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