I didn't really put much stock in machine empires being weak but...

[Black_Shade]

Those trade lanes also bring pirates, which means fortress starbases set up for pirate suppression. Also note that optimal placement for pirate suppression probably doesn't line up with optimal placement for empire defense. Relying on trade income also gives you an Achilles heel, since occupying the trade lane cuts off trade. Meanwhile, the gestalt empires can afford to allocate more starbases to anchorages.

Yeah you do need to allocate a few starbases to fortresses in worthless locations to supress pirates. But you still are far, far ahead of ME on starbase efficiency, because a single trade starbase is worth 4+ solar panel starbases. Also, ME cannot afford to waste even a single star base on anchorages, there are just no energy credits to spare. Everything must be solar panels, or it's bankruptcy. I don't even build defenses on my border starbases, it's all solar panels everywhere and you're still struggling to make ends meet. The economy for ME is just borked.

 

[sterrius]

My recomendation for machine empires. Super quick 10-20 years start game guide.

tradition -> prosperity, synch and domination have powers that either reduce robot upkeep or increase energy production. Go straight for them. 9 lvs and you have everything and its a huge boost.

50% POPs need to be on energy all the time. After some tech you can think about reducing this but at the start you have no such liberty.

Physics focus either energy tech or the cheapest one to hunt that tech. Generator + Field modulator is bread and butter as they give a 25% increase in energy production.

food production is 4 Jobs (24 food) for 15 energy = 3.75 energy/POP. Early game its a safe choice only if you're not getting buffs for energy production. As soon energy production reach 4 per POP food becomes a secondary source. Specially when you start to stack traditions and upkeep bonuses.


Amenities -> Close to 0 even a little negative if possible. Just stays above 50 stability and only worry about stability after you planet reach 100-150 POP´s.

Alloys -> Early game you can build 2 alloy factorys but keep at most 4 POp´s on it instead of 6. You can freely move pops from ADm / menial work jobs so use it to your advantage. When low on alloys you can move 2 pops there to boost production, after fixing the problem you go back.

Remember each POP making alloys is a pop not making energy. Eventually you will have enough POPs to keep 6 there all the time.

 

[Black_Shade]

My recomendation for machine empires. Super quick 10-20 years start game guide.

tradition -> prosperity, synch and domination have powers that either reduce robot upkeep or increase energy production. Go straight for them. 9 lvs and you have everything and its a huge boost.

50% POPs need to be on energy all the time. After some tech you can think about reducing this but at the start you have no such liberty.

Physics focus either energy tech or the cheapest one to hunt that tech. Generator + Field modulator is bread and butter as they give a 25% increase in energy production.

food production is 4 Jobs (24 food) for 15 energy = 3.75 energy/POP. Early game its a safe choice only if you're not getting buffs for energy production. As soon energy production reach 4 per POP food becomes a secondary source. Specially when you start to stack traditions and upkeep bonuses.


Amenities -> Close to 0 even a little negative if possible. Just stays above 50 stability and only worry about stability after you planet reach 100-150 POP´s.

Alloys -> Early game you can build 2 alloy factorys but keep at most 4 POp´s on it instead of 6. You can freely move pops from ADm / menial work jobs so use it to your advantage. When low on alloys you can move 2 pops there to boost production, after fixing the problem you go back.

Remember each POP making alloys is a pop not making energy. Eventually you will have enough POPs to keep 6 there all the time.

Do you not see how terrible this is compared to organic empires, though? Organic empires never have to do this kind of management and restricting themselves to only using half their planets building slots. The administrative penalty hits you hard by doing this strategy, as your spamming districts but not using any build slots. Organics can use every build slot available to them and will double your research/alloy/unity output for the same administrative cost and will be able to stop you into the ground by midgame.

 

[Jamey]

oh boy, I'm barely getting any energy production from my largest generator producing planet.

Year 2268
i looked at my production
I have 250.17 energy produced from jobs
-56.7 from districts
-50.7 from jobs
-106 from pops

Frankly, this is just unsustainable if energy plants can't barely support them selves.

going to see about editing my files to remove upkeep on energy districts.

13 unemployed jobs, probably most of them in energy production because of job prioritization.

Rather than being an example of a problem with machine empires (and there are definitely problems there), this shows a problem with a massively overbuilt planet.

 

[Black_Shade]

We're both wrong. It's actually 0 trade for Trade Hubs, +2 for each with Offworld Trading Company. So a starbase could produce 12 energy for normal races. However, trade modules cost 1 energy apeice, and starbases 1 per upgrade level. So a fully upgraded starbase for Gestalts produces 18 -4 = 14 energy and for a normal race 12 - 4 - 6 = 2 energy.

As for producing trade on planets, that requires actual investment which usually isn't efficient.

Thanks for correcting the math on the default starbase! But it's not just trade on planets, the starbases will collect all trade for all hyperlanes within 6 jumps. Usually thats another 20-30 trade from sectors per starbase, so investment/pop free.

And if you get lucky with the sector resources you might have a couple that bring in +50 trade, in addition to any planets, which can push you up over +100.

The main thing that makes it so good is the extreme range you get, 6 lanes in any direction means you only need 2-3 starbases to cover your whole empire until the midgame, and each of those will gather an insane amount of trade. This frees up most of your starbase slots for things like anchorages, which machine empires don't have to spare given that they will use all of theirs on solar panels.

 

[SirL]

My advice is to not produce energy, but ... food. In current game mechanics it is better to produce food as machines and sell it for energy creds or build bio-reactors. I did some tests

 

[wundergoat]

So, I'll admit that I had been theorycrafting and had not tried my bots in 2.2, so I fired up a game. Relevant traits are luxurious (+10% pop cost), durable (-10% upkeep), bulky (+10% housing) and rapid replicator civic (+20% growth). Here are my obeservations:

Off the start, big issue that is gonna hose new ME players: you have 4 excess maintenance bots. Part of this is that you have the maintenance drone building for +3 jobs, part is that your capital building has +2 jobs plus coordinators. The extra stability is nice, but these guys are much better off making energy and minerals. Build those extra districts and restrict down 2 maint jobs or delete the maintenance building for now. You won't need it for a while.

Initial energy production is not bad (+9), so I split the districts 50/50 to accelerate mining station construction.

Another great starting bonus: you start with 300 energy instead of 100 like other empires. This means you can start building a science ship off the start and staff it as soon as it completes. Other empires need to build up 100 extra EC first, which results in a MUCH slower 2nd explorer.

I opened with the exploration traditions with the aim to fast expand and get additional population production going. The sci vessels had found a few good, close candidates and two construction ships were getting claims in place. 2nd alloy factory was built to avoid an alloy bottleneck. A pair of colonies were built around 2207-2208.

Upon completion, I got a nasty surprise: despite having the tradition for a 2nd colonist, each colony only started with 1 bot. Darn, will just have to deal with this bug.

Then another annoyance that will really hurt people who don't know what is going on: the ME starter building gives a bunch of extra jobs that are initially useless. Whereas a normal empire starts with 2 colonist slots out of the starting building, meaning you only lose 2 pops as rulers, MEs get 4 jobs out of their building: 1 replicator, 1 coordinator, 1 hunter-seeker (enforcer), and 1 maintenance bot. Only being at 1 replicator is super rough, since it means you only have 1 pop growth baseline instead of 3 like all other empires. It is extra sucky because your 1/3rd pop growth will naturally want to fill out 3 non-productive jobs before actually producing anything.

Next step - ship over 4 bots, build a production district and bot factory, and disable the maint bot and hunter-seeker on each colony. Now each colony is producing new bots at a 2/3rd rate and energy positive. They'll keep building up as energy and mineral plants from here.

The double colony play was rough to start due to losing so many energy and mineral workers on the homeworld, so I had to disable mineral production. I didn't realize that I could instead disable alloy and freely demote the drones, because that would have been better.

By 2021 I'm establishing my 3rd colony. I've got the excess energy to spend 1000 on the growth edict, so my two initial colonies are growing at greater than 3/month. Expansion tree is done so I'm still under admin cap.



Final summary:
1) Initial empire capital setup is not good, with 4 pops and a building (and their upkeeps!) wasted to make 20 excess amenities. This is easily fixed by disabling jobs and adding production districts.
2) Starting with 200 extra energy felt big. Your second science vessel enters service quite a bit in front of other empires, just 2 months into the game.
3) Bot colony starter building has a lot of jobs on it that are not needed off the start. They are not useless jobs, they just are not jobs you want your first colonists to be doing.
4) Being able to freely swap between complex and menial bots is HUGE. Normal empires need to commit to additional specialist pops, but as an ME you can optimize your pop output as needed.
5) Job management feels optional with normal empires but makes a major difference with MEs. These are definitely not as newbie friendly as they were pre-2.2

 

[wundergoat]

Oh, and resettling to colonies is nearly mandatory. Getting to 5 pops to build the factory building doubles initial pop growth. Later on, getting to 10 pops to upgrade the planet capital adds 50% to that growth rate. It is almost an exponential curve and resettlement lets you jump past the flat part of the curve to the good part.

 

[Dmitrius]

There really should be a bio reactor tech available for machinists to produce energy at the cost of food.

Actually I assumed there was one....

Edit: sorry not thinking clearly. What I meant was a bioreactor district.

 

[Devanor]

if Clerks and MAintance jobs became the least priority job (Instead of top priority)

Isn't Clerk already lowest priority? Or is that in the beta? Because as soon as I get more jobs than pops, Clerk jobs empty first (maintenance drones for gestalts are still high priority)

 

[sterrius]

Do you not see how terrible this is compared to organic empires, though? Organic empires never have to do this kind of management and restricting themselves to only using half their planets building slots. The administrative penalty hits you hard by doing this strategy, as your spamming districts but not using any build slots. Organics can use every build slot available to them and will double your research/alloy/unity output for the same administrative cost and will be able to stop you into the ground by midgame.

i already said on other post that machine empires need a buff. Not going to repeat myself every post.

Like it or not fixing your energy problem early game is how you have to play until its fixed.

 

[Riftwalker]

as others have said

1. That's not an energy planets, you got tons of things going on.
2. You didn't manage your pops correctly. You got too many maintenance pops working, Machines don't care about happiness so its wasted on them.
3. Machines run on energy so you not taking into account the energy the pops are consuming on the planet.
4. Planets with high pops don't have high net energy and mineral production because stellaris won't give us those resource buildings. So once you hit the cap of energy jobs, it's all down hill if you keep the planet growing. 12 districts times 2 plus maybe 4 for nexus (I forgot what upgraded gives). That's only 14 energy jobs and that planet has 60+ pops

wow, so like all of this is wrong, i mean the planet even has 26 tech-drones (generator jobs)

I'm currently at 59 energy on that planet, with capacitor edict. robot amenities create stability, which boosts pop resource production and it prevents deviancy. Yes, this is pretty much my only planet that's giving me a decent energy income. most planets have 3-4 only energy districts and are running at about -10, their only benefit is slowly making more robots.

THIS IS WITH CAPACITOR OVERLOAD.

 

[Riftwalker]

2-> Prosperity tree (Must be first pick for machine empires). Gives a Energy adm job and 5% bonus.

no it makes a coordinator jobs that turns energy into unity and society research for every 20 pops....

also, you're gaining minerals, but have no mining jobs...

in fact i'm beating you

my empire is barely positive with ~35% of my pops on generator jobs...

edit: looking at it, you have an empire size of 35.... I'm sorry, but i'm actually fielding leaders and fielding a navy that i'm using in wars. my empire size is now 252 from the land i've eaten up from other empires.

I started this run hoping to focus down tech, but found out I 'can't reliably make a research world without tanking my energy production.

 

[Riftwalker]

Your example world is not a good representative example. It is not a generator world, it is a developed world that happens to have a lot of generators. With how much other stuff you have on this planet, I would expect it to be consuming boatloads of energy. That is assuming that all the technician jobs are filled.


Not saying that robots couldn't use some tuning.

30% is my entire empire. i'm well beyond just that planet, it's my example of what my best generator world was at 2068, colonies simply don't go positive for a while, even with only energy districts.

comparably my orgainic empire was spamming a pop growth decision all over the place by then with only 1-2 agri worlds.

 

[sterrius]

no it makes a coordinator jobs that turns energy into unity and society research for every 20 pops....

also, you're gaining minerals, but have no mining jobs...

in fact i'm beating you

my empire is barely positive with ~35% of my pops on generator jobs...

edit: looking at it, you have an empire size of 35.... I'm sorry, but i'm actually fielding leaders and fielding a navy that i'm using in wars. my empire size is now 252 from the land i've eaten up from other empires.

I started this run hoping to focus down tech, but found out I 'can't reliably make a research world without tanking my energy production.

1-> Planet production don´t care if you have 1 ship or 1000, or if im using 1 or 100 leaders. Only POP and Districts upkeep are calculated there. Reason i don´t need to growth a empire and run for 100 years to show how to make a energy planet. ( Just fast foward until i got the researchs, at 2x cost as i don´t bothered to change my galaxy setup).

Also reason im showing planet production and not Empire production.

2-> I nerfed myself on purpose not taking traits and civis that would have helped my energy prodution, i could also have used Menial Work policy for +20% just for show, but whats the point using things you might not have or can´t use? Every bonus i used there you can have every game no matter your empire configuration.

3-> You are talking about the JOB you get after completing prosperity . Im talking about 1 choice you can make inside the Prosperity Tree. That option of +5% energy only need 3 points to reach, no need to complete the tree.

4-> its the capital planet. Thats why i have 30 minerals / 30 energy for free. Also influence, unity and research. CApital planets are incredible like that .

Your planet on page 1 was also the capital planet. So your real energy surplus there is +4 not 34.

 

[Andy_Dandy]

That seems like your issue here TBH. My first 'game over' in 2.2 came from building too many buildings, without realizing that this caused my worker pops to promote out of base resource production and into Specialist jobs. This in turn crashed my minerals & food production, and everything else followed soon after. You're almost certainly in a similar position, with 13 unworked generator jobs.

Yeah, your bio-empire will easely lack alot of food as well under simular circumstances.

 

[sterrius]

Using all building slots is easily the biggest trap this game ever had.

 

[Leylos]

This is one of those things that a lot of people are still getting used to with 2.2.

Don't overdevelop your planets, especially raw resource production planets.

You play a machine empire, so just halt robot assembly on that planet, move some robots elsewhere and destroy some of those useless buildings it has.

 

[ShoGuL]

wow, so like all of this is wrong, i mean the planet even has 26 tech-drones (generator jobs)

I'm currently at 59 energy on that planet, with capacitor edict. robot amenities create stability, which boosts pop resource production and it prevents deviancy. Yes, this is pretty much my only planet that's giving me a decent energy income. most planets have 3-4 only energy districts and are running at about -10, their only benefit is slowly making more robots.

THIS IS WITH CAPACITOR OVERLOAD.

You can move 3 maintenance bots to energy for literally +21 completely free energy...

 

[sterrius]

You can move 3 maintenance bots to energy for literally +21 completely free energy...

i would say he can move 4 . A little negative on stability will not hurt his energy and minerals production that much as long the penalty is small and he keep adding POP´s there.

and that if stability actually goes below 50. Any bonus to stability will allow him to go negative amenities and keep the POP´s working.