Apheirox wrote:
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.

Actually, the same techs that reduce expansion disapproval reduce disharmony. I've been playing with them a bit to test drive them. Combine that with better base stats on ships and a massive FIS bonus when you have maxed planet population... It gets pretty crazy.



But you have to be patient, they don't have immediate returns.

No, you're wrong - they're broken. It doesn't matter that they get some respectable bonuses in the late game when their early game is as weak as it is. I'm aware the usual expansion disapproval reduction techs reduce disharmony for them, but they're facing the same problem as the other factions: Other than the first one that also allows wormhole travel, these are fairly late-game techs - you can't rely on these alone to reduce disapproval/disharmony. Like I wrote, the other factions compensate by having access to two relatively early approval improvements - the Harmony has none, so for them it's either stay small for many, many more turns than with any other faction or suffer a disharmony malus that eats most of your income. Strong ships and other bonuses don't make up for this.

Apheirox wrote:
No, you're wrong - they're broken. It doesn't matter that they get some respectable bonuses in the late game when their early game is as weak as it is. I'm aware the usual expansion disapproval reduction techs reduce disharmony for them, but they're facing the same problem as the other factions: Other than the first one that also allows wormhole travel, these are fairly late-game techs - you can't rely on these alone to reduce disapproval/disharmony. Like I wrote, the other factions compensate by having access to two relatively early approval improvements - the Harmony has none, so for them it's either stay small for many, many more turns than with any other faction or suffer a disharmony malus that eats most of your income. Strong ships and other bonuses don't make up for this.

The expansion tech can minimize that disharmony bonus. It's not that hard.



They're a bit weak, but really its a matter of playstyle and tuning, not that tehy're fundamentally broken.

Well this is a screen from my present game and the Harmony are in Red and the Automatons are in green and you can see they are both holding their own so I dont know about them both being broken. Same goes for the Sophons who are the blue. This is on normal difficulty which I suspect is the only level that actually works as intended in this game.

Igncom1 wrote:
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!

yeah they may have no upkeep but when they build any ships growth = 0 also they can't be upgraded at all once built.

BlackWind wrote:
yeah they may have no upkeep but when they build any ships growth = 0 also they can't be upgraded at all once built.

But Harmony are a race you decide when to grow, not one that grows all the time. Hence ramp up growth for a bit then roll over to build time. Its a back and forth process. they get silly powerful because they can flip their focus entirely on a moments notice

Sorry to say this but posting screenshots of a game and saying they have some colonies so there fine is pointless. Play them yourselves and feel how they work compared to other races and glaring issues pop up.



Disharmony is huge and mostly unavoidable.

Yes there is mid/late game tech to remove it and there is 1 kinda early game tech to reduce it (the rest is all mid/late aswell) but it means as a Harmony player you need to stick to 3-4 colonies for the first half the game. There is no way to mitigate Disharmony outside of specific tech. Meanwhile other races can use the tax slider, approval improvements and tech. It really slows down your early game which in 4x games is extremely important in setting up the rest of the game.



Ship Building is painful.

No planet growth while building any ship makes yet again the early game a problem. Your happily playing along. improving planets, researching things and woops some alien gets angry and declares war. You wanne build some extra ships to be able to defend and defeat him and... your colonies stop progressing completely. Ofc like other races your not building improvement but unlike them your also not growing! That planet you colonized 3 turns ago? well tobad its wasted effort now since you cant gain any more population. This means that if you need to build ships outside of planned windows where a system would be at max population anyway your being punished heavily for something as basic as ship construction.

Late game its less of a problem since your systems will be mostly maxed anyway but once again you have a big early game deficit.



New systems.

Starting up a new system takes time. Even more time if your Harmony. The previous 2 problems I mentioned cause for a slower start but then when your a little further in and want to set up some more colonies you run into yet another problem. No hero's means that your colonies will build up a lot slower then other races.

No +food/+industry boost from an experienced hero that you moved to the new system to boost your start. your stuck there spending half a dozen turns just building the initial planet exploitation. This once again means that Harmony growth is very much slowed after an already crippling slow start.



Almost every defining feature of the Harmony imposes an early game penalty on the faction. Your constantly being slowed down by almost every mechanic and to counter this they have "strong" late game bonuses? Be it against the AI or other players your constantly in a desperate race to not fall behind or strait up die because every card in the deck is stacked against you.

I honestly wonder how much testing has been done with this faction. Every game I have started I have been struggling to get far while before the expansion I could reliably win on Endless. Add to that fact that module cost reduction isnt working (seriously how do you miss this in testing) it just destroys this faction while it could have had great potential.

nats, that's a hilariously bad argument you're making with that screenshot - I can't tell whether it's sarcastic and whether to laugh, cry, or facepalm.



* screenshot of Harmony and Automaton AIs doing clearly worse than other factions, holding much less territory*



"Look guys! This random screenshot of AI players clearly shows the balance is fine!"





On a more serious note, to anybody in doubt the Harmony has problems: Simply play a game as them and notice how much slower your FIDS, tech level and score have grown by a certain number of turns. They're decidedly worse than any other faction - even the Hissho with no economic traits flat out beats them in terms of economic buildup.



The mind/matter research conversion definitely helps you a great deal, and you're in an even worse position if you don't use it well - but the faction as a whole clearly isn't working. It seems clear something is wrong when a faction that's completely unreliant on approval is the MOST limited by approval (disharmony).



@ Autocthon: Your infatuation with this new faction is blinding you from the obvious. I already explained to you why you can't rely on the % disharmony reduction techs alone, and the tech from the warfare tree that eliminates the malus for good costs over 5000 research. It doesn't matter how good their late-game techs are if they're gimped for the first 150+ turns of gameplay, they'll never catch up (if they even survive).

In my game i've expanded to 5 colonies as the Harmony. I didn't read much into it about them, anyone care to explain what the whole disharmony thing is with them? I havent encountered it yet.

I want someone who really understands how the Harmony play to show us how they are meant to be played, I have been trying different starting tactics and slider tactics but I still haven't figured it out yet. I can hold my FIDS on serious for about 60 turns or so then I plunge down to the bottom... still figuring out how I am suppose to use them.

Problems with the Harmony:



1. Construction of any Ships even scouts causes a stop in population growth (thats kind of to much...they have enough penaltys)



2. Harmony Custom races i bet with you are almost exactly the same every player will pick the same traits.



Tolerant

+ Some Traits to make Colo ships cheaper

Werthyman wrote:
In my game i've expanded to 5 colonies as the Harmony. I didn't read much into it about them, anyone care to explain what the whole disharmony thing is with them? I havent encountered it yet.

Once your over 3 systems check your FID (just mouse over your industry for example and you will see a - from Disharmony. The more colonies you control the worse this penalty becomes.

(you can lower but not remove it with tech in the bottom tree and you can make colony's not count for the calculation with a research in the top tree)

Harmony is just way to underpowered right now, not growing in pop when building ships is too crippeling when the AI spams fleets.

Flamar wrote:
Harmony is just way to underpowered right now, not growing in pop when building ships is too crippeling when the AI spams fleets.

You only lose it on the system producing the ships. So you plan ahead, you ramp up your expected ship producing systems to pop fast and them flip them into ship mode as the need.

Shivetya wrote:
You only lose it on the system producing the ships. So you plan ahead, you ramp up your expected ship producing systems to pop fast and them flip them into ship mode as the need.

I did try that but the AI went to war so soon that i could not get my pop going and i just got swamped and with low pop i could not produce ships fast enough. I'll try Again later and hope for at better start.

On normal Disharmony from 4 colonies is a 10% FIS penalty. I'm not seeing where that's crippling the harmony on its own.



Edit: With 6 colonies my FIS penalty is ~15% in normal. Additionally,



Mind and Matter bonus/penalty is up to 100%. Industry Conversion ignores this bonus/penalty. The best exploitation on planets is probably Industry because it will allow you to produce faster during expansion phases (and convert larger industry values). Though for low-food planets its definitely more efficient to go with food, as otherwise you'll never get them increasing in population. Colonize Barren/Lava is a must, the harmony are much more efficient in T4 or T5 systems, tolerant would probably be broken for them.

because you need a lot more than 4 systems to get the 5.6k science needed to start purifying the systems. In order to get that much science in any reasonable amount of time, you have to get 8+ systems, which is pretty crippling.



I think they should add a lower tech upgrade that mitigates the disharmony, w/o fully purifying it. Maybe just move all the -22% disharmony upgrades to lower techs. As it stands, the 3rd and 4th take way more sci than even the purification tech, making them effectively useless. Lower those tech costs, and you have a way to mitigate disharmony enough until you can actually purify.



As for ship building, they are supposed to take significantly less industry....they just haven't fixed that yet.

Affinity wrote:
As for ship building, they are supposed to take significantly less industry....they just haven't fixed that yet.

Bollocks.



The AI already kicks my ass, and they are supposed to have MORE ships? heh.....oO'

It would be easier to test drive the harmony if every time I started I wasn't surrounded by half a dozen systems with literally no colonizable planets. Is it too much to ask for some systems with lots of tundra? At 8 systems I'll be looking at ~20% penalty with one disharmony penalty reduction. I also want to point out that the disharmony reduction effects are on lynchpin researches.



Specifically, Applied Casimir Effect and Applied Atmospherics. The former is required for galactic travel, the latter is a standard flagship. I'm thinking that if I wasn't handed crap systems (seriously one in 10 of the systems in the starting arm of my galaxy has more than 3 planets /sigh and only 2 systems were colonizable without research) I could have probably leveraged growth to be at a decent research right now. Sadly it took me 12 turns to find a colonizable system... and that system had one planet.



So basically early game strategy is something like this as far as I can tell:



1) Set starting colony to food conversion, maximize research bonus.

2) Exploit Industry EVERYWHERE

3) Research N-Way Fusion Plants and Core Mining.

4) Reduce research multiplier while you upgrade systems and produce your first two colony ships.

5) Ramp up research again while you colonize and research.

6) Research Compact Fusion and Applied Casimir Effect



Just keep on sweeping back and forth, prioritze tech for colonizing Barren and Lava, and then start working on weapons tech. As long as you're not shafted in systems you should be able to pretty quickly ramp up techs to reach the imnportant colonization points, then focus 100% on population expansion and defending your systems. And get your Luthic ASAP. -44% disharmony combined with your flagship will help you consolidate power.



If they fix ship costs the Harmony will be much better :P



And for reference, I'm not blind to how bad the harmony currently are. But I'm also absolutely sure that they require a different approach and a bit more luck than any other race. You can't rely on heroes to increase your throughput, so you have to do it yourself.

I don't get why they are bad, the AI with them seems to be very good at zerging across the stars.