preface:

galaxy size medium

serious difficulty

6 opponents

ok i played three long games two with cravers (one with militarist the other with the religious party) one with the ue and the cravers still have issues comparatively:

1) you are basically forced to use the religious party for the law that sets all happiness to content, reasons being:

-if you have a system with a lot of non craver pops you will have to eat them wasting precious turns building nothing while the depletion points accumulate

-to make use of the 50 pop collection bonus you want as many depleted planets as possible, meaning on medium and larger maps you will have huge issues with overcolonization

-other laws that give happiness are not as powerful and/or are conditional

to be honest the religious law feels like a cheat code for the cravers, you can ignore quite a few techs and buildings and slavery unhappiness. i tried both one game with military happiness laws and one game with religious.

2) depleted planets are a big economic issue in the mid to late game.

-depletion affects all buildings and development bonuses that are on per pop basis. basically the most powerful buildings are cut in half in their effectivness. craver systems are a lot weaker than systems of other races

3) early game the cravers are too strong

-the 2 command points make a big difference in the early game

-the economy is very strong as long as you don't have many depleted planets

-i never met an enemy in the early game i could not conquer

4) late game militarily i prefer the united empire (sheredyn faction through the faction quest)

-ue fleets are a bit smaller

-ue ships deal more damage if you choose the sheredyn faction and get their combat card and focus on projectile attacks. (the card gives -50% enemy projectile absorbtion)

-the damage bonus from depleted planets is not as strong as you might think, late game ships usually have 60-70% damage absorbtion

-needless to say the ue have a much better economy in the late game

-ue can have multiple parties, e.g. military+economists for 50% increased damage and 30% increased hull points and more laws strengthening the economy or fleet. 

cravers are basically stuck with thre religious party.

suggestions:

-depletion should be a passive terraforming process and depleted planets should simply not give any bonuses to fids. the big difference to the current system is that system improvements and development are not affected, i.e. a building that give 4 production per pop is not halved in effectivness any more. this would make the late game economy more competetive

-fids bonuses from undepleted planets should be lower i suggest 100% to 75% down from 150%. the economy is simply too strong in the early game.

-there should be a midgame tech that increases the fids bonus to 150% (current value) from non depleted planets.

-slavery unrest as well as overcolonization should have hard caps (i suggest -100 for slaves and -125 for overcolonization) this way you don't have to use the religious party

-the ship that you can capture from the starting quest should not be given to the player. it makes early game agression even easier (i conquered an enemy riftborn and all it's systems in the first few turns: i had 4 colonies the riftborn had 5)

-the craver unique building should not be an emprie unique and should be capped at 50 max happiness to prevent exploits.

The largest improvements to system yields are population and percentage bonuses. The "per planet" or "on system" bonuses are very small. So -50% FIDS on planets is a huge penalty.

The infantry bonuses are very "meh." One of the "Tikanan" assimilation bonuses for example doubles infantry. Doubles it. So a 30-50% bonus here or there is not a big deal, especially when taking over a planet is so easy to begin with. You are just saving a little manpower, and manpower is currently an ignorable infinite resource for every faction other than Riftborn.

I dont think any improvements are affected by depletion. So the 4 industry per pop building will still keep the 4 industry per pop even after depletion. The only improvements that will be affected indirectly are percentage based improvements.

Nope, anything that says +per pop is applied to the pops not the system, it's added up on the planet based on number of pops working that planet, and then effected by penalties like depletion or the hardship ready FIDS reduction. Improvements, system upgrades, hero bonuses, everything that says +per pop is reduced by depletion.

I'm going to test it, but I think you're interpreting the description wrong. Happy to be proved wrong. Will test and get back.

I'm also pretty sure improvement + per pop bonuses are not affected by depletion.

It's only base planet yields and innate racial pop bonuses.

I just did a run of Craver Jesus (religious Craver with the law to set happiness to content) and in that case I just got to keep all my depleted system for the pop collection bonus. Not having to worry at the happiness at all is very powerful, you also don't care about the political opinion of your pops since you can just select religious at every election and you don't take the happiness hit since you got it covered by the law. All you have to do is being able to maintain the influence cost of the law. 

Once you finally unlock it (after 3 elections) it also basically remove the concept of overcolonization so you can just spam colony ship to every available system. In fact I tried to deplete planets as fast as possible by also having the religious law to only grow cravers. Late game with multiple depleted systems my fleets and troups were just unstoppable and I could directly invade a system in one turn without having to siege at all (i also had assimilated the minor faction with the bonus to infantry)

I'll just correct one mistake above - the 50 pop bonus is plus damage to ship weapons and plus damage to infantry. I thought it was plus damage and health to infantry. Doesn't change the basic point.

I'm still struggling to tell whether depletion affects population improvements. I'm *fairly* sure it doesn't, but it's difficult to tell with so many multipliers and effects going on. Maybe a dev could wade in on this to confirm?

I tested the effects on pop bonuses in relation to depletion before I made that comment. I am 100% sure improvement and hero related per pop bonuses are reduced by depletion. I did the test again using the same save and took screenshots.

Here's the hero used:

Here's a depleted planet with 2 pops on it:

You'll notice the planet has 5 base industry per pop, plus the 2 from the hero is 7 industry per pop. With 2 pops on the planet it's only producing 7 industry.

Here's the planet after building the interplanetary whatever inprovement that adds +1 industry per pop:

As you can see industry only went up by 1 instead of 2.

Fair play! Thanks for the testing. 

thank you for settling this.

Astasia wrote:

I tested the effects on pop bonuses in relation to depletion before I made that comment. I am 100% sure improvement and hero related per pop bonuses are reduced by depletion. I did the test again using the same save and took screenshots.

<snip>

thank you for settling this.

C0ldSn4p wrote:

I just did a run of Craver Jesus (religious Craver with the law to set happiness to content)  <snip>

i think this law is somewhat gamebreaking. you basically loose out on the ecstatic happiness bonuses which are minor (25% food and influence) but you can ignore all happiness buildings which is a lot of production that can be used on ships or other improvements. in my current craver game i have about -100 happiness from over-colonization i just can't make this up with happiness buildings. if i want to expand further and keep my planets at content i basically have to build all happiness buildings and terraform all planets and this compared to one law. the military laws that give happiness are a bit too unreliable/weak in my opinion as i usually are at at war with one or two factions.

another issue is that the unique technology and building that gives gives happiness per ship is once per empire although the tooltip does not say so. if this building could be build on every planet the happiness issue would be fixed from my perspective. it would also encourage cravers to spam many little ships as compared to my current goto strategy of the biggest ships possible full with the best modules my strategic resources can provide.

i read your post but it does not cover my experience. the religious law is just one law you need the miltarist have multiple laws (including a neutral one) and in the end they don't scale as well with larger empires. you have to consider that some systems have way bigger happiness penalties due to planet types and anomalies (which can be removed/terraformed only late in the game)

i am not saying the laws are bad or your strategy is invalid (to the contrary), just that in my experience the religious law covers all your need with just one law, no matter the size of empire, the size of the galaxy and so on (also you do not need to be at war with multiple factions all the time).

once i reached a size of 70+ planets the happiness bonuses from the military laws are just not enough and this is with happiness buildings.

imho turning the craver empire unique building into a regular improvement would be fine (the tooltip afaik currently does not say it is an empire unique, but it is)

Astasia wrote:

Taking everything you just said, would it not be even more powerful to heavily micromanage your systems to avoid complete depletion and very strongly favor minor faction pops? You'd still get most of the bonuses you listed in your points, but also have an empire full of planets actually producing a solid amount of FIDS.

Not really. Of course, you can do that if you want to, and I'm sure it will improve your FIDSI output a bit, but you're getting diminishing returns for the amount of work being put in. You're not really missing out on a whole lot with depleted planets if the system has a few decent developments.

For example: Take a 6/6/6/6 FIDS output planet, that has a pop cap of 10. Let's total it up for ease, and say you are producing 240 FIDS total just from population. After depletion, you are producing 120 FIDS less. But depletion doesn't affect system developments, and 120 FIDS is not a whole lot. It's around the equivalent of 4 early game improvements. With larger systems with larger pops, your loss is more, but your development yields are also greater.

In terms of total Empire output, as most games on normal speed only last around 150 turns, fiddling around with population to stop depletion isn't really going to help that much given that the diminished output will not be running that long anyway until victory. You could maybe move pop around from your first systems when they start to be fully depleted.

Moving large amounts of population around is risky, means you have population doing nothing for a long amounts of time, and it's not always clear you are making any overall gains in the long run, as you are going to have to regrow whole systems with minor faction populations, while those systems could have just been at full pop that whole time, albeit with some diminished output.

But the REAL reasons you want to be actively depleting planets is your 50 pop bonus. 1% health and damage increase on infantry for each depleted planet. That's huge. Who cares if you have loads of depleted planets, when you have super-soldiers that can just take more. Cravers already get a health boost to infantry, so with just 10 depleted planets, and no upgrades, your infantry are 30% more effective than anyone else's infantry other than Vodyani (20% more effective) and Sophons (50% more effective). Don't even both upgrading to tanks or aircraft, as your infantry is just as effective, and you can field way more of them. In other words, depleting planets helps you get more undepleted planets faster. 

ok something has to be done to save the cravers.

i currently play a game with a custom faction and have cravers as an empire:

-they are not at war, theyhave all the time to develop

-they are stuck and are seriously behind all other empires

-they abandon their own colonies

this is on serious difficulty. imho something is wrong if even the ai with some(?) bonuses can't even keep it's own empire afloat.

tesb wrote:

ok something has to be done to save the cravers.

i currently play a game with a custom faction and have cravers as an empire:

-they are not at war, theyhave all the time to develop

-they are stuck and are seriously behind all other empires

-they abandon their own colonies

this is on serious difficulty. imho something is wrong if even the ai with some(?) bonuses can't even keep it's own empire afloat.

It's the problem in itself that they aren't at war, since without expansion they'll get stuck with depleted planets. But that's for players, AI cravers spam impressive fleets from fully depleted systems heh.

In my expirience (playing serious difficulty too) cravers are the only race that can become runaway AI (being way ahead of the rest AI's) and pose a serious military threat (it's not uncommon to meet their doomstacks of 20+ CP with 3 carrier class ships in them by turn 130+-). 

Atm imo they're the strongest AI becouse increased difficulty doesn't improve AI gameplay (just look at conquered colonies, they're always awfull with barely any buildings) but give them FIDS bonuses, then that bonuses are multiplied by cravers 150% FIDS bonus and as a result when cravers spawned near me i saw their core world supporting 3 outposts and still growing population (if human player try this, he'll starve it's homeworld to death). 

So in your case cravers got unlucky with starting location, didn't have space to expand or smth. else. For example in my recent Unfallen game i literally screwed cravers by turn 80 and now they're worse of all AI's, but that doesn't mean cravers have problems in general - they've some countradictory mechanics but still in right hands with right aproach they're one of the strongest races.

Crizis wrote:

In my expirience (playing serious difficulty too) cravers are the only race that can become runaway AI (being way ahead of the rest AI's) and pose a serious military threat (it's not uncommon to meet their doomstacks of 20+ CP with 3 carrier class ships in them by turn 130+-). 

i made this experience with the riftborn, they tend to spam vast amount of fleets comparativly. i never saw this with cravers

Atm imo they're the strongest AI becouse increased difficulty doesn't improve AI gameplay (just look at conquered colonies, they're always awfull with barely any buildings) but give them FIDS bonuses, then that bonuses are multiplied by cravers 150% FIDS bonus and as a result when cravers spawned near me i saw their core world supporting 3 outposts and still growing population (if human player try this, he'll starve it's homeworld to death). 

So in your case cravers got unlucky with starting location, didn't have space to expand or smth. else. For example in my recent Unfallen game i literally screwed cravers by turn 80 and now they're worse of all AI's, but that doesn't mean cravers have problems in general - they've some countradictory mechanics but still in right hands with right aproach they're one of the strongest races.

they had room to expand, in fact they have uncolonized systems within their borders that they don't colonize. i saw colonies they had for many turns being vacated/abandoned (the colony disappeared and they got a colony ship in return). it is not the case that they lack room to expand. 

however i am talking about the late game here. i agree that cravers are too strong in the early game before depletion sets in (see my suggestions in the second post above yours) for both the ai and the player. as a player the main problem with the need to expand for cravers is overcolonization (which the religious law neatly negates), maybe the ai suffers from mass unhappiness?

i add the savegame if any is interested:

androleth.zip

Hello. After tryed to win with cravers and terribly failed in endless difficulty i finnaly managed to set up a winnable game. In the current state of the game, those guys are tricky to manage but i don't feel they are underpowered. I tryed several time to set up powerfull rush against endless IA in fast speed, and it was a disaster. Also, when i tryed to play against cravers IA, i found that the best tool to win the war is a strong economy to support it. So that was my final toughts about cravers :

• You canno't rush anymore, so before go to war you need to build an very effecient economy designed to win war, based on production, and science only. 
• Now the depletion is slower, it's probably possible. It's maybe possible to build strong economy faster than any other faction if you manage to have a good slave population and a slow depletion.
  
• Cravers have a massive strenght : their governement. You can make everything you want with politics, because of dicature politic swtich and immunity to rebellion. Not a single faction's political power is free as craver governement is. 

So i tryed this build (fast speed):

1. Cocoon phase : In the first time. Buld a strong home system, in order to prepare the next phase : good industry, good science, good food, and some pupas if you have the time. Set your hero in your home system to get extra influence/food/industry ( i only get two point in system governor bonus, and the rest in fleet bonus). Explore as much system as you can, create a new colony with the initial pupa. Very important ! try to get your home system level 2 and have a starport. You will see the utility later. Also, get the first dust technology, to support later the cost of all your outpost.
2. Expansion phase : First election : here is susprising thing : get an ecologic governement. You can now colonize everywhere, and A LOT, without a single rebellion. Swarm the constellation with pupas. Create some minimal fleets if needed to protect your system. Don't be over agressive with IA if they contest some of your outpost. You need to delay the war to your momentum. When you have outpost on a lot of systems (for my parti it was bout 6 at the same time), your homeworld population will horribly decrease, but you need to  protect your slaves lifes. So, put your haroshem in space port. When your out post will turn on colony, send your haroshems on your new worlds as cattle. They will be a great tool against depletion and a fair food income ! The outcome they provide to your empire make the space port very very important. When an outpost turn into a colony, follow this build order : indusrty > dust > science. Meanwhile, when my basics technology are on line, i look already work on my war technolgies.
   
3. Smithy of war : Later, my home world population has grow up again very fast and it's a powerfull and productive system. my new colonies give already a fair amount of science and dust. I got my tier 3 war technologies (hull, weapon, armor) and i am about to get the techology that allow to get 20 CP+ in a fleet. I am building my first army. My momentum is about to rise ! I turn my politic in military.
   
4. WAR : My fleet is complete, i put my first hero in it, i upgrade my ground warriors , and go to fight my unfortunate neighbour. I am building a second and as strong fleet lead my the quest hero.
   

For the moment the build worked pretty well. I rushed into an other war between Vodyanis and Lumeriis. I declared hostility to both, and my momentum was very strong, i was able to ravage all of their fleets easily !

The war was Warhammer 40k size. I think somthing like 150 CP was destroyed, a ton of ground warriors and populations. Everything a craver dream i guess. I noteiced if you make super specialized ships against an IA, it adapt very well and is very rapidly able to punish you. That's why i created polyvalents fleets, able to fight well at all range, with polyvalents war tactics. It was a freakin good decision. because lumeriis was specialized in short range, and vodyanis in long range... And i had to beat both if I wanted to eat something.

I am about to conquer the lumeriis empire, and made a huge mistake against Vodyani. The lumeriis, who lost a lot of system, lost their economy, meanwhile the vodyanis continued to upgrade and improve their ships. I was too condifent, and decided to improve my economy instead of my war power. I looked for a lot of friendy technology in order to create hapiness and dust in my empire, but not a single military upgrade. At the end of the war, vodyanis has come with very strong carrier and almost wiped half of my fleets. I would have lost if he wast allied with sophons. I asked truce with sophons, so it stopped the war... huhuhu. But i will get my REVENGE ! After my breakfast. it's seafood today !

All this little story to say : i am not sure cravers are so weak. They may be tricky, but they have incredible strenghts.

The above post is very important to keep in mind when asking for balance:  Sometimes what appears to be weak just needs more time in the community's oven to bake. 

(Not saying I agree or disagree, I'm not a Cravers-main so I can't say much there, but I love that SuperMarloWorld knuckled down and began running tests.)

If you want to get better, rather than critcising the balance of what are probably the strongest faction right now, I suggest watching Macsen's current let's play. He's up to video 4 and is already stomping with Cravers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAec2uZCqDA

So I tried playing the Cravers on Hard difficulty earlier today. This was the first time since perhaps November - I don't really know, but it's been a while. Hard, mostly because its a fairly comfortable difficulty level (I know that I'll win, but it isn't a total cakewalk). Six players on a medium disk galaxy, nothing special. Over the course of the game I used some of the ideas present in this thread, which essentially boiled down to managing population micro and depletion micro to get the most out of every planet (well, until I stopped really caring).

.... whoah. Just, wow.

By turn 40, I had completed every but the last chapter 4 quest; I had conquered my neighbors the United Empire, as well as two minor factions (and not conquered anyone else as I was far away from them; I had 30 population in my home system and zero depleted planets (they all depleted the next turn due to the Hero's capstone ability), and had built 3 wonders in 10 turns in my capital. It was crazy. The turn before depletion, the production yields were insane. Before I had started on the wonder project I had built four capital ships in one turn.

My strategy was probably inefficient in a number of ways, but going for the 'strictly best' playstyle wasn't really my goal. I was careful to keep system and empire happiness above unhappy, I didn't really colonize until after conquering my neighbor, and I never went far beyond my colonization limit. My research was military focused and generally avoided colonization techs unless they unlocked strategic resources. I guess it was a 'tall' Craver build? Fun as hell, that's for sure.

There's so much more to say, but I'll leave it at this: player the Cravers feels like nothing else - like it's a totally different game. No other game developed so quickly. I'm still processing the game (and I haven't even finished it), but, two things: Cravers are probably OP (especially the early medium ship); and Cravers are so much goddamned fun.

By turn 40, I had completed every but the last chapter 4 quest

I was also surprised by how quick the storyline end. I have yet to test all others faction to fully evaluate its difficulty, but compared to the Vodyanis I am playing now it is nothing comparable : the Craver storyline is both far easier and far quicker to progress into.

I'm still processing the game (and I haven't even finished it), but, two things: Cravers are probably OP (especially the early medium ship); and Cravers are so much goddamned fun.

It's also my feeling : under standard galaxy settings they look really powerfull - their early game in particular, and they have all the tools to easily snowball and crush everything on their path.

the sophons quest seems even faster (depends what quest options you choose ofc, i went the military path)

I just finished a Craver game and they were absolutely fantastic. The trick is to never completely deplete the systems that you like.

For example, I captured the Unfallen capital very early thanks to the early medium ship from the quest and some attack ships. Thanks to that, I moved all of my Craver population out of the starting system before any of the planets were completely depleted. From then on, the slave race I started with filled out the whole starting system.

I did the same with the Unfallen capital -- I exploited all of the planets to the brink of depletion. But before they were depleted, I moved all of my Craver population to the newly conquered United Empire capital.

You get the idea. I ended up having to create a few depleted systems because I had way too many Craver pops. But I had four intact systems that were never depleted fully and populated by other races (Unfallen capital, Horatio capital, a system with 5 cold worlds which I wanted to keep undepleted, some other capitals to which I didn't bother moving Cravers to).

I had triple the score of my closest competitor before turn 50, and it was a steamroll from then on. This is on tiny and hard, and my second game.

Cravers were "meh" in alpha because of a bug that caused them to still get their bonus FIDS on depleted planets, so while that bonus was lower at only 50%, it meant even on a depleted planet they were getting 75% FIDS. That bug has been fixed, now they only get 50% on depleted planets, and this has completely destroyed any sense of balance the faction had with other empires. Cravers are currently trash tier right now, their mechanic allows them to slightly speed up some of the basic infrastructure or a couple ships in a system that quickly becomes useless. Hurrah. It servers no purpose and gives them no advantage. 5-10 turns of bonus FIDS in a fresh system with nothing in it before it becomes a useless barren wasteland of a system is not meaningful or interesting content.

If I recall corectly, they used to have 1 depletion point per pop. Now they have 2 which is IMHO way to much.

Hi!

Thanks for picking that up. It's true that now with the bug fixed where they still had their 150% bonus applied on depleted planets, they do need some love - we'll probably go back to 1 depletion point per pop instead of 2. :)

Cheers,

Kynrael wrote:

Hi!

Thanks for picking that up. It's true that now with the bug fixed where they still had their 150% bonus applied on depleted planets, they do need some love - we'll probably go back to 1 depletion point per pop instead of 2. :)

Cheers,

That would be great! Thanks!

Cravers have a number of huge problems, including:

- slave happiness penalty;

- planet depletion being too fast;

- expansion cap: designed for neverending conquest with a cap of 16 systems (after techs) before disaproval kicks in and murders your empire (as if slave unrest wasn't enough). 

Typical example for lack of synergy: you conquer sweet system with 20 population an it's only logical that you want to double FIDS output through sending there few cravers to become proper slavedrivers (talking about +100% FIDS output from other races when craver is present on a planet). Your cravers land there and slaves start producing -10 disaproval each (-200 for system with 20 population).

Another problem is that you're depleting planets, that forces you to move on and during conquest spree you're going over the system cap producing global disaproval becouse of overcolonization. And pretty fast after you stop conquering you'll be lagging behind other major factions. 

Also, the higher difficulty is, the better bonuses AI recieves, so past hard even measly Lumeris AI can field enough forces right of the bat to stall you for quite some time and by the time you conquer it, your core planets ran out of gas already. 

Cravers have a fun aproval building that provides 1 aproval for every fielded ship, thematicaly it's great but on practice it costs around 6.000 production and that's a complete overkill when you'll need it in every system way before you'll be even half way to clearing your conquest objective. Also keep in mind what amount of production is needed to field enough ships to support this kind of building.

Still, at the moment there's a weird workaround - start promoting religious faction right away to unlock law that forces hapiness to content. Thanks to it now you can have as many slaves as you want and conquer any amount of systems, needed for victory. But... that law upkeep costs 3 influence / population so you'll need a lot of it (and it's not a good news since it only increases amount of techs, really essential to pull of a strategy). 

Actually the best cravers trait (imo) is +1% dmg / depleted planet (think population collection bonus), that allow your fleets to have a serious advantage by mid-game and be completly insane by late game. 

To close it off cravers are indeed underpowered, but not unplayable (well a single religious law makes them playable the way, they should be played...).

At present it's not hard to fix cravers in two steps:

1. Reduce depletion points per population. Atm the window of opportunity for cravers is too small so it may work on medium map, but on large+ they're at serious disadvantage.

2. Move craver specific hapiness building (forgot it's name) one era earlier and reduce it's cost to ~1500 production. If cravers rely on military (ships in our case) to produce hapiness, then they're playing the way they should be played: building military and conquering in neverending cycle. 

P.S. Also for the sake of fantasy, it would be nice if slaves were slowly dieing off (dunno why they removed it after beta).

Crizis wrote:

Cravers have a number of huge problems, including:

- slave happiness penalty;

- planet depletion being too fast;

- expansion cap: designed for neverending conquest with a cap of 16 systems (after techs) before disaproval kicks in and murders your empire (as if slave unrest wasn't enough). 

Typical example for lack of synergy: you conquer sweet system with 20 population an it's only logical that you want to double FIDS output through sending there few cravers to become proper slavedrivers (talking about +100% FIDS output from other races when craver is present on a planet). Your cravers land there and slaves start producing -10 disaproval each (-200 for system with 20 population).

Another problem is that you're depleting planets, that forces you to move on and during conquest spree you're going over the system cap producing global disaproval becouse of overcolonization. And pretty fast after you stop conquering you'll be lagging behind other major factions. 

Also, the higher difficulty is, the better bonuses AI recieves, so past hard even measly Lumeris AI can field enough forces right of the bat to stall you for quite some time and by the time you conquer it, your core planets ran out of gas already. 

Cravers have a fun aproval building that provides 1 aproval for every fielded ship, thematicaly it's great but on practice it costs around 6.000 production and that's a complete overkill when you'll need it in every system way before you'll be even half way to clearing your conquest objective. Also keep in mind what amount of production is needed to field enough ships to support this kind of building.

Still, at the moment there's a weird workaround - start promoting religious faction right away to unlock law that forces hapiness to content. Thanks to it now you can have as many slaves as you want and conquer any amount of systems, needed for victory. But... that law upkeep costs 3 influence / population so you'll need a lot of it (and it's not a good news since it only increases amount of techs, really essential to pull of a strategy). 

Actually the best cravers trait (imo) is +1% dmg / depleted planet (think population collection bonus), that allow your fleets to have a serious advantage by mid-game and be completly insane by late game. 

To close it off cravers are indeed underpowered, but not unplayable (well a single religious law makes them playable the way, they should be played...).

At present it's not hard to fix cravers in two steps:

1. Reduce depletion points per population. Atm the window of opportunity for cravers is too small so it may work on medium map, but on large+ they're at serious disadvantage.

2. Move craver specific hapiness building (forgot it's name) one era earlier and reduce it's cost to ~1500 production. If cravers rely on military (ships in our case) to produce hapiness, then they're playing the way they should be played: building military and conquering in neverending cycle. 

P.S. Also for the sake of fantasy, it would be nice if slaves were slowly dieing off (dunno why they removed it after beta).

Hey! Thanks for your full feedback.

About your approval problem - have you tried using the Feeding Pits during your games to mitigate that or not? The idea was that on systems with few cravers and many slaves to use the Feeding Pits for good approval / growth boosts.

Craver units also need something to help boost their siege capability. As it stands, in the mid-game a fully decked Craver fleet still needs at least 10 turns to bring down a system's manpower enough to survive an invasion, let alone be successful in it. With all the improvements to destroy invasion forces available to all races, the Cravers make like wet tissue paper against everything late-game, because they can't maintain any kind of momentum past the mid-game.

Kynrael wrote:

Crizis wrote:

Cravers have a number of huge problems, including:

- slave happiness penalty;

- planet depletion being too fast;

- expansion cap: designed for neverending conquest with a cap of 16 systems (after techs) before disaproval kicks in and murders your empire (as if slave unrest wasn't enough). 

Typical example for lack of synergy: you conquer sweet system with 20 population an it's only logical that you want to double FIDS output through sending there few cravers to become proper slavedrivers (talking about +100% FIDS output from other races when craver is present on a planet). Your cravers land there and slaves start producing -10 disaproval each (-200 for system with 20 population).

Another problem is that you're depleting planets, that forces you to move on and during conquest spree you're going over the system cap producing global disaproval becouse of overcolonization. And pretty fast after you stop conquering you'll be lagging behind other major factions. 

Also, the higher difficulty is, the better bonuses AI recieves, so past hard even measly Lumeris AI can field enough forces right of the bat to stall you for quite some time and by the time you conquer it, your core planets ran out of gas already. 

Cravers have a fun aproval building that provides 1 aproval for every fielded ship, thematicaly it's great but on practice it costs around 6.000 production and that's a complete overkill when you'll need it in every system way before you'll be even half way to clearing your conquest objective. Also keep in mind what amount of production is needed to field enough ships to support this kind of building.

Still, at the moment there's a weird workaround - start promoting religious faction right away to unlock law that forces hapiness to content. Thanks to it now you can have as many slaves as you want and conquer any amount of systems, needed for victory. But... that law upkeep costs 3 influence / population so you'll need a lot of it (and it's not a good news since it only increases amount of techs, really essential to pull of a strategy). 

Actually the best cravers trait (imo) is +1% dmg / depleted planet (think population collection bonus), that allow your fleets to have a serious advantage by mid-game and be completly insane by late game. 

To close it off cravers are indeed underpowered, but not unplayable (well a single religious law makes them playable the way, they should be played...).

At present it's not hard to fix cravers in two steps:

1. Reduce depletion points per population. Atm the window of opportunity for cravers is too small so it may work on medium map, but on large+ they're at serious disadvantage.

2. Move craver specific hapiness building (forgot it's name) one era earlier and reduce it's cost to ~1500 production. If cravers rely on military (ships in our case) to produce hapiness, then they're playing the way they should be played: building military and conquering in neverending cycle. 

P.S. Also for the sake of fantasy, it would be nice if slaves were slowly dieing off (dunno why they removed it after beta).

Hey! Thanks for your full feedback.

About your approval problem - have you tried using the Feeding Pits during your games to mitigate that or not? The idea was that on systems with few cravers and many slaves to use the Feeding Pits for good approval / growth boosts.

Hello! 

Of course i've been using them, but to get meaningfull results you need to do quite a bit of butchering, replacing existing population with cravers and that only leads to faster planet depletion. All in all slaver-slave relationships aren't lasting long enough for cravers (without religious workaround). 

Also in terms of efficiency  religious law allow you droping a craver on each conquered planet and enjoying 200% FIDS from slaves till the planet is depleted, and even after depletion slaves will work at 100% FIDS instead of 50% cravers. That leads to another problem, you're butchering slave for approval boost and growth boost , essentially killing pop to replace with another that will become significantly worse after your planet is depleted (and the more cravers on planet, the faster it depletes duh). Also the more slaves you kill, the less effective slavedriver trait becomes. 

Still cravers are probably the only race completly designed for expansion victory and imo that's the most tedious victory condition on large+ maps. Think on large i need to own 50 systems for victory, and so far i've been able to finish it (without cheesing alliances) only with the help of religious law setting happiness to content, becouse there's no other mechanics that allow you to beat 340 disaproval from overcolonizing by 34 systems (at least i'm not aware of such). But that's a generic problem, since 16-18 systems before disaproval hits is a very low number for large maps. Half the time i can grab that amount with small war or without even going to war at all. 

Cravers unique building would serve wonderfully for fixing happiness problems, but it costs over the top, considering how much production you need to stay ahead in military and still improve your systems. But thematically it's a wonderfull building, shame i've never built a single one.

All in all fixing cravers at this point is all about tweaking numbers a bit.

gigabytemon wrote:

Craver units also need something to help boost their siege capability. As it stands, in the mid-game a fully decked Craver fleet still needs at least 10 turns to bring down a system's manpower enough to survive an invasion, let alone be successful in it. With all the improvements to destroy invasion forces available to all races, the Cravers make like wet tissue paper against everything late-game, because they can't maintain any kind of momentum past the mid-game.

You can equip every ship with a siege improving module (2d tier military tied to fleet size), single fleet  easilly reaches 500+ siege and endgame fleets are pumping around 1000, so sieging a planet in 2 turns (and even 1 turn if couple of fleets involved) is possible at any point of the game.

Also the more planet you deplete, the better your troops become.  

Weird. I've been absolutely smashing it as Cravers on Endless difficulty. The changes to the depletion and FIDS output, along with the feeding pits is much appreciated.

If you're getting overcolonisation approval hits, try a 'deplete and ditch' strategy by pumping your food and approval with feeding pits, depleting the planets, then evacuating the system. The AI can recolonise if it wants, but the system will be utterly trashed. I feel like I should be doing this a lot more, as I always end up with some 1-2 planet system that I don't really need.

Also, are you using laws to their full effect? With a single war you can have +55 approval (I think) with just 2 militarist laws (the force law and 'Us and Them') and Toys for Boys. You can always just declare another war if you need a bit more approval. It's often worth not completely finishing off your opponent so you can live off the approval the war with them is giving you (assuming you can afford the force truce influence costs).

I don't really know for the highest difficulties but Cravers feel very viable but you need to be constantly moving your pops around, pretty much you send cravers to your newly conquered/colonized systems.

After depletion you or abandon the system if nothing useful is located in the the system.

If you do need the strategic/luxury resources from the system you move the Cravers once more to the front (or to manpower systems where you use chain-gang recruitment to turn pops into manpower).

You leave a small token force of cravers on the system (1 craver for each planet), and afterwards fill it with what ever other pop you think is most useful, due to the cravers the system works on about 100% efficiency.

you do require a lot of approval to make this work but if the systems get to angry use a bit of feeding tanks will solve the problem and provide enough food to replace the "lost" pops.

hello,

i played a few games since release and i have little to no problems on serious difficulty with the races i played: vodyiani, united empire, unfallen. i just tried a game with the cravers and my experience was that they seem underpowered. the main issue is that their planets deplete too fast, i.e. where all other races take off economically the cravers fall into a hole.

is there something i am missing with them? in the beta they seem a bit better because you only got 1 depletion point per turn and population (although the bonus from exploitation was also smaller), so there was a smoother transition to the mid game and planet depletion did not hit that hard. is there some trick to this faction? i tried aggressive conquest but this is severely hampered in the early game due to manpower, i.e. you may crush a faction or take at least a few planets, but any other unmolested empire will eclipse the cravers very fast.

Crizis wrote:

gigabytemon wrote:

Craver units also need something to help boost their siege capability. As it stands, in the mid-game a fully decked Craver fleet still needs at least 10 turns to bring down a system's manpower enough to survive an invasion, let alone be successful in it. With all the improvements to destroy invasion forces available to all races, the Cravers make like wet tissue paper against everything late-game, because they can't maintain any kind of momentum past the mid-game.

You can equip every ship with a siege improving module (2d tier military tied to fleet size), single fleet  easilly reaches 500+ siege and endgame fleets are pumping around 1000, so sieging a planet in 2 turns (and even 1 turn if couple of fleets involved) is possible at any point of the game.

Also the more planet you deplete, the better your troops become.  

Damn, I totally missed that. Thanks for pointing that out. Time to run another game. xD

zolmir wrote:

I just finished a Craver game and they were absolutely fantastic. The trick is to never completely deplete the systems that you like.

...

I've also tried playing like this. I get the most out of all my undepleted planets then move the Cravers pop either to another planet within the system or to the spaceport just before it is depleted.

It was fun and somewhat working. If I don't have the time or resources to create a spaceport, I normally designate one of the less desirable planet as a dumpster to put my Craver pops while the non-Craver pops populate the near-depleted planets. Sometimes I forget the timing and accidentally deplete one of my favored planets, so I'm like "screw it, deplete the rest of the planets within the system, then pack my bags and leave for a new system."

The main issue with this is all the micromanagement. I had to keep track of multiple depletion rates and keep track of which population is being sent to which location. The accidental depletion of planets happens more frequently as my empire's situation got more hectic.

Hum... Maybe the Cravers needs to have an adaptative depletion bonus : 250% at star, then +25% per depleted planet, so that you would want to deplete planets to get a snowball effect.

VieuxChat wrote:

Hum... Maybe the Cravers needs to have an adaptative depletion bonus : 250% at star, then +25% per depleted planet, so that you would want to deplete planets to get a snowball effect.

That would certainly be interesting. I think it would make a lot of sense for the faction to want to deplete planets rather than trying to avoid it. Some sort of stacking bonus for every planet depleted would work well. 

I still think some sort of mid or late game tech to bump up depleted planets to 75% as tesb suggested would be needed though. Or a mechanic that increases a planet's pop cap based on how depleted it is, because I mean the planet is being hollowed out right? There's more space to live. Something like a +3-4 pop increase on a fully depleted planet?

KyoPa wrote:

zolmir wrote:

I just finished a Craver game and they were absolutely fantastic. The trick is to never completely deplete the systems that you like.

...

I've also tried playing like this. I get the most out of all my undepleted planets then move the Cravers pop either to another planet within the system or to the spaceport just before it is depleted.

It was fun and somewhat working. If I don't have the time or resources to create a spaceport, I normally designate one of the less desirable planet as a dumpster to put my Craver pops while the non-Craver pops populate the near-depleted planets. Sometimes I forget the timing and accidentally deplete one of my favored planets, so I'm like "screw it, deplete the rest of the planets within the system, then pack my bags and leave for a new system."

The main issue with this is all the micromanagement. I had to keep track of multiple depletion rates and keep track of which population is being sent to which location. The accidental depletion of planets happens more frequently as my empire's situation got more hectic.

It requires tons of micromanagement, true. That was the real downside. I had to check every system I wanted to preserve nearly every turn to avoid unwanted depletions, and cobbling together the luxury resources to build a spaceport in many planets was distressing. The turns easily took 2-3 times more time than usual. But the snowballing effect really pays off -- the faster you tech up and get new planets, the better it is.

I've played a few more games since last posting on this thread, and they've made me lean more towards the complete opposite. Cravers aren't just playable right now, but quite easily one of the strongest races, if not the strongest for a couple of reasons.

1. The fleet size increase bonus is huge. Your fleets, if at full size, mean you never lose. But the bigger point is that it allows you to field more battleships and cruisers. The second fleet size upgrade allows you to field 4 battleships, for everyone else, it's 3 (plus one small ship which is insignificant). This is a massive disparity in power. Throw in a fleet hero, and your fleets (that were already stronger than everyone else's) are nigh on invincible in the mid to early-late game.

2. The first quest, if you choose to intercept (which you should), gives you a ship with enough manpower capacity that can easily wipe out any minor factions early. More systems, less pirates. Makes expansion really fast early, without losing too much growth from food transfer.

3. Speaking of food transfer, the early FIDS bonus means that your systems get up much faster than anyone else, other than Riftborn. Again, early expansion is really easy and really fast.

4.  The 'eat population' option means that with very little population micromanagement, you can keep systems growing and ecstatic, even when you have far exceeded the colonisation cap. Cravers outmatch everyone else for growth, to the point where I would seriously consider a nerf to the duration buff of feeding pits. The only 'difficult' thing about it is running out of minor population to eat, but you can always just transport some from the newly conquered systems. Just the maths on this - on normal speed pop growth number is 300. Eating a pop gives you 25 for 10 turns, so without any buildings or happiness you make a loss of 50 food. At ecstatic, you get a 25% bonus to food, which means you are now making a net gain of 1.25 food. Add in a 20% bonus from Intensive Cultivation building, and you make a net gain of 5 food. It's not much, but do it enough and you are increasing your growth considerably. Craver systems can get really big, really fast.

5. Your starting hero is really good. 20 food and 20 industry at level 3. Only the Riftborn heroes come close to being that good. Solus is also an overseer, so you are going to be raking in industry and food, which means things build faster, which means he levels up faster.

6. Autocracy is dictatorship without the hassle. An extra law early, and you don't need to worry about any minor factions messing with your ideology as they don't get to vote.

7. Your population bonuses are probably the best in the game for what you're made for, and you reach them fast. Faster ship building is so good, but where they really shine is the infantry bonus from depleted planets. Don't even bother with tanks or aircraft, your infantry alone are good enough to plow through systems.

8. Depletion isn't that much of a worry, as your overall FIDSI will come from owning lots of planets with lots of population. Equally sized empires and populations will be producing more, but there shouldn't really be a point where you are not a bigger empire than everyone else. It doesn't matter if your planets produce half the FIDS when you have double the planets and double the population of everyone else.

Finally, and this might be a weak point, but the AI seems to know all this too. Craver AI reliably destroys all the others, and they are the only AI I have been beaten by so far. Mind, this is on Endless difficulty. I'd be interested in the analytics if the devs are still recording the game results.

I think a lot of the critique of Cravers has come in because some people here are playing them like a standard 'builder' empire. But they're not. Minor pops aren't there to be micromanaged. They are your food and happiness, nothing more. If they are unhappy about being enslaved, eat them. Planets are not there to be cleverly developed and optimised, they too are your food to fuel your war machine. Trying to optimise a system that will be deadzone in 30 turns is a waste of time, so just see those planets as a means to an end - either making more ships and manpower to get more planets, or producing dust and science so you can build more and better ships to get more planets.