Organizing thoughts on the upcoming changes to necro-hives, and what they will mean in practice.
My Bottom Line Assessment: No fundamental change to the overall design as a high-aggression/early-expansion build generally dependent on catalytic converters. A strong buff for genocidal devouring swarms who can't do that, but a slight nerf to early-game optomization for expnsion and a significant nerf for the mid-game post-Bio-Ascension economy.
What Hasn't Changed
Necro-Hives will still be resource-poor, still can't pop-bloom, and still rely on Catalytic Converters.
The biggest restriction on the necro-hive resource economy isn't the 10% malus to worker jobs, but the nearly 30% effective population decrese in pops to work those jobs due to 12 pops being locked into livestock jobs. This isn't even about the livestock themselves, who produce sufficient food for major needs, as it is the inability to put them into other jobs. Further, this is the limiting factor that constrains the otherwise strong ability to snowball conquests: captured pops only produce food, not specialist functions.
This is fundamentally the reason that the necro-hives can't pop-bloom their way into dominance like normal necrophages or normal hives. 100% of natural pop growth goes into food jobs. Your necro-drone population will only increase by up to 4 drones a decade through conversion and the spawning pool, and only at decade-long intervals. If you use these on worker-level jobs, you're not expanding your specialist economy of science and alloys. The only continuous economic input growths are food from pop-growth, and space deposits.
Together, these are why the (non-genoicdal) hives depend on catalytic converters: it's the only way to effectively make use of their growing and captured livestock. You 12-pop-smaller drone economy in turn doesn't have to split mineral production between science upkeep and alloy upkeep, letting you use drone-pops producing alloys instead of mining minerals for alloys.
Without a fundamental change to starting with a secondary species treated as any other species (ie, purge-target or livestock), the fundamental constraints remain.
Going by the notes-
Per feedback from the dev, this means livestock have a 15% political weight instead of 25% weight, or a 1-to-6.66 instead of 1-to-4 drone-to-livestock ratio for planetary approval purpose. This is an indirect buff to stability, which was already a net-gain for necro-hives due to how amenities translate for gestalts.
However, the already high (and increasing) incentives to necro-purge will mitigate the value of this in the early game pre-bio-ascension, and is irrelevant post-bio-ascension when you you just make livestock into drones.
Currently, necro-drones have a clear dominance in the specialist role, and so turning a secondary drone species (either captured from another hive or assimilated via bio-ascension) into your primary menial drone workers was a good use for nerve-stapled. Now that necro-drones will have the same worker and specialist output, there's less value in the specailist-vs-worker specking, especially as non-pop sources of minerals and energy (deposits, tributaries, mega-structures) negate more and more of the need. It still has value, but the value of specializing roles has marginally decreased.
Spawning pools for necro-hives should be thought of as marginlly better amenity drones, not pop-growth sources.
In the early-game, it's the necro-drone shortage that limits your mineral production so sharply, and it's the livestock dynamic that gives you an excess of food. Catalytic Converter works because it lets you use drones producing alloys instead of supplying for alloy production. With livestock covering food worker-needs, and Starbases- especially Unyielding starbases- covering the energy needs, you only need (or want) 6 mining drones for the first 30 years or so once the starbase economy is up, where the 10% penalty was about 3 minerals a month for all 6. All the other worker drones can be removed from the worker roles by the end of the second decade as you build science labs and industrial districts, and afterwards you only need to build about 500 minerals a planet a decade to deal with necrophyte conversions compared to 500 minerals a planet per 2 pops grown for district jobs.
20 years of a 10% worker penalty on the homeworld amounts to about 720 minerals over 2 decades, which is when necrophyte buildings will start converting primitives into other jobs (including the coordinator jobs for admin sprawl and colony-specific special functions). That's 720 minerals you really don't need; you can already max out your available necro-drones jobs by year 15, at which point you'll be limited by necro-drones rathr than minerals. Putting your first decade on extraction focus for a 20% buff more than overcomes the 10% penalty to production, and you'll be able to swap to specialist-focus at year 11 and more than make up for the first decade loss with the specialists you'll be employing in the second decade.
At year 20 you can easily get 30+ alloy production and science jobs limited only by your number of necro-pops, and start the war economy to take over and conquer neighbors for more pops. Once you can capture pops, the 10% penalty no longer really matters because you're adding far more than 10% to your drone-pool as miners and will have access to mining-world designations (25%) and so many potential captured pops that you're past the mineral-shortage phase of the game.
The alloy and science economy support the ability to take further pops, they benefit far more from the 5% specialist bonus than they're limited by the 10% worker penalty. You'll still be able to start your snowball without the early-game 5%, but once you are able to do it you don't need the worker buff (as you're already in position to conquer), and you get marginally less use out of the necro-drones you do convert.
This becomes a harder nerf when bio-ascension is reached, as necro-hives lose their primary long-term advantage over other hive-minds, and their primary incentive to pursue necro-drones. At bio-ascension, any hive can assimilate a species into a drone. Necro-drones having a 5% boon was a long-term and enduring gain over other specilist drones, and incentivized mass-necro-purging even into the end-game despite the 25% pop escape rate. Now there's only one reason to not just assimilate the species directly, and that's unity- both from necrophytes, and from the per-pop conversion with the Unity of Mind tradition.
Now, once you have any other drones- including those you capture from another hive-mind- the dominant strategy for necro-hives will be to prioritize the empire share of the other drones over the necro-drone primary species. Through both pop-assembly and natural growth displacing livestock, the mechanical optimization for necro-hives is to stop using necrophage unique mechanics.
The primary advantage necro-hives will retain is the unity produced by necrophytes vis-a-vis a maintenance drone's equivlaent amenities, and the unity produced by purging. Unity will presumably be more important in the upcoming unity rework, but probably not be worth keeping livestock or purging pops you could assimilate. (Unless hive-minds get a unity-rework nerf to their unity production, in which case who knows.)
It will also combo with terravores and crisis empires, who actually need a lot more minerals. Necrophage penalties were actually a slight balance against that, but obviously the strongest genocide civs deserve it.
Strategy Implication: More necro-purging hyper-aggression, not less
Necro-hives will be more incentivized to rush the unity and tech for bio-ascension, not less, and the best way to do that is mass-necro-purging. The best way for them to do that is still a catalytic-convert quasi-genocidal necro-purger civ that engages in aggressive pop-aquisition.
In current edition, there are 3 main reasons not to necro-purge all pops you come across: the 25% pop-efficiency loss as refugees, the 5% bonus to specialist if you waited to convert them through necrophytes, and the 10% worker malus even if you do purge them. The 25% escape rate is the hard limiter, but the 5/10% considerations are what shape the decision based on your needs: if you need a specialist, more livestock can't really convert to alloys or science workers, but the food production of a livestock in hand is balanced against a what they could convert into energy/minerals directly. Further, once Bio-Ascension does arrival, you'll still want the maximum number of necro-drones possible, because you want to maximize them post-ascension.
Now that necro-drones have no competitive advantage to other drones, the necro-hive's priority is bee-line to bio-ascension ASAP, no matter how many livestock it purges. There's no advantage to maximizing necro-drones vis-a-vis all drones.
This means that the already-strong second-tradition for necro-hives- synchronicity- becomes stronger. Synchronicity gives up to 100 unity per pop turned into a necrophage, whether necrophyte or necro-purge. That unity easily unlocks the three traditions needed to get Bio-Ascension, and any livestock turned into a drone can be made into a scientist to research the techs to bio-ascension. The science drones won't have the 5% buff, but the menial drones will have more minerals to support more, and jsut as the 10% penalty doesn't matter when you can flood necro-purgings in, the 5% buff can be ignored for the same reason.
All of this just requires you to get the pops, and the best way to do that is the Catalytic Converter civic, which enables early-game alloy rushing. Catalytic lets you use your livestock to fuel your alloys instead of restricting your drones to mining for the alloy upkeep AND producing alloys, lets your existing miners focus on science upkeep, and lets you prioritize early military techs over economic techs to get an early starship advantage. Combine that with Unyielding starbases- which give you another +40 food/+48 energy and free up more farmer and energy drones to work as specialists- and you can get overwhelming fleets by year 30. Which you use to conquer pops, necro-purge them for more unity and science drones, and bee-line to bio-ascension where you can turn all your livestock into normal drones.
Mind you, you can already do that now, but that's the point. The meta-path to success hasn't changed. The goal has just shifted to maximizing the total number of drones, not necro-drones, and your best tools for doing that have been dulled a bit.
Overall Conclusion
A decrease in the skill ceiling potential for playing necro-hives. Not enough of a buff to change their early-game economy menial drone weakness, because that's primarily the 12 pop shortfall than the 10% malus. Not a crippling nerf to their snowball potential, but a definite decrease in their ability to make use of conquests. This adds up over time in the mid and late game, where they become functionally interchangeable with other Hives, and thus economically inferior to those with enduring bonuses like Tree of Life.
Sadly, the mechanical incentives appear to lock-in the already-available war-rush strategy, but make it less rewarding to accomplish and less rewarding to maximize your necro-drone dominance. If you thought the necro-hives needed a nerf, this probably isn't enough, but if you thought it needed a buff it won't be enough either.
My Bottom Line Assessment: No fundamental change to the overall design as a high-aggression/early-expansion build generally dependent on catalytic converters. A strong buff for genocidal devouring swarms who can't do that, but a slight nerf to early-game optomization for expnsion and a significant nerf for the mid-game post-Bio-Ascension economy.
What Hasn't Changed
Necro-Hives will still be resource-poor, still can't pop-bloom, and still rely on Catalytic Converters.
The biggest restriction on the necro-hive resource economy isn't the 10% malus to worker jobs, but the nearly 30% effective population decrese in pops to work those jobs due to 12 pops being locked into livestock jobs. This isn't even about the livestock themselves, who produce sufficient food for major needs, as it is the inability to put them into other jobs. Further, this is the limiting factor that constrains the otherwise strong ability to snowball conquests: captured pops only produce food, not specialist functions.
This is fundamentally the reason that the necro-hives can't pop-bloom their way into dominance like normal necrophages or normal hives. 100% of natural pop growth goes into food jobs. Your necro-drone population will only increase by up to 4 drones a decade through conversion and the spawning pool, and only at decade-long intervals. If you use these on worker-level jobs, you're not expanding your specialist economy of science and alloys. The only continuous economic input growths are food from pop-growth, and space deposits.
Together, these are why the (non-genoicdal) hives depend on catalytic converters: it's the only way to effectively make use of their growing and captured livestock. You 12-pop-smaller drone economy in turn doesn't have to split mineral production between science upkeep and alloy upkeep, letting you use drone-pops producing alloys instead of mining minerals for alloys.
Without a fundamental change to starting with a secondary species treated as any other species (ie, purge-target or livestock), the fundamental constraints remain.
Going by the notes-
- Pops working the Livestock job now have 10% less political power.
Per feedback from the dev, this means livestock have a 15% political weight instead of 25% weight, or a 1-to-6.66 instead of 1-to-4 drone-to-livestock ratio for planetary approval purpose. This is an indirect buff to stability, which was already a net-gain for necro-hives due to how amenities translate for gestalts.
However, the already high (and increasing) incentives to necro-purge will mitigate the value of this in the early game pre-bio-ascension, and is irrelevant post-bio-ascension when you you just make livestock into drones.
- Nerve Stapled Hivemind pops can no longer perform complex drone jobs.
Currently, necro-drones have a clear dominance in the specialist role, and so turning a secondary drone species (either captured from another hive or assimilated via bio-ascension) into your primary menial drone workers was a good use for nerve-stapled. Now that necro-drones will have the same worker and specialist output, there's less value in the specailist-vs-worker specking, especially as non-pop sources of minerals and energy (deposits, tributaries, mega-structures) negate more and more of the need. It still has value, but the value of specializing roles has marginally decreased.
- Necro-Hives:
- Cut Necrophage pop assembly penalty to 50% from 75%
Spawning pools for necro-hives should be thought of as marginlly better amenity drones, not pop-growth sources.
- Made pop output modifiers (positive and negative) no longer apply to hive minds.
In the early-game, it's the necro-drone shortage that limits your mineral production so sharply, and it's the livestock dynamic that gives you an excess of food. Catalytic Converter works because it lets you use drones producing alloys instead of supplying for alloy production. With livestock covering food worker-needs, and Starbases- especially Unyielding starbases- covering the energy needs, you only need (or want) 6 mining drones for the first 30 years or so once the starbase economy is up, where the 10% penalty was about 3 minerals a month for all 6. All the other worker drones can be removed from the worker roles by the end of the second decade as you build science labs and industrial districts, and afterwards you only need to build about 500 minerals a planet a decade to deal with necrophyte conversions compared to 500 minerals a planet per 2 pops grown for district jobs.
20 years of a 10% worker penalty on the homeworld amounts to about 720 minerals over 2 decades, which is when necrophyte buildings will start converting primitives into other jobs (including the coordinator jobs for admin sprawl and colony-specific special functions). That's 720 minerals you really don't need; you can already max out your available necro-drones jobs by year 15, at which point you'll be limited by necro-drones rathr than minerals. Putting your first decade on extraction focus for a 20% buff more than overcomes the 10% penalty to production, and you'll be able to swap to specialist-focus at year 11 and more than make up for the first decade loss with the specialists you'll be employing in the second decade.
At year 20 you can easily get 30+ alloy production and science jobs limited only by your number of necro-pops, and start the war economy to take over and conquer neighbors for more pops. Once you can capture pops, the 10% penalty no longer really matters because you're adding far more than 10% to your drone-pool as miners and will have access to mining-world designations (25%) and so many potential captured pops that you're past the mineral-shortage phase of the game.
The alloy and science economy support the ability to take further pops, they benefit far more from the 5% specialist bonus than they're limited by the 10% worker penalty. You'll still be able to start your snowball without the early-game 5%, but once you are able to do it you don't need the worker buff (as you're already in position to conquer), and you get marginally less use out of the necro-drones you do convert.
This becomes a harder nerf when bio-ascension is reached, as necro-hives lose their primary long-term advantage over other hive-minds, and their primary incentive to pursue necro-drones. At bio-ascension, any hive can assimilate a species into a drone. Necro-drones having a 5% boon was a long-term and enduring gain over other specilist drones, and incentivized mass-necro-purging even into the end-game despite the 25% pop escape rate. Now there's only one reason to not just assimilate the species directly, and that's unity- both from necrophytes, and from the per-pop conversion with the Unity of Mind tradition.
Now, once you have any other drones- including those you capture from another hive-mind- the dominant strategy for necro-hives will be to prioritize the empire share of the other drones over the necro-drone primary species. Through both pop-assembly and natural growth displacing livestock, the mechanical optimization for necro-hives is to stop using necrophage unique mechanics.
The primary advantage necro-hives will retain is the unity produced by necrophytes vis-a-vis a maintenance drone's equivlaent amenities, and the unity produced by purging. Unity will presumably be more important in the upcoming unity rework, but probably not be worth keeping livestock or purging pops you could assimilate. (Unless hive-minds get a unity-rework nerf to their unity production, in which case who knows.)
- Made the -50% organic upkeep also apply to energy, for photosynthesis.
- Devouring Swarm Necrophages now spawn with extra infrastructure to account for the lack of chambers of elevation.
It will also combo with terravores and crisis empires, who actually need a lot more minerals. Necrophage penalties were actually a slight balance against that, but obviously the strongest genocide civs deserve it.
Strategy Implication: More necro-purging hyper-aggression, not less
Necro-hives will be more incentivized to rush the unity and tech for bio-ascension, not less, and the best way to do that is mass-necro-purging. The best way for them to do that is still a catalytic-convert quasi-genocidal necro-purger civ that engages in aggressive pop-aquisition.
In current edition, there are 3 main reasons not to necro-purge all pops you come across: the 25% pop-efficiency loss as refugees, the 5% bonus to specialist if you waited to convert them through necrophytes, and the 10% worker malus even if you do purge them. The 25% escape rate is the hard limiter, but the 5/10% considerations are what shape the decision based on your needs: if you need a specialist, more livestock can't really convert to alloys or science workers, but the food production of a livestock in hand is balanced against a what they could convert into energy/minerals directly. Further, once Bio-Ascension does arrival, you'll still want the maximum number of necro-drones possible, because you want to maximize them post-ascension.
Now that necro-drones have no competitive advantage to other drones, the necro-hive's priority is bee-line to bio-ascension ASAP, no matter how many livestock it purges. There's no advantage to maximizing necro-drones vis-a-vis all drones.
This means that the already-strong second-tradition for necro-hives- synchronicity- becomes stronger. Synchronicity gives up to 100 unity per pop turned into a necrophage, whether necrophyte or necro-purge. That unity easily unlocks the three traditions needed to get Bio-Ascension, and any livestock turned into a drone can be made into a scientist to research the techs to bio-ascension. The science drones won't have the 5% buff, but the menial drones will have more minerals to support more, and jsut as the 10% penalty doesn't matter when you can flood necro-purgings in, the 5% buff can be ignored for the same reason.
All of this just requires you to get the pops, and the best way to do that is the Catalytic Converter civic, which enables early-game alloy rushing. Catalytic lets you use your livestock to fuel your alloys instead of restricting your drones to mining for the alloy upkeep AND producing alloys, lets your existing miners focus on science upkeep, and lets you prioritize early military techs over economic techs to get an early starship advantage. Combine that with Unyielding starbases- which give you another +40 food/+48 energy and free up more farmer and energy drones to work as specialists- and you can get overwhelming fleets by year 30. Which you use to conquer pops, necro-purge them for more unity and science drones, and bee-line to bio-ascension where you can turn all your livestock into normal drones.
Mind you, you can already do that now, but that's the point. The meta-path to success hasn't changed. The goal has just shifted to maximizing the total number of drones, not necro-drones, and your best tools for doing that have been dulled a bit.
Overall Conclusion
A decrease in the skill ceiling potential for playing necro-hives. Not enough of a buff to change their early-game economy menial drone weakness, because that's primarily the 12 pop shortfall than the 10% malus. Not a crippling nerf to their snowball potential, but a definite decrease in their ability to make use of conquests. This adds up over time in the mid and late game, where they become functionally interchangeable with other Hives, and thus economically inferior to those with enduring bonuses like Tree of Life.
Sadly, the mechanical incentives appear to lock-in the already-available war-rush strategy, but make it less rewarding to accomplish and less rewarding to maximize your necro-drone dominance. If you thought the necro-hives needed a nerf, this probably isn't enough, but if you thought it needed a buff it won't be enough either.
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