For those of you who have been playing as Harmony, would it be worth using production exploit on your planets rather than alien grafting first?

I guess considering the views and the fact that there were no replies, it was a silly question :P

Since you're home planet is a tundra, it benefits more from the industry exploit, which lets you build your colony ships faster.



It also doesn't get penalized from the mind/matter. So industry isn't a bad choice. However it does mean you'll have to wait quite awhile to get your home to full pop. Food exploits are very very very good. (One of the main reasons the sowers are pretty bad...)



So for the home world, it's kind of a toss up. I would still lean towards the food upgrade. On other systems, go with food until you get some pop on them.



All that said...be careful. Last I checked, there was a bug if you build a colony ship with the Harmony on a full pop planet, then you lose all your pop. So don't build a colony ship on a full pop planet.

Oh so far I havnt had an issue like that. It's so odd. First game I did really well VS Hissho, but the automatons have beaten me twice in a row. I did get pretty bad planets both times vs the Automatons but I didnt expect to lose to easily.



In both games it was just 1v1 on a tiny spiral to trial Harmony and the AI's on enemy factions in all games behaved in the same way but both with very different results.

Or maybe i just did better when I didnt understand how they worked more so than when I think i know how they work :P

Industry is in general better than Food in my experience with the harmony.



BAsically during the early game with your first two systems you turn Food increase up very high and exploit industry to for I->S conversion, which will give you better growth rates overall relative to exploiting Food because you're getting just a bit more oomph from your I->S conversion (and therefore getting casimir effect earlier which is important). It's most noticeable when you play with a Custom Harmony because you can really see how much faster you're researching and growing relative to other factions.



I heavily recommend staying away from food exploitation unless you are desperate form the growth rate, early game +100% growth rate is the same as food exploitation on most planets, and you should be getting Core Mining as an early tech. It's only later (when food exploits are worth 4+ food production on tehir own) when those food exploits make a relative difference.

And if you use Industry exploit and need fast growth you can put the slider to +100% food and use ind/food at the cost of all research