It's also late game, when unity is much less useful, and it still requires you to be running edicts. It's strong, sure, but they all are
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The New Precusor Building is absurdly broken
- Thread starter MagnusDux
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It's also late game, when unity is much less useful, and it still requires you to be running edicts. It's strong, sure, but they all are
This is a terrible analogy. Literally nobody spams bureaucrat jobs to build unity in the early game. Nobody's got the pops for that. The first building a serious culture planet will have is a monument, which right off the bat adds 5% Unity per tier of the building, and that's going to be on top of stuff like high stability, governor levels, general production bonuses, etc.
If we take a more serious look at Unity production in the mid-game when this building *might* be relevant, a max-level Unity building will have 6 jobs producing base 5 unity each (because we're not daft and we're building an Orbital Filing System). These jobs will then have a +25% bonus, minimum, from techs boosting resource output, a similar 25% bonus, minimum, from ascension-based production bonuses, another 25% minimum from high stability, another 12% or so from a Governor, 5% from Planetary Unification, 15% from an upgraded monument, some number of random 5% or 10% bonuses from events, anomalies, and situations, and also likely a few more 10% bonuses from traditions and AP's like Prosperity and/or One Vision. Finally, if you're actually going to build a Unity planet then you're building it on a planet with a misc. bonus like Wenkwort, which has a 40% bonus, Paradise Made which is 25%, a planet with The Sentinels which is 25%... there's a lot of options, there, and that's not even all the bonuses available.
Getting 10 unity per Bureaucrat in 2250 is not hard, so it's not 25 pops, it's *maybe* 10, but you're also losing out on the specialized job production of a better building for the planet if you decide to shove these on every planet in the galaxy, and that's a terrible idea, you never build this over a fully upgraded Tech Lab or Commerce Megaplex on a planet built for purpose, and planets doing basic resource production will have plenty of other, more practical uses for their relatively limited building slots such as housing buildings, amenity buildings, refineries, maybe some defensive buildings to double as a fortress world, and maybe some trade buildings. That's also just a rough stab at what can be done at mid-game. Once you're all the way into repeatable techs getting 13-14 Unity per Bureaucrat is not all that extreme.
Compare that, instead, to the Vultaum Reality Computer. It's basically a second Research Institute -- your researchers will produce 17% more reasearch in a way that works multiplicatively with the Research Institute and other Research bonuses -- basically a better modifier for a slightly worse job on the building itself. That's a crazy good building that always gets built on any remotely research-oriented planet as soon as possible.
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Yes it's true that with modifiers bureaucrats produce more than 5 unity but even in your example you're getting 10 pops worth of unity per planet (which is insane!). And what you say is incorrect, you are never capped on building slots so the opportunity cost of building this new building is close to zero. Even in tech worlds it will probably be worth to build it, the 6 researchers that would be working on the tier 3 research building can go to another tech planet, very rarely will the player run out of building slots. And in planets producing basic resources getting 10 pops worth of unity is obviously better than a refinery which you can always build somewhere else.
I never said it was going to be game-breaking, nor did i ever say that there weren't other things that where OP in the game. My point was that this effectively eliminates the cost of edicts. Whenever a player gets this precursor they will have all good edicts enabled all time which defeats the purpose of that system.
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No one builds unity planets. Everyone has room for a single building on (almost) every planet when that enables running every unity-based edict in the game.
The only balancing factor is the artifact cost, which does limit it somewhat.
The only balancing factor is the artifact cost, which does limit it somewhat.
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Ascensionists do. Rushing through the tree to start on those early ascensions is reasonably viable, now.
Agreed, though. This is like Monument v2. Monument was worth spamming on every planet because it gave 5/10/15% extra unity from the politicians you already had and gave X pop-free unity, plus (for some ethics) some better-than-bureaucrat culture worker jobs.
This gives 3-4x as much pop-free unity as a max level monument with all the APs finished, gives 4 better-than-bureaucrats jobs (5 unity and 1 amenity, at the very least, with possible stability, trade value, even more amenities, etc. depending on ethics and civics).
Spam it everywhere. Continue to make 0 unity worlds, but now get unity output like any other empire that is making unity worlds.
I'm very confused by all the people in this thread who apparently think +100 unity per month with 0 pops (other than 1/2-1/3 of a translucer and 1/2-1/8 of a technician) is just fine, and shouldn't cause any problems at all. We must play very different games if edicts being free doesn't change anything at all.
Like, if it was just "Here's a job that produces 50 unity with 5 energy and 1 crystal in upkeep. One per planet.", that would obviously be broken, right? Or 25 unity? Are edicts really so worthless for your playstyle that edict fund isn't even worth half of its value in unity?
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If you can run every edict at the same time without any cost then it is absurdly broken. It's still not game breaking but it's absurd.
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Almost every planet? I'm not building it on trade planets, I'm not building it on science planets, I'm not building it on my Capital, and I'm not building it on Fortress worlds. That leaves Forge worlds and Rural worlds, which I'm going to try to minimize housing districts on and, therefore, minimize building slots, so the question then becomes what misc. utility buildings does this thing beat out? Certainly not pop assembly buildings or Psi Corps, not Alloy production buildings, and probably not the first one or two housing buildings or amenity buildings.
The only building you should think of building on every planet in your empire is a Fortress and a Shield Generator because that's a pretty compact way to make your colonized system *far* more heavily defended. If you're building a Unity building on every planet in your system, however, then as soon as you have 5 or 6 planets you should actually stop doing that and instead build a specialized Unity planet.
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Are you playing without logistic growth or something? 90% of planets in my empire by 2300 are at like 30/40 pop. I have hundreds, no, thousands of build slots.
Literally never built one lol. Probably should but too much micro for something you'll probably not use.
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Sir/Madam i don't mean to be disrespectful, i really don't, but i think you don't understand the concept of the opportunity cost of a building. Why wouldn't you build this new building in a science planet? You can build it instead of one of the research buildings, you'll gain +100 Edicts Fund and loose 2/4/6 researcher jobs. There will always be another planet that you can make into a science planet and where you can build that research building instead and move the 2/4/6 pops that lost their jobs. There is no (or barely any) opportunity cost of building any building.
In Stellaris the main resource that constrains the economy is the number of pops, never the number of building slots, you will always have room to build a building somewhere, yet you might not have pops to work those jobs. That's why buildings that produce something without labor input have the potential to be OP, you can spam them everywhere and there's no need for pops.
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Why? I mentioned like 5 buildings in there that give 1 or fewer jobs and, therefore, provide maximum benefit to planets that don't have high pop numbers.
Imagine this: I build 1 Science Lab on every world. That's awful, right? Why is it awful, though? Well, we've got planetary designations that give bonuses to certain jobs and nothing to anyone else. In the case of the non-Science worlds, those researchers are the "everyone else" not getting any bonuses. In the case of the Science worlds, the everyone else is every other job on the world except the researchers. On top of that there are buildings -- both planetside and orbital -- that increase the output of researchers.
Here we have the same issue. You're using a building to essentially build unity instead of building more of whatever that planet is good at, and as a direct result you're not getting any bonuses or synergy to that building. Even if you changed the planet designation to unity, because this isn't real unity and is, instead, Edict Fund, you don't even have the option to boost it's output with a planet designation.
Now here's where I need you to pay attention. If you're building a unity building on each of 6 worlds instead of buildings that those worlds can actually use, then why aren't you just dedicating a planet to Unity production? You're dedicating nearly a whole planet's worth of building slots to Unity production, so why not just throw in the rest of the planet? It *will* be more efficient, especially since this particular Unity building boosts the Unity output of the other Unity buildings.
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It doesn't matter if you don't have a planet designation for Edicts Fund, the building produces it for free, you don't need pops to produce it. If instead you create a unity specialized planet you'll need pops to work those jobs, and those pops have a very high opportunity cost because there's only so many pops and they could be working other jobs in other planets. It will not be "more efficient" because producing something for free is far better than spending pops to produce it.
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The ideal I think is that a) precursors often push you in a certain direction, but b) it's usually a direction you can take.
So for instance if you find Zroni as a Materialist, it's a bit of an awkward shift but you can still go Psionic, and you may reconsider your empire ethics. However if you find Zroni as a Gestalt, it's just a trash precursor, because most of the benefit is completely inaccessible to you. From this perspective I think there's a good case for the Psionic Archive or something else to give some alternative benefits to Gestalts specifically. Then again, particularly for Machine Intelligences, there are quite a lot of precursor bonuses that are irrelevant, so it would take a lot to make all the precursors equally interesting for them.
An alternative approach would be to make precursors random but not completely arbitrary, basically "veto" the ones that are near-useless for your empire type. So for example you could make it so Gestalts will never discover the Zroni and machine empires never discover the Baol. That would take away a lot of the frustration without going all the way to the other extreme of letting everyone pick a specific precursor.
In terms of timing I don't think this will be substituting for Executive Vigor exactly, but what it would mean is that later in the game, you get not only whatever basic unity edicts you want (there are some you won't want because of the downsides), but also several "Ambition" edicts for free. That is an awful lot of bonuses to be getting.
It's a bold move balance-wise, certainly. I don't think it would inherently be a balance disaster if the other precursors were given equally wacky benefits (counting relics), for example some other precursor could give you a 1 per planet Ancient Cloning Vat, or another could give you effectively infinite amenities, and so on. A bonus like +1 food/CG from farmers though is clearly not in the same league.
As for the argument that First League doesn't give a relic, so it should get a more powerful building, you can make a case that *Fen Habbanis III* is the relic, and it's also getting buffed (in a way that will help pay for the buildings!). It's way stronger than any of the other precursor homeworlds, except Cybrex Alpha (but the latter takes a while to actually bring into action).
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What does that have to do with anything? As I said, you have at least hundreds of build slots available by the mid/late game. There's no opportunity cost between this and other buildings that use no/low pop numbers.
I've often seen this logical fallacy in games. I think I need to coin a term for it, something like "specialization/synergy fixation"
Just because something A gets a bonus from something X doesn't mean that doing A is always the best idea when you have X. In this case, it's clear that getting 100 unity from a building slot is better than virtually anything else. A single research building is minuscule in comparison, especially when you can build it anywhere else in your empire.
Because a building that takes 0 pops to produce 100 unity is better than a building that takes multiple pops to produce less unity. No, it won't be more efficient. There is no other way you can use 0 pops to produce 100 unity. Granted you can use monuments to produce 24 unity with zero pops after you've unlocked all your perks and the tech for them, but this is still plainly better and also works with some edicts that scale their cost as a % of your unity production. And if you're using monuments to do that then you're doing the exact same thing of building one on every planet of your empire and then disabling the jobs.
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Sure, but there are good ways of achieving that goal, and bad ways.
If these buildings go live the way they were presented, then getting the first league as your precursor is the difference between running all the Edicts you could ever want, and probably not running any until you've run out of things to do with your unity. If you get the Zroni instead, you'll get access to a defensive starbase building that you probably don't need. If you're a machine that rolls the Zroni, that will feel even worse than it already does.
Realistically speaking, how do these things actually change your game plan in any radical way? Might make the difference between taking that new Ascension Perk or not, and you'll need some extra building slots for the building (neither seem particularly exciting or radical to me), but other than that it just seems like you'll either get a large bonus for your late game, or you won't, depending on a random roll that you had no control over.
this is OP for biology ascendition when you have clone buildings that eat 30 food for every planet
I world rly love it as my main for my overtuned spieces ...
If they keep precursors exclusive to human players, finding a precursor will feel even more like cheating against the AI now.
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I should clarify that I was speaking more in general terms, replying to the sentiment of the post in question, than specific ones about these particular bonuses.
I haven't played with any of these buildings yet and don't even know what they all do, so I won't speak much to balance or how game changing they are. Obviously if one is a useless starbase building and another is free edict capacity you can spam everywhere, then there will be some feels bad moments.
You can feed the cloning vats easily just with farmers. It's actually pretty easy to get it relatively cheaper than the basic spawning pool, which is 1 pop + 5 food for 2 assembly, while the clone vats are 30 food for 4.5 assembly. Meaning if your farmers can produce more than 2 assembly / 4.5 assembly * 25 food = 11.11 food apiece, you should be scrapping the spawning pools in favor of clone vats (or just running both of course).
I mean - ambitions edicts can easily cost 2k-3k edict fund per ambition. This building certainly helps in this cases.
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