I just got done playing my first 2.2 game, with stock Lokken Mechanists. For custom start enthusiasts who've forgotten the stock starts, the Lokk are fanatic materialist, individualist, and start with robots.
Starting with robots more or less commits you to synth ascension, which I like anyway because synths have +200 habitability everywhere. Unlocking synths seemed to take longer than I remember, so by the time I did get a synth ascension my all-refugees-welcome policy had already got me a decent variety of hab preferences. Nevertheless, I followed through and turned everyone into machines.
When my very large empire abruptly stopped eating, I suddenly had way more food than I knew what to do with. The 0 job food-to-energy building was no solution, not worth the building slots. I preferred replacing food districts and selling food on the galactic market - and eventually I just let it overflow cap, since I was winning and didn't need to do the extra management.
I did not have difficulty feeding my machine citizens with energy, unlike the author of this thread on gestalt synths. Trade value is powerful and gestalts really need a strong bonus to make up for it.
I did have a great deal of difficulty keeping my population housed and employed - a difficulty magnified by the fact that free synths do not migrate. While I was playing, a minor patch fixed the useful bug which allowed me to resettle free synths despite my individualist prohibition on resettlement. When I liberated the awakened empire's species preserve I had an utterly intractable housing disaster.
This may be older than 2.2, but using "assimilation" to upgrade pops to cyborgs or synths doesn't feel like the kind of thing an individualist empire should do (ditto xenophiles). On the other hand there's no mechanic for allowing materialist organics to opt in to the system, and I had a lot of robot bonuses, so assimilate I did. I would like to see the ascension upgrades shifted away from the species right in favor of a dedicated policy: Mandatory or Voluntary. (Or prohibited, if someone imposes spiritualism on you. Then again, I expect that a synth ascended empire would break completely under imposed spiritualism.) Voluntary upgrades would not lock population into unemployment and bad living conditions, in exchange for some (i.e. spiritualist) pops not getting with the program. Mandatory upgrade could preserve the current penalties or, perhaps, something less severe.
As things stand, I would strongly recommend that anyone planning to synth ascend be at least 1 step authoritarian and take the cheaper resettlement civic. You are going to want to move your mechanical citizens and they aren't going anywhere on their own.
Late in the game I picked up some cyborg refugees, and amusingly I was not allowed to assimilate them to synths - only purely organic pops could be assimilated.
As I mentioned above, the awakened empire was xenophile/species preserve and didn't start any trouble, even when I was ripping claims out of the successor khanate and subjugating my rivals. In fact they were quite helpful when the Unbidden showed up! My standing fleets were no match for the Unbidden, but the awakened xenophiles were willing to start a federation with me and held the Unbidden back until I was able to assemble enough federation battleships to push to the rift and chew through their fleets.
Of course, the moment the Unbidden's gate was destroyed, they left the Federation, and I gave them cause to regret letting me build a fleet of ships with their technology. The game clock ended shortly after I obtained their surrender.
So, Synth ascension is not so broken I wasn't able to ride technological superiority to galactic domination, but there are rough spots I'd like to see fixed.
Starting with robots more or less commits you to synth ascension, which I like anyway because synths have +200 habitability everywhere. Unlocking synths seemed to take longer than I remember, so by the time I did get a synth ascension my all-refugees-welcome policy had already got me a decent variety of hab preferences. Nevertheless, I followed through and turned everyone into machines.
When my very large empire abruptly stopped eating, I suddenly had way more food than I knew what to do with. The 0 job food-to-energy building was no solution, not worth the building slots. I preferred replacing food districts and selling food on the galactic market - and eventually I just let it overflow cap, since I was winning and didn't need to do the extra management.
I did not have difficulty feeding my machine citizens with energy, unlike the author of this thread on gestalt synths. Trade value is powerful and gestalts really need a strong bonus to make up for it.
I did have a great deal of difficulty keeping my population housed and employed - a difficulty magnified by the fact that free synths do not migrate. While I was playing, a minor patch fixed the useful bug which allowed me to resettle free synths despite my individualist prohibition on resettlement. When I liberated the awakened empire's species preserve I had an utterly intractable housing disaster.
This may be older than 2.2, but using "assimilation" to upgrade pops to cyborgs or synths doesn't feel like the kind of thing an individualist empire should do (ditto xenophiles). On the other hand there's no mechanic for allowing materialist organics to opt in to the system, and I had a lot of robot bonuses, so assimilate I did. I would like to see the ascension upgrades shifted away from the species right in favor of a dedicated policy: Mandatory or Voluntary. (Or prohibited, if someone imposes spiritualism on you. Then again, I expect that a synth ascended empire would break completely under imposed spiritualism.) Voluntary upgrades would not lock population into unemployment and bad living conditions, in exchange for some (i.e. spiritualist) pops not getting with the program. Mandatory upgrade could preserve the current penalties or, perhaps, something less severe.
As things stand, I would strongly recommend that anyone planning to synth ascend be at least 1 step authoritarian and take the cheaper resettlement civic. You are going to want to move your mechanical citizens and they aren't going anywhere on their own.
Late in the game I picked up some cyborg refugees, and amusingly I was not allowed to assimilate them to synths - only purely organic pops could be assimilated.
As I mentioned above, the awakened empire was xenophile/species preserve and didn't start any trouble, even when I was ripping claims out of the successor khanate and subjugating my rivals. In fact they were quite helpful when the Unbidden showed up! My standing fleets were no match for the Unbidden, but the awakened xenophiles were willing to start a federation with me and held the Unbidden back until I was able to assemble enough federation battleships to push to the rift and chew through their fleets.
Of course, the moment the Unbidden's gate was destroyed, they left the Federation, and I gave them cause to regret letting me build a fleet of ships with their technology. The game clock ended shortly after I obtained their surrender.
So, Synth ascension is not so broken I wasn't able to ride technological superiority to galactic domination, but there are rough spots I'd like to see fixed.
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