The Harmony works in waves - you either research and build, or you expand your empire with new colonies and increase your fleet. The idea is to take advantage of their "Mind and matter" slider that controls food vs science, a very powerful tool. About to expand the empire with more colonizers? Build colonizers and ships on ALL your planets while you crank the research slider up to near maximum (be sure to avoid starvation!) and enjoy a huge research boost while minimizing the food lost to the growth halt. Done expanding, and need no further fleet? Get your food improvements in place, then crank the slider all the way to the left for explosive growth. During this phase you should try to build as few ships as possible - build food and industry improvements on ALL your planets. Waves - ebb and flow: try to be either expanding or reinforcing what you already have, not both.



Avoid expanding to arid/desert planets if possible, these provide mostly dust yields and so are decidedly harmful to your economy. Tundra or food planets are what you want for the food/industry yields. You can't really get science from expansion planets until they turn into full colonies due to the 'distance from empire' modifier.



Try this out and see if your luck with Harmony improves. Harmony can do wide expansion even better than the Sowers, provided the planet types aren't too hostile.

when i build a colony ship on my home system as harmony, it took all but 1 pop away. That's a pretty game breaking glitch for harmony. Maybe the colonists went on a murderous nuclear rampage before they left. A friend reported the same thing. has anyone else had this? It only seems to happen on home system.



How could Amplitude miss that? did they play a single test game with harmony? It seem pretty hard to miss.



Also as an aside the traits of the default harmony are even worse than other default factions, which is saying a lot.



Despite how broken it is now....it is certainly cool. With some tweaking (and, ya know, not losing your whole population) it could be a good faction. Better than sowers, at least.

Affinity wrote:
when i build a colony ship on my home system as harmony, it took all but 1 pop away. That's a pretty game breaking glitch for harmony. Maybe the colonists went on a murderous nuclear rampage before they left. A friend reported the same thing. has anyone else had this? It only seems to happen on home system.



How could Amplitude miss that? did they play a single test game with harmony? It seem pretty hard to miss.



Also as an aside the traits of the default harmony are even worse than other default factions, which is saying a lot.



Despite how broken it is now....it is certainly cool. With some tweaking (and, ya know, not losing your whole population) it could be a good faction. Better than sowers, at least.

dont be so harsh dude. i played 5 games with harmony and never had that bug.



@apheirox



sounds intresting, i try it in the next game

Thanks for the helpful information, I will certainly try to go with the ebb and flow and so where it leads me.

Thanks for the tips, will try Harmony next game.

Actually, I was too hasty calling them better at rapidly expanding than the Sowers. I overlooked that they still get a malus per 'inpure' system. But the 'ebb and flow' tip I provided is definitely good, you certainly want to take advantage of the research slider playing Harmony. The ability to expand to a bunch of systems, then crank your 'mind and matter' slider to full 'matter' with a 100% food bonus is really powerful.



Also, I think all you Sower-bashers need to give them a second look now. That +5 happy/planet special research coupled with the ability to 'build' food they get is *extremely* good.

Is Harmony's lower industry cost for ship classes working yet? If so I think I'll give the dlc another try.



But from my early games, it really does seem sowers can handle themselves better than before. Imo the +5 happy/planet is probably the strongest of all the new early faction techs.

drakir89 wrote:
Is Harmony's lower industry cost for ship classes working yet? If so I think I'll give the dlc another try.

Nope, less industry on mods still isn't working

tarrens wrote:
dont be so harsh dude. i played 5 games with harmony and never had that bug.

I tested the colony ship killing pop bug more. It seems to occur on any system if the planet is at max pop. It also seems to occur only if you have a negative food bonus from mind and matter. So if you never built a colony ship from a full pop system with - food bonus, then you probably won't see the glitch.

yea..now i had it, too.

Speaking of Harmony, has anyone had the AI successfully use them?



I am in an Automaton versus Harmony, Harmony, and Harmony, 4 arm spiral, and they are about as slow as pudding. Now granted Automatons basically skip past that whole "no growth while building colonies" BS but damn, I figure with three chances one of the Harmonies would do good but not really seeing it. Going to try all Harmony all the time next, as in I will be Harmony and all the AIs will be as well.



Did seem to enter starvation rather quickly, however I did notice that when you colonize your new systems its best to move sliders so as to double its pop in one turn.



Which exploit are people using? Trying to determine if just industry is only way to go.... since I can slide off the other two

Well, as shown above, harmony is already pretty glitched for humans. I'm willing to bet the harmony AI doesn't understand the mind and matter bar, so it might be using the same logic as other AIs use for taxes. Which is pretty funny. If this is the case, then they might be stunting their food, or science, for no reason what so ever, and hence grow as fast as your toenails.



As for which exploit....industry is great on your homeworld, but new outposts still need the food exploit.

Someone should go and confirm this, but I think the "mind and matter" slider works exactly like taxing. That is to say the bonus it provides doesn't seem to be affecting industry conversion tech.



Ergo, you can use research conversion AND turn down food production to get a mix of fast planet growth and slow-mediocre research rate. That's huge.

the problem seems to be that even if you streamline colonization and research abusing the 150% bonus from mind-matter, you still end up with a pathetic level of FIDS compared to a standard race which has an early admin/corp hero. The faction just seems inherently underpowered due to its core mechanics.



oh but thats fine, late game I can spam free fleets..... ye that doesnt work at all because of how militiary heroes scale. Unless the harmony have some truly disgusting hull designs such as -90% tonnage on wep modules or something, I cant imagine them ever being able to deal with a lvl 15+ hero



seems like the sowers arent the worst race anymore though, thats something !

obsidia wrote:
the problem seems to be that even if you streamline colonization and research abusing the 150% bonus from mind-matter, you still end up with a pathetic level of FIDS compared to a standard race which has an early admin/corp hero. The faction just seems inherently underpowered due to its core mechanics.



oh but thats fine, late game I can spam free fleets..... ye that doesnt work at all because of how militiary heroes scale. Unless the harmony have some truly disgusting hull designs such as -90% tonnage on wep modules or something, I cant imagine them ever being able to deal with a lvl 15+ hero



seems like the sowers arent the worst race anymore though, thats something !

They DO have +10% weapon damage for each strategic monopoly from a midgame tech, which is admittedly less than a hero but applies to all ships so I think it is too early to say they cannot fight back in late game.

Harmony weak?



In my games they are a worse god damn plague then the Cravers.



No upkeep costs means that they have no penalty to expanding to every world in the universe and then building huge war fleets to annihilate everything!

obsidia wrote:
the problem seems to be that even if you streamline colonization and research abusing the 150% bonus from mind-matter, you still end up with a pathetic level of FIDS compared to a standard race which has an early admin/corp hero. The faction just seems inherently underpowered due to its core mechanics.



oh but thats fine, late game I can spam free fleets..... ye that doesnt work at all because of how militiary heroes scale. Unless the harmony have some truly disgusting hull designs such as -90% tonnage on wep modules or something, I cant imagine them ever being able to deal with a lvl 15+ hero



seems like the sowers arent the worst race anymore though, thats something !

The Harmony have -75% to (insert module type here) on their ships, compared to -30% on other races. It's amazing at multipliying their effective MP.



At twice the base MP with further multipliers for resource monopoly and no penalties to expanding or creating massive fleets they can keep up with hero MP multipliers, but they take time to get there.

I started my first game with the Harmony last night and yes they start off with a slow growth, (again, im not sure if thats true or i just suck at being a quick player lol) but I was doing a small 1 vs 1 game and i had two fleets of basic ships mounted with either lasers or Fighters. About 60 turns into the game the other race (Automatons) declared war on me and attacked me on two fronts with 4 full fleets on each side ( 8 6/6 fleets vs my 2 7/7 fleets) and i BLEW them apart.



One thing I don't like though, the first ship class you can research as the Harmony has the -70% or whatever for fighters/bombers. but it only has room for 2 special slots..kind of makes it pointless in my opinion. If i have a ship with that bonus, i want to fill it up with nothing but fighters/bombers and shields then put it at the back of my fleet. Which brings me to my next semi-off topic thing.



When choosing fighters/bombers/weapons. You have to choose like ground attacking, fleet attacking, or balance fighters/bombers, and long/mid/melee for weapons. My ships still fire their weapons through all three rounds, so what am I missing?

Werthyman wrote:
I started my first game with the Harmony last night and yes they start off with a slow growth, (again, im not sure if thats true or i just suck at being a quick player lol) but I was doing a small 1 vs 1 game and i had two fleets of basic ships mounted with either lasers or Fighters. About 60 turns into the game the other race (Automatons) declared war on me and attacked me on two fronts with 4 full fleets on each side ( 8 6/6 fleets vs my 2 7/7 fleets) and i BLEW them apart.



One thing I don't like though, the first ship class you can research as the Harmony has the -70% or whatever for fighters/bombers. but it only has room for 2 special slots..kind of makes it pointless in my opinion. If i have a ship with that bonus, i want to fill it up with nothing but fighters/bombers and shields then put it at the back of my fleet. Which brings me to my next semi-off topic thing.



When choosing fighters/bombers/weapons. You have to choose like ground attacking, fleet attacking, or balance fighters/bombers, and long/mid/melee for weapons. My ships still fire their weapons through all three rounds, so what am I missing?

Note that the ship with -75% Fighter-Bomber tonnage is a 1CP ship. The ships with 4 slots are all 2CP or better. That means you can fit twice as many (or more) in your fleet. And since Fighters and Bombers are the only module that you can switch research level on (aside form troops) you can keep a fight bomber combo or use only one or the other. Then load the rest of the ship with siege cannons (or AP bombs).



What you choose for fighter/bombers/troops just changes the invasion power and ship damage of the modules. This changes how effective they are in ship to ship combat relative to invasions. Weapons act independently of siege modules.

Autocthon wrote:
Someone should go and confirm this, but I think the "mind and matter" slider works exactly like taxing. That is to say the bonus it provides doesn't seem to be affecting industry conversion tech.



Ergo, you can use research conversion AND turn down food production to get a mix of fast planet growth and slow-mediocre research rate. That's huge.

Tested this and you're right, it appears to be unaffected. Nice find!



However, I was clearly too quick to declare them 'not as bad'... they really are bad, research conversion or not, nor will manipulating the research slider save them. The thing I overlooked about the disharmony penalty from expansion completely wrecks them. Harmony faction gets the worst of the whole 'approval' gameplay aspect in every way possible: They can never gain a positive boost from high approval, but they still gain the negative malus from low 'approval' (ie. 'disharmony') from having colonized many planets - and while the other factions can counter this low-approval malus by researching and building happiness-improvements, the Harmony have no such thing (no approval means no approval buildings). The only way in which they can combat 'unhappiness' (disharmony) is by researching that tech that destroys all dust production from the warfare tech tree, and that is a late game tech. Therefore, while they could theoretically expand all they wanted, if they do so their economy goes down the drain due to disharmony. Sure, if/when you finally unlock this tech and remove the dust penalty from all your planets it is huge, but good luck surviving long enough to do that!



Looks like this faction needs a total makeover.

Biggest problem i feel for the Harmony is that atm non of the cost reduction on any ship hulls is working. So your paying way more industry for all your ships then you should be. Which considering your planets dont grow while building means your entire empire growth is crippled by it.