you know, i have not actually played a race that eats other races. what is your build for a devouring swarm (i am guessing), you have peaked my interest.
Should Technicians/Miners Produce 6 like Farmers?
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you know, i have not actually played a race that eats other races. what is your build for a devouring swarm (i am guessing), you have peaked my interest.
I only played DE and FP in the current version as I'm no fan of hiveminds myself as a lot of fluff text is still broken. I only wanted to see if it is really as op as the screenshots posted here suggested.
Build does not really matter against the AI though. Just start by focusing on alloys and just enough minerals to keep going and spam corvettes and rush the first AI you meet. Move all xeno pops to your homeworld and never stop the war train. Use forced labor purge as FP.
I actually used this in an inward perfection game too. Pick nihilistic acquisition and keep the xenos coming. That perk is great for genocidal civics too but you can use resettlement instead if you want to save that perk slot.
You will most likely fail against advanced start AIs on GA though if you like to max. advanced AIs and it is not that viable if you play with few AIs or on a tiny map. Edit: Fail in the sense that you will start slow not that the AI will defeat you though. At least in vanilla.
Well of course GA isnt a challenge in vanilla, lol, as it is completely brain dead. Thank god for glavius mod. Anyhow, may give it a shot, just out of curiousity. Thanks.
4/4/4 also fixes the fundamental issue, but I think that's where the developers started from. I think they increased the output of food halfway through development because QA probably felt that the economy was too tight to manage and they likely didn't want one incident to cause a downward spiral that couldn't be escaped from. So I'd be conservative to reduce everything down to 4, especially since most average players (especially as robots) have an issue trying to balance their early game energy as it is.
Could also be an issue, but that at least comes with a stability hit which decreases its efficiency and uprising chance, no? But even still, that at least has you playing an evil empire for economic benefits, there's a sort of choice between faction and empire play styles that can justify it over 'why bother building a generator world when its more efficient to sell food from agriworlds'.
It seems to be, primarily, that food prices will swing back to normal faster than you can depress them, until mid to late game economies where you can get your energy through trade, space, and dyson sphere and thus still not need to fall back upon generators. You'll get more energy from selling that amount of food than an equivalent worth of technicians would, and that's before stacking +food yield technology and buildings onto it instead. At least when it comes to internal markets, the galactic market the AI tends to buy a lot of food which would make the market more stable despite your exploiting.
At base, its more efficient and the market price fluctuating down might make it sliiightly less efficient. But then you can skip technician research (important because physics is arguably more important to cycle through techs than society), only build a food processing center rather than that and an energy hub. And then the only reason you'd ever need to do anything but that is if you don't have enough food tiles on planets to cover your food and energy demands, but you can be just as screwed with energy and minerals in the same respect.
Well I had no problems at least with an FP.
Might be because of nerve stapling though.
The psionic path purifer worked well until the self-purging started after full psionic ascension...
Edit: It was more difficult with DEs but I abandoned that game early because I got a bugged crisis.
The most fun I have had in 2.2 was as a raiding inward perfection purger though. The pacifist and xenophobe factions were a wee bit unhappy but deviant helped a bit with that.
The HUGE benefit of a purge is you don't pay ANY upkeep on eating pops. No districts, no housing, no buildings, no admin cap and no maintenance. That makes a +6 from purging far more
effective than a +6 from farming.
effective than a +6 from farming.
The stability hit is a legitimate issue because it also reduces the yield of purging. It can be partially resolved by shuffling your food around planets, but more planets mean more declining queues so your food gets consumed more quickly. Ideally you want nerve stapled pops so they always give max output. Cram them into a single fast food planet to maximize the time it takes to eat them all.
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As far as I can tell, these issues mostly stem from overproducing manufacturing industry early on. That's a trap that I think can be addressed indirectly in ways that don't require raw resources.
The jump from 4/4/4 to 5/5/5 might seem innocent, but from my experience, 5/5/5 already turns into having an abundance of everything, which I don't think is interesting gameplay. If the 4/4/4 economy is too tight though, then a bit more leeway could be opened up by removing the maintenance costs from (non-city-)districts for example. That's would indirectly mean +0.5 energy per worker.
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I was actually wondering the opposite. why are our farms all so awfull?
I mean, 1/6th (assuming a stable 1 food upkeep per pop) of your population on food production? Thats medieval in the UK or US the number is closer to 1 in 10 if not more. If you have the tech to get to space then you have things like refidgeration, aerificial fertalisers, yeild boosting artifical selection, weed killers, pesatacides, agraculture is our oldest science and the best developed. Theres no reason to need so many farmers. Balance? a more realistic number could also be balanced around.
I mean, 1/6th (assuming a stable 1 food upkeep per pop) of your population on food production? Thats medieval in the UK or US the number is closer to 1 in 10 if not more. If you have the tech to get to space then you have things like refidgeration, aerificial fertalisers, yeild boosting artifical selection, weed killers, pesatacides, agraculture is our oldest science and the best developed. Theres no reason to need so many farmers. Balance? a more realistic number could also be balanced around.
It's much closer to 1/20 if you include all food production chain steps for a state like the UK, 3/100 if your just talking about farming.
Hah, that's true from a realism point of view. At the same point, we can argue why the pops are so heavily dominated by industrial/raw resources/manufacturing jobs when they should be almost entirely clerks.
I just presume that pop =/= a direct number of people and is a rough approximate of area to population or some such, that the 'farmer pop' job includes the minor clerks and other businesses around the farming communities, and other hand waves.
Service based economy only works in a mostly peaceful environment though. If big players focus most of their industry on growth and war those that do not will not prevail.Hah, that's true from a realism point of view. At the same point, we can argue why the pops are so heavily dominated by industrial/raw resources/manufacturing jobs when they should be almost entirely clerks.
I just presume that pop =/= a direct number of people and is a rough approximate of area to population or some such, that the 'farmer pop' job includes the minor clerks and other businesses around the farming communities, and other hand waves.
I had considered this option in the past, though I'd argue that the balance then shifts too far the other way. While energy is the food for machine pops in regards to upkeep, energy otherwise typically has different applications than food for any empire, and I believe this might empower machine energy stores a bit too much (don't forget that this also makes % modifiers relatively stronger, 150% of 4 is 6, 150% of 6 is 9). Plus, machines have purpose for food in feeding slaves and (in the case of Rogue Servitors) Bio-Trophies, and reducing food output for Machines specifically would impact this.
Of course, I'm open to counterargument on this point.
I'm personally in favor of having a single value of production between energy, minerals, and food. I believe that was the way it functioned in previous versions of the game, so I'm not certain why it could not work now.
UK and US uses a lot of supporting chemistry and infrastracture. Think about it as people in agri districts also producing fertilizers and herbicides and maintaining infrastructure and so on.
I guess, PDS could improve hydroponic farms so it was more into your face.
I'd think it would be nice for farms for regular empires to produce 5 food, since 1 has to be used anyways. That being said, I feel that machine empires should get the same bonus for energy. 4/4/5, or 5/4/4. It could even swap if a regular empire synthetically ascend.
Livestock definitely should be nerfed. I had a game where at about the mid-point I switched a large fraction my slaves (and total population) to livestock. At that point my economy realyl took off. Especially after I gene modded my slaves to be delicious.
I made and published a mod that changes the basic workers to produce 5 of their respective resources and did a quick game with my relatively tall focused start (although I spammed out 2-3 colonies pretty early).
5 food districts didn't mean I was swimming in it until my agricolony was advanced, but I was still able to play with encourage growth (permanent -8.3 from a mod) and nutritional plentitude without issue. I was still lacking on energy without a generator colony up and running yet, but I was able to subsidize it, and my lacking food industry, through selling minerals and consumer goods (from a second artisan building at 30 capital pops).
Over all it did smooth over some of the early game issues, if only because my generator worlds began being productive quicker, minerals were slightly higher, and while I couldn't maximize growth and food expenditure as hard as I was for much longer, it felt pretty right.
I don't know if it'll work the same for machine empires, but I think it'll at least bring the two to being equivalent, with machines being a bit more efficient because they don't require consumer goods (but also don't produce trade value, so that feels like a wash).
5 food districts didn't mean I was swimming in it until my agricolony was advanced, but I was still able to play with encourage growth (permanent -8.3 from a mod) and nutritional plentitude without issue. I was still lacking on energy without a generator colony up and running yet, but I was able to subsidize it, and my lacking food industry, through selling minerals and consumer goods (from a second artisan building at 30 capital pops).
Over all it did smooth over some of the early game issues, if only because my generator worlds began being productive quicker, minerals were slightly higher, and while I couldn't maximize growth and food expenditure as hard as I was for much longer, it felt pretty right.
I don't know if it'll work the same for machine empires, but I think it'll at least bring the two to being equivalent, with machines being a bit more efficient because they don't require consumer goods (but also don't produce trade value, so that feels like a wash).