So, I'm gonna say it: Even post-buff, 2.2 machine empires (Assimilators excluded) seem to just suck.
For starters I'm not super concerned about balance with Stellaris. I generally just play it SP or with friends and I don't try to be competitive, where Stellaris works best is as a theme-heavy 4x game. We're not aiming for the e-sports crowd, and so I think game balance falls secondary to empires that play in a way that makes sense from a thematic standpoint. Regardless of how you feel about the balance of machine empires (but in that regard they still feel terrible,) thematically their gimped nature just doesn't make sense.
Let's start with pop growth, which seems to be intended to be the big weakness of machine empires... and boy is it. I'm not sure if the growth civic and growth trait stack, because one of them doesn't snow up in the tooltip for pop growth, but regardless, machine empires seem to cap out at about 6-7 pop growth. Why? First off, from a game balance standpoint ME's aren't that much better to justify the low growth, and beyond that, thematically it doesn't make sense:
Your average human in a first world country takes about eighteen years to join the workforce and is a complete invalid until about ten years old. By comparison, machine pops come off the assembly line ready for work. From a time standpoint, it's much faster to crank out a machine work force than an organic one. If we assume robots take as long to assemble as a car (about eighteen HOURS) then one factory, building one drone at a time should produce almost 9000 completed machine drones in the time it takes for one human to get its education and become a worker for your empire. Comparing this figure again to reality, on Earth we're looking at a net population growth of around 76 million people per year... while our car production is at about 70 million per year. In Stellaris we're talking about what... 20 starting pops for machine empires, 2 of which have dedicated assembler jobs. That's ten percent. 3.8% of the real population works in the auto industry... So again if we're looking at drones being about as difficult to make as cars, ten percent of the population making new drones should churn out 182 million new drones per year, more than twice the organic population growth on Earth. It gets worse that when you factor in farming, heating/cooling, light and consumer goods, your average human takes far more joules of energy to raise to adulthood than it takes to build a car... or in this example, a drone.
WHY is it that machine empires' weakness is pop growth? It goes beyond making no sense to the point where it makes it hard for me to play ME's just because the theming makes so little sense. I can grant the pop upkeep as a game-balance concession, even if unrealistic, but pop growth is such a huge advantage in 2.2, that I can't let that one go. Pop growth is SO slow that it renders them basically unplayable in any kind of competitive capacity, and not fun to play in any other. In reality, one of a machine empire's biggest strengths should be their population growth.
The next problem is tech/unity with vanilla ME's or Exterminators. They're terrible at it. Just terrible. If I want to go with an organic empire and tech rush, I can rock Materialist/Fanatic Egalitarian, Beacon of Liberty, Technocracy, etc. MEs top out at about +10% Physics/Social +25% Engineering, +10% Unity. For organics with the previous setup I'd be looking at +25% to each tech and 35% to the tech of my choice, on top of that I get Research Grants for another 10% to all and +25% unity on top of it, with scientists that create more unity and capital buildings that produce research. At that point why even give ME's tech/unity options? It seems like a beginner's trap for potential ME players who don't yet know that organic empires will do those things strictly better than they possibly can. This would all be okay if ME's were getting the ridiculous pop growth they should... but they don't, so it's a huge problem. Beyond that their researcher jobs cost more than other empires.
In real life we're looking at general AI causing a technological singularity. Why should Stellaris AI be just the opposite where it's somehow intrinsically worse at researching tech than organics?
I don't want ME's to be a palette swap of normal empires, but right now they seem exceptionally weak while their strengths and weaknesses make no damn sense with regards to the theme. Do I have solutions? Not really... I'd rather have Stellaris be a sandbox where things work in a way that seems to make sense, even if that does imbalance the game. It's more fun to face the challenges your empire would rather than just feel like you're playing a game.
For starters I'm not super concerned about balance with Stellaris. I generally just play it SP or with friends and I don't try to be competitive, where Stellaris works best is as a theme-heavy 4x game. We're not aiming for the e-sports crowd, and so I think game balance falls secondary to empires that play in a way that makes sense from a thematic standpoint. Regardless of how you feel about the balance of machine empires (but in that regard they still feel terrible,) thematically their gimped nature just doesn't make sense.
Let's start with pop growth, which seems to be intended to be the big weakness of machine empires... and boy is it. I'm not sure if the growth civic and growth trait stack, because one of them doesn't snow up in the tooltip for pop growth, but regardless, machine empires seem to cap out at about 6-7 pop growth. Why? First off, from a game balance standpoint ME's aren't that much better to justify the low growth, and beyond that, thematically it doesn't make sense:
Your average human in a first world country takes about eighteen years to join the workforce and is a complete invalid until about ten years old. By comparison, machine pops come off the assembly line ready for work. From a time standpoint, it's much faster to crank out a machine work force than an organic one. If we assume robots take as long to assemble as a car (about eighteen HOURS) then one factory, building one drone at a time should produce almost 9000 completed machine drones in the time it takes for one human to get its education and become a worker for your empire. Comparing this figure again to reality, on Earth we're looking at a net population growth of around 76 million people per year... while our car production is at about 70 million per year. In Stellaris we're talking about what... 20 starting pops for machine empires, 2 of which have dedicated assembler jobs. That's ten percent. 3.8% of the real population works in the auto industry... So again if we're looking at drones being about as difficult to make as cars, ten percent of the population making new drones should churn out 182 million new drones per year, more than twice the organic population growth on Earth. It gets worse that when you factor in farming, heating/cooling, light and consumer goods, your average human takes far more joules of energy to raise to adulthood than it takes to build a car... or in this example, a drone.
WHY is it that machine empires' weakness is pop growth? It goes beyond making no sense to the point where it makes it hard for me to play ME's just because the theming makes so little sense. I can grant the pop upkeep as a game-balance concession, even if unrealistic, but pop growth is such a huge advantage in 2.2, that I can't let that one go. Pop growth is SO slow that it renders them basically unplayable in any kind of competitive capacity, and not fun to play in any other. In reality, one of a machine empire's biggest strengths should be their population growth.
The next problem is tech/unity with vanilla ME's or Exterminators. They're terrible at it. Just terrible. If I want to go with an organic empire and tech rush, I can rock Materialist/Fanatic Egalitarian, Beacon of Liberty, Technocracy, etc. MEs top out at about +10% Physics/Social +25% Engineering, +10% Unity. For organics with the previous setup I'd be looking at +25% to each tech and 35% to the tech of my choice, on top of that I get Research Grants for another 10% to all and +25% unity on top of it, with scientists that create more unity and capital buildings that produce research. At that point why even give ME's tech/unity options? It seems like a beginner's trap for potential ME players who don't yet know that organic empires will do those things strictly better than they possibly can. This would all be okay if ME's were getting the ridiculous pop growth they should... but they don't, so it's a huge problem. Beyond that their researcher jobs cost more than other empires.
In real life we're looking at general AI causing a technological singularity. Why should Stellaris AI be just the opposite where it's somehow intrinsically worse at researching tech than organics?
I don't want ME's to be a palette swap of normal empires, but right now they seem exceptionally weak while their strengths and weaknesses make no damn sense with regards to the theme. Do I have solutions? Not really... I'd rather have Stellaris be a sandbox where things work in a way that seems to make sense, even if that does imbalance the game. It's more fun to face the challenges your empire would rather than just feel like you're playing a game.
