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

[Secret Master]

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.

I was going to say this, but you have it covered.

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.

It also means that if you go biological ascension, you can play "mix and match" in the late game. If for some reason you think 2 points is too much to spend on rapid breeders after 100 years, mod it out and use something else. Or upgrade to fertile for the 30% increase and housing reduction.

But given how important labor and employment in Stellaris is, there's very little reason not to pursue POP growth as a priority. By the time unemployment might be a problem for some empires, your extra growth should have resulted in a win against everyone else. Having POPs is really important in this game, almost to Vic2 levels of importance.

 

[208]

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.

You can buy food from the market, and needing fewer farmers doesn't get you more building slots & upgraded colonies faster.

 

[Dustman]

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.

Communal is far inferior first few dozens years since housing is not a problem at all.

Habitability is still worth more than a point, especially if you colonize out of your comfort range, since skyrocketing costs of CG and amenities eat up large portion of your earnings from new planets.

And charismatic not only affect amenities, which are quite useful for number of reasons, but also affect Xenophiles if you care for them.

It's really hard to beat Breeders if you compare initial 2 points picks.

 

[permeakra]

You can buy food from the market, and needing fewer farmers doesn't get you more building slots & upgraded colonies faster.

Credits are even harder to earn.
Early on building slots are not an issue.

If you want quickly upgraded colonies, you can just as well pick some "faster colony dev speed" tech for greater effect.