How to fix Necrophage Hivemind with few small changes

[Tech Noir Synth]

Hello there! Its me again.

So since we have a new DLC announced, surely the devs are hard at work for the next patch. We have had some time since Necrophage Hivemind were enabled and discussed the problems in several threads. Like this one:
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...d-necrophage-is-really-dissapointing.1491479/
or this one:

Necro hives: expected a buff to hives but got a nerf

I was real exited for necro hives but unfortunatly they are are far worst then regular hives cus the secundary species can only be livestock, so for the first 10 year you basicly have no main species pop growth, after that, its minimal at best...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

So here are few but simple suggestions to improve Hivemind Necrophage and fix the problems:

1. The Livestock job now gains increased output from all modifiers which improve farmer jobs: Edicts, Tech and other bonuses
2. The Necrophyte job in the chamber of elevation is no longer a specialist job -> its changed to a worker job (only for Hiveminds, not non-Gestalts!)
3. The starting Livestock species starts with the nerve-stapled trait (and has fewer trait points) ->this means they cannot work specialist jobs but they also don't destroy your stability anymore because of unhappyness. If we don't have Necrophyte job to a worker job, we cannot nerve-staple the Livestock.

The Necrophage Trait is changed for Hiveminds:

1. No longer have -10% menial Drone output
2. No longer have +5% Ruler output (this is useless)
3. Instead have +5% job output, -10% Amenity usage, -50% Food upkeep
4. Leader age bonuses removed, Hiveminds already start young

Spawning Drones increase pop growth by 15%-20% instead of 10%. Since Budding doesn't work with Necrophage and Necrophage pops grow 75% slower, this will improve livestock pop growth a tiny bit.

Thats it. We fixed stability issues. We fixed the Livestock job scaling issue. We fixed the Necrophage trait for Hiveminds.

 

[DeanTheDull]

Your analysis suffers on multiple fronts.





Amenities:
Livestock don't cause stability issues if you're managing them competently. The amenities created by Necrophytes more than cover for the standard livestock growth pattern on growing worlds, where the biggest issue you have is too many amenities and not enough food (ie, livestock) to support the necrophytes.

Livestock only become stability issues when you either capture major population centers, at which point you can necro-purge the new addition to get more Necrophage pops, if you relocate them to focus on specific worlds, which is a player choice and can be mitigated by using Necro-drones as amenity workers and building hive warrens with the building slots unlocke by the city districts you build for housing, or if you're not using necrophyte buildings, which is solved by building necrophyte buildings and using all slots. Necrophytes give +5 amenities, meaning that in most cases they are subsidizing your drone stability, not the other way around.

And, of course, Charisma has always been an appropriate synergy with Necrophages, and remains so with Hiveminds where Synchronicity tradition is a high-priority tree which makes your admin-drones a major source of amanities (and, with minor relics, an economy booster).


Changing the ruler pop bonus in the trait:

The necrophage trait is a pop-trait, not a civic. We don't make trait-modifiers government dependent because pops can- and do- move between government types over the course of the game. The issue with changing the perk isn't just that there's no point- it's no more a bug or balance issue than Robot-getstalts not getting advantage of captured organic traits when they're forced to Grid Amalgation- but that the process of changing risks needless bugs.

For any change of the Necorphage perk to occur, you'd need to introduce coding that runs checks every time a pop with the necrophage trait changes governments to do substitution. No other perk needs this- even void dweller just bases it on planet, not planet ownership- and the nature of software programming is that it's not a risk-free process to create. For which there's no real reason to, which makes it a needless risk.

Necro-hives don't have ruler pops, but they're not losing anything either. The 5% is the same for the specialists, which they already have, so no need for change. And if the necro-hive is conquered by a Bio-Ascended empire with Assimilation, that empire would care about the perk, which is a reason not to do it.



Giving the Necro-drones a flat job bonus:

Giving necro-drones a +5% job output to all roles fundamentally reverses the necrophage design principles of having an early-game tight resource economy but longer-term specialist payoff. Worse, not only is it missing the point, it's unnecessary- necro-hives already have workarounds that normal organics don't.

In game design vision, necrophages in general are conceptually builds that have a tight early resource economy, especially minerals, but grow in specialist potentail over time. They are expected to be weaker-than-most early on. Yes, non-hive necrophages can use their prepatents as workers, but they are also required to use the workers to support a CG economy which the necrophytes quickly eat up. The early game is always a tight basic resource economy vis-a-vis non-necrophage empires, and an anemic early mineral economy.

This is less of an issue for Necro-hives when you start leaning into the hive-synergies and take an appropriate civic combo. Of the three worker-tier jobs Necro-hives have a penalty for- food, energy, and mines- there are major work arounds for all three.

For food, necro-hive empires have an innate excess of food production, and should never be working the job except for a brief period if/when clone vats come online. That's literally what the livestock are for, while both livestock and necro-pops have innate discounts on food needs.

For energy, necro-hives are hive-minds, and hive-minds flat-beat the early-game energy workers through the power of starbase solar panels. Every tier of starbase is 12 energy, and with the very-strong first-tradition of Unyielding you can get 8 starbases with 96 energy in the first decade of the game. This is far more energy than you need for early-game upkeep purposes, and more than makes up for the 10% energy worker penalty of a necro-drone. Further, there are the pop-free energy deposits from expanding, and the option of wars for tributaries, who provide energy and minerals.

The worst front Necro-hives have to deal with is minerals, which is a limiting factor for everyone early game because minerals can be used to build buildings, fund science (direclty or indirectly through CG), and make alloys. Nero-hives don't have to bother with the CG conversion inefficiencies for funding science, which basically breaks even with their 10% mineral penalty, but alloy production is a big bite, especially since hives have 2 alloy workers per district which means a -12 mineral hit per district. Natural deposits in space don't keep up with alloy production scaling.

But that alloy hit is entirely sidestepped if you just use Catalytic Converters as a civic, which in turn directly makes use of your ever-growing livestock economy. Factor in starbase hydroponic bays- especially if you go Unyielding as a first tradition- and you can be swimming in alloys early-game, so much so that Necro-hives have a far greater early-game war potential to start snowballing than non-Hives. A T1 starbase with hydroponics bays and solar panels pays itself back in alloys in the first 8-ish years, and produces a net alloy profit with 0 workers and 0 minerals required.

Which, in turn, reduces your need for miners significantly, making your poor necro-miners only necessary for building/district construction and science upkeep... and the science upkeep is basically on par with a non-hive necro build where you use slaves but have to pay CG inefficiencies.


So the great -10% worker penalty doesn't affect food because you're using livestock and star base hydroponic bays for food, doesn't kneecap you in energy because solar panels offset with a surplus, and doesn't limit mineral-support to science upkeep because the CG-inefficiency cancels out the miner penalty. Which leaves buildings and alloys, the later of which doesn't have to be a mineral problem at all and the former of which is quite manageable with a smaller number of miners and space deposits.


Giving necro-drones a flat 5% bonus to all jobs including worker drones is really not necessary. Necro-hives already have unmatched early-war potential to subjugate and conquer through catalytic converter, and if you're not building to take advantage of a hive-mind-with-secondary-species economy why on earth are you playing a necro-hive?

It's really not as bad as you make it out to be.

 

[The Caesar]

I really really REALLY hope the Devs will at the very least make it so that Necrophyte job is no longer a specialist job at least. The fact it can't be used alongside nerve-stappled is really weird to me and I don't see why Necrohives can't really make use of the obvious option to do that, it's already somewhat annoying sometimes with regular necro but for them it's a real pain

 

[DeanTheDull]

I really really REALLY hope the Devs will at the very least make it so that Necrophyte job is no longer a specialist job at least. The fact it can't be used alongside nerve-stappled is really weird to me and I don't see why Necrohives can't really make use of the obvious option to do that, it's already somewhat annoying sometimes with regular necro but for them it's a real pain

Flip it on its other side: if you could have nerve-stapled necrophytes, under what conditions would a Necro-hive not do it? If your answer is 'there is none', then it's probably not a balanced mechanic. Always-superior choices without variety make the game less fun because it makes all other choices deliberately sub-par.

Fundamentally because amenities are a balance mechanic, and nerve-staples are a trade-off between amenity-reduced menial workers and specialists. Necrophytes are indisputably specialist jobs- they produce amenities and unity which are specialist resources, they consumer specialist-tier upkeeps, and of course make the specialist-oriented necro-pops. Making worker pops produce specialist job outputs without specialist-job restrictions isn't the sort of thing you want to make an empire-wide optimization, not without real tradeoffs.

 

[currylambchop]

Why though? It’s fun currently just on the weak side. Just like spiritualist but I still only play spiritualist Mega-Corps, which is weak but fun.

 

[Tech Noir Synth]

Flip it on its other side: if you could have nerve-stapled necrophytes, under what conditions would a Necro-hive not do it? If your answer is 'there is none', then it's probably not a balanced mechanic. Always-superior choices without variety make the game less fun because it makes all other choices deliberately sub-par.

Because some people like to Roleplay? Just because Synth Ascension is objectively the best Ascension doesn't mean everybody is doing it. I kept playing it for months and let me tell you the game gets boring (atleast for me) if you do the same every time.

Of course always- superiour choices without variety make the game less fun! Why do you think we talk so much about Hivemind balance and Origin balance? Or balance in general? We don't want to be playing Tree of Live Hivemind in every Hivemind game even though thats better than Necrophage. And we also don't want to be playing Materialists all the time even though they are stronger than Spiritualists.

 

[DeanTheDull]

Because some people like to Roleplay? Just because Synth Ascension is objectively the best Ascension doesn't mean everybody is doing it. I kept playing it for months and let me tell you the game gets boring (atleast for me) if you do the same every time.

Of course always- superiour choices without variety make the game less fun! Why do you think we talk so much about Hivemind balance and Origin balance? Or balance in general? We don't want to be playing Tree of Live Hivemind in every Hivemind game even though thats better than Necrophage. And we also don't want to be playing Materialists all the time even though they are stronger than Spiritualists.

What ever you think you're arguing against, this probably isn't the counter-argument for it. Origins and civics have their tier lists, but what they are good at differs- a spiritualist is better at unity production and governing ethics attraction than a materialist, a Tree of Life hivemind isn't as good at mil-rushing as a devouring swarm or exploiting captured pops as a necro-hive, and so on. There are trade-offs and playstyles distinction, and typically to get an advantage in one thing, you give up an competitive advantage in another.

Making Necrophytes accept nerve stapled pops isn't a trade-off, it's removing the trade-off in favor of flat-upgrade with no drawback.

 

[Tech Noir Synth]

Making Necrophytes accept nerve stapled pops isn't a trade-off, it's removing the trade-off in favor of flat-upgrade with no drawback.

The Necrophytes and Livestock are a huge Drawback for Hiveminds. A drawback that does not exist for normal Necrophages. I already explained how bad Livestock jobs are. I won't post another wall of text here, so please take a look at the screenshots I posted and at my explanation in this thread:

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...s-but-got-a-nerf.1491071/page-2#post-27860646

Long story short, the Livestock job is crippling because of how terrible the scaling is compared to farmer jobs. Normal Necrophages have happyness from all of their pops. So if your Necrophytes are enslaved in indentured servitutde (still better than Livestock) they have 30% happyness.

In the screenshot, you can see the total Happyness for Hiveminds will always be below 50% because Hive pops do not add any Happyness. This causes huge stability penalties which normal Necrophage do not have. And the Amenities added by Necrophyte jobs are the same for both empire types.

If you were able to nerve-staple Livestock Necrophytes, then atleast you could get your Happyness back up to 50% like a normal Hiveminds.

 

[Incompetent]

I feel like the problem here is that jobless pops generally are a burden in 3.X. This is true of Livestock, Grid Amalgamated, Domestic Servants and Utopian unemployed, for example. Necrophage Hives just have it worse than most because while most empires can either give everyone a job or purge the unemployable, they're more or less obligated to maintain a jobless population (and unassimilated too, which is inherently unhealthy for a Gestalt unless we're talking about Bio-Trophies).

Pre-3.X, jobs and building slots were somewhat scarce, so pops that produced stuff while jobless had a niche in cramming more pops onto fully-built planets (with their usually reduced housing requirements) and unlocking building slots on less built-up planets. It made sense for them to be less productive than workers because they needed less setup. In 3.X though, the population has been reduced without a proportional reduction in the jobs/housing supply (in fact, except on Habitats there is more housing on demand, even in absolute terms, than there used to be). So jobless pops lost their niche, on top of their generally low production and inability to benefit from a bunch of techs. I don't know if it's a good solution though to simply buff them to be closer to workers in output, given how inflexible they are; maybe we should instead limit the situations where you end up with unemployable pops.

The logic behind Necrophages getting a penalty to worker/simple output seems to be that they're too decadent to work these jobs properly and would rather have someone else do it. In that case, why not give Necrophage Hives a slavery type that lets the unassimilated pops do simple drone jobs? They'll still be unhappy, as they should be, but how happiness translates to stability for Gestalts (except Rogue Servitor) is a whole other story. When comparing with non-Gestalt oppressive empires, I think the problem is Gestalts' inability to nuke the relative political power of their slaves/purge pops, which doesn't make a lot of sense given the Gestalt's "politics". For starters, I would let Gestalts build something like a Slave Processing Facility to reduce the PP of unassimilated pops.

 

[Surimi]

The Necrophytes and Livestock are a huge Drawback for Hiveminds.

I disagree.

Hive minds have very limited sources of amenities. That's kind of a built in weakness, and is one of the biggest limiting factors of hive minds. It's why ascetic is the best hive mind civic. Being able to run the entire economy without a single maintenance drone for the first 30 years is a pretty major advantage for necrophage hive minds, and also completely cancels out the stability loss from unhappy livestock.

Livestock being worse than agricultural drones isn't really a problem. Livestock don't require jobs to be generated by districts, and thus aren't limited in the same way as agricultural drones. Sure, they don't scale with the edict, but unless you have 3 edict slots (i.e. you've filled out both domination and synchronicity traditions) I really question why you'd use that edict. You will still end up with more food than you know what to do with. In fact necrophage hive minds are one of the few empires where it's genuinely efficient to take catalytic processing just because of the amount of food you will end up with just from having livestock.

I agree that late game, when you have a lot of livestock, you can struggle with stability, but there are really obvious strategies to get around that. For example, move all the livestock onto habitats. In fact, build tons and tons of habitats to maximize pop growth and then have a transit hub in the system to automatically resettle drones out when they get necrophaged. You don't want non-hive minded pops living on your hiveworlds anyway.

But in terms of the positives, Necrophage hives can do something no other hive can do, which is early game snowballing. Sure, rushing as a hive is pretty hard unless you're a devouring swarm, but if you manage to rush down another empire population growth isn't going to matter, you've already outpaced any other hive.

And yes, the trait itself is not as good for hiveminds as it is for normal empires, but +5% complex drone output is absolutely worth -10% menial drone output. Basic resources are trivially plentiful, especially for hive minds and especially for necrophage hive minds. Science and alloys are the most important resources, and complex drone output gives you both.

 

[Tech Noir Synth]

Livestock being worse than agricultural drones isn't really a problem.

Yes it is. Please don't ignore simple math. A farmer job has 6 base output, a Livestock job has 4 base output. The Livestock job is worse than normal Necrophage worker jobs and ontop of it it destroys your stability, unlike normal Necrophages which can buffer Happyness by having happy specialists and rulers.


I urge you, please take a look at the thread and the screenshots. You will see a screenshot of a newly colonized planet with 9 pops. 3 are Livestock, 3 are Necrophytes, 3 are Necrophage pops. The 3 Livestock destroy your stability while the Necrophytes provide amenities just to buffer the stability loss. And inbetween you get sub-optimal food output. Its way worse than a normal Necrophage empire. See the screenshot for yourself.

Livestock don't require jobs to be generated by districts

So what? We have massively decreased pop numbers since 3.0 meanwhile, job productivity has gone up massively. Everyone gets new tech which increases job output by 10% while increasing job upkeep by 10%. This goes up to +30% job output and negligible +30% upkeep. Obviously this means your pops are more pop efficient. They produce more ressources per pop than before.

And you completely ignore Hive worlds in your argument. Gestalts don't have any problems with district slots on their planets because they can just turn planets into Hive or Machine worlds and fill them up with 20 districts of the same type. Hiveminds also get 3 jobs per district as opposed to other empires which get 2 jobs per district.

 

[Oculument]

Holy shit I've never ever seen such high stability on a hive mind planet. You have +24% specialist output and worker output, 29% specialist and 14% worker after necro trait. Gotta try this next, especially with Unyielding first tradition.

 

[Tech Noir Synth]

Holy shit I've never ever seen such high stability on a hive mind planet.

Its from The Memorex buff. +20% ressources on planet and +10 stability. You get it from the Dig Site Ix Belèn. This has nothing to do with Hivemind or Necrophage.

As for the stability, as you can see I have 63 spare Amenities which is terrible. You never want to have this many Amenities. The pops should be working other jobs. Its better to have lower stability and have pops working jobs.

 

[Surimi]

Yes it is. Please don't ignore simple math. A farmer job has 6 base output, a Livestock job has 4 base output.

I mean, delicious livestock have 6 base output, still require no districts, use less amenities, use less housing (and thus have less effect on planet capacity) but even if we take this at face value, so what?

Maximizing food is not a good strategy. The simple fact is, you will end up with more food than you know what to do with as a necrophage hive mind. You will be using catalytic processing and still scrapping agricultural districts and still be drowning in food. That's because most of your pop growth is going on providing food.

Which would be really really terrible if it was the only way you had of growing population, but you're a necrophage so it's not..

I urge you, please take a look at the thread and the screenshots. You will see a screenshot of a newly colonized planet with 9 pops. 3 are Livestock, 3 are Necrophytes, 3 are Necrophage pops. The 3 Livestock destroy your stability while the Necrophytes provide amenities just to buffer the stability loss. And inbetween you get sub-optimal food output. Its way worse than a normal Necrophage empire. See the screenshot for yourself.

Again, if you're that concerned about stability, take subsumed will. Dump your livestock to one planet (assuming you don't have habitats yet) but keep 3 non-hive-mind pops around to be necrophytes. You now have better amenity economy than any other hive mind. I get that that's micro and some people find micro annoying, but I'm just not seeing the huge problem here.

Yes, it's weaker than normal necrophage. Normal necrophage, even post nerf, is an incredibly powerful origin. Not to mention that normal empires generally beat out hive minds in the long term anyway. A better comparison would be between normal and necrophage hive minds, and here things become a bit more interesting because again, necrophage hive minds have vastly, vastly more snowballing capacity than normal hive minds.

Again, I will freely admit that necrophage hive minds aren't "meta". But then, I don't think any hive minds are "meta", and I don't think we should be judging everything by the standards of competitive multiplayer.

 

[Avernite]

I just now played a game as a devouring swarm necrophyte, and it works pretty swell. No more empty planets, you just get tons of pops (granted, building jobs fast enough to accomodate them can be tricky on 100+ pop planets, but then, you'll have been winning for a while at that point).

But okay, that may be an edge case Very good snowballing combo, though.

 

[theBigTurnip385]

I have been playing a lot of syncretic evolution.

Using livestock + double budding + pleasure seekers (domestic servants) + 1 food ecumenopolis. The Growth + Output is insane.

Who ever said there base food output is 4 is wrong its 8
4 + (2) delicious + (2) upgraded farm building

What Necrohive are missing is the Ecumenopolis dump center.

I enslaved half the galaxy and moved them onto my 1 food Ecu in my last game. Makes fighting the Crisis easy since your ecomony is centralized.

 

[Dragatus]

Livestock slavery along with the issues it might cause is not unique to necro-hives. Standard hives can use livestock too. What is unique to necro-hives is that you start with Livestock and need them for peace time pop growth. So the livestock issue is not a necro-hive issue, but is instead a general hivemind issue. Actually, it's even a general gestalt issue since standard MEs (those that aren't Rogue Servitors, Driven Assimilators, or Determined Exterminators) have a similar case with Grid Amalgamation slavery.

The -10% worker production is less bad than it sounds too because it's 10% of base production, which is 4 or 6, depending on the job, so you lose out on 0.4 or 0.6 of a resource per worker, which is in turn balanced by requiring 0.5 less food per worker. The net effect is then +0.1 or -0.1 production value per worker. It does become -0.1 or -0.3 once you have the resource production building fully upgraded, but by then you probably have a lot of complex drones so it balances out again.

The actual core of the necro-hive vs normal hive comparison is instead about how you get your pops. Necro-hives have the unique ability to assimilate the pops of a regular empire without having to first complete bio ascension, which then has to be balanced out by bad normal growth. And that's it, really. A necro-hive is not supposed to grow most of its pops the normal way. It's supposed to grow them by purging conquered planets. And you get to choose between doubling down on that by being a Devouring Swarm and having virtually no normal growth at all or leaving yourself the option to grow with livestock, but missing out on the combat bonuses and having to deal with reduced stability.

And yes, that won't work in competitive multiplayer, which is a shame. But any solution that would make necro-hives work in competitive MP risks destroying that which makes them unique and worth playing in the first place. And personally I'd rather have unique necro-hives in SP than bland ones in MP.

So to sum up, I think necro-hives don't need any special attention, but slavery forms for Gestalt empires might indeed need a balance pass, specifically in regard to stability/political influence.

 

[Vorpaliminal]

What if Necro-Hives were given access to a unique living standard for livestock? Right now one of the major problems is that livestock tank stability because Hives have no way to directly counter unhappiness from the single-minded. This living standard would reduce political power in general, but restore it for pops employed as Necrophytes and counter the happiness penalty from being livestock (as logically the Necro-Hive would stop preying upon them while they learn the ways of the Hive).

 

[DeanTheDull]

What if Necro-Hives were given access to a unique living standard for livestock? Right now one of the major problems is that livestock tank stability because Hives have no way to directly counter unhappiness from the single-minded. This living standard would reduce political power in general, but restore it for pops employed as Necrophytes and counter the happiness penalty from being livestock (as logically the Necro-Hive would stop preying upon them while they learn the ways of the Hive).

They do have a method, though- the amenities necrophytes produce. These are net-stability boosters in hive-minds due to the differences in how hiveminds work for stability purposes. Amenities and happiness do different things between Hive Minds and normal empires.

In normal empires, Amenities go into a calculation that can add at most 20% happiness to pops, which goes into the political power formula from lifestandards. Political approval in turn affects stability to a degree of .6 for every point above 50 (to a max of 30), or -1 for every point below 50. Pops that do not have happiness- like nerve-stapled, or drones- are treated as having 50. (This matters in weighting how much of a penalty you get- the more drones, the less any individual 0% happiness pop matters.)

In gestalt empires, however, amenities aren't used for pop happiness, because gestalts don't use the political power formula at all. They don't have factions. Gestalts do use the political approval process, but the amenities are never a part of it. Instead, gestalts amenities go directly into stability.

This is far stronger, because the amenity boost to stabillity for gestalts don't have the same declining asset of amenities in normal organics, which only indirectly boosts stability by up to 30. You'll note that when technoire posts the picture of Kornaggi Prime (3 livestock, 3 necrophages) he has net 8 stability thanks to the 15 amenities he has from necrophytes. And when he posts Luk'torh, he has a stability of 86. 10 of it is a Memorex stability buff, but the other 25% are on the basis of the 60 amenities his necrophytes are producing. In a planet with 12 0-approval pops, 10 of them necrophytes and 2 livestock; the necrophytes are producing 60 of his 63 excess amenities, and responsbile for 70% of his positive stability. And- if you look at the pop consumption blurbs- the livestock are using fewer amenities than the typical drone, leaving more in the pot to be excess.

Playing around with a basic Ascetic build, necrophytes were typically a +2 buff to stability, while moving a pop or a livestock to a planet had the same general impact to stability of -1, with the only deviations being explainable by their differing amenities usage. Necrophytes very much appear to be able to cover the amenities of themselves and two others.

Pop happiness is a red herring that's largely irrelevant for the necrophates. Job output of livestock doesn't depend on happiness. The only number that matters is the stability number, but for necro-hives each necrophage produces enough amenities to support about 2 other livestock at a break-even pce.

Considering that Livestock won't grow to a nine-pop surplus under natural growth patterns unless you don't build a conversion building, this is basically a non-issue until conquests come in. At which point, necro-purging is there for the excess.

 

[Vorpaliminal]

They do have a method, though- the amenities necrophytes produce. These are net-stability boosters in hive-minds due to the differences in how hiveminds work for stability purposes. Amenities and happiness do different things between Hive Minds and normal empires.

I'm very much aware of the mechanical difference in how amenities translate into stability between the two. I'm just saying that I find Necro-Hive's obligation to keep livestock and lacking any method to alleviate their unhappiness to be concerning. I hadn't really considered the full ramifications of the math however, and was more focused on how this clash in mechanics leads to inefficiency, even if it does come out to a net positive for stability.