Machine empires need to allocate pops to the replicator job in order to grow pops, however, the starting building on a new colony provides only 1 replicator job, which in turn produces 1 pop growth per month. 100 months to produce your second pop if nothing is done, where organics get 3 growth per month without having to assign pops.
So you have to resettle 4 pops over to the colony so you hit the 5 pop threshold and construct a building that adds another replicator slot. You've now invested 400 more energy credits and 300 more minerals as a startup cost into your new colony...... so that you can have a monthly growth rate of 2. You still have to wait until you reach a population of 10 on the colony before you can upgrade your capital building and unlock another replicator slot, finally bringing your growth in line with what organics get for free. In addition, every point of pop growth costs you 5 minerals, meaning you have to spend 500(!) minerals to obtain one machine pop. Machine pops used to cost 100 minerals to produce, and in the past each pop produced just a little less minerals on average than they do now.
Machine empires don't consume any food, and they don't consume any consumer goods, but this doesn't matter much because they still "eat" 1 energy credit per population. There's another problem here, which is the cost of using research buildings. A machine empire researcher population consumes 6 minerals in order to output 4 of each research. An organic researcher consumes only 2 consumer goods to do the same job, 2.5 if you count the consumer goods cost of the pop, except in their case consumer goods translate 1 / 1 to minerals.Even when you factor in the extra cost of converting the minerals into consumer goods, you are still looking at DOUBLE the amount of minerals that you're paying for every point of research as a machine empire. You could work around this, except that you're inherently gated on mineral production by the number of industrial districts that you can build on your planets.
Machine empires have a far smaller "roster" of jobs to perform, since they DON'T USE THE NEW TRADE MECHANIC and they don't have entertainers. Not using the trade mechanic locks them out from a very important method of getting energy credits, since you are able to produce energy credits at a 1/1 ratio from trade value with the right trade policy. Entertainers are an incredibly strong job right now, since each one consumes only 1 consumer goods resource but outputs 2 unity and 10 amenities. Machine empires have no equivalent job to entertainers, leaving them with fewer sources of unity than other empires. In addition to this, their primary means of producing amenities makes only 4 per population. You have an initial amount of amenities to work with that come from your replicators, but after that you must rely on maintenance drones to produce amenities, and since they consume amenities themselves, you are producing only 3 amenities per drone. This means that you will end up taxing nearly 1/4 of your population on each planet in order to provide maintenance for the remaining 3/4. Fortunately you can get a lot of these maintenance drones per building, up to 5 per building if you take the right tradition. This "amenities tax" is huge, and it really kills your infrastructure, since building pops in a machine empire is REALLY expensive.
You can treat the "amenities tax" as an effective increase in the cost necessary to use your population. Each maintenance drone pop produces 3 surplus amenities and consumes 1 energy credit to work. If we do some math, we can calculate how "efficient" your populations are at working by taking a percentage of their own resource output that is consumed as upkeep. You need one maintenance drone for every 4 population units, which immediately reduces your population's efficiency to 75%. In addition, every pop consumes energy credits, and energy credits are produced at a base rate of 4 per worker producing them, so for every 4 units of population you are using up one of them to produce energy credits to "feed" them (This ratio will improve as your tech and bonuses get better to provide more energy credits). This lowers your pop efficiency again, now going down to 50%, since this pop that is producing the upkeep energy credits is also consuming a unit of amenities. Without counting energy credit costs for building upkeep, a full half of your pops are being used just to handle your upkeep. Since only 1/2 the pops are producing surplus energy credits/minerals for the empire or converting them into research/unity/alloys, the cost to get production out of your planets is enormous. Each pop that you want to have on a planet to produce resources will cost you 1000 minerals up front to produce, factoring in the populations necessary to support them. That's insane!
To compare this to an organic empire, an organic population consumes 1 unit of food, and an amount of amenities based on their job. Let's just assume most of your pops are specialists (which consume 0.5 consumer goods by default). A farmer pop produces 6 food before bonuses, which only lowers population efficiency down to about 84%. Consumer goods are converted 1/1 from minerals, but they have to be made by a population. Each pop producing consumer goods will make 6 of them from 6 minerals, before bonuses. Therefore in this example 1 of them can produce for 12 populations, including themselves. This reduces their population efficiency to 77.7%. Entertainers produce 10 amenities in addition to their unity production, and administrators produce 8,clerks also provide amenities, although clerks provide a very small amount. Using entertainers to meet amenity needs is easy, and reduces pop efficiency by only 10%. You can even make up for this cost with the production bonus that high amenities gets you, but let's ignore that for now. Because entertainers also produce unity, You will always get a valuable resource out of using them. They do use 1 unit of consumer goods, but we can ignore the hit on productivity here because of the unity production. This brings the population efficiency of a default, no bonuses organic population down to 67.77%.
So in the end we have:
Machine Empire:
1 functional working unit of machine empire population, after factoring in population work efficiency. Takes 200 effective units of growth to obtain(100 / 0.5) and costs 1000 minerals (500 / 0.5)
50% work efficiency
Organic Empire:
1 functional working unit of organic populationm after factoring in population work efficiency. Takes 147.7 effective units of growth to obtain(100 / 0.677) and costs ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to obtain.
67.7% work efficiency
This is a crippling disadvantage for machine empires. We consume so many minerals just to grow our economies that we take forever just to get off the ground. Our only saving grace is our habitability, but even that's a race against time, since organics eventually can raise their habilitability with tech, terraforming or building machine pops of their own. You have to greedily expand to as many planets as you can in order to get minerals to feed your growth, but it's incredibly hard and expensive to fund new colonies. This expansive tendency leads you into conflict with other empires, but good luck on having enough alloy production to pay for any decent military. When you see a machine empire with 40 pops in the early game, recognize that those 16 pops that they built cost them 8000 minerals to build, and if they could have made them into alloys instead they could build around 25 corvettes.
To end this extremely long tantrum about machine empires, for balancing sake any of them that aren't determined exterminators should have access to the new trade mechanics, in some shape or form. Also, the mineral cost of producing populations is way too high, it costs more than twice as many minerals to make a functioning colony as any other type of empire. Lastly, Machine empires could use access to a better source of amenities, maybe giving them a counterpart to the entertainer?
I love the concept behind this new economic system, and I love the stellaris game too. If any of the developers see this post and think that some of this information is useful, and assuming that they don't alreayd have all of this information at their fingertips, I don't mind doing some number crunching to help round out balancing issues in the new update.
So you have to resettle 4 pops over to the colony so you hit the 5 pop threshold and construct a building that adds another replicator slot. You've now invested 400 more energy credits and 300 more minerals as a startup cost into your new colony...... so that you can have a monthly growth rate of 2. You still have to wait until you reach a population of 10 on the colony before you can upgrade your capital building and unlock another replicator slot, finally bringing your growth in line with what organics get for free. In addition, every point of pop growth costs you 5 minerals, meaning you have to spend 500(!) minerals to obtain one machine pop. Machine pops used to cost 100 minerals to produce, and in the past each pop produced just a little less minerals on average than they do now.
Machine empires don't consume any food, and they don't consume any consumer goods, but this doesn't matter much because they still "eat" 1 energy credit per population. There's another problem here, which is the cost of using research buildings. A machine empire researcher population consumes 6 minerals in order to output 4 of each research. An organic researcher consumes only 2 consumer goods to do the same job, 2.5 if you count the consumer goods cost of the pop, except in their case consumer goods translate 1 / 1 to minerals.Even when you factor in the extra cost of converting the minerals into consumer goods, you are still looking at DOUBLE the amount of minerals that you're paying for every point of research as a machine empire. You could work around this, except that you're inherently gated on mineral production by the number of industrial districts that you can build on your planets.
Machine empires have a far smaller "roster" of jobs to perform, since they DON'T USE THE NEW TRADE MECHANIC and they don't have entertainers. Not using the trade mechanic locks them out from a very important method of getting energy credits, since you are able to produce energy credits at a 1/1 ratio from trade value with the right trade policy. Entertainers are an incredibly strong job right now, since each one consumes only 1 consumer goods resource but outputs 2 unity and 10 amenities. Machine empires have no equivalent job to entertainers, leaving them with fewer sources of unity than other empires. In addition to this, their primary means of producing amenities makes only 4 per population. You have an initial amount of amenities to work with that come from your replicators, but after that you must rely on maintenance drones to produce amenities, and since they consume amenities themselves, you are producing only 3 amenities per drone. This means that you will end up taxing nearly 1/4 of your population on each planet in order to provide maintenance for the remaining 3/4. Fortunately you can get a lot of these maintenance drones per building, up to 5 per building if you take the right tradition. This "amenities tax" is huge, and it really kills your infrastructure, since building pops in a machine empire is REALLY expensive.
You can treat the "amenities tax" as an effective increase in the cost necessary to use your population. Each maintenance drone pop produces 3 surplus amenities and consumes 1 energy credit to work. If we do some math, we can calculate how "efficient" your populations are at working by taking a percentage of their own resource output that is consumed as upkeep. You need one maintenance drone for every 4 population units, which immediately reduces your population's efficiency to 75%. In addition, every pop consumes energy credits, and energy credits are produced at a base rate of 4 per worker producing them, so for every 4 units of population you are using up one of them to produce energy credits to "feed" them (This ratio will improve as your tech and bonuses get better to provide more energy credits). This lowers your pop efficiency again, now going down to 50%, since this pop that is producing the upkeep energy credits is also consuming a unit of amenities. Without counting energy credit costs for building upkeep, a full half of your pops are being used just to handle your upkeep. Since only 1/2 the pops are producing surplus energy credits/minerals for the empire or converting them into research/unity/alloys, the cost to get production out of your planets is enormous. Each pop that you want to have on a planet to produce resources will cost you 1000 minerals up front to produce, factoring in the populations necessary to support them. That's insane!
To compare this to an organic empire, an organic population consumes 1 unit of food, and an amount of amenities based on their job. Let's just assume most of your pops are specialists (which consume 0.5 consumer goods by default). A farmer pop produces 6 food before bonuses, which only lowers population efficiency down to about 84%. Consumer goods are converted 1/1 from minerals, but they have to be made by a population. Each pop producing consumer goods will make 6 of them from 6 minerals, before bonuses. Therefore in this example 1 of them can produce for 12 populations, including themselves. This reduces their population efficiency to 77.7%. Entertainers produce 10 amenities in addition to their unity production, and administrators produce 8,clerks also provide amenities, although clerks provide a very small amount. Using entertainers to meet amenity needs is easy, and reduces pop efficiency by only 10%. You can even make up for this cost with the production bonus that high amenities gets you, but let's ignore that for now. Because entertainers also produce unity, You will always get a valuable resource out of using them. They do use 1 unit of consumer goods, but we can ignore the hit on productivity here because of the unity production. This brings the population efficiency of a default, no bonuses organic population down to 67.77%.
So in the end we have:
Machine Empire:
1 functional working unit of machine empire population, after factoring in population work efficiency. Takes 200 effective units of growth to obtain(100 / 0.5) and costs 1000 minerals (500 / 0.5)
50% work efficiency
Organic Empire:
1 functional working unit of organic populationm after factoring in population work efficiency. Takes 147.7 effective units of growth to obtain(100 / 0.677) and costs ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to obtain.
67.7% work efficiency
This is a crippling disadvantage for machine empires. We consume so many minerals just to grow our economies that we take forever just to get off the ground. Our only saving grace is our habitability, but even that's a race against time, since organics eventually can raise their habilitability with tech, terraforming or building machine pops of their own. You have to greedily expand to as many planets as you can in order to get minerals to feed your growth, but it's incredibly hard and expensive to fund new colonies. This expansive tendency leads you into conflict with other empires, but good luck on having enough alloy production to pay for any decent military. When you see a machine empire with 40 pops in the early game, recognize that those 16 pops that they built cost them 8000 minerals to build, and if they could have made them into alloys instead they could build around 25 corvettes.
To end this extremely long tantrum about machine empires, for balancing sake any of them that aren't determined exterminators should have access to the new trade mechanics, in some shape or form. Also, the mineral cost of producing populations is way too high, it costs more than twice as many minerals to make a functioning colony as any other type of empire. Lastly, Machine empires could use access to a better source of amenities, maybe giving them a counterpart to the entertainer?
I love the concept behind this new economic system, and I love the stellaris game too. If any of the developers see this post and think that some of this information is useful, and assuming that they don't alreayd have all of this information at their fingertips, I don't mind doing some number crunching to help round out balancing issues in the new update.
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