Playstyles that work despite current bugs

[Tyro]

Assuming an AI improvement mod, what playstyle(s) are viable in the current patch (beta 1960)? Robots are bugged, as are slaves; I have a mod which removes the 0.5 minimum unhappiness for slaves, but I'm not sure it's balanced.

My first thought was xenophile-egalitarian focused on immigration bonuses, but I've heard the job sorting has issues (maybe fixed by the beta patch, maybe only partially fixed; unclear) & that emigration doesn't take habitability into account. Maybe authoritarian xenophile played tall with lots of resettlement?

The best option right now seems to be non-enslaved Syncretic Evolution workers played tall with heavy micro (if you're avoiding slavery because of the bug or because the mod fix makes it too good, which I suspect might be the case).

 

[AmpsterMan]

I'm only going to speak of Fanatic Egalitarian-Xenophile because it's what I've played.

Job changing isn't bugged, rather the weights are probably not strong enough in some cases. Also, it takes time for things to stabilize.

Immigration weights are wonky and should be tweaked, especially for non-optimal temperature planets. I.e., having Continental people on an ocean planet is fine. Having Continental people in Arctic is unacceptable. Still, over the long run, the populations balance themselves somewhat.

You can take a few approaches with Ascension. Cybernetic enhancements are nice because they mean all your pops can live on all your planets comfortably, given some habitability techs. Furthermore, add the adaptability perk to all your pops for 1 point and you'll be fine. Droid tech synergizes well because robots are very useful for Egalitarians, for reasons I'll post soon. Also, hands off conversion of pops is very nice from a usability perspective.

Second approach is to make all your planets Gaia worlds using world shaper. Sure it's bugged, but that's going to be fixed soon so I don't see it being a huge deal. Gaia worlds allow you to get rid of the habitability issues.

Xeno-compatibility perk is powerful, combined with one of the two above. Gives a large population growth bonus as well as having you lots of different trait combinations. Still, it's not strictly necessary like the other two. It pollutes your species tab

Utopian Abundance Is powerful, but expensive. Minerals are extremely important. One should focus on minerals and rare resource buildings because you will need the building density. In some ways, Utopian Abundance makes your existing pops more efficient, raising the opportunity cost of an extra pop. It's a bit anti-synergetic with rapid growth paradigms.

 

[Metztli]

I played as a militarist slaver and it was ok (currently the campaign is on hold cuz the lag is brutal and the game is on the bring of crashing every few days. Seriously Paradox dafaq are these calculations that are throttling my i7 so much ?!)

 

[trojan1234]

Xenophobia empire who purges every single xeno in the galaxy = less pop in galaxy = less lack = playable!

 

[Cronos988]

Devouring swarm works fine. Lots and lots of micro though.

 

[permeakra]

Devouring swarm works fine. Lots and lots of micro though.

Nah.
You can enable migration and plan for moderate overcrowding/unemployment and swarm works just fine with minimal resettlement. It's machine empires who have no way around micro

 

[Cronos988]

Nah.
You can enable migration and plan for moderate overcrowding/unemployment and swarm works just fine with minimal resettlement. It's machine empires who have no way around micro

I was more referring to the fact that you'll probably play pretty wide, and managing 50 planets with several pops growing every month is a lot of clicking.

 

[M@ni@c]

On the plus side, lots of micro means you always have stuff to do despite time moving so slowly on fastest speed.

 

[Slynx]

I've played defferent types of megacorps and most of them were fine. except maybe Xenophile-Authoritarian one(which has some issues with slavery).
had no troubles with spiritualist, materialist, xenophobe, authoritarian and militarist ethics (haven't played pacifist and egalitarian cuz I hate the very idea of those ethics)
had no problems with psionic, bio and synthetic1(hasn't played til synth2. got bored) ascension paths
also tried assimilators and devouring swarms. and militaristic f.purifiers. - all of them were fine (though I knew about some bugs with rights, so I planned accordingly to avoid them)

 

[Less2]

How exactly are robots and slaves bugged and unworkable? News to me considering I've been using and abusing them consistently.

Synth Ascension is bugged if you ascend while Synths don't have full rights. If you avoid that you are fine. Unfortunately it turns the best housing pop in the game into the worst housing pop in the game, but that's in exchange for the best production modifiers so its more a question of balance and weird design than it is bugs.

 

[Tyro]

How exactly are robots and slaves bugged and unworkable? News to me considering I've been using and abusing them consistently.

Synth Ascension is bugged if you ascend while Synths don't have full rights. If you avoid that you are fine. Unfortunately it turns the best housing pop in the game into the worst housing pop in the game, but that's in exchange for the best production modifiers so its more a question of balance and weird design than it is bugs.

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[Optimizt]

I've been having a lot of fun with a Shared Burdens + Agrarian Idyll build. Species traits are flexible, but I always pick Communal. Gene mod into Fertile and pick up Byzantine Bureaucracy and then you're drowning in housing and can almost completely ignore city districts.

 

[Slynx]

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both of the threads are explaining that the formula to count approval\happiness\etc. is either not what we think it is, or not working as intended.
it's not concerning slaves or robots only, but empires as a whole

 

[Tobasco da Gama]

Everything except non-DA Machine Empires is playable. Beware of Egalitarian-Xenophile empires if you have a bug up your ass about every pop being "perfectly" assigned to a planet/job, though.

 

[Less2]

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Explain how robots and slaves are non-viable in 2.2 though. The fact is that they are overpowered. They dominate egalitarian builds, or anything else not using robots or slaves. Know what's actually non-viable in 2.2? Trying to run an utopian abundance egalitarian, even though its WAD that it sucks.

 

[KingAlamar]

In vanilla SP I suspect a lot of things are viable ... depending on how you define viable that is.

Xenophile Egalitarian vanilla Mega Corp: Easy considering I never had to build any generators and didn't have to worry too much about consumer goods either

Vanilla gestalt machine empire: Doable ... seems harder than when playing organics

Authoritarian Xenophobe Syncretic (?) Evolution Slavers: Easy-enough. Had some planet improvement hurdles because I had too many of the "ruler" species or not enough depending on growth algorithm.


I played the first couple of games on Commodore, no scaling, aggressive AI. Bumped to Admiral with same settings and that seems about right. Even with the broken AI I suspect Grand Admiral would be too much for me but I'm not a good player so that's not necessarily surprising.

Warning: With my playstyle a lot of micro was needed either to suppress piracy [pre-gateways] OR for resettlement or other headaches. If you don't like micro I'm not sure what I'd recommend.

 

[fuinril]

I played the first couple of games on Commodore, no scaling, aggressive AI. Bumped to Admiral with same settings and that seems about right. Even with the broken AI I suspect Grand Admiral would be too much for me but I'm not a good player so that's not necessarily surprising.

Pleasure yourself and do it.

Just take a look

Do you really think you'll have any problem against an AI unable to even update his ship ?

 

[Tyro]

I use an AI improvement mod. I recommend everyone does until they teach the AI how the game works in 2.2. The beta branch opt in patch also helps. They fixed World Shaper, among other things.

 

[magickware99]

I enjoyed learning the new game mechanics when I played a hive mind. Didn't notice any real bugs with them besides pop extermination not working.

 

[magickware99]

I played the first couple of games on Commodore, no scaling, aggressive AI. Bumped to Admiral with same settings and that seems about right. Even with the broken AI I suspect Grand Admiral would be too much for me but I'm not a good player so that's not necessarily surprising.

The only thing I've experienced so far with playing on GA with no scaling is that, if you have a hostile empire spawn RIGHT next to you, then you will likely die.

Anything else and there's no difference, as the AI is unlikely to invade immediately and it is fairly easy to at least achieve enough level of power to deter them from invading.