Robots seem unplayable

[Arkton]

As far as the mechanics, you are going to have them anyways because otherwise you don't have growth at all. That is their primary purpose. Why count them towards dragging you down when they're the only thing holding you up?

Sure you need them for growth, but if all space is filled up, you couldn't simply take them away, cause you would lack their amenities. They are the best maintenance drones one could have with base 5 production. So I see them more like maintenance drones (or Jobs) with the growth mechanic tied to them, which in turn means, I just have to pay minerals for a new pop and actually don't need any additional pop for that. This is also more in line with bio empires, who also don't need any pop for their growth. From your perspective it would mean, you need less maintenace drones but have to pay heavy for growth with pops.
In the end it's just a matter of the view, but which might lead to different interpreations.

 

[Makinus]

I´m actually playing a Rogue Servitor in 2.2.4 with Glavius AI and doing well - i agree that the start is rough, mostly because of the low growth (bulding?) rate of robots compared to bio empires, but late game the machine empires have an easier time to get minerals than bio empires by taking the Machine Worlds ascension perk.

When i play a bio empire in late game i get bottlenecked by lack of minerals - i need to spend more and more in the market buying minerals late game - with machine empires you can simply convert another world to a machine world and fill it up with mining districts.

Now, and that only applies to Rogue Servitors, habitats are extremely useful to hold all your bio-trophies - my third ascencion perk is always voidborn so i can move all my bio-tropies to habitats and leave my planets to my robots - and remember that the organic sanctuary is more than enough for housing, no need for paradise domes, and can be used by your robots too.

 

[Nakkivene]

Now, and that only applies to Rogue Servitors, habitats are extremely useful to hold all your bio-trophies - my third ascencion perk is always voidborn so i can move all my bio-tropies to habitats and leave my planets to my robots - and remember that the organic sanctuary is more than enough for housing, no need for paradise domes, and can be used by your robots too.

Perhaps, but bio-trophies themselves are a burden, not an asset. They have a high job/pop upkeep and only produce 2 unity per biobag.

 

[Makinus]

Perhaps, but bio-trophies themselves are a burden, not an asset. They have a high job/pop upkeep and only produce 2 unity per biobag.

I agree that they are a burden, the trick is to only have enough to supply your unity needs and then limit their reproduction (easily done with habitats) the main reason for choosing Rogue Servitors is for the organic sanctuary building and the better relations that RS have with other bio empires, not the biotrophies.

You use the better relations early game to avoid wars and with the organic sanctuary building you can get all the housing your need for robots, in fact it is the only way that i see for making habitats lucrative.

I normally allow biotrophies to reproduce until they fill one habitat (using organic sanctuaries) then make other habitats robot-only, with a second bio habitat late game when i need more unity.

 

[Xephos Demonslayer]

Sure you need them for growth, but if all space is filled up, you couldn't simply take them away, cause you would lack their amenities. They are the best maintenance drones one could have with base 5 production. So I see them more like maintenance drones (or Jobs) with the growth mechanic tied to them, which in turn means, I just have to pay minerals for a new pop and actually don't need any additional pop for that. This is also more in line with bio empires, who also don't need any pop for their growth. From your perspective it would mean, you need less maintenace drones but have to pay heavy for growth with pops.
In the end it's just a matter of the view, but which might lead to different interpreations.

Well, I can't help you with the minerals being spent, but you can stop the pop growth without sacrificing the amenities by paying a paltry 25 influence to halt drone production on a planet of your choosing. Though I rarely do this as a gestalt, as I just resettle my pops from my full planets to new ones I'm working on filling up, so if I have 12 full planets, and two I'm working on filling it, every time my planets all get a pop, those two planets get seven each instead one each.

 

[Chthon]

Sure you need them for growth, but if all space is filled up, you couldn't simply take them away, cause you would lack their amenities. They are the best maintenance drones one could have with base 5 production. So I see them more like maintenance drones (or Jobs) with the growth mechanic tied to them, which in turn means, I just have to pay minerals for a new pop and actually don't need any additional pop for that. This is also more in line with bio empires, who also don't need any pop for their growth. From your perspective it would mean, you need less maintenace drones but have to pay heavy for growth with pops.
In the end it's just a matter of the view, but which might lead to different interpreations.

I would consider that you would have to be full up on all of your planets for their population production to be useless, but that's just me. I have no issues shipping populations over to other colonies.

I haven't checked, can a machine empire sell pops as slaves on the market?

(I will freely admit I have never faced an end game event, as I tend to get distracted for a bit and then forget where I was, and restart rather than reacquaint myself with my save)

 

[Xephos Demonslayer]

I haven't checked, can a machine empire sell pops as slaves on the market?

Yes you can, but keeping them means they would make more energy over time, most certainly outstripping the one lump sum you get off selling them.

 

[chrisisarea]

as an ME , just dont bother to produce Energy. Pump everything into Alloy and sell them on the market. The AI is still buying shitton of alloys over the market and so the average Price for alloys will be arround 10 Energy Always. this means every alloy you produce worth more Energy as producing it by districts. PDX should really fix the market because it is the most broken thing right now. Why the hell does the AI purchases arround 50 K alloys on average in 100 years from the market? Figure out

 

[icon41gimp]

They are far from unplayable. I played every ME except assimilators in 2.2.3. Difficulty grand admiral, 30 agressive AI. Normal ME and rogue servitors have a more difficult start, but not that hard to overcome and they snowball after the early game. I had alot more diffculty with the exterminators, i'm not great at early wars, so it took me 7 or 8 restarts before i got an empire going that could conquer the galaxy. All in all i would say that only in the early game they are weaker, but they are very strong in the mid and late game.

That doesn't seem like the appropriate hurdle to judge with. I think the better question is to ask yourself whether you would have survived any of those games if a copy of you was playing the empire next door. Take your favorite organic empire type: devouring swarm, slavers, mechanists, whatever. If you had wanted to conquer the ME early, could you have resisted?

 

[Chthon]

Yes you can, but keeping them means they would make more energy over time, most certainly outstripping the one lump sum you get off selling them.

I was thinking excess unemployed pops that have no place anywhere in my empire.

 

[mcolder]

I don’t find ME unplayable, I think that’s an oversimplification of the issues they’re facing. In my current RS playthrough I am able to stay competitive and easily handle enemies especially with the much improved AI relationship that RS enjoys as mentioned above.

What I do find annoying is the fact that some of the ME mechanics and by extension Gestalt are clearly unfinished. Every time I colonize a planet I get Low Stability alert, that’s just sloppy coding. Every time a habitat is built as Hive you launch with low stability. While a regular empire has a balanced start as RS you start with all kinds of things in the negative. It’s just a lot of left out or unfinished code. Does that mean you cannot play as ME? No, it doesn’t but I do understand the frustration that players are experiencing

 

[TheDungen]

I find that regular ones work fairly well but Rogue Servitors really suck.

What I would do with them is I would allow biotrophies factions, and have one the blissful ignorance faction which is essentially them being happy as biotrophies and generating influence for you. That should be their thing, that using biotrophies they should be able to generate influence a lot better than other machine empires. Them generating unity is pretty much pointless, I mean they do generate a ton per building but not nearly enough per pop for it to be meaningful.

My second playthough under 2.2.x was with a vanilla ME Gestault. I seem to recall it was much more difficult than playing an organic megacorp [first playthrough] with the economy never tanking but always balanced on a razor's edge.

Against the vanilla AI you CAN ignore bio-energy and work with traditional energy & mineral districts. I did take bonuses to mining & energy production with my bots so they were adapted to that style of play.

If I recall properly the ME playthrough was my weakest in many tracking stats in early & mid-game and it only wound up being stronger than my first playthrough because I didn't know what I was doing

Well megacorps are really powerful so comparing them is not really fair.

In my current betabranch playthrough at year 2500, the organic empires have 1500+ pops, one has about 3000.

Both of the machine empires have sub 600,

Both of them have access to comparable planet quantity and territory as their organic neighbors, and neither has been overpressed by wars (one actually consumed a fanatical purifier).

I've tried machine starts 3 times in leguinn, each time I've quit because there's much less reward for effort put in, they have no late game to look forward to and their pop growth is like watching paint dry.

Stellaris is about waiting for pops to grow, with organic empires it's easy to get monthly growth of 7.5 and above.

With robots you're still on 3.5 at 2300 and it's not free.

Well machine empires are suposed to have fewer but better pops, pretty sure Wiz has stated that. That said the difference in numbers may be a bit more than can be compensated for.

2.2 was obviously rushed and came out at an unfortunate time right before the devs went on a ridiculously long vacation (those Scandinavian holidays!), so the game has been at HoI4 levels of broken for longer than it should have been. I think most of the bugs will be ironed out in the next month, though.

I think it was a really odd choice to drop 3 DLCs in december.

Perhaps, but bio-trophies themselves are a burden, not an asset. They have a high job/pop upkeep and only produce 2 unity per biobag.

They should be producing influence through factions instead.

 

[Chthon]

I find that regular ones work fairly well but Rogue Servitors really suck.

What I would do with them is I would allow biotrophies factions, and have one the blissful ignorance faction which is essentially them being happy as biotrophies and generating influence for you. That should be their thing, that using biotrophies they should be able to generate influence a lot better than other machine empires. Them generating unity is pretty much pointless, I mean they do generate a ton but it's not nearly important enough.

Honestly, I don't know a thing about non-normal Machine Empires, other than the fact that other races tend to dislike them aggressively.

 

[TheDungen]

Honestly, I don't know a thing about non-normal Machine Empires, other than the fact that other races tend to dislike them aggressively.

Yeah I never really got what their problem with servitors are. I mean they shouldn't inherently dislike servitors but it should rather be dependent on how the servitors threat organics in their empire, population controls, migration controls, forced resettling and so on. If your bio trophies can leave whenever they want then there's essentially no reason to be pissed at the servitors.

 

[Secret Master]

The AI is still buying shitton of alloys over the market and so the average Price for alloys will be arround 10 Energy Always. this means every alloy you produce worth more Energy as producing it by districts. PDX should really fix the market because it is the most broken thing right now. Why the hell does the AI purchases arround 50 K alloys on average in 100 years from the market? Figure out

Not in the current beta. I had no problem in my last game getting alloys down to 4 or even 3.x per unit. And I don’t think I’ve seen the price even get close to 10 for alloys in the beta.

For those in the thread that aren’t using the current beta, you are in for a rude awakening with energy. (Although minerals are far more plentiful..,,)

 

[TheDungen]

Not in the current beta. I had no problem in my last game getting alloys down to 4 or even 3.x per unit. And I don’t think I’ve seen the price even get close to 10 for alloys in the beta.

For those in the thread that aren’t using the current beta, you are in for a rude awakening with energy. (Although minerals are far more plentiful..,,)

Really? I thought energy was hard to find in the current build. Except if you were a Megacorp hence why they were so powerful.

 

[LayZboy]

Well machine empires are suposed to have fewer but better pops, pretty sure Wiz has stated that. That said the difference in numbers may be a bit more than can be compensated for.

ME pops are not better than organic ones in any way. They was deliberately nerfed to be equal to a bio-pops even before 2.2 came out.
Don't believe me? go check the 04_gestalt_job file and compare them to normal empires.

 

[TheDungen]

ME pops are not better than organic ones in any way. They was deliberately nerfed to be equal to a bio-pops even before 2.2 came out.
Don't believe me? go check the 04_gestalt_job file and compare them to normal empires.

*Sigh* They are better because you can tailor them to the jobs they do. And modifying robots cost a lot less then gene editing and the techs are more available.

 

[Chthon]

*Sigh* They are better because you can tailor them to the jobs they do. And modifying robots cost a lot less then gene editing and the techs are more available.

Unfortunately the current population system penalizes you for trying to specialize individual populations. Some work needs to be done there first before this is actually useful.

Not in the current beta. I had no problem in my last game getting alloys down to 4 or even 3.x per unit. And I don’t think I’ve seen the price even get close to 10 for alloys in the beta.

For those in the thread that aren’t using the current beta, you are in for a rude awakening with energy. (Although minerals are far more plentiful..,,)

If you are constantly selling metals, I can see that. However, it does naturally rise to about 8-9 in the beta for me. I think the more AIs you have, the more it will rise.

 

[Secret Master]

Really? I thought energy was hard to find in the current build. Except if you were a Megacorp hence why they were so powerful.

Umm, it is? The previous poster was claiming to consistently sell alloys for 10 a unit which is enough to make energy a non-issue.

You can't do that any more. The ol' "Scam the galactic market never build energy districts" gambit doesn't work anymore.