think that because poop explosion to your face is now worse means Psionic Ascension is somehow weaker than the other 3 just shows how one dimension your thinking is.
Oh man, a poop explosion? What a strong ascension.
I have mostly lost the ability to take your comment seriously, but to the extent that I can; psionics getting any ship components at all is not guaranteed, lacking the power tech to do anything meaningful with shields is guaranteed until you can take on a fallen empire, and other ascensions are strictly better than psionics for per-pop production without Instruments of Desire. They are almost as good with it, and they have pop assembly.
If you want me to accept downsides for what I can only assume you were trying to say was explosively good pops,
5-10% is not going to cut it. Try 40-50% effective increased production. This brings me to the 5-10% bonus psionics has over other ascensions, which is more along the lines of 3-6% in real output, with a quarter or so fewer pops at least which DO scale multiplicatively. With 50% bonus resources, a 20% boost gives 150+20=170 and not 150*1.2=180. This means the extremely minor percentage output bonuses on psionics over other ascensions
do almost nothing. With 20% more pops on a 50% boost, you get 20% more than after-bonuses production: 20% from telepaths gives 20% before-bonuses production. This means that pop assembly alone gives more of an output boost than psionics has, except they also have actual output bonuses: they're just slightly smaller.
Psionics does not have production bonuses competing with pop assembly (which would still be worse, mind, because of the above, but could be a fair trade for potentially great shroud bonuses). It has production bonuses competing with slightly smaller production bonuses
and pop assembly.
This means that, generously, psionics with all shroud bonuses unlocked might be on par with other ascensions - except they don't have a mutually parasitic relationship with spiritualist, and are guaranteed to get all of their bonuses after one project and the tradition itself. In order for psionic to get the full bonuses necessary to
maybe be on par with the other ascensions you need the same number of projects, a Holy Covenant at level 5 (and therefore almost always the diplomacy tree in addition to the psionic tree), to fish for stuff from the shroud for literal decades worth of game time, get or buy zro, and to gain dark matter reactors. Oh, and the tech for psionics itself is rare with a specially rare specialty trait. Don't try to tell me psionics is really strong if your argument is going to make it clear you read off the wiki what psionics can give you but obviously have never actually tried it to compare it to literally any other ascension.
Ironically, your thinking is entirely one dimensional - psionics CAN have these bonuses, therefore it does and every single peripheral loss MUST be trivial because you've played other ascensions and those had trivial downsides. Guess what: they're not. Don't condescend if you can't back it up with knowledge instead of "poop explosion" and how psionics isn't the "worse of the 3 ascensions." Here's a hint: there are four ascensions. This is why I'm not taking you seriously. Are you playing on a previous version and literally unaware of the downsides or something? Is that why you think there are three ascensions? Do you actually literally have no idea what you're talking about or are you just incapable of assessing all (four) ascensions and seeing that they all have comparable upsides except only psionics has downsides compared to no ascension at all?
