Psionic ascension vs Gene ascension vs Synthetic ascension

[stenver]

Which one is the best and why?

I read that Synthetic is the worst with the new economy due to the massive energy requirements.

Psionic seems to be easy to reach, for 2 games in a row for me, but the best thing I've seen it gives is psionic armies

I never gone down the gene-tailoring path

 

[LordNarvi]

Gene is legitimately OP right now. Growth + habitability bonuses = strongest economy.

 

[bobucles]

Habitability is over rated. The agrarian +15% bonus will let your pops harvest 0.9 more food while +10% habitability makes them consume 0.1 less food. Granted habitability helps everyone while food bonus only helps farmers (and livestock, strangely enough).

I totally agree about the growth. Fertile pops and clone vats are excellent.

 

[Playwars]

Habitability is over rated. The agrarian +15% bonus will let your pops harvest 0.9 more food while +10% habitability makes them consume 0.1 less food. Granted habitability helps everyone while food bonus only helps farmers (and livestock, strangely enough).

I totally agree about the growth. Fertile pops and clone vats are excellent.

It also affects livestock ? Guess they can harvest their own pastures or something. I'll have to remember that when I bio engineer my next delicious livestock xenos.

 

[Bouchart]

Biological ascension is probably better if you are a xenophile and have multiple races all over the place.

 

[LordNarvi]

Biological ascension is probably better if you are a xenophile and have multiple races all over the place.

I don't think you realize how effective nerve-stapled, robust, fertile, strong slaves are.

 

[darthsquirt2]

They all have some pretty great strengths. Machine ascension gives you some good universal pop traits, immortality, trade food consumption for energy, and 100% habitability for everything but it requires you to build new pops as opposed to them growing naturally. Psi ascension also gives some nice leader traits, but it's more RNG-dependent. If you get a pact and all the exclusive tech options, it's potentially the strongest militarily, but that's if the shroud favors you. Bio ascension is a great general pick since you get to pick from a ton of strong traits that can buff your entire populace in different ways but to reach full potential you need to micromanage more. Plus your pops might choose to take jobs that their stats aren't optimized for. As far as misc bonuses go, each ascension gets some nifty armies to play with and psi/mech get an ideology boost with spirit/material factions.

 

[Cry_Havok]

Right now I'd probably rank things as Psi = Gene > Cyborg > Full Synth

Psi has the best leaders and minimal special projects, and a great army (minimal collateral damage is great), but only mediocre pops. However, it can passively assimilate those pops as well as mod the species once a psi subspecies pops up.

Gene has pretty bland leaders (only better than Cyborgs), a good army, the BEST pops. It's also micro hell and can't rely on assimilation to do anything other than remove hive mind. Fortunately it's special projects are crazy quick

Cyborg Only gives only modest bonuses, mostly to habitability, but it's a free and useful trait, and IIRC once the initial special project completes it effects everything in your Empire, unlike Psi which only hits your primary species. Cyborg Leaders are the worst of the list, but it's also only one ascension point, and they grow organically, unlike Synths.

Synth is bad, particularly if you can't resettle (congratulations Synth egalitarians, your new colonies will never grow!), and suffer from super-bad pop growth. At least they get top tier leaders?

 

[ComradeKroo]

My opinion about 3 ascension, Hive and Machine.
Psi
-Moderate growth speed.
-Strongest fleet with shield and Psi jumpdrive.
-Strong with boon from shroud.
Gene
-Fast growth speed with multi cultural.
-Heavy micro, with new economy system, old Gene mod mechanic to specialize pops is bad.
-Less option to fleet power.
Synth
-Fastest growth speed, especialy when you are assimilating other races, the assimilated race is ridiculously still growth in your planets.
-Pop cant migrate, so if you are Egalitarian, your pop in Egalitarian faction suffer -10% happiness when you turn on Resettlement policy.
-Consume energy, wasting Food district slots, so overall, they are bad at raw resources until megastructures are unlocked.
-No need to pop mod so much, because they can have strong 1 universal pop type.
Hive
-Fast growth speed, cant build robots, can assimilate, but cant be effective like machines and synths.
-Planet support full raw resources districts when unlock Hive World, make Hive become one of the best specialize economies.
-Like Gene Ascension, Hive required micro in gene modding.
Machine
-Slow pops growth, but can expand early to have more planets, and can assimilate.
-Like Hive, Machine have Machine world, and their specialized economy somewhat better with only 2 raw resources and alloys to deal with.
-Moderate pops effection, and can be heavier cost because engineering research is always less than society and more precious.

 

[WhiteKyubey]

First - about synths. They are quite good...when they don't have AI. Then they use 0.5 housing, no CG, cannot rebel and have enough specialist jobs like Metallurgists. But free synths and synth ascension ruins all that. I will suggest to build and use no AI synths even as spiritualists -5% faction happiness totally worth that much pop growth and low upkeep.

So the worst is found, now bio and psi.
While psi has some good things like +10 stability (governor+psi corp building), psi shields, psi jumps, chosen one, avatar, covenants, I don't feel like any of these bonuses are really strong. They are totally nice to have, but they are not game changing (psi jump could be, if it happened much earlier then normal empires get regular jump).

And bio gives you massive bonuses to the most important areas.
- Growth speed. Add +30% to species you want to grow with trait, another +33% from building.
- Make habitats and small planets worth the time with -20% housing to everyone who lives there.
- Nerve stapled + Residence + Basic Subsistence aliens are so good for all worker jobs! You don't even need to be a slaver to do that.
- If you are a slaver, then everything is even better.
- Psi gives all your pops +10% research +10% energy and good leader traits - and that's totally useless on 90% of your population. Bio can instead just make 2-3 tech worlds (up to 100 researchers each) and gene mod only people there to be smart and venerable + other stuff for age, lvls or science. Then buy some leaders from there. While the rest of your empire gets totally different perks like -CG use or +growth speed.

Just don't play egalitarians with bio. They ruin most of the benefits.

 

[Linusz]

Right now I'd probably rank things as Psi = Gene > Cyborg > Full Synth

Psi has the best leaders and minimal special projects, and a great army (minimal collateral damage is great), but only mediocre pops. However, it can passively assimilate those pops as well as mod the species once a psi subspecies pops up.

Gene has pretty bland leaders (only better than Cyborgs), a good army, the BEST pops. It's also micro hell and can't rely on assimilation to do anything other than remove hive mind. Fortunately it's special projects are crazy quick

Cyborg Only gives only modest bonuses, mostly to habitability, but it's a free and useful trait, and IIRC once the initial special project completes it effects everything in your Empire, unlike Psi which only hits your primary species. Cyborg Leaders are the worst of the list, but it's also only one ascension point, and they grow organically, unlike Synths.

Synth is bad, particularly if you can't resettle (congratulations Synth egalitarians, your new colonies will never grow!), and suffer from super-bad pop growth. At least they get top tier leaders?

What you say about Synth is simply wrong. You can resettle, if you want to cope the faction modifier hit. But generally, that is not a problem. Pop growth for synth is 10 on any 80+planet. It is around 6 on any 50+ pops planet. Combine that with resettling and you have one of the strongest planet-filling setups you can have. Additionally, you can still keep some organics around and have dual-growth. So in terms of population growth, I would consider synth one of the strongest.

Immortal leaders are also super nice. Having level 10 scientists, governors, admirals and so on all the time is an immense boost. To be honest, synth leaders cannot have a brain slug, which makes them loose against other leaders. But the permanent boost due to max level will cope for that.

Resource wise you get an +10% resources from jobs for robots. That's huge, especially if you combine it with the different robo-mods. Additionally, you pay -10% upkeep for your robos from "flesh is weak".

 

[Novacat]

After having been gone for a while myself and having played a game. Here are the big changes I noticed.

-Psionic leaders got buffed massively, it used to be the leader traits for psionics were kind of mediocre. No more, they are easily one of the strongest now.
- Cyborgs, likewise, got nerfed hard and repeatedly. Not only are the leader traits now mediocre, but cyborgs also have the added penalty that they cannot benefit from brain slugs, if you get that event. Not sure why, cyborgs still have fleshy bits in them. The species trait is still the same, but the meta shifted, habitability is no longer as substantial as it was.
- Bio ascension is mostly unchanged, but Erudite now has its own leader traits, unfortunately those leader traits are even worse than cyborgs. Bio ascension's newfound power is largely from the meta shifting than any specific changes.

Now, synths.

Robots in general have undergone some massive changes. In the days of old, all robot pops can work all jobs, but they had various resource penalties and bonuses. Synths were famous because of their +20% production bonus to everything. However, all of those bonuses are gone, and the only differentiation between the robot types is what jobs they can and cannot work. Now, you can mod robots like organics, and robots have traits of their own. On top of this, non-AI robots (under Outlawed AI) consume 50% less housing, 50% less amenities, and 100% less consumer goods.

Between all those changes, the meta practically flipped on its head. Free synths are now mediocre, especially since they cannot get the research/unity production they used to be able to get (there is no research bonus/unity trait for robots), while properly modded non-sapient robots can work your technician, farming and mining jobs because there are traits that provide 15% bonus to those. Non-sapient robots also consume 50% less housing, 50% less amenities, and 100% less consumer goods which means you can pack a lot of them on a planet, which makes it almost trivial to unlock the 70 pop requirement for all buildings on even small planets.

Now.. in light of all that, synthetic ascension is just not very good anymore, since most advantages have been cut out from it and its disadvantages are still there. There is still the habitability but, habitability is no longer as big a deal as it used to be.

 

[orlykthxbai]

Synth is garbage now. Cyborg is okay. Gene is very good. Can't really comment on Psionic since I haven't played it.

 

[Less2]

Objectively looking just at their bonuses I'd say Gene > Psi >>>> Synth, however I consistently fail to get the gene research early and if I roll Psi research then I'll definitely take Psi just because it's free, instant, and flavorful. Synth is crap.

Psi gets lots of production from stability in their psi corps. Great leader traits. Shroud is ehh.

Gene gets the best traits and a potential 5% global production. Annoying and cumbersome to use if you have 100 different pops in your empire though.

Synths get decent traits and their own potential 5% global production. The problem is that slaved synths are objectively better, costing .5 housing and amenities. Synth Slaves are arguably the best pops in the game, but actually ascending removes their main bonus. As it is building synths and going gene or psi route with your biological pops is always better.

 

[ArmChairAttila]

I love gene, synthetic is kind of broken and psyonic is annoying. You can get some good tech from psyonic but it is all random. Some games you get lucky some you dont. Gene is really good with slavers. You can make a ton of fast cash by gene modding unwanted pops, enslaving them then sell them on the slave market.

 

[Foxador]

Synthetic can be made less expensive if you get the right stuff for it. With fanatic materialistic and mechanistic you can get -35% pop upkeep which will bring your synth's down to 0.65 energy and consumer goods. But they do suffer the same problems that Machine Empires have which is having very slow pop growth until their planet is made at least 80+. They also have the worst ground troops of the three perks.

I found things to go a lot better BEFORE I went to full synthetic because I had double pop growth which let my planets grow at a massive rate. After you ascend you also have to spent a few decades fixing all your planets to stop making and start making batteries which really hampers you for awhile.

 

[Kravoka]

Synthetic: If I wanted to describe its theme I'd say "things that you can get elsewhere". Completion means losing the one "unique" benefit it can give you.
Psionic: It's a gachapon that forgot to have actual mechanics.
Bio: Best one, just remember that it's more Khan Noonien Singh than Yuuzhan Vong.

 

[mitkoo4]

Synthetic ascension is really good on xenophilic empires because you can get non-ascended species from other empires to grow alongside your robots after you ascend. That way on big planets you can get 10-12 growth from robots + 4-5 from organics. Thats pretty broken and you quickly outgrow all other empires.

 

[Cry_Havok]

After having been gone for a while myself and having played a game. Here are the big changes I noticed.

-Psionic leaders got buffed massively, it used to be the leader traits for psionics were kind of mediocre. No more, they are easily one of the strongest now.
- Cyborgs, likewise, got nerfed hard and repeatedly. Not only are the leader traits now mediocre, but cyborgs also have the added penalty that they cannot benefit from brain slugs, if you get that event. Not sure why, cyborgs still have fleshy bits in them. The species trait is still the same, but the meta shifted, habitability is no longer as substantial as it was.
- Bio ascension is mostly unchanged, but Erudite now has its own leader traits, unfortunately those leader traits are even worse than cyborgs. Bio ascension's newfound power is largely from the meta shifting than any specific changes.

Erudite Boni are most the same as Cyborg, but slightly better. Cyborg has no ruler trait, Erudite is +5% research. Governors that are cyborgs are +5% minerals, Erudite is research (probably better for Cyborg there. Researchers are the same, and both Erudite and Cyborg have the same, and while Cyborg and Erudite have the same damage and fire rate bonuses to armies and fleets, Erudite adds a disengage chance bonus

 

[Linusz]

It seems like most people here haven't played synths properly. Partly the best features of synth are not fully understood and deemed as useless. The other part is people not being aware of applied boni. E.g. synth ascenion gives +10% robo output on jobs. Not as much as the +20% from pre-Le-Guin, but still a lot. And they can have unity and research boni.

Seems like most of the information provided in this thread concerning synth ascenion is simply wront.

In my opinion, synth is still really, really strong if played correctly. And keep in mind that right after the ascension took place (project finished), you will have many pops without traits. So of course your output will drop for a few years. But AFTER modding your ascended pops from no traits to full traits (and you also get another trait point for robos), your economy will skyrocket.