The reason people say the Sowers are underpowered is because they're underpowered.



It's not a matter of "we don't know how to play this race properly" or "we always beat the AI when they play Sowers." It's a simple matter that the Sowers are awful, even when played the way they're meant to be played.



I feel like the Sowers are a bit more useful now, since the base FIDS of a lot of planets have been changed drastically (12 on Lava planets is kind of insane compared to what it was before), but they're still incredibly weak. They should have a strong early game, but taper off the longer the game goes on, but instead they start off basically even and spiral downward. They need some better Food or Industry buff on their systems, or perhaps building ships shouldn't halt their population growth.

Sower lategame is actually hyper amazing. But that's because of the raw Industry output of a Tundra Systems in the hands of the Sowers.



Admittedly comparing to Amoeba abusing Resource Platforms ends up pretty humbling.

Autocthon wrote:
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.

All of the numbers you use to back up your points are completely utopian to me. Maybe I am just much worse in endless space than you, or you just make numbers up.

But you still don't make a strong point in my opinion.



1.Ok lets say dust is great and I don't understand it. Now 20% industry is still a big deal and being able to turn it into dust (as a race that is not very focused on dust, diplomacy, trading etc.) makes it even better than if dust was underwhelming. Therefore you kind of backed up my point anyways.



2. If my Industry is strong I can build everything. If my dust income is strong I can buy everything. The problem is that you need systems AND trading for a strong dust income but you only need systems for strong industry. Sure buyout is a one turn action which makes it strong, but it doesn't seem reliable.



3. You can't buy science with dust.



4. There is still nobody who wants to trade my dust for their ressources/techs. It doesn't matter how much dust I have, everything above like 250 dust won't increase their acceptance to the offer any further.

Autocthon wrote:
Sower lategame is actually hyper amazing. But that's because of the raw Industry output of a Tundra Systems in the hands of the Sowers.

I am sorry but I have to ask this: Are you a troll sir? first you are trying to all-out convince me that the sowers lategame is not as amazing as I see it and their industry advantage is not big enough to be mentioned and then you say the sowers lategame is hyper amazing because of the high industry... contradiction



edit: I think I will just retreat from this discussion now, it does not seem to go anywhere.

raubtier86 wrote:
All of the numbers you use to back up your points are completely utopian to me. Maybe I am just much worse in endless space than you, or you just make numbers up.

But you still don't make a strong point in my opinion.

Resource Platforms and pure trade focus. It's crazy.

1.Ok lets say dust is great and I don't understand it. Now 20% industry is still a big deal and being able to turn it into dust (as a race that is not very focused on dust, diplomacy, trading etc.) makes it even better than if dust was underwhelming. Therefore you kind of backed up my point anyways.

3 Dust is one Industry (give or take). In general trade routes > Industry focus if you know what you're doing. But that's because of buyout improvements.

2. If my Industry is strong I can build everything. If my dust income is strong I can buy everything. The problem is that you need systems AND trading for a strong dust income but you only need systems for strong industry. Sure buyout is a one turn action which makes it strong, but it doesn't seem reliable.

Actually you don;t need systems for strong dust. You only need trade routes. Right now without focusing on trade I've got half my dust income coming from trade routes with Horatio (all my planets are Desert/Arid pretty much, turn 122). Admittedly I have like 7 Admin/Corp clones. Cloning OP.

3. You can't buy science with dust.

Trade routes provide enough science to stand in for science planets.

4. There is still nobody who wants to trade my dust for their ressources/techs. It doesn't matter how much dust I have, everything above like 250 dust won't increase their acceptance to the offer any further.

Talking about AI? AI values dust about as much as dirt.

I am sorry but I have to ask this: Are you a troll sir? first you are trying to all-out convince me that the sowers lategame is not as amazing as I see it and their industry advantage is not big enough to be mentioned and then you say the sowers lategame is hyper amazing because of the high industry... contradiction



edit: I think I will just retreat from this discussion now, it does not seem to go anywhere.

I said that the industry gain isn't huge. Sowers lategame is amazing. But it's all industry. They have much weaker buyout potential than other races, which is why they favor Wonder victory in general.



I suppose there's a disconnect. So I'll try to make it easier to understand.



Sower lategame doesn't suck, they're hyper efficient. Which is amazing. But they have weak buyout and science potential, and they are hard to get there. Which prevents it from being overwhelming or broken. Though if the game drags to the point where the sowers are at full tech god help you, every system is a forge system (and if they did it right they all have blockade breaker) so they don;t have to burn resources to build blockade defense fleets. Of course at that point either you've disabled non-military victory or none of the players want teh game to end. Plus at that point there's not a hug difference in effectiveness between factions, teh yjust do things differently.

Sowers are decent at all stages except a weird lull midlate where their techhing towards terraforming and the time till some of the terraforming is done. Its not just endgame where every system for sowers is a forge world, its ALL game. Sure your systems might have two planets colonized, but its like methane lava or lava tundra or something. Itll hurt your science since you have to stop converting but you can get into a war at any stage and you will probably have more ships than the other guy since you can crank em out from every single system. Cept maybe sheredyn if their retrofitting fleets.



Dust value changes, the dust->ind is an exponential curve, and fast speed settings or cost reduction (the base value, not the buyout bonus) traits you can end up with less than 1 dust per ind on buyout! Also, its .5 dust per ind when retrofitting (Make dummy fleets and retrofit to their real form). Its also an incredible way to transplant production from one system to another. And you can gain economic victory while spending all your dust into improving eco and making fleets... I have a hard time seeing anything beating a really good sheredyn player.

They need some better Food or Industry buff on their systems, or perhaps building ships shouldn't halt their population growth.

Sowers arent harmony (and ive been trying hard to make harmony work, its hillarious how much stronger sowers are at all stages of the game). If your complaining about colony ships the sowers have a massive advantage, the only two factions that have it easier are sheredyn (buyout colony) and automaton (insta colony).



Heres a tip for any industry heavy build, every single faction has an invisible buffer industry 1 turn in size like the automatons. No interest obviously, and gets consumed if you ever use ind conversions (without being converted, its wasted). So lets say you can make a colony ship in 2 turns because your on a lava or methane as sowers. Clear your queue for one turn, and the next you can make the colony ship in 1 turn, just like the automatons.





Custom sowers feel in an okay spot atm. Custom sheredyn and UE feel overstrong, sheredyn by a lot, ue by a bit. Anything Harmony feels worse than the old sowers in vanilla(before the save the sowers started kicking in) by a fair margin.. and im not exaggerating. Theres some other factions that sorta feel weak atm but it might be cause I havnt figuerd em out (hissho, pilgrims) or cause fighters/bombers suck and they have all their hull bonuses on those (i havnt tested latest patch with em, but someone said the data in the files didnt change).



Edit: There is some rng, if your area doesnt have systems that have tundra/methane/lava to jump start that system your kinda hosed. Which means sowers dont play well on young galaxies.

Sower just happen to take a pretty hefty net loss in FIDS if they can't get Tundra/Lava/Methane planets.



When you're taking a 10% FIDS loss on most planets it can make the gamne feel really swingy. Then you get terraform and it's k tho.

You have my vote



The Sowers are by far my favourite race and I think their affinity sounds great but everytime I played them I had a very hard time against the enemies.

I have been playing with some friends and I did not want to mention that I found the Sowers underpowered but after reading this thread I actually realized that a lot of people think the same.

Although I did really well compared to my friends in my last game (Round 100, 15k FIND and 5k Science) I still believe that the Sowers have a real disadvantage.



Thank your for the detailed explanation as to why the Sowers need to be improved. Most people would just post made up claims to boost their fav race but you make good points.

Autocthon wrote:
Sower just happen to take a pretty hefty net loss in FIDS if they can't get Tundra/Lava/Methane planets.



When you're taking a 10% FIDS loss on most planets it can make the gamne feel really swingy. Then you get terraform and it's k tho.

Whats the fids loss? I never really got that complaint. Your right that its painful as hell if you dont get tundra/lava/methane. But they arent that hard to find, specially if you end up in a game with many planets per system like a lot of people like to play on.



I still hold that I feel pretty adequate playing custom sowers in MP Games. Though not as strong as sheredyn or UE, though its not too far for ue. Sheredyn are getting nerfed in the beta patch at least.

Scrangos wrote:
Whats the fids loss? I never really got that complaint. Your right that its painful as hell if you dont get tundra/lava/methane. But they arent that hard to find, specially if you end up in a game with many planets per system like a lot of people like to play on.

It's always a food loss. And population growth is exponential, which creates an ever widening gap in population until somewhere after 60 turns (ish) depending on what you get. And because of this it makes bad luck starting out EXTREMELY crippling.



Ocean/Terran: Lose 1.33 Food/pop (13% FIDS) Cannot be recovered with Industry Exploit

Jungle: Loses .66 Food per pop (6.6% FIDS) Requires 3D Replicators

Arid: Loses .33 Food/pop (3.3% FIDS) Requires industry Exploit

Desert: loses 50% Food (~5% FIDS) Requires GeoIndustrial Plants (T3 Exploit)

Arctic: Loses 50% Food (~5% FIDS) Requires T3 Exploit



And remember that even if you manage to get the correct planets they still won't be able to grow as fast as enemy factions who are exploiting food. They can't even break even on their best planet (tundra).

I still hold that I feel pretty adequate playing custom sowers in MP Games. Though not as strong as sheredyn or UE, though its not too far for ue. Sheredyn are getting nerfed in the beta patch at least.

The affinity itself isn't weak, assuming you know what to take for traits (like any other affinity). However there are some baseline problems with it (terraforming tech order is pretty bad, unless you want to go through to get desert terraforming on the other side instead of continuing to the much needed arctic).



With .14 the change to custom traits is probably going to help to highlight some of the weaknesses of the sowers. But this whole campaign is to save them as an AI faction, AI factions should be designed in such a way as to be on par with custom factions (ALL of them) and some of them are already there *cough*amoebahisshoautomaton*cough*. Go play with non-Custom factions. Feel the difference between the power of the Sowers and other factions, hell just looking at their trait points spent tells a lot.



Vanilla sowers have BAD traits, and they have 61 points spent to the 70+ of nearly all other factions. It's almost like amplitude wants them to suck.

Er I did say MP games, where every single other player is custom pretty much. I dont see hissho amobe or automaton do well actually (but then again their rarely played), most of the leading players are sheredyn or UE. The scariest players I've faced have all been sheredyn. I'd be up for a game if you wanna see sowers in action against other custom factions.

Scrangos wrote:
Er I did say MP games, where every single other player is custom pretty much. I dont see hissho amobe or automaton do well actually (but then again their rarely played), most of the leading players are sheredyn or UE. The scariest players I've faced have all been sheredyn. I'd be up for a game if you wanna see sowers in action against other custom factions.

Sheredyn are imbalanced at this point, and UE are arguably the easiest to play (there's less of a penalty, and almost a reward for high taxes). Considering it's multiplayer and there's a lot of new players, perhaps you just happened to run into some of them - new players who aren't too skilled at the game?



I'm pretty awful at the game, but maybe sometime I could go Cravers and see how well we do against each other (although Cravers are a pretty bad choice for such a demonstration)

If your up for it, though ive never done 1v1 =o My steam name is the same as my forum name

Scrangos wrote:
If your up for it, though ive never done 1v1 =o My steam name is the same as my forum name

same here, you can add me if you want, although it's midnight here so it's too late for me to commit myself to a lengthy multiplayer game and I do 1v1s often (mostly because my comp can't handle too many AI), but Cravers are probably a bad choice for this because they do eventually deplete their planets. I could try Sophons, perhaps? They might better exemplify the weakness of the Sowers.

As I see it the only problem with the Sowers is they have a god-awful Early game. If they are given 100 turns to get rolling they have the potential to be a major late game powerhouse- but until then they are meh- and the first 40 turns are hell.



This deficiency is due to two problems:





1). Slow population growth. 50% of food +30% of industry is substantially lower then the amount of surplus food you can have with just 100% food. Administrators and early game food imporvements generate enormous amounts of food. This deficiency is further compounded by the Sower's tendency to settle high production worlds they don't have colonization tech for yet- most high production world types have low base food generation, and -25% production and food doesn't help.



2).The sowers seem to have a genetic disposition to depression(which is impressive being that they are machines!). They tend to rack up a lot of worlds with approval penalties to get good production and have trouble compensating.





This could be solved in 2 changes I think:



First, give them rank 2 of optimistic, but removed rank 2 of Builders- or if possible replace optimistic entirely with a new trait that reduces all planet/anomaly based approval penalties by maybe 50%.



Second, drop artificial Biologies from T4 to maybe T2 or at most T3. The sowers need this tech to actually have decent population growth. T4 techs generally don't start getting researched until your empire is pretty well establish- the Sowers need population growth early to even get to that stage at a similar rate to other races.

bilun wrote:
Second, drop artificial Biologies from T4 to maybe T2 or at most T3. The sowers need this tech to actually have decent population growth. T4 techs generally don't start getting researched until your empire is pretty well establish- the Sowers need population growth early to even get to that stage at a similar rate to other races.

To be fair, there's an achievement for winning as the Sowers without a single food improvement - it seems the intent of the devs that playing the Sowers without any food improvements would be feasible (to some extent).



That said, there's a weird thing going on with the Approval. As in, considering they're clearly intended to focus on :Industry:, they simply never have the production boost (or population) to back it up. If they were truly focused on Industry, the idea may be that they should have a lower Dust income (need to keep taxes low to keep Approval up). But again, because the Industry boosts never make up for it, it's not a good place to be in.



Perhaps they should just get a huge :Industry: buff, on top of the 40% they already have? Somewhere on the order of 120%? That will probably become imbalanced towards the end game, but Space Cadets is such a huge negative for them that it should (in theory) compensate.

Their affinity towards Tundra planets gives them the Industry boost.



btw anyone know what Counts as Food improvement for this acchievement?

unclear "improvements":

Food exploitation

Food conversion

FIDS improvements

Colonial rights(or rather their unique Version)

Ca_Putt wrote:
Their affinity towards Tundra planets gives them the Industry boost.



btw anyone know what Counts as Food improvement for this acchievement?

unclear "improvements":

Food exploitation

Food conversion

FIDS improvements

Colonial rights(or rather their unique Version)

I believe it's ONLY improvements with the green label in the top. Which counts food exploitation, but I don't remember the others in that list off the top of my head.

Fenrakk101 wrote:
To be fair, there's an achievement for winning as the Sowers without a single food improvement - it seems the intent of the devs that playing the Sowers without any food improvements would be feasible (to some extent).



That said, there's a weird thing going on with the Approval. As in, considering they're clearly intended to focus on :Industry:, they simply never have the production boost (or population) to back it up. If they were truly focused on Industry, the idea may be that they should have a lower Dust income (need to keep taxes low to keep Approval up). But again, because the Industry boosts never make up for it, it's not a good place to be in.



Perhaps they should just get a huge :Industry: buff, on top of the 40% they already have? Somewhere on the order of 120%? That will probably become imbalanced towards the end game, but Space Cadets is such a huge negative for them that it should (in theory) compensate.

There's a reason my recommendation for a custom Sowers faction is what it is.



Edit: Oh and Elegant Systems or any of the total FIDS improvements don't prevent yo uform getting teh achievement. It's only green improvements.

Fenrakk101 wrote:
same here, you can add me if you want, although it's midnight here so it's too late for me to commit myself to a lengthy multiplayer game and I do 1v1s often (mostly because my comp can't handle too many AI), but Cravers are probably a bad choice for this because they do eventually deplete their planets. I could try Sophons, perhaps? They might better exemplify the weakness of the Sowers.

Steams says you havnt been on in over a year o.o

Scrangos wrote:
Steams says you havnt been on in over a year o.o

I have to assume then that you're looking at the wrong profile? XD make sure the profile ID is fenrakk101