Climate Restoration & the tech rebalance (2024)

Hansatron said:

Machine worlds are arguably closer to arcologies in that they are built, not terraformed. The notion that the atmosphere has largely been replaced with industrial pollution (according to the tooltip in game) is quite thematic.

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Hmm, perhaps Machine Worlds should be made a distinct form of Ecu instead of being a basic resource world.

They'd have 6-job districts for Energy, Alloys, Unity, and Research.

No food, no CG, and no minerals.

Origin / Homeworld variant might start with Scrap Mining districts in place of Research, and then you'll need to acquire another source of minerals before you restore the Machine World to full operation.

For empires which can use citizen robots, capturing a Machine World should feel pretty good.

HFY said:

Hmm, perhaps Machine Worlds should be made a distinct form of Ecu instead of being a basic resource world.

They'd have 6-job districts for Energy, Alloys, Unity, and Research.

No food, no CG, and no minerals.

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It's an interesting idea and it feels thematically appropriate for non-Servitor machines to also be able to make a very "tall" empire in terms of number of core colonies. On the other hand, you'd have to be careful to make this balanced so it's not *too* efficient; in particular, the whole energy->science/unity engine could get a bit out of hand when you also factor in planetary ascension (plus possibly the Guardian Matrix civic) to kill sprawl. There would also be a danger of overshadowing Ringworlds, which come significantly later in the game and are constrained by megastructure build limits.

HFY said:

Hmm, perhaps Machine Worlds should be made a distinct form of Ecu instead of being a basic resource world.

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I was literally thinking about exactly this earlier - make it cost alloys to convert, give it nexus, industrial, generator, and “computation” districts. The computation districts would provide both calculators and coordinators, but if you swap the planet designation, it would switch to one or the other, similar to how industrial districts work for normal empires. (Or we could do separate research and unity districts for reuse of assets.)

That would make them complex drone focused worlds versus hive’s simple drone focus, and you couldn’t just spam everywhere - my biggest gripe with the way they are now. 6 jobs / district might be too insane, though - perhaps 4. Even if it was only 2 jobs, any time players can access a research district you’re gambling with balance.

Regardless, that gives you more flexibility in the power budget. Machine worlds can’t be too strong right now or machines will just run away with it every time.

Incompetent said:

It's an interesting idea and it feels thematically appropriate for non-Servitor machines to also be able to make a very "tall" empire in terms of number of core colonies. On the other hand, you'd have to be careful to make this balanced so it's not *too* efficient; in particular, the whole energy->science/unity engine could get a bit out of hand when you also factor in planetary ascension (plus possibly the Guardian Matrix civic) to kill sprawl. There would also be a danger of overshadowing Ringworlds, which come significantly later in the game and are constrained by megastructure build limits.

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Machine Empires have a +% penalty to colony sprawl so my impression is that they were always intended to play "tall".

(And then regular empires got Ecus so they could do "tall" better than machines ...)

But yeah, it would need to be balanced.

Maybe no Energy, and the 5th district would be 2 Hunter-Killers and 4 Maintenance Drones instead. Then you'd need regular colonies to provide both minerals and energy, like how Ecus need external supplies of minerals and food.

Hansatron said:

Regardless, that gives you more flexibility in the power budget. Machine worlds can’t be too strong right now or machines will just run away with it every time.

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RS already get Ecus.

That said, I agree that machines should be balanced.

The whole point of the tech rebalance was to at least somewhat try to fix the broken pacing of the game where you get access to endgame features in the early game.

These kinds of threads demanding to have everything as early as possible are just baffling. No, you shouldn't have Hive/Machine worlds that early. It's supposed to be a late game feature. The real problem is that Traditions are obtained too quickly due to not being rebalanced along with the technology.

HFY said:

Machine Empires have a +% penalty to colony sprawl so my impression is that they were always intended to play "tall".

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Rogue Servitors definitely play tall, but they also have relatively little use for Machine Worlds. Driven Assimilator has a "wide" vibe to me in terms of the overall concept, even if in principle you could drag all the pops onto a small number of colonies. Determined Exterminator is supposed to go out and exterminate the organics, which doesn't fit in with sitting in a small part of the galaxy. (They're also stymied by inability to dump excess colonies as vassals, until they Become the Crisis and start just deleting the other empires.) The "basic" Machine Intelligence though needs a niche, and given their limited interest in most of the galaxy's pops, building up internally instead of blobbing is surely the natural niche for them to fit in.

HFY said:

Maybe no Energy, and the 5th district would be 2 Hunter-Killers and 4 Maintenance Drones instead. Then you'd need regular colonies to provide both minerals and energy, like how Ecus need external supplies of minerals and food.

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No energy production would be more reasonable, although the fact that Dyson Spheres (and soon, a cheaper/earlier version: Dyson Swarms) exist is also a big factor until you get really huge.

The main thing basic machines need colony spam for is actually drone assembly; that's the most painful part of being a non-Assimilator machine to be honest, your drones are highly efficient (including sprawl-efficient) once you have them, but assembling them is a huge chore. The ability to mass Replicators on a single colony would be a godsend for any sort of "tall" strategy, but again, it shouldn't be too efficient (and you have to be especially careful letting Rogue Servitors anywhere near this sort of capability, given how many alloys/science they can make per drone).

Takfloyd said:

The whole point of the tech rebalance was to at least somewhat try to fix the broken pacing of the game where you get access to endgame features in the early game.

These kinds of threads demanding to have everything as early as possible are just baffling. No, you shouldn't have Hive/Machine worlds that early. It's supposed to be a late game feature. The real problem is that Traditions are obtained too quickly due to not being rebalanced along with the technology.

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Agree with premise on pacing but the character of your Empire by Tradition and AP should be done by the start of the 3rd act. I have gotten there a handful of times by 2360-2375 in 3.11 playing a Trade based Unity emphasizing (I do monuments and sparing admin offices - no traits nor civics helping out here until Immigration ) Empire that scoops up event chunks on purpose. It would feel extremely goofy pacing wise to me at least, that my ploddingly consistent spec would hit their last tradition any later than 2425 which is when Crisis is showing up or has shown. And there not being anything really good for that last AP in many circ*mstances.

But overall, and this is something I've done a metadiscourse whine about, everyone wants to basically be in their 'final form' the first 50 years or start the game in their 'final form' and talk about 'final forms' ahead of anything else in their meta-analysis and it's like, there's a good 100-150 years of game where you don't get your final form tools nor SHOULD YOU, no matter how cool or fulfilling it is once you're lopping Xenos in half with your mind.

Sian said:

If you feel that it’s critical to your plans you can take Adaptability and use it’s agenda that gives you 25% researched of the terraforming line

In fact, between letting you beeline through terraforming tech (faster more useful planets) and the new finisher it’s actually quite decent and not subtefuge-level trash tier anymore

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Adaptability is honestly really solid, now. 10% habitability and +1 building slot is nice early on for giving you 5% production on most of your planets and letting you skip a city district while the -15% strategic resource costs and upkeeps scales really well later on while the agenda keeps your terraforming techs on-track. If you're doing Gaia Seeders then I think it's pretty much an automatic pickup and Bio Hives will like it for their planets and hive worlds, too.

Takfloyd said:

The whole point of the tech rebalance was to at least somewhat try to fix the broken pacing of the game where you get access to endgame features in the early game.

These kinds of threads demanding to have everything as early as possible are just baffling. No, you shouldn't have Hive/Machine worlds that early. It's supposed to be a late game feature. The real problem is that Traditions are obtained too quickly due to not being rebalanced along with the technology.

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I agree with this. Gaia/Machine/Hive worlds are more-or-less appropriately paced, now. Ecu's are a bit too easy to get, though.

Takfloyd said:

The whole point of the tech rebalance was to at least somewhat try to fix the broken pacing of the game where you get access to endgame features in the early game.

These kinds of threads demanding to have everything as early as possible are just baffling. No, you shouldn't have Hive/Machine worlds that early. It's supposed to be a late game feature. The real problem is that Traditions are obtained too quickly due to not being rebalanced along with the technology.

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I’m not demanding everything as early as possible - I called out in a comment that I like the tech rebalance stretching things out. I just don’t think that we can justify machine and hive worlds as “late game features” in Stellaris 3.11. Maybe when machine worlds were introduced in 1.8 they were late game; but we have things like arcologies, orbital rings, and habitats labeled and tech locked as “mid game.”

My premise is that no matter how we stretch the tech tree, machine and hive worlds come too late compared to other things. I will remind you that world shaper is a tier 1 AP, and Arcology project is tier 2; as are machine and hive worlds. The tradition gating isn’t that strong.

But keeping them as they are, they should come sooner given the current balance of the game. That doesn’t mean 2250 but it also doesn’t mean sitting on the very far end of the society tree.

XCodes said:

Adaptability is honestly really solid, now. 10% habitability and +1 building slot is nice early on for giving you 5% production on most of your planets and letting you skip a city district while the -15% strategic resource costs and upkeeps scales really well later on while the agenda keeps your terraforming techs on-track. If you're doing Gaia Seeders then I think it's pretty much an automatic pickup and Bio Hives will like it for their planets and hive worlds, too.

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Adaptability is one of the best traditions in the game right now, poor machines got absolutely screwed on that.

You also left out its finisher which is probably the best finisher of all the traditions.

its 5% resource output for most designations and 10% for basic resource designations is very strong, those numbers also scale up with ascensions.

As an example, getting -20% input reduction for alloys and 5% output bonus is awesome and scaling that up with ascensions.