- 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.