In turn 180 the game usually ends for me. But even if not I still need luck for a smooth overall game to get it in that time (if I dont play a heavy science faction).



20% more industry is a lot if you ask me. That is 20% more overpowered than other races that go for heavy industry. Especially since dust is not that great unless you want an economy victory. As pilgrims I often ask myself why I even bother trading, nobody needs/wants my bloody dust in the first place.

RobM wrote:
Since Disharmony, I've been back and forth on the "are the Sowers underpowered?" question. They're definitely stronger since the changes, but I think the question comes down to two points:



"Are the default Sowers underpowered?" - Yes. Not massively so, but they're definitely weaker than the average and tweaking their faction traits to give them a boost seems like a sensible plan.



"Is the Sowers affinity/custom tech underpowered?" - No. Tinkering around with custom sowers builds, they can easily hold their own against custom Automatons or Sheredyn. They're going to have to work at it to beat the Sheredyn's trivially easy eco victory, but they're definitely in the running.

I'm inclined to agree with RobM on this one: as a player of custom Sowers per-harmony, I found I could generally build a competitive custom race with them: it was difficult, but not impossible. Their default configuration was, however, awful. Since Disharmony, custom builds are even more viable (although as RobM mentions, not as viable as some!) but default Sowers are still not exactly brilliant. They work better than they did before, but the getting the benefit of tolerant is entirely down to luck of the draw when it comes to the systems you're dealt at the beginning of the game: if you get a lot of lavas and methanes, it's great, but otherwise it does little.

raubtier86 wrote:
In turn 180 the game usually ends for me. But even if not I still need luck for a smooth overall game to get it in that time (if I dont play a heavy science faction).



20% more industry is a lot if you ask me. That is 20% more overpowered than other races that go for heavy industry. Especially since dust is not that great unless you want an economy victory. As pilgrims I often ask myself why I even bother trading, nobody needs/wants my bloody dust in the first place.

Whether the game ends at 180 or not depends on settings and what victory conditions you have enabled.



If you think Dust isn't great you don;t understand just how powerful it is. I played amoeba and had something like 15k dust/turn by around 150 turns in. I could buyout literally anything.



I do keep Eco victory off though because it's completely unbalanced.

Now that the planetary fids have been changed it is.

Igncom1 wrote:
Now that the planetary fids have been changed it is.

If you're responding to my feeling on eco victory... It's always been considered pretty much broken. There was a point in the game where the UE were ridiculous simply because they could get what was effectively a 100 turn Eco victory.



The different virctories aren't tuned very well with each other. Nevermind the fact that non-military victories are basically time-limit victories as you can't do much (if anything) to prevent them.

wow HEADACHE this article is way to angry for me. Why chose the sowers, a pathetic example of robot slaves gone rogue, when you can customise a race that looks the same and outputs exactly what you want?

But really, Its because we love the sowers and want the default race and AI for them to succeed!

I can't be bothered to read the seven pages of text I missed, but I'll hop in and say... why does it feel like the Harmony is played the way the Sowers were meant to be played?



The Harmony basically expands like crazy because they don't have to deal with disapproval, and very few limiting factors on those systems (unlike the Sowers' FIDS penalty), and have to carefully manage food vs. Science.



They're not entirely similar, but the entire time I played the Harmony it just screamed to me "These are the Sowers, only better."

Ive been trying hard to make harmony work lately with different trait setups, build orders and priorities. That said I am a sowers fan and had been playing them since before the buff, I can tell you that sowers can easely out expand harmony due to the disharmony mechanic. Depending on difficulty if you go past like 6-8 systems with harmony you WILL CRIPPLE yourself, additional systems take away fis from all your other systems so every single system ahs diminishing returns. Not only that, even though its not ideal for sowers you can use dust planets as your second or third planet on system, with harmony if you pickup a dust planet (or even a planet with a dust anomaly) that dust will lower y our fis by the dust value, making them actually cripple you even further if you touch em. GG if all titanium is on dust planets early on.



Sowers that only have to deal with the approval mechanic and if you use optimistic can grow at an alarming rate and science can keep up so you can keep getting approval buildings and expansion disapproval techs. Due to their system picking nature, the colonies can start making colonizers as well surprisingly early. Sowers grow to a LOT of systems with small pop in each with slow constant growth. However each system is practically a forge system where you can crank out science conversion or ships or dust.

I've been considering an incremental overhaul of all factions. The first step would be to change colonial bases to be faction unique along the lines of something like this...



Sowers (Industrious Colonies)

+9 Industry

+10% Growth Rate



UE (Dusty Outpost)

+5 Food

+5 Industry

+2 Dust



Horatio (Perfect Colonists)

+5 Food

+5 Industry

-20% Overpopulation Disapproval



Pilgrims (Mystic Colonies)

+5 Food

+5 Industry

+20% Experience on Assigned Hero



Sophons (Research Colonies)

+5 Food

+5 Industry

+2 Research



Hissho (Martial Colonies)

+5 Food

+5 Industry

+15 Ground Defense



Cravers (War Machine)

+5 Food

+5 Industry

+4 Industry per War per planet



Amoeba (Diplomatic Colonies)

+5 Food

+5 Industry

+4 Dust per Alliance per Planet



Automaton (Orbital Colonies)

+5 Food

+7 Industry



Harmony

+5 Food

+5 Industry

+2.5% FIS per planet



I've been putting in a lot of thought. What do you guys think, I know this isn't technically a Sowers only change, but it would be part of a sweeping set of changes to give all factions more unique identities.

I like the idea more than you can imagine, but I feel like they should still be differentiated a tad bit. Most of them don't even mention Dust or Science, and I feel like they could be differentiated a bit more. Suggested changes:



-The UE should probably get +2 or +2 and +5

-The Sophons should get +2 and +5



Also, I'm pretty sure the standard colony base was +2 and +2 - did they change that to 5 each?

Standard is 5 FI.



The idea is cute but some of them are kinda useless, like the amoeba. Then theres the cravers one, which is crazy overpowered if your going EW, and still op without it if midgame.





Sadly single player is boring, and there doesnt seem to be any hint of a mod becoming mainstream for multiplayer so it feels kinda pointless unless devs add it to the main game.

sowers are fine . you just have to use them different than some other species to win . its the same for most of the species . the games not that unbalanced people just dont know that they HAVE to play different with some species . the only odd thing i have noticed is that planets with anomalies seem to be every were when i use sowers . not just the penalty that would be expected i think the galaxy gen hates sowers so stuff around you will be less usefull than others near by systems to make up for the fact that you can spread without any concern for the type of planets / tech level early

EvilLordXenu wrote:
sowers are fine . you just have to use them different than some other species to win . its the same for most of the species . the games not that unbalanced people just dont know that they HAVE to play different with some species . the only odd thing i have noticed is that planets with anomalies seem to be every were when i use sowers . not just the penalty that would be expected i think the galaxy gen hates sowers so stuff around you will be less usefull than others near by systems to make up for the fact that you can spread without any concern for the type of planets / tech level early

You realize that the sowers have a net loss on FIDS in most situations right? And that reduced growth is results in more than linear lagging behind other races. I'v eplayed Sowers extensively, I know how to play Sowers.



The simple fact is that the other vanilla races (Hissho/Automaton/UE in particular) are much much more effective than the vanilla sowers. And it isn't rocket science to figure out LOOK at the traits.



The sowers have multiple negative traits, not to mention the negative traits they have are the most crippling ones in the game. Tolerant is at best a gamble (massive negative penalties on a trait that costs 30 points), and at worst useless. Compare to Amoeba who have no negative traits at all, or to Sophons whose negative traits are much more mild than the Sowers' (not to mention that they have almost 20 more trait points spent than the Sowers).



It's simple truth that the Sowers as they are are inherently weaker than most other factions.



Edit @Fenrakk: It's important not to cripple any of the races growth (except the Sowers, as they have "reduced growth" as an identity point) due to the way FIDS work. It's also important to balance FIDS across the empires so it doesn't break anything. But base outpost stats were increased to +5FI/planet with disharmony

One thing that does bug me is that people speak a little too generally. Are we talking about the base factions or custom factions? Is this movement just to save the vanilla sowers AI or something?



All the AIs will get slaughtered by a player, and all the vanilla factions are weak compared to a custom ANYTHING in MP. If a player handles em any vanilla faction can beat the AIs without much trouble too. If your trying to save the vanilla sowers from other vanilla AI.... theres a point where we have to reflect how much work is worth fixing something like that.





I think the most important thing to balance is the affinity and tech trees, because everything else is mutable. If your worried about the AIs and/or vanilla faction settings you can go crazy and throw w/e traits you want at the factions and overspend till their balanced, because they will still be weak compared to a custom anything and will still lose to a vanilla player using anything.

Scrangos wrote:
One thing that does bug me is that people speak a little too generally. Are we talking about the base factions or custom factions? Is this movement just to save the vanilla sowers AI or something?



All the AIs will get slaughtered by a player, and all the vanilla factions are weak compared to a custom ANYTHING in MP. If a player handles em any vanilla faction can beat the AIs without much trouble too. If your trying to save the vanilla sowers from other vanilla AI.... theres a point where we have to reflect how much work is worth fixing something like that.





I think the most important thing to balance is the affinity and tech trees, because everything else is mutable. If your worried about the AIs and/or vanilla faction settings you can go crazy and throw w/e traits you want at the factions and overspend till their balanced, because they will still be weak compared to a custom anything and will still lose to a vanilla player using anything.

The only reason Custom races >>>>>> Vanilla is because AMplitude decided to include traits that are basically free points (hello Eternal War) meaning that a custom faction usually has between 80 and 90 effective points spent. It would be pretty easy to bring vamilla in line with custom overall (which I should do at some point).



Though vanilla Amoeba and Vanilla Hissho are both pretty close to custom power.



And we want to save Sowers both AI and Custom.

Uh, no since the trade boost eternal war is considered underpowered and the cravers i run into dont even use it. The loss of science dust and tech trade is BRUTAL. Even as cravers and hissho I would never take it. Trade with those far from you, war with neighbors. Now sheredyn integrity is closer to free points, but its bugged, so anyone trying to abuse it can get tricked in to some massive penalties.



The trait balance is way better than before that trait review. Thanks to amplitude listening to the players. Theres a few things that could be said about a few ones being too strong/weak for certain factions, or in general but its not extremely disparate as before. (cough, mineral memory, cough). A lot of the goto "free points" arent available to harmony, that does rather suck. And some of the traits are disproportionally strong due to player knowledge. Would be nice if the trade window had a blaring warning that the guy has naive and you should be asking for more stuff in exchange for peace than just peace. But ironic than naive trait is more about abusing naive players than being naive



If you want to save the AI sowers just keep throwing traits into their vanilla setup till their not UP anymore... Or improve their AI decision making, but the previous is easier than the later.





I have a few ideas on howto tweak numbers and details to balance affinities, but like I said, pointless if its just gonna be used for single player.

Scrangos wrote:
Uh, no since the trade boost eternal war is considered underpowered and the cravers i run into dont even use it. The loss of science dust and tech trade is BRUTAL. Even as cravers and hissho I would never take it. Trade with those far from you, war with neighbors. Now sheredyn integrity is closer to free points, but its bugged, so anyone trying to abuse it can get tricked in to some massive penalties.



The trait balance is way better than before that trait review. Thanks to amplitude listening to the players. Theres a few things that could be said about a few ones being too strong/weak for certain factions, or in general but its not extremely disparate as before. (cough, mineral memory, cough). A lot of the goto "free points" arent available to harmony, that does rather suck.



If you want to save the AI sowers just keep throwing traits into their vanilla setup till their not UP anymore... Or improve their AI decision making, but the previous is easier than the later.

Trade pretty much sucks unless you focus on it. On the other hand Eternal War + Dust on CP kill + Research on CP Kill + HH-Pilot will provide much much more for your warrior race than trade will. Unless you're an amoeba.



+Dust on Kill from heroes is global. Pilot/Adventurer heroes are amazing because of that (+90 Dust per CP anytime you kill anything anywhere).



Anyway, some players don;t use Custom factions because your average custom faction just laundry lists. And even if you do use custom factions certain vanilla factions can (and do) keep up. The goal is to get Sowers at least on par with other vanilla factions (they're nowhere near close) and after that bring all vanilla factions on par in spent points with Custom factions.

Your initial 3 routes will provide more dust/science than 10 trait points worth of dust on cp kill/research on cp kill, and their not even mutually exclusive. You can be at war and have your trade routes filled out with a pilot hero and youll make way more than you ever would with eternal war. The tradeoff in trade fids (not even counting tech trade) you lose for those 10 traitpoints in EW I dont feel can be replaced with any other trait unless you have some extremely specific setup that just wont work without those 10 points and I cant even begin to phantom what build that would be.

My initial 3 trade routes this game were worth about 4/4 apiece. That is to say they were 12 D/S a turn total. That's not really a massive amount.



To put it in persepctive; An additoional rank each of Dust/Science on kill would net me 10/20 per CP destroyed. War is awesome.