I actually tried to mitigate this a little by starting in the krynn system (+eco starbases in the home system). It provides you with 3 times the pop cap in your home system and has very short transport ways for resettling (2 transports with 2 moves and one colony module in my case). By about turn 90 I had surpassed the genius AIs populations, but was still behind on research and had a war on my hands. So I am not satisfied with this approach yet. I also think this wouldn't have worked very well if I hadn't gotten the durantium refinerie on my homeworld.

What it really comes down to is what I wrote earlier. If you want to directly compare to the bio races you have the same starting manufacturing, but instead of getting 0.2 pop/turn/colony for free, you have to pay 50 MP/pop. You are just at an -10 manufacturing/turn disadvantage for each colony when you are doing the same as the bio races.

This is allright if there is a strategy you can implement, which can put you on even footing. The Yors big growth rates and tile independent pop caps are great, but they happen very late. I think properly editing the assembly projects can lead to a balanced scenario, but I don't know the numbers.

 

I took a break around 1.4 or so. It used to be you could sell/ lease stuff to the AI's for x credits/turn and run 0% econ, 50/50 research/mfg until you had a stable base capable of supporting yourself but you can only demand pay/turn & doing so as stock yor is a good wy to get attacked

Yes, this issue is pretty much all about the colony rush.  In my games, the Yor are so far behind after the rush is over that they are never a real threat unless everybody leaves them alone for a very long time.  Even then, they are so far behind in the tech race that their ships can't compete.

Messing with social production sounds a lot trickier as social production is is used to build everything except ships. I'm not keen to mess with that as the fix will likely cause more balancing issues than it solves -- I'd be very nervous about giving the Yor any further advantage to building anything beyond the assembly projects.  And note: you can build ships while you're building an assembly project.  It's just that your raw production on colonies is crippled until you can spend time building up the population.  In my games, everybody's usually jumping on me before I can get any of my colonies really going.

Boosting Yor initial pop helps a bit, but like zuPloed and Tetrasodium have noted, it's probably not enough.  In my, albeit limited, tests starting pop = 15, homeworld pop cap =20 really only helps your homeworld some, but colonies still struggle a LOT.  I think adjusting costs for the assembly projects can make it a little easier to get colonies going, and it's probably the best approach since the effects won't likely unbalance anything else.

I started another game last night, reducing the costs of each of the assembly projects to about half (gotta start somewhere).  So far things look promising, but still too early to tell if I got the numbers right.  Probably not, but I'll see.

A little update from me:

I have run another test on a medium map with 3 Genius AI's. For keeping the test clean I had no strategic ressources or relics on the map. I managed to pull even in pop around turn 63 with the leading Iridium. Below are the graphs for population and research.

I made my custom Yor start in the kryseth type system, bought asteroid mines (5 for kryseth system) asap, and only sent the initial colonizer (with 0.5 pop) outside my home system. Once my homeworld had all the basic manufacturing improvements I started pushing out assy projects and constructors in order to boost my home system with starbases. 1 Colonizer tranported pop from the homeworld to the two other planets in the home system.

The final population in the graph should be about 160: 120 from my home system + the first colonized world plus 40 from two other worlds the AI didn't take in the colonizing phase for some reason.

What might be worth mentioning is that I became UP chair and implemented galactic peace around turn 85 or so. But around turn 80 I should have been able to fight a war with some adjustments even without the two additional worlds and the galactic peace.

Not sure whether this is what you are looking for, but I think this is a somewhat viable solution, where you however don't take part in the big colony race.

I play stock Yor on an Immense galaxy. I had only a few opponents selected. It took a while to meet any of them but by the time war was upon me I was well on my way to becoming an unstoppable juggernaut of raw production.

The thing to bear in mind as the Yor is that social production is crucial to doing Assembly projects quicker, which gives you more population so you can research and do the more expensive Assembly projects quicker. You do need military production in order to keep making ships, but if you have more Yor then you'll do that anyway.

Also, the Yor benefit from any colony which has a social production boost e.g. Desert, Active Core, Tidally Locked, and suffer no growth penalty on planets with, for example, Thin Atmosphere, I suppose because they don't grow the way that meatbags do.

 

I thought we were talking about normal wherevthe ai doesn't get economic bonuses. Changing the yor for genius doesn't work when the ai gets economic bonuses. Any mods based on this should be stated best if played above normal. I really am done with this conversation then. This doesn't count with the ai getting bonuses. 

Uhm, I thought we are speaking about playing as the Yor. I was just trying to demonstrate, that the synthetic playstyle is actually playable without mods at genius and hence on normal, too.

I've been hit with the can't get past starting new turn 1.8 thing for most of this thread(CML-436-70080 already wip), setting pirates to none seems to avoid it& I hesitate to say that tiday's patch might have fixed.  as a result I was worried about saying "I mod xyz".  here's some of the stuff I do

 

abilitydefs.xml:PopulationCapYor=20

FactionDefs.xml: yor StartingColonyPopulation=18

planetdefs.xml: PlanetIconia2 PlanetIconia3, & PlanetIconia4 set from Dead to Habitable.  all 4 come through as class0 & colonizable allowing iconia to send out colony ship swarms to start new planets with 6-9 pop without iconia killing itself.  It's also amusing to watch ai colonize them for me & start with them instantly in revolt  

Yor factories all add 0.5 populationcapyor & -20% food to colony when built

first tier power matrix adds 4 pop like someone suggested

I posted Yor Outreach earlier (they do pretty well), but FactionDefs.xml gets updated to put yor at the completely legal since yor are a core race & cannot be edited directly

<RaceTraits>Productive1</RaceTraits>
<RaceTraits>Clever1</RaceTraits>
<RaceTraits>Economical1</RaceTraits>
<RaceTraits>Fertile4</RaceTraits>
<RaceTraits>Handy1</RaceTraits>
<RaceTraits>Dense1</RaceTraits>
<RaceTraits>Militant1</RaceTraits>
<RaceTraits>Traders4</RaceTraits>

after someone pointed out y mistake elsewhere, iconia 2/3/4 are as follows:

<Planet>
<InternalName>PlanetIconia2</InternalName>
<DisplayName>Iconia2Name</DisplayName>
<PlanetType>Habitable</PlanetType>
<PlanetClass>12</PlanetClass>
<PlanetTrait>BarrenWorld</PlanetTrait>
<ArtDefine>Iconia2Art</ArtDefine>

</Planet>

<Planet>
<InternalName>PlanetIconia3</InternalName>
<DisplayName>Iconia3Name</DisplayName>
<PlanetType>Habitable</PlanetType>
<PlanetClass>12</PlanetClass>
<PlanetTrait>FrozenWorld</PlanetTrait>
<ArtDefine>Iconia3Art</ArtDefine>
</Planet>

<Planet>
<InternalName>PlanetIconia4</InternalName>
<DisplayName>Iconia4Name</DisplayName>
<PlanetType>Habitable</PlanetType>
<PlanetClass>12</PlanetClass>
<PlanetTrait>AquaticWorld</PlanetTrait>
<ArtDefine>Iconia4Art</ArtDefine>
</Planet>

early on they will be 50% output & later when non-adaptable races in the icos system could settle them it's no big deal having a triop of class 12 extreme worlds compared to whatever ability they took instead

Question:  why the -20 food, yor have no need for food

when I did the improvement changes I was working on a modded tech tree that removed the specializations from yor extreme colonization & moved the colonization focus non-speciallized techs behind terraforming alongside extreme colonization (instead of behind) but I accidentally deleted the tech tree & didn't bother to rebuild it.  basically because I didn't want to balance out if a non-synthetic race using that tree would be a problem or not so made sure it would be self defeating if they tried

Well then I would ask tetrasodium if this post was for normal or higher levels. Assuming levels didn't  matter then I'm not saying it's not playable but would you say it's  about equivalent in strength to some else. So are. You saying making the iconic system more habitual equates the raw production problem. There really not saying they are effectively broken just have a weak early game.

 

I wouldn't say that it adds raw production so much as yor to out on ships without causing iconia to collapse because the extra planets come through class 0 with no usable tiles & only benefit from starbases.  When it's all said & done though, the other stuff  I mentioned makes a dramatically more significant impact.

 

Alsom keep in mind that the class 4-6 planets used to be great for yor & other synthetic.  on insane I rarely ever see anything under pq8

From what I have read here, I think the problem is that they are misunderstood.

The synthetic style has significantly different strenghts and weaknesses then the bio styles have among themselves. If you are trying to do a colony rush you are emphasizing their weakness, which is the early games limited production. You can't go without grabbing a few colonies to slow down your bio neighbors and preparing for a high pop cap in the early midgame when you are shuttling your population.

Your main focus however should not be grabbing as many colonies as possible, but to build up critical infrastructure at your home planet to start playing to your strengths, which is rapid population via assys and high population caps. Effectively this means blasting your ealry money on asteroid mines or -if possible- an early durantium refinery instead of many colony ships. This is the more important part to solving the raw production problem, then the changing the home system. Changing the home system to kryseth maximizes one of their strengths (pop cap for small worlds and high growth rates with high manufacturing),

You will probably end up behind in colonies. The synthetics have the least issues with this. A bio race needs 10+ (assuming one contributing planet) turns to replace the pop for a 6 pop transport module, the synthetics need 1 turn. Invasions are a strength of synthetics.

The Iconis star system doesn't emphasize their strengths enough with only one habitable planet and one asteroid group. Better systems are basicly any system with 2 asteroid groups and more then one world: Iridia, Iconia, Kryseth, Arcea and Torus. The Torus system in particular together with the aquatic trait might be very interesting, too since the aquatic worlds give a 25% production bonus (-> stacks nicely with early asteroid mines!).

For me it is too early to definitly say whether they are underpowered. MAybe they need a little something which helps them out at the start, but they probably don't need a lot to be competitive again. Giving their tech tree capitals and the Iconis system 2-3 asteroid groups (one in the habitable zone for early access?) might actually do the trick.

For the AI however I am not so sure this will be enough. They might need their own AIDefs to use this to its full extent.

Addendum: One more thing you can do for your early production: get the free colony ship from benevolent = +3 free population followed by another world so you will have 4-5 (depending on homesystem) worlds in any scenario (Not sure if the constructor trick might be better though).

So a better home system would probably do the trick.

Ok from what I can see my suggestion to boost social manufacturing is there i's called productive.

I thought I would reply on how I adjusted things since I enjoy playing a custom Yor race.  After thinking about all the various options of adjusting I figured that my issue with the poor starting power of the Yor started with the Power Matrix (and subsequent Matrix).  First, I thought about why I like the Hive so much - it's the raw production and the adjacency bonus of the manufacturing type.  I went into the files and changed the Matrix to mimic the Hive.  To do that I substituted the % manufacturing to raw production and changed the improvement type from Population/Food to Manufacturing.

This accomplishes all that I was hoping for - a quicker start and the ability to surround the Matrix with manufacturing improvements (which I would generally do anyway - this time I'm rewarded for doing so).

Can I have your custom Yor.

The true Yor don't have constructors was that deliberate.