Stellaris - Main species gets assimilated, nevertheless they already are machine, psionic type 2.8.1 [dfce]

[DerMoe]

Description
Main species gets assimilated, nevertheless they already are machine, psionic type 2.8.1 [dfce]

Game Version
2.8.1 [dfce]

What version do you use?
Steam

What expansions do you have installed?
Synthetic Dawn, Utopia, Leviathans Story Pack, Apocalypse, Megacorp, Distant Stars, Ancient Relics, Lithoids, Federations

Do you have mods enabled?
Yes

Please explain your issue is in as much detail as possible.
info to mods: this behavior happens in vanilla, if you load the file with vanilla.

Hi devs,

Problem described:
During using the observer mode I realized a strange behavior on planets. All jobs were missing for some seconds and sometimes this brings the empire's resources to a collapse. The pops must then choose all jobs again. This leads to buildings being aborted and other ones triggered due to the deficits. I guess it can also affect performance, since this happens randomly every 3-6 months and reruns the whole pop-economy calculation.

Finding the problem:
I looked up the planets and realized that besides the main species, which already has an assimilation trait (e.g. psionic, hive minded, machine, synthetic evolution), the AI starts to assimilate them once more. This behavior is weird, since assimilation should not be allowed on this species and the option is actually not activated. But somehow the AI still can access it.

Not solvable, it must be a bug:
I tried to do some modding on the citizen_types.txt to exclude the behavior with no succes. If you block assimilation completely the empire does not assimilate any more. But if you try to make exclusions as written in the allow = {} the empire still does assimilate and gets arround it. So my assumption is that the AI can somehow get around the allow = {} rules and access assimilation on their main species out of the scope of moddable files.

Documentation:
I documented the behavior in several screen shots and attached a save game. The savegame is from modding, but the same behavior can be seen on loading it up with vanilla. Please take a look at the files showing the machine empire being set to assimilation over and over again.

Please take care of this bug, since it affects the AI economy performance.

Kind regards,

Moe

Steps to reproduce the issue.
In the observer savegame you need to got to "Janagman Anocratic Marketplace" (id 7) and watch a planet or the species tab to see the behavior. It happens every 3-6 months.
There is another psionic empire, which suffers under the same issue.
I guess this problem affects all empire types that have an assimilation. But here there are only these two examples.

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File(s) attached

 

[pdx_struby]

Thank you for the report

 

[DerMoe]

Hello devs,

I analyzed the problem once more, since I realized that on my latest game the whole main species got assimilated and they already have the psionic trait. The interesting fact is, if you are a non AI empire, you cannot select the assimilate citizenship. If you then jump into observe, the main species gets assimilated directly by the AI.

So my guess is that if you are an AI empire the trigger "has_trait = psionic" does not work correctly. You can double check it by adding an always=no the line before 279 in 00_citizenship_types.txt to permit assimilation. Then the AI does nothing, too.

Please add this to the high priority, since it can harm the AI economy significantly.

Thank you and a happy new year start.

Moe

 

[Easo]

It seems that the same behaviour persists on 3.0.1.
If you are on Observer mode you can see that AI starts assimilating the primary species, even with xenophobic purging empires with single species. It absolutely breaks their economy.