Necroid Hive needs buffs desperately.
Please take a look at these pictures:
The weird thing is, the Necrophytes are still set to Livestock status and also have 0% Happyness. But why? They are a specialist job and do not work in the livestock job anymore yet they still destroy your Stability. And other players have reported that you cannot nerve-staple the livestock slaves because then they can no longer use the Necrophyte job...
Nerve-stapling not supporting Necrophyte has been around since Necrophage was introduced. And managing non-hive mind unhappiness (and amenities in general) has been central to the Hivemind gameplay design.
Also as you can see on the "Assembling" picture, Necrophages are being assembled at an Abysmal 0.50 rate. Meanwhile non-Gestalt Necrophages can just build Robots at 2.0 assembly speed and ignore the growth and assembly Malus. Something needs to be done for Hives.
You're comparing apples to oranges here. Aside from that Necropahges can't start any pop assembly until they draw and build the robots, which could be decades into the game depending on RNG and economy, the proper basis of comparison is Necro-hives to other hive minds.
To which the balance is clearly non-symmetric by design: necro-hives get a slower pop assembly of a superior pop, but in turn also get livestock that grow, a unique job that gives more amenities and unity that Hives are often short in,
and the totally-unique necro-purge, which is the only hive-mind option to directly convert non-hive pops to the superior necro-hive pops.
Which, when combined with the Catalytic Converter civic, is extremely high-potential, as instead of minerals-to-alloys you can directly convert your livestock-to-alloys to then conquer more livestock for more alloys. Or- if you have too much livestock- necro-purge for more super-specialists.
Necro-hives have the highest snowball potential of any hive mind, as once they make their first conquest they can turn captives into far more productive assets far sooner than other hive-midns can.
Of course thats not where the problems end. You have your -10% Worker/ Menial Drone output which doesn't matter much for non-Gestalts because you just have your non-Necrophage do worker jobs. But as Hives, Necrophages have to work all jobs. So you are getting 5% bonus Complex Drone output but -10% Menial Drone output. Thats just bad. And you have a 5% Ruler output which does nothing because Gestalts don't have rulers.
If you're necrophages are working as energy workers or farmers, you're playing it wrong. Build your starbases and invest in solar panels and nebula refineries and the space economy.
An entire pillar of the gestalt economy game is that starbases- freed from trade- are far more integral to the early-game economy, while the worker economy is more limited by the amenities shortage. Solar Panels beat trade collectors for the first decades easily, hydroponics bays can cover entire early-game empires, and if you RNG a nebula you'll get loads of rare gases for boosting science output. Combine that with the Unyielding tree (+4 starbases, -50% starbase upgrade cost), and for the normal cost of four starbases you can get ~80 food/96 eneergy a month from 8 starbases alone. This is equivalent to nearly 20 pops of output at a time your empire is barely 40. Take the grasp the void perk in conjunction, and you can get another 50 food/62 energy in your first decades. This is more than enough to put all your starting -10% energy/farmer drones out of the energy/farmer jobs.
Where necrophages do have a weakness is their mineral economy, which is a balance to their unique trait of 5% not just to ruler-jobs, but specialist (ie, complex drones). But- if you're doing your starbase economy and letting starbases/livestock handle the food- you can compensate not only by having more pops available to be miners, but more pops available to be scientists, or live-stock fueled catalytic converters. And if it is that big an issue for you, you can always spec your race build to have the miner trait to bring them to 'normal' until you reach the Bio-Ascension mid-game and can replace it freely.
The necro-hive early game economic potential is
huge, and- assuming you take catalytic converters like any live-stock user should- has major snowball potential to simply out-muscle any non-rush empire economically with an early game economy/science build. Yes, it has an unusual build order- Unyielding trumping Expansion, Synchronicity is not a late-pick, Grasp the Void actually providing significant early-game advantage to support a science rush- but it's definitely doable.
.png){kind=avatar}
