Synthetic Evolution...

[xxaxx]

So on my second game i decided to go SE and boy i was in for a shock. So here are some questions regarding it.

I had a very strong empire going, insane tech (i was playing MP with friends and i was basically overwhelming compared to almost everyone), very good economy (was very careful to build stuff on planets when unemployment came up etc.) all was going well when i was only a cyborg.

Then my species became robots and all hell broke loose. My energy production went into the shit (from like +100 to -150), ok to be expected all pops have energy upkeep now and fixable by changing some stuff.
Next was losing a ton of minerals (like from +80 to -10), why? Do robots need more minerals to function?

All my planets went into serious deficit of amnesties, guessing robot pops really need more, so ok not a problem.

Here are the two killer ones though, 2 i don't understand.

Why did i suddenly have insane unemployment on my worlds (from having a perfect population to employment ratio) to some planets having almost 10+ unemployed and why did i suddenly have such a big housing shortage? What am i missing?

Also apart from trading it on the market, the +150 food really was a bit of a waste....

 

[Stadtpark]

I had the same experience: luckily I had an Arcology / Ecomenopolis world where I could transfer my unemployed citizens to.

What I felt most harming when going Synthetic Evolution is, that my species lost its "Thrifty" trait (+25% trade from jobs), and it can't be added onto synthetics!

At least I can add "Propaganda machines" +15% Unity from jobs to make up for the loss of the "Traditional" (+10% Unity from Jobs) trait.

Also Synthetic Evolution gives immortal rulers with "Synthetic"-Trait: Governors gving +5% Energy from jobs and +5% Minerals from jobs, and the Reasearchers get +5% research, but still the loss of "Thrifty" hurt pretty bad. Also I'm getting the impression that Biological Ascension ends up with more trait points and better / additional "super-traits" compared to robot-modification points: the 200% habitability does not make any difference compared to what you end up with when gene-modding your species if you went with the biological ascension.

Selling Food / building Bio-Reactors / making up for the extra energy needs takes a while to adjust / leaves you with losses on conversion at first, until you adapted.

What I found cool about Synthetic Evolution is, that your Capital Buildings give Roboticist jobs, so at least your species is able to keep growing / you don't have to build Robot assembly plants everywhere. - I just had to introduce population controls, to be able to actually switch the assembly to my main species instead of robots and the "Awoken" guys from the event...
And for a while the other species in your empire still grow normally (- until you change their species citizenship rights to assimilation and you wait until that happened: at least you don't need to micromanage / gene-mod each and every species, since they will just "become" your actual species over time.)

As an aside / P.S.:I did a Biological Ascension game before with a Megacorp Authority, that went extremely well, so I'm a little disappointed with this playthrough so far, but you can't really compare playthroughs: I would have needed to do ideology / liberation wars as usual with my federation, but instead I didn't declare war myself, but my federation members did it for me, and so I found myself doing very ineffective wars over a few single systems to conquer multiple times and decades, always having to wait until my federation members who started the war were willing to make peace etc.. - Instead of changing the whole landscape of the galaxy, I just wasted my time for very very little gains. (Not even mentioning the fact that I dissolved my federation and founded a new one mid-game, and am currently thinking of leaving again... - my friends have been more trouble than they were worth...)
Also I did many other things suboptimal this playthrough - I'm so starved on influence: I ended up with more factions earlier on, that I needed to supress, as I chose the Harmony traditions 5th I think instead of 2nd this time, and that boosted my influence spending / upkeep very high; also by racing ahead in tech I left every one else "pathetic" in earlier years, so I had no normal empires to rival, so I lost also on influence gain. And I'm not fanatic xenophile this time, which means my treaties with other empires actually cost monthly influence. And I'm not egalitarian, which means I don't get additional influence from the good factions.

 

[01d55]

Robot growth uses jobs that consume minerals, and synth ascension adds those jobs to planet capitols. That would explain the spike in mineral consumption.

If you didn't emancipate synths before completing ascension, your previously assembled robots would have gone from 0.5 housing to 1.0, as synth ascension implies citizen synths.

I'm not sure about unemployment, you'd have to investigate a planet for that. I do know that organic pops being assimilated into synths are unemployed for the duration, but every existing organic in your empire should be converted at ascension.

 

[Kryndude]

Just don't take it. Not worth it unless just for the sake of challenge.

 

[Tech Noir Synth]

Synthetic Evolution has huge downsides.

Bio reactors are not worth a building slot.

Fodd and Energy are inherently imbalanced simply because you gain less energy per worker than you get food per worker. Of course Energy has the potential to translate into minerals, consumer goods or alloys. But simply relying on selling food to cover energy cost is a risk. Food price can crash easily thanks to other players or yourself purging livestock.

When I take an ascencion slot I don't want to risk my economy crashing because of something I have no control over, like someone else purging a bunch of pops and selling food.

Full citizenship synths are a huge downgrade from enslaved synths because of 2x housing requirements. Here is something I posted in other threads aswell, but I will keep bringing this up in case some of you have not seen it:

Upkeep for free pops is substantial (1.25F + 0.25CG + 1 Amenity + 1 Housing / worker)

• Enslaved synths (additional +10% production from tech, w/ Flesh is Weak to prevent AI rebellion plus other buffs) or droids (+5% from efficient processors) are the best pops in game. ($1 + 1 Amenity + 0.5 Housing / specialist) Plus they have no PP or happiness unlike slaves, which means high stability and high resource output. Taking synthetic evolution ironically downgrades their usefulness as upkeep is substantially higher. In fact, droids are preferable to enslaved synths, and IMO the synthetic path is somewhat weak.
• Slaves are the next best pops in game. (1.25F + 0.05CG + 0.75 Amenity)

Other huge problems:

The engineering research problem: Engineering research is the most important in the game because of better Starbase tech which is mandatory for staying alive. You sacrifice a huge amount of engineering research when choosing this Ascension path which as you can read above might not be worth it.

The robomodding problem: Not only do you require and exorbitant amount of engineering research for your Ascencion project. You also need even more engineering research for Robomodding your species since they lose all traits.

Ways to improve Synthetic Ascencion:

In its current state Droids or slaves are simply the better pops because of low upkeep and housing. There are multiple ways to tackle this imbalance:

Reduce housing usage of civil right synths to something inbetween 0,5 and 1, for example 0,75.

Reduce engineering cost for special projects.

When completing synth ascencion you should be able to choose Robomodded traits for your species already OR drastically lower robomodding costs.

Much needed Quality of life change: Allow Synths/Robots to automatically migrate. Having to resettle manually makes the already painful amount of micromanagement completely unbearable.

Seriously. All the min/maxing talk aside. I cannot force myself through micromanaging 50 planets with a non functional sector system. On top of that, I have to keep resettling all my produced Robots manually to new colonies or conquered worlds.

I don't care what your opinion is on synthetic ascencion, but this manually resettling is enough for me to not want to choose it ever again. It has to stop.

 

[starz]

To tell you more - in my case I went for my first synthetic ascension in 2.2 with a FP empire (keep in mind it can't be picked w/ materialist ethic) while having some leftover droids in servitude\specialist positions, and did ascend in the lategame having a large-scale empire and some +900 energy pre-project.

Right after ascending I got -1100 energy (?!) and no ability to pick the species rights for my "reborn" synthetic population at all (presumably, b/c of choosing certain droid rights before ascension), which means that I have no ruler/administratior strata AND all ex-rules on all planets are automatically unemployed.

I sure hope some dev can look into it (@Jamor ?) since I run only ironman games and can't roll back any progress. I can give my save file ofc.

 

[Volapyk]

I just did a Synthetic Evolution game on the newest beta branch patch, and yes you really do have to prepare your economy for the switch from food to energy. Other than that I don't recognize the problems you are having.

The energy shortage is a given, going from 'eating' food to energy causes that.

Mineral shortage is easily explained as well, robots have to be constructed, which costs minerals, 6 per job (or is it 4?) so a difference of 90 seems reasonable.

Amenity shortage is probably that robots you previously had are now considered free citizens and thus need more amenities.

I have no idea why you have so many unemployed citizens though, would need a closer look at the planets to better understand which pops are unemployed and why. Is there a loss of ruler jobs or specialist jobs maybe? Or is it pops that are being assimilated?

 

[starz]

I have no idea why you have so many unemployed citizens though, would need a closer look at the planets to better understand which pops are unemployed and why. Is there a loss of ruler jobs or specialist jobs maybe? Or is it pops that are being assimilated?

I am a FP (fanatic purifier), so i don't get to assimilate anyone. But - yes, all rulers are unemployed and I gave a presumption as to why this happens.

The energy shortage is a given, going from 'eating' food to energy causes that.

Energy shortage is explainable and is to be expected. What is NOT expected is the sheer ammount of it. There's no in-game calculation as to how much energy your pops will consume AFTER the ascension project (which is quite weird).

 

[Tech Noir Synth]

Looks like you didn't change Synths to full citizen rights before doing the ascencion project. Like probably hundreds or thousands of other players who have been posting this problem over and over again. The no ruler bug might have been fixed in 2.2.4 beta patch but I am not sure of it. A save way to prevent this bug is to simply give your synths full citizen rights before doing the ascencion project. Sadly since you are ironman you are probably out of luck unless you can do some savegame editing. The exact same happened to me in my first playthrough of 2.2 and I had to abandon that save.