Thrall World + Livestock = Free Food forever

[Dementor4]

It seems to me this combo is really strong for xenophobes:

1. Invade Primitive World in the first few years of the game
2. Set the natives to "Livestock"
3. Manually delete their primitive capitol building so your shelter gets built (This is a bug: it's supposed to happen automatically). Upgrade it.
   
4. Shift a few of your pops over there to run things, filling the ruler/enforcer jobs
5. When you have the Thrall Worlds tech, turn the planet into a Thrall World
6. Enjoy having free food forever*.

You don't need to build any districts for them to farm, so you're saving massively on minerals that you can apply elsewhere. Livestock uses very little housing: one "Slave Hovel" building fits 32 livestock pops (or more if they're communal). Overseer buildings keep crime down if and when it outpaces the ability of your enforcer pops. One of the best parts of all this: because you aren't using districts, this strategy keeps your sprawl extremely low, effectively increasing your tech/unity output.

The agrarian trait doesn't increase food yield from livestock, but any trait that improves output by "workers" or "jobs" will. This means strong/very strong pops make good food, as do serviles and proles. Once you have genetic ascension, robust pops and nerve staples pops will produce more food as well.

*As the game wears on the stability of the planet will drop, as even the low political influence of the slaves will begin to lower your approval rating on the planet. The best solution to this is nerve staples, and of course once you can nerve staple them you can also make them delicious, at which point your food surplus grows to the point where you can dump your excess food on the market, effectively giving you energy income as well.

 

[Retry]

IIRC someone tested and found that Livestock's food yield actually is increased by the Agrarian trait.

 

[strangebloke]

Even nicer, you open up dozens of building slots, so you can also make it a forge world with 100+ metallurgists working, or whatever.

Truthfully, this is probably the best way to make your habitats worthwhile.

 

[Dementor4]

IIRC someone tested and found that Livestock's food yield actually is increased by the Agrarian trait.

A bug, one assumes? Is the yeild improved by all "food from farmers" modifiers?

 

[Adolf - Finite War]

The agrarian trait doesn't increase food yield from livestock, but any trait that improves output by "workers" or "jobs" will. This means strong/very strong pops make good food, as do serviles and proles. Once you have genetic ascension, robust pops and nerve staples pops will produce more food as well.

So, I got job on killing floor as a knocker. It is a good job. Yeah, skilled labor. A xeno comes up the ramp. Boom, boom, boom. And you take a sledge hammer, and - Boop! You knock the xeno dead. It takes strength. It takes strength, but not only strength. It takes talent, because it's a craft. You have to do it right, or the xeno gets angry. And angry meat taste bad. Yeah, you need arms to break the skull, but that's not the goal. The goal is to crush the brain inside the skull, and quick, before the pain can travel from outside the brain to the inside, so the brain never knows the brain is crushing. To give a good death is art.

 

[Dementor4]

Another note: which empires have a "xenophage" opinion penalty doesn't always make sense. Most standard empires don't seem to care at all, only xenophiles care, and then it's only a -25 penalty, but because they're xenophiles anyway it's not like they're hard to make friends with. Oddly, both machine intelligence empires and hive minds have the penalty, and there's no reason for either of them to care.

Also: it's very odd to me how poorly the "processing" purge type compares to livestock slaves in terms of food production right now. Playing Devouring Swarms is so painful right now because you hardly get any food at all from eating a whole planet full of 20 primitive pops.

 

[Bouchart]

IIRC someone tested and found that Livestock's food yield actually is increased by the Agrarian trait.

Yes, livestock food output is increased by Agrarian, Never Stapled, and Strong/Very Strong.

 

[Talanic]

Even nicer, you open up dozens of building slots, so you can also make it a forge world with 100+ metallurgists working, or whatever.

Truthfully, this is probably the best way to make your habitats worthwhile.

This is about a thrall world, where you can't build metallurgists. Although, resettling your thralls and reengineering them to something else should let you go right ahead.

 

[SadNova]

IIRC someone tested and found that Livestock's food yield actually is increased by the Agrarian trait.

Yes it is. Livestock is truly very interesting because the pops carry their own job. You can ship them to the newly colonized planet to unlock the building slots, and start to build science/alloy buildings immediately without the penalty of unemployment.

 

[SadNova]

A bug, one assumes? Is the yeild improved by all "food from farmers" modifiers?

It doesn't seem to be a bug to me. Agrarian trait reads "increase food from jobs", not necessarily the farmers. The farmer specific modifiers are not working on livestock.

 

[y1kdcb5au9rqw]

Since livestock does not create farmer jobs to harvest them it can be assumed that they tend themselves and therefore the farmer bonuses should apply.

 

[strangebloke]

This is about a thrall world, where you can't build metallurgists. Although, resettling your thralls and reengineering them to something else should let you go right ahead.

I'm talking about habitats.

The best use of livestock, IMO, is using them to unlock buliding slots. Shipping them to a thrall world misses out on a lot of the potential there. Using them on a habitat lets you potentially crowd 100+ employed pops into a habitat, which is crazy.

 

[Dustman]

Livestock is god-sent for Hives. Since most of thing for Hives requires food, picking couple of homeworlds early on really makes life easy in the long run. And later you can modify locals with NS, Fertile, Delicious and Agrarian for very, very good yields.

This is one of the reasons I dislike Devourers.