So why the nerf?

[Firehawk11]

I would have loved to see a trait in the future for all planet types. However I feel for these traits they need to be 0 costs to coutner-balance the other species packs that add traits. I feel like Ocean/Aquatic should be a base trait you get.

 

[Nebbie Zebbie]

Because it's a bonus on your starting planet and guaranteeds with only downsides later on, and this is a snowbally game. In its current form, at 1 trait cost, it is probably one of the best traits to have, because most traits are utter garbage.
They would need to nerf it pretty hard for it to not be a net benefit and thus be worth 0 trait points.

 

[Ludaire]

The other 0-cost traits, with the exception of Survivor, all have serious, unavoidable down sides that balance out the bonuses.

Aquatic's penalties are more penalties to flexibility than actual output or growth, since it's not hard to stick to wet worlds, and everyone is bad on non-ideal worlds. Aquatic only makes that marginally worse.

 

[Millbot]

Also have to wonder if they had concerns about keeping it a zero cost trait would just incentivize people that went down biological ascension to throw the trait on all their pops if they happen to have a means to turn all their worlds into Gaia, relic, ringworld, ecumenpoli or ocean worlds. Mind you I'm checking the wiki and assuming it's correct and that I'm properly interpreting the information to mean that you either get the trait upon empire creation or mod into it. Didn't think to see if I could mod it in without biological ascension on my psionic fish pops (got zroni, so had to go psionic). If you can mod it in without biological ascension, well that makes things worse in a way.

if you nothing but the worlds I've already mentioned and it was still zero cost. There would be zero reason to not stick it on all your pops. In fact, that would make it one of the only zero cost traits you could add with gene modding and it's kind of easy to realize why that is likely going to always be bad design. More often than not, you get a scenario where it just becomes impossible to justify not adding it. At a single trait point cost, there is now an opportunity cost and that kills the incentive to add it to all your pops.

I also have to imagine that in additional to this being one of the best traits, the devs probably weren't crazy about the idea of aquatic making world shaper even less likely to be picked up (yes, Gaia world boost all production that isn't pop assembly, pop growth added by jobs, stability, amenities and trade value, but there are so many better ascension perk options than world shaper). Anyone can terraform a world into an ocean world and I'd argue that aquatic trait puts hydrocentric ahead of world shaper anyways; especially, if someone decides to go tall (god, I'm hoping sprawl and unity rework actually gives tall some solid advantages that wide doesn't have, while raining in the snowball ability of going wide).

 

[GloatingSwine]

Anyone can terraform a world into an ocean world and I'd argue that aquatic trait puts hydrocentric ahead of world shaper anyways; especially, if someone decides to go tall (god, I'm hoping sprawl and unity rework actually gives tall some solid advantages that wide doesn't have, while raining in the snowball ability of going wide).

Gaia worlds are still good for Aquatics because all the Aquatic bonuses are to worker output, so your ideal is to put workers on ocean worlds and specialists on gaias.

Meanwhile habitats are bad for Aquatics because they do trigger the penalties, so you want to be a planet focused build (IIRC Ecus don't have penalties, not sure about ringworlds).

 

[Ryika]

Even at 1 cost, it's still a really good trait. In the early game, the trait essentially gets you a combined 5 points worth of upsides combined into a single trait, with downsides that can largely be mitigated and avoided. The downsides become more visible later on, but you can play around them, and early game snowballing is very potent.