Some gripes about SyntheticLife ability as is

from GalCiv3 Forums

first and foremost, the synthetic ability should have a StartingColonyPopulation of more than the 10 they get.  Given that the PopulationCapYor is set to 15 base in the syntheticlife ability, it should be at least 15.  everything below used to be mitigated by using the planetary wheel heavily early on, but now it's exacerbated since it cant really be done & causes a reduction in output from making people unhappy if you try to run 100%. On a map  without a bajillion habitableplanets, it seems  pretty unusual to see planets <pq8 (and pq8 itself seems rare) the difference between being able to cram 15+ pop on a world at the cost of not having one of these:

  • 50% SponsorDecay
  • AwardFreeImprovement OnColonizePlanet
  • OnConquerPlanet AwardDominantIdeologyPoints 15
  • Invasions never cost credits
  • Gets Research from Precursor Artifacts
  • Trade Routes give Approval bonuses to both parties and 2 extra Trade Routes
  • Starts with tourism enabled and with extra credits
  • Planets can adjust their planetary Production manually.
  • Planets start with 50% more population than is brought on the Colony ship
  • Can colonize Aquatic, Frozen and Barren Worlds.
  • All starbases get the first module free. All ships are immune to Nebula effects
  • Free drones defend planets, shipyards and starbases
  • Starts with free Research
  • Starts knowing the location of other homeworlds
  • or,,, SyntheticLife: Disables Food and natural Growth. Instead an Assembly project is used to produce Citizens.

While the assembly project can be huge once you have a phenomenal manufacturing world(s)... but you are badly hamstrung along the way in doing so & will often see even the thalan with a higher total pop because growth is a flat 0.2/colony regardless of if you have 0.5 mil pop or 50mil pop while a syntheticlife's world starting with .5 mil will take a gajillion turns to do either assembly, or improvements to speed it up.

PopulationCapYor should probably be more like 20 to start out.  I say that because even with the +PopulationCapYor techs & power improvement to bump it, you generally need to be one higher on the cap tech and  the power improvement than the assembly tech to really make much use of them on built up mfg world with the yor's productive ability at the base 15.  Thios is the case because you won't have enough population left over to actually build the next assembly otherwise

even though syntheticlife has a growth of 0, they still get a yellow ! (and appear to get happiness hit) for coming close to/maxing out a planet's pop... something extremely easy to do on a precursor world given the -50% PopulationCapYor they tend to have.  the fact that these always seem to be pq15-20+ adds insult to injury given that the 50% food is pretty darned high at 15-20+ before it gets cut in half leaving them with roughly the same population given the ability to drop a good farm or two alongside the synthetic race's unique power improvement

there are a lot of ways that the syntheticlife ability could be bumped, but allowing StartingColonyPopulation to be set from the abilitydefs.xml & setting it to 15+ with a PopulationCapYor of at least 20 would help significantly since participating in the early colony rush beyond their starting colony ship wouldn't cripple their homeworld development for dozens of turns to come

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Reply #1 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

I agree.  In the early versions (1.1, 1.3) I could play the Yor successfully, starting slow but building up to be the galaxy's robot menace.  But the AI back then was pretty poor at the the colony rush, so there was lots of time to build up and expand.

Now, the AI is much better at the colony rush and the Yor just can't keep up.  The starting pop of 10 is about all you have to colonize with, and every new colony ship you send out just depletes your production so that getting even your first Assembly project completed takes longer and longer.  If you send out colonizers with just a minimum population, your colonies can't do anything at all until you send more pop from your homeworld later.  Your homeworld gets so badly depleted of population that it can't do much either except try to get assembly projects done to replenish.  Meanwhile, your opponents have much better developed colonies, better developed homeworlds, far more research, and are outpacing you building fleets because they have so many more workers.  It just made me sad, so I'd given up on the Yor. 

Even when AI Yor were present my games, they were always so far behind, they were easily wiped out before they could ever get going.  "Poor little robots" I'd think when I encountered one of their scouts, and then didn't bother worrying about them because someone or myself would just sweep them up if they ever got in the way. 

I like the sound of your suggestions, so yesterday I started a new game, modding them in.  (I just copied the two xmls to the mods folder and changed two settings you mentioned).

Modded:

  FactionDefs.xml
  StartingColonyPopulation=15

  AbilityDefs.xml
  PopulationCapYor=20

For reference, here are my Galaxy options:

  GalaxySize=Large
  StarFrequency=Occasional
  PlanetFrequency=Abundant
  HabitablePlanetFrequency=Occasional
  ExtremePlanetFrequency=Uncommon

  Tech brokering is OFF. 

At the end of the colony rush, I find myself with about 8 planets (can't recall the exact number) + homeworld.  All have self-sufficient populations (yay!) and my homeworld has a quite strong manufacturing ability (and the only shipyard).  I have 4 or 5 tiny military ships salvaged from pirates.  I'm last in technology among the major factions since I've been focusing everything on manufacturing to build assembly projects.  I've traded most of what I can for weapons and defense so I can start building small military ships.  I don't have the medium ship-building tech, but I don't think anyone else does either. 

No war yet, but my neighbors are threatening and I've seen some anti-matter missile ships that I know I can't beat flying around my perimeter.  At least I feel like I can now be competitive.  So I'll see how it goes. 

Thanks very much for your suggestion!  Like you, I think Stardock needs to change something to help our robot friends.

Reply #2 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

My two cents on this. Some of these ideas could be used. When it comes to manufacturing there needs to be a third one military social and population or building the assembly project could be built simultaneously dividing social production between the two. This could be on or turned off. This way manufacturing gets diverted but it doesn't stop planetary improving. I don't think approval should affect yor. Being robots their should be no coersion penalties. And they shouldn't use money their would be no rush buying or trading using money. Their would be no maintenence cost. 

Galactic Civilizations III
Reply #3 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting admiralWillyWilber, reply 2

I don't think approval should affect yor. Being robots their should be no coersion penalties
End of admiralWillyWilber's quote

I like this one and it makes a lot of sense :thumbsup:

Quoting admiralWillyWilber, reply 2

And they shouldn't use money their would be no rush buying or trading using money.
End of admiralWillyWilber's quote

This one not so much.  Maybe no rush buying but there is no reason why their computers would not see the logic in massing BC to bribe or buy things from other races

Reply #4 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting admiralWillyWilber, reply 2

When it comes to manufacturing there needs to be a third one military social and population or building the assembly project could be built simultaneously dividing social production between the two. This could be on or turned off. This way manufacturing gets diverted but it doesn't stop planetary improving.
End of admiralWillyWilber's quote

This is an interesting idea.  Any tinkering with dual production would have to be balanced to provide an average 0.2 growth rate or so (like biologicals).  But then you might just be better off doing away with assembly projects altogether, giving synthetics the same growth rates as their biological rivals and justifying it as ongoing Yor production.  Then just rename the growth-rate increase buildings "Yor Assembly Plants" instead of hospitals and such.  I think you then lose much of the synthetic life uniqueness.

Quoting admiralWillyWilber, reply 2

I don't think approval should affect yor. Being robots their should be no coersion penalties. And they shouldn't use money their would be no rush buying or trading using money. Their would be no maintenence cost.

End of admiralWillyWilber's quote

I think "Approval" for Yor really means "Efficiency".  If there are a lot of Yor, then they have to devote more computing cycles to making sure they're not getting in each other's way.  I think of the approval buildings as computing centers devoted to optimizing Yor schedules and tasks, thus increasing efficiency.  I wish the names of these buildings reflected this better -- clearly, "Entertainment Center" is silly for a robot.  Call them "Optimization Centers" or something like that.

I rather think coercion should apply in the opposite sense for synthetics. That is, the more specialized a planet is, the more efficient it becomes (no "coercion").  The more varied the tasks, the less efficient the colony becomes (more "coercion") since more and more computing cycles have to be devoted to optimizing routines.  This would probably be unbalancing, though, as experienced players know how over-powered hyper-specialization was.

Reply #5 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Update on my modded Yor game:

War was declared (by AI civ) and I got my metal ass handed to me in a bucket.  I did get medium ships and tried to counter, but the enemy just swarmed me with bigger fleets, better weapons, and some with multiple weapon types.  In the final standings, Yor were second last (of seven civs) in tech, military and treasury.  Hey, at least I wasn't last.:S Yor population was in the middle (so at least that was something).  Thumbs up to the improved AI! :thumbsup:

Not sure what I should have done differently.  I guess I shouldn't have built quite so many constructors early and focused earlier on military.  I was so busy building population, all my planets except my homeworld were under-developed when war started and I was out-classed in just about every way.  Not being able to broker techs hurt a lot, but I never liked doing that even in GalCiv 2, so I really don't want to turn that on.  And I manage fine without it when playing biologicals. 

Poor little robots.  I'd love to hear tips from any of you more heroic players who've enjoyed recent success playing the Yor.

Reply #6 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Just like there is military project in the build que that a planet will do if nothing else is being done.

How about making an Assembly Project so Assembly can be done when nothing else is being built.

That would be an in between of the current view and what some want.

Reply #7 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

An easy solution to mod this would be to add the difference you have in population growth in how much you build a farm divide the population growth. Add the difference to social manufacturing then that way you could make up a difference by taking turns between building buildings and population To the yor capital. If you couldn't do this to only yor capital then just make it a add it to their synthetic bonus. 

Reply #8 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting CrankyMoe, reply 5

Poor little robots. I'd love to hear tips from any of you more heroic players who've enjoyed recent success playing the Yor.
End of CrankyMoe's quote

What i have been doing

I concentrate on malevolent improved yards & production BUT i get enough pragmatic points in reserve to do the no declaired war for 50 turns and use it when it looks like an AI is about to do it. This gives me time to concentrate on nothing but military.  I also research up diplomacy and build diplo buildings and starbase diplo modules.  This can really slow how fast the AI hates you

Reply #9 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Thanks for your reply.  I got pragmatic for 3 free constructors -- upgraded 2 for colony ships and used one for my first starbase.  Then I took all Malevolent - Motivation line, getting up to the Death Furnaces tech (but didn't have a chance to build any).  My homeworld was a powerhouse, but my colonies were all pretty so-so.  I managed to build intimidation centers on most colonies -- that helped me up an ideology step and certainly helped morale.  Other than that, all colonies got a manufacturing building or two and power plants on some.  Then worked on assembly projects to get more pop and raw production.  Really not much more than that.  I did build a couple more shipyards after I traded for level 1 weapons and defence so they could build some early defenders. 

For techs, I went straight for the first two +1 moves techs like I've always done.  I bee-lined Fast Assembly and began cranking out more Yor.  Mostly I ignored research techs in favor of manufacturing and then economy to avoid dropping into the red. Military definitely suffered.

On the bright side, I didn't get left out of the colony rush with the modded properties, so I'm going to keep that in and try again.  The "no war" would have been useful, no doubt.  Next game I'll try to reserve that as you suggest -- thanks. I also think I'll try leaving production of Yor to my homeworld and ferry population out to my colonies so they can focus on building other stuff.

Interestingly, when I look at the three top-most civs in that last game, all had the trait "Prolific" (colonies start with 50% more pop than the colony ship brings).  That may make a big difference.

Reply #10 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

A slightly less creative approach: Why not just tune the manufacturing cost of the assembly projects?

Quoting CrankyMoe, reply 4

But then you might just be better off doing away with assembly projects altogether, giving synthetics the same growth rates as their biological rivals and justifying it as ongoing Yor production. Then just rename the growth-rate increase buildings "Yor Assembly Plants" instead of hospitals and such. I think you then lose much of the synthetic life uniqueness.
End of CrankyMoe's quote
Or maybe even scrap growth rate buildings and make manufacturig yor provide growth rate. Wouldn't that be logical?

Reply #11 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting zuPloed, reply 10

Or maybe even scrap growth rate buildings and make manufacturig yor provide growth rate. Wouldn't that be logical?
End of zuPloed's quote

The whole idea behind synthetic is that you need to play them very different, if you put in a growth rate they become much less  unique.   No doubt early-mid game they are the hardest race to play but if you work out how to survive that, they become a very bad ass power house mid-late game.  I do like the idea of increasing starting population though

Reply #12 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting a0152570, reply 11

The whole idea behind synthetic is that you need to play them very different, if you put in a growth rate they become much less unique.
End of a0152570's quote
I know. But that is how it allways is, the further you strive from your core mechanic (e.g. bio race population), the harder it gets to find any reasonable balance.

The bio races only have to invest time; you can change the growth rate by about a factor of 4 if you really push it (.2 -> .8). The Yor have to invest manufacturing instead. Here you easily get a factor of 20 in the late game (10-15 manufacturing at the start of the game and a couple of hundred later).

At any rate, I just wanted to throw the idea out, since CrankyMoe brought up the possibility to give them a normal growth rate.

Coming back to what I suggested first, why not play with the assembly project balancing itself? I think I will play with some numbers here a little.

Reply #13 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting zuPloed, reply 12

why not play with the assembly project balancing itself? I think I will play with some numbers here a little.
End of zuPloed's quote

I have thought about this also, make the first level project cost a little less to help get you off the ground floor. I know this would upsets the cost/pop balance as you move up in tech but as you become a mfg power house you can do any of the assy projects in one turn

Reply #14 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Well one way you can look at it would be to say the following:

The Yor pay 100 manufacturing for 2 pop.

Thus the 0.2 growth rate of the bio races is equivvalent to 10 manufacturing per turn ... and per colony. Plus diminishing returns from growing constantly versus growing in steps. Not hard to see why this hurts at the start.

I haven't really tried the synth tech tree before. Because I couldn't really figure out how to compete with the thalan tech tree. But having taken another look I wonder if trying to compete in the colony race in the first place is the right strategy. My alternative approach would be rushing a 30 pop homeworld first, grabing only a few extra worlds and then grab more worlds by going to war... which gets hindered by the lack of tech and manufacturing capitals in the yor tech tree...

Reply #15 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting a0152570, reply 13

I have thought about this also, make the first level project cost a little less to help get you off the ground floor.
End of a0152570's quote

Thanks for this idea.  I might try modding this too.  Maybe cut the value in half -- from 101 to 51 -- and see how that goes.

ImprovementDefs.xml

    <InternalName>Assembly</InternalName>
    ....
    <Stats>
      <EffectType>ManufacturingCost</EffectType>
      <Scope>Queue</Scope>
      <Target>
        <TargetType>Improvement</TargetType>
      </Target>
      <BonusType>Flat</BonusType>
      <Value>101</Value>
    </Stats>

 Edit - of course, if it's too cheap then why would you bother researching/building anything beyond it like Spark of Life?  So I'd have to adjust all the upgrades too.  Ugh :annoyed:

Hmm....I wonder about modding the PowerMatrix improvement to add additional population of 4 or 6 to help provide a population boost to colonies that build it.  It's available early in the Propagation tech line so your colonies could get a better start building that early.  A little cheesy maybe, but it seems it might be easy enough to mod.  Or I guess I could just make custom synthetic race with the "Prolific" trait.  But I am oddly enamored of the Yor.

Reply #16 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

another problem with the yor is that they still try to be like non-A.S. beings when it comes to the point buy stuff.  change them, to look like this pic (I put it up on steam workshop race).  The yor quite literally have more than one tech that flat out refers to destroying & paving/building over biological detritus, but they don't ever actually do it or put that unused labor into anything else to farmland==0 or take advantage of growth==0 when val=0 and val*.7=val for them.  if you crank the hell out of pirates & extreme planets to abundantit helps, but adaptable only gives them 50%& my attempts to set the option to both adaptable & synthetic for full colonization didn't seem to count synthetic even alone :(.

 

Another place they should probably differ is to have the ability to build traveling manufacturing ships rather than just colony ships.  there are multiple ways of triggering +pop on colonization & within the lore the yor could easily cram a ship full of half completed yor & spare/unattached parts that are assembled by specialized yor while en-route.

 

 

Reply #17 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting CrankyMoe, reply 15

Edit - of course, if it's too cheap then why would you bother researching/building anything beyond it like Spark of Life? So I'd have to adjust all the upgrades too. Ugh
End of CrankyMoe's quote

 

Because  once your manufacturing is really up and running any assy project 2,4,6,8 can be built in one turn so why build 2 when you can build 8/turn

Reply #18 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

I would go so far to say that the balancing on the assys is weird. The manufacturing per pop produced is almost the same on all of them. I see little motivation to go from 4 to 6, since 6 allready takes more than a research world would produce for me. If I was rebalancing it, I would probably do something like:

produce 1 pop for 30-35 manufacturing
produce 2 pop for 70-80 manufacturing (35-40 per pop)
produce 4 pop for 160-200 manufacturing (40-50 per pop)
produce 8 pop for 400-480 manufacturing (50-60 per pop) or 6 for 300-360

That way you have the manufacturing cap mechanic/tradeoff throughout the game.

Reply #19 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting Tetrasodium, reply 16

Another place they should probably differ is to have the ability to build traveling manufacturing ships rather than just colony ships.  there are multiple ways of triggering +pop on colonization & within the lore the yor could easily cram a ship full of half completed yor & spare/unattached parts that are assembled by specialized yor while en-route.
End of Tetrasodium's quote


This certainly makes sense to me.  Couldn't you easily achieve that by making the Yor "Prolific" in addition to "Synthetic" and "Adaptable".  But then that means they would have 3 racial abilities -- darn game rules get in the way.  :annoyed:  

Admittedly, I'm thinking about this whole discussion from the point of view of modding the Yor to make them more playable rather than how or whether Stardock might change things.

Quoting a0152570, reply 17

Because  once your manufacturing is really up and running any assy project 2,4,6,8 can be built in one turn so why build 2 when you can build 8/turn
End of a0152570's quote


Yes, you're absolutely right.  I didn't think that through.

Quoting zuPloed, reply 18

I would go so far to say that the balancing on the assys is weird. The manufacturing per pop produced is almost the same on all of them. I see little motivation to go from 4 to 6, since 6 allready takes more than a research world would produce for me.
End of zuPloed's quote


Interesting point -- I hadn't thought about it like that, so thanks.  I'm going to consider your suggestion as I tinker around.

 

Addendum:  I kept the StartingPopulation=15 and PopulationCapYor=20 and then modded the Power Matrix to add 2 population on construction and started a new game.  The Power Matrix boost provided a slightly better start-up for new colonies, but my Yor are still falling far behind -- last in production, tech, military, middle-of-the-pack in population.  This despite going hard on production and getting a good number of lucky tech-boosting hits on anomalies.  Grrr....  Not sure I have the wherewithal to stay with this particular game.  Time to look more closely at zuPloed's suggestions. 

 

 

Reply #20 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

On a sidenote: what difficulty are we talking about? My statements usually come from the "genius" level perspective, since I have a little bit of a grudge with the free tech chance of the two above.

Reply #21 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

I'm playing with Gifted AIs.

Since I play Large galaxies, not Insane-Abundant as many seem to do, there are a lot fewer worlds to colonize.  That means ideology points beyond the first 4 or so are really precious.

 

Reply #22 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting zuPloed, reply 20

On a sidenote: what difficulty are we talking about? My statements usually come from the "genius" level perspective, since I have a little bit of a grudge with the free tech chance of the two above.
End of zuPloed's quote

I usually play on normal, insane, 30-40+ ais .  Prior to about 1.4 or so I could wtfpwn the ai's with the yor.  right now my experience is slightly different, not significantly different from what others have posted.

Reply #23 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting zuPloed, reply 20

On a sidenote: what difficulty are we talking about?
End of zuPloed's quote

I play one up from genius,  Godlike still kicks my ass

Reply #24 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

A couple of things first this is not a late game concern. Since lack of raw production due to lack of population affects early and then midgame most. Then this affects colony rush. This only hinders it more so than anyone else. Upping population is only a miner solution since it is harder in the beginning to replace it.

This is why messing with social production is better instead. First social production for the yor is the closest thing they have to population growth. I want to point out that social production is not raw production. As a modder if you couldn't mod social production then use total manufacturing. 

The reason why this is not cheasy is because anything built other than population is used for other stuff so you have to balance the two to keep up.

The reason why the building assembly plants scenario doesn't work then while you do that you are not building buildings or ships so this tequires switching between all three. First this us not a knock on assembly projects at all. This is a solution to not change assembly projects. Remember the worry of to much manufacturing is not really there. Most races get free raw production because of population growth on top of buildings. I just want to add population growth to social to the yor not add anything else. This benifit stays with them where extra population doesn't as the game progresses. Increasing cap makes it more overpowering inthe late game but doesn't solve the no growth problem.

While the social actually gives you the extra time you need. To pause forpop growth. This might become a problem in the late game after everyones planets are filled up and are done invading. First to decide this you would have to add up everyones manufacturing on a maxed out optimum planet. With all wonders built. If the yor is top the you could fix this by removing some manufacturing from end tier techs.

Reply #25 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

 

Quoting zuPloed, reply 18

I would go so far to say that the balancing on the assys is weird. The manufacturing per pop produced is almost the same on all of them. I see little motivation to go from 4 to 6, since 6 allready takes more than a research world would produce for me. If I was rebalancing it, I would probably do something like:

produce 1 pop for 30-35 manufacturing
produce 2 pop for 70-80 manufacturing (35-40 per pop)
produce 4 pop for 160-200 manufacturing (40-50 per pop)
produce 8 pop for 400-480 manufacturing (50-60 per pop) or 6 for 300-360

That way you have the manufacturing cap mechanic/tradeoff throughout the game.
End of zuPloed's quote

 

 

 

you can't complete more than 1 project /turn. The higher tuers do get better, but to really make use of them you need to:

 

- research &choose the popcapyor techs beyond the power matrix ones

 

-research the power matrix techs aggressively

 

-build & continually upgrade the power matrix

 

- aggressively research & build bigger & badder factories

 

- have a colony capable of pumping out colony/transport ships faster than you can complete +3 yor or you will hit the cap faaaast... But not too much faster or you will depopulate the planet and not have enough local pop to build the replacement in aby reasonable time frame

 

-have the econ infrastructure somewhere to support a manufacturing empire that is easily 2-3x more powerful than the next in line (sometimes the next couple in line

 

 

 

if you are playing stock yor, you are double screwed because she diplomacy hit makes everyone eager to attack you for not having enough military, nit having that military orbiting every planet, having too much military too quick (remember that massive mfg capability?), being a different ideology,trafing with their enemy, not giving them yet another gifte dry couple turns etc.