This polls been around since pre-Disharmony, maybe its time for a new one.

More importantly, they've been around since pre-the boost they're getting in a few days.

Antera wrote:
This polls been around since pre-Disharmony, maybe its time for a new one.

I've played Sowers with Disharmony, particularly against United Empire (I'm normally a United Empire player). They are still underpowered from of lack of food and economy. Great industry though.

The changes to Tolerant do little to address Sower Affinity's lategame slump, and only really addresses some of the early game weakness of the vanilla faction while simultaneously making tolerant near-mandatory for Sowers to be competitive.



They still take a significant penalty to food, which results in a significant penalty to the remaining FIDS and research/growth stagnation.

Autocthon wrote:
The changes to Tolerant do little to address Sower Affinity's lategame slump, and only really addresses some of the early game weakness of the vanilla faction while simultaneously making tolerant near-mandatory for Sowers to be competitive.

Why would you ever want to play the Sowers without tolerant? It completly defeats the purpose of their racial ability. ^_-

They still take a significant penalty to food, which results in a significant penalty to the remaining FIDS and research/growth stagnation.

Really?

I usually see positive results for the +/- trait equation, so the faction trait is usually a net benefit. Combine that with the ability to run industry exploitations everywhere and you have insane early game growth in combination with superb industrial capacity. Heck, now that Artificial Biologies is tier II you can even use the 33% conversion ability much earlier if you really need it. I guess they start falling a bit behind during the late mid game when the improved food exploitations come into play, but the ability to focus fully on industrial exploitation is well worth that tradeoff.



I must admit I rarely play anything except my custom sowers, but they seem to have by far the fastest early game growth ratio of all the races.



While I agree that it is sad to see that the -20% science penalty sticks, the recent patch made the sowers a lot better. I can now run my empire on high approval almost all the time and even have 5 additional points for my custom race. X_x



...tbh I never felt that the Sowers were as UP as some people claim. They certainly had a big approval problem back in vanilla and they still have a sort of unfortunate trait combination, but they aren't really that bad. They just require a completely differnt approach, that's all.

Ya!

First of all, sorry about the lack of maintenance this thread has received over the last 2 months. Summer brought on some crazy changes, and now that schools back I actually have time to do stuff (go figure)



@Antera & Nacho: This forum has some pretty terrible poll editing abilities. Unfortunately, it is either a very hidden feature or a completely impossible request (short of Moderator intervention) for me to delete/edit/close the poll, even though I have searched repeatedly in the past for a way to do so.



On a note of how the Sowers are doing, I would have to say that tolerant is still too expensive (at last check, which was pre-newest update, unfortunately) but other than that they are a competitive race in Single player

If it was too expensive before the latest update, and the latest update gave it a pretty decent boost, then maybe it's fine now?

3ntf4k3d wrote:
Why would you ever want to play the Sowers without tolerant? It completly defeats the purpose of their racial ability. ^_-

So what you are saying is that there's no point to Sowers without Tolerant, ergo Sowers effectively have 35 racial customization points.



That's the definition of broken.

Really?

I usually see positive results for the +/- trait equation, so the faction trait is usually a net benefit. Combine that with the ability to run industry exploitations everywhere and you have insane early game growth in combination with superb industrial capacity. Heck, now that Artificial Biologies is tier II you can even use the 33% conversion ability much earlier if you really need it. I guess they start falling a bit behind during the late mid game when the improved food exploitations come into play, but the ability to focus fully on industrial exploitation is well worth that tradeoff.



I must admit I rarely play anything except my custom sowers, but they seem to have by far the fastest early game growth ratio of all the races.



While I agree that it is sad to see that the -20% science penalty sticks, the recent patch made the sowers a lot better. I can now run my empire on high approval almost all the time and even have 5 additional points for my custom race. X_x



...tbh I never felt that the Sowers were as UP as some people claim. They certainly had a big approval problem back in vanilla and they still have a sort of unfortunate trait combination, but they aren't really that bad. They just require a completely differnt approach, that's all.

On top of having the fewest racial trait points vanilla sowers also have the MOST negative traits. Most other vanilla faction setups hover around 75 trait points spent with few or no negative traits, sowers are at 61, which is not only below cap but also has several heavy penalty traits.



And yes, Sowers take a significant penalty to food, and yes that translates to a significant penalty to FIDS in the early and midgame. And by significant I mean your population will be as much as 50% behind the population of other factions.



If you don't play Vanilla Sowers you aren't really in a position to comment on their health. Custom Sowers are fine purely because they work especially well with the generally chosen custom traits.

Autocthon wrote:
So what you are saying is that there's no point to Sowers without Tolerant, ergo Sowers effectively have 35 racial customization points.



That's the definition of broken.

Custom sowers are perfectly fine without Tolerant. Tolerant only helps if you actually get those lavas and gas giants you're really looking for, and you're usually better taking Builders 3, colonising planets just like everybody else does, and running the conversions as often as possible. Betting on the galaxy generator to give you things is usually a fools errand.

Autocthon wrote:
If you don't play Vanilla Sowers you aren't really in a position to comment on their health. Custom Sowers are fine purely because they work especially well with the generally chosen custom traits.

I don't play Vanilla Sowers, so I don't know how well they're holding up through the changes. I'd suspect they're a lot stronger than they were, but yes, I can see an argument for them still being below the curve. But, until I play them I'm not in a position to comment so please ignore my input!

^^ Exactly. Its a gamble, which makes Tolerant too expensive in my opinion, even now. Could use reduced cost of FIDS malus or race point cost to make it better, again in my opinion. Or, as Autocthon said, 75 race points for the Sowers.



But honestly, I believe the Sowers are now at the stage where they should be tweaked in the fine tuning of Faction balance, just as soon as the Harmony show some level of balance.