Is rapid breeder worth it? Is slow breeder a meaningful malus?

[permeakra]

My problem is that rapid/slow breeder is applied as an additive bonus to all others. Which are numerous, and by the midgame I usually end with assorted +40+60% or maybe even more.

Meaning that one bonus is fairly meh, and stacking random +10% when you already plan for +70 is not so important in comparison. It doesn't provide that much of a bonus. This doubles for hiveminds, who have +25 inborn bonus and get another +30 for nutritional plentitude and another +25 for spawning pool and random +10 for the fairly common early tech and another 10 for another fairly common tech and... You got the idea. All of which are apparently additive, might not be worth it and it could be better to use the points for something else.

So, am I wrong?

 

[pryr]

+10% for 2 points is too much. Amount of stacking of additive bonuses is a problem of many aspects of this game.

 

[dostillevi]

If you could engineer it off later I think it would be more useful. It's odd to me that traits that are positive are locked and can't be modded off. Shouldn't it be up to me to decide what a positive trait is in my authoritarian empire?

 

[Askorti]

If you could engineer it off later I think it would be more useful. It's odd to me that traits that are positive are locked and can't be modded off. Shouldn't it be up to me to decide what a positive trait is in my authoritarian empire?

Well, you can do it if you go down the genetic modification ascension line. I guess they needed to leave some good stuff for it.

 

[Kryndude]

Yeah what I discovered while playing heavly for the past 10 days is that it's just better to start another colony somewhere and get another pop producing factory running. Before I used to go for that early 1000 food decision but now I don't care and just spam colony ships with that food. However that doesn't mean rapid breeder isn't good because the more colonies you have the more you benefit from that trait. I'd say it's not worth if you're doing a life-seeded or something of the sort but otherwise it's good.

edit: but then if you think about what other trait you're gonna take even in a life-seeded run... Now that I think about it, it might still be better than other options you have. It's basically getting each pop 3 months faster, and by the time you get 100 with rapid breeder without it you'd be sitting on 70. Also 10% modifier being meager in the late game doesn't matter at all because in games like Stellaris all that matters is snowballing early. It doesn't matter what's good or bad later when you've already won the game thanks (in part) to rapid breeder.

 

[dostillevi]

Ah ok. Never done that. So if I take an ascension perk I can then change the genetic traits that have arbitrarily (think realism) been assigned as "positive", that I just couldn't manage to remove previously, even though I could add them? Gotcha.

 

[permeakra]

edit: but then if you think about what other trait you're gonna take even in a life-seeded run...

Very strong ? Gives you +5% flat bonus to worker production (yay extra alloys for the early raid) and helps with your first invasion.

I guess I wasn't coherent enough. My apologies. The bonus of rapid breeder is +10% pop growth, but its usuability is quickly drowned under bonuses provided by tech and policies. In fact, policies provide greater effect. It both breaks flavor and makes the trait a suboptimal choice to some flat bonus to production. It also has the same cost for hiveminds who, ironically, need it the least as they have enough inborn bonuses to not care and would benefit more from flat bonus to food production (which might be a deficit early on)

 

[Kryndude]

Very strong ? Gives you +5% flat bonus to worker production (yay extra alloys for the early raid) and helps with your first invasion.

It's worker output so specialists won't benefit from it.


And for your main point, I agree. There gonna be an optimal point of pop growth speed / pop production ratio.

 

[fodazd]

My personal opinion: Rapid breeder is good, but for most builds there are better options.

A lot of other traits that used to be really good now also stack additively with a lot of stuff, which makes them much weaker (Intelligent, Industrious, natural x, etc.). The really good traits don't have this problem (Charismatic, Thrifty, Communal, Conservationist).

 

[Peter Ebbesen]

So, am I wrong?

Yes.

Or at least partially so. All those other boosts to growth either come later in the game or require a specific race setup. Rapid Breeders is active from the start, affecting all your starting pops (unless mechanist or syncretic evolution) helping you significantly in the crucial early game, and even when you start acquiring other growth boosters that arguably dwarf it, more remains better.

There are very few trait picks that can compete with across the board early game acceleration pumping out pops faster wherever the race is growing pops.

Which is why it costs 2 points now. If it cost only 1, it would be a no-brainer choice: nothing else available would come even close to provide the same power for the cost. At 2 it remains well worth the cost for many race designs, but a rational case can be made for skipping it in favour of other traits.

Which is as it should be. Gives us options.

 

[tremor3258]

It's not as worth it later, but every job filled a month earlier is that much more +1 at a time when those really count, and the others aren't available.

 

[Tobasco da Gama]

All those other boosts to growth either come later in the game or require a specific race setup. Rapid Breeders is active from the start, affecting all your starting pops (unless mechanist or syncretic evolution) helping you significantly in the crucial early game, and even when you start acquiring other growth boosters that arguably dwarf it, more remains better.

This is the right answer. It's a trait you probably shouldn't add via gene-modding later in the game, but 2 points accurately reflects how good it is in the early game before you've started stacking growth modifiers.

 

[Slynx]

for me patch 2.2 was a patch of Rapid Breaders + Nomadic species. and I like them very much.
in my recent game I outgrew my mechanist friend. which is pretty impressive considering he had both bio pops and robots growing simultaneously.

 

[fodazd]

I agree that rapid breeders would be way, *way* too strong if it were only 1 point. But I also think 2 points is too expensive.

 

[permeakra]

Or at least partially so. All those other boosts to growth either come later in the game or require a specific race setup. Rapid Breeders is active from the start, affecting all your starting pops (unless mechanist or syncretic evolution) helping you significantly in the crucial early game, and even when you start acquiring other growth boosters that arguably dwarf it, more remains better.

Rapid breeders are clearly suboptimal if you aim for early game advantage.

Example: food is consumed by every pop and early on is produced at rate of roughly 6 per pop, so you need 1 of 6 pops being farmer. with 15% bonus to food it's rougly 7 per pop, so you need 1 farmer per 7 pop which is roughly 15% boost to efficient number of pops not counting other recursive maintenance costs for pop size.

And at the beginning you already have 30+ pops, so getting 15% boost to their productivity is more useful than getting 11 instead of ten in oh so little years as this extra 1 would be only a 2.5% increase.

Also, for hiveminds I get about... +80% bonuses from the start? +25% for being a hivemind, +30 I think for nutritional plentitude and another +25 for spawning drones.

 

[Slynx]

And at the beginning you already have 30+ pops, so getting 15% boost to their productivity is more useful than getting 11 instead of ten in oh so little years as this extra 1 would be only a 2.5% increase.

aren't only megacorps start with 30+ pops? iirc normal empires start with 25 or even less...

also more pops = more building slots. while 15% food is just +15% to the resource that you can buy from the market

 

[Xrybnix]

As always, people are under-estimating boons that mostly (or even only) affect the early game. Due to the nature of exponential growth, the early game counts for infinitely more than mid and late game.

If you have a choice between a weak early game boon and a strong end game boon, the early game boon is virtually always superior from a power-player perspective. This holds true for most 4x games, including Stellaris.

Hence Rapid Breeders is underrated.

 

[permeakra]

Hence Rapid Breeders is underrated.

I pointed that Rapid Breeders are worse than flat bonus to production early on, see above.

also more pops = more building slots. while 15% food is just +15% to the resource that you can buy from the market

Early on (first 25 years) you are not all that strained for buildings, but for basic resources. Especially for rush strategies.

 

[yerm]

Rapid breeders are clearly suboptimal if you aim for early game advantage.

Example: food is consumed by every pop and early on is produced at rate of roughly 6 per pop, so you need 1 of 6 pops being farmer. with 15% bonus to food it's rougly 7 per pop, so you need 1 farmer per 7 pop which is roughly 15% boost to efficient number of pops not counting other recursive maintenance costs for pop size.

And at the beginning you already have 30+ pops, so getting 15% boost to their productivity is more useful than getting 11 instead of ten in oh so little years as this extra 1 would be only a 2.5% increase.

Also, for hiveminds I get about... +80% bonuses from the start? +25% for being a hivemind, +30 I think for nutritional plentitude and another +25 for spawning drones.

If only 1 in 6 or 7 works food, a 15% boost to output seems pale compared to a 10% boost to 100% of your population growth. Food is also a semi-outlier as most jobs do not even go as high (6:1 before modifiers).

Rapid breeders is a very good trait. Its biggest drawbacks are in that others give day 1 boosts (for rushing etc) while this is a gradual reward, and that its linear boost seems marginal after enough time or in a diverse but stratified empire.

If you are using robots or syncretics to do manual labor and your primary race for specialists, this is hard to pass up. If you are reliant on non-gaia conquered pops to expand, going xenophile melting pot eventually, or just playing super tall? Probably not.

 

[meiam89.]

The problem is that pop growth is linear with current population. 100 pop reproduce at the same rate as 1 pop. Rapid breeder would be very strong if growth took into account the population number, because getting a pop a few month early would means you'd also get the growth bonus from the increase pop a few month early which would lead to even better growth and the next pop even earlier and so on.

As it stands it's goodish but not worth 2 points compare to some of the other choice (I'd take communal over it even if they'd have the same cost).

The traits really need to a good overhaul in the near future, most of it is still the same as when the game was release, but plenty of those don't make much sense anymore. Habitability went from something extremely important to something almost negligible, extremely adaptive would barely be worth 1 point, let alone 4. Amenities as very little impact and is easy to obtain, 2 point is too much for charismatic. Resilient is worthless. Talented isn't very useful when there's so many way to increase level cap, it should be combined with exp gain.