It's not 12 turns.... its alot earlier. I've only rarely reached the point to terraformed to tundra in multiplayer with other factions, but both times i've played automatons I've terraformed to terran.

1) Don't move the goalpost. We're talking about early and mid-game. Please run 100% taxes then. Show me how it is done.



2) 100% taxes produce 150% dust, not +150% dust.



You're right about the Industry. I thought it begins at 50% taxes, not 25%.

Xenolith wrote:
1) Don't move the goalpost. We're talking about early and mid-game. Please run 100% taxes then. Show me how it is done.



2) 100% taxes produce 150% dust, not +150% dust.



You're right about the Industry. I thought it begins at 50% taxes, not 25%.

Early game you can get to around 45% until you want to start getting your new colony's out of bad approval, its good for getting those colony ships out, by partially building them, and buying the rest.



2: derp that's what I was trying to say.



I assumed you put them in the wrong way round, yes the industry bonus starts at 30% with a 4% boost.



The bonus overall is rather poor early game, but once your colony's are established mid-game and you have 2-3 of the approval structures, you should crank that sucker up as far as you can before too many colony's go into unhappiness, I prefer to only allow 2-3 colony's to do this but that may change on how may you have.

I don't see how reducing your bonus to Industry helps you produce colony ships faster. Yes, you can cheaply buy them out after partially building them, but I doubt you even shave a turn off the actual construction time. And at the same time you cripple Food and Science on all systems.



Of course if you actually get to the endgame with UE and manage to have an empire of competitive size and development, you'll dominate (everyone except Hissho). What I am saying is that this won't happen because early game bonuses are much, much more important than late-game bonuses.

Good tier list. I agree with most of it, but I reckon there should be some minor shifts (my opinion though and geared for multiplayer, i'm interested in what you think.)



Hissho needs to be in special tier: if you're playing with noobs, its the best by far. If you're playing against a pro who rushes you, well gg your affinity is at best +20% weapons with useless unique techs.



Automatons need to go to A tier.

Too many newer players play this (better players build factions that either rush or can at least defend rush), so it makes it look crap all game. But really, automatons affinity is pretty much a total waste at the start, however it gets alot better. Their jungle start would have been good pre-patch, but post-patch dust requirement make it actually worse than terran or arid.

Even so, they have one HUGE HUGE HUGE HUGE bonus on everyone else... they can terraform to terran (+special terran hydro is insane) before other guys can terraform to desert. This makes them the strongest faction in a peaceful game. After the stacking interest increase tech, their affinity also becomes relevant, 20% interest roughly equates to about a +40-60% system production overall, making it pretty good.



Horatios should be tier B, the biggest downside is its too luck dependant on getting an admin (or even better admin/corp) hero. Cloning the best admin hero and chucking it on a new planet speeds it up by at least 10 turns. Arid is actually the best homeworld post-patch IMO because dust is so much more relevant. With the homeworld being the only colony for the first 30 turns, being able to get 9 (5 base+4 exploit) dust per pop is huge... compared to say the 4 you would get from jungles and ocean. If you don't get 2xlegendary heroes (like me) you can actually save enough money to buy out around 3/4 the n-way fusion plant. I still think horatio is much better than most of the other B tiers.



Pilgrims need to go to C tier.

Pilgrims affinity is never very relevant. Early on, the wasted industry to build the fleet errant itself is too much a waste, as well as the fact you will really only be moving the n-way fusion plant. With the new fleet upkeep + you depriving the homeworld of pop, you can't afford a sustainable farming on every colony (homeworld would only produce 2 dust per pop since you'd use food exploit to generate pop). Read above for why jungle homeworld is bad now.

Only benefit I can see from it early is to get rich soil anomaly and use your homeworld as a population factory. But I already don't have enough pop on homeworld itself just to keep pumping colony ships for expansion.

Later on, when you have more buildings to transport, you should already have an admin hero of at least lvl 4 with both +15 ind and +20 food, and I also buy out n-way and the +6 to all FIDS (can't remember the name), those together will pretty much mean the fleet errant is useless later as well.



As to other guys comments about UE and Sowers:



UE can be okay so tier B is alright, especially with the recent HP buffs.



Sowers may be good in singleplayer (and no impossible ai should be renamed "I get massive bonuses but I'm still so stupid and therefore easy to beat") but if you play against other players, your start is just too slow.



Say terran planet, 7 food per pop (base + t2 exploit) for other factions. For sowers it would be either 4.3 ([3+4]/2 + 2*0.4) with food exploit or 3.1 (3/2+ [2+2]*0.4) with t2 ind exploit. The t2 ind exploit is a waste of research earlygame and it turns out crapper food so it'll be better for you to stay with the food exploit, this would then also mean you get no ind benefit at the start from your affinity. Its true once you get N-way running thats + 4 total (not per pop), and with 2xlegendary admin thats + 6 total. So once you do have those 2 up, it even up around 4 populations worth of food difference (7-4.3 = 2.7 dif per pop), but by the time you get that up, terran homeworld should have 6 pop already for a non-sower. And you don't have that many (for all your systems) or even any admin hero to start.

The start is just too crippling, SOWERS are sorta like the anti-craver lol. Later on, when you can just buyout n-way fusion plants and you have t-3 ind exploit, you'll start up your colony a little faster than other dudes. And sowers can make better use of some crappier planets such as lava and gas methane, but you can't do that at start without tolerance (crap^10 faction trait) anyways.

Xenolith wrote:
I don't see how reducing your bonus to Industry helps you produce colony ships faster. Yes, you can cheaply buy them out after partially building them, but I doubt you even shave a turn off the actual construction time. And at the same time you cripple Food and Science on all systems.



Of course if you actually get to the endgame with UE and manage to have an empire of competitive size and development, you'll dominate (everyone except Hissho). What I am saying is that this won't happen because early game bonuses are much, much more important than late-game bonuses.

due to the way they an out, I know but what I am saying is the ability to give your home system a large boost to dust while keeping a comparable boost to industry.



This is the way I see it, as it also acts as a great incentive thorough the game to get good approval so you can tax the hell out of them.



I feel the Affinity works well on that basis, and the XP boost is just great.





However you have a different opinion, so in the effort of being constructive, what would you say about improving it?



Possibly increasing the bonus so it out does the approval industry bonus sooner?

Having the bonus start sooner in the tax list, thus ending with a higher bonus?

Or something else?



(I would also like to apologize if I have been rude to you in the way I have responded before, as I feel I might have been a little rude).

ryousei wrote:
Horatios should be tier B, the biggest downside is its too luck dependant on getting an admin (or even better admin/corp) hero. Cloning the best admin hero and chucking it on a new planet speeds it up by at least 10 turns. Arid is actually the best homeworld post-patch IMO because dust is so much more relevant. With the homeworld being the only colony for the first 30 turns, being able to get 9 (5 base+4 exploit) dust per pop is huge... compared to say the 4 you would get from jungles and ocean. If you don't get 2xlegendary heroes (like me) you can actually save enough money to buy out around 3/4 the n-way fusion plant. I still think horatio is much better than most of the other B tiers.

It's true that with a high-dust homeworld you will have no trouble with dust even while rushing. On the other hand you get -1 or -2 food per pop and -1 pop total compared to T1 planets, which hurts your rexing capability. Additionaly you'll have absolutely pitiful science until you colonize meaning later Xenobiology and N-Way Fusion Plants. Now, with the increase in ship maintenance I can actually see them being worthy of B-Tier.

ryousei wrote:
Automatons need to go to A tier.

Too many newer players play this (better players build factions that either rush or can at least defend rush), so it makes it look crap all game. But really, automatons affinity is pretty much a total waste at the start, however it gets alot better. Their jungle start would have been good pre-patch, but post-patch dust requirement make it actually worse than terran or arid.

Even so, they have one HUGE HUGE HUGE HUGE bonus on everyone else... they can terraform to terran (+special terran hydro is insane) before other guys can terraform to desert. This makes them the strongest faction in a peaceful game. After the stacking interest increase tech, their affinity also becomes relevant, 20% interest roughly equates to about a +40-60% system production overall, making it pretty good.

If micromanaged perfectly they have very competitive Industry. The problem is that you have to produce just the right amount of stuff each turn to maximize the benefit of the interest. This is just not realistic in larger games with a timer. At least I can't do it.

ryousei wrote:
Pilgrims need to go to C tier.

Pilgrims affinity is never very relevant. Early on, the wasted industry to build the fleet errant itself is too much a waste, as well as the fact you will really only be moving the n-way fusion plant. With the new fleet upkeep + you depriving the homeworld of pop, you can't afford a sustainable farming on every colony (homeworld would only produce 2 dust per pop since you'd use food exploit to generate pop). Read above for why jungle homeworld is bad now.

Only benefit I can see from it early is to get rich soil anomaly and use your homeworld as a population factory. But I already don't have enough pop on homeworld itself just to keep pumping colony ships for expansion.

Later on, when you have more buildings to transport, you should already have an admin hero of at least lvl 4 with both +15 ind and +20 food, and I also buy out n-way and the +6 to all FIDS (can't remember the name), those together will pretty much mean the fleet errant is useless later as well.

I only kept it in B because of the Jungle homeworld. It is probably C, though.



I don't agree that Jungle is a bad homeworld type. So far I haven't been dust-starved yet.

Igncom1 wrote:
However you have a different opinion, so in the effort of being constructive, what would you say about improving it?

What I could see working is "condensing" the bonus. Instead of progressing like:



4-8-12-16-20-24-28-32-36-40-44-48-52-58-60



it could progress like:



8-16-24-32-40-48-56-60-60-60-60-60-60-60-60

Igncom1 wrote:
(I would also like to apologize if I have been rude to you in the way I have responded before, as I feel I might have been a little rude).

No, problem. I don't think you were.

Xenolith wrote:
It's true that with a high-dust homeworld you will have no trouble with dust even while rushing. On the other hand you get -1 or -2 food per pop and -1 pop total compared to T1 planets, which hurts your rexing capability. Additionaly you'll have absolutely pitiful science until you colonize meaning later Xenobiology and N-Way Fusion Plants. Now, with the increase in ship maintenance I can actually see them being worthy of B-Tier.





If micromanaged perfectly they have very competitive Industry. The problem is that you have to produce just the right amount of stuff each turn to maximize the benefit of the interest. This is just not realistic in larger games with a timer. At least I can't do it.





I only kept it in B because of the Jungle homeworld. It is probably C, though.



I don't agree that Jungle is a bad homeworld type. So far I haven't been dust-starved yet.

Sorry I editted some of my post while you were replying.



Anyways um yea either way though, the automatons would be stronger than even cravers in a peaceful game because of terran terraform.



Well for the arid not being an upside thats why horatios are only still B tier in my opinion and not A lol.

For the pitiful science issue, yea thats true, but I get my early science from ind->sci anyways =). Horatios really need the admin/corp hero to really shine though.



Oh btw, yea dust problems is only gonna be huge if you are rushing or are successfully defending a rush. As far as I know in my normal time-zone for playing, I'm one of the only skillful players that don't rush, so you need that dust against the pros. Against the noobs, any race, except maybe sowers, will do fine.

BlueTemplar wrote:
Of course I did, we're talking about custom factions here, not default Sowers! (Sadly, more ind->food is not something you can change.)

"Doing so well" means rather easily winning an Impossible game (started in 1.0.5) against the AI after I eliminated the Sophons in my arm.

Also I just remembered, you can't take black thumbs anymore yea? Before that sowers mighta been okay, because you can get other bonuses to try even out the shitty food growth.

About the Terran Terraform: Do you get it that much earlier? I mean you still need the resource. If you bee-line Black Hole Mining before getting Non-Baryionic Shielding you save 41 500 research, but that's maybe 12 turns at that point in the game, and your good systems might get capped out on population for quite a while.

Xenolith wrote:
Normal Faction via fervent+optimistic:

+30% Food

+30% Industry

-40% Dust

+30% Science



UE on high taxes:

+8% Industry

+10% Dust



UE pales in comparison.

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Err...so no, +60% industry and +150% dust is a hard amount to simply deny, especially once colony's are done growing.



And its still a 20% industry bonus at 50%.



And really both can be applied to UE systems, so an even greater advantage.

Xenolith wrote:
What I could see working is "condensing" the bonus. Instead of progressing like:



4-8-12-16-20-24-28-32-36-40-44-48-52-58-60



it could progress like:



8-16-24-32-40-48-56-60-60-60-60-60-60-60-60





No, problem. I don't think you were.

That's a quick ramp up with a suitable level off, I like it but will say that without some kind of end road bonus for getting to 100% tax, 65% tax in that model would be a good stopping point for players like me.



Of course it I were to suggest a ending bonus for 100% tax, I would probably go for a gratuitous bonus like 200, so what do you think

How about



8-16-24-32-40-44-48-52-56-60-64-68-72-76-80



It makes early game high taxes better, gives them better military potential in mid-game, possibly makes T3 approval a better beeline than Low-Temp Hydration (unlike every other affinity), and should be enough to close the gap.



Edit:



For Sowers I'd suggest restoring the Ind->Food to 50% as at some point in beta.



How to make Pilgrims viable I have no idea. Reduce the base cost of Fleet Errant and let Master of Illusion and Militarists apply to it?

What kind of turn count are we talking about here? 100? 110?

Yeah, I won a wonder victory yesterday on turn 109.



As for Sowers, by taking N-Way Fusion Plants, Core Mining and Mineral Rich as traits, you can have a blazingly fast start.

BTW, in my current game as Sophons, I found starting by this tech path to get Heavy Isotope Refineries up and running quickly was more beneficial than getting food improvements first.



I didn't know we were also talking about multiplayer here, I suppose is a whole different situation...



Discussing and trying to classify various empire affinities without considering what traits you might take to enhance them is meaningless.



UE affinity doe not give ships more HP, it's a secondary trait. As for their affinity, if you stack the various approval bonuses, you can reach Fervent + Ecstatic while still having a nice Industry bonus easily. (An admin hero can easily get +70 !)

BTW, have you noticed they have a hidden affinity feature : they get more dust on low tax rates and less dust on high tax rates! (which is kind of counter-intuitive if you think that they're supposed to be run with high taxes)

http://endlessspace.wikia.com/wiki/Approval#Tax_rate

It's not 12 turns.... its alot earlier. I've only rarely reached the point to terraformed to tundra in multiplayer with other factions, but both times i've played automatons I've terraformed to terran.

Even with Sowers? They too have a earlier terraforming : tundra, though the Adamantian pre-requisite makes it a lot less powerful it could be.



I'd rather see Black Thumbs available again for Sowers, maybe a small industry bonus too, or give them 65 starting points like the other factions, or give them 50% ind->science/dust conversion efficiency like before... (though 50% might be a bit high)



Its funny, it would seem stock Sowers were so OP, that they apparently have been nerfed to death (in addition to 50% conversion (that all races had but that was especially good with sowers) they had no -20% science, and they also had Optimal Defense and Crowded Planets). I also suppose their affinity lost quite a few empire points...

Xenolith wrote:
How about



8-16-24-32-40-44-48-52-56-60-64-68-72-76-80



It makes early game high taxes better, gives them better military potential in mid-game, possibly makes T3 approval a better beeline than Low-Temp Hydration (unlike every other affinity), and should be enough to close the gap.

Looks good, want me to suggest it?

BlueTemplar wrote:
Discussing and trying to classify various empire affinities without considering what traits you might take to enhance them is meaningless.

I'm assuming the default pick of Mineral Rich and Optimistic II. For rest of the points I'm assuming whatever fits the affinity or I have seen picked in mp.

BlueTemplar wrote:
As for Sowers, by taking N-Way Fusion Plants, Core Mining and Mineral Rich as traits, you can have a blazingly fast start.

So you have to pay 30 (25 from tech + 5 from affinity having only 60) faction points just to have starting growth comparable to other affinities?

BlueTemplar wrote:
UE affinity doe not give ships more HP, it's a secondary trait. As for their affinity, if you stack the various approval bonuses, you can reach Fervent + Ecstatic while still having a nice Industry bonus easily. (An admin hero can easily get +70 !)

Sure you can. But it is less effective than bee-lining Low Temp Hydration. I don't see how master of propaganda helps with taxes. You should have at least 10 systems at that point.

BlueTemplar wrote:
BTW, have you noticed they have a hidden affinity feature : they get more dust on low tax rates and less dust on high tax rates! (which is kind of counter-intuitive if you think that they're supposed to be run with high taxes)

http://endlessspace.wikia.com/wiki/Approval#Tax_rate

I didn't. That is interesting.

Igncom wrote:
Looks good, want me to suggest it?

Sure.

Some races work well without Optimistic, or even with Pessimistic (especially the Sophons IMHO).



Um, no, with those starting techs you'll have a MUCH faster starting growth than your average faction.



What Low-Temp Hydration has to do with the UE? I'm seeing the UE affinity being most effective when staying and developing only a few very good systems. This strategy of course can't work well until we have a way to abandon/raze systems (because there's no failproof way to deny systems to other players right now).

BlueTemplar wrote:
Some races work well without Optimistic, or even with Pessimistic (especially the Sophons IMHO).

I assume you want to play them at extremely low tax and do a lot of Ind-to-Dust. I'd like to know how you deal with any kind of aggression in that case.

BlueTemplar wrote:
Um, no, with those starting techs you'll have a MUCH faster starting growth than your average faction.

Just tried it in singleplayer, with an above average (admin hero, komatite terran, mineral rich tundra, garden of eden arid) start, and had less pop (<40) than my Amoeba average (46.5) over 20 games at the start of turn 31. The amoeba data is fairly old too - I can do better now.

BlueTemplar wrote:
What Low-Temp Hydration has to do with the UE? I'm seeing the UE affinity being most effective when staying and developing only a few very good systems. This strategy of course can't work well until we have a way to abandon/raze systems (because there's no failproof way to deny systems to other players right now).

That doesn't really work in multiplayer, because other players will have core high quality systems as well - and a lot of mediocre systems making their total fids higher than yours. I thought T3 approval was a 7500 research tech, but it's just 4000. Forget what I said about Low-Temp Hydration.

- No Ind to Dust required (except maybe a bit in the start), just a lot of commerce. It looks like I might be able to beat Endless AI's with this setup (without even stealing stuff from them).



- Did you do 20 games too with the Sowers with various empire trait combinations? High pop is nice, but what about the IDS? Otherwise it seems pretty good for a faction you don't seem to play often.



- Yes, but they won't have your industry and dust bonus, and it seems this setup would allow you to have a huge military quickly. The idea would be not to grow faster than your opponents, but force them to grow slower. Anyway, at least some testing is needed, though I'm not sure if blockading a system indefinitely (as you're rather forced now with this strategy) would work well.

If only you could add the Piligrim affinity to this strategy! You could have a raiding fleet stealing improvements from enemy systems and bringing them to yours, or relocate to a system with more approval when unlocking new luxury resources...

- What tax level do you use? Still I wonder how you keep up Fervent+Optimistic without Optimistic.



- Couldn't get an accurate FIDS measure because my economy was horrible and there was no comfortable tax level.



- The bonus adds less fids than more systems do. Of course having fewer systems also means that you have to spend less industry for improvements, leaving more queue time for ships. I'd agree that mid-game aggressiveness is required for UE to succeed.

Well, I'm still in the earliest stages of the game, no need for a potent military yet, but in the two games I tried so far I didn't need to go over 10% tax rate for long before being able to go back to 0% tax when trade routes started to kick in.

@Ail: Those 5 less points at Sowers and Amoeba are one small "positive" talent less for those two races. Which makes it even worse for Sowers. . Amplitude made only very little use of balancing with trait points, thus the balancing of the faction affinities with each other, is much more important and can be seen more or less alone.



The Hissho faction trait for example is still a very strong trait, with a long duration and a steamrolling side-effect on your fleets, which can stack infinite. Other faction traits are not even worthy to spend any points on them, if you could buy them for points. I believe, that Amplitude should invest some time in re-balancing it. Meedoc asks in another thread about overpowered traits, but those should only be touched, if faction traits are reworked, too. Both traits are interconnected heavily with each other, so it shoud be done within one iteration =).

To a point they're not meant to be. The affinities are designed to alter gameplay, slightly, depending on what you choose. Are some inherently more useful? Yes. Do they all need to conform to the same rough balance level? No.



If you aren't actively making a choice and taking a gamble to make something work then, on the whole, why bother.



Have you factored in the affect of the various faction specific techs on this?

I would say one has to look at a race as a whole. At least when it comes to stock races. Also I don't find the Horatios Affinity weak at all. They basically can switch from 7 Level 20 System-Heros to 7 Level 20 Fleet-Heros and back. Even if they don't have a good hero at the start: Cloning a nicely-leveled sub-ideal-hero is still better than having him to level.



For the Sowers, however, I really feel bad for them. I think their Affinity ain't even an advantage at all. Not like the Affinity being not as good as others... more like: They would probably do even better without it!

Everytime there's Sowers in my games, they are the most likely ones to do worst and I feel it's really hard to play them well.

I wouldn't even think it was imbalanced if they would only have the positive effect from it.

Their affinities are linked to their tech tree, so while on surface one affinity might shine it might get balanced out by their tech, for exemple sure Amoeba gets the advantage in trade, but at the same time they don't get the 1st trade system improvements, missing out on 1 trade route. Of course there are also the things that are easier to spot since are marked with orange icons, but not everything is.

I feel like the sowers are supposed to be late game juggernauts with their industry, but they never seem to pull it off.

They are fantastic for MP.

@Waylander1982: How are Sowers "fantastic" in MP? I play mainly MP & nearly noone choses Sowers, because it is a default-loss. You have a disadvantage in the beginning, because it takes more time to populate your planets & in the Terran-terraformed-endgame, they are the biggest loosers ever, because everyone else is able to have much more industry. Food is the key to victory & quick growth.



@Skyrah: The differences in techtree are little. It is basically about getting some techs earlier and sometimes you are allowed to have "more" of a resource. The first "trade system improvement" is: "Extreme Option Exchange", which is available to Amoeba, too. Which Tech is not available to Amoeba?



@Ail: I must disagree, that you have to look at "standard / stock factions", only. I believe, that many players are trying to experiment with traits at some point. So "standard factions" are in a sandbox-game sth. like a beginner mode, but not the mode, which is being played after 50 or 100 hours. It may be fun to play with them, but faction traits should be balanced. I would agree, that noone awaits a perfect balancing, which is quiet hard, if you want diversity, but while some affinities are giving you bonuses, others (Sowers!) are giving you a malus. That's something, which should be changed. All affinities should give you in some way an edge over other factions in some way.

With food Turing into industry, they really should be the faction with the "Industry-To-Food" infinite production. (Tax free of course)

In my opinion, the Sowers are an early-game juggernaut but they very quickly fall behind. They do get Industry bonuses, but then, so do other races - and the Sowers' lower level of Research really comes to bite them later on in the game, and at that point all players will also have access to Lava planets. When the Sowers get the actual lava planet tech, their enemies will be terraforming. Sowers really need some huge late-game advantage to stay competitive, otherwise it's suicide.

@wahnvorstellung: I actually never tried making a custom-faction. Do all the Affinities cost the same budget? If this is the case, then, yes, they would need to be balanced. Or the other thing would be: Have the affinities cost different amount of race-creation-budgets to balance them out and give the races which weaker affinities more other stuff.

wahnvorstellung wrote:
@Skyrah: The differences in techtree are little. It is basically about getting some techs earlier and sometimes you are allowed to have "more" of a resource. The first "trade system improvement" is: "Extreme Option Exchange", which is available to Amoeba, too. Which Tech is not available to Amoeba?

My bad, it seams you are right, after rechecking, only cravers lack the 1st trade tech, was quite sure Amoeba do too, without all 9 tech tree in front hard to compare them, sadly can't start multiple sessions of es to do that the easy way.



@Ail: Amoeba and Sower affinities get only 60 points limit for custom factions, everyone else gets 65.



Edit:

I understand why Amoeba might miss 5 points, but a bit confused about Sower.



Off topic: at times like this i'm happy the game can be modded so easily, i know it's not supposed to be the solution but it is for me at the very least, that was also the reason why for me Amoeba lacked the 1st trade tech, got so used to it that forgot that i made the change myself.

From my point of view, faction affinities are not balanced - not even close.



On the one side, we do have faction affinities, which have always a positive effect on your economy / game, like the ones from Hissho or Amoeba. The faction trait of Amoeba, is enabling players to decide right from the beginning to fly into the right direction and colonize the right planets. Furthermore it enables the amoeba to ramp up its trade routes very early in the game and connect to all other players easily. While all other players are forced to discover every single system of another player to establish a trade route, amoeba players only need to discover any fleet or system to establish trade routes with all planets. In fact, amoeba players are the only ones, who are able to trade with all systems, while it is sometimes impossible for other players to find all players of a cravers system, without declaring war.



On the other side we have bonuses from the Sower or Horatio, which are very situational or do not lead to any benefit at all for anyone. A Horatio with bad luck at the specialization of heroes, is not able to make any good use of his cloning ability. 3 Adventurer / Corp heroes are not worthy to clone, thus the faction affinity and the additional buildings are not helpful at all. While some players argue, that a game, which does not start with an admin-hero is already lost, this is true^2 for Horatio, making Horatio-Gameplay very luck-dependent.

The Sower-affinity is cutting down the most important resource: food, in many stages of the game, leading to a disadvantage. Furthermore the strongest production planet is a terran one. The transformation of food to industry is the best way of creating insane production systems. Due to the malus on food production of Sowers, Sowers are not able to compete with other races in late game (while also having a disadvantage in early game :P!).



While i like diversity, i dislike the current implementation of racial affinities, which are sometimes huge advantages for players and sometimes even disadvantages, depending on which faction, you have chosen. The huge difference leads to less usage of some faction, while others are "overpopulated". Balancing the faction affinities is especially important, if you want to rework the traits, too. As discussed in: https://www.games2gether.com/endless-space/forum/28-game-design/thread/11381-opinion-requested-on-faction-traits

I am in agreement with that, as people have pointed out, some races have exclusively positive effects (Hissho and Horatio are exclusively positive traits), whereas groups like Cravers and Sowers are often negative aspects, with select circumstances where they have useful effects. That needs to be rectified.

The Sower affinity greatly simplifies micromanagement and decision-making.



Food is irrelevant, foor system improvements are not very useful so you save on upkeep and infrastructure construction.

All planets should get an industry exploitation along with all industry system improvements (which you would have built anyway with another faction).

Planets to colonize first are Class I along with Tundra, then Desert and maybe Arid. The Sower tech tree lets you terraform to Tundra earlier (10-20 turns?).

You can colonize Lava planets early without having food problems when it's the only good planet in system.



As for late-game arguments, in my games, by that time the winner is already known and the endgame is a formality.



Of course, a custom faction with the Sower affinity can do much better than the default Sower faction. The -20% science is annoying, the Tolerant trait to colonize any planet at start isn't that useful because of approval problems, and I'd prefer Mineral Rich anomaly over Metallic Water.



I greatly enjoyed playing with that affinity pre-automaton-addon.

Yes, Adaptive Industrial Systems comes so late in the game that it barely even matters. It looks like it will be faster in my current game to go straight for Invulnerable Empire than to research Dust Visualization and one of it's pre-requisites first. Even terraforming to Jungle is only going to be done because I need 5 turns after that to get Siderite+Endless Empire, and even then keeping everything as Tundra might actually be faster.



If the Sower -50% food penalty is so bad as you say it is, then why am I doing so well even after having increased this penalty to -80% for my custom empire?

BlueTemplar wrote:
If the Sower -50% food penalty is so bad as you say it is, then why am I doing so well even after having increased this penalty to -80% for my custom empire?

Sorry how do you define "doing so well"? I have never seen a sower do well in multiplayer; in war or no war, so its not linked to say the current imbalances with glass cannon destroyers.



And when you increased to -80% did you change anything else? (like more ind->food?)

I think folks focus far too much on the -50% food of the Sower's affinity and miss out on the 40% of industry is converted to food and the two Sower specific improvements that add more industry per population and the 1 that gives a higher percentage boost to industry than other races get. Of all the races the only one that gets any additional food bonuses from an improvement is the Pilgrims.



Elegant Networks (replaces Colonial Rights)

+30 Approval on Star System

+10% Food on Ecstatic

+25% Industry on Ecstatic

+10% Dust on Ecstatic

+10% Science on Ecstatic



The +25% industry equates to +10% food for a net of only -30% food.



Inorganic Cultivation (replaces Intensive Cultivation Logistics)

+3 Food on planets with explored moon

+3 Industry on planets with moon temple



The 3 industry equates to +1.2 food and the +3 food gets reduced to +1.5 for an after affinity bonus of 2.7 food and 3 industry. That's only 10% less food than any other race could get out of a planet with an explored moon.



Extreme Infrastructures

+3 Industry on Arctic

+2 Industry on Hydrogen, Helium, Tundra, Barren

+1 Industry on Terran, Ocean, Arid



This equates to +1.5, +1 and +0.5 food respectively.



When you start adding everything up you'll find that the Sowers don't really have much of a food penalty and have a massive production boost.

ryousei wrote:
Sorry how do you define "doing so well"? I have never seen a sower do well in multiplayer; in war or no war, so its not linked to say the current imbalances with glass cannon destroyers.



And when you increased to -80% did you change anything else? (like more ind->food?)

Of course I did, we're talking about custom factions here, not default Sowers! (Sadly, more ind->food is not something you can change.)

"Doing so well" means rather easily winning an Impossible game (started in 1.0.5) against the AI after I eliminated the Sophons in my arm.

BlueTemplar wrote:


"Doing so well" means rather easily winning an Impossible game (started in 1.0.5) against the AI after I eliminated the Sophons in my arm.

What kind of turn count are we talking about here? 100? 110?

Monthar wrote:


I think folks focus far too much on the -50% food of the Sower's affinity and miss out on the 40% of industry is converted to food and the two Sower specific improvements that add more industry per population and the 1 that gives a higher percentage boost to industry than other races get.

Planets have higher base food than industry in the early game. If you lose 50% of your base food and gain 40% of your base industry, you'll have a net loss. This is mostly because of how good food exploits are on T1 and T2 planets, while only Tundra, and later Jungle, get a bonus from the industry exploit. Add to that all the little things like the T2 industry exploit tech being slightly more expensive than the T2 food one or the 5 approval hit from Tundra making fervent+optimistic more expensive and it just adds up. Yes, you can get more industry later with improvements, but you're already behind at that point.





I'd roughly group affinities in multiplayer like this:



A-Tier:

• Cravers - Unrivaled early game. Having a competent craver as a neighbor is a death sentence. The hard part is leveraging that advantage and not falling behind the rexing Amoeba and Sophon players on the other side of the map.
• Hissho - Still the best affinity if you can manage to stay relevant in mid-game, as the huge drawback is that it offers no help in the early game. It's a gamble - get one bushido stack and you will very likely be able get 4 and then steamroll the game.
• Amoeba - Very flexible. The early galaxy information can be used both for rapid expansion and rushing. Ocean homeworld allows the earliest possible Casimir.
• Sophons - Best expansion capability in the game and good science bonus at the cost of mid- to late-game retrofitting shenanigans. Synergizes well with the unique science improvement on the right tree. Solid choice.

B-Tier:

• Empire - The Industry part of their affinity doesn't help early- and mid-game at all. The ship xp part only shines if you can keep ships alive, which doesn't happen easily unless you get a defense resource monopoly. It does help, however, and is the only reason I'd put them in the B-Tier. Terran homeworld is average.
• Automatons - Three things: Managing stacked industry makes this the most micro-intensive faction. The unique predictive logistics lacking base industry hurts very badly in mid-game, as you have to micro so much more to get more industry out of it than the standard predictive logistics. Symbiotic Satellites is another micro trap and becomes useful too late for where it is in the tree. It's not a bad affinity, but it requires more effort than the turn timer allows.
• Horatio - Cloning admin heroes is not as useful as one might think. Early game it is offset by the disadvantage of their Arid homeworld, mid-game it a drop in the bucket, and end-game the ability is irrelevant as you can easily train up new heroes in a few turns. Cloned Lv10+ military heroes are moderately useful in the mid-game, though.

C-Tier:

• Sowers - The lower net food cripples their early game growth and makes them unable to compete.
• Pilgrims - While a Jungle homeworld is awesome and their affinity can be used to lower the time needed to get initially bad systems running, it is usually strictly worse than just settling every available system with normal colony ships as soon as possible.

Xenolith wrote:


B-Tier:

• Empire - The Industry part of their affinity doesn't help early- and mid-game at all. The ship xp part only shines if you can keep ships alive, which doesn't happen easily unless you get a defense resource monopoly. It does help, however, and is the only reason I'd put them in the B-Tier. Terran homeworld is average.

I feel you underestimate the UE, their affinity is extremely easy to use at the beginning of the game giving you a good overall boost to production and a massive sum of dust for rush buying, the HP of UE ships is unparalleled meaning that once they get to cruisers and above are total tanking monsters, and once they reach the late game their affinity is arguably unbeatable giving you a redonkulous industry advantage and an excuse to rank up dust like your hoovering, pair that with a buyout bonus improvement and you can get fleets like there is no tomorrow.

Normal Faction via fervent+optimistic:

+30% Food

+30% Industry

-40% Dust

+30% Science



UE on 50%* taxes:

+20%* Industry



UE pales in comparison.



*EDIT