Spiritual in 2.2 ?

[ShoGuL]

Is it just me or do spiritual civs seem kind of weak in the current patch? I love playing spirual, but currently other options seem more attractive.

Genetic ascension gives +33% growth speed.

Going NON spiritualist gives +2 base growth (robots). Synthetic Ascension gives (I believe) +10 growth per planet.

Spiritual ascension gives.. +10 stability, +5% happiness, 10% research and access to a super random shroud event once in a while?


Am I missing something? How are spiritual civs meant to compete without robots and without picking genetic ascension? And +20% unity and -10% edict cost seems kind of meh too... unity just doesn't seem that important in the current version of the game.

Let me know if anyone has an actual 'strong' spiritual build please

 

[Bouchart]

Temples are nice. They give amenities and society research along with unity. Spiritualist empires don't have to go Psionic since there's always Biological. Robots are a bit of an oddity because of their upkeep costs and some people are sour on them for that reason.

I think they are suited for a high Unity build. Not only do they unlock traditions sooner, Unity Ambitions are now part of the base game and don't require Apocalypse. Spiritualist has +unity and -edict cost. And those Unity Ambitions have some strong modifiers to them. Getting Will to Power early gives your influence a real shot in the arm. Or Architectural Renaissance and get out those megastructures more quickly.

 

[Fungers]

You can consecrate a few worlds to reduce your admin costs rather than colonizing them.

 

[ShoGuL]

Temples are nice. They give amenities and society research along with unity. Spiritualist empires don't have to go Psionic since there's always Biological. Robots are a bit of an oddity because of their upkeep costs and some people are sour on them for that reason.

I think they are suited for a high Unity build. Not only do they unlock traditions sooner, Unity Ambitions are now part of the base game and don't require Apocalypse. Spiritualist has +unity and -edict cost. And those Unity Ambitions have some strong modifiers to them. Getting Will to Power early gives your influence a real shot in the arm. Or Architectural Renaissance and get out those megastructures more quickly.

Hmm.. looked it up, and priests are actually okay. 5 amenities per priest compared to the culture worker makes them quite attractive. I am still not impressed by the High Priest, though

And yeah, unity ambitions are nice but, it seems to me that a materialist empire with technocracy will both reach unity ambitions faster (tech is the biggest bottleneck by far), and have the unity from researches to use the ambitions. I often end up picking cutthroat politics by the time unity ambitions come along anyway.

It's true that spiritual empires can go biological, but to me the entire point of being spiritual is to go transcendence! Which just doesn't seem very strong these days

A high unity build is all well and good, but how does it help your empire? The traditions are not generally that strong these days, and most ascension perks are locked behind tech anyway. I was kind of hoping spiritual had some sort of hidden modifiers to make it awesome, but it doesn't really look like it.


Stacking edicts might be a strategy, though.. picking executive vigor as your first perk for +50% duration, grabbing cutthroat politics for -20% cost (should probably be done when you get the third civic as you mostly need it for unity ambitions) with spiritual 10% means you should be able to keep up all 3 production edicts for +20% all basic resources and still have influence left over for other things. That seems fairly powerful, but again, anyone can do it, spiritual just gives a small bonus.