn't allow you to build it into your DNA. (not sure to what extent this argument can be made for all of the modifications in question, but AFAIK most of these traits originate from outside events, they are not inherited from a parent.)
(b) out-of-game, the stacking of benenficial traits from events was never meant to happen: e. g. your pops could go psionic, or cyborg, but having the effect of both would be OP. You could argue that this stacking is required to keep up with Synth ascended empires, but that is a question of balancing and goes beyond the scope of 'why'
Maybe someone suggested it before, but my understanding of the 'why' is this:
(a) in-game: those modifications are not gene-based, and therefor not subject to geneteic engineering. E.g. the brain slugs are not some part in your DNA, they are separate organisms! While you could argue that such organisms might be cloned, that still doesn't allow you to build it into your DNA. (not sure to what extent this argument can be made for all of the modifications in question, but AFAIK most of these traits originate from outside events, they are not inherited from a parent.)
(b) out-of-game, the stacking of benenficial traits from events was never meant to happen: e. g. your pops could go psionic, or cyborg, but having the effect of both would be OP. You could argue that this stacking is required to keep up with Synth ascended empires, but that is a question of balancing and goes beyond the scope of 'why'
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Special traits have to be handled differently.
Speed demon traits and brain slug trait should be empire modifers. Brin slug should giveonly to random leaders brain slug trait without any pop bonusses.
Ascension traits and ascendend empires should assimilate freely all pops, including main species (right now i cant assimilate my main species with laten psionic trait into full psionic) with cybernetic and psionic being compatible.
Tomb, gaia and other special habitability traits should become an gene modding options once showed up in empire, but should be able to being moddable into planets they fit (gaia on gaias only, tomb on tomb only), and maybe works asshifting once pop is appearing on that planet.
Modding pops with special traits should be available, but should result in changing all traits except special ones so i dont need to create 8 almost identical templates diffrent only because one is brain slug, second is with pheromones, 3rd is with both, 4th is with neither, and 4 next are same but with gaia habitability.
Speed demon traits and brain slug trait should be empire modifers. Brin slug should giveonly to random leaders brain slug trait without any pop bonusses.
Ascension traits and ascendend empires should assimilate freely all pops, including main species (right now i cant assimilate my main species with laten psionic trait into full psionic) with cybernetic and psionic being compatible.
Tomb, gaia and other special habitability traits should become an gene modding options once showed up in empire, but should be able to being moddable into planets they fit (gaia on gaias only, tomb on tomb only), and maybe works asshifting once pop is appearing on that planet.
Modding pops with special traits should be available, but should result in changing all traits except special ones so i dont need to create 8 almost identical templates diffrent only because one is brain slug, second is with pheromones, 3rd is with both, 4th is with neither, and 4 next are same but with gaia habitability.
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Yes.
You can already increase the 'Slug Count' within your Empire anyway.
Select "Slugged" Colonists when building new colonies.
And say Hello to super slow colony growth.
Great way to stay ahead of the competition.
And as mentioned elsewhere
Why would gene-modding your species affect a secondary symbiotic species.
Slug's are not a part of your species DNA.
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