So here's a question. Why would a machine empire build an Alloy Foundry that required additional robots to operate? Why isn't the alloy foundry just a robot in an of itself. Maybe just make it so machine empire building don't make jobs?
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In terms of early ME bonus to help with initial expansion, i think the simplest way to do so is to add some flat production of, at least Energy, to basic colonial building, so new colony is self-sustained.
About ME pop growth - I played some games and here is the tactic I got:
- Emotion Emulators cost just 1 point. Take it.
- +20%/-20% policy helps a lot in early game with maintaince problems. Turn your 4 energy into 4.8 and everything is not that bad anymore.
- Go expansion first. These 1 extra pop and 10% robot build speed is much more important for you then for organics
- Try to keep an edict for +10% robot build speed active all the time
- After you set a new colony build 2 districts - it can be energy or minerals (maybe food for special types)
- Then resettle 3 pops to your new colony, build robot factory in 1st slot. Your jobs will be like: 2 replicators+3 miners (or 2 miners+coordinator)
- If you have Rapid Replicator + Mass Production your colonies should be on 3 pop growth, your capital at 4.5. While it's not super-fast, it's ok enough to keep up with most empires
- In the late game you can resettle to 10 pops at start for factory+lvl 2 of the main building
- Use all the planets, they all provide extra growth speed
- The best robot build speed I got was 9.2/month.
Dirty tricks:
- You can resettle some pops to a new colony, upgrade main building, resettle them elsewhere. While extra building slots get ruined, upgrades don't
- As Rogue Servitor you can use buildings for your organics to provide housing for robots, it's better then drone depot in every way.
- Emotion Emulators cost just 1 point. Take it.
- +20%/-20% policy helps a lot in early game with maintaince problems. Turn your 4 energy into 4.8 and everything is not that bad anymore.
- Go expansion first. These 1 extra pop and 10% robot build speed is much more important for you then for organics
- Try to keep an edict for +10% robot build speed active all the time
- After you set a new colony build 2 districts - it can be energy or minerals (maybe food for special types)
- Then resettle 3 pops to your new colony, build robot factory in 1st slot. Your jobs will be like: 2 replicators+3 miners (or 2 miners+coordinator)
- If you have Rapid Replicator + Mass Production your colonies should be on 3 pop growth, your capital at 4.5. While it's not super-fast, it's ok enough to keep up with most empires
- In the late game you can resettle to 10 pops at start for factory+lvl 2 of the main building
- Use all the planets, they all provide extra growth speed
- The best robot build speed I got was 9.2/month.
Dirty tricks:
- You can resettle some pops to a new colony, upgrade main building, resettle them elsewhere. While extra building slots get ruined, upgrades don't
- As Rogue Servitor you can use buildings for your organics to provide housing for robots, it's better then drone depot in every way.
Why would ME ever need pops? 
The only exception could be sevitors or assimilators = flavour. And even then limit pops to organics/cyborgs only to have them work on special buildings.
They should only build machines - aka. districts/buildings. Quick and dirty solution:
- no pops
- districts unlock more buildings
- start on tomb world by default
- add building for converting captured organics into energy and robots into minerals; could also buy slaves from the market
- change pop traits into district/buildings bonus/malus
- planets other than tomb worlds cost 10x (any value for balance) to build districts/buildings; could also add devastation events or production maluses (to discuss/balance)
- change machine world to have alloy district instead of food
- conquer all the xenos
This would make ME unique, but would need some balancing act not to make it OP.
Get rid of machine pops! It solves all issues ppl bring.
The only exception could be sevitors or assimilators = flavour. And even then limit pops to organics/cyborgs only to have them work on special buildings.They should only build machines - aka. districts/buildings. Quick and dirty solution:
- no pops
- districts unlock more buildings
- start on tomb world by default
- add building for converting captured organics into energy and robots into minerals; could also buy slaves from the market
- change pop traits into district/buildings bonus/malus
- planets other than tomb worlds cost 10x (any value for balance) to build districts/buildings; could also add devastation events or production maluses (to discuss/balance)
- change machine world to have alloy district instead of food
- conquer all the xenos
This would make ME unique, but would need some balancing act not to make it OP.
Get rid of machine pops! It solves all issues ppl bring.
I don't agree that a machine empire wouldn't need pops. Organic factories are largely automatic too. However, materials need to be moved into factories and products need to be moved out to site-of-use, and the factory itself requires upkeep. Autonomous agents, be they centrally directed drones or employed people, are needed for those tasks.
What I would suggest instead is that machine intelligence house drones at their place of work. Instead of a housing district, the nexus district is something like 4 housing / 4 amenities jobs, and all jobs producing buildings provide an equal number of housing.
What I would suggest instead is that machine intelligence house drones at their place of work. Instead of a housing district, the nexus district is something like 4 housing / 4 amenities jobs, and all jobs producing buildings provide an equal number of housing.
You've got that backwards.
Realistically, autarky and sprawling suburban deserts are things people ask for because they like the idea of them, but interdependence and high-density urban centers are the more productive solution. Since MIs are supposed to be cold unfeeling machines who don't know the meaning of fear and don't get claustrophobic, you would expect them to pick the unpopular-but-efficient option over the popular-but-inefficient option.
There's a reason that large life forms generally aren't made entirely of undifferentiated, independently viable cells, and are instead made of specialized cells arranged into tissues and organs that depend on each other to function, and it's because it works better.
A hive or nexus district is the equivalent of a high density urban centre.
The guiding principle behind industrialization has always been supply chains. Manchester went from being a tiny town to a huge industrial city because of a combination of easy access to the port of Liverpool and to coal mines in the surrounding region. They didn't just built factories in London because London was the biggest city and then figure out how to get resources there, they built whole new cities specifically to exploit easy access to resources.
And this is the problem with the ecumenopolis as an industrial centre. Because an ecumenopolis has no usable resources. It can't even provide food or energy for itself. Every single thing consumed on the planet needs to be imported from other, productive planets. That should be incurring immense costs in terms of efficiency simply from the sheer scale of the supply lines involved. I get that the game doesn't model supply lines in that sense, but the fact remains that from a realism standpoint it's an awful idea when you could just spread urban centres across many planets while ensuring they still have access to local sources of materials they need
There are real life examples of cities which are kind of like ecumenopoli, but generally they're financial centres, or rely heavily on tourism, or otherwise involve things which machine empires probably wouldn't care about.
This is kind of OT, but the historian in me must quibble. "People" don't ask for suburban deserts, suburban deserts of the type you describe where the result of a mix of factors including deliberate government policies in the United States, influences of racism in aftermath of the collapse of legalized segregation, and a few other factors.
Human beings have always flocked to cities for exactly the reasons you describe them working well: they are efficient, they allow economies of scale at producing things. Ecumenopoli are simply this writ large: at a galactic scale it might actually be more effective and efficient to have a planet city and have all the materials it needs for survival transported by cheap and fast FTL transports from the farm and resource planets.
That being said, machine empires should be able to create something even *better* than this in terms of economies of scale, because they should lose less "space" in "inefficient" ways the way that organic beings with individual wills and needs require. Housing needs for machine pops should default to being much, much lower, and/or each district should provide more housing, since machine pops would neither need nor desire a "home" in the sense an organic pop would: all they need is a recharging/maintenance station at their work site.
Furthermore, the commute from home and back for a machine pop is unnecessary, and they require no leisure, which would justify a general boost in productivity over and above lack of a need for consumer goods, since they can spend more time "on the clock" and the only time they need to not be working is for recharging/maintenance.
I think, lore wise, it would make sense for the default machine world to function somewhat like a Ecumenopolis in the first place: giant sections of a planet organized to be maximally logistically efficient. Then machine worlds would be that turned up to 11.
Likewise, their population production should be at least as fast as organics, if not faster. Machine empires could logically also have fine grained control over the rate of "reproduction."
Whether all of this combined would make machine empires OP or simply equal but interesting is an exercise in game balancing, I can think of a couple of trade offs:
Perhaps machine population production might be more expensive, perhaps machines might have a lower rate of experience gain as a trade off for being more or less immortal, perhaps their buildings could be generally more expensive, since they are more complex internally to allow their logistical efficiency, there a number of ways to reflect what is generally the sci-fi "weakness" of machine civilizations which tends to be a lack of cultural/intellectual/strategic (e.g. "soft power") type flexibility in favor of a pure "guns and butter" type of approach.
I think a thematically appropriate drawback for gestalt empires is to make admin cap a lot harsher on them because they don't have independent subordinate intelligences to manage things. Maybe excessive sprawl also either increases deviancy or reduces productivity, depending on policies.
They could also have tighter leader limits, or not simultaneously research all three types at once (but research whichever types of research they're doing a little faster as a result. Not fast enough to make up for the whole loss, but enough that they're not completely pathetic at research)
this doesn't make a lot of sense. Thematically machines would need one super sector as everything is controlled by a supreme AI. No one literally needs independent subordinate intelligences, because you literally have one SUPER AI which is vastly superior to any bunch of smart invidiums, even if they would be in the thousands.
Right. They'd have a core sector that's much more powerful than normal, but everything else would have to "sleep" (do basically nothing) most of the time because the gestalt doesn't have trusted lieutenants to manage them separately.
Parallel processing causes deviance, such as race conditions.
And that's where I'd fundamentally disagree with you. First off, preventing one type of research from functioning is something that will never happen because it would alienate almost the entire player base from any empire that does that and would basically kill sales on Synthetic Dawn. And it's not just one super AI managing every single drone. The game clearly states the master intelligence creates autonomous units to manage other tasks, such as commanding entire fleets or managing entire sectors (with billionsof drones). If in any way they should be getting penalties, Machine Intelligences should only get a penalty for something (fleet/sector) without an autonomous drone commanding it, but I would still be against that. Knocking out everything outside of the core sector would ruin machine intelligences for me, and essentially make driven assimilators, determined exterminators, or a conquest oriented Rouge Servitor unplayable because you'd only have the core sector to power the conquest of an entire galaxy. A massive machine AI gestalt who communicates to its drones at FTL speeds should be better at managing everything, not worse. I'm sorry, but every idea you gave that you think is great, I think is terrible, and would hurt my favorite type of empire to the point of literal literal unplayability.
Not a core sector.. this would imply that they have several sectors. Just one sector for each and every planet they own. It makes no sense that a machine empire can not control outer rim colonies because of "time" or lack the computing power.
We were discussing thematically appropriate downsides to balance out the gestalt's thematically appropriate upsides, but you could also just hand the problem to the flavor writers and have them be roughly the same as mobs, but with different pictures and labels.
In retrospect, though, I agree that the research idea is a bad one, and think that giving them a downside that's more like a megacorp's sprawl penalty or the (possibly existing?) leader upkeep penalty is better.
Think about them as maintenance crew. While automated factory might work on its own most of the time, some
Automated Districts are a good idea but always conserving the pops, otherwise a ME will be a sci-fi Simcity.
so you are saying the current machine empire downsides are not enough?
I'm curious what nerfs you would give to machine empires IF they were to get a buff to available districts/buildings or to job output etc that required some negative to offset it.
Personally I quite like the idea of being able to focus on one tech path - e.g. engineering instead of society, even if I'd do it differently. I'd frame that as a potential buff and not a nerf, perhaps give machine empires the ability to build more efficient and focused research buildings (with only engineering/physics/society jobs) or add a new policy to replace their lack of trade policy where you could designate the research focus of the empire.
As to nerfs once machine empires are made competitive: I think I'd rather robots had a much higher production cost and also a higher max growth rate - e.g. a building with an alloy upkeep giving a robot producing job, each job with a higher mineral cost. Several tiers for the building so you can build robots slowly and cheaply or quickly and very expensively (with the upkeep costs and jobs used for growth being the nerf, higher max growth being a buff).
I don't really mind if they had different penalties for going over empire sprawl just for flavour... but I agree that forcing them into a tall playstyle as a potential nerf doesn't fit the theme for more than half of all machine empires.
The short production chains with fewer % bonuses are the current nerf. i.e. they make less research with the same amount of minerals, they make less efficient use of deposits. That doesn't feel correct at all. If anything I wish they had extra steps to their production or extra tiers to their buildings - e.g. instead of using consumer goods they make and use "advanced materials" with a better conversion rate than consumer goods buildings (possibly with a variant using food). Or for an even higher tier alloy factory with more rare resources required, higher tier refineries with more rares produced. Investing in two extra upgrades for a more efficient planet (in terms of building slots used). So machine empires would have a greater potential (growth/output/efficiency) but lower early game power and higher costs to max their buildings... but again those are buffs not nerfs.
The thread is "machine empires are still a flop". So I assumed people were considering nerfs that would fit once machine empires are given any sort of buff.
Without any nerf after they are given something to make them interesting then some of the proposed ideas could swing far too far in the other direction e.g. giving them ecumenopolis tier districts at the start of the game, better pop traits, better districts, higher output from buildings and reduced resources required... if you did all those things machine empires would be massively OP. Unless you also added a nerf at the same time. But what nerf would make sense in that situation?
I've seen this mentioned a couple times now, but I'm not really sure how it works to the advantage of the longer supply chain. Near as I can tell, midstream production bonuses only help to offset the fact that you have to deal with a midstream product in the first place; modifiers in the midstream don't directly increase production at the end of the chain, and the indirect benefit just approaches (but does not reach) the effect of being able to skip the midstream entirely.
Unless I'm missing something, which I probably am since I haven't actually done a serious attempt with a regular empire yet.