First I’d like to start off by saying I love Stellaris and normally play robots. That came to a hault in 2.2. They just felt ... off. I've been playing more organic empires and I do love the changes in 2.2. It's just a shame robots are in the state they are. This isn’t a complaint about them not really working but my attempts to figure out WHY they don’t work. A bit of warning, there is math and opinions so beware the faint of heart. This is current to the 2.2.3 update on the test brach.
After looking over robots and doing some math I’ve narrowed down the issues with robots to three primary problems. The reworked economy, scalability, and unbalanced cons.
1: The reworked economy.
The main problem is the economy of the game is designed around organics. As such food production is king and everything else is secondary. This presents a crippling flaw for robots who eat energy not food.
A tech-drone (worker in energy districts) makes a baseline 4 energy. However, he eats 1, and the district itself costs 1 more energy in maintenance. With districts granting 2 jobs, that means a fully staffed district produces 8 energy but costs 3 to run for a net gain of 5 energy or 2.5 energy produced per bot.
Meanwhile, an Agri-Drone (worker in food districts) produces 6 food.
Now before we get further in, let’s take a moment to get everything on common footing. Since we have the bio reactor (a building and concept I despise but I’ll get into that in a bit) we have a conversion rate for food. It takes twenty-five food to produce twenty energy. In other words, 1 unit of food is worth 0.8 units of energy. Back to the main topic:
With our keeping everything on the same terms this means the food bot makes 4.8 energy (6 food x 0.8 conversion ratio). Already we can see some issues. It is more profitable to farm than to make tech districts (and this is AFTER the nerf of bio reactors as before it was a 1:1 ratio). So continuing on, that’s 4.8 energy per job for 2 jobs so 9.6 energy minus the 3 energy for the workers and district for a total of 6.6 per district and 3.3 per bot.
So this leads to two big issues for the core economic model for robots. 1: It is more profitable to grow food than energy. 2: A robot empire needs building slots to make food into energy, and these buildings offer zero jobs and are not upgradeable.
Let’s make an example so we can illustrate the problem. A robot working in an energy job makes enough energy for 2.5 other robots, and a robot working a farm makes enough energy for 3.3 other bots. Meanwhile an organic makes enough food to feed 5 other people (6 food, minus the one they eat).
So say you have a planet that is size 15 with all food districts. A robot empire would be able to make enough energy to feed 49.5 population. An organic empire on the same world would be able to feed 75 population.
The 15 districts that gather food offer 2 jobs and housing each for a population of 30 or 6 building slots unlocked. The numbers come out to 180 food so you would need 7.2 bio reactors to compress it all into energy. Meanwhile organics just get to eat the food as it is. So here’s another problem. A 15 size world, all farms, can’t even support the bio reactors needed to turn it all into energy. Which ignores the fact you need maintenance depots to make the amenities to keep the population working as well. And this world offers nothing else but food to energy to boot.
Meanwhile, the organics on the same planet get 6 slots to build houses for more population and with that increased population build the buildings to get whatever they fancy off the world in addition to the 180 food. Beyond that, the organic just has to make sure they make enough food to keep the population fed, while robots need the energy to eat AND pay for everything else in the empire.
So the issue is compounded as building too many ships/star bases/what have you won’t starve organics but will, in fact, starve machines. So not only do machines have a harder time feeding their populations but they have to balance the rest of the empire that consumes the same resource. In addition, organics have the option to burn 1k food to increase pop growth while machines don’t have any similar options hurting them in the long run with slower growth early on when the economy needs all the help it can get.
The secondary issue is robots do not partake in the trade system. So all the systems with trade value are not even visible to robot empires. This trade value isn’t replaced by anything either so a large source of energy that organic empires are balanced around simply don’t exist for machine players. Which dovetails into the second main problem with robots:
2: Scalability
At a certain point, every empire hits what I call the natural cap. This is the point where they have every system/world they can exploit. Be it they are building tall and have hit the point they don’t want to expand outward or they are boxed in by neighbors and cannot grow without conflict.
The ramifications of this natural cap are that the number of energy/minerals/food is now capped and static. An empire knows how many mining stations they can build in their space, how many worlds they can colonize and how many resource districts those worlds contain. And this number is set in stone. Certain things like the mastery of nature ascension perk and increase it slightly, but when every rock is mined and every district is built, that’s it.
Except it’s not for organics.
For organics, once you hit this natural cap, you can surpass it with one building – the commercial zone.
The commercial zone provides 5 jobs that each provide 2 trade value. Which converts into 2 energy (or some combination of energy and commercial goods/unity based on policy) with no resource investment. In other words, after an organic empire has hit their natural cap and exploited all natural resources, they can continue to create energy and at no cost outside of excess population. This energy then can be used to buy whatever they need off the galactic market. Basically allowing them, admittedly at a slow rate, to grow beyond the natural cap and thus scale in power with population.
Robot empires do not have anything similar to this. Robots only have 1 economic job that doesn’t cost resources to produce an output and that’s Maintenance drones. However, the Maintenance depot doesn’t produce anything near to the output of a commercial zone. Maybe in theory having large amounts of amenities balances out, but in practice, it falls far short.
Basically the more amenities a world has over those consumed by population grants a percentage boost to output on a planet. At high amounts of excess amenities, the robot colony gets a 20 point bonus to stability and a 15% increase to resource production. This is a hard cap. Once you have those 2 numbers all the maintenance depots in the world won’t give any more.
Now a tech drone job produces 4 energy as established and 4.8 for food. And since the amenity caps at 15% for having a fleet of maintenance drones will grant you an additional .6 energy (4x1.15=4.6) per tech job or .72 energy (4.8x1.15=5.52) per food job at the cost of all the maintenance drone buildings and workers. And yes, this 15% boost also affects everything on the world, but it is hardly close to 2 energy PER POP working in a commercial zone. And again, there is a hard cap. Every single organic pop produces 2 energy ad infinitum, while at a point adding more maintenance drones just costs you while offering nothing.
Now Hydroponic farms do grant both robots and organics with a source of food after the natural cap, but for robots is only half the equation because they still need bioreactors to convert the food. 2 hydroponic farms produce 24 food which is just 1 shy of the bio reactors 25. So robots will need 3 building slots to produce more energy this way, and that’s 3 slots for 4 jobs. 3 slots take 15 population. What is the other 11 population to do?
If the robot empire is at the natural cap and can’t produce any more minerals, 11 production jobs mean a lot of alloys but you’d gain 20 energy from the 3 building slots and 11 production jobs are going to use a lot more minerals than 20 energy can buy. Same with research. And even if you wanted to shove the 11 into maintenance drone jobs, you get 3 per building so you’d need 4 more building slots for those buildings.
If you were to forgo the bio reactor and just sell on the market the problem becomes variability. Some months you’ll make money better than bio reactor, but the vast majority of months you’ll make far less and even then that’s 4 jobs from 2 building slots which require 10 population to unlock leaving 6 spare population that in turn need 2 maintenance depots to keep from being unemployed and robots don’t have access to any living standard that makes unemployed anything but a drain.
For the math side 2 hydroponics produces enough for 20 energy roughly via bio reactor, minus the 4 energy maintenance for the farms themselves, and another 4 eaten by the robot pops working them for a gain of 12 energy with the additional cost of the 3 maintenance depots (1 energy each) and the spare population (6 population) for a final net gain of 3 energy with no unemployment.
Meanwhile 10 organics working in 2 commercial zones produce 20 energy at a cost of 4 energy in maintenance of the zones (or just 2 for an upgraded Commerce Megaplex that also has a merchant job increasing the total value to 28 trade/energy produced) for a net total of 6 energy (20-4 building maintenance-10 pop consumption if they were robots eating 1 energy each) or 16 energy for the megaplex (28-2 building maintenance- 10 pop). Although the megaplex also requires strategic resources so that number will depend on if you have to buy the resource or have it in your empire or manufacture it in a building.
In a nutshell: Pops are power to organics and they scale infinitely. To robots pops are a power hungry menace that once they reach the natural cap have no positive effect on the economy. Once a robot empire hits the natural cap and have exploited every natural resource and has set the balance of alloy/research/maintenance – it is best to stop making robots completely from an economic point of view.
And finally, the third problem facing robot empires
3: Unbalanced cons.
Now everything needs flaws and I am in no way saying that flaws are inherently bad. They make for better games. If any one civilization, be it organic or hivemind or robot, was absolutely perfect it would, in fact, decrease the enjoyment of that empire.
The issue isn’t cons themselves, it is the balance of those flaws. Take the fanatic purifier, devouring swarm, or determined exterminator for example. They have the con of being unable to engage in any diplomacy or use of the markets. However, they have the advantage of getting strong bonuses to combat. It is the balance of the pros and cons that make them interesting to play.
So let’s look at robots flaws and advantages.
The main advantage, at least from an economic standpoint, is the ability to colonize any world. This opens up every world to be exploited from the start and doesn’t require 4 perk points for extreme adaptability. However, the conto counter this is mainly the fundamental issues in the economy. Yes, they can colonize every planet. Yes, they have good pop growth. However, their economy is very tight, requires lots of building slots to burn food, and worst of all is harmed by pop growth in fully developed colonies.
For the growth factor, new colonies have 1 replicator job which grows robot pops at a rate of 1 per month. Organic new colonies have a 50% penalty to growth cutting their rate to 1.5 if they have no other perks. Beyond this organics have a decision to burn 1k food to increase growth by 25%. Both robots and organics have an edict that increases growth by 10%. And while organics have a few technologies to increase population growth, robots do not. Instead, they have more replicators built into the planetary capital building that is unlocked by those techs. So assuming you build a machine assembly plant, you get 3 pop growth (standard for organics without perks or tech) at pop 5 when you can build it. 10 pop on world grant upgrade to capital, but no boost to replicator jobs. At 40 pops the upgrade grants one more job boosting to 4.4 per month, 46% more than base. At 80 one final job is granted give you a total of 5.5 growth, 83% more than base.
Now robots can move more pops to the new world and construct a machine assembly plant to get to standard 3 per month base growth quickly while organics can’t get around the new colony penalty. Again on paper, this looks like a great strength. Once colonies hit 5 pop they grow at standard rates and once they hit 40 and above they grow faster than organics until they get techs and policies. However, as listed above the economy of robots makes each pop expensive and not necessarily a gain in power turning what should be an advantage into a flaw overall.
Right about the point when they get the most growth you are faced with two options: Turn off growth in the developed colony or pay to ship those robots to growing colonies. If you pick the resettlement option you are in for a lot of clicking as your empire gets bigger and at 100 energy a pop it can be a strain on your economy. At 4.8 energy from a food job it would take a pop 20.8 months, or a year and eight months, to pay for moving it to a new world – assuming it’s being moved to a job that pays for itself. Meanwhile, at 5.5 growth per month, you will get a new pop every 18.18 months. In other words, you will have to move a new pop before the last pop has turned a profit from its move.
So on the balance robots can go anywhere, but the fundamental flaws in the robot economy mean building too many colonies will bankrupt you quickly so expansion is delayed further until you have a strong base to support the drain of a new colony. And each new colony will take a while to produce a profit, even with resettlement. And eventually, it will hit a cap of production where more pops hurt it more than help it.
For comparison organic base growth is 3 and can be boosted by 20% from tech, 10% from food policy, and 25% from jobs which gives a growth of 4.65 and since organics can build robots as well (at the slower pace of 2 per month), their net growth late game is 6.65 per world (and extra 25% to organic growth by spending 1k food if they desire). And a few well-placed migration treaties or some genetic modification means organic pops can eventually exploit all worlds as well but that admittedly takes time. However, with the compound the issue of commercial zones giving each pop in an organic empire value means I really don’t see being able to colonize everywhere at the start as much of an advantage as it first appears.
Admittedly robots also don’t use consumer goods, so they don’t require minerals or the civilian industries building for pop upkeep. However, the bio reactor is a far more hungry beast to feed. Civilian industries grant 2 jobs that turn 12 minerals into 12 consumer goods, which depending on your living standards can feed a variable amount of pops. However, given the building is upgradeable a single building slot can produce a staggering amount of consumer goods far in excess to the 20 energy and thus 20 pops a bio reactor could provide for. Additionally, organics have the option to create consumer goods from trade through a policy. Which again with the infinite nature of the commercial zone and trade can make them a trivial issue.
The next system is both a flaw and an advantage. Robots don’t have happiness. On the advantage side, a robot empire doesn’t have to worry about making pops unhappy or deal with factions. On the flip side they do not receive as much influence as happy factions grant (nor the techs that boost influence from factions), do not receive as large a bonus to production as happy pops grant (as discussed above hard cap of 15% boost to robot production at max while happy organic pops/high stability grant them 25%), have no options for living standards, and have an unavoidable crime system. Let’s tackle each of these one by one.
Factions. Robots don’t have them. On the whole, I would say this really depends on the player if it’s a pro or con. Making factions happy for bonus influence can be annoying and robots get 1 higher base production while happy factions tend to generate around 1.5 influence. So they lose .5 influence a month but don’t have to deal with the system if they don’t want. So again, I'm saying this one is purely preference.
Amenities percent production loss. Organics get more out of amenities and have a verity of jobs that produce them as a by-product (clerk, farmers if agrarian idyll, administrators, merchants, science directors, medical workers, etc) and holo-theatres produce more using fewer jobs (admittedly at a cost of consumer goods). Meanwhile, robots don’t need any resource to produce amenities and the maintenance drone is the main “what do I do with unemployed pops” dump. On the whole, I’d say its a con more than a pro as while you don’t have to think about it much, you don’t get much out of it either unless you go overkill on it and at that point, the 15% doesn’t cover the cost.
No living standards is a huge flaw for robots. Mostly because robots have no way to deal with unemployment or use for overpopulation while organics have 2 living standards that turn unemployed into resource generators.
"Actually they have five: shared burdens, social welfare and utopian abundance for egalitarians, servants and livestock (super useful) for authoritarians." –Contributed by Gyrvendal
If a robot has no job it very quickly triggers the event where you start to get crime, know as deviancy, or have them double in energy cost upkeep. There is no social welfare or utopian abundance living standards to make a tradeoff of paying more so unemployed contribute. There are no systems of any sort like this for robots. Unemployed robots are bad and always will be bad.
The unavoidable crime system. Again a flaw and this time with no advantage or counter-weight. Every robot pop creates 1 unit of deviancy. The only way to decrease this number is with the hunter-seeker job. A fully upgraded capital building grants 3 of them, for a total of 60 deviancy protection. If you get more pop than that you will need a Sentinel post. Costing 2 energy and offering 2 more jobs. So another building for already contested building slots and offering 1 unity, -20 deviancy and 4 garrison armies per job. I don’t really see any advantage to this system besides taking up more building slots. Even for the defense armies, the stronghold is better. It costs 1 less energy in maintenance, grants housing in addition to the warrior job, which grants 1 less army but grants 6 naval capacity and can be upgraded to grant 3 housing and 3 warrior jobs. If I really try I can see a fringe case where you fill every empty building slot with Sentinel posts for the unity as robots only have 1 source of unity.
For organics they have crime, but they have multiple ways to deal with it or outright avoid it. And usually they get something in return. Slavers for example get crime from unhappy slaves, but these slaves produce more resources. So it's a counter-weight. You get more resources but you have to spend more to keep the peace. Robots get nothing for dealing with deviancy.
The final flaw is traits and robo-modding.
Let’s get this out of the way quick. Robo-modding doesn’t work. When we lost the ability to manually assign workers to tiles, we gave robo-modding to the ai. And it fails. Constantly. You create a robot template that is good at mining. You build this template. Ai assigns it to work in the labs. You make a second template that is great at science - ai puts it in the mines. You close both jobs and open them up, usually ai gets it wrong again. If we had any system were we could either manually assign pops OR select a pop preference for jobs to force the ai to use our custom creations it would be great and we could min-max. As it stands, it doesn’t work and for the most part, I find creating one decent robot gives you predictable results while using multiple templates and hoping the ai gets it right is a longshot at best.
Onto the traits. With the economy problems robots have, there are only really a few viable traits and several options that are flat out missing. Which is weird because organics can build custom drones with these traits so we know they exist.
Harvesters: gives 15% bonus to food jobs - not an option even for the 2 robot types that have organic in their empire.
Loyalty Circuits: Happiness +10% - Synths in biological empire can have happiness, but machine empires don’t have access to this trait or a civic enabling happiness.
Propaganda Machines: 15% bonus to unity jobs – granted robots don’t have many jobs that give unity but seems odd to not rename it and give it as a choice to machine empires.
So given the economic issues, Superconductive gives 0.6 (4x1.15=4.6) bonus to all energy jobs. Still not as good as farming but easier on building slots.
Durable gives a 10% reduction in robot upkeep, so 0.1 energy per robot per month. To put in perspective, on a world with 50 robots, it saves you 5 energy. Hardly a cure-all.
Efficient Processors feels like a trap trait. For 3 points it gives 5% to all jobs. That works out to 0.2 bonus to tech jobs (4x1.05=4.2) and 0.24 for food jobs (4.8x1.05=5.04). And yes this effects all jobs save for amenities. But 3 points is a big ask when compared to all the -1 negative traits - you have to give up a lot to get it.
-Side note, it is possible to take efficient processors and superconductive, but as there is only one trait that refunds two points you would need to take luxurious and two other negative traits.
Double-Jointed makes robots take up 10% less space. Again for perspective 50 robots would take up 45 units of housing or to put it another way 50 units of housing would grant you 55 pops or another building slot. Nice but again hardly a cure-all.
One last flawish detail is that leaders aren’t immortal. Anyone who’s played machine empires knows there is a random chance they can die without warning. Sometimes it can be hundreds of years without a single malfunction, while other times you can get chain deaths early and often. As it is completely random it can be irritating but I would call it more an annoying quirk than an outright flaw.
Not really a flaw, but a side note here for Rogue servitor. With the removal of the bonus to production for taking care of bio trophies as a percent of population, they are now robots with a version of a unity job.
Every biotrophy requires food to feed so that’s a cost of 0.8 energy per pop. However, they also require Consumer goods, which is an entire industry that robots don’t use. So that means in addition to the already strained build slots system they need to dedicate building slots to civilian industries to produce the consumer goods, pops to run the buildings and minerals for the conversion.
For the math-focused, like myself, it works out as thus: 4 energy upkeep for the building, 2 energy for the two jobs and twelve minerals for the twelve consumer goods. Giving a total cost of 0.5 (4+2=6/12=0.5) energy and 1 mineral per bio pop’s consumer good intake and the 0.8 energy for food consumption giving a total of 1.3 energy and 1 mineral per biotrophy.
They also have access to the Organic Sanctuary which is a wonderful little building that provides twice the housing as drone storage. Meaning for 1 building slot you can house a population big enough to grant 2 building slots AND it can be upgraded to house a whopping 20 population, granting 4 whole building slots worth of pops. And yes both robots and bio trophies can live in them. They still have the problem of not having a good dump job for that extra population but they are great at unity and housing needs.
Conclusion:
As long as the base economy model is based on food, robots will never truly work. Besides the odd feeling of having to farm as much as organics just to burn it all to keep the lights on, it actually detracts from the usefulness of Machine worlds. The ascension perk allows you to transform a world into a fancy robot planet with infinite energy and minerals (up to its full size). However, it kills all agriculture districts so it can actually lower your overall energy production if you use it on a world with plentiful agriculture.
The bio reactor is a band-aid to fix the fact the economy is based on food. I’d say ideally robots lose the bio reactor and instead get a boost to energy production and an ability to convert farmland into more reactor slots. With everything from starships and star bases to every single pop eating the same resource, it needs to be plentiful in order to work. That or perhaps give robots a version of the trade system. Perhaps a tech where they learn foolish organics like shiny bits that unlocks the system for them at some point.
As long as robots have no sort of dump job, pops will have diminishing returns. In 2.2 Pops are power. Every organic wants as many as possible as fast as possible. Machine empires are inverted but oddly their robot pops are just the same as organic pops with fewer job options and higher maintenance. This is a grievous problem for the long-term health of machine empires.
There needs to be some sort of basic building with plentiful job slots that provides more than it costs. Currently, when a machine empire hits its natural cap, it has only two options to break this plateau. Eat your neighbors or wait for megastructures. If it’s next to something it can’t eat, it’s basically sit on hands until megastructures which isn’t all that engaging.
After looking over robots and doing some math I’ve narrowed down the issues with robots to three primary problems. The reworked economy, scalability, and unbalanced cons.
1: The reworked economy.
The main problem is the economy of the game is designed around organics. As such food production is king and everything else is secondary. This presents a crippling flaw for robots who eat energy not food.
A tech-drone (worker in energy districts) makes a baseline 4 energy. However, he eats 1, and the district itself costs 1 more energy in maintenance. With districts granting 2 jobs, that means a fully staffed district produces 8 energy but costs 3 to run for a net gain of 5 energy or 2.5 energy produced per bot.
Meanwhile, an Agri-Drone (worker in food districts) produces 6 food.
Now before we get further in, let’s take a moment to get everything on common footing. Since we have the bio reactor (a building and concept I despise but I’ll get into that in a bit) we have a conversion rate for food. It takes twenty-five food to produce twenty energy. In other words, 1 unit of food is worth 0.8 units of energy. Back to the main topic:
With our keeping everything on the same terms this means the food bot makes 4.8 energy (6 food x 0.8 conversion ratio). Already we can see some issues. It is more profitable to farm than to make tech districts (and this is AFTER the nerf of bio reactors as before it was a 1:1 ratio). So continuing on, that’s 4.8 energy per job for 2 jobs so 9.6 energy minus the 3 energy for the workers and district for a total of 6.6 per district and 3.3 per bot.
So this leads to two big issues for the core economic model for robots. 1: It is more profitable to grow food than energy. 2: A robot empire needs building slots to make food into energy, and these buildings offer zero jobs and are not upgradeable.
Let’s make an example so we can illustrate the problem. A robot working in an energy job makes enough energy for 2.5 other robots, and a robot working a farm makes enough energy for 3.3 other bots. Meanwhile an organic makes enough food to feed 5 other people (6 food, minus the one they eat).
So say you have a planet that is size 15 with all food districts. A robot empire would be able to make enough energy to feed 49.5 population. An organic empire on the same world would be able to feed 75 population.
The 15 districts that gather food offer 2 jobs and housing each for a population of 30 or 6 building slots unlocked. The numbers come out to 180 food so you would need 7.2 bio reactors to compress it all into energy. Meanwhile organics just get to eat the food as it is. So here’s another problem. A 15 size world, all farms, can’t even support the bio reactors needed to turn it all into energy. Which ignores the fact you need maintenance depots to make the amenities to keep the population working as well. And this world offers nothing else but food to energy to boot.
Meanwhile, the organics on the same planet get 6 slots to build houses for more population and with that increased population build the buildings to get whatever they fancy off the world in addition to the 180 food. Beyond that, the organic just has to make sure they make enough food to keep the population fed, while robots need the energy to eat AND pay for everything else in the empire.
So the issue is compounded as building too many ships/star bases/what have you won’t starve organics but will, in fact, starve machines. So not only do machines have a harder time feeding their populations but they have to balance the rest of the empire that consumes the same resource. In addition, organics have the option to burn 1k food to increase pop growth while machines don’t have any similar options hurting them in the long run with slower growth early on when the economy needs all the help it can get.
The secondary issue is robots do not partake in the trade system. So all the systems with trade value are not even visible to robot empires. This trade value isn’t replaced by anything either so a large source of energy that organic empires are balanced around simply don’t exist for machine players. Which dovetails into the second main problem with robots:
2: Scalability
At a certain point, every empire hits what I call the natural cap. This is the point where they have every system/world they can exploit. Be it they are building tall and have hit the point they don’t want to expand outward or they are boxed in by neighbors and cannot grow without conflict.
The ramifications of this natural cap are that the number of energy/minerals/food is now capped and static. An empire knows how many mining stations they can build in their space, how many worlds they can colonize and how many resource districts those worlds contain. And this number is set in stone. Certain things like the mastery of nature ascension perk and increase it slightly, but when every rock is mined and every district is built, that’s it.
Except it’s not for organics.
For organics, once you hit this natural cap, you can surpass it with one building – the commercial zone.
The commercial zone provides 5 jobs that each provide 2 trade value. Which converts into 2 energy (or some combination of energy and commercial goods/unity based on policy) with no resource investment. In other words, after an organic empire has hit their natural cap and exploited all natural resources, they can continue to create energy and at no cost outside of excess population. This energy then can be used to buy whatever they need off the galactic market. Basically allowing them, admittedly at a slow rate, to grow beyond the natural cap and thus scale in power with population.
Robot empires do not have anything similar to this. Robots only have 1 economic job that doesn’t cost resources to produce an output and that’s Maintenance drones. However, the Maintenance depot doesn’t produce anything near to the output of a commercial zone. Maybe in theory having large amounts of amenities balances out, but in practice, it falls far short.
Basically the more amenities a world has over those consumed by population grants a percentage boost to output on a planet. At high amounts of excess amenities, the robot colony gets a 20 point bonus to stability and a 15% increase to resource production. This is a hard cap. Once you have those 2 numbers all the maintenance depots in the world won’t give any more.
Now a tech drone job produces 4 energy as established and 4.8 for food. And since the amenity caps at 15% for having a fleet of maintenance drones will grant you an additional .6 energy (4x1.15=4.6) per tech job or .72 energy (4.8x1.15=5.52) per food job at the cost of all the maintenance drone buildings and workers. And yes, this 15% boost also affects everything on the world, but it is hardly close to 2 energy PER POP working in a commercial zone. And again, there is a hard cap. Every single organic pop produces 2 energy ad infinitum, while at a point adding more maintenance drones just costs you while offering nothing.
Now Hydroponic farms do grant both robots and organics with a source of food after the natural cap, but for robots is only half the equation because they still need bioreactors to convert the food. 2 hydroponic farms produce 24 food which is just 1 shy of the bio reactors 25. So robots will need 3 building slots to produce more energy this way, and that’s 3 slots for 4 jobs. 3 slots take 15 population. What is the other 11 population to do?
If the robot empire is at the natural cap and can’t produce any more minerals, 11 production jobs mean a lot of alloys but you’d gain 20 energy from the 3 building slots and 11 production jobs are going to use a lot more minerals than 20 energy can buy. Same with research. And even if you wanted to shove the 11 into maintenance drone jobs, you get 3 per building so you’d need 4 more building slots for those buildings.
If you were to forgo the bio reactor and just sell on the market the problem becomes variability. Some months you’ll make money better than bio reactor, but the vast majority of months you’ll make far less and even then that’s 4 jobs from 2 building slots which require 10 population to unlock leaving 6 spare population that in turn need 2 maintenance depots to keep from being unemployed and robots don’t have access to any living standard that makes unemployed anything but a drain.
For the math side 2 hydroponics produces enough for 20 energy roughly via bio reactor, minus the 4 energy maintenance for the farms themselves, and another 4 eaten by the robot pops working them for a gain of 12 energy with the additional cost of the 3 maintenance depots (1 energy each) and the spare population (6 population) for a final net gain of 3 energy with no unemployment.
Meanwhile 10 organics working in 2 commercial zones produce 20 energy at a cost of 4 energy in maintenance of the zones (or just 2 for an upgraded Commerce Megaplex that also has a merchant job increasing the total value to 28 trade/energy produced) for a net total of 6 energy (20-4 building maintenance-10 pop consumption if they were robots eating 1 energy each) or 16 energy for the megaplex (28-2 building maintenance- 10 pop). Although the megaplex also requires strategic resources so that number will depend on if you have to buy the resource or have it in your empire or manufacture it in a building.
In a nutshell: Pops are power to organics and they scale infinitely. To robots pops are a power hungry menace that once they reach the natural cap have no positive effect on the economy. Once a robot empire hits the natural cap and have exploited every natural resource and has set the balance of alloy/research/maintenance – it is best to stop making robots completely from an economic point of view.
And finally, the third problem facing robot empires
3: Unbalanced cons.
Now everything needs flaws and I am in no way saying that flaws are inherently bad. They make for better games. If any one civilization, be it organic or hivemind or robot, was absolutely perfect it would, in fact, decrease the enjoyment of that empire.
The issue isn’t cons themselves, it is the balance of those flaws. Take the fanatic purifier, devouring swarm, or determined exterminator for example. They have the con of being unable to engage in any diplomacy or use of the markets. However, they have the advantage of getting strong bonuses to combat. It is the balance of the pros and cons that make them interesting to play.
So let’s look at robots flaws and advantages.
The main advantage, at least from an economic standpoint, is the ability to colonize any world. This opens up every world to be exploited from the start and doesn’t require 4 perk points for extreme adaptability. However, the conto counter this is mainly the fundamental issues in the economy. Yes, they can colonize every planet. Yes, they have good pop growth. However, their economy is very tight, requires lots of building slots to burn food, and worst of all is harmed by pop growth in fully developed colonies.
For the growth factor, new colonies have 1 replicator job which grows robot pops at a rate of 1 per month. Organic new colonies have a 50% penalty to growth cutting their rate to 1.5 if they have no other perks. Beyond this organics have a decision to burn 1k food to increase growth by 25%. Both robots and organics have an edict that increases growth by 10%. And while organics have a few technologies to increase population growth, robots do not. Instead, they have more replicators built into the planetary capital building that is unlocked by those techs. So assuming you build a machine assembly plant, you get 3 pop growth (standard for organics without perks or tech) at pop 5 when you can build it. 10 pop on world grant upgrade to capital, but no boost to replicator jobs. At 40 pops the upgrade grants one more job boosting to 4.4 per month, 46% more than base. At 80 one final job is granted give you a total of 5.5 growth, 83% more than base.
Now robots can move more pops to the new world and construct a machine assembly plant to get to standard 3 per month base growth quickly while organics can’t get around the new colony penalty. Again on paper, this looks like a great strength. Once colonies hit 5 pop they grow at standard rates and once they hit 40 and above they grow faster than organics until they get techs and policies. However, as listed above the economy of robots makes each pop expensive and not necessarily a gain in power turning what should be an advantage into a flaw overall.
Right about the point when they get the most growth you are faced with two options: Turn off growth in the developed colony or pay to ship those robots to growing colonies. If you pick the resettlement option you are in for a lot of clicking as your empire gets bigger and at 100 energy a pop it can be a strain on your economy. At 4.8 energy from a food job it would take a pop 20.8 months, or a year and eight months, to pay for moving it to a new world – assuming it’s being moved to a job that pays for itself. Meanwhile, at 5.5 growth per month, you will get a new pop every 18.18 months. In other words, you will have to move a new pop before the last pop has turned a profit from its move.
So on the balance robots can go anywhere, but the fundamental flaws in the robot economy mean building too many colonies will bankrupt you quickly so expansion is delayed further until you have a strong base to support the drain of a new colony. And each new colony will take a while to produce a profit, even with resettlement. And eventually, it will hit a cap of production where more pops hurt it more than help it.
For comparison organic base growth is 3 and can be boosted by 20% from tech, 10% from food policy, and 25% from jobs which gives a growth of 4.65 and since organics can build robots as well (at the slower pace of 2 per month), their net growth late game is 6.65 per world (and extra 25% to organic growth by spending 1k food if they desire). And a few well-placed migration treaties or some genetic modification means organic pops can eventually exploit all worlds as well but that admittedly takes time. However, with the compound the issue of commercial zones giving each pop in an organic empire value means I really don’t see being able to colonize everywhere at the start as much of an advantage as it first appears.
Admittedly robots also don’t use consumer goods, so they don’t require minerals or the civilian industries building for pop upkeep. However, the bio reactor is a far more hungry beast to feed. Civilian industries grant 2 jobs that turn 12 minerals into 12 consumer goods, which depending on your living standards can feed a variable amount of pops. However, given the building is upgradeable a single building slot can produce a staggering amount of consumer goods far in excess to the 20 energy and thus 20 pops a bio reactor could provide for. Additionally, organics have the option to create consumer goods from trade through a policy. Which again with the infinite nature of the commercial zone and trade can make them a trivial issue.
The next system is both a flaw and an advantage. Robots don’t have happiness. On the advantage side, a robot empire doesn’t have to worry about making pops unhappy or deal with factions. On the flip side they do not receive as much influence as happy factions grant (nor the techs that boost influence from factions), do not receive as large a bonus to production as happy pops grant (as discussed above hard cap of 15% boost to robot production at max while happy organic pops/high stability grant them 25%), have no options for living standards, and have an unavoidable crime system. Let’s tackle each of these one by one.
Factions. Robots don’t have them. On the whole, I would say this really depends on the player if it’s a pro or con. Making factions happy for bonus influence can be annoying and robots get 1 higher base production while happy factions tend to generate around 1.5 influence. So they lose .5 influence a month but don’t have to deal with the system if they don’t want. So again, I'm saying this one is purely preference.
Amenities percent production loss. Organics get more out of amenities and have a verity of jobs that produce them as a by-product (clerk, farmers if agrarian idyll, administrators, merchants, science directors, medical workers, etc) and holo-theatres produce more using fewer jobs (admittedly at a cost of consumer goods). Meanwhile, robots don’t need any resource to produce amenities and the maintenance drone is the main “what do I do with unemployed pops” dump. On the whole, I’d say its a con more than a pro as while you don’t have to think about it much, you don’t get much out of it either unless you go overkill on it and at that point, the 15% doesn’t cover the cost.
No living standards is a huge flaw for robots. Mostly because robots have no way to deal with unemployment or use for overpopulation while organics have 2 living standards that turn unemployed into resource generators.
"Actually they have five: shared burdens, social welfare and utopian abundance for egalitarians, servants and livestock (super useful) for authoritarians." –Contributed by Gyrvendal
If a robot has no job it very quickly triggers the event where you start to get crime, know as deviancy, or have them double in energy cost upkeep. There is no social welfare or utopian abundance living standards to make a tradeoff of paying more so unemployed contribute. There are no systems of any sort like this for robots. Unemployed robots are bad and always will be bad.
The unavoidable crime system. Again a flaw and this time with no advantage or counter-weight. Every robot pop creates 1 unit of deviancy. The only way to decrease this number is with the hunter-seeker job. A fully upgraded capital building grants 3 of them, for a total of 60 deviancy protection. If you get more pop than that you will need a Sentinel post. Costing 2 energy and offering 2 more jobs. So another building for already contested building slots and offering 1 unity, -20 deviancy and 4 garrison armies per job. I don’t really see any advantage to this system besides taking up more building slots. Even for the defense armies, the stronghold is better. It costs 1 less energy in maintenance, grants housing in addition to the warrior job, which grants 1 less army but grants 6 naval capacity and can be upgraded to grant 3 housing and 3 warrior jobs. If I really try I can see a fringe case where you fill every empty building slot with Sentinel posts for the unity as robots only have 1 source of unity.
For organics they have crime, but they have multiple ways to deal with it or outright avoid it. And usually they get something in return. Slavers for example get crime from unhappy slaves, but these slaves produce more resources. So it's a counter-weight. You get more resources but you have to spend more to keep the peace. Robots get nothing for dealing with deviancy.
The final flaw is traits and robo-modding.
Let’s get this out of the way quick. Robo-modding doesn’t work. When we lost the ability to manually assign workers to tiles, we gave robo-modding to the ai. And it fails. Constantly. You create a robot template that is good at mining. You build this template. Ai assigns it to work in the labs. You make a second template that is great at science - ai puts it in the mines. You close both jobs and open them up, usually ai gets it wrong again. If we had any system were we could either manually assign pops OR select a pop preference for jobs to force the ai to use our custom creations it would be great and we could min-max. As it stands, it doesn’t work and for the most part, I find creating one decent robot gives you predictable results while using multiple templates and hoping the ai gets it right is a longshot at best.
Onto the traits. With the economy problems robots have, there are only really a few viable traits and several options that are flat out missing. Which is weird because organics can build custom drones with these traits so we know they exist.
Harvesters: gives 15% bonus to food jobs - not an option even for the 2 robot types that have organic in their empire.
Loyalty Circuits: Happiness +10% - Synths in biological empire can have happiness, but machine empires don’t have access to this trait or a civic enabling happiness.
Propaganda Machines: 15% bonus to unity jobs – granted robots don’t have many jobs that give unity but seems odd to not rename it and give it as a choice to machine empires.
So given the economic issues, Superconductive gives 0.6 (4x1.15=4.6) bonus to all energy jobs. Still not as good as farming but easier on building slots.
Durable gives a 10% reduction in robot upkeep, so 0.1 energy per robot per month. To put in perspective, on a world with 50 robots, it saves you 5 energy. Hardly a cure-all.
Efficient Processors feels like a trap trait. For 3 points it gives 5% to all jobs. That works out to 0.2 bonus to tech jobs (4x1.05=4.2) and 0.24 for food jobs (4.8x1.05=5.04). And yes this effects all jobs save for amenities. But 3 points is a big ask when compared to all the -1 negative traits - you have to give up a lot to get it.
-Side note, it is possible to take efficient processors and superconductive, but as there is only one trait that refunds two points you would need to take luxurious and two other negative traits.
Double-Jointed makes robots take up 10% less space. Again for perspective 50 robots would take up 45 units of housing or to put it another way 50 units of housing would grant you 55 pops or another building slot. Nice but again hardly a cure-all.
One last flawish detail is that leaders aren’t immortal. Anyone who’s played machine empires knows there is a random chance they can die without warning. Sometimes it can be hundreds of years without a single malfunction, while other times you can get chain deaths early and often. As it is completely random it can be irritating but I would call it more an annoying quirk than an outright flaw.
Not really a flaw, but a side note here for Rogue servitor. With the removal of the bonus to production for taking care of bio trophies as a percent of population, they are now robots with a version of a unity job.
Every biotrophy requires food to feed so that’s a cost of 0.8 energy per pop. However, they also require Consumer goods, which is an entire industry that robots don’t use. So that means in addition to the already strained build slots system they need to dedicate building slots to civilian industries to produce the consumer goods, pops to run the buildings and minerals for the conversion.
For the math-focused, like myself, it works out as thus: 4 energy upkeep for the building, 2 energy for the two jobs and twelve minerals for the twelve consumer goods. Giving a total cost of 0.5 (4+2=6/12=0.5) energy and 1 mineral per bio pop’s consumer good intake and the 0.8 energy for food consumption giving a total of 1.3 energy and 1 mineral per biotrophy.
They also have access to the Organic Sanctuary which is a wonderful little building that provides twice the housing as drone storage. Meaning for 1 building slot you can house a population big enough to grant 2 building slots AND it can be upgraded to house a whopping 20 population, granting 4 whole building slots worth of pops. And yes both robots and bio trophies can live in them. They still have the problem of not having a good dump job for that extra population but they are great at unity and housing needs.
Conclusion:
As long as the base economy model is based on food, robots will never truly work. Besides the odd feeling of having to farm as much as organics just to burn it all to keep the lights on, it actually detracts from the usefulness of Machine worlds. The ascension perk allows you to transform a world into a fancy robot planet with infinite energy and minerals (up to its full size). However, it kills all agriculture districts so it can actually lower your overall energy production if you use it on a world with plentiful agriculture.
The bio reactor is a band-aid to fix the fact the economy is based on food. I’d say ideally robots lose the bio reactor and instead get a boost to energy production and an ability to convert farmland into more reactor slots. With everything from starships and star bases to every single pop eating the same resource, it needs to be plentiful in order to work. That or perhaps give robots a version of the trade system. Perhaps a tech where they learn foolish organics like shiny bits that unlocks the system for them at some point.
As long as robots have no sort of dump job, pops will have diminishing returns. In 2.2 Pops are power. Every organic wants as many as possible as fast as possible. Machine empires are inverted but oddly their robot pops are just the same as organic pops with fewer job options and higher maintenance. This is a grievous problem for the long-term health of machine empires.
There needs to be some sort of basic building with plentiful job slots that provides more than it costs. Currently, when a machine empire hits its natural cap, it has only two options to break this plateau. Eat your neighbors or wait for megastructures. If it’s next to something it can’t eat, it’s basically sit on hands until megastructures which isn’t all that engaging.
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